One of the local Washington television stations was doing a typical early morning honoring our soldiers schtick just before Thanksgiving. In it soldiers stationed far from home were treated to videolinks so they could talk to their families and everyone could nod happily and wish themselves a wonderful holiday. Not really listening, I became interested when I half heard that the soldier being interviewed was spending his Thanksgiving in Ukraine.
It occurred to me that the soldier just might have committed a security faux pas by revealing where he was, but I also recalled that there have been joint military maneuvers as well as some kind of training mission going on in the country, teaching the Ukrainian Army how to use the shiny new sophisticated weapons that the United States was providing it with to defend against “Russian aggression.”
Ukraine is only one part of the world where the Trump Administration has expanded the mission of democracy promotion, only in Kiev the reality is more like faux democracy promotion since Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is clearly exploiting a situation that he himself provoked. He envisions setting himself up as a victim of Moscow to aid in his attempts to establish his own power through a security relationship with Washington. That in turn will help his bid for reelection in March 2019 elections, in which his poll numbers are currently running embarrassingly low largely due to the widescale corruption in his government. Poroshenko has already done much to silence the press in his county while the developing crisis with Russia has enabled him to declare martial law in the eastern parts of the country where he is most poorly regarded. If it all works out, he hopes to win the election and subsequently, it is widely believed, he will move to expand his own executive authority.
There also has to be some consideration the encounter with the Russians on the Kerch Strait was contrived by Poroshenko with the assistance of a gaggle of American neoconservative and Israeli advisers who have been actively engaged with the Ukrainian government for the past several years. The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own domestic political reasons but it was also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that surround Trump and proliferate inside the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.
The defection of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, together with the assumption that a lot of anti-Trump dirt will be spilled soon, means that the American president had to be even more cautious than ever in any dealings with Moscow and all he needed was a nod of approval from National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel the encounter. A heads-of-state meeting might not have solved anything but it certainly would be better than the current drift towards a new cold war. If the United States has only one vitally important relationship anywhere it is with Russia as the two countries are ready, able and apparently willing to destroy the world under the aegis of self-defense.
Given the anti-Russian hysteria prevailing in the U.S. and the ability of the neocons to switch on the media, it should come as no surprise that the Russian-Ukrainian incident immediately generated calls from the press and politicians for the White House to get tough with the Kremlin. It is important to note that the United States has no actual national interest in getting involved in a war between Russia and Ukraine if that should come about. The two Eastern European countries are neighbors and have a long history of both friendship and hostility but the only thing clear about the conflict is that it is up to them to sort things out and no amount of sanctions and jawing by concerned congressmen will change that fact.
Other Eastern European nations that similarly have problems with Russia should also be considered provocateurs as they seek to create tension to bind the United States more closely to them through the NATO alliance. The reality is that today’s Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union and it neither aspires to nor can afford hegemony over its former allies. What it has made very clear that it does want is a modus vivendiwhere Russia itself is not being threatened by the West.
Recent military maneuvers in Poland and Lithuania and the stationing of new missiles in Eastern Europe do indeed pose a genuine threat to Moscow as it places NATO forces on top of Russia’s border. When Russia reacts to incursions by NATO warships and planes right along its borders, it is accused of acting aggressively. One wonders how the U.S. government would respond if a Russian aircraft carrier were to take up position off the eastern seaboard and were to begin staging reconnaissance flights. Or if the Russian army were to begin military exercises with the Cubans? Does anyone today remember the Bay of Pigs?
When it comes to international conflicts context is everything. Seeing the incident between Russia and Ukraine in Manichean terms as an example of Moscow’s aggressive instincts is satisfying in some circles, but it does not in any way reflect the reality on the ground. Internal politics of the two countries combined with deliberate fabrications that are expected to generate a certain response operate together to create a largely false narrative for both international and domestic consumption. Unfortunately, narratives have consequences: in this case, the sacrifice of the possibly beneficial meeting between Trump and Putin.
The same dynamic works vis-à-vis Washington’s other enemy du jour Iran. In the case of Russia, useless “friend” Ukraine is pulling the strings while regarding Iran it is conniving Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran has been accused of being the world’s leading sponsor of terror, of destabilizing the Middle East, and of having a secret nuclear weapon program that will be used to attack Israel and Europe. None of those assertions are true. The terrorism tag comes from the country’s relationship with Hezbollah, which is only a terrorist group insofar as it is hostile to Israel and pledged to resist any future Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Washington and Israel have pushed the terrorism label for Hezbollah, but most Europeans have begun to disregard the designation since the group has become a part of the Lebanese government.
And regarding destabilizing the Middle East, that has largely been the end result of actions undertaken by the United States, Israel and the Saudis, while the alleged Persian nuclear weapons program is a fantasy. If someone in the U.S. national security apparatus had any brains the United States would work to improve relations with Iran real soon as the Iranians would in the long run quite likely prove to be better friends than those rascals who are currently running around using that label.
And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don’t expose anything done by the Russians. Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?
So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Global Research has over 50,000 subscribers to our Newsletter.
Our objective is to recruit one thousand committed “volunteers” among our 50,000 Newsletter subscribers to support the distribution of Global Research articles (email lists, social media, crossposts).
Do not send us money. Under Plan A, we call upon our readers to donate 5 minutes a day to Global Research.
Global Research Volunteer Members can contact us at [email protected] for consultations and guidelines.
If, however, you are pressed for time in the course of a busy day, consider Plan B, Consider Making a Donation and/or becoming a Global Research Member.
When George H.W. Bush was president he ordered the massacre of Iraqi soldiers after the ceasefire in 1991, and after he had promised them safe passage out of Kuwait.
“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016
Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.
The first reports emerging from the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, December 2, 2018, are that Trump and Xi have agreed to put their trade war on hold, a kind of ‘trade war armistice’, at least for the next 90 days.
Israel has never hidden its ambition to seize control of East Jerusalem, Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967 and then annexed, as a way of preventing a viable Palestinian state from emerging.
Lest we forget, one day before the 9/11 attacks [as well as on the morning of 9/11, the dad of the sitting President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting none other than Shafiq bin Laden, the brother of the alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
After a week of insisting that a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Trump at the last minute sent out a Tweet explaining that due to a Russia/Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be willing to meet his Russian counterpart.
According to Trump, the meeting had to be cancelled because the Russians seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in Russian waters that refused to follow instructions from the Russian military. But as Pat Buchanan wrote in a recent column: how is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business?
Unfortunately it is “our business” because of President Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically-elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his Administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama Administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote.
US interventionism in Ukraine led to the 2014 coup and many dead Ukrainians. Crimea’s majority-Russian population held a referendum and decided to re-join Russia rather than remain in a “pro-West” Ukraine that immediately began discriminating against them. Why would anyone object to people opting out of abusive relationships?
What is most disappointing about President Trump’s foreign policy is that it didn’t have to be this way. He ran on a platform of America first, ending foreign wars, NATO skepticism, and better relations with Russia. Americans voted for this policy. He had a mandate, a rejection of Obama’s destructive interventionism.
But he lost his nerve.
Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course. What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that.
But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest. Just this week he told the Washington Post, in response to three US soldiers being killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, that he has to keep US troops fighting in the longest war in US history because the “experts” tell him there is no alternative.
He said,
“virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.”
That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq! We’ve got to fight Saddam over there or he’d soon be in our streets. These “experts” are worthless, yet for some reason President Trump cannot break free of them.
Well here’s some unsolicited advice to the president: Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your “experts” a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
December 4th, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Trump administration plans to auction more than 900,000 acres for oil and gas extraction on the doorstep of Nevada’s only national park and other protected public lands. It would be the largest single lease sale of public lands in the lower 48 states in at least a decade.
“The Trump administration is doubling down on its reckless ‘drill-anywhere’ strategy,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Nevadans cherish our national park and wildlife refuges. It’s disgusting that Trump officials are willing to permanently defile these spectacular places to appease the oil industry.”
The Bureau of Land Management lease sale, scheduled for March 12, 2019, will auction off public land next to Great Basin National Park and Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, an internationally known migratory waterfowl stopover cherished by birders and hunters.
One parcel comes within a half-mile of South Ruby Lake, where a spill of fracking fluids or a well failure could contaminate one of the Great Basin’s most vibrant aquatic ecosystems.
Great Basin National Park has been designated an International Dark Sky Park in recognition of its remoteness. The area surrounding the park is undisturbed except for a few multigenerational ranches.
The plan threatens imperiled wildlife, including greater sage grouse, since the massive lease sale includes hundreds of thousands of acres of important grouse habitat. The sale also covers tens of thousands of acres of designated critical habitat for the federally protected desert tortoise and parcels adjacent to springs harboring rare native fish, including the threatened Railroad Valley springfish.
“Every time the BLM invites the oil and gas industry to drill and frack sage-grouse habitat, the grouse moves closer to extinction,” said Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for Western Watersheds Project. “The BLM needs to stop leasing sage-grouse habitat, period.”
The BLM deferred roughly 400,000 acres of sage-grouse habitat from an October auction to the March sale in response to a federal court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Center, Western Watersheds and Advocates for the West.
“The BLM is doing the absolute minimum to claim it’s complying with the court order,” Donnelly said. “Meanwhile the agency is rushing ahead with the illegal action that prompted the lawsuit in the first place, offering massive swaths of critical sage-grouse habitat in violation of its own plans to protect the bird.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Featured image: Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
India is sending several messages by bragging about its alleged ability to track one of its “frenemy’s” submarines in the “Indian Ocean”, though the timing of this announcement might inadvertently raise further suspicions in Russia about its South Asian partner’s true long-term strategic intentions.
Sputnik reported that Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba just disclosed during a press conference on Monday that his country had secretly tracked a Chinese submarine in the “Indian Ocean” in October, which sent several important messages irrespective if his claims are true or not:
The “Indian Ocean” Is Hegemonically Regarded By India As Its “Backyard”
India considers one of the world’s largest bodies of water to be exclusively within its “sphere of influence”, giving it the self-proclaimed “right” to supposedly track foreign submarines that traverse through the tens of millions of square miles of international waters here in a thinly disguised hegemonic message meant to convey its aspirations as a rising Great Power.
India’s American Ally Might Have Lent A Helping Hand
Supposing that a Chinese submarine did indeed enter the “Indian Ocean” during October and was tracked the entire time, it’s very likely that India was able to do this only through the help of its new American ally via the working channels between their two militaries that were recently established through the Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) that was finally agreed to in early September.
New Delhi’s Naval Capabilities Are Much Better Than Previously Thought
Considering that the “Indian Ocean Region” is expected to become the geostrategic center of gravity in the New Cold War, India has an interest in deceptively portraying its naval capabilities as being much better than previously thought, both in order to “deter” China but also to prove its military-strategic “value” to the US in the face of rising skepticism at home about its role in this alliance.
The BJP Isn’t “Going Soft” On China Ahead Of General Elections Next May
Practically every domestic and international political development concerning India nowadays must be seen through the prism of next May’s general elections, meaning that the ruling BJP is also signaling to its supporters that it isn’t “going soft” on China despite the faux ‘rapprochement’ that it’s partaking in with its “frenemy” as part of a deal for both of them to increase their respective negotiating leverage vis-à-vis the US.
India Doesn’t Care How Russia Interprets Its Statement
It says a lot that India would make this announcement just days after Admiral Lanba returned from Russia and at the same time as his country’s Eurasian partner is holding joint naval drills with Pakistan, strongly suggesting that New Delhi doesn’t care how Moscow interprets the pro-American and anti-Chinese messages that it conveyed because India sees itself as much closer to the US than Russia in the military-strategic sense.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
On November 30th, Khalid al-Mahamid, a prominent figure of the Syrian opposition, revealed that there is “an international agreement” to eliminate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib. Al-Mahamid is known as the godfather of the reconciliation process which took place in southern Syria in 2018. The UAE-based businessman reportedly persuaded thousands of former FSA fighters in the governorates of Daraa and al-Quneitra to join the ranks of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) 5th Assault Corps.
On the same day, a military source told SF that units of the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) 4th Armored Division were redeployed from the northern al-Suwayda countryside to frontlines in the northern Lattakia countryside and the northwestern Hama countryside.
On December 1st, the SAA deployed additional units of the 5th Assault Corps and the Republican Guard in several positions around Aleppo, pro-government sources reported. A video showed several T-72 battle tanks and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) heading towards advanced positions west of Aleppo.
Syria’s SANA news agency reported that the SAA tracked militant movements in the southern parts of Latimineh city and conducted concentrated strikes on them while they were attempting to infiltrate the military posts around al-Zalaqiyat village.
Furthermore, an army unit in the area surrounding al-Hamamiyat village shelled another group of militants while they were attempting to infiltrate from the surroundings of al-Jaisat and Tal al-Sakhir.
In Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) efforts against ISIS are also on-going with mixed success. On November 30th, the SDF Media center reported that Abu Awayd, a close aide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was captured.
The SDF also announced that its forces evacuated dozens of civilians from the ISIS-held pocket in the middle Euphrates River Valley during a successful special operation.
Last weekend, SDF claimed that they repelled an attack by ISIS on positions in eastern Deir Ezzor. US-led coalition warplanes supported SDF fighters during the clashes and conducted 34 airstrikes on positions, vehicles and gatherings of ISIS. Reportedly 33 militants were killed as a result of the clashes.
During the last week, ISIS carried out several attacks on the SDF confirming by actions that the terrorist group is still relatively strong on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in this part of Syria.
Fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), SDF’s core, launched a hit and run attack on positions of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the town of Ablah, near Aleppo.
On November 30th, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) reported that its agents had arrested Jamal Khalil Taha Znad Mashhadani, another prominent commander of ISIS during a special operation in Baghdad. On December 9th, 2017 Iraq announced the defeat of ISIS in the country. However, since then there have been continuous operations to hunt commanders and remaining ISIS elements and sleeper cells in the country.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Ignored by French President Emmanuel Macron, distorted by the media, courted by the Right, snubbed by the Left, the self-organized mass movement known as the Yellow Vests (Mouvement des gilets jaunes) is seriously challenging the political and economic order in France.
In Paris, on the morning of Saturday December 1st, as thousands of self-organized Yellow Vest protestors attempted to gather to express their grievances on the Champs-Elysées at a planned, peaceful demonstration, French CRS riot police in Paris attacked them savagely with tear-gas, flash-bombs and water-canons. By the end of the day, cars were burning near the Arc de Triomphe, and all of Paris was in chaos as groups of would-be peaceful marchers, joined by the usual casseurs (smashers) spread throughout the capital, expressing their anger at the system and calling for the resignation of President Macron.
This militarized state over-reaction to a peaceful mass demonstration breaks with a long tradition of tolerance for muscled demonstrations by rowdy angry farmers and militant labour unions. A tolerance Macron, in speeches, has blamed for the failure of previous governments to pass needed pro-business counter-reforms. Predictably, Macron (who must have ordered Saturday morning’s unprovoked, violent attacks on unarmed demonstrators arriving early for the planned march) blamed the victims:
“What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate anger,” he said on Saturday. “Nothing justifies attacking the security forces, vandalizing businesses, either private or public ones, or that passers-by or journalists are threatened, or the Arc de Triomphe defaced.”
Meanwhile, throughout the French provinces, at least 75,000 Yellow Vest protesters (police estimate) were blocking highway entrances, intersections, and shopping centers all day – all with minimal violence and apparent general approval (80% according to recent polls).
Why France’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Mad as Hell
Like all the spontaneous mass uprisings that dot French history going back to Feudal times, the Yellow Vest revolt was initially provoked by taxes. In this case, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Macron’s decision to increase taxes on gas and diesel fuel, which affect ordinary working and lower-middle class French people dependent on their cars to earn a living. The rebels, donning the yellow breakdown-safety vests they are required to keep in their cars by the government, have been on the warpath for three weeks now. Spurning all political parties, the Yellow Vests got organized on social media and acted locally. The broadcast media, although highly critical, spread the news nationally, and the Yellow Vest movement spread across France, blocking intersections, filtering motorists, and gathering to demonstrate, more and more numerous and militant, on successive Saturdays.
Why Saturdays?: “I can’t go on strike,” explains one woman. “I’m raising three kids alone. My job, that’s all I have left. Coming on Saturdays is the only way for me to show my anger.” Women workers – receptionists, hostesses, nurses-aids, teachers – are present in unusually large numbers in these crowds, and they are angry about a lot more than the tax on diesel.
To begin with, inequality: Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron has showered corporations and millionaires with huge tax cuts, creating a hole in the budget which he has compensated by cuts in public services (hospitals, schools, transit, police) and by tax increases for ordinary people (up to 40% of their income), large numbers of whom are struggling hard to make ends meet and going into debt. “We’re hungry and we’re fed up,” said Jessica Monnier, 28, who works in a watch factory in the French Alps. She earns €970 a month, and said: “Once I pay my bills, I don’t have enough to eat. We’re just hungry, that’s all.”
This anger has been building since last Spring, the 50th anniversary of the 1968 worker-student uprising, but was frustrated when Macron won the stand-off with labour over his neoliberal, pro-business counter-reforms. This labour defeat was facilitated by the leadership of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and other unions, played the same negative role in the 1968 sell-out to Charles de Gaulle. A half-century later the French union leaders, eager to keep their place at the political table (and on the government payroll), avoided a major confrontation, met with the government behind the scenes, and only went through the motions of carrying out strikes, spreading them over months and tiring out the workers [see my “French Labour’s Historical Defeat”].
Macron is also hated for his truly monarchical arrogance, ruling alone like Louis XIV, imposing his will by decrees, ignoring his opponents and patronizing the common people in a pedantic style that humiliates and enrages them. By dismissing the Yellow Vests, haughtily refusing to address their issues, and then violently repressing them despite their popularity, Macron has revealed the vast gap between his authoritarian, neoliberal regime and the mass of the French population. The French elected him in 2017, in the run-off following the first round collapse of the traditional parties of the Left and the Right. Macron was a stop-gap to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen of the extreme-right, openly racist National Front. He has no real mandate and no political party behind him, despite an unorganized parliamentary majority.
This Saturday, the demonstrators were heard booing the TV network people on Place de la Concorde, furious at being been presented as deliberate vandals, calling the press “Usurpers.” “We wanted to come and demonstrate calmly,” said one fifty-ish Yellow Vest interviewed by Médiapart. “I came by train, I had my ID card in my pocket. They threw so much tear-gas at us that we ran like rabbits.” He then held out a rubber cartridge. “They even fired Flash-balls at us” he added as two nearby women nodded. “Who are the Vandals?”
Another would-be demonstrator, Franck, from nearby Seine-et-Marne, added: “We came to the Champs-Elysées this morning and when we tried to approach the entry-points, we were immediately inundated with tear-gas, 300 meters before the check-points.” Furious, he spits out “Macron gasses his own people like Bashar al-Assad!”
Marité, a retiree from the suburbs, kept repeating over and over: “I confess before the CGT that I voted for Macron, and beg your forgiveness.” She has worked for 42 years, her husband for 44; together their retirement comes to $3,200 a month and their anger is deep. A woman named Morgane hisses through clenched teeth a phrase heard all over France since the beginning of the movement: “Marie-Antoinette was living high off the hog just before the Revolution also. And they cut off her head.”1
What was remarkable at this Saturday’s chaotic mass outbreak in the streets of Paris was the fortuitous convergence of the Yellow Vests with previously scheduled demonstrations organized by the CGT and other unions as well as the feminist #MoiAussi (#MeToo) movement, and the LGBT movement. So happenstance created the first real dialogue between members of these disparate movements which took place under clouds of tear-gas as the various demonstrators, driven away from the Champs-Elysées area by the police, wandered through the half-empty streets.
A start: Angry French people waited all Spring for the promised “convergence” of the various unions of students and workers united against Macron’s reactionary anti-reforms which the leaders never organized, leaving the different groups of strikers isolated.
Popular Risings, Elite Contempt
The French popular classes have long historical memories, and seem unaffected by the postmodern scholarly denigration of the 1789 French Revolution and its successors as useless explosions of popular violence which inevitably led to bloody dictatorships. Morgane knows all she needs to know about the guillotine. According to Gérard Noiriel, author of a monumental history of France ‘from below,’ “The Yellow Vests who block highways and refuse to be coopted by political parties have taken up, in confused form, the tradition of the Sans-culottes of 1792-93, the citizen-combatants of February 1848, the Communards of 1870-71 and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Banquet Years.”
Indeed, these traditions go back much earlier, to the Feudal period, with its periodic uprisings of peasants burning landlord’s chateaux and urban rioters taking over towns. What changed in late 18th Century France was the development of roads and mail service, that enabled revolutionary Committees of Correspondence to coordinate and organize discontent on a national level. Today, Internet social networks and network news play the same role in real time.
Like today’s Yellow Vest rebellion, all these historical uprisings were initially about excessive unfair taxes, like the Tithe of 10% (imposed by the wealthy Catholic Church on the poor), the royal Gabelle tax on salt (necessary for life and preserving foodstuffs) and the Corvée (days of free labour owed to the noble landlord, the Church and the government). Although violent, these spontaneous, self-organized risings eventually led to the democratic republic, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, free secular education, etc. (all under threat today).
The other common denominator between the Yellow Vests and historical popular movements is the near-universal contempt with which they were (are) treated by France’s elite classes: the royalty, the nobility, the upper clergy, official academic historians, and today the media and the leadership of the unions and Left parties, who have joined the establishment and are an integral part of what the French call the “political class.”
Class Prejudice
Not so much has changed since the Old Regime. Then, the nobles derisively referred to any peasant as “Jacques Bonhomme” (Jack Goodfellow), and to their violent uprisings as “Jacqueries.” Around 1360 the revered French chronicler Jean Froissart reported: “These evil folk assembled together without a leader and without arms were stealing and burning everything and killing without pity and without merci, like rabid dogs. And they made a king among them who was the worst of the bad; and this king they called Jacques Bonhomme.”
In fact, says Noiriel, the archives show the peasants selected as their spokesman one Guillaume Carle, known to be “a good thinker and a good talker.”
Similarly, for three weeks the government, the media, and even the Left (parties and unions) have been attempting to present the Yellow Vests as red-necks and/or vandals, while reducing their generalized anger to the issue of gas taxes. On one TV broadcast, the reporter kept trying to get the Yellow Vest being interviewed to say she was rebelling against taxes, but the woman kept repeating over and over: “Fed up to the ass-hole,” “We’ve had it up to the ass,” “Everything.”2
The organized Left has shown little sympathy for this, self-organized, autonomous (albeit amorphous) uprising of desperate and angry lower middle class people who, out of long experience, reject domination by union and party leaders. Plus, they live in places no one has heard of and sing the Marseillaise (originally a revolutionary song, but who remembers). More, the color “Yellow” used to stand for “scab unions.” So the unions and Left parties, as usual embroiled in infighting among each other, instead of supporting the Yellow Vests’ struggle against Macron and offering leadership by example, left the field open to the Right. Le Pen’s people (also embroiled in internal squabbles) attempted to manipulate the movement and made little headway, as did belatedly Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
France in Crisis?
Hegemonic Balance Sheet:
An autocratic President without a party or a mandate. Crowds calling for him to resign. A desperate lower class population angry over growing economic inequality in a rich country and government indifference to their plight. A class of organized civil servants and unionized workers still licking their wounds and paying their bills after failing to block the President’s counter-reforms last Spring.
Traditional parties – Left (Socialists, etc.) and Right (Gaullists etc.) – that have alternated in power since the end of WWII diminished and eclipsed. The parties of the far Left (Mélenchon, various Trotskyists, etc.) and the far Right (the former National Front) are too preoccupied with internal fights to play any significant role.
Powerful, effective mass media dominated by the interests of big business but viewed with suspicion by more and more of the population.
A brand-new “leaderless” spontaneous mass movement connected by social media, “finding its way by walking,” more or less consciously embedded in a long history of rebellions and struggle, finding its natural leaders (“good thinkers, good talkers” like old Guillaume Carle), putting forth its own ideas for the reorganization of society.
Here are the two latest proposals coming from the Yellow Vests and borrowed from the history the 18th Century French revolution. First, a call for a kind of democratic constituent assembly. Second, the creation of Cahiers de doléances (Grievance Notebooks) like the ones in 1788 listing all the people’s complaints and proposed remedies. Both great ideas. We can only hope that given the hollowness of the hegemony of the French political class, the convenience of social media for self-organization, and the desperate desire for dignity and participatory democracy incarnated in this latest historical uprising, something good may come of it.
Meanwhile, here are excerpts from the 2018 Yellow Vest Grievance list3:
No one left homeless.
End the austerity policy. Cancel the interest on illegitimate debt. Don’t tax the poor to pay it back, find the €85-billion of fiscal fraud uncollected.
Create a true integration policy, with French language, history and civics courses for immigrants.
Minimum salary €1500 per month.
Privilege city and village centers. Stop building huge shopping centers.
More progressive income tax rates.
Big companies like McDonald’s, Google, Amazon and Carrefour should pay big taxes, and little artisans low taxes. •
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org.
In 1973 I was still a somewhat naive college senior ready to face the business world. My major had been in Speech and Theater, with a minor in Sociology. As the year was ending and the new one upon us, I was engaged to be married and needed to find secure employment. Graduation was really just a formality… I needed a steady income. My present job was as a commissioned telephone salesman working in what had been labeled a ‘boiler room operation’. We sold office supplies over the phone, using the infamous ‘going out of business, 40% off’ pitch. I was actually very good at this rap, but the weekly returns were too inconsistent. So, with the urging from my parents and my fiancée, out came the Sunday Times want ads. Not too many jobs in recreation, as the ’73 recession hit hard on most programs for youth. What could I do?
The ad said ‘Management trainee, college degree necessary, no experience needed’. I called the place, The ****Linen Corporation, and got an interview. Their plant was in downtown Brooklyn, maybe a 30 minute commute from home. After I finished all the paperwork the sales manager interviewed me for maybe just 20 minutes. He was Italian American like myself, wore a suit that was too tight for his expanding paunch, and had this ( pardon the French) greasy look to him. Basically, what he said to me should have signaled all that I would really need to know about this company: “Listen kid, the way it works is that the more you save the company, the more you can earn… period!” He told me of my duties, which were basically to ‘Hold the whip over all the workers and drivers’. Then, he walked me into the GM’s office to meet him. This guy, a bit older than the sales manager at maybe fifty years of age, gave me the once over and repeated what the other guy had said. He then told the sales manager to give me a tour of the facility.
When we walked into the tremendous area of the plant where the linens were washed and dried, I thought I was back in the days of the plantations. Here we were, two white guys strolling into a two tiered area, hot as hell (and this was mid January) and noisy enough to force us to shout in order to hear each other. The giant plant was filled with all black faces, with the women wearing outfits that looked like Aunt Jemima from the pancake box. The men all wore white pants and tops, and when we arrived there it seemed like all I could see was a myriad of ‘the whites of eyes’ peering at me. Everything seemed to just stop for perhaps 30 seconds. I felt like I was the new overseer at a plantation in the colonial South. The sales manager shouted into my ear “You gotta keep an eye on these birds or they’ll goof off every chance kid”. He then took me back to his office for my work instructions.
The next morning I was to report to the giant garage area to meet up with the delivery drivers. I was to spend one full day on the road with a driver, and then repeat this the next day with another driver… until I went through the lot of them. In the AM, very early, maybe at 6 o’clock, I showed up at the garage area, and man was it frigid cold in there. The driver’s foreman greeted me and introduced me to the first guy to take me out with him. We got going and I mean this truck was so old it must have had arthritis!
The heater wasn’t working too well, and the ride was like a jeep in the jungle! The driver was pleasant, chain smoking one ciggie after another. He had the Bronx territory so we were able to chat for awhile. I learned that the union was what they called a ‘Sweetheart union’ whereupon the union officials were basically ‘in the pocket’ of the corporation. This guy pulled no punches. We began making stops, and man there were so many of them. These were bakeries, butcher shops, food stores and restaurants mostly. He told me I could wait in the truck, but I needed to see how things went. After all, in reality I was his boss, yes? At the first stop, which was a bakery, the driver greeted the owner with a few funny hellos about the frigid weather. Then, the ‘mad scramble’ began. After dropping off the fresh linens, he had to search the premises for the old, dirty ones. I mean, they were everywhere! “Is this the way it always is?” I asked him. He nodded as we went down the basement stairs. I really got nervous when I could sense that something down those steps was fixed on me. “Don’t get too scared kid, those rats are as scared of us as we are of them. They won’t hurt ya” as he laughed.
One day on that job was enough for me. I went home and didn’t show up the next day. What really hurt me was the fact that those workers didn’t have the luxury that I still had. I lived at home and could move on whereas many of these folks couldn’t. Those black faces in that plant were mostly uneducated and unskilled folks from the Caribbean and the only jobs they could secure were similar to this shit. The drivers, going by the two or three I had met, were not educated men, and thus another shitty driving job would be the same. The workers in the plant had NO union at all, and I already was alerted to the driver’s lot. Sadly, forty five years later nothing has changed, perhaps for the worst! A Neo feudalistic society is what the corporate predators want… and still get!!
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]
In August two Belfast journalists were arrested in dawn raids involving up to 100 police officers for exposing state protection of the perpetrators of a notorious sectarian massacre. This Thursday they will speak at a special screening of their documentary in defence of press freedom, writes Barry McCaffrey
***
We didn’t know it at the time, but at 7am on August 31, my colleague Trevor Birney and I were both about to feel the full angry retribution of a state who had not taken kindly to our documentary No Stone Unturned.
Released in 2017, the film had revealed evidence that loyalist gunmen, who massacred six unarmed men as they sat in a quiet little village pub watching football in June 1994, had been protected from prosecution by police.
Why arrest journalists?
This wasn’t Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan or South America — it was sleepy, suburban Belfast.
For Birney’s eight-year-old daughter Freya it should have been her first day back at school.
She should have been telling her friends all about her summer adventures.
Instead she was left shaking and sobbing as armed police took part in co-ordinated dawn raids on both our homes and Birney’s film and television company offices.
We were both forced to undress and wash in front of armed police before being arrested and hauled off in front of families and neighbours who could only have been imagining what heinous “crimes” we must have committed.
Laptops, telephones, documents and materials that had clearly nothing to do with the documentary were being scooped up and taken away without any questions of relevance.
Freya’s pink mobile telephone was one of the items seized by police. Another daughter had homework on a pen drive seized. All supposed evidence in this alleged “crime.” Three months on, nothing has been returned.
Meanwhile at our offices, more police officers were going through every desk and computer, removing note books belonging to our colleagues and sucking every piece of data from our main server.
Police technicians fed on the main computer for a full 12 hours before they removed every scintilla of information, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the data had no relevance to what they were supposedly searching for.
Thousands of hours of interviews and notes relating to investigations which had nothing to do with No Stone Unturned were seized despite the protests of our colleagues.
These materials involve highly sensitive and confidential documents relating to investigations all across the world.
Only a tiny percentage of it relates to No Stone Unturned.
Before we’d even been finger-printed and had our mugshots taken, police had released a press statement claiming that they were investigating a complaint from the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI) that documents had been stolen from PONI offices in Belfast.
The statement said the documents were covered by the Official Secrets Act.
The only problem is that the Police Ombudsman never made a complaint — and has now said so publicly.
What is this all about and why do we now find ourselves looking at potential prison sentences? You may well ask!
We both worked with the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on No Stone Unturned. It told the story of the 1994 massacre of six Catholic men at a pub in the village of Loughinisland, deep in the heart of rural County Down.
The men were watching Ireland beating Italy in the World Cup on a battered television in the bar when a gunman armed with an assault rifle burst in and opened fire.
No-one had ever been charged with the killings and the Police Ombudsman in Belfast, Dr Michael Maguire, concluded in a 2016 report that police had colluded with the loyalist killers.
In 2011, a document into the Loughinisland murder investigation had been leaked to us. It was a draft report into the massacre. It named the chief suspects and outlined significant failings in the murder investigation.
Once No Stone Unturned premiered in London in October 2017, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) apparently became concerned that the document, and the highly damaging information it contained, had found its way into the public domain.
They were so concerned, they launched a fresh investigation — just not into the massacre and the unsolved deaths of six innocent men.
Instead, the PSNI called in Durham Constabulary to examine how the documents came to be in the film. The relatives of the murdered men were horrified.
On the day of our arrests, Durham Police told the press that the arrests were the result of a complaint from the Police Ombudsman.
Maguire’s report into Loughinisland and his damning conclusions had played a pivotal role in our documentary.
The Police Ombudsman’s office had been set up after the Good Friday Agreement to investigate complaints relating to police officers.
It wasn’t designed to investigate the so-called dirty war, but in Northern Ireland’s complicated world of politics and policing that’s what a huge amount of its resources has been dedicated to do.
PONI continues to deal with a huge number of complaints from relatives believing police colluded with loyalist and republican terrorists.
Once he’d seen No Stone Unturned, Maguire had alerted police that our film named four suspects. His office has no ability to take an assessment of any increased risk to the suspects, so by telling police he was advising the force best placed to decide.
Critically, he didn’t make any complaint about the documents we used in the film.
So why did Durham Constabulary say they were called in on the back of a complaint?
We don’t know the answer because the PSNI won’t comment on the case, ironically citing our arrests as the reason they’re unable to explain what has been going on.
Durham Police have told journalists that their investigation had “a definite and clear starting point.” Whatever that start point is, Maguire insists it wasn’t a complaint from him.
On the day of our arrests we were taken to a high-security Belfast police station and held for 14 hours in cells normally set aside for terror suspects.
We were kept apart, spending countless hours in separate cells with the only human interaction being when we were taken out to be questioned throughout the day.
At no time during that questioning were the names of the victims ever mentioned — Barney Green (87), Dan McCreanor (59), Adrian Rogan (34), Patsy O’Hare (35), Malcolm Jenkinson (52), Eamon Byrne (39).
We didn’t know it at the time, but the Loughinisland families, whose case we were supposed to be highlighting, were instead holding a vigil for us at the site of the massacre.
Unwittingly, we had become the latest victims in a very dark story of how Northern Ireland chooses to deal with its past.
We were released on police bail shortly before 9pm that night. Three months on we’re still living under those same police bail conditions.
We have to ask police permission any time we want to leave the jurisdiction, even for family birthdays in the Republic of Ireland. We were ordered to hand ourselves in for further police questioning on November 30.
The support we’ve received from our journalistic colleagues in Belfast, Dublin and abroad has been immense. The NUJ has led the way from the moment we were arrested — campaigning and raising awareness of our case in the UK, Ireland and across the world.
We believe that the police actions are an act of intimidation designed to send a chill down the spines of any other journalists seeking to unearth the truth about Northern Ireland’s dark and dirty past.
We believe that the PSNI and Durham are trying to distract from the police failures to not only bring to justice the killers responsible for the deaths of six innocent men but the high-level cover-up that has gone on for over 24 years.
In Belfast, they’re coming after the journalists, but as one of our colleagues has said: they cannot arrest the truth.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Barry McCaffrey is senior reporter for The Detail.
Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, will be in London for a public screening of the documentary on Thursday December 6 7pm at the NUJ’s Headland House, Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 9NB. Tickets for the event can be bought online via Eventbrite – mstar.link/NoStoneUnturned.
Featured image: The scene in the Loughinisland village pub in 1994 after the paramilitary murder of six Catholic men (Source: Morning Star)
First published by Consortium News on April 6, 2016
“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016
A recently discovered lecture by the late British traitor Kim Philby contains a lesson that may help explain how George H.W. Bush could bluff and bluster his way past mounting evidence that he and other Republicans conspired in 1980 to block release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran and thus ensure Ronald Reagan’s election, an alleged gambit that bordered on treason itself.
In a speech in East Berlin in 1981 – just aired by the BBC – the Soviet double-agent Philby explained that for someone like himself born into what he called “the ruling class of the British Empire,” it was easy to simply “deny everything.” When evidence was presented against him, he simply had to keep his nerve and assert that it was all bogus. With his powerful connections, he knew that few would dare challenge him.
“Because I was born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of an influential standing, I knew that they [his colleagues in Britain’s MI-6 spy agency] would never get too tough with me,” Philby told members of East Germany’s Stasi. “They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they had been proved wrong afterwards, I could have made a tremendous scandal.”
That’s why growing evidence and deepening suspicions of Philby’s treachery slid by while he continued spying for the Soviet Union. He finally disappeared in January 1961 and popped up several months later in Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1988.
Image on the right: British double-agent Philby, who spied for the Soviet Union and fled to Moscow in 1961.
Though the circumstances are obviously quite different, Philby’s recognition that his patrician birth and his powerful connections gave him extraordinary protections could apply to George H.W. Bush and his forceful denials of any role in the Iran-Contra scandal – he falsely claimed to be “out of the loop” – and also the October Surprise issue, whether the Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran began in 1980 with the obstruction of President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. Embassy hostages seized by Iranian radicals on Nov. 4, 1979.
Carter’s failure to secure the hostages’ release before the U.S. election, which fell exactly one year later, doomed his reelection chances and cleared the way for Reagan and the Republicans to gain control of both the White House and the Senate. The hostages were only released after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981, and as Bush became Vice President.
We now know that soon after the Reagan-Bush inauguration, clandestine U.S.-approved arms shipments were making their way to Iran through Israel. An Argentine plane carrying one of the shipments crashed in July 1981 but the incriminating circumstances were covered up by Reagan’s State Department, according to then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes, who traced the origins of the arms deal back to the 1980 campaign.
This hard-to-believe reality – that the tough-guy Reagan-Bush administration was secretly shipping weapons to Iran after Tehran’s mullahs had humiliated the United States with the hostage crisis – remained a topic for only occasional Washington rumors until November 1986 when a Beirut newspaper published the first article describing another clandestine shipment. That story soon expanded into the Iran-Contra Affair because some of the arm sales profits were diverted to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
For Bush, the emergence of this damaging scandal, which could have denied him his own shot at the White House, was time to test out his ability to “deny everything.” So, he denied knowing that the White House had been secretly running a Contra resupply operation in defiance of Congress, even though his office and top aides were in the middle of everything. Regarding the Iran arms deals, Bush insisted publicly he was “out of the loop.”
Behind closed doors where he ran the risk of perjury charges, Bush was more forthcoming. For instance, in non-public testimony to the FBI and the Iran-Contra prosecutor, “Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales.” [See Special Prosecutor’s Final Iran-Contra Report, p. 473]
But Bush’s public “out of the loop” storyline, more or less, held up going into the 1988 presidential election. The one time when he was directly challenged with detailed Iran-Contra questions was in a live, on-air confrontation with CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Jan. 25, 1988.
Instead of engaging in a straightforward discussion, Bush went on the offensive, lashing out at Rather for allegedly ambushing him with unexpected questions. Bush also recalled an embarrassing episode when Rather left his anchor chair vacant not anticipating the end of a tennis match which was preempting the news.
“How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” Bush asked testily. “How would you like that?”
Fitting with Philby’s observation, Bush’s bluster won the day. Much of the elite U.S. media, including Newsweek where I was working at the time, sided with Bush and slammed Rather for his sometimes forceful questioning of the patrician Bush.
Having put Rather in his place and having put the Iran-Contra issue to rest – at least as far as the 1988 campaign was concerned – Bush went on to win the presidency. But the history still threatened to catch up with him.
October Surprise Mystery
The October Surprise case of 1980 was something of a prequel to the Iran-Contra Affair. It preceded the Iran-Contra events but surfaced publicly in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra disclosures. This earlier phase slowly came to light when it became clear that the U.S.-approved arms sales to Iran did not begin in 1985, as the official Iran-Contra story claimed, but years earlier, very soon after Reagan and Bush took office.
Also, in the wake of the Iran-Contra Affair, more and more witnesses surfaced describing this earlier phase of the scandal, eventually totaling about two dozen, including former Assistant Secretary of State Veliotes; former senior Iranian officials, such as President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and Defense Minister Ahmad Madani; and intelligence operatives, such as Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and a CIA-Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi. Many of these witnesses were cited in a PBS documentary that I co-wrote in April 1991, entitled “The Election Held Hostage.”
After the documentary aired – and amid growing public interest – pressure built on Congress to open a new inquiry into this prequel, but President Bush made clear that his reaction would be to “deny everything.”
On May 3, 1991, at a White House press availability, Bush was asked about reports that he had traveled to Paris in October 1980 to personally seal the deal on having the 52 hostages released only after the election – as Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe had described.
“Was I ever in Paris in October 1980?” a clearly annoyed Bush responded, repeating the question through pursed lips. “Definitely, definitely, no.”
Bush returned to the October Surprise topic five days later, his anger still clearly visible:
“I can only say categorically that the allegations about me are grossly untrue, factually incorrect, bald-faced lies.”
Yet, despite Bush’s anger – and despite “debunking” attacks on the October Surprise story from the neoconservative New Republic and my then-former employers at Newsweek – the House and Senate each started investigations, albeit somewhat half-heartedly and with inadequate resources.
Image below: President George H. W. Bush addresses the nation on Jan. 16,1991, to discuss the launch of Operation Desert Storm.
Still, the congressional October Surprise inquiries sent Bush’s White House into panic mode. The President, who was expecting to coast to reelection in 1992, saw the October Surprise issue – along with the continued Iran-Contra investigation by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – as threats to his retention of power.
By fall 1991, the Bush administration was pulling together documents from various federal agencies that might be relevant to the October Surprise inquiry. The idea was to concentrate the records in the hands of a few trusted officials in Washington. As part of that process, the White House was informed that there appeared to be confirmation of a key October Surprise allegation.
In a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991, Associate White House Counsel Paul Beach Jr. wrote that one document that had been unearthed was a record of Reagan’s campaign director William J. Casey traveling to Madrid, Spain, a potentially key corroboration of Jamshid Hashemi’s claim that Casey had met with senior Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi in Madrid in late July and again in mid-August 1980.
The U.S. Embassy in Madrid’s confirmation of Casey’s trip had gone to State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who was responsible for assembling the State Department documents, according to the memo. Williamson passed on word to Beach, who wrote that Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”
The significance of this confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid can hardly be overstated. The influential October Surprise debunking stories – ballyhooed on the covers of Newsweek and The New Republic – hinged on their joint misreading of some attendance records at a London historical conference which they claimed proved Casey was there and thus could not have traveled to Madrid. That meant, according to the two magazines, that the CIA’s Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi was lying about arranging Casey’s two meetings with Karrubi in Madrid.
In their double-barreled shoot-down of the October Surprise story, Newsweek and The New Republic created a Washington “group think,” which held that the October Surprise case was just a baseless “conspiracy theory.” But the two magazines were wrong.
I already knew that their analyses of the London attendance records were inaccurate. They also failed to interview key participants at the conference, including historian Robert Dallek who had looked for Casey and confirmed to me that Casey had skipped the key morning session on July 28, 1980.
But 1991 was pre-Internet, so it was next to impossible to counter the false reporting of Newsweek and The New Republic, especially given the powerful conventional wisdom that had taken shape against the October Surprise story.
Not wanting to shake that “group think,” Bush’s White House withheld news of the Williamson-Beach discovery of evidence of Casey’s trip to Madrid. That information was neither shared with the public nor the congressional investigators. Instead, a well-designed cover-up was organized and implemented.
The Cover-up Takes Shape
On Nov. 6, 1991, two days after the Beach memo, Beach’s boss, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.
At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation where some of prosecutor Walsh’s investigators also were coming to suspect that the origins of the Reagan-Bush contacts with Iran traced back to the 1980 campaign.
The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s political future. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Image on the right: Gray (oregonlive.com)
Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]
Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings, the document said.
In other words, just as the Reagan administration had insisted on walling off the Iran-Contra investigation to a period from 1984-86, the Bush administration wanted to seal off the October Surprise investigation to 1979-80. That would ensure that the public would not see the two seemingly separate scandals as one truly ugly affair.
Meanwhile, as Bush’s White House frustrated the congressional inquiries with foot-dragging, slow-rolling and other obstructions, President Bush would occasionally lash out with invective against the October Surprise suspicions.
In late spring 1992, Bush raised the October Surprise issue at two news conferences, bringing the topic up himself. On June 4, 1992, Bush snapped at a reporter who asked whether an independent counsel was needed to investigate the administration’s pre-Persian Gulf War courtship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
“I wonder whether they’re going to use the same prosecutors that are trying out there to see whether I was in Paris in 1980,” the clearly peeved President responded. “I mean, where are we going with the taxpayers’ money in this political year? I was not in Paris, and we did nothing illegal or wrong here” on Iraq.
At another news conference at the world environmental summit in Brazil, Bush brought up the October Surprise case again, calling the congressional inquiries “a witchhunt” and demanding that Congress clear him of having traveled to Paris.
Taking their cue from the President, House Republicans threatened to block continued funding for the inquiry unless the Democrats agreed that Bush had not gone to Paris. Although Bush’s alibi for the key weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980, was shaky, with details from his Secret Service logs withheld and with supposedly corroborating witnesses contradicting each other, the Democrats agreed to give Bush what he wanted.
After letting Bush off the hook on Paris, the inquiry stumbled along inconclusively with the White House withholding key documents and keeping some key witnesses, such as Bush’s former national security adviser Donald Gregg, out of reach.
Perhaps more importantly, the Casey-Madrid information from Beach’s memo was never shared with Congress, according to House Task Force Chairman Lee Hamilton, who I interviewed about the missing material in 2013.
Whatever interest Congress had in the October Surprise case faded even more after Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. There was a palpable sense around Official Washington that it would be wrong to pile on the defeated President. The thinking was that Bush (and Reagan) should be allowed to ride off into the sunset with their legacies intact.
So, even as more incriminating evidence arrived at the House task force in December 1992 and in January 1993 – including testimony from French intelligence chief Alexander deMarenches’s biographer confirming the Paris meeting and a report from Russia’s duma revealing that Soviet intelligence had monitored the Republican-Iranian contacts in 1980 – it was all cast aside. The task force simply decided there was “no credible evidence” to support the October Surprise allegations.
Trusting the Suspect
Beyond the disinclination of Hamilton and his investigators to aggressively pursue important leads, they operated with the naïve notion that President Bush, who was a prime suspect in the October Surprise case, would compile and turn over evidence that would prove his guilt and seal his political fate. Power at that level simply doesn’t work that way.
Image below: Casey
After discovering the Beach memo, I emailed a copy to Hamilton and discussed it with him by phone. The retired Indiana Democratic congressman responded that his task force was never informed that the White House had confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid.
“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.
“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said. Hamilton added that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.
Therein, of course, lay the failure of the October Surprise investigation. Hamilton and his team were counting on President Bush and his team to bring all the evidence together in one place and then share it with Congress, when they were more likely to burn it.
Indeed, by having Bush’s White House gather together all the hard evidence that might have proved that Bush and Reagan engaged in an operation that bordered on treason, Hamilton’s investigation may have made it impossible for the historical mystery ever to be solved. There is a good chance that whatever documentary evidence there might have been doesn’t exist anymore.
After discovering the Beach memo, I contacted both Beach and Williamson, who insisted that they had no memory of the Casey-to-Madrid records. I also talked with Boyden Gray, who told me that he had no involvement in the October Surprise inquiry, although I had the minutes to the Nov. 6, 1991 meeting where he rallied Bush’s team to contain the investigation.
I also filed a Freedom of Information Act request to have the records of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid searched for the relevant cable or other documents regarding Casey’s trip, but the State Department said nothing could be found.
So, the question becomes: Did Bush’s loyal team collect all the raw documents in one place, not so they could be delivered to Congress, but rather so they could be removed from the historical record permanently, thus buttressing for all time the angry denials of George H.W. Bush?
Surely, someone as skilled in using power and influence as former President Bush (the elder) would need no advice from Kim Philby about how to use privilege and connections to shield one’s guilt. That, after all, is the sort of thing that comes naturally to those who are born to the right families, attend the right schools and belong to the right secret societies.
George H.W. Bush came from the bosom of the American ruling class at a time when it was rising to become the most intimidating force on earth. He was the grandson of a powerful Wall Street banker, the son of an influential senator, and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Along the way, he attended Yale and belonged to Skull and Bones.)
Indeed, Poppy Bush could probably have given Kim Philby lessons on how to brush off suspicions and cover up wrongdoing. Still, Philby’s insight into how the powerful and well-connected can frustrate the investigations and questions of lesser citizens is worth recalling: “Deny everything.”
[To watch a video interview with Robert Parry discussing this article, click here.]
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
All images in this article are from Consortiumnews
Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.
So the idea of wearing your yellow vest to demonstrate against unpopular government measures caught on quickly. The costume was at hand and didn’t have to be provided by Soros for some more or less manufactured “color revolution”. The symbolism was fitting: in case of socio-economic emergency, show that you don’t want to be run over.
As everybody knows, what set off the protest movement was yet another rise in gasoline taxes. But it was immediately clear that much more was involved. The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population. That is why the movement achieved almost instant popularity and support
The Voices of the People
The Yellow Vests held their first demonstrations on Saturday, November 17, on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It was totally unlike the usual trade union demonstrations, well organized to march down the boulevard between the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille, or the other way around, carrying banners and listening to speeches from leaders at the end. The Gilets Jaunes just came, with no organization, no leaders to tell them where to go or to harangue the crowd. They were just there, in the yellow vests, angry and ready to explain their anger to any sympathetic listener.
Briefly, the message was this: we can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down. We just can’t take it any more. The government must stop, think and change course.
Source: NDTV.com
But so far, the reaction of the government was to send police to spray torrents of tear gas on the crowd, apparently to keep the people at a distance from the nearby Presidential residence, the Elysee Palace. President Macron was somewhere else, apparently considering himself above and beyond it all.
But those who were listening could learn a lot about the state of France today. Especially in the small towns and rural areas, where many protesters came from. Things are much worse than officials and media in Paris have let on.
There were young women who were working seven days a week and despaired of having enough money to feed and clothe their children.
People were angry but ready to explain very clearly the economic issues.
Colette, age 83, doesn’t own a car, but explained to whoever would listen that the steep raise of gasoline prices would also hurt people who don’t drive, by affecting prices of food and other necessities. She had done the calculations and figured it would cost a retired person 80 euros per month.
“Macron didn’t run on the promise to freeze pensions”, recalled a Yellow Vest, but that is what he has done, along with increasing solidarity taxes on pensioners.
A significant and recurring complaint concerned the matter of health care. France has long had the best public health program in the world, but this is being steadily undermined to meet the primary need of capital: profit. In the past few years, there has been a growing government campaign to encourage, and finally to oblige people to subscribe to a “mutuelle”, that is, a private health insurance, ostensibly to fill “the gaps” not covered by France’s universal health coverage. The “gaps” can be the 15% that is not covered for ordinary illnesses (grave illnesses are covered 100%), or for medicines taken off the “covered” list, or for dental work, among other things. The “gaps” to fill keep expanding, along with the cost of subscribing to the mutuelle. In reality, this program, sold to the public as modernizing improvement, is a gradual move toward privatization of health care. It is a sneaky method of opening the whole field of public health to international financial capital investment. This gambit has not fooled ordinary people and is high on the list of complaints by the Gilets Jaunes.
The degradation of care in the public hospitals is another complaint. There are fewer and fewer hospitals in rural areas, and one must “wait long enough to die” emergency rooms. Those who can afford it are turning to private hospitals. But most can’t. Nurses are overworked and underpaid. When one hears what nurses have to endure, one is reminded that this is indeed a noble profession.
In all this I was reminded of a young woman we met at a public picnic in southwestern France last summer. She cares for elderly people who live at home alone in rural areas, driving from one to another, to feed them, bathe them, offer a moment of cheerful company and understanding. She loves her vocation, loves helping old people, although it barely allows her to make a living. She will be among those who will have to pay more to get from one patient to the next.
People pay taxes willingly when they are getting something for it. But not when the things they are used to are being taken away. The tax evaders are the super-rich and the big corporations with their batteries of lawyers and safe havens, or intruders like Amazon and Google, but ordinary French people have been relatively disciplined in paying taxes in return for excellent public services: optimum health care, first class public transport, rapid and efficient postal service, free university education. But all that is under assault from the reign of financial capital called “neo-liberalism” here. In rural areas, more and more post offices, schools and hospitals are shut down, unprofitable train service is discontinued as “free competition” is introduced following European Union directives – measures which oblige people to drive their cars more than ever. Especially when huge shopping centers drain small towns of their traditional shops.
Incoherent Energy Policies
And the tax announced by the government – an additional 6.6 cents per liter for diesel and an additional 2.9 centers per liter of gasoline – are only the first steps in a series of planned increases over the next years. The measures are supposed to incite people to drive less or even better, to scrap their old vehicles and buy nice new electric cars.
More and more “governance” is an exercise in social engineering by technocrats who know what is best. This particular exercise goes directly opposite to an earlier government measure of social engineering which used economic incitements to get people to buy cars running on diesel. Now the government has changed its mind. Over half of personal vehicles still run on diesel, although the percentage has been dropping. Now their owners are told to go buy an electric car instead. But people living on the edge simply can’t afford the switch.
Besides, the energy policy is incoherent. In theory, the “green” economy includes shutting down France’s many nuclear power plants. Without them, where would the electricity come from to run the electric cars? And nuclear power is “clean”, no CO2. So what is going on? People wonder.
The most promising alternative sources of energy in France are the strong tides along northern coasts. But last July, the Tidal Energies project on the Normandy coast was suddenly dropped because it wasn’t profitable – not enough customers. This is symptomatic of what is wrong with the current government. Major new industrial projects are almost never profitable at first, which is why they need government support and subsidies to get going, with a view to the future. Such projects were supported under de Gaulle, raising France to the status of major industrial power, and providing unprecedented prosperity for the population as a whole. But the Macron government is not investing in the future nor doing anything to preserve industries that remain. The key French energy corporation Alstom was sold to General Electric under his watch.
Source: Archy news nety
Indeed, it is perfectly hypocritical to call the French gas tax an “ecotax” since the returns from a genuine ecotax would be invested to develop clean energies – such as tidal power plants. Rather, the benefits are earmarked to balance the budget, that is, to serve the government debt. The Macronian gas tax is just another austerity measure – along with cutting back public services and “selling the family jewels”, that is, selling potential money-makers like Alstom, port facilities and the Paris airports.
The Government Misses the Point
Initial government responses showed that they weren’t listening. They dipped into their pool of clichés to denigrate something they didn’t want to bother to understand.
President Macron’s first reaction was to guilt-trip the protesters by invoking the globalists’ most powerful argument for imposing unpopular measures: global warming. Whatever small complaints people may have, he indicated, that is nothing compared to the future of the planet.
This did not impress people who, yes, have heard all about climate change and care as much as anyone for the environment, but who are obliged to retort: “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.”
After the second Yellow Vest Saturday, November 25, which saw more demonstrators and more tear gas, the Minister in charge of the budget, Gérard Darmanin, declared that what had demonstrated on the Champs-Elysée was “la peste brune”, the brown plague, meaning fascists. (For those who enjoy excoriating the French as racist, it should be noted that Darmanin is of Algerian working class origins). This remark caused an uproar of indignation that revealed just how great is public sympathy for the movement – over 70% approval by latest polls, even after uncontrolled vandalism. Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, was obliged to declare that government communication had been badly managed. Of course, that is the familiar technocratic excuse: we are always right, but it is all a matter of our “communication”, not of the facts on the ground.
Maybe I have missed something, but of the many interviews I have listened to, I have not heard one word that would fall into the categories of “far right”, much less “fascism” – or even that indicated any particular preference in regard to political parties. These people are wholly concerned with concrete practical issues. Not a whiff of ideology – remarkable in Paris!
Some people ignorant of French history and eager to exhibit their leftist purism have suggested that the Yellow Vests are dangerously nationalistic because they occasionally wave French flags and sing La Marseillaise. That simply means that they are French. Historically, the French left is patriotic, especially when it is revolting against the aristocrats and the rich or during the Nazi Occupation[i]. It is just a way of saying, We are the people, we do the work, and you must listen to our grievances. To be a bad thing, “nationalism” must be aggressive toward other nations. This movement is not attacking anybody, it is strictly staying home.
The Weakness of Macron
The Yellow Vests have made clear to the whole world that Emmanuel Macron was an artificial product sold to the electorate by an extraordinary media campaign.
Macron was the rabbit magically pulled out of a top hat, sponsored by what must be called the French oligarchy. After catching the eye of established king-maker Jacques Attali, the young Macron was given a stint at the Rothschild bank where he could quickly gain a small fortune, ensuring his class loyalty to his sponsors. Media saturation and the scare campaign against “fascist” Marine LePen (who moreover flubbed her major debate) put Macron in office. He had met his wife when she was teaching his theater class, and now he gets to play President.
The mission assigned to him by his sponsors was clear. He must carry through more vigorously the “reforms” (austerity measures) already undertaken by previous governments, which had often dawdled at hastening the decline of the social State.
And beyond that, Macron was supposed to “save Europe”. Saving Europe means saving the European Union from the quagmire in which it finds itself.
This is why cutting expenses and balancing the budget is his obsession. Because that’s what he was chosen to do by the oligarchy that sponsored his candidacy. He was chosen by the financial oligarchy above all to save the European Union from threatening disintegration caused by the euro. The treaties establishing the EU and above all the common currency, the euro, have created an imbalance between member states that is unsustainable. The irony is that previous French governments, starting with Mitterrand, are largely responsible for this state of affairs. In a desperate and technically ill-examined effort to keep newly unified Germany from becoming the dominant power in Europe, the French insisted on binding Germany to France by a common currency. Reluctantly, the Germans agreed to the euro – but only on German terms. The result is that Germany has become the unwilling creditor of equally unwilling EU member states, Italy, Spain, Portugal and of course, ruined Greece. The financial gap between Germany and its southern neighbors keeps expanding, which causes ill will on all sides.
Germany doesn’t want to share economic power with states it considers irresponsible spendthrifts. So Macron’s mission is to show Germany that France, despite its flagging economy, is “responsible”, by squeezing the population in order to pay interest on the debt. Macron’s idea is that the politicians in Berlin and the bankers in Frankfurt will be so impressed that they will turn around and say, well done Emmanuel, we are ready to throw our wealth into a common pot for the benefit of all 27 Member States. And that is why Macron will stop at nothing to balance the budget, to make the Germans love him.
So far, the Macron magic is not working on the Germans, and it’s driving his own people into the streets.
Or are they his own people? Does Macron really care about his run of the mill compatriots who just work for a living? The consensus is that he does not.
Macron is losing the support both of the people in the streets and the oligarchs who sponsored him. He is not getting the job done.
Macron’s rabbit-out-of-the hat political ascension leaves him with little legitimacy, once the glow of glossy magazine covers wears off. With help from his friends, Macron invented his own party, La République en Marche, which doesn’t mean much of anything but suggested action. He peopled his party with individuals from “civil society”, often medium entrepreneurs with no political experience, plus a few defectors from either the Socialist or the Republican Parties, to occupy the most important government posts.
The only well-known recruit from “civil society” was the popular environmental activist, Nicolas Hulot, who was given the post of Minister of Environment, but who abruptly resigned in a radio announcement last August, citing frustration.
Macron’s strongest supporter from the political class was Gérard Collomb, Socialist Mayor of Lyons, who was given the top cabinet post of Minister of Interior, in charge of national police. But shortly after Hulot left, Collomb said he was leaving too, to go back to Lyons. Macron entreated him to stay on, but on October 3, Collomb went ahead and resigned, with a stunning statement referring to “immense problems” facing his successor. In the “difficult neighborhoods” in the suburbs of major cities, he said, the situation is “very much degraded : it’s the law of the jungle that rules, drug dealers and radical Islamists have taken the place of the Republic.” Such suburbs need to be “reconquered”.
After such a job description, Macron was at a loss to recruit a new Interior Minister. He groped around and came up with a crony he had chosen to head his party, ex-Socialist Christophe Castaner. With a degree in criminology, Castaner’s main experience qualifying him to head the national police is his close connection, back in his youth in the 1970s, with a Marseilles Mafioso, apparently due to his penchant for playing poker and drinking whiskey in illegal dens.
Saturday, November 17, demonstrators were peaceful, but resented the heavy teargas attacks. Saturday November 25, things got a big rougher, and on Saturday December 1st, all hell broke loose. With no leaders and no service d’ordre (militants assigned to protect the demonstrators from attacks, provocations and infiltration), it was inevitable that casseurs(smashers) got into the act and started smashing things, looting shops and setting fires to trash cans, cars and even buildings. Not only in Paris, but all over France: from Marseilles to Brest, from Toulouse to Strasbourg. In the remote town of Puy en Velay, known for its chapel perched on a rock and its traditional lace-making, the Prefecture (national government authority) was set on fire. Tourist arrivals are cancelled and fancy restaurants are empty and department stores fear for their Christmas windows. The economic damages are enormous.
And yet, support for the Yellow Vests remains high, probably because people are able to distinguish between those grieved citizens and the vandals who love to wreak destruction for its own sake.
On Monday, there were suddenly fresh riots in the troubled suburbs that Collomb warned about as he retreated to Lyons. This was a new front for the national police, whose representatives let it be known that all this was getting to be much too much for them to cope with. Announcing a state of emergency is not likely to solve anything.
Macron is a bubble that has burst. The legitimacy of his authority is very much in question. Yet he was elected in 2017 for a five year term, and his party holds a large majority in parliament that makes his destitution almost impossible.
So what next? Despite having been sidelined by Macron’s electoral victory in 2017, politicians of all hews are trying to recuperate the movement – but discreetly, because the Gilets Jaunes have made clear their distrust of all politicians. This is not a movement that seeks to take power. It simply seeks redress of its grievances. The government should have listened in the first place, accepted discussions and compromise. This gets more difficult as time goes on, but nothing is impossible.
For some two or three hundred years, people one could call “left” hoped that popular movements would lead to changes for the better. Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism”. This attitude is one of many factors indicating that the changes ahead will not be led by the left as it exists today. Those who fear change will not be there to help make it happen. But change is inevitable and it need not be for the worse.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
[i] The exception was the student uprising of May 1968, which was not a revolt of the poor but a revolt in a time of prosperity in favor of greater personal freedom: “it is forbidden to forbid”. The May ’68 generation has turned out to be the most anti-French generation in history, for reasons that can’t be dealt with here. To some extent, the Yellow Vests mark a return of the people after half a century of scorn from the liberal intelligentsia.
This morning I read online the current problems Benjamin Netanyahu is having within the Knesset and within his own political party,
“Now, Netanyahu’s once stable coalition is hanging by a thread, with the support of only 61 members in the Knesset. This means that the coalition’s once comfortable majority is now dependent on a single MK. One wrong move and Netanyahu could find himself forced into snap elections, a choice that, at least for now, he dreads. [“Netanyahu’s Predicament: The Era of Easy Wars is over.” Ramzy Baroud. Palestine Chronicle, November 28, 2018.]
How appropriate, as after reading Bibi – The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshell Pfeffer, it is very much in line with how the rest of his political career has progressed – hanging on by a thread, short elections cycles, scandals of different sorts orbiting around him, coalition partners deserting him. Nothing new.
Pfeffer’s work is an interesting read on Israeli political history, restricted in its comments about the Palestinian situation or concepts about Palestine, except for a noteworthy ongoing reiteration on Palestine that I will explore later. It has some faults with certain narrative aspects of its history – again more later – but overall it appears to be a fairly complete analysis of Netanyahu’s life and times.
Unfortunately it starts with one of those faults, the idea that “before then [1929] the Arabs living there had not factored into Zionist thinking.” Except that it had, and one of the critical political ideologues/philosophers of early Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who plays an important role in the political ideas of Netanyahu and throughout this history, recognized both the existence of the Arabs and the need for force for Jewish settlement:
The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural ….. There was no misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict. …. No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an ‘iron wall,’ when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement. [from Haaretz, 1923]
Different stories
From there it gets narrowly political, and relates a story not only of Netanyahu but of much of Israeli politics. It tells the history of the long political battle between Mapai/Labour (the secular socialist side) and Likud (the Revisionist or Jabotinsky side) . It tells of the earlier history of Benzion Netanyahu and his life and career considerably spent in the U.S. with that influence bearing on Benjamin. In the early stages it tells more about Netanyahu’s brother Yoni, whom Benjamin idolized with “reverence”, and about whom a mythological heroic figure was created. It also tells the story in part of Ben Gurion and his conflicts within Israeli politics.
In sum, the politics of Israel seem not much different than that of other countries, one full of political infighting, crossovers, corruption, double dealings, recriminations and attacks – and above all, it is a story of power hungry elites.
It is centred on the story of Netanyahu of course, but he is a minor figure through much of the early history, seemingly out of place in Israel and very comfortable in the U.S., uncomfortable with people in general, but becoming a master of manipulation.
Bibi
Netanyahu spent a considerable amount of his time in childhood and early adolescence living in the United States. His education from the U.S., both in his youth and later as a young adult, proved highly influential, and he seemed more comfortable in the U.S. than in Israel. It is where he first encountered how the media influenced politics, how it could be used to manipulate populations on a large scale and without worrying about facts as much as ideology. One of his prime ideological influences was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead,
Rand’s muscular blend of capitalism and individualism appealed to Netanyahu and has influenced his political and economic thinking ever since.
He was not interested in people, but power, wanting to change Israel from its socialist somewhat accommodating intentions towards peace to a competitive capitalist and militarily powerful country. Pfeffer variously describes him as egotistical, arrogant, averse to making concessions, and disdainful of others, ready to use whomever as was required to reach his goals.
The U.S. influence is writ large in everything Netanyahu does. He uses U.S. political ideas in the sense of cultivating a fear factor based on racism, spreading it through modern technology, and relying on a base that supported him pretty much regardless of his misdeeds and failures. His base, the people he knew who would support him through thick and thin, are the far right wing, ideologues of the settler community and their many small but influential political parties that often carried the balance of power in his favour. In spite of being a secular Jew, he used the religious right to augment his hold on power, offering cabinet positions in return for support.
One of his strongest supporters, among the many from the United States, is Sheldon Adelson, a U.S. billionaire businessman. Adelson spent $93 million while operating an Israeli newspaper designed with the purpose of supporting Netanyahu’s political career, and spending twice that amount for publicity during critical election times. Netanyahu never achieved a full majority government, using the right wing parties to support him in the Knesset, using the fear factor, racism, and modern media to hang on to his base, and using the usual bagful of political promises to gain power. The economy in a statistical sense did thrive under his leadership, but as with all governments that apply capitalist austerity – tax cuts, social benefit cuts, firings, privatizations, and deregulation of finances – poverty and inequality increased significantly.
Fault lines
As mentioned earlier, there are some historical narrative faults scattered through the history. While they do not change what is mostly an insider political history (with the U.S. being considered part and parcel of Israel’s history) they need to be addressed as it is a soft way of reiterating the overall Israeli narrative concerning their interactions with the Palestinians.
Pfeffer does admit that the 1948 war “results were much more devastating” for the Palestinian population than the Israelis,
Around two-thirds of that community, some 750,000 people, had fled their houses at the advice of the Arab leaders, for fear of the fighting and Jewish reprisals, or had been forcibly banished by the new Israeli army.
That needs to be looked at in reverse order. “Forcibly banished” is an understatement as what occurred were genocidal murders and demolitions of whole villages using bulldozers and dynamite. Following that, yes, word spread, the fear spread that similar actions could and would be repeated as IDF forces moved from village to village, eventually removing from the landscape about 500 Palestinian villages.
Another small point is snuck by the reader while discussing the pre 1967 situation where tensions had risen “with Syria over attempts by Israeli farmers to work on land in contested areas of the demilitarized zone.” “Contested” is the preferred word used by the Israelis to describe land the colonial settler society wanted to use for itself at the exclusion of the Arabs; for the Arabs it was not contested, but “occupied”.
A bigger fault line emerges with the actual 1967 Six Day War. Pfeffer admits that the war started with a pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian military but he also adds,
But Israel had half planned, half-blundered into the war. Now it would approach a long military occupation of another nation in the same manner.
To give credit, the author does recognize that there is a “long military occupation of another nation”, but it is an undefined statement especially as to what would constitute a Palestinian ‘nation’. The original point about half-planned and half-blundered is simply not true.
Current historical readings show clearly that the generals and military had clear plans and clear knowledge about the status of the opposing Arab armies and knew they could win readily if they struck preemptively. At the other end of the war, the Israelis imposed martial law on the occupied territories (not contested) with plans developed over a period of years before the war began. [ see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.One World Publications, Oxford, England, 2006, and The Biggest Prison on Earth – A History of the Occupied Territories. Ilan Pappe. Oneworld Publications, London, 2018. Also see, Miko Peled’s The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.Just World Books, Washington, DC, 2012.]
In 2006, Hamas won the civic elections held in Palestinian territory for a new Palestinian Authority government. In what was considered at the time to be a very fair election free of outside meddling or internal corruption, Hamas won the majority of positions. This was not the correct result for the Israelis and was quickly condemned by Canada, the U.S., and other countries who withdrew financial support from the Palestinians in an attempt to have them change the situation. Pfeffer says, without mentioning the election results nor the reaction to it,
In June 2007, Hamas launched a coup in Gaza, ousting the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.
This is taken completely out of context as Pfeffer places it within the dismantling of settlements with “no arrangement…put in place to help alleviate the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.” While he does not say that one action resulted in the other, his context strongly implies it. In truth, Fatah attempted to take control of Gaza with their coup attempt, supported by Israel and the U.S., as a consequence of the election results favoring Hamas. Hamas was effectively silenced in the West Bank, but they managed to defeat the Fatah led coup in Gaza. It is only one line in the book, but it carries a whole load of misinformation and narrative twisting along with it.
Bibi’s faultines
In conclusion, Pfeffer does not see much hope in a Netanyahu government.
Netanyahu’s Israel is living on borrowed time….the occupation of another nation, nearly of equal size, is eroding Israeli democracy and human rights at an alarming rate. Netanyahu has no plans to deal with that erosion, save for stoking racism and fear.
Perhaps the word “revealing” should be used instead of “eroding” as Israel, now a declared Jewish state is not a democracy. Any country living as an apartheid state, with discriminatory laws against half its population, a population under a rather brutal military occupation, cannot be considered in any way, shape, or form to be democratic. Certainly the fear factor is still there, but it is mostly directed at Iran rather than at neighbouring Arab countries, perhaps as most of them, apart from Syria, have acquiesced to Israel’s’ presence and actions in the Middle East.
This leads to Netanyahu’s biggest faultline – fear of Iran, or fear of Palestinians. His ranting against Iran is well known, from his sadly infantile rant at the UN with his kindergarten bomb drawing to his speech to his adoring sycophantic U.S. admirers in Congress (without Obama’s presence or invitation). Throughout this book Pfeffer quotes him frequently as indicating that the Palestinians are not the problem, they are a “diversion”. The conflict “is not about the Palestinians, borders, or refugees….It rises from an implacable Arab and Muslim hatred toward the West, and Israel is the West’s outpost in the Middle East.”
The latter quote is Pfeffer’s words, revealing Netanyahu’s position but also identifying a century long truth from early Churchill, Balfour and the British government that Israel is indeed an outpost of the west, an idea similarly held by U.S. counterpartners.
But back to Bibi. While meeting with Obama in 2009, “the Palestinian issue was a distraction from the real threat [Iran], not just to Israel, but to the entire world.” This is a rather highly inflated fear factor, but it certainly works on most of the U.S. mainstream. Fortunately Obama was able to reach a nuclear energy/control deal with Iran through the working group with Russia and the European powers.
Then comes the “aha” moment to Netanyahu’s bluster on Iran,
…the focus on Iran significantly reduced the pressure on Netanyahu to make concessions to the Palestinians.
Ever since Oslo, the ability to talk, and talk some more, to create distractions with some pretty little war somewhere all played into keeping the mainstream entertained as to Israel’s good intentions all the while they continued their military occupation, ramped up the apartheid system, and continued with their slow ethnic cleansing.
It has to be obvious to Netanyahu and any other Israeli politician that keeping the Palestinian narrative out of the western mainstream press was a paramount concern for their control and take over of all Palestinian lands. Thus the Arab states became the problem – their non democratic governments and their hatred of the west and its freedoms.
But as a corollary, if Israel had actually done something, actually accomplished something towards establishing a peaceful settlement with Palestinians, be it two states, one state, or a binational state, then the Arab states would no longer be hostile towards Israel (except perhaps for the occupied Golan Heights of Syria). But even as the governments of those Arab states are even now generally accepting of the existence of Israel and some are de facto allies, the need for an enemy, the ‘other’, has to go somewhere, and thus Iran.
Without Iran, without an ‘other’, Netanyahu would have no one to use his fear mongering and racism against, forcing him to then address the Palestinians as the fear factor, but then only drawing more attention to the manner in which Israel occupies and controls their territory.
A readable history
From Jabotinsky’s recognition of the Palestinians resisting Jewish occupation to the rantings of Netanyahu against Iran, the racism and fear factor have been a constant in Israeli political life. It has become stronger under Netanyahu’s leadership and his adoption of the U.S. manner of politicking. It has become stronger as Israel clearly demonstrates a high degree of ownership of the U.S. state. Pfeffer’s conclusion, after Netanyahu loses power, sometime soon if current Knesset actions play out fully, is that his “ultimate legacy will not be a more secure nation, but a deeply fractured Israeli society living behind walls.”
Regardless of the faultline criticisms, Bibi is well worth the read, if only to see that the Israel government is as elitist, corrupt, manipulative, and filled with power hungry people as much as any other state. I am not sure if Pfeffer’s one off faulted comments are due to his believing in the full Israeli narrative or are part of a softening of the narrative on his part in order to make the book more publishable, but they do not take away from the political story. The personal story defines the man as an egotistical, vain, and insecure person. The political story is thought provoking and interesting, covering much of Israel’s internal history during The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The first reports emerging from the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, December 2, 2018, are that Trump and Xi have agreed to put their trade war on hold, a kind of ‘trade war armistice’, at least for the next 90 days.
Trump entered into his meeting this past weekend with China’s president, Xi, having imposed $50 billion in tariffs at 25% on China goods imports last July, to which another $200 billion was added thereafter. Tariffs on the $200 billion were set at 10%, but were scheduled to rise to 25% on January 1, 2019. Before the US November elections, Trump further threatened to add a further $267 billion if China continued to refuse to meet with the US. But China didn’t take the bait. Trump’s strategy was transparent. His plan was to lure China into negotiations before the US elections so he could act tough for his political base before the US elections. China refused to be sucked in and refused to come to Washington to be played by Trump. Instead, it agreed to meet at the G20 gathering this weekend, at a more neutral setting and after the US elections.
In the lead up to this weekend’s G20 US-China meeting, Trump sent conflicting signals to the Chinese. On the one hand, Trump praised China’s president Xi personally, while announcing the existing 10% tariff hikes on the $200 billion would rise to 25% next January 2019 and that another $267 billion would follow if China did not meet with him. Meanwhile, China’s counter tariffs on US imports were levied at 25% for its first $50 billion tariffs and set at only 10% on the additional $60 billion on US goods.
However, to date the US-China trade dispute is more like a trade skirmish than a trade war. The initial first $50 billion in tariffs levied by both US and China this past July have been selective. Most have not yet had a significant impact on their respective economies thus far after only four months in 2018. But in 2019 that $50 billion would start to have an impact. Moreover, the $200 billion additional US tariffs, levied at only 10%, have been largely offset by a roughly equivalent 10% decline in the value of China’s currency, the Yuan.
A rise in $200 billion US tariffs, from 10% to 25%, in 2019 would have an impact, however, in 2019. The likely response by China would be to raise its second $60 billion tariffs on US imports by an equal amount, from current 10% to 25%. That could very well mark the start of a true US-China trade war.
China could also add more non-tariff barriers, or slow its purchase of US Treasury bonds, or block approval of mergers of US companies globally with operations in China, or encourage boycotts of US goods in China, or allow its currency to devalue well below the current 10% decline. These are measures that are typical of true trade wars, but which have not been employed as yet by China or the US. Sparring with tariffs are just initial moves, especially when tariff rates are relatively low, selectively applied, and not fully implemented yet.
While the US and China were clearly on the brink of a bona fide trade war, but until the G20 meeting they had not quite taken that last step. Nor is it likely now that they will. The Trump-Xi meeting at the G20 represents a kind of a trade policy ‘rubicon’ which neither has crossed as yet. If the initial reports coming out of the G20 meeting are accurate, then Trump and Xi have so far continued to decide not to cross the river of no return with regard to a war over trade.
The question is why now the apparent ‘armistice’ in the trade war? Why, after months of threats and warnings aimed at China, has Trump decided to back down? For that’s exactly what the agreements with China at the G20 represent: Trump has backed off, making concessions, while the Chinese have only reiterated proposals they publicly offered over the course of the last six months.
The reasons for the Trump retreat lay in the significant changes in economic conditions since last spring. At the time Trump launched his ‘trade war’ last March 2018 the US economy was accelerating due to multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for investors and corporations; the global economy still appeared to be growing nicely; US profits were rising 20%-25% and stock markets booming; and the Fed, the central bank, was still relatively early in its scheduled interest rate hikes. But that’s all changed as of year end 2018.
With growing indications that the global economy is slowing—with another recession in Japan and German and Europe economies contracting and weakening facing the UK Brexit and Italian bank problems—the US and global stock markets in recent months had begun to retreat noticeably. Early signs since October of US economic slowdown in 2019 have begun to emerge, especially in construction and autos. Japan is in recession. Germany’s economy is contracting, with Europe not far behind facing imminent crises as well in the UK’s Brexit next March and growing debt refinancing problems in Italian, Greek and other Euro banks. And more emerging market economies continue to slip into recession.
Faced with these looming economic realities, as well as growing political pressure at home, Trump eagerly sought the meeting with Xi at the G20 gathering despite continued and intensifying in-fighting between the factions on his US trade negotiating team.
Those factions and divisions among the US elite concerning trade center around three issues: first, access by US bankers and multinational corporations to China markets, especially getting China to allow a 51% or more ownership of US corporate operations in China; second, China increasing its purchases of US exports, especially agricultural and energy products; and third, most important, China agreeing to slow its development of nextgen technologies like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and 5G wireless—which has assumed the codename in the US of ‘intellectual property’.
Anti-China hardliners—Robert Lighthizer, US office of trade director, Peter Navarro, special advisor on trade, and John Bolton, long time anti-China hawk and national security adviser to Trump—all of whom are closely allied with the Pentagon, military industrial US corporations, and intelligence agencies—have all preferred a trade war with China to achieve US technology objectives. They have been engaged in an internal US faction fight since last April with the two other US factions—i.e. the bankers and multinational corporations whose priority objectives have been to get open markets and majority ownership rights for US businesses, especially banks, in China; and US heartland agricultural and manufacturing exporters, who represent Trump’s red state political base, who want a return and an expansion of China purchases of US exports.
Since this past summer, the Lighthizer-Navarro-Bolton faction have clearly had Trump’s ear and have prevailed ensuring technology transfer is at the top of the list of US trade negotiations priorities. However, with the recent weakening of the US stock markets, indications of economic slowdown coming, and growing US business concerns of a bona fide US-China trade war deepening in 2019, Trump has shifted his position toward a softer line in trade negotiations with China, apparently retreating closer to positions of the other two factions in US-China trade negotiations. That softer line is evident in the G20 meeting tentative agreements announced by Trump and Xi.
Put another way, facing the shift to a bona fide trade war in 2019—in the midst of a slowing global and US economy and a likely steeper correction in US stocks and financial markets—Trump met Xi at the G20 and ‘blinked’, as they say.
That Trump clearly retreated is undeniable in the content of the G20 announcement following his meeting with Xi. Of course a Trump retreat is not the likely ‘spin’ it will be given in the US corporate media this coming week. The agreements will be characterized as a mutual ‘pause’ of some sort in what appeared as an inevitable trade war commencing January 2019.
But a consideration of the substance of the verbal agreement between Trump and Xi released this past weekend shows that Trump clearly backed off while Xi simply reiterated what the China team has already offered Trump and had already put on the table the last several months.
Here’s what was agreed in broad principle, at least according to early reports:
Trump agreed not to allow the scheduled January 1, 2019 increase in US tariffs on $200 billion of imports from China to rise, from the current 10% tariff rate to the 25%.
Trump agreed not to move forward with his threat of another $267 billion tariffs on.
These represent two clear concessions by Trump and amount to reversals of prior US positions. What about China’s response? Unlike Trump, there was no clear retreat from previous positions, i.e. concessions.
China agreed to increase US purchases of agriculture goods (actually a restoration of prior levels) “immediately”, in order to ease the US trade deficit with China and boost US farmers and agribusiness. But China had already publicly offered to buy a further $100 billion in previous months. The joint communique coming out of the meeting only indicates to increase US purchases ‘in accordance with the needs of its domestic market’. The $100 billion is thus more a restoration of previous levels of China purchases of US agricultural and manufacturing exports.
China agreed to open its markets to US banks and businesses further. But it had already also announced earlier this year it would allow 51% foreign ownership, and suggested it could even go to 100% in coming years. So this too was an ‘offer’ it had already made to the US this past summer.
What about the key tech transfer issue that has split the US elite and the US trade team? That primary demand of the US hard liners, which seemed paramount in preceding months, has been tabled for future discussion. Both US and China have only agreed to discussions for the next 90 days “with respect to forced technology transfers” and related issues. (Reuters report by Roberta Rampton and Michael Martina, 12/2/18, 1:23pm ET). So no agreement on technology. Just a mutual face-saver to meet again and agree “to further exchanges at appropriate times”.
Meanwhile, Trump retreats from raising tariff rates from 10% to 25% and agrees to drop threatening another $267 billion, while Xi simply restates prior offers about more purchases agricultural goods and more US banker access to China markets.
If China’s objective of the Buenos Aires meeting was to get Trump to halt imposing higher and more tariffs—while conceding nothing except further talks on the technology issue—in that objective China has clearly succeeded. Trump will no doubt spin the additional agricultural purchases and more market access as China ‘concessions’. But these were already conceded before the parties met in Buenos Aires.
In contrast, if Trump’s primary objective, driven by his anti-China hard line US faction, was to get China to slow nextgen technology development and tech transfer, and concede on intellectual property issues, then Trump has clearly retreated at the G20.
Nor is it likely, at the end of the 90 day hiatus early next March 2019, that Trump and the hard-liners faction bargaining position will be any stronger. The 90 day ‘armistice’ in the emerging US-China trade war might even result in Trump back-peddling further should economic and political conditions worsen appreciably in the interim.
If the global and US economies continue to weaken and slow, which is highly likely, pressure by the other two US trade factions—the one demanding an agreement with China based on more access to China markets and the other demanding settlement so long as China agrees to more purchase of US goods—will only be stronger.
Political developments related to Trump’s business relations in the US and with Russian Oligarchs eventually forthcoming by the Mueller investigation will also likely weaken Trump’s position with regard to resuming a hard line on further tariffs on China. Japan’s recession may also have deepened further by then. Germany’s current economic contraction may have spread to the rest of Europe, which is also facing a confluence of additional problems involving the UK Brexit and the Italian bank problems next spring 2019.
Since 2008 US economic GDP growth has typically slowed dramatically in the winter quarter, and the first quarter 2019 US GDP is likely to again slow significantly from 2018 GDP growth rates. That will be especially the case if the US central bank, the Fed, continues its interest rate hikes into 2019, which appears likely to do at least through next spring. Trump may also have to focus more on saving his recent US-Mexico-Canada trade deal in Congress. All the above will almost certainly provoke a further decline in US stock and other financial markets as investors grow even more uneasy with Trump policies and increase pressure on Trump to postpone further tariffs on China trade.
More US banker-multinational corporate access to China and more China purchase of US farm goods could supersede US hardline anti-China faction demands for China concessions on tech transfer and nextgen military technology development.
More market access and more China purchases would be easy to ‘spin’ as huge gains by the Trump administration. They’ll just keep talking about technology, while cutting off China companies’ access to mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures in the US and in other US allies’ economies.
Should that occur, the US-China so-called ‘trade war’ will prove as phony as have prior Trump threats to tear up NAFTA, or to fundamentally remake the South Korean-US free trade treaty, or to impose 25% tariffs on German autos and European imports, or Trump’s steel tariffs which are riddled with more than 3000 tariff exemptions. While Trump talked tough, all have turned out to be ‘softball’ trade deals granted by the US.
Having ‘blinked’ after meeting with Xi at the G20 strongly suggests Trump’s potential trade war with China has peaked and will now deflate over time. And should the more serious economic and political developments noted above also materialize in 2019, the deflation and slow retreat may look more like an implosion and a rout.
Trump’s incessant bragging about his great skills and acumen in negotiating ‘deals’ will be revealed as so much egoistic bombast and exaggeration. And forthcoming economic developments and political events in 2019 may unravel more than just Trump’s phony trade offensive launched last spring.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Jack Rasmus.
Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, by Clarity Press, 2019, and ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression, Clarity Press, August 2017. He hosts the Alternative Visions radio show on the Progressive Radio Network and blogs at jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus
On December 10, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This analysis will try to look at how the prize fits into the bigger picture, but first, some general background is appropriate:
Norway is a member of NATO and has close ties to the United States and Great Britain. The political, economic and bureaucratic elites are firmly integrated in transatlantic networks, a nexus of economic connections, think tanks, international institutions, media and a thousand other ties that bind. They tend to identify with the liberal wing of the empire, (i.e. the Democrats, not the Republicans), but will work with any US administration. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are selected by the Norwegian parliament, and the Committee is nominally independent.
Despite being considered – and where the population considers itself – a ‘peace nation’, there are few countries that have eagerly joined more wars than Norway, from the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan 2001, the occupation of Iraq, Mali, Libya 2011 and the ongoing occupation of Syria. Norway spends large sums of money supporting the joint Western effort to control the rest of the world through comprador intermediaries in non-governmental organizations.
This analysis will discuss some (overlapping) points about the Nobel Peace Prize:
The prize reinforces certain grand narratives, the most important one being We are the good, and thus have the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world.
It creates symbols for regime change operations. It beatifies modern day ‘good natives’ complaining about cruel treatment and pleading for the West to do something to liberate them (but are often remarkably unable to see Western abuses).
It reinforces general reasons to start wars, by making specific themes very important at the same time they are being used to justify military action.
It reinforces the narrative that enemy fights with illegal and cruel weapons. The focus on chemical weapons, as opposed to napalm or sanctions, is one example.
It sanctifies peace treaties that are more like unilateral surrenders, advantageous to Western imperialism and capitalist interests.
For a bunch of peaceful people, the prize winners are remarkably eager for war and bloody interventions
Some other points + Conclusion
1. We are the good, and thus have the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world.
(Photo: / White House, Samantha Appleton /Public Domain)
The Nobel Peace Prize gets its prestige and press coverage because it reinforces several big narratives. If it should deviate too much from what the powerful want, it would be ignored. Of prime importance is the notion that we are the good, and we have a monopoly on interpreting reality and to decide what is important. (‘We’ in this context being people in the West, and by extension their governments and leaders). During the Cold War, the prize had a similar function. It would be interesting to take a closer look at it, but for practical purposes this analysis will mostly be limited the last 30 years. Once you start to notice certain basic themes, they are rather obvious. To put it pointedly, the Nobel Peace Prize tries to aid regime changes to achieve the Empire’s aims where it is possible to avoid direct war, but it will aid in confirming the narrative that our troops are good guys.
This explains why Western leaders so often get the prize. The point is creating an impression that there exists a more humane possibility within our current unjust world system. When they receive it, what they have actually done is not an issue. Hence the award to people like Jimmy Carter (winner 2002); as president he instigated several bloody covert interventions in Central-America, Africa and of course the Islamist fighters in Afghanistan, but has since then opposed direct US wars; or Al Gore (winner 2007), who when he was vice president didn’t shy away from using the military as a foreign policy tool (see part 7). The prize to Barack Obama (winner 2009) can be placed here.
But the main use of the prize is to create support in Western liberal opinion for interventions that would otherwise be naked imperialistic aggressions.
2. A focus for regime change operations
Where a Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a dissident of a non-western country, the CIA or the Pentagon (see point 3) often has a task force working on cracking the exact same country.
They winners have varying degrees of internal appeal in the targeted country, but the main purpose in choosing these people is not to boost their standing internally, but to justify attempts at regime change to Western liberal public opinion. Without the focus on these martyrs, these operations would look suspiciously like old style colonial domination.
Hence the beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi (winner 1991) coincided with a concerted campaign to get control over a recalcitrant, but very strategic country. Suu Kyi is in many ways typical of the people the Committee prefers. She is a known entity, having conspicuously strong personal connections to the former colonial power – Oxford educated, married to a British citizen, her children are British citizens, etc. Signaling in which direction her political compass was oriented, she asked the world to use the old colonial name Burma instead of Myanmar. She asked for harsh measures against her own country (for its own good) fitting hand in glove with the US strategy actually used. In fact, all means would be permissible to use against this regime imprisoning a modern day saint.
The Nobel Prize to Suu Kyi played an invaluable role in creating huge support, especially on the liberal left, for the draconian economic sanctions against an otherwise fairly obscure country. And maybe many of her Western supporters actually did believe that the US and UK could fund her with large sums of money and create entire NGO-networks for her with the expressed goal of subverting a sovereign nation’s government, and her intentions to still be pure and progressive.
Myanmar is immensely rich in natural resources and is positioned between China and the Indian Ocean, and China and India. Any significant land connection between these two 21st century great powers would have to go through Myanmar to avoid the Himalayas. It is also of great Chinese interest as a transit country to the Indian Ocean. Therefore, the country was targeted with a multi-approach regime change operation.
A massive press campaign was arranged over several decades, a plethora of NGO financed, whilst «former» CIA-agents now turned missionaries were working with the ethnic guerilla forces to create military pressure. In the usual attempt to concentrate all opposition into a joint force, extreme right wing religious fanatics became the spearhead in this campaign. The sanctions imposed on Myanmar, precluded any economic development and doomed the population to a life of crushing poverty.
One could interpret the recent calls to take the prize back from Suu Kuy as disappointed buyers not getting what they paid for.
We can go forward to 2010, when a Chinese citizen, Liu Xiaobo, won the prize. There were no surprises for what future was envisaged for China:
“It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is. Given the size of China, certainly it would need 300 years of colonisation for it to become like what Hong Kong is today. I even doubt whether 300 years would be enough.”
The lines between creating justification for a covert regime change operation and next step, a direct war, is blurry. But when required, the Prize Committee can step in to keep the focus of world opinion on the right narrative.
3. Creating reasons for war: Women’s rights
Malala Yoysafzai receives the Sakharov price (Source: Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons)
In 2003, just after the blitzkrieg on Iraq and at the very height of the George Bush’s talk of continuing the offensive to a few more countries, the committee chose to give the prize to Shirin Ebadi. By beatifying an Iranian at that time, the committee very well knew that they increased the danger of war.
Ebadi is a champion of women’s rights, a recurrent theme in NATO’s efforts to justify their wars. We know that targeting women in the West with this type of messaging has been a major effort for the organization for a long time. By giving the prize to her, they in effect created support in Western (female) public opinion for a war/regime change that would kill an untold number of Iranian women and destroy the lives of the rest, a repeat on a larger scale of what happened in Iraq.
The 2018 prize went to the fight against sexual violence in war. This happens to coincide with the very image NATO wants to promote of itself – who can forget Angelina Jolie and NATO’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg writing a joint article in 2017 titled “Why NATO Must Defend Women’s Rights,” where they point out that “NATO has the responsibility and opportunity to be a leading protector of women’s rights” and “can become the global military leader in how to prevent and respond to sexual violence in conflict”. How convenient that the Nobel Committee shares the same view.
A more analytic approach would point out such facts that US/NATO-interventions have made the situation for women infinitely worse in places such as Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. An intervention to topple the legal government in Syria would certainly have created the same result.
In addition, a bit broader view would point out how allegedly stopping sexual violence against women has justified many wars of aggression. The stereotypes of cruel foreigners have not advanced noticeably from depictions of swarthy Spaniards groping blonde women in the Spanish-American war, to the claim that Gaddafi was handing out Viagra to mercenaries to rape women, as Susan Rice, the US Permanent Representative at UN told the Security Council. Amnesty International, later reported it had “not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped.”
Other notorious examples of how this has been used in war propaganda include Serbian rape camps during the Yugoslav wars. Allegations of mass rape were a key element of NATO’s propaganda campaign during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. Clare Short, Britain’s international development secretary, claimed that the rapes were “deliberately performed in front of children, fathers and brothers.” After the war was over, there were some retractions, including from the Washington Post, which reported that “Western accusations that there were Serb-run rape camps […] all proved to be false.”
Malala Yousafzai (winner 2014), the young Pakistani girl who became a symbol of the war against the Taliban, is another figure that fits this pattern. The indefinite occupation of Afghanistan is, among plenty of other vicarious reasons, justified by improving women’s rights. This overlooks the fact that no improvement can be made under a government installed with the help of foreign bayonets. The situation for Afghan women has not improved since the occupation, but then again, the claim was only meant to created support for the war in public opinion.
The importance of creating the perception of fighting for women’s rights has long been realized in military circles.
An internal CIA-documentfrom 2010 (a few years before Malala received the prize from the Nobel Institute for her struggle against the Taliban), published by WikiLeaks, discusses how to best market the war in Afghanistan, To show how similar the Nobel Committee and the military/intelligence apparatus think, it is worth quoting the following passage:
Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.
4. The enemy fights with illegal and inhumane weapons, and it is imperative to stop them
By highlighting certain themes, in this case ‘illegal weapons’, they reinforce the narrative in Western public opinion that certain things are very urgent and real problems, when in fact they are of relatively minor significance.
Poison gas is a clear example. The OPCW won the prize in 2013. Given the general situation in the Middle East, several million dead in Iraq after the US invasion and at least 400.000 dead in the covert invasion of Syria, gas is a minor factor, and even if we take the frequent claims of ‘gas massacres’ at face value (which of course we shouldn’t), is only responsible for an infinitesimal fraction of these dead.
But to reinforce a false narrative, this focus has been invaluable. The prize creates acceptance for the narrative that gas is a uniquely important and evil weapon, where it is fully justified to do anything necessary, including attacking countries, to stop the possible use of it. At the moment of writing this, Nov 24, 2018, the US just accused Iran of hiding a chemical weapons program.
Some weapons that are killing far more people in far more gruesome ways than poison gas, like napalm, would never be put on this list. And we could compare gas to sanctions, the West’s favorite and most effective weapon of mass destruction, killing the weakest, the sick, children and old people slowly, while destroying entire peoples’ right to a decent life. No other or weapon of mass destruction has killed as many people since WW2.
5. Sanctifying peace treaties that are negotiated surrenders to western interests
Yasser Arafat receives the prize in 1994, together with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin CC BY-SA 3.0 File:Flickr – Government Press Office (GPO)
The most noticeably feature when the prize goes to creators of peace treaties, is that the treaties are more like a negotiated surrender than a just peace.
Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos (winner 2016) received the prize for victoriously having put the finishing touches to a long US-led counter-insurgency campaign against leftist guerilla forces. Now the reactionary oligarchy has a safe grip on the country, and can continue their neoliberal agenda, which isn’t that different from the old reactionary order. The death squads murdering leftist and human rights activist continue their activities with impunity.
The country had an extremely tarnished image in human rights issues and needed a quick touch-up to make it palatable. The most conspicuous thing the 2016-award is that the president got the prize just before Colombia became a global partner of NATO. The planning of the PR-requirements for this to happen smoothly must have been already well under way when the prize winner was decided. Remember the prize is directed at Western public opinion, and has little to do with an actual just peace in Colombia.
Yasser Arafat (co-winner 1993) got the price so he would be tied to a peace plan with a chimerical two-state solution the Israeli side had no intention of honoring. The peace offer didn’t even include a stop in constructions of Israeli settlements. No clearer signal of Israeli intentions could have been given. This is a continuation of the joint prize to Sadat and Begin in 1978, for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, where Israel succeeded in making a separate peace with the biggest Arab country, and could thereafter concentrate on consolidating its grip on the West Bank.
While Nelson Mandela (co-winner 1994) undoubtedly was a worthy winner, the transition deal the ANC negotiated for South Africa only transferred formal political power, and left unjust economic power structures intact. The assets of multinational companies were guaranteed, and the neoliberal policies implied in the deal doomed the large majority of the population to continued poverty.
Michail Gorbachev (winner 1990) got the prize for a unilateral and wholesale surrender of every Soviet position, both economic and political; he didn’t even keep them as bargaining cards. Trusting Western oral promises, this naiveté is unprecedented in a leader of a great power. His bad decisions made a managed transition to a mixed system impossible and abandoned the former socialist states to Western looting and a social collapse they still haven’t recovered from. No wonder he still is so popular in the West that gave him the medal as a sign of appreciation.
Finnish Martti Ahtisaari got the prize in 2008, «for his efforts on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts». This is very true. Left out is what should be added to the sentence, to resolve international conflicts – as a total Western victory. Ahtisaari is directly linked to the creation of the NATO-protectorate of Kosovo. By 1999, NATO had decided to splinter Yugoslavia one more time. A 78 day aerial bombing campaign had little effect, so they sent in the diplomats. It was suggested that an envoy from a ‘neutral’ country would be more efficient. Here is how Ahtisaari handled the situation, telling the Serbs what ‘we’ would do (my emphasis):
Ahtisaari opened the meeting by declaring, “We are not here to discuss or negotiate,” […]. Ahtisaari says that Milosevic asked about the possibility of modifying the plan, to which he replied, “No. This is the best that Viktor and I have managed to do. You have to agree to it in every part.” [..] As Milosevic listened to the reading of the text, he realized that the “Russians and the Europeans had put us in the hands of the British and the Americans.” Milosevic took the papers and asked, “What will happen if I do not sign?” In answer, “Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” and then moved aside the flower centerpiece. Then Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week.”
The Serbians signed the treaty.
6. Not a peaceful very bunch of people
US Marine Corps tank in Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: USMC/ Public Domain)
For recipients of a peace prize, a remarkable number of them support wars.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war of aggression under the trumped up pretext of disarming Iraq of Weapons of mass destruction. It was a blatant breach of both international law and the United Nations Charter. What did the Nobel Prize Winners think of it?
Jose Ramos-Horta(winner 1996) claimed approvingly that the only truly effective means of pressure on the Iraqi dictator [is] the threat of the use of force.
Liu Xiaobo (winner 2010) was clear, the «decision by President Bush is right!». But then again, Liu had the remarkable opinion that «the major wars that the US became involved in are all ethically defensible,» including the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Former vice president Al Gore (winner 2009) had argued aggressively in favor of war in Iraq in 1991 and 1998, Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1998, and believed the 2003 Iraq war was legal based on earlier UN resolutions.
The Cold War winner Lech Walesa (1983) was an opponent of the invasion, but at least heknew where to put the blame; It’s not the United States that is to blame for the war, but rather the EU, and in particular Germany and France. They knew the war was coming and they failed to prevent it.»
The Dalai Lama (winner 1989) was wily enough to hedge his bets, but decidedly did not condemn the war: «it’s too early to say, right or wrong», He also supported the US/NATO military intervention in Afghanistan and the attack on Yugoslavia.
There is a similar level of support among prize winners for a direct intervention in the ‘civil’ war in Syria, an US/NATO regime change plan on the drawing board for at least 10years before it started. The push for a no-fly zone in Syria on a Libyan model, which could then be used as a fig leaf for a full-scale assault, was immense for several years. What did the Nobel Prize winners think of this possibility?
(Keep in mind that the ‘action’ they call for, can only be either an aerial bombing or ground troops.)
Kailash Satyarthi (winner 2014) did not say anything about the fact that it was the 3 Western powers on the Security Council which started this war by spending billions of dollar arming and financing armed Islamist gangs. Stopping this support would seem to be the obvious way to stop the war, but instead we get: «The UN Security Council (UNSC) has the military power to bring this unceasing genocide to a halt. »
His co-winner Malala Yousafzai with seems to have envisaged a similar future for Syria as for Afghanistan, a Western intervention: «When I look at Syria, I see the Rwandan genocide. When I read the desperate words of Bana Alabed in Aleppo, I see Anne Frank in Amsterdam. …..We must act. The international community must do everything they can to end to this inhumane war»
This was echoed by former UN-leader Kofi Annan(winner 2001). Defining Aleppo as only the small part of the city occupied by Islamist gangs, he called for ‘action’. How this ‘action’ would differ from what he describes, is not clear: «The assault on Aleppo is an assault on the whole world. When hospitals, schools and homes are bombed indiscriminately, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent children, these are acts that constitute an attack on our shared, fundamental human values. Our collective cry for action must be heard, and acted upon, by all those engaged in this dreadful war. »
This wish was supported by Medecins sans Frontiers, recipient of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. It was the first to report the alleged gas attack in Ghouta on 21. August 2013, which the Obama-administration wanted to use as a pretext for a military assault. As it admitted, the MSF’s decision to issue a press release on the incident—which had not taken place in an MSF hospital, but in its “silent partner” facilities in rebel-controlled areas—was highly political.
MSF was well aware that their announcement of chemical weapons use would be immediately seized upon by the US to claim that Syrian President Assad had crossed a red line, and to start a bombing campaign.
The organization was here true to its roots, as the civilian part in the French military/intelligence effort to support an independent state in the oil producing parts of Nigeria, in the Biafran war of independence in 1967-1970.
Amnesty International, (winner 1977) was not much better, with its call for unspecified ‘action’: The international community’s catastrophic failure to take concrete action to protect the people of Syria has allowed parties to the conflict, most notably the Syrian government, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, often with assistance of outside powers, particularly Russia…. he international community had said ‘never again’ after the government devastated Eastern Aleppo with similar unlawful tactics. But here we are again.”
Anyway, Amnesty has a soft spot for endless NATO-interventions. In 2012, after 11 years of dismal occupation, the organization paid for advertising posters in the US applauding NATO’s actions in Afghanistan — “Keep the progress going”, purportedly doing something for women’s rights.
Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman is a Yemeni journalist and human rights activist that won the price in 2009 wanted ‘protection’, writing: Instead of protecting residents in Aleppo from brutalities of Russia, Iran and Bashar Al Assad’s regime, the world tended to mediate to provide safe corridors for the displacement of civilians,” adding, “these also are partners in crime.”
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (2016) voiced support for the missile attacks on Syria in March 2018.
Such bellicosity (or just as often, coy bellicosity) is nothing new in the type of people selected as winners. Henry Kissinger (winner 1973) was the most infamous war hawk to win the prize during the Cold War, but long as it was the right side doing the fighting, plenty of others identified with this one sided world view. We can recognize all the themes mentioned above in Michael Parenti’s description of the 1975 Peace Prize winner:
Andrei Sakharov was a darling of the U.S. press, a Soviet dissident who regularly sang praises to corporate capitalism. Sakharov lambasted the U.S. peace movement for its opposition to the Vietnam War. He accused the Soviets of being the sole culprits behind the arms race and he supported every U.S. armed intervention abroad as a defense of democracy. Hailed in the west as a «human rights advocate,» Sakharov never had an unkind word for the horrific human rights violations perpetrated by the fascist regimes of faithful U.S. client states, including Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia, and he aimed snide remarks at the «peaceniks» who did. He regularly attacked those in the West who opposed U.S. repressive military interventions abroad.
7. Some other points + Conclusion
You don’t have to be an prop for US/NATO power projection to win the prize, but it helps.
The prize was originally intended to be given to the person who has done most to foster peace between nations. In a subtle twist, in many cases it has changed to banning aspects of warfare, barely ever addressing war itself. Broaching such as subject honestly would be impossible without addressing the elephant in the room, US/Western imperialism. The award has had many winners who are variants of this year’s theme, sexual violence in war (which also touches on point 3, the NATO-narrative of defense of women). The focus here is on a more civilized form of war, not abolishing war as such as a means of settling disputes.
No one (apart from some military brass) is actually pro-landmines, but the Peace prize to the Campaign Against Land Mines in 1997 coincided with the increased Western interventions in places where these weapons would be a hindrance to the success of the occupation It was not in the interest of NATO forces to have their opponents using these ‘poor man’s weapons’, creating the casualties so feared by the military in modern wars, which again might increase opposition at home to war. The coalition suffered most of their casualties from IEDs, a sort of land mine, in Iraq, while having limited use of mines themselves.
There is a certain unpredictability as to who the prize will be awarded to, making it not as obvious beholden to the immediate needs of the powerful, even though the long term trend is clear. For example, there has been no Russian winner for quite a while now, and the White Helmets have not yet got the award, maybe as they are too obviously only a PR-front.
When Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, he said that the prize ‘is for Western writers or Eastern rebels’. On a similar note, we might say that the Nobel Peace Prize is for Western elites or Eastern rebels.
That the selection of winners conforms to US views does not mean that there is a direct influence, although some recommendations to the Committee probably weigh heavier than others. Rather this pattern is a sign of how well socialized the Norwegian Nobel Committee members are in the transatlantic world view, where ‘our’ requirements override any genuine wish for peace.
Barack Obama, speaking to the Baker Institute, made sure the audience of wealthy Texans, many in the oil business, gave him credit for making the United States a world leader for oil and gas production. He said, “American energy production . . .went up every year I was president. And . . . suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer, that was me, people,” eliciting cheers.
Throughout this century, even though the climate science was clear, presidential leadership has escalated the dependence on oil and gas, built infrastructure for pipelines and compressor stations, encouraged fracking in the US and around the world and prevented a global response to reducing carbon gas emissions.
This dereliction of consistent misleadership has put the planet on a dangerous path of climate crisis. In a just world, the political and corporate leadership of the United States would be held accountable. As it is, leadership for confronting the climate crisis must come from the people, not from political leaders.
Obama’s Sordid History of Undermining the Climate
Obama’s legacy confuses some people because, unlike President Trump, he did not deny climate change and, unlike President Bush, he did not come from the oil industry. But in reality, Obama watered down global climate agreements and grew oil and gas output and infrastructure in the United States.
As a newly elected president, Obama came to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 with the goal of weakening the agreement so there would be no internationally enforced reductions of climate gases. Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, warned leaders that they held in their hands “the future of this entire humanity.”
NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the US monitored communications between countries before the summit, and planned to spy on the negotiations during the conference. The NSA knew of China’s efforts to line up its negotiating position with India. Chinese negotiators entered the talks willing to undertake mandatory emissions cuts, but needed other major countries in the the developing world to agree. The US developed a strategy to stop China, indeed to make them the villain.
As the Copenhagen meeting was progressing, Obama, who had already “won” a Nobel Peace prize and was a political star as the first black president, flew to the meeting with Secretary of State Clinton. Obama and Clinton crashed a meeting of Chinese, Indian, South African and Brazilian leaders who were trying to agree on enforceable standards. The US made sure their agreement would not threaten US oil interests.
As a result of Obama’s intervention, the accord set no target for concluding a binding international treaty, leaving the implementation of its provisions uncertain and fueling criticism that it was more of a sham than a breakthrough. US intervention stopped a collective agreement among nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050, which was included in earlier drafts. Obama also successfully prevented adequate US funding for climate justice policies for poorer countries and scuttled the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed on in 1992.
Obama undermined the UN climate process and became known as “the man who killed Copenhagen,” said Greenpeace US head Phil Radford. Bill McKibbon said:
“The president has wrecked the UN and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it’s at the expense of everything progressives have held dear.”
Obama declared a phony negotiating victory for the climate in Copenhagen and went on to make sure the Paris Accords also contained no enforceable standards, making it an inadequate treaty for the climate crisis. Climate scientist James Hansen called the Paris agreement a “fraud” of “worthless words.”
Domestically, after running against “drill baby drill” Republicans, Obama governed in the era where fracking became widespread, off-shore drilling increased and massive oil and gas infrastructure were put in place. In 2012, Obama said,
“We’ve opened up new areas for exploration. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”
Under Obama, while there was a decline of 37% in coal production, gas production vastly increased by 34% due to fracking. Obama presided over the highest gas production in history and crude oil production rose by 88%, the fastest rate in the 150-year history of the U.S. oil industry. On the positive side, his tenure was also timed with big increases in solar and wind energy. Obama also deserves credit for putting in place fuel economy and emissions standards for cars.
Obama’s bragging about increasing US oil and gas production at the Baker Institute came shortly after the dire October IPCC report, which warned the world has 12 years to put in place a radical transformation of the energy economy to prevent climate catastrophe, and the November 23rd release of the 4th National Climate Assessment, which warned of the serious impacts of the climate crisis in the United States. In this environment, Obama took credit for this crisis situation that will kill hundreds of thousands, cause mass migration and trillions of dollars in damage.
Despite the above, Obama’s presidency looks good in comparison to the George W. Bush administration, which denied climate science. and was marinated in oil with deep oil connections. Climate scientists were kept out of meetings to develop energy policy while the oil and gas industry worked closely with the administration.
President Bush was in the oil industry for more than two decades and came from an oil family. His investors included the bin Laden family and other members of Saudi Arabia’s oil-wealthy elite. Bush called the Saudi ambassador, Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, “Bandar Bush” because he was so close to the Bush family.
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice was a director of Chevron and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans was head of an independent oil company in Colorado. Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was George W. Bush’s most generous campaign contributor. Bush received more campaign contributions from oil companies than any other administration in history.
Trump Takes Climate Denialism and Climate Destruction To New Levels
As bad as previous presidents have been, President Trump’s climate denial policies have reached a new low for presidential misleadership.
When the recent National Climate Assessment revealed that global warming is causing ongoing and lasting economic damage, President Trump denied the findings of the 13 federal agencies who wrote it. Trump said, “I don’t believe it,” while noting he has “very high levels of intelligence,” and had his political appointees and press secretary attack the report.
Trump appointed the former CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State and appointed other industry supporters, e.g., Rick Perry at the Department of Energy, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, now replaced by industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler. Trumps’s policy is “Energy dominance,” the expansion of coal and oil production as well as the weakening of environmental regulations, including those that address climate change.
From People’s Climate March,in April 2017 from Orlando Rising.
Climate Justice From the Bottom Up
The science on climate has been known since 1990 when the first international agreements to combat climate change were negotiated. Since then, the science has only become stronger. We must not produce any more gas-fueled cars or build any new power plants or buildings of any kind unless they are replacing old ones or are carbon-neutral. When we build a factory, power plant, house, automobile or anything else that uses energy, we are committing to using energy through that structure for up to 40 years, depending on its lifespan.
This century has shown that facing up to the challenges of climate change will not come from the top of the US political system, which is polluted by the oil and gas industry as well as investors who profit from carbon pollution. Change is going to come from the bottom up.
Recently, we have seen how activity from below can impact political reality. The Green New Deal, developed in 2007 by Green Party activists, is now being taken on by Democrats. Establishment Democrats and Republicans will fight it, but it is making its way onto the agenda and will become reality if people keep mobilizing for it.
The Extinction Rebellion, started in the United Kingdom, is growing around the world. And there is now a call to build towards a general strike in September with actions throughout the year, beginning on January 15. Follow #EarthStrike.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.
The Ugly Canadian has shown his elite-supporting, poor-bashing repressive face in Haiti.
Ottawa is backing the repression of anti-corruption protests and Justin Trudeau is continuing Canada’s staunch support for that country’s reactionary elite.
Over the past three months there have been numerous protests demanding accountability for public funds. Billions of dollars from Petrocaribe, a discounted oil program set up by Venezuela in 2006, was pilfered under former President Michel Martelly, an ally of current leader Jovenel Moise.After having forced out the prime minister in the summer over an effort to eliminate fuel subsidies, protesters are calling for the removal of Moise, who assumed the presidency through voter suppression and electoral fraud.
According to the Western media, a dozen protesters have been killed since a huge demonstration on October 17. But, at least seven were killed that day, two more at a funeral for those seven and pictures on social media suggest the police have killed many more.
Ottawa is supporting the unpopular government and repressive police.While a general strike paralyzed the capital on Friday, Canadian Ambassador André Frenette met Prime Minister Jean Henry Céant with other diplomats to “express their support to the government.” Through the “Core Group” Ottawa has blamed the protesters for Canadian trained and financed police firing on them. The Canada, US, France, Spain, EU, UN and OAS “Group of Friends of Haiti” published a statement on Thursday criticizing the protesters and backing the government. It read,
“the group recalls that acts of violence seeking to provoke the resignation of legitimate authorities have no place in the democratic process. The Core Group welcomes the Executive’s commitment to continue the dialogue and calls for an inclusive dialogue between all the actors of the national life to get out of the crisis that the country is going through.” (translation)
In a similar release at the start of the month these “Friends of Haiti” noted:
“The group praises the professionalism demonstrated by the National Police of Haiti as a whole on this occasion to guarantee freedom of expression while preserving public order. While new demonstrations are announced, the Core Group also expresses its firm rejection of any violence perpetrated on the sidelines of demonstrations. The members of the group recall the democratic legitimacy of the government of Haiti and elected institutions and that in a democracy, change must be through the ballot box and not by violence.”
But, in late 2010/early-2011 the Stephen Harper Conservatives intervened aggressively to help extreme right-wing candidate Michel Martelly become president. Six years earlier Trudeau’s Liberal predecessor, Paul Martin, played an important role in violently ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government. For two years after the February 29, 2004, overthrow of Haitian democracy, a Canada-financed, trained and overseen police force terrorized Port-au-Prince’s slums with Canadian diplomatic and (for half a year) military backing.
Since that time Ottawa has taken the lead in strengthening the repressive arm of the Haitian state (in 1995 Aristide disbanded the army created during the 1915-34 US occupation). Much to the delight of the country’s über class-conscious elite, over the past decade and a half Canada has ploughed over $100 million into the Haitian police and prison system.
Since his appointment as ambassador last fall Frenette has attended a half dozen Haitian police events. In April Frenette tweeted,
“it is an honour to represent Canada at the Commissaires Graduation Ceremony of the National Police Academy. Canada has long stood with the HNP to ensure the safety of Haitians and we are very proud of it.”
The previous October Frenette noted,
“very proud to participate today in the Canadian Armed Forces Ballistic Platelet Donation to the Haitian National Police.”
Canada also supports the Haitian police through the UN mission. RCMP officer Serge Therriault currently leads the 1,200-person police component of the Mission des Nations unies pour l’appui à la Justice en Haïti. For most of the past 14 years a Canadian has been in charge of the UN police contingent in Haiti and officers from this country have staffed its upper echelons.
Canada is once again supporting the violent suppression of the popular will in Haiti. Justin Trudeau has taken off his progressive mask to reveal what is inside: The Ugly Canadian.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Yves Engler is the co-author, with Antony Fenton, of Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority. His latest book is Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada
Czech president Milos Zeman offered Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government a fillip during his visit to Israel last week. He inaugurated a cultural and trade centre, Czech House, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.
At the opening, he expressed hope it would serve as a precursor to his country relocating its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If so, the Czech Republic would become the first European state to follow US President Donald Trump’s lead in moving the US embassy in May.
It is this kind of endorsement that, of late, has emboldened Mr Netanyahu’s government, the Israeli courts, Jerusalem officials and settler organisations to step up their combined assault on Palestinians in the Old City and its surrounding neighbourhoods.
Israel has never hidden its ambition to seize control of East Jerusalem, Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967 and then annexed, as a way of preventing a viable Palestinian state from emerging.
Israel immediately began building an arc of Jewish settlements on Jerusalem’s eastern flank to seal off its Palestinian residents from their political hinterland, the West Bank.
More than a decade ago, it consolidated its domination with a mammoth concrete wall that cut through East Jerusalem. The aim was to seal off densely populated Palestinian neighbourhoods on the far side, ensuring the most prized and vulnerable areas – the Old City and its environs – could be more easily colonised, or “Judaised”, as Israel terms it.
This area, the heart of Jerusalem, is where magnificent holy places such as the Al Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are to be found.
Under cover of the 1967 war, Israel ethnically cleansed many hundreds of Palestinians living near the Western Wall, a retaining wall of the elevated Al Aqsa compound that is venerated in Judaism. Since then, Israeli leaders have grown ever hungrier for control of the compound itself, which they believe is built over two long-lost Jewish temples.
Israel has forced the compound’s Muslim authorities to allow Jews to visit in record numbers, even though most wish to see the mosque replaced with a third Jewish temple. Meanwhile, Israel has severely limited the numbers of Palestinians who can reach the holy site.
Until now, Israel had mostly moved with stealth, making changes gradually so they rarely risked inflaming the Arab world or provoking western reaction. But after Mr Trump’s embassy move, a new Israeli confidence is tangible.
On four fronts, Israel has demonstrated its assertive new mood. First, with the help of ever-more compliant Israeli courts, it has intensified efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in the Old City and just outside its historic walls.
Last month, the supreme court handed down a ruling that sanctions the eviction of 700 Palestinians from Silwan, a dense neighbourhood on a hillside below Al Aqsa. Ateret Cohanim, a settler organisation backed by government-subsidised armed guards, is now poised to take over the centre of Silwan.
It will mean more Israeli security and police protecting the settler population and more city officials enforcing prejudicial planning rules against Palestinians. The inevitable protests will justify more arrests of Palestinians, including children. This is how bureacratic ethnic cleansing works.
The supreme court also rejected an appeal against a Palestinian family’s eviction from Sheikh Jarrah, another key neighbourhood near the Old City. The decision opens the way to expelling dozens more families.
B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, characterised these rulings as “sanctioning the broadest move to dispossess Palestinians since 1967”.
At the same time, Israel’s parliament approved a law to accelerate the settler takeover.
Over many years, Israel created a series of national parks around the Old City on the pretext of preserving “green areas”. Some hem in Palestinian neighbourhoods to stop their expansion while others were declared on the land of existing Palestinian homes to justify expelling the occupants.
Now the parliament has reversed course. The new law, drafted by another settler group, Elad, will allow house-building in national parks, but only for Jews.
Elad’s immediate aim is to bolster the settler presence in Silwan, where it has overseen a national park next to Al Aqsa. Archaeology has been co-opted to supposedly prove the area was once ruled by King David while thousands of years of subsequent history, most especially the current Palestinian presence, are erased.
Elad’s activities include excavating under Palestinian homes, weakening their foundations.
A massive new Jewish history-themed visitor centre will dominate Silwan’s entrance. Completing the project is a $55 million cable car, designed to carry thousands of tourists an hour over Silwan and other neighbourhoods, rendering the Palestinian inhabitants invisible as visitors are delivered effortlessly to the Western Wall without ever having to encounter them.
The settlers have their own underhand methods. With the authorities’ connivance, they have forged documents to seize Palestinian homes closest to Al Aqsa. In other cases, the settlers have recruited Arab collaborators to dupe other Palestinians into selling their homes.
Once they gain a foothold, the settlers typically turn the appropriated home into an armed compound. Noise blares out into the early hours, Palestinian neighbours are subjected to regular police raids and excrement is left in their doorways.
After the recent sale to settlers of a home strategically located in the Old City’s Muslim quarter, the Palestinian Authority set up a commission of inquiry to investigate. But the PA is near-powerless to stop this looting after Israel passed a law in 1995 denying it any role in Jerusalem.
The same measure is now being vigorously enforced against the few residents trying to stop the settler banditry.
Adnan Ghaith, Jerusalem’s governor and a Silwan resident, was arrested last week for a second time and banned from entering the West Bank and meeting PA officials. Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, is under a six-month travel ban by Israel.
Last week dozens of Palestinians were arrested in Jerusalem, accused of working for the PA to stop house sales to the settlers.
It is a quiet campaign of attrition, designed to wear down Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents. The hope is that they will eventually despair and relocate to the city’s distant suburbs outside the wall or into the West Bank.
What Palestinians in Jerusalem urgently need is a reason for hope – and a clear signal that other countries will not join the US in abandoning them.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
More than 80% of the people of France—ordinary working people, not the professional bureaucrate class—support the “gilets jaunes,” the yellow vests in the street protesting against the globalist policies of Emmanuel Macron, defender of the mega-wealthy and upholder of EU progressivism.
The establishment media in the US and Europe are focusing on the violence of the protests—including vandalism of the Arc de Triomphe (which is a monument to war and French colonialism)—and underplaying the political and economic complaints central to the demonstrations.
It is a decentralized movement sans leaders (who can be picked off or compromised) in direct opposition to the agenda of the global elite: carbon taxes in response to “climate change” (as if additional parasitical fleecing of the public can modify weather), preferential treatment of financial class interests, unchecked and irrational immigration practices threatening the long-standing cultural customs of western civilization, an eroding economy, growing poverty and unemployment.
No doubt much of the violence is the work of agent provocateurs in addition to dim-witted “anarchists,” who are nothing of the sort. Lobbing billiard balls and cobblestones at police, torching an art museum, vandalizing national monuments, and destroying private property provide a suitable pretext to impose yet another “state of emergency”—France is renowned for its pouvoirs exceptionnels, that is to say its “exceptional powers,” in other words the state using its monopoly of violence to address serious political and social issues.
Article 16 of the French Constitution is a hangover from France’s colonialist past, specifically its disastrous war in Algeria. It allows the government to declare a state of emergency during an état de siège, never mind the siege is the result of policies imposed by the state and the ruling class.
After attending the globalist G20 soirée in Buenos Aires, Macron paraded along the Champs-Élysée to witness first-hand the vandalism. Following this public display of pomp and photo-op, Macron declared yet another state of emergency will be declared in response to public support for the yellow vests, the vast majority nonviolent.
Spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said the president is willing to talk to the yellow vests. He stressed, however, there will be no backing down from his “green agenda,” that is to say further taxing the French people (soon to rival Belgium and Germany in the art ofconfiscation) and ensuring more unemployment, poverty, and social stress—exacerbated by unchecked third world immigration—that will ultimately tear France apart.
As soon as Trump is out of the way, Democrats and globalist friendly Republicans will impose similar green taxation and regulation on the American people. However, there is a distinct difference between grumpy French and indolent Americans. The former will go into the street and make their demands known, while the latter are too busy binge watching Netflix to be bothered.
In America, protest and outrage are now stage managed by the state and promoted by a corporate media. The economy and endless war do not figure into these protests orchestrated by faux leftists. Instead, these foundation lubricated activists are moved to outrage and occasional violence by the color of skin, the preference of gender (real, manufactured, and imagined), and a litany of exaggerated and invented victimization.
I say faux leftists because today’s SJW dimwits have little in common with old school Marxists and socialists. They were primarily focused on “historical materialism,” the means of production, the plight of the proletariat, and class consciousness.
Now? Marxism has become “cultural,” that is to say based on what’s between your legs, the color of your skin (this used to be rightfully called racism), and the “human right” to force one group of people to pay for the care and lifestyle of others (including sexual mutilation and abortion). This has led to calls for authoritarianism and violence against the “privileged”—not the banksters and the ruling elite, mind you, but white men in general. This absurdity is megaphoned 24/7 by the corporate media.
No, there will not be a French Revolution in America. The people here are well-indoctrinated, dumbed-down by “public education,” fed lies and fantasies (the Russians are coming, Trump is the New Hitler), and other distractions, including a decadent in-your-face “entertainment” industry feeding on perversity, violence (while calling for disarmament), promotion of homosexuality, and the normalization of vulgarity.
Certainly, when the Everything Bubble bursts and misery is rampant, Americans may go into the street, but it will be too late. Meanwhile, many shake their heads at those crazy French, outraged over the economic strip-mining of their country and the globalist mandates of the European Union.
This will be wiped away, however, by the next episode of Game of Thrones or the Walking Dead.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The death of certain political figures, notably those of a vast imperium, is bound to provoke less criticism or critical insight than soul searching pursuits. With the US in the mauling clutches of Donald J. Trump, the nightmare that was supposedly never to happen, nostalgia prevails in establishment circles. What ever happened to traditional duplicity and dynasty politicians, with their sanctimonious call upon the good Sky God benefactor and the messianic mission? The US Republic, even as it was being emptied of its worth during their tenure, could at least be assured of predictable corruption. Decay, yes, but on their controlled terms.
The death of the forty-first president, George H.W. Bush was a fine reminder of that point, a man of standing and missions who could be said, by Time, to be a creature of Aristotle’s “practical wisdom”. A “natural born leader” was he, one “comfortable with dissenting views” and skillful in his employ of “strong advisers”.
The New York Times, with ceremonial hat tilting, saw Bush as “part of a new generation of Republicans” and was “often referred to as the most successful one-term president”. The recipe for this success, according to such commentary, seems to have been written in foreign rather than domestic fields. He is seen as a masterful juggler, “handling” the collapse of the Soviet Union and ensuring “the liberation of Eastern Europe”. As the Cold War curtain was drawn, Bush, reprising his role as a Second World War naval aviator, remained calm.
Bush’s passing is a reminder about a particular moment of history. The Soviet Union packed up in disarray, its own imperium unfolding as based closed and forces left. This left the way, dangerously, for an uncontained hegemon. The United States became Prometheus unbound, even if its power was initially advertised under the broader umbrella of a “New World Order”.
Bush gave an inkling of what this order would look like in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990. “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation.”
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, having invaded Kuwait in August 1990 after reading mixed signals from Washington, had presented an alibi and pretext for principled aggression, done so, artificially, under the blanket of international norms. Bush made the spurious claim that the Iraqi invasion had been prompted “without provocation or warning,” ignoring the July assurance given to Saddam by US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, that Washington had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” He saw, in Baghdad’s efforts, a stretched historical analogy. “As was the case in the 1930’s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbours.”
Crucial to this was a condescending hand to the Soviet Union: that it be welcomed “back into the world order”. (Had it been absent for the duration?) Such language was couched in the confidence of an imperial leadership convinced that the barbarians had been subjugated and would, if not exactly lend their support, avoid any effort to sabotage Project USA.
These shaky norms were defended by a coalition, assembled in January 1991, disproportionate in its scope involving two dozen countries, but it lent itself to the dangerous illusion that the US should, and could, become a post-Cold War policeman equipped with discriminatory wisdom and fine acumen. New World Orders, when invoked, tend to be preludes to further conflict. President Woodrow Wilson, vainly obsessed with the League of Nations, did much to aspire to a moral structure that had, within its own foundation, ruination and despoliation. As Europe recoiled in 1919 from self-inflicted slaughter, a second world war was in gestation.
In that very suggestion that a country might be central to remaking a global system came the defective nature of US foreign policy and its messianic, delivering strain: an empire seen in the context of duty and shouldering a heavy burden to make a world safe for something or rather. (Democracy less than money and hustling.) Expelling Saddam from Kuwait was a false advertisement for future collective security, a concept that had been doomed in the aftermath of the First World War.
The 1991 mission also came with an unhealthy sense that the Vietnam syndrome had been purged, rendering US military interventions somehow free of original sin. Morally inspired giants could intervene in foreign conflicts at will without lasting and dangerous consequence. Father Bush thereby begot the failings of Bush Junior in a Middle East repeat in 2003 that continues to shake the region in paroxysms of sectarian rage.
No figure can be considered in splendid isolation. Bush was Ronald Reagan’s vice-president for eight years, much of it featuring a president prone to astrological advice (quite literally) and amnesiac episodes. He also took a leaf out of the latter’s book of deception over the arms-for-hostages deal, professing ignorance about it in 1987. It is one of the few points that his biographer, Jon Meacham, finds fault with him over. Then came the supply side economics that remains a perennial disease of US economics: you coddle and favour the wealthy through sugary tax cuts, increase public debt and slash public funding.
If the beasts of relativity were to be consulted, Bush Sr could be seen as better in value than certain US presidents, but only marginally. He, after all, presided over the motor of hubris that did lead the US into a lengthy sunset even as it hectored the rest of the world. In evaluating his own son’s exploits, he was guarded and concerned about the turn of power after September 11, 2001. He was particularly concerned of the neoconservative hardliners. “I don’t like what he did,” reflected Bush on former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, “and think it hurt the president, having his iron-ass view of everything”. In the annals of empire, the two Bushes, separated by a Clinton, remain more consistent than the hair splitters would wish.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
There has been another defenestration of a television-based political commentator for touching the only real electrified third rail remaining in reporting what passes for the news. Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, who is a regular political commentator on CNN, was fired for what he said in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which took place last Wednesday at the United Nations. Hill called for a “free Palestine from river to the sea,” which CNN considered grounds for terminating his contract.
As ever, the Israelis were quick to jump on the bandwagon with their New York Consul General Dani Dayan denouncing Hill as a “racist, a bigot, [and] an anti-Semite.” He noted that Hill is under contract both with Temple University and CNN, implying that he should be punished by being fired, and called the remarks “appalling.” To no avail, Hill responded
“I support Palestinian freedom. I support Palestinian self-determination. I am deeply critical of Israeli policy and practice. I do not support anti-Semitism, killing Jewish people, or any of the other things attributed to my speech.”
Hill was fired by CNN within 24 hours. The message is clear. You can criticize Christianity, Muslims, white males, Donald Trump and the American government at will and you can even criticize blacks or sexual alphabet soups if you are clever in how you do it, but never, never go after Jews or Israel even indirectly if you want to keep your job. One recalls the fate of Rick Sanchez, a CNN anchor who was fired in September 2010 one day after he complained about how Jon Stewart and others in the Jewish mafia that runs the media treat Hispanics, saying
“Yeah, very powerless people. He’s such a minority. I mean, you know, please. What—are you kidding? I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?”
Sanchez was forced to publicly grovel for his “inartful” comments and even had to write a letter of apology to the monstrous Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Far worse, he also had to endure two hours of counseling with “America’s rabbi” Shmuley Boteach. Sanchez subsequently drifted through low level jobs for a number of years, but he is now a news anchor with RT America.
Also in 2010, Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese-American journalist who had been CNN’s Senior Editor for Mideast Affairs for over 20 years was immediately fired after she tweeted “sad to hear of the passing” of Lebanese cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlalah. Fadlalah’s only crime was that he had been demonized by Israel and the neocons as a “spiritual mentor” of Hezbollah. Nasr’s only crime is that she granted the admittedly controversial dead man some respect.
To be sure, CNN is pro-Israeli in its reporting and, more important, in terms of choosing what not to report. Its lead political anchor is Wolf Blitzer, a former American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) employee, who speaks Hebrew and has lived in Israel. Like most major American mainstream media outlets, CNN has numerous Jewish employees working to select, edit and produce the news stories that actually air, well placed to manage what does finally go out to the public.
Reports critical of Israel or Jews are not welcome anywhere in the U.S. national media, which is why Israel gets away with slaughtering unarmed Gazans using army snipers. I note a recent bizarre though interesting story that appeared in the British media and was not picked up by the U.S. mainstream at all. The story detailed how the leadership of the European Jewish Congress is seeking the insertion of “warning messages” in both Christian and Muslim holy texts. In a document entitled “An End to Antisemitism,” which was released last week, it was recommended that “Translations of the New Testament, the Qur’an and other Christian or Muslim literatures need marginal glosses, and introductions that emphasize continuity with Jewish heritage of both Christianity and Islam and warn readers about antisemitic passages in them. While some efforts have been made in this direction in the case of Christianity, these efforts need to be extended and made consistent in both religions.” One wonders when the same body will be recommending that the nastier bits of the Torah and Talmud be “glossed” to deal with the numerous slaughters of conquered peoples as well as slurs on Jesus Christ and assertions that Jews have`1 the right to treat non-Jews as no better than livestock?
Some in the media might argue that the same set of rules about not offending one’s religious beliefs would apply to all religions, not just to Judaism, but it is difficult to find evidence of any even handedness, particularly when Islam is being discussed by commentators who are completely ignorant of the tenets of the religion. Nor are there any apparent limits in making ridiculous statements on CNN if one is disparaging Arabs, most particularly if they are Palestinians. CNN paid commentator former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has claimed absurdly that Palestinians do not even exist, which many Israelis believe, without any admonishment. Consider the outrage if he were to say that Jewish Israelis do not exist, which may actually be much closer to the truth according to some geneticists.
And what about when a Jew is attacking Christians? Far from there being any consequences, there is a demonstrable double standard as Christian beliefs appear to be fair game in some circles. Dana Jacobson currently co-anchor for the weekend edition of CBS national morning news experienced an apparently alcohol driven meltdown at a sports roast that she was helping emcee in January 2008 when she was working for ESPN.
Belting down vodka and cursing “like a sailor,” Jacobson went after Catholics in particular and said “Fuck Notre Dame,” “Fuck touchdown Jesus” and “Fuck Jesus” a number of times before she was hauled off the stage. Her after-the-fact apology consisted of written concession that she had demonstrated a “poor lack of judgment.” And her punishment by ESPN also demonstrated a “lack of judgment” when the company spokesman Josh Krulewitz reported that “Her actions and comments were inappropriate and we’ve dealt with it.” Dealing with it apparently consisted of a one-week suspension.
Any company operating in the United States should be able to dismiss an employee for any reason or for no reason, but anything even mildly critical of Jewish collective behavior or Israel is severely punished immediately. Professor Marc Lamont Hill said nothing wrong. On the contrary, he said something badly needed and which should have been accepted by CNN if it were really a global communications network dedicated to the truth and, one might add, to justice. Instead it was more of the same old, same old. If you criticize Israel don’t let the door hit you in the ass as you leave the building.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Ukraine matters. It’s territory is Europe’s largest after Russia’s. It borders seven countries in Europe’s heartland – Belarus, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia.
It shares a strategically important 1,500-long land and sea border with the Russian Federation.
The country is resource rich. Zbigniew Brzezinski once said
“without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Separately, he said if Russia reunites with Ukraine, it’ll be a Eurasian powerhouse. If Ukraine allies with Western Europe, Moscow will be significantly weakened geopolitically.
The Obama regime’s February 2014 coup d’etat replaced democratic governance in Kiev with Nazi-infested tyranny. Political crisis continues to grip the continent since that time, flashpoint conditions risking East/West confrontation.
Obama bears full responsibility for what happened. Neocon Victoria Nuland was his point person involved in staging the coup, its aim to border Russia with a hostile menace to its security.
Brussels shares blame for what happened, partnering with Washington’s coup. Britain, France, Germany and other EU countries virtually always go along with its imperial agenda, even when harming their own interests, operating as a virtual US colony.
Washington stops at nothing to advance its imperium. Replacing independent governments with subservient pro-Western ones is longstanding US policy – by color revolutions or naked aggression.
US-installed putschists in Kiev represent mob rule. Puppet president Poroshenko and others surrounding him are societal misfits, waging war against their own people, risking war with Russia over staged provocations like Black Sea/Kerch Strait incident – likely planned and orchestrated in Washington and London.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman minced no words, saying the following:
“After Poroshenko said that Russia is allegedly planning to seize Mariupol and Berdyansk, I can say, putting his own pronouncements in other words, that it is Russia that protects Europe from barbarism, tyranny, terrorism, aggression and militarism looming large over our continent,” adding:
“It is due to the current Kiev regime that the present-day Ukraine is characterized by the frenzy of extremists and paramilitary groups, warfare against own people, propaganda and manipulation as a key tool of governance, provocations as a foreign policy concept, rampant corruption, intimidation of journalists and overall control over the mass media, nationalism as a national idea, dictation of law enforcement agencies, the lack of mechanisms of public control, and erosion of power institutions.”
Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel blasted Kiev’s war party, saying
“we by no means should allow Ukraine to drag us into” war with Russia. Earlier, “Ukraine tried to do so.”
He slammed Poroshenko for urging NATO to send warships to the Black Sea in response to the Kerch Strait incident, along with closing international ports to Russian ships coming from the Sea of Azov, adding:
“The only way out of this completely hopeless conflict is to establish a truce, achieve heavy weapons withdrawal from both sides and then take the first step towards lifting (illegal, unacceptable) sanctions” on Russia.’’
France, Germany and other EU countries rejected Poroshenko’s call for tougher sanctions on Moscow over the Kerch Strait incident – what US and UK hardliners support.
Trump regime neocon hardliners urged EU nations to get tougher on Russia over the incident. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Europe should review support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project that “helps the Russian government.”
She called for increased EU toughness against Russia, saying the US “has taken a very strong position in…support of Ukraine. We would like other countries to do more as well.”
On December 10, EU foreign ministers will discuss the Kerch Strait provocation. EU leaders are expected to extend existing illegal sanctions on Russia.
Theresa May regime’s spokesman James Slack turned truth on its head, calling the incident
“further evidence of Russia’s destabilizing behavior in the region and its ongoing violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity. Russia must not be allowed to use force to exert greater pressure on Ukraine.”
Sergey Lavrov explained that documents found aboard the seized Ukrainian vessels showed their crew provocateurs “did everything to fulfill an order, the text of which was found when our border guards boarded these gunboats.”
Kiev ordered the vessels “to secretly enter the neutral waters without any pilots and notifications and break under the Crimean Bridge through the Kerch Strait to Azov.”
The order showed the incompetence, arrogance, and militancy of Poroshenko and his cronies – Russia clearly able to monitor navigation of foreign vessels near and in its waters, able to act swiftly against anything potentially dangerous to its security, precisely what happened.
Putin explained what he told Trump at the G20, saying
“I answered his questions about this incident in the Black Sea. He has his own position. I have my own position. We each stuck to our own views, but in any case I informed him about our perspective on this incident.”
What happened was a “planned provocation,” he stressed. Captured Kiev documents prove it.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin gave an exhaustive explanation of the Black Sea border incident, illustrating it clearly. He even drew a map” – explaining the provocation to Germany’s Angela Merkel.
Separately, Poroshenko lied claiming Russia intends to seize Ukrainian territory.
Fallout from the likely US/UK planned, Kiev implemented, Kerch Strait provocation continues.
With US/UK neocon extremists supporting Ukraine’s fascist regime against Russia, anything is possible ahead – even unthinkable war in Europe’s heartland.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
President Putin’s been accused by the West of being many things, but ironically enough, it’s former President George H. W. Bush who embodied many of them.
The passing of former President George H. W. Bush over the weekend prompted a lot of reflection about the influence that he had on America’s role in the immediate post-Cold War era. Notorious for literally proclaiming the “New World Order”, Bush Sr. also has the ignoble distinction of being one of the US’ few one-term presidents, dramatically losing then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. More interestingly for most foreign observers, however, is that Bush Sr. literally embodied much of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of being, even if the Western Mainstream Media will never recognize this paradoxical reality:
“Deep State” Prodigy
The West loves to fearmonger about President Putin’s intentions by endlessly reminding their audience of the Russian leader’s time in the KGB and later as the head of Russia’s FSB, though Bush Sr.’s decades-long experience rising through the ranks of the CIA to eventually lead it and then go on to being America’s Vice-President and later President is usually overlooked in favor of pretending that it was the voters and not the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) that pave his path to power.
Backstabbed By His Own
Another common myth is that President Putin apparently has to watch his back out of fear of being backstabbed by his own “deep state” that’s apparently plotting his ouster (with the most recent variation of this narrative being that they’re ‘provoked’ by the US’ sanctions regime), though it was actually Bush Sr. who was betrayed by his own after some of them broke ranks with the American leader to support his presidential opponent in 1992, forever reshaping domestic politics and indelibly altering the course of the “New World Order”.
International Bully
President Putin is commonly cast by the Western Mainstream Media as the world’s worst international bully after Crimea’s reunification with Russia was deliberately misportrayed as an “aggressive annexation”, though Bush Sr. isn’t held anywhere near those same ‘standards’ after invading Panama in 1989 and then eventually launching the First Gulf War against Iraq, the legacy of which still impacts regional politics today and was in hindsight partially carried out as a sign of force to the rest of the world during the USSR’s rapid decline from superpower status.
Civilian Slaughterer
Along the same token, President Putin is wrongfully held accountable by many decision makers in the West for the downing of MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014 on the unproven basis that he allegedly dispatched BUK anti-air missiles to the local rebels that are blamed for shooting it down, though those same leaders have ‘conveniently’ forgotten that Bush Sr. was Vice President of the US when his country’s navy “accidentally” shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf.
Untrustworthy
US Defense Secretary James Mattis recently insulted President Putin by declaring him ‘untrustworthy’ on the supposed basis that the Russian leader “rips up international agreements”, yet Bush Sr. is being held up as a man of honesty unheard of in American politics since the time of “Honest Abe” even though he allegedly broke his promise to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about not expanding NATO beyond the border of reunified Germany, an act of duplicity that set into motion far-reaching consequences that continue to destabilize Europe today.
It may sound strange to countenance, but George H. W. Bush embodied much of what President Putin is accused of being by his Western Mainstream Media enemies just like the latter represents a lot of what the former is said to have been in terms of the positive spin being put on his legacy.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
British trophy hunters brought home two tonnes of elephant tusks from Africa over the past decade, new figures show.
Nearly 400 ‘trophies’ from the world’s most endangered animals have been brought into Britain by hunters in recent years.
A motion calling for an urgent ban on trophy imports has now won the support of MPs from the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Green Party, and Democratic Unionist Party.
Risk of extinction
The Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting said UN figures showed that the most popular trophies for UK hunters included elephants, lions, leopards and rhinoceroses – all of which are included in Appendix I of CITES, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species. Appendix I animals are considered to be at greatest risk of extinction.
Other Appendix I animals killed by British trophy hunters include cheetahs, Nile crocodiles, zebras and caracals.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, criticised the loophole in CITES which currently allows trophy hunters to kill the world’s most endangered animals.
“I’m totally opposed to trophy hunting and to the importing of animals that have been killed for trophy hunting. CITES needs to include trophy hunting because we have to protect animals that are facing extinction,“ he said.
Bill Oddie, the Conservationist and broadcaster, said trophy hunting was putting increasing pressure on vulnerable wildlife.
He added:
“When you’ve got a scattered, dwindling population, the loss of a handful of animals doesn’t just cause a ripple effect – it can be like a tsunami wave.
“Trophy hunting has always been senseless cruelty. Letting people kill them because they think it’s entertaining is just insane, especially when you’re talking about wildlife with such a vulnerable status”.
International action
Zac Goldsmith is one of a number of leading Conservatives calling for a ban, and has now tabled a motion in Parliament which has won cross-party support.
He said:
“I find it amazing that anyone would take any kind of pleasure from shooting one of these magnificent creatures – elephants, lions, even rhinos. It makes no sense to me at all at any level.“
Sir Ed Davey MP, the former Lib Dem minister, called for new laws to be introduced.
He said claims by trophy hunters that the ‘sport’ helped fund wildlife conservation and poverty eradication programmes were deliberately misleading.
“Trophy hunting should be banned across the world, and that ban should be enforced very strongly,” he argued.
“It’s completely wrong that we’re allowing people to kill animals, particularly endangered species. The argument that it’s good for local communities is completely bogus. The money goes to the rich people, and we could actually help communities far better by promoting nature tourism.”
Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, said the government had failed to follow through on a 2015 promise to ban lion trophy imports.
She pointed to the examples of Australia, France and the Netherlands where trophy imports have been banned:
“Our government is supposed to be doing something about this. They pledged to make a start by banning the imports of lion trophies.
“But even on this they haven’t implemented it. Every year there’s an average of 242 animal trophies coming back into the UK We’re calling on the government to step up to follow the lead from other countries who have banned all trophy hunting imports.”
Hunting expeditions
Eduardo Gonçalves, from the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, said the public would be shocked to learn both that British trophy hunters were deliberately killing endangered animals and bringing in elephant tusks, and that the law allowed them to do it.
He said:
“Over the last decade, UK hunters have brought home over 2500 trophies, of which nearly 400 were from some of the most endangered species on the planet.
“UK hunters have killed literally hundreds of elephants, hippos, leopards, zebras and lions – and then brought home their trophies and body parts for show.
“As well as tusks and mounted trophies, U.K. hunters bring home ‘souvenirs’ from their elephant-hunting expeditions that include trunks, feet, ears and tails.”
Uncontrolled slaughter
Gonçalves accused the trophy hunting industry of deliberately encouraging the large-scale killing of rare wildlife.
“The Safari Club International ‘Global Hunting Award’ challenges hunters to kill a minimum of 12 species in Africa. Their ‘Cats of the World’ prize is handed to those who kill a lion, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, cougar and several other big cats.
“Its other awards include the infamous ‘Africa 29’ which is given to hunters who kill no fewer than 29 different wildlife species. This is grotesque, uncontrolled slaughter on a massive scale, and it’s pushing threatened species to the brink of extinction”.
He added that the loopholes in wildlife protection laws were being exploited by poachers posing as trophy hunters.
“Many people think the hunting of endangered wildlife is banned. In fact trophy hunters are exempted from CITES. It’s an extraordinary loophole that poachers are taking advantage of. Around 300 rhino horns are known to have been exported by phony trophy hunters between 2009-2014 alone.
“The government wants to be seen as a global leader on wildlife and animal welfare. If it’s serious about this, it should commit to an immediate ban on imports. This is an area where Michael Gove will find there is strong public support for decisive action.”
For the SNP, Tommy Sheppard MP said:
“It’s disgraceful in the modern age that we allow people to indulge in the slaughter of wild animals purely for entertainment.”
Ben Lake MP (Plaid Cymru) added:
“I find it abhorrent that anyone would consider killing animals for sport and then to mount them above their mantelpieces as some sort of trophy. I want to see it completely banned. The U.K. as a leading nation can make an important contribution to bringing a global ban.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting.
Qatar said on Monday it was quitting OPEC from January to focus on its gas ambitions, taking a swipe at the group’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia and marring Gulf efforts to show unity before this week’s meeting of exporters to tackle an oil price slide.
Doha, one of OPEC’s smallest oil producers but the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, is embroiled in a protracted diplomatic row with Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states.
Qatar said its decision was not driven by politics but, in an apparent swipe at Riyadh, Minister of State for Energy Affairs Saad al-Kaabi said:
“We are not saying we are going to get out of the oil business but it is controlled by an organisation managed by a country.”
He did not name the nation.
Al-Kaabi told a news conference that Doha’s decision “was communicated to OPEC” but said Qatar would attend the group’s meeting on Thursday and Friday, and would abide by its commitments.
He said Doha would focus on its gas potential because it was not practical for Qatar “to put efforts and resources and time in an organisation that we are a very small player in and I don’t have a say in what happens”.
Delegates at OPEC, which has 15 members including Qatar, sought to play down the impact. But losing a long-standing member undermines a bid to show a united front before a meeting that is expected to back a supply cut to shore up crude prices that have lost almost 30 percent since an October peak.
“They are not a big producer, but have played a big part in its (OPEC) history,” one OPEC source said.
It highlights the growing dominance over policymaking in the oil market of Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States, the top world’s three oil producers, which together account for almost a third of global output.
Riyadh and Moscow have been increasingly deciding output policies together, under pressure from US President Donald Trump on OPEC to bring down prices. Benchmark Brent is trading at around $62 a barrel, down from more than $86 in October.
“It could signal a historic turning point of the organisation towards Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States,” said Algeria’s former energy minister and OPEC chairman, Chakib Khelil, commenting on Qatar’s move.
He said Doha’s exit would have a “psychological impact” because of the row with Riyadh and could prove “an example to be followed by other members in the wake of unilateral decisions of Saudi Arabia in the recent past”.
‘A strategy decision’
Qatar, which Al-Kaabi said had been a member of OPEC for 57 years, has oil output of just 600,000 barrels per day (bpd), compared with Saudi Arabia’s 11 million bpd.
But Doha is an influential player in the global LNG market with annual production of 77 million tonnes per year, based on its huge reserves of the fuel in the Gulf.
OPEC members Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and fellow Arab states Bahrain and Egypt, have imposed a political and economic boycott on Qatar since June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Doha denies the charges and says the boycott aims to impinge on its sovereignty.
Qatar’s announcement comes ahead of a GCC summit scheduled for 9 December. The last GCC summit – and the first held after three Gulf countries cut ties with Qatar and blockaded it – ended after 15 minutes.
Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister who remains a powerful figure in the country, called the nation’s withdrawal from OPEC a “wise decision”.
“This organisation has become useless and adds nothing to us,” he tweeted. “They are used only for purposes that are detrimental to our national interest.”
Al-Kaabi, who is heading Qatar’s OPEC delegation, said the decision was not political but related to the country’s long-term strategy and plans to develop its gas industry and increase LNG output to 110 million tonnes by 2024.
“A lot of people will politicise it,” Al-Kaabi said. “I assure you this purely was a decision on what’s right for Qatar long term. It’s a strategy decision.”
Oil surged about 5 percent on Monday after the United States and China agreed to a 90-day truce in their trade war, but prices remain well off October’s peak.
Asked if Qatar’s withdrawal would complicate OPEC’s decision this week, a non-Gulf OPEC source said:
“Not really, even if it’s a regrettable and sad decision from one of our member countries.”
Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultancy Energy Aspects, said Qatar’s withdrawal “doesn’t affect OPEC’s ability to influence as Qatar was a very small player”.
Al-Kaabi said Qatar Petroleum planned to build the Middle East’s largest ethane cracker – an industrial plant which converts gas into ethylene, a which is used in plastics and other synthetic oil byproducts.
He said Qatar would still look to expand its oil investments abroad and would “make a big splash in the oil and gas business”.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
On the evening of Friday, November 30, Hezbollah’s war media broadcasted this video addressed to Israel and subtitled in Hebrew, in response to recent Israeli military exercises simulating an aggression against southern Lebanon, an escalation of violations of Lebanese airspace –from which aggressions against Syria are usually carried out– by Israeli drones, and new threats to assassinate Hezbollah Secretary General. The statement in the video is excerpted from the latest speech by Hassan Nasrallah on November 10, 2018, and the footage shows in particular the precise coordinates of Israeli military bases that would be targeted in case of aggression. Let us remind that Hezbollah’s policy is to target exclusively the military, and to hit the colonies and cities of the enemy only in response to the ongoing Israeli aggression against Lebanese civilians. The civilian/military ratio of the victims of the 2006 war was 1/10 on the Israeli side, and 10/1 on the Lebanese side, a striking proof of the fact that Israel strikes civilians above all, and that Hezbollah favors military targets.
Despite the August 2006 ceasefire, Lebanon and Israel remain in a state of war, and if direct clashes have ceased, information & psychological warfare continue to rage, as are indirect clashes in Syria or even Yemen, where Israeli planes are directly involved in the conflict. At a time when the Gulf countries are openly engaging in the normalization policy of relations with Israel, when yet another futile attempt to strangle Iran economically is at work, and where MBS is touring North Africa to promote Israel’s peace agreement with Israel, Hezbollah recalls that its hostility to Israel remains irreducible, demonstrating its solidarity with the Resistance in Gaza that has recently scored a new victory, which foreshadows a real disaster in the event of a confrontation with such a powerful actor as Hezbollah. Hassan Nasrallah has several times announced as imminent the Great War to Liberate Palestine, in which the extended Resistance Axis (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq and Yemen) would participate.
This video made headlines in Israel Friday night and throughout the weekend, and senior military officials of the Zionist entity reacted to it. In accordance with its policy of anti-Nasrallah censorship, Youtube immediately deleted this video broadcast, among others, by Al-Manar (French) and Sputnik (English) for alledgedly “violating Youtube’s Terms of Service”, but Israeli media like Ynet were able to broadcast it on the platform without fear of censorship –proof that the content itself has no valid reason to be censored according to the Youtube’s Terms of Service. Only sources that are a priori favorable to Hezbollah are tirelessly hunted down by IDF cyber-soldiers and deleted.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The full quote by Porfirio Díaz is: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Mexican President Díaz (1876-1880 and 1884-1911) got it at least half right. Mexico has suffered in the shadow of the Colossus of the North, but Mexico is not poor. Mexico is rich in many ways, yet it also has been impoverished. And Mexico has been greatly underappreciated by North Americans.
Mexico is bucking an international right-wing tide, shifting its government from right to left-of-center with the presidential inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on December 1. Speaking for international capital, The Economistis worried. The other 99% of humanity is hopeful. A cautionary history of this trice conquered land follows.
Pre-Colombian Mexico and the First Conquest
Prior to Europeans “discovering” the New World, Mexico was home to many great civilizations, which thrived for nearly four millennia: Aztec, Huastec, Izapa, Maya, Mixtec, Olmec, Purépecha, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Totonac, and Zapotec. History and Headlines rates the “10 great historical civilizations,” naming the Olmecs and Aztecs alongside the Romans, Persians, and Egyptians.
The popular image of the Aztec depicts savage men in loin clothes and feathers on top of stone pyramids making human sacrifices. But let’s put that into historical context. HistorianJames Cockcroft tells us that at the same time the barbarians in the New World were assuaging their pagan gods with human blood, more people met their end burned at the stake as “witches” by the civilized Europeans in the name of Jesus. Christian femicide is a forgotten legacy.
European contact in 1519 brought Christianity and disease to the then flourishing Mexican civilizations. While the Europeans and the indigenous Americans were roughly on the par technologically, the Europeans were far more adept at war and to them went victory and the spoils.
Geographer Jared Diamond estimates that 90% of the Native American population was obliterated by measles, small pox, flu, and the like for which the Europeans had developed relative immunities. Mexico did not regain its 1519 population until 1940, taking over 400 years to recover.
Although the official language of Mexico is now Spanish and Mexico is the most populous Spanish speaking nation in the world, it is also home to the largest number of actively spoken indigenous languages in North America.
The Second Conquest of Mexico
The first conquest of Mexico was by the Spanish conquistadores. The second was by the Yankees and has received far less acknowledgment.
Mexico won its independence from Spain in the period 1810-21 and with it slavery was abolished, though not entirely until 1829. It wasn’t until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued followed by the Thirteenth Amendment two years later, that formal slavery was abolished in the US. However, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws continued to preserve the “peculiar institution” in the “land of the free.”
The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 established the border between the former Spanish colonial territories and the former British colony, now the US.
By 1836, the Republic of Texas succeeded from Mexico and was annexed to the US in 1845. The following year, the Mexican-American War was provoked by the US as a war of conquest.
Two years later, Mexico was forced to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceding nearly half its national territory. The US gained what would become parts or all of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added southern Arizona and New Mexico to the spoils of war.
In all, 55% of Mexico, over half of her sovereign territory, was taken from Mexico by the ever-expanding Colossus of the North. No wonder our Chicanx compatriots remind us “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us.”
Alta California
Gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill just a few days before the treaty was signed, which transferred Alta (upper) California from Mexico to the US. The discovery of gold was unknown to the signatories at the time.
Alta California was to become the Golden State. With a $2.7 trillion economy, the state now boasts the world’s fifth largest economy, larger than Mexico’s $2.4 trillion gross domestic product (GDP). Were Alta California to rejoin Mexico, the new union’s GDP would be surpassed only by the mega-economies of China, US, India, and Japan.
The constitution for Alta California was drafted in both Spanish and English. Despite having a bilingual constitution, the Alta California voters passed the English-only Proposition 227 in 1998. Then in 2016, the voters passed Proposition 57, which repealed the more egregious English-only provisions of the earlier proposition.
The repeal of the English-only proposition reflected an influx of non-English speakers into the state. Alta California is today a truly multi-ethnic state with 43% of its inhabitants speaking a language other than English at home. The largest ethnic group is again Hispanic-Latinx, comprising 39% of the population and outnumbering what the Census Bureau calls “white alone.”
The Mexican Revolution
The bully to the north became revolution-adverse after concluding its own revolution. When Haiti won its independence from France in 1804, the US joined Napoleon’s empire to force the fledgling Haitian nation to pay debilitating reparations for freeing itself from slavery.
Nevertheless, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 was able to slip by. In those days the US empire was not as capable at multitasking as it is now and was preoccupied by World War I.
The Mexican Revolution stands in the pantheon of great 20th century revolutions, pioneering the way for Russia (1917), China (1949), Vietnam (1975), and the many Third World liberation struggles of the last century.
As the first of the major 20th-century revolutions, the Mexican Revolution guaranteed labor rights, nationalized subsoil rights, secularized the state and curbed the power of the Roman Catholic Church, and gave inalienable land rights to indigenous communities. Women’s rights were advanced, and women fought as soldiers and even commanders in General Emilio Zapata’s revolutionary army. Many of these gains have since been eroded.
The Revolution Institutionalized
After the tumultuous revolutionary period, politics in Mexico became consolidated under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). This single corporatist party brought together political factions representing the peasantry, labor, and urban professionals. As the revolutionary period receded, the PRI became politically centrist.
The one-party rule of the PRI was finally ended with the successful presidential election in 2000 of Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party). The PAN won the subsequent presidential election as well. The PAN is a right-of-center Christian democratic party. It has strong backing among northern Mexican agri-business and international corporations and has a conservative social agenda.
The current Mexican president, Peña Nieto, is a member of the PRI. As the PRI moved to the right, more liberal forces within split in 1986 and formed the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). The main stronghold of the PRD has been Mexico City and among organized labor.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the PRD standard bearer in the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections. His losses in both elections are widely believed to be due to fraud.
NAFTA – the Third Conquest of Mexico
The third conquest of Mexico was by North American finance capital came in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar neoliberal arrangements. Neither free nor restricted to trade (e.g., it includes military cooperation), this stealth conquest facilitated the repatriation of foreign investment profits and the further integration of Mexico into the US economy.
NAFTA was ratified in 1994 among Mexico, the US, and Canada. The agreement remains controversial in the constituent counties. The Zapatistas in southern Mexico specifically chose the initiation date of their on-going rebellion to coincide with the day NAFTA started, presciently predicting the deleterious effects NAFTA would have.
NAFTA ended many Mexican government supports for agriculture, while encouraging the entry of US and Canadian agricultural products. Consequently, peasant and most family farm agriculture in Mexico are less economically viable. The result has been a massive internal migration from the countryside into Mexican cities and an external emigration of people forced off the land to the US.
Neoliberalism’s Winners and Losers
A decade or two before the imposition of NAFTA, Mexico had appeared poised to transform from a developing to a developed country. New oil reserves had been discovered and a boom seemed imminent. Then instead of continuing a development model, Mexico bowed to international financial pressure and switched to a neoliberal model of deregulation and privatization.
Rather than lifting Mexico’s economy through its deeper integration with the US economy, as NAFTA’s proponents promised, Mexico has fallen even further behind. After NAFTA and the neoliberal “reforms,” poverty went up in Mexico while per capita economic growth lagged compared to the rest of Latin America.
Instead of wages becoming like those in the US, working wages became competitive with Guatemala. Mexico took its place in the international market economy as an export platform for low-wage maquiladoras, factories owned by foreigners and exporting to a foreign market.
Despite great national wealth, 46% of Mexicans live below the poverty line. The per capita income of Mexico is a third of the US, making the shared border the most income-unequal border in the world.
Neoliberalism has also had its winners. The government telephone monopoly Telmex was privatized in 1990, bought up by Carlos Slim Helú who became the richest man not only in Mexico but in the entire world by 2010. His ranking has now slipped to seventh, though he is still the top tycoon in Mexico owning 40% of the listings on the Mexican stock exchange. His net worth is equivalent to 6% of Mexico’s GDP, which is greater than the entire GDP of neighboring Guatemala and four times that of Nicaragua.
With a new strata of billionaires and deepening poverty, both spawned by neoliberalism, Mexico is among the more income unequal nations, with a Gini Index of 48.2. Carlos Slim and eight other international fat cats now have more wealth than half the world’s population.
Contemporary Mexico
Yet today Mexico as a nation is rich in many ways.
In terms of biodiversity, Mexico is way under-recognized. Mexico ranks fourth or fifth in the world, scoring high for the number of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants. The much more celebrated Costa Rica in comparison doesn’t make the top ten in any of these categories, although it has a far better public relations apparatus. Mexico encompasses vast rainforests, dry forests, mountains, deserts, and the second largest coral reef in the world.
In terms of conservation, Mexico has been a world leader in the protection of whales. Commercial whaling was banned in 1954. In contrast, the last US whaling station in the San Francisco Bay was closed in 1971, followed the next year by passage of the Mammal Protection Act. The world’s first whale refuge was established in 1972 by the Mexican government. In 2002, Mexico again exercised world leadership in designating all its territorial waters and Economic Exclusion Zones as whale refuges.
Culinarily, Mexico’s cocina is considered among the great cuisines of the world; a lot more than taco trucks and cheap burrito stands. Amongst Mexico’s contributions to the world’s larder are avocado, chocolate, guava, tomato, vanilla, many varieties of beans and chiles, and most notably corn, which is now the world’s most important staple food.
With 7.6 billion bbl of proven reserves, Mexico is a major crude oil producer. Ranking 12th in the world, it outproduces Nigeria, Qatar, and Libya.
Mexico’s economy ranks 11th in the world, placing it second in Latin America after Brazil. Mexico’s GDP is greater than that of Italy or Spain and just below France and the UK, making it one of the world’s economic powerhouses.
The 2018 Election
Left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for the Mexican presidency on July 1. Having broken from the PRD, this third run was the charm as he won decisively. Morena, his newly formed party, swept the national and state legislatures.
Mayor-elect of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is also part of the winning coalition.She is the first woman and first Jew to be elected to the post. She is a scientist and was a joint winner of the 2007 Noble Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
After decades of right-wing governments in Mexico, López Obrador is being sworn in on December 1. The popular sectors in Mexico are expectant that corruption, inequality, and other long-festering economic injustices will be addressed.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Roger Harrisis the immediate past president of the Task Force on the Americas (http://taskforceamericas.org/), a 32-year-old human rights organization, and is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela (https://tinyurl.com/yd4ptxkx).
At home, Saudi Arabia’s media trumpeted Mohammed bin Salman’s meetings with world leaders, tweeting pictures of his encounters, which also included the presidents of South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa.
However, Western leaders appeared to avoid the crown prince during the family photo at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires – after almost two months of global outrage at the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The only Arab leader there, the prince stood rather isolated at the end of the line, at times looking uncertain and nervous.
Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri kept the prince hanging on when it came to finding time to talk.
During an informal conversation on the sidelines of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron was overheard admonishing Mohammed, saying he “never listened”, while the crown prince tried to assure him that “it’s OK”. French officials later said the men were discussing the killing of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and the war in Yemen.
Similarly, British Prime Minister Theresa May opted to focus on those two topics, rather than economics and trade as her country struggles with the uncertainty of Brexit, the UK’s departure from the European Union. May insisted Riyadh needed “to build confidence that such a deplorable incident could not happen again”, referring to the Saudi team sent to Turkey to murder Khashoggi.
The message Prince Mohammed probably took home from the G20 summit was that illiberal democratic, authoritarian and autocratic leaders were happy to do business with the kingdom and the crown prince despite persistent assertions that he ordered the killing.
Trump and western Europe’s leaders appeared to play to public opinion but do nothing to threaten their relations with the kingdom. The US president also chose not to have a formal meeting with Prince Mohammed’s foremost detractor, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The crown prince may also have been heartened that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, which Saudi Arabia had a diplomatic row with earlier this year, was the only leader to raise the Khashoggi issue during the G20’s formal proceedings.
Other US allies made clear the kingdom’s financial largesse and willingness to guarantee the flow of oil would go a long way to ensure they would choose realism above principle.
The Saudi Press Agency reported after Mohammed’s meeting with Modi that the crown prince pledged to meet India’s oil and petroleum product needs.
But the prince is not out of the woods yet. The kingdom, eager to project itself as a regional and world power, has suffered significant damage to its reputation which will take time and hard work to repair.
Just how hard depends on whether the US Congress decides to sanction Riyadh, if the Europeans will follow suit, and on Turkey successfully pushing for an international investigation into the killing.
“We have never seen Khashoggi’s murder as a political issue,” Erdogan told a news conference in Buenos Aires. “For Turkey, the incident is and will remain a flagrant murder within the Islamic world. International public opinion will not be satisfied until all those responsible for his death are revealed.”
He described Saudi Arabia’s response to the killing as “unbelievable”.
Yemenis queuing up to get their daily bread rations from a food aid distribution centre in Sanaa, Yemen, on November 28, 2018. Photo: Xinhua
Prince Mohammed’s case was not helped by the leak of a CIA report saying he sent 11 messages to Saud al-Qahtani – a former close aide – at the time Khashoggi was killed. However, the intelligence agency admitted it lacked direct evidence of the crown prince “issuing a kill order”.
Qahtani has been accused of overseeing the killing and been fired from his position as Mohammed’s adviser and information tsar. He has also been sanctioned by Washington.
The CIA claims Prince Mohammed told associates in August 2017 they “could possibly lure [Khashoggi] outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements” if the Washington Post columnist refused to return to the kingdom from the US.
Nevertheless, the G20 summit suggests Prince Mohammed and the kingdom may have taken their first step towards putting the Khashoggi affair behind them. Even if US lawmakers slap sanctions on the kingdom, the prince is likely to remain secure in his position as king-in-waiting.
Keeping Khashoggi in the headlines will prove increasingly difficult as it seems much of the world has signalled that it is moving on.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
As expected, the report primarily focuses on Russian influence, since other influence from the EU and the US cannot be considered any sort of influence, especially not bad. It also primarily focuses on Ukraine.
In the section dubbed “Security Assistance in the Short and Medium Terms,” the situation in the Sea of Azov is highlighted.
“Russia is currently occupying and militarizing Ukrainian Crimea, conducting a simmering, hybrid war in the Donbas, and obstructing Ukrainian shipping in the Sea of Azov.”
Furthermore, the section looked at the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008, claiming that Russian “peacekeeper in South Ossetia periodically move the line of demarcation farther into Georgia.”
The US and NATO provided training to both Ukraine and Georgia. And under the Donald Trump administration, the US, “at long last” provided Javelin missiles to both countries.
Furthermore, the US may and should also consult with Georgia and Ukraine for further military assistance, according to the report.
“It would also be useful for the United States and the EU to consider a proactive use of sanctions to deter further Kremlin aggression. To date, sanctions have been used to punish the Kremlin for past sins, but they also can be used to discourage further aggression.” Giving as an example, that the Kremlin “keeps taking more territory in the Donbass,” despite the ceasefire. Also, despite that even the OSCE doubts that there are signs of Russian participation in the region.
Furthermore, the report also presents a suggestion on fighting “Russian aggression and provocations” in the Sea of Azov.
“The United States and the EU should also look closely at Kremlin provocations in the Sea of Azov, and consider an appropriate response. Perhaps it should not permit Russian ships sailing from ports in the Sea of Azov to call at European and US ports, so long as Moscow is obstructing Ukrainian shipping there.”
What is the EU going to do about the illegal Russian blockade of the international Sea of Azov? Instant action is called for! @FedericaMog@JunckerEU@eucopresident
Everything suggests that Russia slowly takes one step after the other to block the Azov Sea off from Ukraine & international shipping. The West & NATO should react sharply before it is too late. https://t.co/kZMn2XTEls
Chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov tweeted that aside from the “practical risks” which might arise from US ships rushing into the kerfuffle, it would also be “illegal without Russian permission.”
Practical risks aside, it would be illegal without Russian permission according to the 2003 treaty between Russia and Ukraine that declared Azov to be “internal waters” and only guaranteed freedom of navigation for RUS and UKR military vessels. https://t.co/CjTOyfcmethttps://t.co/VKxbcACZOc
By the end of the day, not one single US official has said a word against Russia's aggression in Ukraine. That can only mean that they were strictly ordered by POTUS not to do so. Why is POTUS supporting Russian aggression in Ukraine?!
Leonid Ragozin, formerly of Lonely Planet and BBC also pitched in his opinion on the matter and the Atlantic Council’s support of “democratic values.”
Side show? I thought Western support of Ukraine was about democratic values, not geopolitical machinations. I very genuinely did. https://t.co/eQXHNNSkS5
“Secretary Pompeo and Foreign Minister Klimkin reiterated that cooperation between the United States and Ukraine is based on common interests and shared values, including support for democracy, economic freedom and prosperity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, energy security, and respect for human rights and the rule of law.”
Furthermore, it appears that a “provocation by Russia” was expected in one way or another, as it becomes somewhat apparent from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s press release.
“The United States condemned Russia’s aggressive actions against international shipping transiting the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait to Ukrainian ports. Both sides underscored that Russia’s aggressive activities in the Sea of Azov have brought new security, economic, social, and environmental threats to the entire Azov-Black Sea region.”
With all of these preemptive reports and warnings against “Russian provocations” it appears that it would not be surprising if there was an attempt at a coordinated effort to cause an incident by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. However, judging by US, NATO and EU reactions so far, Poroshenko may have listened to a wrong adviser from his wing, as the play appeared to be botched.
Luckily, no Ukrainian or Russian ships were sunk, and nobody lost their life. Barring some injuries, the incident failed to lead to a very large scandal, despite hyper-measures undertaken by Ukraine in the face of martial law.
It would make sense that Poroshenko expected the ships would likely be destroyed, judging by the Su-30 claims of November 27th. However, it appeared that the Russians decided to surprisingly not be as “aggressive” as expected.
To create some perspective – imagine if a Syrian warship somehow entered “Israeli territorial waters” – unsurprisingly that ship would more than likely be immediately destroyed, no questions asked. And the whirlwind in mainstream media and the rhetoric from the US, NATO and EU would most likely be much calmer than in the Ukraine-Russia scenario.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
In Hitler’s goals to attain Germanic dominion of the planet, he enjoyed some of his most triumphant days secured away at the vast, virtually unheard of Wolf’s Lair. The complex was known in the German tongue as Wolfsschanze. Hitler had inserted “Wolf” into the title of many of his military headquarters, as it was a self-appointed nickname.
Situated over 400 miles from Berlin in East Prussia, Hitler arrived at the Wolf’s Lair for the first occasion during late evening of 23 June 1941. The advanced time was not an issue. From the days of Hitler’s “struggle” beginning in the early 1920s, he had developed a habit of remaining active until the small hours, often present in rowdy beer halls, and rising as late as noon.
On the night of 23 June 1941, the dictator was again in no mood for bed rest; his form was in fact jubilant as remarkable news filtered through from the Eastern Front. Less than 48 hours after the invasion began, German armies were smashing through the first bewildered Soviet lines, and had already reached the USSR republics of Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s most trusted military companion, also travelled eastwards to join his leader at the new Wolf’s Lair. As Operation Barbarossa rolled mercilessly along, Keitel’s disposition remained pensive and austere. It was the 58-year-old Keitel, almost standing alone in isolation, who had warned Hitler not to attack the Soviet Union.
Conservative and cautious by nature, Keitel detected the unmistakable sense of danger in the air. He was convinced that assaulting a landmass as great as the USSR – with its numerous complications – would be a task too much, even for the apparently unstoppable Wehrmacht. Due to Keitel’s reputation as a willing pawn of Hitler, he was held in poor esteem by an array of German generals and field marshals.
Yet Keitel’s military career had dated to the year 1901, and he possessed a distinguished record, claiming honours for bravery during the First World War while rising through the ranks. Keitel’s demeanour was that of a charming and approachable officer, educated in the old-fashioned virtues of the Prussian military establishment. Keitel possessed strong organizational and literary skills, but lacked the insubordinate, resolute nature to challenge Hitler directly.
Keitel had said later,
“It isn’t right to be obedient only when things go well; it is much harder to be a good, obedient soldier when things go badly and times are hard. Obedience and faith at such time is a virtue”.
His subservience would inevitably lead to a complicity in some of the Nazis’ atrocious crimes.
Unlike Keitel, the great majority of German military leaders firmly supported Hitler’s decision to attack Russia, believing the conflict would last around two months with Stalin’s expected ousting and death. The Nazi war chiefs’ unrealistic confidence swayed Hitler, who believed the Red Army would fold like a pack of cards. By mid-1941 Hitler had still to assume personal command of men in the field, and he unavoidably lacked the required knowledge and expertise.
Meanwhile, on the same evening that Hitler first entered the Wolf’s Lair (23 June 1941), one of the largest tank engagements in military history was starting. It was called the Battle of Brody: A near forgotten clash in north-western Ukraine between 750 panzers and 3,500 Soviet tanks, stretching across the cities of Brody, Dubno and Lutsk. About 350 miles northwards Hitler was in tune to proceedings from the Wolf’s Lair, and awaiting further stunning reports. They would come.
Despite the Nazis being outnumbered by more than four to one during the Battle of Brody, their panzers bludgeoned a way to victory by 30 June 1941. The Germans destroyed many hundreds of Soviet tanks, while meting out 65,000 casualties upon the Red Army. For mile after mile, this section of north-western Ukraine was strewn with dead bodies and horses, shattered Soviet armoured vehicles along with battered heavy weaponry.
The triumph around Brody consolidated vital German gains on the Ukraine’s western boundaries. It was also an indication of the ferocity of Hitler’s troops, as they unleashed what would be the bloodiest invasion of all time.
Also on the night Hitler became acquainted with the Wolf’s Lair, the Battle of Raseiniai was under way in western Lithuania; it was another critical early meeting between around 240 panzers and 750 Soviet tanks. Outmatched by three to one, the Germans were again victorious in the face of seemingly daunting odds. By 27 June 1941, they had destroyed over 700 of the Soviets’ 750 tanks near Raseiniai, a medieval Lithuanian town. The Luftwaffe also provided telling air support when it was needed.
Further south Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, had easily been captured on 24 June 1941 and Kaunas, the country’s second largest city, capitulated that day too. Germany’s Army Group North, under Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, was now positioned 600 miles from Moscow; yet his key objective was to seize the major Russian city of Leningrad closer to the north.
As a Blitzkrieg easily overcame Red Army resistance in Lithuania, an onlooking Hitler had been situated a mere 90 miles from the Lithuanian border at his Wolf’s Lair. In Hitler’s choice of headquarters across Europe, it was his desire to be as near the fighting as conceivably possible. Previously, as the Battle of France commenced (10 May–25 June 1940), Hitler’s compound, the Wolf’s Ravine (Wolfsschlucht), was erected in the Belgian village of Brûly-de-Pesche.
While the Nazi leader oversaw France’s swift and humiliating defeat, he became a resident for over two weeks at this Belgian hamlet. Brûly-de-Pesche is only five miles from the French northern frontier, and Paris was within comfortable driving distance.
Choice of location for the Wolf’s Lair was painstakingly assessed; in late 1940, construction began in the ancient and mysterious Masurian woods, near a small Prussian town called Rastenburg. The Wolf’s Lair was clear of urban centres and primary roads, while its entire complex covered 2.5 square miles. It was safeguarded by three security zones, and disguised by extensive netting that cleverly mimicked leaf cover when viewed from above.
Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando, wrote that
“I was ordered to the Wolfsschanze [Wolf’s Lair] nine times and also flew over it; it was so very well camouflaged from air attack that one could only see trees. The guarded access roads snaked through the forest, in such a way that I would have been unable to give the exact location of the Führer headquarters”.
Regardless of Hitler’s growing fears and precautions, not one bomb was dropped on the Wolf’s Lair, while his private secretary Traudl Junge later revealed “there was never more than a single aircraft hovering over the forest”. This is despite the fact that Hitler spent over 800 days immersed there.
As Germany’s victories mounted, the prevailing mood at the Wolf’s Lair became increasingly euphoric. At the end of June 1941, German forces had claimed a significant success when capturing Minsk, the sprawling capital of Belarus. By 11 July 1941, the Wehrmacht had conquered vast regions of Belarus, a state rivalling the size of Great Britain.
In doing so, the Nazis inflicted almost 420,000 casualties on Soviet divisions around the Belarusian capital, while the invaders lost only 12,000 men by comparison.
During fighting near Minsk, the Red Army further saw 4,800 of its tanks eliminated and up to 1,700 aircraft destroyed, while the Germans were shorn of just 100 panzers and 275 airplanes. The scale of victory is put into even sharper perspective when considering the Wehrmacht had a combined total of about 3,500 panzers, and little more than 2,000 warplanes.
While July 1941 proceeded, German infantrymen were pouring forward onto the very borders of Russia, taking the town of Ostrov on 4 July, in north-west Russia – followed, on 8 July, by their capturing Pskov 30 miles further north.
From the small city of Pskov, Moscow lay but 450 miles further east. As the world looked on in wonder, including the Americans and British, it seemed an eventuality the Nazis would cover these last few hundred miles, and overwhelm the Russian capital.
By 10 July 1941, the 13th Panzer Division (of Army Group South) had advanced to the Irpin River, just over 10 miles from Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine – a country with a rich agricultural base that would help sustain Germany’s foot soldiers. Yet it would not be for another nine weeks until Kiev itself fell, with the surrendering of almost 700,000 Soviet troops.
In the meantime, due to the incredible progression and devastation wrought, it was perhaps not surprising that on 8 July 1941 a boastful Hitler was telling propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, “The war in the east was in the main already won”. Hitler was simply echoing the views of his commanders.
As early as 3 July 1941 the 57-year-old Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, had written in his diary,
“So it’s really not saying too much, if I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days”.
The experienced Halder was surely letting himself get carried away. In the autumn of 1942 Halder would be sacked by Hitler, due to their ongoing disagreements over Russian fighting capacity, with the dictator saying to him,
“We now need National Socialist ardour rather than professional ability to settle matters in the East. Obviously, I cannot expect this of you”.
Hitler replaced Halder with General Kurt Zeitzler, who was thought to be a genius in his ability to manoeuvre large formations across battlefields, and perceive danger. It was expected that Zeitzler would finally move German armies to where Hitler wanted them to go.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: OKH commander Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and Hitler study maps during the early days of Hitler’s Russian Campaign
From the moment Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was sworn in as president of Mexico, the presidential house known as ‘Los Pinos’ was opened to the public as a museum and art gallery as a sign of the new government’s austerity.
“I won’t live in Los Pinos,’ said Lopez Obrador during his swearing-in ceremony at the Congress. “That residency was opened to the public today and it will be part of the Chapultepec Forest. It will turn into one of the biggest spaces in the world for art and culture.”
Hundreds of Mexicans have visited the house since then, taking pictures and selfies in one of the most reserved political places in the country, home to the previous 14 presidents. Enrique Peña Nieto left the house a week before leaving the presidency, receiving the King of Spain Felipe VI as his last guest.
Built in 1856, Los Pinos wasn’t always the presidential residency. The massive complex of buildings was owned by Dr. Jose Pablo Martinez del Rio, of one of Mexico’s richest families, before being expropriated by the post-Mexican Revolution government of Venustiano Carranza.
When President Lazaro Cardenas took office in 1934, he decided to change his residency to Los Pinos, after the Michoacan garden in which he fell in love with his wife, because he wanted the Chapultepec Palace to be opened to the public as a museum.
Before Cardenas changed its name to Los Pinos, the residency was known as ‘La Hormiga’ (The Ant), because it was the smallest of Martinez’s properties. As new presidents arrived, they ordered the construction of additional houses within the complex to fit their own taste, lifestyle or political affiliation. Presidents of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) used to live in the ‘Miguel Aleman’ house, while those from the National Action Party (PAN) chose the ‘Las Cabañas’ construction.
As a result, there are now four houses in the complex, besides gardens, squares, halls, pools and other sports facilities, with a constructed space of 56,000 square meters: an area 14 times bigger than the White House.
Now, a giant floral arrangement outside reads “People of Mexico, welcome to Los Pinos.” In the presidential office there’s a sign with the names of the three previous presidents and the legend “We received it this way.” Many of the halls, saloons and rooms are empty, but others still house some furniture. The portraits of the presidents are still there, drawing the occasional insult from visitors.
Supporters of Lopez Obrador and other curious people approached its opened gates in earnest. Some of them walked into the buildings, but others gathered at one of the gardens to watch Lopez Obrador’s ceremony on a screen. When he was formally sworn in, they chanted: “It was possible! It was possible!”
Meanwhile, Lopez Obrador went to the National Palace in the center of Mexico City to have lunch with world leaders and other guests, who would be able to taste traditional delicacies such as Huitlacoche, Zapote and many corn derivatives.
Outside, at the Zocalo square, thousands of supporters are enjoying the “AMLOFest, inauguration party.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
It takes only a spark, from a lightning or human ignition, to start a fire, but it involves high temperatures, a period of drought, a build-up of dry vegetation and strong winds to start a bush fire, such as is devastating Queensland and recently California. When all these factors combine firestorms ensue, enhanced by strong winds from the hot interior of the continent, overwhelming the desiccated bush and human habitats. This is the face of global warming, which on the continents has reached an average of 1.5oC (see this).
An overview of the cost of extreme weather events for the first half of 2018 (Figure 1A), prior to the California wildfires, estimates the cost as US $33billion. Some 3,000 people lost their lives in natural disasters during this period. The NatCatSERVICE database registered 430 relevant natural disasters in the first half of 2018, more than the long-term average (250) and the previous year (380). The rise in floods correlates with the rise in global temperatures (Figure 1B).
Figure 1A. The rise in extreme weather events 1980 – 2018. Munich Re-insurance (Source)
Figure 1B. Extreme weather events on the rise. (Source)
In 2018 widespread wildfires spread over multiple continents, including north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, near the Barents Sea, Siberia, in British Columbia and California – where the most extensive fire on record destroyed largest areas in its modern history. Table 1.1 indicates the severity of the 2018 wildfires around the world:
An independent report in 2012 from the International study the human and economic costs of climate change (DARA) linked direct and indirect[1] 250,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year [see this and this] and is estimated to cost between $US 2-4 billion/year by 2030 [see this].
California: The 2018 California wildfires burnt the largest amount of acreage recorded in a fire season, as of 30.11.2018, causing $2.975 billion in damages, including $1.366 billion in fire suppression costs, becoming the largest complex fire in the state’s history. On August 4, 2018, a national disaster was declared in Northern California, due to the extensive wildfires burning. In November 2018, strong winds caused another round of large, destructive fires to erupt across the state, killing at least 88 and destroying more than 18,000 structures, becoming both California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire on record (see this).
Figure 2. California fires October-November 2018 (Sources: A, B, C and D.)
Queensland: As these lines are written the news from the Queensland wildfires read: “There is no immediate relief in sight for Queensland’s bushfire crisis as extreme heatwave conditions continue to grip the state on the first day of summer and a cyclone threat looms. Wildfires have raged across central Queensland this week and 110 are still burning throughout the state. That number could grow as heatwave spreads to the state’s south east corner in coming days with possible storms with damaging winds.” (See this)
B. BOM – Queensland and Northern Territory, 3-day heat wave forecast from 1.12.2018 (See this)
C. Frequency of extreme weather events, Australia 1915-2017 (See this)
D. Australia warming trend since 1910 consistent with surrounding oceans (See this)
With the continuing rise in global carbon emissions and temperatures, the fate of the world’s forests due to fires and logging is in doubt (see this and this). The correlation between the rise in catastrophic bush fires in California, Queensland and other parts of the world (Figure 1A) emphasizes the dangerous course the world is undertaking. The introduction of lumps of coal to parliament would hardly help (see this), nor would the opening of new coal mines in heat scorched Queensland where Adani has just announced the opening of a new coal mine (see this).
There is no planet B.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
One month to the day after President Kennedy’s assassination, the Washington Post published an article by former president Harry Truman.
I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
Truman had envisioned the CIA as an impartial information and intelligence collector from “every available source.”
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what’s worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Truman found, to his dismay, that the CIA had ranged far afield.
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
The article appeared in the Washington Post’s morning edition, but not the evening edition.
Truman reveals two naive assumptions. He thought a government agency could be apolitical and objective. Further, he believed the CIA’s role could be limited to information gathering and analysis, eschewing “cloak and dagger operations.” The timing and tone of the letter may have been hints that Truman thought the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. If he did, he also realized an ex-president couldn’t state his suspicions without troublesome consequences.
Even the man who signed the CIA into law had to stay in the shadows, the CIA’s preferred operating venue. The CIA had become the exact opposite of what Truman envisioned and what its enabling legislation specified. Within a few years after its inauguration in 1947, it was neck-deep in global cloak and dagger and pushing agenda-driven, slanted information and outright disinformation not just within the government, but through the media to the American people.
The CIA lies with astonishing proficiency. It has made an art form of “plausible deniability.” Like glimpsing an octopus in murky waters, you know it’s there, but it shoots enough black ink to obscure its movements. Murk and black ink make it impossible for anyone on the outside to determine exactly what it does or has done. Insiders, even the director, are often kept in the dark.
For those on the trail of CIA and the other intelligence agencies’ lies and skullduggery, the agencies give ground glacially and only when they have to. What concessions they make often embody multiple layers of back-up lies. It can take years for an official admission—the CIA didn’t officially confess its involvement in the 1953 coup that deposed Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq until 2013—and even then details are usually not forthcoming. Many of the so-called exposés of the intelligence agencies are in effect spook-written for propaganda or damage control.
The intelligence agencies monitor virtually everything we do. They have tentacles reaching into every aspect of contemporary society, exercising control in pervasive but mostly unknown ways. Yet, every so often some idiot writes an op-ed or bloviates on TV, bemoaning the lack of trust the majority of Americans have in “their” government and wondering why. The wonder is that anyone still trusts the government.
The intelligence agency fog both obscures and corrodes. An ever increasing number of Americans believe that a shadowy Deep State pulls the strings. Most major stories since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, Kennedy’s assassination, foreign coups, the 1960s student unrest, civil rights agitation, and civic disorder, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, domestic surveillance, and many more—have intelligence angles. However, determining what those angles are plunges you into the miasma perpetuated by the agencies and their media accomplices.
The intelligence agencies and captive media’s secrecy, disinformation, and lies make it futile to mount a straightforward attack against them. It’s like attacking a citadel surrounded by swamps and bogs that afford no footing, making advance impossible. Their deadliest operation has been against the truth. In a political forum, how does one challenge an adversary who controls most of the information necessary to discredit, and ultimately reform or eliminate that adversary?
You don’t fight where your opponent wants you to fight. What the intelligence apparatus fears most is a battle of ideas. Intelligence, the military, and the reserve currency are essential component of the US’s confederated global empire. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump questioned a few empire totems and incurred the intelligence leadership’s wrath, demonstrating how sensitive and vulnerable they are on this front. The transparent flimsiness of their Russiagate concoction further illustrates the befuddlement. Questions are out in the open and are usually based on facts within the public domain. They move the battle from the murk to the light, unfamiliar and unwelcome terrain.
The US government, like Oceania, switches enemies as necessary. That validates military and intelligence; lasting peace would be intolerable. After World War II the enemy was the USSR and communism, which persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The 9/11 tragedy offered up a new enemy, Islamic terrorism.
Seventeen years later, after a disastrous run of US interventions in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it’s clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets. For all the money they’ve spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare
So switch the enemy again, now it’s Russia and China. The best insight the intelligence community could offer about those two is that they’ve grown stronger by doing the opposite of the US. For the most part they’ve stayed in their own neighborhoods. They accept that they’re constituents, albeit important ones, of a multipolar global order. Although they’ll use big sticks to protect their interests, carrots like the Belt and Road Initiative further their influence much better than the US’s bullets and bombs.
If the intelligence complex truly cared about the country, they might go public with the observation that the empire is going broke. However, raising awareness of this dire threat—as opposed to standard intelligence bogeymen—might prompt reexamination of intelligence and military budgets and the foreign policy that supports them. Insolvency will strangle the US’s exorbitantly expensive interventionism. It will be the first real curb on the intelligence complex since World War II, but don’t except any proactive measures beforehand from those charged with foreseeing the future.
Conspiracy theories, a term popularized by the CIA to denigrate Warren Commission skeptics, are often proved correct. However, trying to determine the truth behind intelligence agency conspiracies is a time and energy-consuming task, usually producing much frustration and little illumination. Instead, as Caitlin Johnstone recently observed, we’re better off fighting on moral and philosophical grounds the intelligence complex and the rest of the government’s depredations that are in plain sight.
Attack the intellectual foundations of empire and you attack the whole rickety edifice, including intelligence, that supports it. Tell the truth and you threaten those who deal in lies. Champion sanity and logic and you challenge the insane irrationality of the powers that be. They are daunting tasks, but less daunting than trying to excavate and clean the intelligence sewer.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
After less than two years, France’s youngest President, Emanuel Macron, has become the de facto leader of Europe but the object of violence at home.
Having spent a total of thirty-odd years living and working in France, I am only too familiar with its government’s high-handedness vis a vis its peoples’ incomes. Recently, in an effort to set an example for the rest of the world when it comes to combatting climate change, which he has publicly championed, Macron decided to raise the tax on fuel at home, as a way of ‘nudging’ (as in Obama’s advisor Cass Sunstein’s social theory) the public into purchasing non-polluting but more expensive electric cars.
In a country where social benefits form the bedrock of family budgets, that turned out to be a major blunder: with no trade union coordination, thousands of French people are shouting ‘Non’! What makes this crisis more challenging than others is precisely the fact that it has no leaders: the usually fractious French are, for once, of one mind.
Shouting Macron Must Go, an enraged crowd tore up paving stones and looted high end shops on the Champs-Elysées, site of the Republic’s carefully choreographed parades, and leading to the Arc de Triomphe dedicated to France’s fallen. These actions have nothing in common with the plethora of carefully choreographed demonstrations that have been part of French public life after the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
At the G-20, Macron was forced to momentarily ditch his ‘Jupiter’ persona for that of Louis XVI, whose Queen, Marie Antoinette, was said to have advised her starving people to eat cake if they had no bread — before both were guillotined. Macron has been trying to steer the leaders of the most developed countries toward climate sanity, while teaming up with Angela Merkel to bring Europe into a tighter Union. As citizens in yellow vests rampaged at home, he stated from the safety of Buenos Aires (with admirable calm, it must be said) that ‘No merited discontent justifies violence’. We’ll see where that gets him back in Paris.
Meanwhile, the standoff in the Kerch Straight between Russia and Ukraine illustrated once again the unpardonable ignorance (given the existence of Google and its maps), of the American media (Time actually reporting that Russia had invaded the Black Sea, which in fact is its home lake), while anchors ratcheted up the case against Donald Trump for having aspired to build a tower in Moscow at a time when Russia was ‘invading Ukraine’ and ‘taking over Crimea’. While ‘the little Emperor’ struggles to keep his crown, the American president is accused ex post facto of having allowed ‘the Kremlin’ to gather ‘kompromat’ on him, to be used at a time of its choosing.
As Europe struggles to retain its enviable standard of living, the United States falls back on its demons: fear of the Other. The founding documents currently invoked (as has happened periodically for over two hundred years) warn of the ability of foreigners to affect America’s destiny. Anchored in the war against the British Monarchy, it was soon extended to Papal worshippers, and gradually, even as the country gathered in people from across the planet, to those still ‘over there’. Only by being ‘over here’ may individuals lay claim to acceptance.
As Mexico installs its long-awaited progressive President, Macron’s crown wobbles, while the American businessman turned president is accused ex post facto of consorting with the enemy.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Born in Phila, Deena Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being Cuba, Diary of A Revolution.
In September, President Trump announced he would declassify pertinent documents relating to the Russian Collusion investigation. Four days later, he cancelled this order because two allies, believed to be England and Australia, had requested the documents remain classified. Recently, Trump has once again said he is “very seriously” thinking about declassifying the files.
The documents in question include 21 pages of the FBI’s original FISA Court application to surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page. In addition, notes from the FBI’s interviews “used in the FISA applications, notes of interviews with Bruce Ohr, the DOJ official who served as a back channel to Steele, and FBI and DOJ emails which are believed to show that evidence was withheld from the FISA court in its applications to spy on Page” were part of the request.
According to the Telegraph, MI6 officials are warning that the release of these documents would “undermine intelligence gathering” operations. The Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith claims to have interviewed twelve sources in both the US and the UK for his article. Here are some of the highlights. Italics, mine.
The row comes as UK intelligence agencies are increasingly dragged into a heated and partisan battle in Washington DC over the origins of the Russian investigation. Where did it start?
Mr. Trump’s allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK’s role in the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain. True.
However, a result of the attack line is that Britain’s spy agencies are being included in claims of “deep state” opposition to Mr Trump. It risks inflaming UK-US tensions at a time when Britain wants to deepen ties with America as it leaves the European Union. Not our problem. You should have thought of this long before now.
British spy chiefs have “genuine concern” about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.
“It boils down to the exposure of people”, said one US intelligence official, adding: “We don’t want to reveal sources and methods.” US intelligence shares the concerns of the UK. This has been the main talking point of Democrats in Congress from the beginning.
Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous “precedent” which could make people less likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. The exoneration of President Trump is far more important. Again, the British intelligence community should have thought about this before getting involved.
The current row is deemed so politically sensitive that staff at the British embassy in Washington DC have been barred from discussing it with journalists. They shouldn’t be discussing it with the press anyway.
One former British official warned that many of the attacks seem to originate from right-wing internet forums, such as 4chan. The claims must be treated with suspicion given they are often cited without hard evidence and bring a political benefit to the White House. This is propaganda.
GCHQ, Britain’s secret listening post, issued a rare on-record statement last year denying a suggestion quoted by Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, that it had helped wiretap Trump Towers. A GCHQ spokesman called the claim “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous”. Do they honestly think we believe them?
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, also had to publicly deny a suggestion he told Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, that UK intelligence agencies may have been involved in surveillance of the Trump campaign.
Riley-Smith included one lone source, one of Trump’s former advisors, who said: “You know the Brits are up to their neck.” And regarding the FISA Court application, he said “I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don’t want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA.”
It appears the Brits “doth protest too much.” Why are they so concerned about transparency if they have nothing to hide? Most of the above statements sound as if they had been uttered by Adam Schiff himself.
The documents must be declassified with or without British approval. Former British intelligence official Christopher Steele, the author of the bogus Trump dossier, stands at the center of the whole story. His compilation of unsubstantiated allegations was cited as the basis for the FBI’s FISA court application to spy on Carter Page and for subsequent renewals. The application was released earlier this year in heavily redacted form. Republicans are now calling for an unredacted copy.
Also involved in this intrigue was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic with reportedly high level connections to the Russian government. Mifsud, who is now missing and presumed dead, allegedly informed low level Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos then famously shared this information with then-Australian ambassador Alexander Downer in a London bar in May 2016. Two months later, when the FBI received word of this encounter, they immediately opened their counterintelligence investigation of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Papadopoulos and others believe that Downer, who has previous connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton, was part of a British intelligence conspiracy to discredit the US president.
Moreover, University of Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper was paid by the FBI for his role as a secret informant in their investigation of Trump.
Since much of the action began on British soil and many of the key figures in this fairy tale are either British citizens or individuals who spend a lot of time in the UK, country, it’s necessary to question the role of UK and even Australian intelligence agencies.
For far too long, Republicans have been reduced to reading the tea leaves while Mueller, Democrats and their pawns, the mainstream media, and now the Brits seek to obstruct the truth. It’s time for some transparency.
British opposition should not be a consideration in Trump’s decision whether or not to declassify the material. Trump needn’t worry about the consequences to people who have never passed up an opportunity to mock him. Although it might have improved Republican fortunes if these documents had been released prior to the midterms, their release at any time will be welcome.
The President of the United States has been held hostage by a sham investigation, the outcome of which could alter the course of history. If the release of classified documents reveals information that proves embarrassing to either Britain or Australia, their discomfort pales in comparison to the damage the FBI’s original counterintelligence probe and the subsequent Mueller investigation have inflicted on Trump’s presidency over the past two years. Please release the documents President Trump.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
December 2nd, 2018 by African Centre for Biodiversity
Tanzanian civil society organisations (CSOs) welcome the decision of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Mathew Mtigumwe, to bring an immediate stop to all ongoing GM field trials taking place in the country. These are under the auspices of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project which includes Monsanto, the Gates Foundation and national research centres. This decision has since been verified by the newly appointed Minister of Agriculture, Japheth Hasunga in latest media reports.
In a report issued by the Ministry, the Permanent Secretary ordered, with immediate effect, the cessation of all field trial operations and the destruction of all “the remnants” of the trials at the Makutupora Centre in Dodoma, where trials were taking place. This decision has come after the Tanzania Agriculture Research Institute (TARI) released the results of the trials without the necessary authorisation, when it invited certain members of the public, including the well-known pro GM lobbyist, Mark Lynas, to witness how ‘well’ the GM crops were performing. TARI also hosted a recent excursion to the trial site by the Parliamentary Committee on Food and Agriculture.
Unauthorised access to trial sites indicates collusion between biotech lobbyists and GM researchers paid by the Gates Foundation and others. Mark Lynas’s unethical social media hype uses Tanzania’s smallholder farmers in an instrumentalist way as a means to justify the introduction of GMO crops in the country, claiming that Tanzanians are poor and hungry. The statements of the pro-GM scientists have not yet been corroborated by the Ministry of Agriculture or related institutions such as the Tanzania Official Seed Certification Institute (TOSCI).
The biotech machinery both in Tanzania and elsewhere has supported a well-funded media campaign to spread pro GM propaganda and to push for the adoption of GM maize in the country, despite the questionable benefits for smallholder farmers. They have consistently made unsubstantiated claims about the GM varieties, including superior drought tolerance and resistance to fall army worm. In a media report ‘New push in pipeline for acceptance of GMO seed’, GMO trials were hailed as a “success” with the Director General of TARI claiming that ‘GMO seeds are a solution to the longstanding problems of pest invasions in farms across Tanzania’. These unsubstantiated claims were made on the effectiveness of the insect resistant Bt trait -MON 810 – that was ‘donated’ to WEMA countries even though it has been phased out in South Africa due to massive and widespread insect resistance.
That the claims are unsubstantiated was confirmed by the recent decision of South African biosafety authorities to reject Monsanto’s application for commercial release of its triple stacked GM drought tolerant maize, MON 87460 x MON 89034 x NK 603. The decision was made on the grounds that the field trial data insufficiently demonstrated the claimed drought and insect resistant efficacy of the GM event. MON 87460 is currently being field trialed in Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique where the WEMA project is also active. The decision to stop the trials is another blow to the WEMA project following so soon after the South African decision.
Farmers’ organisations including Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania (MVIWATA), the national smallholder farmers’ organisation, other CSOs, academics from the University of Dar es Salaam and members of the scientific community and the public within and outside the country, have openly criticized the WEMA project and the GM trials taking place in Tanzania. In a recent letter to a local newspaper, MVIWATA strongly expressed the view that “farmers have called for our government not to allow GMOs to be used in the country for obvious reasons that neither farmers nor the nation shall benefit from GMOs”.
Organisations have condemned threats by local scientists, who are paid by WEMA, to push for further revisions of the country’s biosafety regulations. The aim of proposed revisions is to change from strict liability to fault based provisions to allow the commercial release of the GM crops once the trials were completed. Strict liability means that whoever introduces GMOs into the environment is directly legally responsible for any damage, injury or loss caused. Fault-based provisions mean that the fault or negligence of whoever introduces a GMO will first have to be proven.
According to Janet Maro from Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT)
“the move by the Permanent Secretary comes at a critical time when almost all media houses are publishing the pro biotech propaganda about the successes of the field trials without a shred of solid research data to back up their claims. We call upon the Permanent Secretary to encourage researchers to carry out farmer-centered research aimed at addressing current pressing challenges and to explore using locally available solutions to ensure sustainability and wider adoption of locally researched practices and technologies.”
Dr. Richard Mbunda a food sovereignty researcher and lecturer from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Dar es Salaam also supported the view, recently writing an open letter to the President questioning the deployment of GM technology in the country.
Sabrina Masinjila, Tanzania-based research and advocacy officer at the African Centre for Biodiversity says,
“we hope that this decision will help the government rethink investments when it comes to agricultural research. Rather than spending huge amounts of scarce public resources on failed and discredited GM technology, we should focus on strengthening existing research institutions, and support participatory farmer research on seed systems aimed at strengthening seed, food and national sovereignty.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This video talks about crimes committed against Hutu, before, during and after the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda.
Talking about (and/or seeking Justice for) these crimes should not be considered as neither an act nor an attempt to deny, minimise, defend, vindicate or conceal the genocide committed against Tutsi in 1994.
On the contrary, considering all crimes committed against all Rwandans in the 1990s is the only way towards genuine and sustainable reconciliation among Rwandans.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
I spoke to Sean Gervasi on several occasions prior to his untimely death in June 1996. His incisive understanding of the process of breakup of Yugoslavia, not to mention its cruel aftermath was far-reaching. According to Gary Wilson, “Gervasi saw the breakup of Yugoslavia as an extension of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the first step in a NATO takeover of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He became active in exposing the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the civil war in the Balkans.”
With foresight Gervasi predicted the geopolitics of the post-Cold War era. The breakup of Yugoslavia laid the basis for NATO intervention in the Kosovo war in 1999, which in turn was followed by the enlargement of NATO and the conduct of US-NATO wars and military interventions in the Middle East.
Michel Chossudovsky, December 02, 2018
***
Interview with Professor Sean Gervasi, Institute of International and Economic Problems, Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
Recorded on February 24th, 1993
Harold Channer (HC): Good evening and welcome very, very much to the conversation. We’re pleased to welcome to the program Sean Gervasi. He is a professor and academic who is concerned with economics and particularly with what is relevant to what we want to talk about tonight. He has just returned from a long stay in in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and knows something of that situation. Sean Gervasi, welcome very, very much to the conversation, and back to New York. Before we go into some detail about what in the world is going on in terms of the Balkans, from your experience there, maybe share a little bit of your own background. You did some economics, you’re interested in economics.
Sean Gervasi (SG): Well, I’m basically an economist. I studied in Europe, came back to graduate school at Cornell, went into the federal government, resigned.
HC: And the Balkans… you had some reason to be concerned with that area particularly in some of your early life experience and so on?
SG: Well, I’d lived a long time in the Mediterranean. My father had been a diplomat posted in the Mediterranean and he covered a number of countries there for quite a long time after the war, so I was living in the Med, and I know a fair amount about Yugoslavia. I’m particularly interested in American foreign policy, the economic aspects of that, and so when things started getting really out of hand about a year ago, some old friends of mine whom I had known in the UN very well and who are Yugoslavian, and diplomats, spoke to me and enticed me to come over to the Institute for a week or ten days. Out of that I became a research professor in Belgrade.
HC: Yes, you’re research professor at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Political Problems.
SG: Right. It’s the Institute for International Politics, so it’s concerned primarily with understanding the international aspects of Yugoslavia’s position and it’s really been the premier research institute in Yugoslavia since 1948 or so when it was founded. It was very large, with a very substantial staff which has now been cut in about half. It’s still about 60 to 70 people, but it’s the equivalent of a major think tank in the United States, obviously without the connections and power that those have, although many members of the government, the federal government primarily, have gone in and out of the institute and government, and back and forth.
HC: And that’s a long-standing institution.
SG: It was founded in 1948, right after the war with Tito and so forth, and it’s interesting that they tack on the end economic problems. Problems they have in the Balkans.
HC: That is for certain and what a vantage point it has been for you. Now we’re taping on February 24th, 1993, and you’ve been there…
SG: Well, I went to the institute in all this. I was appointed in all this, and I’ve been in and out… I’ve been back to the states three times, but I’ve spent a good bit of time there over the last six, seven months.
HC: And as you said, things began to come apart, as you put it, about a year ago. Maybe you could set the stage for us here because the Balkans in modern history have been a pivot point for world developments. After all the First World War started there. There’s been a clash of cultures. Maybe you could give us a little of that historical development, of the crucial nature, and the geopolitical crucial nature of that that particular region. Fill in the general audience.
SG: Well, actually it’s the crucial geopolitical nature of the region which really explains the founding of Yugoslavia in the beginning in 1918 as a state to unite the South Slav nations, the republic of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes. Yugoslavia is in a very unique position in some respects because it’s been a focus of struggle between, for a long time, the Habsburg Empire on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire on the other. And it’s a focus therefore of European interest because it really represented the demarcation line between the Eastern Empire and the West in some sense, and that demarcation line moved up and down the Balkan Peninsula wildly according to the various struggles which were going on between the 13th century and the 19th century, and it was really with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, in 1918, as a result of the First World War, that a vacuum was created in a sense in that area and the Western countries, the entente, really wanted to see a solid political entity there in order to guard against—don’t forget this is shortly after the Soviet revolution—in order to guard against a very traditional Russian Soviet expansionism into the Mediterranean.
HC: This is even following the First World War.
SG: I think that Yugoslavia was envisioned by the Allies at that time as a kind of bulwark against the expansion of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet revolution, into the Balkans.
HC: And the Yugo of Yugoslavia, does that mean unity, or does it have a literal translation? [Yug =South]
SG: It was the union of the Slavs.
HC: That was literally what the word means, and it brought together, prior to that, those ethnic identities, which in various ways are being asserted so obviously now, go way back.
SG: Bosnian, that’s a rather artificial conception. It’s not an ethnic concept at all. The ethnic groups in the area are historically the three South Slavic ethnicities, if you like, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the second and the third being traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Catholic, the former [Serbs] being much closer to Russia and Orthodox, but there are a very large number of significant minorities mixed in there, significant numbers of them too: Hungarians, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and then there are even other peoples there.*
HC: The Montenegrins, and so forth, these would be subcategories of these three main groups?
SG: No. Well, the Montenegrins really are very closely related to the Serbs, but the Albanians are not at all, neither are the Hungarians, and the Macedonians are more complicated. They are Slavs, but they’ve also, being in the southern part of that area, lived for centuries under a strong Turkish influence.
HC: Yes, indeed.
SG: And there is a significant Muslim population in Macedonia, as there is, of course, in Serbia and the province of Kosovo where the Muslims are Albanian.
HC: Yeah, and then you have Skopje to the south.
SG: It’s the capital of Macedonia.
HC: That’s Macedonia there, and that’s not been in the news until now, and let’s hope that it does not become news, but in any event, there’s this clash of these entities there after the First World War, and then there’s also been a considerable German interest.
SG: Well, there’s been a historic German interest in the area. The Germans have always, particularly the South Germans, the Bavarians, have always looked with some possible cupidity on Croatia and on Slovenia. The Austrians have very close relations with Slovenia. Of course Germany, for a time, absorbed Austria. They’re very close culturally, ethnically etc. And Germany, of course, has always been interested in, particularly, the domination of Central Europe. This is an issue that goes way back to the Bismarck Empire and possibly one might also say that Germany has been interested in having access to the Mediterranean through gaining entry into the Adriatic via Croatia. That’s not insignificant.
HC: Yeah, and the Baghdad railway.
SG: The Berlin to Baghdad railway. I forget actually where exactly that passed through. It must have passed through…
HC: But that is interesting. We want to talk some about Mr. Kohl’s [German chancellor 1982-1998] role in the more modern experience with… But maybe we could pursue this historical development a little bit here. There was then, of course, the growth of Nazi Germany and there was the expansion, and they moved in. The First World War obviously started at Sarajevo with the assassination of the Archduke. But bringing it up into the more modern experience, the Balkans was an area where the Nazi forces actually experienced considerable difficulty with guerrillas. It held out and fought them and they never were really able to assert themselves, as powerful as they were, on the ground against some of those guerrilla forces. Or am I off-base on that?
SG: No, that’s absolutely right. The Second World War was a very important experience in the Balkans, especially in Yugoslavia. The Germans created a puppet state in Croatia which was called the Independent Croatian State. This was very large. It included all of Dalmatia, almost all of what is presently Croatia and Bosnia as well, so it was a very large area. That was the area which they occupied. The Italians were given a piece of Montenegro, and had some activities in other parts.
HC: When would they have done that?
SG: 1941, when the Germans invaded in 1941. They created this independent Croatian state, and this is extremely important in understanding the present because the Independent Croatian State included large numbers of Serbs, firstly, and as Croatia and Bosnia today do, they include probably in excess of two million Serbs living in Bosnia, what is now Bosnia, and what is now Croatia. They were also in those areas at that time. In fact, there were probably proportionately more of them, but the important thing to remember about the Independent Croatian State, which is remembered very sharply and bitterly today, is that it was a clerical fascist state, and as a clerical fascist state, it pursued quite savage policies toward the minorities, towards Jews, Gypsies and Serbs. And in fact I think there’s a lot of historical evidence, and certainly it’s taken for granted in the Balkans, that under the Nazis the Germans in fact gave the responsibility to Pavelić, the head of the Independent Croatian State, for carrying out a part of the Holocaust which included the elimination of a large part of the Serb population. It was a very deliberate racist, genocidal policy.
HC: Directed at the Serbs.
SG: Directed at the Serbs, the Jews and the Gypsies, and it’s been recognized after the war by the United Nations as a policy of genocide. Now in that situation at that time, in a number of camps, primarily a camp called Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, very large numbers of Serbs perished and very large numbers of Serbs perished when the Ustashe, the fascist military cadre, attacked Serb villages and pretty horrible atrocities were carried out. Now there’s a lot of controversy, obviously, over precisely how many people were killed, but the range of estimates I can give you, which is generally accepted—except, of course, by the present Croatian president—is between 300,000 and a million Serbs were exterminated at that time.
HC: Good Lord! And this was done in the name of… was there a racist component at the time as there would have been against the Jews?
SG: Absolutely. It was exactly what was directed against the Jews.
HC: And yet the Croats were Slavs, so the direction against the Serbians was something other than geopolitical demonizing. It was an ethnic or racist argumentation, and yet the Croats themselves were Salvs. Why was the Aryan appeal able to find fertile ground among the Croatians?
SG: It was the clerical element which generated the difference between the two. The difference between people who had lived under the Catholic Church for a very long time and people who remained in the Serbian Orthodox Church.
HC: And the underpinning of Bosnian or Muslim was there all along? What was the attitude of the Croats toward those Muslims who were…
SG: That’s an important point.
HC: The Ottoman influence.
SG: It’s important to understand that these Muslims are ethnically Slavs. The Muslims in Bosnia and in other parts of Yugoslavia are people who are the descendants of those Slavs forcibly converted when the areas in which they lived were under Ottoman occupation. Under the Ottomans, the Slavs were, of course, seen as lesser folk, and they were persecuted, discriminated against, and, in fact, very often in danger of their lives. They were very heavily taxed, and there was a lot of resistance to the Ottoman occupation.
So ferocious was—and it’s very famous in literature—the Ottoman occupation that large numbers of Slavs did, in fact, convert to Islam, but, as it were, in a more formalistic sense. So today, for instance, in Bosnia and other parts of Yugoslavia you have Muslims who are ethnically Slavs, blond-haired, blue-eyed, very tall etcetera, but who are in a cultural sense still formally Muslims—by the way many of them are not at all very religious—they’re very modern for Muslims—but they regard themselves as Muslims in some sense. And, of course, as Yugoslavia began to break up, and even before that, there was a great deal of pressure put on Muslims in places like that to become more Islamic. Now one important point, I think, to remember about the experience of the independent Croatian state during the Second World War was that as it included a significant number of Bosnian Muslims at that time, Muslims of Slavic origin but descendants of converted Slavs, again, those people were enlisted in, frankly, the genocidal war which was waged against other populations there. And, in fact, the Muslims formed the primary elements of two SS divisions in Bosnia, and that is one of the bitter memories which Bosnian Serbs have of that epoch: that that the Muslim population actively participated with the Croatian Ustashe in the genocidal attacks which took place against gypsies, Jews and Serbs.
HC: Who at that time was, in a certain sense, if that’s the right term, backing them?
SG: Well, the Nazis. As you know, Serbia was totally occupied by the Nazis. There were at that time, essentially, two quite different groups of Serbs resisting that situation.
HC: Tito being one.
SG: There were first of all Tito’s partisans who were made up of all the Slavic nationalities and including some Muslims, I believe—Serbs Croats and Slovenes. The partisans were primarily a multi-ethnic group and obviously ideologically unique and not at all ideologically diverse, but ideologically coherent around the idea of a future struggle for communism in the future Yugoslavia.
HC: You would tie it to the Soviet Union?
SG: Oh, they were. They had political relationships with the Soviet Union, but the primary military backers I would say at that time, perhaps not the primary military backers of the partisans, were the Allies.
HC: I was thinking in terms of ideology.
SG: Oh, not ideologically. We supported Tito. But there was another Serbian group at the time that needs to be remembered because today it’s a bit on the rise and that is the royalist Serbians calling themselves Chetniks [SP] which refers to the old resistance fighters against the Turks. The Chetniks and the partisans both fought the Nazis, but they also fought each other, so the Second World War is a pretty hellish scene in Yugoslavia in the sense that there was triangular warfare going on.
HC: And the resistance that the Nazis and the Croat patriots experienced was persistent and consistent and well-remembered in the minds of many of the Western Europeans who had experience in that Second World War. There was a real major force that was launched against these invasions.
SG: The partisans, particularly the partisans in Bosnia, really pinned down a large number of German divisions and fought them to a standstill. There is no doubt about that. That was probably the most significant military opposition against the Nazi occupation.
HC: You would think that might be well remembered by military advisers even as we sit and talk now.
SG: Oh, absolutely. There are many British intelligence officers, one of whom died recently, a man named Lise [correct spelling uknown], a man who wrote about British relations with Tito. He was very much against them. He and a number of people like Fitzroy MacLean and _____ Davidson who was an MI-6 officer in Yugoslavia during the wars, who is now a very famous writer. All of these people are fully familiar with the intensity of that conflict and it’s triangular character.
HC: And then there’s building up among the people who inhabit that area these historical and even contemporary, relatively contemporary, experiences of deep animosity and hatred among the people who make it up, which might help account for the incredible chaos that seems to be emerging.
SG: Well, I would emphasize the very precise words you use: “help account” because that’s only part of it. In fact, I would say that one of the remarkable things about the period from 1945 until quite recently in 1990, until 1989 perhaps, is that these ancient antagonisms were very much attenuated, I would say. Some people like to say repressed. There’s no doubt that Tito was an enormously successful leader in this sense. Under the slogan of brotherhood and unity he succeeded really in composing… I would not say eliminating… but he succeeded in composing the accumulated historical antagonisms between the various groups in Yugoslavia, and he and the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist League built what is surely one of the most successful federated states in the history of the 20th century, far more successful in some respects than the Soviet Union was. I would have said it was a model of federalism in many respects…
HC: Of federalism, not confederalism?
SG: Of federalism. I’m not correcting you. I want to make the distinction because from the time of Tito’s death, actually before, from the time of the 1974 Constitution when there were clearly tendencies, possibly fostered already from outside, towards a much looser federation, from the time of that constitution when, by the way, all of the republics of Yugoslavia were already declared sovereign. That’s the sense in which you can already say that there’s a tendency to confederalism in Yugoslavia from the adoption of the 1974 Constitution. The 1974 constitution was already loosening up. There’s just no doubt about it.
HC: Following the Second World War Tito emerged and you had Mr. Churchill with his Iron Curtain, but Yugoslavia which was a nominally socialist, communist aligned country but was unique to the rule that Mr. Tito was able to have a window, in a certain sense, on the West.
SG: More than a window I’d like to say. I think something needs to be said about that.
HC: But he also had a link to the communists.
SG: Ideologically, Tito of course had very close links historically with the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and in 1945 the Yugoslavs established a communist state, but I think Stalin did not regard Tito as a very good communist.
HC: I would think he had reason not to. He had an independent streak.
SG: Tito was a very strong person, and very independent, and the Yugoslavs are very, very independent. The Yugoslavs are very, very independent people. Under the pressure of the Soviet Union they began to wind down joint enterprises with the Soviet Union in the late 40s. They brought about the withdrawal of Russian military advisers, which, by the way, had been with the partisans as well as British officers and some Americans, I think. And then there was an interesting event in 1949. Mr. John Foster Dulles secretly flew to the island of Brioni in the Adriatic and met with Marshal Tito and offered him not just a window but a very large foot in the door. Foster Dulles offered Tito a kind of tacit alliance with the United States to stand against possible Soviet expansionism in the Balkans. And as a matter of fact, there was a tacit and a secret alliance between Yugoslavia after, say, the early 1950s, from the early 1950s, and the United States, in particular in the framework of NATO. There are very large bases which were to be activated in the event of a conflagration between the major powers in Yugoslavia—secret bases like…
HC: In….[INDISTINCT]
SG: Oh, no. Much more serious stuff than that: a major underground military air base in Croatia. There were other bases…
HC: This is in the 1970s?
SG: No, this is from the 1950s. Yugoslavia undertook actual military obligations within the context of a NATO confrontation with the Soviet Union. For instance, the Yugoslav forces undertook the obligation to block the movement of Soviet forces into southern Italy from Hungary. There were very specific engagements which were undertaken. Now, in return the Yugoslavs received enormous military assistance from the United States, from NATO, but really 90 percent of that military assistance was from the US. Yugolsav officers were trained in the United States. Yugoslavia received enormous technical assistance in its aircraft industry, in its military industry. That assistance enabled the creation of a very powerful, very modern military force in Yugoslavia, and of course that was a NATO asset.
HC: And those forces were under the command of the Yugoslavs and of Mr. Tito?
SG: But in the event of a confrontation between East and West, they were to participate in military actions aimed at the Soviet Union.
HC: Now what was the role of the Soviet Union in terms of the support, say militarily, or the logistics, or the internal logistics to the East in terms of military support. How do we begin to understand whence came the weapons that are being utilized in the Balkans now?
SG: Today?
HC: It seems, from our perception, to be overwhelmingly in the hands of the Serbian forces, that they seemed to be very, very well-armed. What were the realities of that, and what has been historically the tie to the Soviet Union in terms of arms and the arms that do appear and are there in the Balkans?
SG: Well, let me start by saying that Yugoslavia saw between 1945 and 1981-82 a quite a remarkable transformation really. It became an industrial state, an industrialized country, not fully industrialized, still with a minority of its population working the land, but nonetheless as a semi-modern industrialized state. There is a widespread view that the exclusive area of industrialization was Croatia and Slovenia, but it’s not true. Let me just give you an example. One of the most modern industries in Yugoslavia is the arms industry. It’s very large, by the way. I think it probably was in the beginning of the 1980s or the mid-80s perhaps the fifth largest arms industry in the world—exporter, sorry, I should correct myself a very, very significant exporter of military equipment and arms.
HC: And manufacturer?
SG: And manufacturer. Absolutely.
HC: Manufacturer of small arms?
SG: No, no. Really, the Yugoslavs manufacture everything from tanks to sophisticated electronics for and avionics.
HC: Let me ask you a naïve question that I should have had right at the beginning. What population are we talking about?
SG: In Yugoslavia? 25 million.
HC: And they had built up industry, one of which was an arms industry.
SG: Right now it’s important to remember that after the building tensions, if you like, with the Soviet Union, the Yugoslavs removed their arms industry and concentrated it where? In Bosnia. Seventy percent of this very modern arms industry is in Bosnia today and was in Bosnia when Mr. Izetbegović declared the independence of his republic in April 1992, April of last year. Now, most of the areas which are occupied by the Muslims are areas which have large portions of that 70% of the Yugoslav arms industry.
HC: What percentage would you say? You’ve brought this point up. It’s new to me. What percentage of the arms that are there, in terms of the fighting on the ground, or in the air, had been sourced domestically?
SG: The vast majority was produced domestically, some of the stuff under license. For instance, the Yugoslavs produced Soviet T52s etc., but they produced their own versions of the 72 called M84. They produced that themselves. My recollection is that it was the 5th largest arms exporter at a certain stage, maybe the mid-80s. I could be wrong, maybe sixth. It’s a significant producer of modern arms and equipment.
HC: Apart from that then if we were to look at that, and you said we had armed the partisans in the Second World War, and there had been this ideological tie to Soviet Union, communism. There was this quasi-tie to NATO. There were ties back to Moscow and so forth, and I’m just in a certain sense curious as to those that were not domestically produced and what has been the reality of supply lines and externally generated materials that would support a war?
SG: In the present conflict?
HC: Leading up to and within the present conflict.
SG: There are two principal external sources of arms in the Yugoslav conflicts today. There are two conflicts, essentially, one between Croatia and the Serbian populations of Croatia and Bosnia, and one between, on the one hand, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, and a part of the Croat army in place in Bosnia, and the army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, which includes 35,000 regulars, perhaps 40,000, and 35,000 irregular troops. And they’re roughly matched in size. The Croatian army has between 45,000 and 50,000 men and weapons inside Bosnia today. That’s something that’s not much talked about.
HC: These are regulars?
SG: Oh, those are regular members. Those are are brigades of the regular Croatian army.
HC: And they would have been part of an overall Yugoslav force that would have been there previously.
SG: Right. No, they weren’t there previously. These troops are…
HC: Because there had been a Yugoslav military presence and established order…
SG: That withdrew from Bosnia in the spring of 1992.
HC: To where?
SG: To Yugoslavia. Some of the people who might have been stationed in Bosnia in the Yugoslav army before that might have withdrawn to Croatia. Many Croatian officers, for instance, left the Yugoslav Army with the outbreak of the wars in Croatia in the spring of 1991 a year previously. They were then integrated into the Croatian army. Now it’s that army which actually invaded Bosnia last year.
HC: You had said earlier there were two sources.
SG: Two sources, primary external sources of arms today. One is Germany. Germany, for instance, is perhaps this week completing the delivery of two squadrons of MIG-21s to Croatia. It has provided military advisors and weapons of many kinds, more light weapons, I think. There are rumors about German leopard tanks being used in Bosnia. They haven’t been confirmed so far as I know, but there’s no doubt that the Germans had a very large hand in equipping and preparing the Croatian army in the end of 1990 in the beginning of 1991.
HC: And those links would have gone back through time?
SG: The political relationship. I would say that Mr. Kohl’s recognition of the seceding republics is without any doubt what precipitated the wars in Yugoslavia. It didn’t start them, but it turned them into major international conflicts. The other source of arms going into Bosnia today is a pipeline from the major Islamic countries, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are obviously competing against each other for influence in the Bosnian Muslim region.
HC: Is that reaching significant dimensions?
SG: It’s not insignificant. The number of volunteers, I don’t think, is really very large—maybe four or five hundred in Bosnia now—but it’s not insignificant and the arms are becoming significant and the military advisers—by the way, I forgot to mention that the Turks are very, very important in this great power game that’s going on.
HC: And there’s great feeling among a good deal of the Muslim world as they see, as we have seen, a great deal of…
SG: What seems to be the persecution of the Muslims?
HC: … what seems to be the persecution of the Muslims by an overwhelmingly powerful Serbian force that has been able to exert itself. Well, you’re aware of the Western press and perhaps you see things differently.
SG: Well it’s very difficult to be on the spot, and you have to look at all of this stuff very carefully. Let me remind you about the incubator incident in Kuwait. Let me remind you about the fact that there’s a vast official propaganda mechanism at work in every major Western country which emanates from the government, which organizes mass propaganda campaigns. Look, there’s a part of the directorate of operations of the Central Intelligence Agency that deals with these things and hundreds of people are employed. Similarly, in the United States Information Agency, similarly, in parts of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. So let’s start from the fact that official propaganda is a fact and that there are massive mechanisms for organizing that. The question at issue here is when we look at what we have seen in the media in the West during the last year and a half as far as you Yugoslavia, or whatever you wish to call the various parts of it, is concerned, are we dealing with honest, objective reporting, or are we dealing with, to very large extent officially inspired and indeed fabricated propaganda?
HC: All right. Officially inspired propaganda on the part of whom?
SG: Primarily on the part of Germany I would say. The Germans have a very great interest in this situation. Let me just sketch that very briefly. At the end of the 1980s, as you know, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe were really disintegrating, under various kinds of pressure.
HC: And in the centrifugal forces that are exerting themselves in Yugoslavia there is a relationship between that fact and the fact that there is difficulty emerging in Yugoslavia.
SG: Well, yes and no. Let’s just start with the fact that this was a fact at the end of the eighties, all right? Now, in 1989 Germany was reunified. That made Germany far and away the most powerful country in continental Europe. Now we also have to remember that Germany at the time—and this was particularly accentuated by the process of unification—had already experienced, as the United States and France and Britain and Italy and other Western countries have, long years of economic dislocation, slowing of economic growth, rising of unemployment. Germany today has more than ten and a half percent unemployment.
HC: They’re absorbing East Germans.
SG: Well, they had a high unemployment before they absorbed East Germany. Eastern Germany has created an absolute economic cataclysm for Western Europe because of the manner in which it sought to be absorbed.
HC: You don’t think they’ll get their act together?
SG: Absolutely out of the question. Well, it depends on what you mean. Economically there’s no way in which they can make it viable, but that’s an economic question we can look at. That’s another hour’s discussion. So, we have the disintegration of the Eastern European regimes. By the way, the death of Tito was in 1980, which is a not insignificant date and an important factor contributing to this situation. We have long years of economic stagnation and dislocation in the West. By the way, that was transmitted to Yugoslavia through the reductions in trade, reductions in investment, reductions in immigrant remittances etc., so that Yugoslavia through the 1970s was affected by the economic crisis in the West which deepened and deepened, you know, from 1972 to 1973. When West Germany absorbed Eastern Germany, that economic difficulty was really greatly enhanced. We then saw… actually it had begun well before that… a rise of a new kind of nationalism in Germany which hasn’t been seen there in a long time. And if you look at the German debates which have been going on for some time now, they are fairly hair-raising. German academics, historians etc. are really debating anew how bad Hitler was. That’s the tenor of the debate. There’s a very large revisionist debate going on in Germany which has been accompanied by and, I think, has facilitated the rise of nationalism. And we have also the rise of the right-wing extremist groups. By the way, I have to remind you…
HC: Skinheads and whatnot?
SG: Like Deutsche Alternativa—these groups which are essentially street combat groups, but they’re financed through the electoral system because when you create a political party in Germany, you get subsidies from the electoral system in order to field your candidates.
HC: You think these street ruffians and people doing fire bombings of immigrants and shouting “auslander aus” and so forth are supported by the government officially?
SG: That’s a complicated question.
HC: Is it disaffected individuals who are lashing out?
SG: No, it’s much more systematic than that. They’re supported by important figures in industry, and they are supported by people in the government in very discreet ways, obviously, but just to give you an example: There are two deputy directors of the Federal Ministry of Defense in the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Germany, an enormously important department in Germany, who are actually members of revanchist eastern parties, particularly Sudeten Deutsche parties, which…
In any case, these connections exist, but most important of all of these things is that Germany began consciously rebuilding its cultural and economic links into Central and Eastern Europe systematically, and South Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia has always been one of the areas which has been in, historically, German imperial sights. And with the reunification of Germany, and the rise of nationalism, and all that that’s been accompanied by, we have seen a definite clearly defined, traceable German effort to resume its dominance in Central Europe, particularly East Central Europe. That is, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs for instance maintain that the Germans played a critical role in precipitating the schism in Czechoslovakia, the separation of Slovakia. And there’s very good reason for believing that. I mean the Germans, don’t forget, had historic ties to the Slovaks. They did, in Slovakia during the Second World War, very much what they did in the independent Croatian state. It wasn’t quite as horrible, but there were Slovak fascists. The Germans supported them. There was a Nazi puppet state in Slovakia etc. What I’m saying is that a lot of the of the ugliness that we saw in the 1930s and the 1920s in Western Europe and in Germany, in particular, really is resuming.
HC: That’s very, very worrying.
SG: But it is an important element here in understanding what’s happened in Yugoslavia because the Germans really helped to precipitate that. They helped to precipitate the war between Croatia and Yugoslavia, the secession of Croatia, and they have armed, assisted, advised etc., guided the new version of the independent Croatian state under Mr. Tudjman.
HC: And do you think that the hand of Germany… I wonder if you could put this in perspective for us. This last year or so, the Serbian activity was a reaction to that?
SG: OK. Serbia. Let’s go over…
HC: We’ve had people like George Shultz and ex-president Reagan—all sorts of people at the very highest authority in this country condemn what we see on television. People are talking now about the Bosnians who have suffered. Today as you and I talk on February 24, they’re airlifting and air dropping supplies into Bosnia, for the suffering Bosnian people. And in the minds of the American people, the Serbian forces have been a ruthless and aggressive force that ought to be confronted. They are even talking about the use of air power against Belgrade.
SG: There’s no doubt that we are…
HC: And what is the reality, as far as you see, of all of these which you obviously can see, which is the perception that is felt by many of the leadership and much of the general society in this country. And we feel frustrated that we’re not able to go in because our military advisors tell us we’ll get ourselves into another Vietnam quagmire and we mustn’t enter militarily. And do you think we might? And what do you think about some of these questions that are so much in the in the thinking of the American people now?
SG: I think it’s important…
HC: Put some of that in perspective for us.
SG: I think it’s important to come to the situation today, to the Vance Owen plan (Mach II), the version generated by the Clinton administration, the new proposals to go into Bosnia, the position of the United States military. But the background… let’s just say something about that. There is a conflict in Bosnia, a major conflict in Bosnia, just as there is in Croatia between Serbs and Croatians. Both of those conflicts were precipitated by a very simple fact: the secession of these states from Yugoslavia without attention to regulating the status of Serbs in Croatia and in Bosnia. This is a very serious question because of the historical background which I mentioned—the independent Croatian state and the genocide conducted against various populations, the Serbs in particular between 1941 and 1945. At the time that Croatia declared its independence in June of 1991, there were 750,000 Serbs living in parts of the Krajina, as they’re called, which by the way is the geopolitical heart of Croatia. There were 1,300,000 or 1,400,000 Serbs living in Bosnia at the time that Bosnian independence was declared in April of last year. These secessions took place in a manner which raised the historic fears, historically justified fears, of the Serbian populations of these areas that they would be the target of genocidal persecutions again. Why? When Mr. Tudjman became the president of Croatia and declared its independence, he passed legislation which purged Serbs from government service, changed property rights of Serbs living in Croatia, mandated the purge of Serbs from the universities, the media etc. in the name of democratization, but nonetheless. And he began this, and in addition right-wing extremists in Croatia carried out military attacks on Serbian communities. And the Serbs resisted. That’s how the war in Croatia began. That’s why the Yugoslav army intervened in Croatia. Now again, remember that the Muslims in Bosnia sought to create, stated so, still do—it’s a very important issue which is denied in this country—a fundamentalist Islamic state in the middle of Europe, and that also ignored the historic rights of Serbs to be considered an equivalent nationality as they had been before Croatian secession in Croatia, with equal rights to other members of the population, and as they saw it, this exposed them once again to the threat of genocidal persecution.
HC: Where would this Muslim oriented entity be?
SG: In Bosnia.
HC: In the whole of Bosnia?
SG: Yes, the secession of Bosnia took place when the Muslim population of Bosnia was 44% of the total and a minority. By the way, that’s against the constitution of the Bosnian Republic itself—secession without the consensus of the three principal nationality groups is against the Bosnian Republic’s own constitution in 1992. So all of these things that were done were totally illegal. The illegalities in themselves frightened the Serbs. The determination of the Croatians to discriminate against and to leave the Serb populations out of equivalent consideration constitutionally, as happened in Bosnia, really began to raise all these old fears. And the Serbs reacted. The Serbs reacted by saying, “OK, we will ourselves choose to secede as a Serbian nationality in Bosnia, in Croatia, from these independent republics and become members of Yugoslavia and accede to membership of Yugoslavia.” That’s really what they would like to see. This whole thing, by the way, could be settled very simply.
HC: How?
SG: By according to the Serbian populations of these republics the same rights and privileges, the same property rights etc. as belong, according to their constitutions, to all other citizens. What has happened with the Croatian and the Bosnian secessions is that mono-ethnicity has been declared as the only right and proper basis for self-determination, but this is complete balderdash. Its historical nonsense. It’s legal nonsense, and frankly it’s only because it serves the strategic interests of outside powers, powers not part of that region, that this has been tolerated, and that around this a whole series of myths have been created which create the impression which you were describing a few minutes ago.
HC: And which is a very widespread one here. It makes one think a little bit of Cyprus where the Turks and the Greeks had fought so vociferously and then they divided the island into two groups.
SG: It doesn’t make any sense economically.
HC: It doesn’t make any sense economically, but it [division of Cyprus] did make sense because they were killing each other and fighting over these ancient animosities, and there are some attempts now to try and divide the people in the area of Yugoslavia into groups because there’s a sense that these groups simply cannot get along together…
SG: Well, let me raise the further irony.
HC: … unless there’s this overpowering force of unity, a Tito or something to hold them together.
SG: Well, I think that’s a false perception. There has been a very great effort to work at the stimulation of nationalist tendencies in order to fragment Yugoslav…
HC: Nationalist tendencies in this case being Yugoslav?
SG: No. Croatian, Slovenian secessionism, Bosnian secessionism, Muslim fundamentalism. All of these, including Albanian secessionism, all of these nationalities have been appealed to, to some extent—financed, cosseted, assisted, directed by outside powers—in order to bring about the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
HC: Well, we have it not only in Yugoslavia. We have it in all kinds of places in the world. You mentioned Czechoslovakia. We have Tajikistan. We have it in Kurdistan and all sorts of entities, and ethnic entities on the subcontinent of India. We have it in Africa. We have it all over the place—these ethnic groups which are asserting themselves as nations which had previously been part of a nation. There was unity, but there seems to be ethnicity, and I’m not sure exactly what we mean by that, this is a whole other program, and this is becoming the basis of political sovereignty in the minds of many.
SG: Well, you see the problem is…
HC: We see this centrifugal force, which is exerting itself on a worldwide scale, and one wonders how many nation states—we don’t say ethnic states—but the ethnicity seems to become the basis of political sovereignty in the modern world.
SG: This is impossible.
HC: It becomes economically unworkable, but I just wonder if…
SG: Apart from the economics…
HC: … it’s not just in Yugoslavia that it’s exerting itself.
SG: I understand that, but let’s look at the example of Yugoslavia. Apart from the economics, obviously the secessions have shattered Yugoslavian infrastructure totally, destroyed the linkages between industries across markets etc. It’s an economic catastrophe for the secessionists. But then there is a further paradox, a very, very bitter irony, actually, which, I would say, for simple geostrategic convenience, various powers, including the United States and Germany in particular… by the way resisted for a very long time by the Netherlands and France and Great Britain behind the scenes. They fought bitterly to prevent Germany from doing what it did inside the European community. While these powers decry the impossibility of holding a nation of many ethnicities like Yugoslavia together, what they are doing is creating mini-republics with the same ethnic contradictions and puzzles. Bosnia is not a state with an 80 percent or 85 or 90 percent Muslim population. There is only 44 percent.
HC: This is going to compound the problem.
SG: Right. So the problem here is… and the same is true of Croatia. It has an enormous Serbian population. There is no way in the world that you can draw a map of Yugoslavia which will contain a really large majority of any individual ethnic group. It’s just not possible.
HC: We only have about two minutes left. What about the Vance Owen plan? Could you just sum it up now? What’s going to happen there?
SG: Well, it’s clear that there’s a strong desire on the part of some US politicians to involve the United States in this war, or at the very least to prolong it. Prolonging this war serves a very important strategic American purpose which is it’s totally disrupting the European continent at a critical moment when it’s trying to move towards political integration. That’s a very important consequence. Germany, Italy and other European countries have suffered tremendously from sanctions [against what remains of Yugoslavia], but there’s a very great danger here that the so-called minor military assistance to these so-called humanitarian efforts can explode into a major conflict, and the Yugoslavs are now telling the United States behind the scenes that they really are risking a major conflagration which could place them in the same situation that the Germans found themselves in when they tried to occupy the country in the Second World War.
HC: Yes, that’s why there’s so much concern. We could talk for hours. Thank you. Sean Gervasi has filled us in very, very admirably.
Note: The transcript has been altered here to reflect what must have been the intended meaning. In the interview, Professor Gervasi said, “… Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the first and the third being traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Catholic, the latter being much closer to Russia and Orthodox.” It is the Serbs who have Orthodox heritage, and the Croats and Slovenes who have Catholic heritage. Professor Gervasi probably meant to say, “… Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, the second and the third being traditionally under the influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Catholic, the former being much closer to Russia and Orthodox.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
All images in this article are from Lit by Imagination
“To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing
This November 22nd marked fifty-five years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Perhaps no other major incident in U.S. history has generated more uncertainty and skepticism towards its official account than his Dallas killing in 1963. A 2013 Gallup poll showed that a clear majority of Americans still doubt the Warren Commission’s determination that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as the accused sniper, with many suspecting that others in government and organized crime were involved in a secret plot to kill the president. Although its etymological origins can be traced back further, as a cultural phenomenon the notion of belief in so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ is widely attributed to a surge in distrust of government and media institutions that followed JFK’s murder. Perhaps its only rival would be September 11th, which surveys have similarly indicated a trend of doubt towards the 9/11 Commission Report’s version of events leading up to the attacks in 2001. In other words, most people believe in a major conspiracy theory — yet they generally remain a mark of disgrace and public ridicule.
At no point in time have conspiracy theories been as stigmatized as in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election. Incidentally, what is classified as such is no longer consigned to the societal fringe or ever been more popular. It is alleged that the spreading of “fake news” on social media, featuring debunked viral conspiracies like Pizzagate, was what tipped the voting scales in Donald Trump’s favor. Or was it the very real conspiracy revealed in leaked emails published by WikiLeaks that the Democratic National Committee rigged the party primary for Hillary Clinton? We’re supposed to consider that fake news too, apparently. Regardless, what is consistently never addressed is the reasons why people turn to unofficial narratives because it would require the media to address its own negligence to hold those in power to account.
An examination of the media‘s systemic failure would draw attention to its actual role in society as a tool of mass persuasion on behalf of the ruling elite. Perhaps if the official doctrines of the over-staged Warren and 9/11 Commission Reports were not treated as articles of faith, people wouldn’t be suspicious of a rogue shadow government hidden behind such obvious dog-and-pony shows. If there is no incriminating evidence in the JFK files, why on earth is the public forbidden to see them half a century later? Instead, it is the working class who are demonized for expressing the human need to grasp the social totality denied by a corporate-controlled media that performs the opposite of its expected function. They are left with no choice but to fill in the enormous blanks left gaping by a press in service of the status quo and a government with no transparency. It is always the people who are blamed for the media’s failure to do its job.
Screengrab from The Guardian
The same can be said across the pond or for the West in general. Look no further than a recent article in British newspaper The Guardian alleging that “60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories.” Its definition of ‘conspiracy’ is so broad that it doesn’t simply refer to beliefs about UFOs or the moon landing, but a general distrust of institutions, official narratives and authority figures in any form. The article then conflates Brexit voters who hold anti-immigrant views with anyone polled who believes that “the world is run by a secret global cabal of people who control events together”, and then almost comically states “the most widespread conspiracy belief in the UK, shared by 44% of people, was that ‘even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway.’” That is to say, The Guardian regards a view generally held by most rational people with an accurate understanding of life under capitalism as a ‘conspiracy’ belief equivalent to racism.The article even concludes that “distrust of company bosses”, a feeling unsurprisingly held by three-fourths of those surveyed, falls under the label of a conspiracy view. Yes, clearly anyone who doesn’t love their oppressors is in equal standing with bigots who want to leave the EU. The world’s self declared ‘leading liberal voice’ is a guardian of power, indeed.
The term ‘conspiracy theory’ itself is a weapon. Its use is so ubiquitous that it automatically implies unconvincing improbability and worthiness of dismissal. How and when did it come to be so widely dispersed in the cultural lexicon? In the 1970s, the CIA had been the subject of numerous scandals with disclosures about its activities ranging from meddling in the affairs of sovereign countries to administering mind-control experiments on citizens in MK-ULTRA. The revelations about its clandestine influence on the press was yet another divulgence. It turns out that a likely possibility for the genesis of the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ and its far-reaching dissemination was revealed in an important 1976 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The New York Times in CIA Document 1035–960. The dispatch showed that by the late 1960s, the spy agency was so worried about pervasive skepticism toward the Warren Commission ruling that it issued a bulletin to its elite liaisons in the press to quell subversion. Entitled “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report”, the communique encouraged the fourth estate to discredit doubters by spreading propaganda. It specifically employed the term while stressing the need to rein in dissenting opinion among journalists and the public:
“Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.”
Whether or not the specific document’s usage of the label is directly attributable to its subsequent omnipresence in the cultural vocabulary is beside the point. It was yet another example of the CIA’s efforts to engineer public opinion with media bias and disinformation, ordering its recruits to “employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.” Only on occasion does an event like the Kennedy assassination occur where the deep state’s savage nature is glimpsed by the public at large, if only for a brief moment. Such instances require a counterintelligence response if the majority is to stay plugged into the matrix.
The unpleasant truth is that the 35th U.S. President became so despised by the most right-wing and militarist elements in the intelligence apparatus — provoked by his perceived treachery in diplomacy toward Cuba and placation of the Soviet Union following the foreign policy disasters of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs and apparent desire to deescalate the war in Vietnam — that they most likely removed him in a coup. The extent to which Kennedy was sincere in those efforts is another matter, although it was confirmed in declassified documents last year that he had rejected the proposed Operation Northwoods which would have carried out ‘false flag’ bombings in Miami to be blamed on Fidel Castro which shockingly made it all the way up the chain of command past the Joint Chiefs of Staff for approval. Why is it outlandish for people to suspect they could have done something similar on 9/11?
For Americans to learn the ugly facts behind JFK’s murder, plausibly located in the more than 15,000 documents still concealed from public view, would destroy the foundations of the national security state and the establishment it safeguards. It is on this basis that for more than half a century, corporate-owned media has stifled the multitude of admissions about the assassination brought to light, even when they’ve come from Hollywood movies. What we are witnessing today in the Russiagate fiasco with the “fake news” PSY-OP is an updated version of the CIA’s enlistment of the media following the JFK assassination to orchestrate public opinion which made the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ a universal pejorative.
Coincidentally, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Breuer satellite location in New York is the exhibition Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy. The show covers more than fifty-years of artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, collage, video and installations addressing a variety of themes ranging from secret torture at CIA black-sites to COINTELPRO to Henry Kissinger’s role in ‘the first 9/11’, the September 1973 coup in Chile which ousted Salvador Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet and Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys. There are many provocative pieces in the show, such as a Calder-like sculpture of Iraqi oil fields exploring imperialism to an abstract painting suggesting that the WTC towers could have been destroyed by controlled demolition using planted super-thermite explosives.
The timing of such an exposition immediately prompts curiosity. One would assume that the Met was capitalizing on the unprecedented popularity of conspiracies with the “fake news” phenomenon surrounding the Trump presidency, but apparently the lead curator conceived of the show concept a decade prior. Nevertheless, for one of the biggest and wealthiest museums in the world founded by robber barons to permit such a showcase still required a selling point which came in the form of its marketability to satisfy the public’s palate for kitsch. Leaving that aside, however, the content of the exhibit is admittedly of bona fide quality, featuring everything from Black Panther graphic designer Emory Douglas to the late conceptual artist Mike Kelley.
The Kennedy assassination is featured heavily as a spectral motif and the first pieces visitors encounter are two striking neon-colored paintings of Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby, by New York-based artist Wayne Gonzales which sets an ominous tone. Although the individual works of the inspired show are of high caliber, its main shortcoming is the sensationalized presentation. Despite seemingly authentic intentions, it inevitably institutionalizes the idea that when two-thirds of Americans reject the official story of a Kennedy assassination or 9/11, it is ultimately still just a ‘conspiracy.’ Although the exhibit itself is not as culpable as the surrounding cultural context in which it has appeared, it ultimately reifies that what is construed as hypothetical and imaginary conjecture (in the case of the JFK assassination a legitimate consensus) only merits attention as something tacky or niche to be appreciated ironically.
This is particularly advantageous to the establishment at the present moment which is relentlessly selling the naïve idea that we are now living in a “post-truth” era, as if prior to the Trump administration we were in a glory age of ‘truth.’ In order for art to portray such subject matter and be given a platform, it cannot avoid being allocated as novelty of unrefined taste by such a powerful institution. A podcast interview with the gallery curators revealed that one of the artists featured in the show, Hans Haacke, had to earn their trust as he was hesitant to participate in the show because he didn’t wish his work “to be associated with fiction.” Perhaps for related reasons, the curators refreshingly chose to omit the term ‘theory’ from the title while providing a thorough investigation of such themes by artists which reveal what they describe as “conspiracies that turned out not be theories at all, but truths.”
While everyone is aware of the intimate relationship between the art world and the ultra-wealthy benefactors of its museums, less familiar is its history with the CIA. As part of its psychological warfare during the Cold War, the agency spent millions promoting Modern Art , particularly the Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, a fact only briefly mentioned by the gallery text of the exhibit. The CIA saw the aesthetic individualism and free form style of Abstract Expressionism as emblematic of Western values of ‘freedom of expression’ in antithesis to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. The CIA provided covert financial support through the establishment of phony foundations with innocuous names that secretly subsidized exhibitions. The primary front organization was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose leading operative was CIA officer Thomas Braden. Braden was even selected as the executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York by Nelson Rockefeller as he oversaw the CIA’s hush-hush cultural activities in the CCF. He would later go on to become a columnist and co-host of CNN’s Crossfire.
Image on the right: Tom Braden, CIA spy and MoMA executive secretary.
The CIA did not just work stringently to relegate leeriness of its activities under a catch-all misnomer at the low brow level. The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s ideological weaponry even extended to the level of high intellectual theory for its gatekeeping. The CCF and other front groups like the Farfield Foundation secretly sponsored literary magazines such as Commentary and The Paris Review as an effort to redirect the sympathies of the non-communist left in the West away from the Soviet Union toward liberal democracy. Another literary publication that received undercover sponsoring from the CCF was the British-based Encounter magazine, founded by the essayist and intellectual Irving Kristol who later became the “godfather of neo-conservatism” and real life father of ultra-hawk pundit Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard. During the 1930s, as a college student Irving Kristol was a member of the New York Intellectuals, a group of Jewish literary critics and writers who mostly were Trotskyists that embraced left-wing politics but were staunchly opposed to the Soviet Union under Stalin. These included prominent figures such as Isaiah Berlin, Irving Howe and Hannah Arendt who overtime moved to the center and became liberals, or in the case of Kristol eventually further to arch-conservatism.
The intellectual voyage from Trotskyism to neoconservatism was a common thread throughout the 20th century, from David Horowitz to the late Christopher Hitchens. Irving Kristol and his intellectual circle were funded by the CIA in order to influence the political leanings of their cohorts in the European left to move toward liberal democracy and away from communism which fractured the left as a whole. To great effect, this split coalitions between social democratic and communist parties across Europe. If European leftists weren’t swayed by the CIA-sponsored intelligentsia, they were likely discouraged from holding any remaining Soviet sympathies by the ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks carried out during Operation Gladio in NATO-member countries by recruited fascist paramilitaries which were falsely blamed on communist organizations to tarnish their reputations.
Along with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the consequences of the CIA’s clandestine activities from the arts to the intelligentsia can be seen in the dominant pseudo-left of today which has further degenerated into excessive preoccupation with toothless reformism and fetishization of gender and race-based identity politics. If the current generation of resolute Marxists are looking to place blame for the dominance of incrementalist politics emphasizing gradual change through existing institutions that has infected the entire left, they shouldn’t be shocked to learn much of it lands on the world’s most powerful spy agency during the Cold War. The CIA wasn’t just in the business of overthrowing democratic leaders of third world nations for Western business interests but equally engaged in cloak-and-dagger cultural operations which successfully altered the focus of leftist politics away from transformative anti-capitalist positions toward centrist liberal stances. To this day, the reverberations of these PSY-OPs can be felt in the contemporary left’s neglect and obfuscation of issues like imperialism and the class struggle. Without knowing this history, one can only have a vague understanding of how the left came to be what it is at present. The military-intelligence complex’s manipulation of the art world is incontrovertible fact, not a fanciful story, and it was just one element of a larger cultural campaign to splinter the Western left.
As the exhibit aptly points out, often what are designated as conspiracy theories in bygone times become indisputable facts years later. If there is now an abundant market for misinformation online exploiting the appetite of a public disillusioned by establishment media in desperate search of an alternative, the presstitutes only have themselves to blame. Claims on the right-wing margins about school shootings being hoaxes will never even begin to approach the irreparable damage done by every major news outlet in the country selling the lies of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction to go to war in Iraq, not just to the millions of human lives lost but the trust of the masses in the mass media orthodoxy. The same can be said about their unwillingness to truly investigate the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Following the 2016 election, the censorship campaign by social network giants against alternative media under the banner of stopping the spread of “fake news” can be seen as confirmation of the effectiveness of real independent journalism and it’s growing audience. Otherwise, it would not provoke such suppression. This development can either disenchant those hungry for the truth or be interpreted as a positive sign for the future, that people are starting to resist drinking the kool-aid— for now let’s choose the latter.
Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy is on view at the Met Breuer until January 6th, 2019.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in publications such as The Greanville Post, Global Research, OffGuardian, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Signs of the Times, and more. Read him on Medium. Max may be reached at [email protected]
“They are fleeing a crisis. They are fleeing catastrophe. One in which not only is it almost impossible for people to economically survive, it’s increasingly difficult to just physically survive and not be subject to some kind of violence….The root of the problem is the crisis in Honduras, and Canada has played a central role in supporting the military government in Honduras.” – Tyler Shipley, from this week’s interview
Thousands have been fleeing high levels of violence in the Central American country which has persisted since the 2009 coup d’etat of then President Manuel Zelaya. Grinding poverty, intimidation, corruption, narco-trafficking and political violence have been plaguing communities in Honduras. The country of nine and a quarter million people is now bleeding waves of refugees as their only recourse to a catastrophe.
While there has been plenty of debate about the appropriate response to the migrant caravan, and brought on in part by President Trump’s fear-mongering, there has been relatively little attention to the role played by the United States and Canada in generating the social crisis that led to the exodus. Both those countries played a role in enabling and legitimizing the overthrow of a democratically elected government, and its replacement with a military dictatorship, all in the name of keeping Honduras profitable for foreign business interests. [1][2]
On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we take a closer look at some of the dynamics influencing and impacting the Central American migrants, what the future may hold, and how the situation may be remediated.
In the first half hour, guest Tyler Shipley, author of Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras, outlines the ways in which Canada and Canadian business interests has supported and enabled the very violent living conditions in Honduras from which migrants are fleeing.
In our second half hour, independent writer and photojournalist José Luis Granados Ceja reports on his observations of the migrant from his time with them in late October. He describes the narco-trafficking and other dangers the migrants have confronted during their 4000 kilometre journey, his thoughts about the November 25th attack by US border agents, and what he anticipates as a leftist politician, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, assumes the presidency of Mexico on December 1st.
(transcript provided below.)
Tyler Shipley is professor of culture, society, and commerce at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. He is also an associate fellow with the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC). His latest book, Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras (2017) is available from the publisher Between the Lines.
José Luis Granados Ceja, is an independent writer and photojournalist based in Mexico City. He previously worked as a staff writer for Telesur and has contributed to the Two Row Times among other outlets. He has also worked in radio as a host and producer, and currently works on a freelance basis.
Transcript – Interview with José Luis Granados Ceja, November 29, 2018
Part One
Global Research: José Luis Granados Ceja is an independent writer and photojournalist based in Mexico City. He previously worked as a staff writer for Telesur and has contributed to the Two Row Times among other outlets. He has also worked in radio and as a host and producer and currently works on a freelance basis. José escorted the caravan from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the city of Tapachula in Chiapas and had a chance to speak with several of the participants in the migrant caravan. It’s great to have you on the program José thanks for making the time to speak with us.
José Luis Granados Ceja: I’m very happy to be here.
GR: Could you talk, first of all, about the encounter at the Mexico Guatemala border at the Ciudad Hidalgo port of entry, the border crossing there? What were the challenges facing the caravan at that point?
JLGC: Yeah. The group that I was able to meet with was actually amongst the first wave of migrants coming from Central America into Mexico in order to continue the journey north to where many intend to go, which is the United States. And, well, this is a difficult journey all along the way. It starts out in, you know, most people are coming from Honduras but there were also people from El Salvador and Nicaragua and Guatemala, and it’s a journey that is actually mostly done on foot. Occasionally people do give them rides, or are able to secure some transportation, but for the most part it’s on foot in very hot weather, and with very little resources to speak of. And so what you’re seeing is an exodus of people who are fleeing a very difficult situation.
I’m going to mostly talk about Honduras because the vast majority of people are coming from Honduras. It’s a country that is experiencing a lot of political and economic turmoil, and in order to kind of put things into context, in 2009 there was a coup d’etat in Honduras which ousted a left reformer by the name of Manuel Zelaya, and since then, there has been effectively a dictatorship, there have been elections but they’ve been rather dubious.
The last one in particular was very questionable, and so the regime in charge in Honduras that is ruling for a very small elite, to the detriment of most people. And so that’s why people are choosing to flee Honduras and endure this journey.
In terms of the actual difficulties of the journey, is that, while apart from the difficulty of having to do such a long trip on foot, is also that during those days there was still not a lot of direction coming from the Mexican government. We were still under the government of President Pena Nieto from the PRI party. It seemed like there was a lot of confused signals.
What ultimately, what ended happening was that when they got to the border, they were met by a closed gate, and were then, when they tried to cross the first gate from Guatemala and then reach the second gate which is on the actual Mexican side of the border, they were met with repression, with teargas, and so, once that settled down, the border was effectively closed to them, most people decided to cross on very makeshift rafts, and where they were then they gathered in Ciudad Hidalgo where they were received by civil society organizations.
You know, I spoke with some people who were attending to the migrants there, and they talked about the exhaustion that many were suffering, you know from the heat, some people had received some confusion as a result of the repression, just to kind of give you an idea.
And so that was just the beginning, and so they still had all of Mexico left to cross which again is a very difficult and a very dangerous Journey. Mexico has a problem with security, and there are areas where the State is not very present, and in those areas it’s often here and you do hear cases of migrants being forcibly disappeared by organized crime. Then all of that to get to Tijuana which I think we can get to in a minute.
GR:Well could you then first of all talk about some of the stories that you heard from the migrants? Are there are a couple of illustrative stories that you can share that will help them understand what these people are going through on their 4000-kilometre journey?
JLGC:Yeah, there’s a couple ones that I think really kind of paint a clear picture. One, I remember speaking to a young man, when we were talking about this exodus, and he out it very plainly, he’s like “we’re not migrating, we’re fleeing.” They are running for their lives. Another young man that I spoke to lifted up his shirt and he showed me the very still very visible scars on his body. They were a result of some thieves who were trying to take his bicycle and shot him 10 times. He barely survived that episode.
It gives you an idea of the level of violence that crime employs in Central America. That use, you know, for – to steal something, that, you know, how much value can a bicycle really have? So it gives you an idea just how bad things are, and migrants told me that they feel very hopeless because, so on the one hand they have organized crime groups asking ..through extortion basically, to contribute fees for protection, and on the other side they have police who are similarly squeezing them for bribes. And so even if let’s say someone is able to put together a business, they quickly find out that everything that they are making goes to either organized crime or to corruption. And so, it’s very difficult for people to feel like there’s an exit.
One final anecdote that I wanted to share, that I think also helps people understand the desperation, is that, so we have a change of government happening this Saturday December 1st, and the President-Elect, Andres Manuel López Obrador, said that he was interested in offering work visas for people from Central America who were fleeing violence so that they could find asylum here inside of Mexico.
And I asked a woman, a mother of three, why she decided to join this caravan and not wait, because at that point it was only a couple of months before there would be changes in government, perhaps a government that maybe would be more friendly towards the needs of migrants, and without a moment’s hesitation, she said immediately, “I can’t wait because my babies will die of hunger.” So that’s how desperate people are feeling, and that I think helps understand.
The other part being that they feel that there isn’t a political solution to their problem either. Last year there was election, the one-year anniversary of those contested elections just passed this week in Honduras and people talked about how they took to the streets to protest, that they tried to do things the right way, quote unquote, of agitating, of protesting, of even going out and voting and pursuing a change of government through the democratic institutions of their country, and that too was denied to them, so all of that combined I think is also really why we’re seeing the numbers are people fleeing Central America.
GR: And, of course, one aspect is the fact that there is safety in numbers, relative safety in numbers. These people are facing major threats you just hinted at the disappearances and the organized crime and the cartels and so on. Could you elaborate a little more on the, some of those threats that you’re familiar with?
JLGC: Yeah, most of the people that I spoke to actually said that they had every intention of leaving their country and heading towards the United States. It was when they heard about this caravan that they decided to join and leave in that moment. And that’s precisely it, because there is safety in numbers. And it’s also a more feasible way of actually doing it.
So when you travel alone, generally you do it through the help of what we call coyotajes and for lack of a precise translation, basically human smugglers. And they charge upwards of $7,000 US. That is an amount of money that most people from Central America will never be able to actually save up. It’s an absurd amount of money. I mean it’s a lot of money to people who earn dollars, so it makes it very difficult for them to make it, and without the help of coyotajes you run the risk of taking the wrong route, of being exposed to organized crime groups, of perhaps trying to cross the desert from Mexico into the United States which is also a very dangerous thing.
So, there is. There’s strength in numbers when you move together, and it also makes, sends a political message. You know, it’s easy to ignore groups of a couple dozen, or a handful of people, but when thousands of people are moving together, well then, the State institutions inside of Mexico, civil society organizations, the world, I guess, ends up paying more attention to their situation. I think that’s also important because, you know, what it means to mobilization of resources and attention, but unfortunately in some cases a negative attention as we’ve seen as well in the United States.
GR: Could you speak to… You also mention the extreme heat that people had to cope with. What kinds of health emergencies is the caravan confronting, and how are they – are people coping with these health emergencies?
JLGC:It’s hard for me to describe just how difficult it is. I’ve merely accompanied them from the border to the city Tapachula, and walking, it’s about 4 hours. But by the second hour, exhaustion was really setting in, I was pouring water on my head just to stave off heat stroke, and most people, because they’re people of modest means, are travelling with the clothes on the back and the shoes that they happen to have at that moment. Some people were walking in sandals or in plastic shoes, and so you wuold see people move off to the side of the road and try to attend to the blisters on their feet, or…
And also, I think one of the things that was really emotional to see was, at the very beginning of the walk, so they start early try to take advantage of the cooler air in the morning, is that the children are quite happy and they’re playing and they’re running around with other kids, but even the first hour, definitely by the second and then onwards, you can tell that they are becoming very exhausted, and it’s really taking a toll on them.
And there’s been some misconception saying that it’s mostly young men…there are a lot of families that are travelling with very young children. There’s even been babies that have been born along the journey. And there isn’t that much services available for them.
You know…groups like The Red Cross, that I witnessed being on site, are there, they hand out water, and they provide kind of first aid, but for the more complicated situations, or health situations that arise, there isn’t that much support for them. Fortunately, when they arrived in Mexico City, Mexico City is obviously wealthier and has more resources at its disposal, they set up kind of like a tent city inside an old sports complex, and there they were able to receive medical attention, doctors were able to be on hand and try to address some of the issues that have been developing along the way.
GR: I noticed that there was in Mexico City, yeah, you mentioned the people who had, they managed to find some safe haven in Mexico City. I wonder if, briefly, you might be familiar with, it was reported earlier this month about a hundred of the migrants had been kidnapped in Pueblo State on their way to Veracruz, could you provide our listeners with some details about that, how that situation arose and how it became resolved?
JLGC: So when they got to the state of Veracruz, they actually were in negotiations with the local state government there in order to get some transportation on buses from the state of Veracruz to Mexico City. Ultimately that kind of support didn’t come through, and people wanted to continue on their journey. And so they started walking. And often when they’re walking, there are good Samaritans who stop and offer to give them rides, but it seems like what happened in this instance is that someone affiliated with an organized crime group offered them transportation but was actually interested in forcibly disappearing them.
It’s a phenomenon that is actually unfortunately all too common for the people who are travelling from Central America through Mexico, where they’re scooped up, they’re used effectively as slave labour in order to, for the means for the ends of the organized crime groups. It’s been difficult to ascertain exactly what happened with this group in particular because, you know, they didn’t have cell phones, if they did, they were likely seized by those that kidnapped them.
And it’s been difficult to also even know the names of the people who are missing, right? Because this is all in many ways an improvised affair, and so there isn’t like a list of people who are travelling as part of the caravan, it’s difficult to know. So who might have been disappeared, the family members are back in Central America, it’s difficult for them to try to make a petition to the State to try to figure out what happened to their relatives. And so, it’s a consequence of the lack of resources, unfortunately.
Although there has been tremendous help that’s been given to them by Mexican civil society, I think in many ways, the lack of transportation that had been promised to them led to this situation. And that’s why you’ve seen so many of the migrant groups advocating for more assistance from the Mexican federal government for their journey, just for questions like that, like safety, maybe having some police accompanying them as much as possible.
GR: Okay so you just mentioned that there was, there has been support from the Mexican population. Unfortunately, some of it is sort of an exploitative kind of help. What can you tell us about the overall balance of both support and opposition towards the migrants?
JLGC: Yeah it’s difficult for me to say with any kind of certainty exactly, you know, what percentage. I haven’t seen any kind of opinion surveys done on that. I will say that when we were walking from the border to Tapachula, it was really impressive to see that people would literally come rushing, running out of their homes in order to offer people, you know, the food that they had in their pantry or whatever water bottles they happened to have in their home. I remember even seeing some people who are apologizing for not having more to offer.
And, you know, the state of Chiapas is also the poorest state in the Mexican Federation, so people who have very little are really interested in giving the little that they have in order to support because, I think as a country, we’re a country that is also, a country that has a lot of people who leave for economic and security reasons. So I think there is a lot of sympathy, for the most part, from Mexican society, for those who are enduring this journey. They know that… they likely have relatives who’ve also had to go to the other side as we say here in Mexico.
But I think it’s also important to say that there is racism and xenophobia inside Mexico. We’ve seen displays of that, especially in Tijuana recently with, there was a couple of weeks ago a protest against the migrant caravan, and we saw the mayor of Tijuana make some very troubling statements against the presence of the migrants in that city. I think in some ways, it’s been exaggerated, I don’t mean to play it down, I don’t want to deny that racism and xenophobia exist inside Mexico and that needs to be confronted, but that rally for example, at some point it seems that there are more reporters than there were people demonstrating.
Ultimately, it was less than 500 people, but none the less they are very vocal, and if you look on social media there’s also a lot of statements coming from people opposed to the caravan. So there is a mix, but, for the most part, I think even you see groups that have been supporting the migrants. This is a new thing, migrants have been travelling through Mexico to reach the United States for decades and so there’s a lot of organizations that have been working with migrants providing shelter along the way, resources and support.
Intermission
Part Two
GR:We’re speaking with José Luis Granados Ceja, independent writer and photojournalist based in Mexico City. He’s been following the migrant caravan. José, I wanted you to maybe give us, maybe from your perspective, given what you know about the physical and mental health and trials of the migrant caravan, what’s been going through your mind, having heard about the US border agents firing tear gas at the migrants, in Tijuana near the San Ysidro border crossing? And the other challenges like the protest you just mentioned.
JLGC:Yeah, you know seeking asylum, as I mentioned at the beginning people are fleeing, they’re not exaggerated. I think some people try to paint a picture that the migrants are economic migrants, they’re just seeking a better life. But they really are fleeing. There are no jobs, there’s very little hope of change in their countries of origin, and seeking asylum is something that is recognized by both domestic and international law throughout North America – we’re talking Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
And so they have a right to seek safety. And it’s really disappointing that people who are fleeing, people who are fleeing danger, are then met with repression. Right? Instead, I would hope that people, that governments, that officials would receive them with open arms, with some compassion, understanding that nobody decides to take this long journey without feeling like they have probably no other choice.
And so when you sees scenes like we saw with the tear gas, and then the photos – worse still I think, in some ways, the attempt to justify that, and I don’t think anything can justify that. And also, kind of going to the root of the problem, that desperation that you see people crossing irregularly these border points, is produced by the policies of, in this case the United States government, which actually is deliberately trying to slow the process. So in order to make that asylum claim, you actually have to set foot inside the United States and present yourself to an official and make the asylum, and then you have a hearing, and well, etc etc.
So what the US actually has been doing as a means of dissuading people from coming, is making that wait-list extremely long. So even before the caravan got there we were talking about thousands of people who were waiting on the Mexican side of the border in order to be able to set foot, because they only let in about 40 to 50 people in the morning and then another 40 to 50 in the evening. So we’re talking about a very small number of people being processed on a daily basis. And everybody else having to wait. And so that’s that desperation of being in makeshift camps without proper sanitation, without proper access to food and water, you know it makes it so that people feel very frustrated at their circumstance, you know? If the policies were different, that they actually instead of sending troops and barbed wire they sent officials who were able to process things, their claims faster than you wouldn’t see these kinds of clashes happening on the border.
GR: Now, this weekend, Saturday December 1st, a new leftist president, Andres Manuel López Obrador , as you mentioned earlier, is taking power in Mexico. He’s promised humane treatment for the migrants, and his incoming interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero had fielded the idea of granting 1 million work visas to Central Americans. At the same time there’s a domestic unrest over the migrant issue a long-term, and it could also cause some difficulty and relations with the Trump Administration. So in your view, to what extent will the incoming Obrador Administration be a game-changer for Central American migrants seeking asylum?
JLGC: I think if they follow through on that promise to offer visas and asylum or even residency for people from Central America inside Mexico, that could be pretty significant, right? Not – while most people want to reach the United States, I also spoke with many who said specifically that if they were offered asylum inside Mexico that they would happily take it and live and work here. And so that would be pretty important. The challenge I think facing the incoming López Obrador Administration is that there’s a lot of things that are just totally out of control. Mainly the issue that I just touched on previously about the inability for people to actually get into the United States and make their asylum claim.
And so there was a proposal that was floated, and then it seemed like there are still negotiations happening, but basically what the Trump Administration is seeking is that people who are seeking asylum in the United States wait inside Mexico. And you know there are issues with that proposal, I’m not an expert on these kinds of topics so I’ll leave that to somebody else, but what I will say is that the de facto situation now is that people are waiting on the Mexican side of the border in order to cross and make their asylum claim.
And so that is the challenge of the Mexican government is what to do with these camps that are only growing. I don’t think these kinds of caravans are going to stop anytime soon and so we’re going to have more and more people who are arriving to these makeshift camps who are just, frankly, they are not adequate for people to stay months at a time. Like I mentioned there was the wait-list was already long and that was before the caravan even got there. So now we have over 6,000 new people who arrived to the border region, the US Mexico border region, who are now waiting to cross to be to make their asylum claim. That’s not a sustainable situation.
So if they’re able to figure out a way for them to be able to live and work inside Mexico while they wait for the opportunity to go inside the United States to make their asylum claim, I think that would be far more dignified for the asylum seekers because otherwise, you know, there’s waits of an hour, two hours just for a plate of rice and beans right now, right? That doesn’t seem like the kind of situation we want to have happening on the border right now.
And then the other the other kind of point of view, even in the last month or so, there’s been at least 11,000 people deported – Central Americans deported from Mexico back to Central America – so the other policy change that one would like to see from this administration, I think would be dropping that enforcement, that heavy enforcement that we’re seeing. So instead of so many deportations because we know that’s the other kind of policy in the United States is basically in a way shifting their border down further south to Mexico-Guatemala, so stopping migrants from ever even coming close to the US border, right? So that would be a positive step forward if we see a reduction in using enforcement and deportation as a means of stopping people from migrating.
GR: Okay, finally José, do you have any advice or recommendations for listeners who wish to try to ameliorate the situation for the migrants?
JLGC: Migration is generally caused because people feeling like they don’t have any other options in their countries – their home countries or their countries of origin, and that’s essentially a political consideration. The poverty in Central America is the way it is, I think in many ways because of foreign policy by the United States and Canada that has, for example, to speak to Canada, Canada was one of the major forces that helped consolidate the coup d’etat in Honduras.
There were negotiations between Canadian officials and the interim government, and then the following government in Honduras trying to facilitate it, because, as we know, in Canada there are a lot of mining companies that are headquartered – mining companies that have interests throughout Central America and Honduras and particular. And so you see Canada as, you know in its diplomatic means, actually undermining the possibility of economic improvement in countries like Honduras, which then further provokes more migration and exodus of people.
I would always say that the number one thing is to challenge the foreign policy of your country, in this case Canada, but also United States, and to pressure representatives, in Canada your MPs, to pursue a more humanitarian policy in Central America.
Just to add a little point, right, like one of the things that the López Obrador administration has talked about really put the emphasis on, which I think is a correct course of action, is attending to the root causes of migration. Making it so that people who do choose to migrate are really doing it because they want to, but otherwise people have, should have the economic reality so that they can stay in their countries of origin where their families are, where their culture is.
I myself emigrated from Mexico with my family to North America when I was very young, and it’s a difficult process. Immigration can be a beautiful thing, and it can really enrich countries, but it’s also, it’s difficult on migrants themselves to come to a new country, so they don’t have to, if they feel like they have a prosperity at home, then I think that’s… everybody wins in that circumstance.
GR: José, thank you so much for your time and thanks for sharing your insights with our listeners.
JLGC: Thank you very much for having me.
GR: We’ve been speaking with Mexico City-based independent journalist, José Luis Granados Ceja.
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 at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.
Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca
Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.
Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.
Notes:
Sarah Kinosian (Dec 7, 2017), ‘Crisis of Honduras democracy has roots in US tacit support for 2009 coup’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/07/crisis-of-honduras-democracy-has-roots-in-us-tacit-support-for-2009-coup
CNN would have been under special pressure to fire Hill because he is a prominent African-American intellectual with a following in his own community, and the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (the propaganda arm of the Likud government) is worried about the boycott and sanctions movement spreading among American minorities who might sympathize with the oppressed Palestinians.
In his speech, Hill carefully explained all the ways in which Israeli Apartheid practices (my word, not his) devastate the basic human rights of the 5 million Palestinians living under Occupation. Not only are the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are of Palestinian heritage second class citizens (and, increasingly, third class citizens), but those kept under the jackboot of the Israeli military in the Palestinian West Bank and in Gaza are kept stateless and without even the right to have rights.
These crimes, epochal and unparalleled in our own time, are being committed by Binyamin Netanyahu and his henchmen in plain sight, violating every principle of agreed-upon international law in the post-1945 period. (I say unparalleled because I know of no other government on earth in the 21st century deliberately keeping millions of persons stateless and depriving them of citizenship. Some countries give minorities a citizenship many of the latter do not want, but they still do have a passport and property rights). Israel occupied the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 and refuses to relinquish them or grant citizenship to the inhabitants, ensuring they remain in the twilight zone of statelessness. They are by far the largest stateless population in the world, (Undocumented migrants are not stateless since they have citizenship in their home country). The Nazis made Jews stateless as a prelude to the Holocaust.
One way that the Israeli right wing gets away with these atrocities is to use techniques of blackballing, smearing, and propaganda to marginalize any voices they don’t like. Jewish American mainstream organizations like the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco secretly have created web sites and techniques for getting people fired or blocking their career advancement if they aren’t on board with Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. Canary Mission is even now targeting our undergraduate students, hoping to blight their lives for taking a stand for justice. I do not believe it is too much to say that Canary Mission is evil.
Pro-Israel bigots in the United States who freely speak about Arabs as “animals” or speak of “filthy Arabs” suddenly develop a saintly halo and accuse anyone who points to Netanyahu’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians of being an anti-Semite. And they’ve been remarkably successful in marginalizing anyone who takes them on. They connive at unelecting congressmen and -women, they block appointments to the Federal government, and organize massive letter-writing campaigns to news outlets to pressure them into firing and blackballing journalists or changing the way they speak about Israeli colonizing activities. (The organization “CAMERA” targets journalists in particular).
This success is not because “Jews” are “powerful.” First of all, only a minority of Jewish Americans sympathize with the far right politics of the Likud Party. Jon Stewart used to complain tongue in cheek that if Jews were so powerful he ought to have been able to get off basic cable and have a network show.
The success is because right wing white people are so powerful, and many of them still have a latent belief in the goodness of colonialism and in the White Man’s Burden. Melanie McAlister argued brilliantly that for right wing Christian whites in the United States, the Israeli domination of the Palestinians is a symbolic reenactment of the Vietnam War, in which this time the “white people” (as they characterize themselves) win instead of losing. I.e., Israel functions as did those old Rambo movies. I was shocked to discover that my opposition to Bush’s Iraq War and critique of it as neo-colonialism was offensive to the Northeast power elite because they supported the war and apparently couldn’t deal with their unfaced assumption of racial superiority over Iraqis.
On the other side, a Christian Zionist such as Rick Santorum is paid to go on CNN and say things like, “If they want to negotiate with Israelis, and all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians. There is no ‘Palestinian.’ This is Israeli land.”
That is all right in White America, but substitute Palestinians for Israelis and vice versa in Santorum’s vile quote and imagine what would happen to someone who said *that* on t.v.
Hill was raked over the coals by the bigoted and racist Israel lobbies for saying this:
“we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
You will notice that Palestine, i.e. the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza (the Green parts), stretches from the river to the sea:
Source: Informed Comment
It is interrupted by Israeli territory in between, of course.
Dishonest propagandists accused Hill of using the language of Hamas, which rejects Israel and has said, “Palestine is ours, from the river to the sea and from the south to the north.” But you’ll note that Hill did not say anything about north to south.
Hill admittedly does not think a two-state solution is any longer plausible. But what he was calling for was for the people living in the Occupied territories to be full citizens, and to have these citizenship rights pertain to everyone living between the river and the sea. He did not say anything about Israelis not having equal rights.
It is not a firing offense to ask for Palestinians living between the river and the sea to enjoy the full rights of citizenship. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres pledged exactly that. Rabin shook Yasser Arafat’s and Bill Clinton’s hand over it on the White House lawn. Rabin was later assassinated by the sort of person now howling for Hill’s blood. Rabin’s vision of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution may well be impossible. That outcome has been engineered by Netanyahu and his thugs. But whatever the diplomacy, it cannot be allowed to keep Palestinians stateless and virtually without secure rights forever.
Hill was also slammed for urging Palestinian activism to oppose the Occupation. One of the standard Israeli propaganda techniques is to equate any resistance to their frankly fascist techniques of social control imposed on the colonized Palestinians with “terrorism.” There is nothing new or strange about this. The British in India considered Gandhi a terrorist. Of course the colonial state views opposition as terrorism.
That same dishonest columnist at The Forward managed to reconfigure Hill’s activism as violence. The fact is that international law recognizes the right of occupied peoples to mount even violent resistance to occupation militaries. But that isn’t what Hill was calling for. And then, any violence is then twisted around as violence toward civilians. And there you have it. Terrorism.
The golden magic circle of Hasbara (Zionist propaganda) gives us: resistance= violence= terrorism.
The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.
The Likudniks don’t actually want nonviolent resistance. That prospect horrifies them since they can’t do a magic circle number on it. When Mubarak Awad tried to start a center for Palestinian nonviolent resistance on the West Bank, the Israeli government illegally expelled him from his own home. One of the reasons the Israeli army is just shooting down unarmed Palestinians in cold blood inside Gaza is that they want to create the image of a violent confrontation where there is none (the marches have not involved clashes with the Israeli army).
CNN does a criminally negligent job of covering Palestine, giving us little better than Israeli propaganda. For the most part, it shapes the presentation of the story by simply ignoring it. But it also shapes the story with a systematically biased language intended to demonize the Palestinians and exonerate Israeli crimes against humanity.
Last March when Palestinians imprisoned in the open air concentration camp of Gaza by the Israeli army, navy and air force– and blockaded from key commodities– began marching to draw attention to their imprisonment, the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his officer corps decided to deal with these protests by shooting down unarmed protesters, many of them women and children, with live fire, on the Gaza side of the border. Using live ammunition on protesters is a war crime. All the civilized countries in the world should have withdrawn their ambassadors and slapped severe economic sanctions on the Netanyahu regime in response.
CNN’s reporting on one of the first such Israeli crimes? “Gaza: 17 Palestinians killed in confrontations with Israeli forces – CNN”. That makes it sound as though the dead Palestinians had come over to the Israeli side of the border and attacked Israeli “forces” (Israel has an army, let us call it an army). But there is a problem with this framing. Those shot down were on the Gaza side of the border and there has been no direct physical encounter with Israeli troops. The dozens of Palestinians shot down in cold blood and the hundreds shot and injured in these demonstrations since March have largely gone unreported at CNN. Otherwise there’d be a segment every Friday afternoon.
In the first six months of the ongoing weekly rallies, Mezan reported that “150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition…”
Amnesty International notes that many of the injuries inflicted on the protesters are to lower limbs and that:
“According to military experts as well as a forensic pathologist who reviewed photographs of injuries obtained by Amnesty International, many of the wounds observed by doctors in Gaza are consistent with those caused by high-velocity Israeli-manufactured Tavor rifles using 5.56mm military ammunition. Other wounds bear the hallmarks of US-manufactured M24 Remington sniper rifles shooting 7.62mm hunting ammunition, which expand and mushroom inside the body.
The nature of these injuries shows that Israeli soldiers are using high-velocity military weapons designed to cause maximum harm to Palestinian protesters who do not pose an imminent threat to them. These apparently deliberate attempts to kill and maim are deeply disturbing, not to mention completely illegal. Some of these cases appear to amount to wilful killing, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime.”
Again, the weekly carnage committed by the Israeli army in direct violation of the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of Occupied populations and in direct violation of the 2002 Rome Statute that created the International Court of Justice, is not covered by CNN. If you got your news from that source, you would not know anything is going on in Gaza.
Nor does CNN cover the tripling of Israeli squatter colonies on Palestinian land in the Palestinian West Bank during the Trump administration, nor the daily acts of violence, sabotage and usurpation committed by Israelis squatting on Palestinian land against Palestinians in their own homes.
If Netanyahu could shut the UN up, he would. His minions have shut up Marc Lamont Hill, a brave voice for freedom and human rights in our time who will now be replaced by the Rick Santorums.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
More than ever, Global Research needs your support. Our task as an independent media is to “Battle the Lie”.
“Lying” in mainstream journalism has become the “new normal”: mainstream journalists are pressured to comply. Some journalists refuse.
Lies, distortions and omissions are part of a multibillion dollar propaganda operation which sustains the “war narrative”.
While “Truth” is a powerful instrument, “the Lie” is generously funded by the lobby groups and corporate charities. And that is why we need the support of our readers.
New START limits the US and Russia each to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed strategic delivery vehicles. Effective since 2011, the agreement covers a 10-year period until February 2021 with the possibility of a five-year extension.
The Trump administration today approved five permits that allow harm to whales, dolphins and other animals so companies can search for oil off the Atlantic Coast using loud seismic airgun blasts.
They ignored Riyadh’s genocidal war in Yemen (in cahoots with the US, UAE and other countries), pretending horrendous Saudi domestic human rights abuses and cross-border atrocities are a non-issue.
On November 28, sixty-three U.S. Senators voted in favor of holding a floor debate on a resolution calling for an end to direct U.S. Armed Forces involvement in the Saudi-UAE coalition-led war on Yemen.
Fifty-eight years ago, a car-bomb exploded in Washington killing Chile’s ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, an act of state terrorism that the CIA and its director George H.W. Bush tried to cover up, Robert Parry reported on Sept. 23, 2000.
The United Nations Universal Children’s Day– 20 November – has come and gone – and nothing has changed. No action that would now protect children any more than before, no move even by the UN to call on nations at war to take special care to protect children – if for nothing else but the fact that children are our planets future.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The Carmichael mine being pursued in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland is a dinosaur before its creation. On paper, it is hefty – to be some five times the size of Sydney harbour, the largest in Australia and one of the largest on the planet. Six open cut and five underground mines covering some 30 kilometres are proposed, a gargantuan epic. The coal itself would be transported through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and World Heritage Area, and would feature a rail line subsidised by the money of Australian taxpayers.
Even before the initial steps are taken, its realisation is doomed to obsolescent indulgence and environmental wearing. It has been endorsed by a bribed political class best represented by Liberal senator Matt Canavan, who sees Adani through tinted glasses as a “little Aussie batter”; it is run by an unelected plutocratic one. This venture has seen Australian politicians, protoplasmic and spineless, do deals with a company run by a billionaire in a way that sneers at democracy and mocks the common citizenry.
The Adani group, run by its persistent Chairman Gautam Adani, has worked out what political figures want to hear and how far it can go, even in the face of mounting opposition. His closeness to the halls of power has been noted: influential be he who has the ear of the Indian Prime Minister, Nahendra Modi.
How divisive the Carmichael project is between Australia’s morally flexible politicians and a growing body of disaffected citizenry can be gathered from the open letter to the Adani Group from some 90 notable Australians that was submitted in the first part of last year. The list was impressively eclectic: authors such as Richard Flanagan and Tim Winton; investment banker Mark Burrows; and former Australian test cricket captains Ian and Greg Chappell. (“The thought,” Ian Chappell ruefully, “that this could affect the relationship, hopefully that’ll get through.”)
The text of the note was simple enough.
“We are writing to respectfully ask you to abandon the Adani Group’s proposal in Queensland’s Galilee Basin… Pollution from burning coal was the single biggest driver of global warming, threatening life in Australia, India and all over the world.”
That same year, the British medical journal The Lancet deemed the Adani mine project a “public health disaster” though Australian authorities remain indifferent to recommendations that independent health assessments be conducted on the impact of the mine. In very tangible ways, air pollution arising from the burning of coal is a global killer. Australia’s menacing own contribution to this casualty list comes in at around three thousand a year; in India, the list, according to a 2013 study by the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust, is an eye-popping 115,000.
“I didn’t expect the mortality figures per year,” remarked Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the Conservation Action Trust, “to be so high.”
The trends in energy generation and resources are against fossil fuels, and even the banks have heeded this, refusing to supply a credit line to the company. But Adani knows a gullible audience when he sees one. Like a sadhu aware of a westerner’s amenability to mysticism, the chairman and his worthies say the rights things, and encourage the appropriate response from the ruling classes they are wooing. The company feeds them the fodder and rose water they wish to hear, and massages them into appreciative stances. The campaign by the Indian company has been so comprehensive as to include decision makers from every level of government that might be connected with the mine.
Adani, not to be deterred by delays of some six years, has suggested that it will pursue a different model, though this remains vague. Extravagance is being reined in, supposedly trimmed and slimmed: targets will be cut by three-quarters, and the company has now promised to finance the project itself.
“We will now,” claimed Adani Mining CEO Lucas Dow this week, “be developing a smaller open-cut mine comparable to many other Queensland coal mines and will ramp up production over time.”
Nothing this company says should ever be taken at face value. Exaggeration and myth making is central to its platform. Slyly, the company’s Australian operation is also given a deceptive wrapping; a visit to the company’s website will see information on Adani’s efforts to “become the leading supplier of renewable energy in Australia.”
Dow has become a missionary of sorts, repeatedly telling Queenslanders that the project can only mean jobs, and more jobs. Astrological projections more in league with tarot card reading are used. Last November, Dow, in a media statement, was brimming with optimism over those “indirect jobs” that would be created in Rockhampton, Townsville, Mackay and the Isaac region.
“Economic modelling, such as that used by the Queensland Resources Council in its annual resources industry economic impact report, show that each direct job in the industry in Queensland supports another four and a half jobs in related industries and businesses, therefore we can expect to see more than 7,000 jobs created by the initial ramp up of the Carmichael project.”
Not merely does the Carmichael mine smack of a crude obsolescence before the first lumps of coal are mined; it is bound to take a wrecking ball to any emissions reduction strategy Australia might intend pursuing. (Matters are already half-hearted as they are in Canberra, poisoned by a fractious energy lobby and ill-gotten gains stakeholders.) Professor Andrew Stock of the Climate Council has explained that once coal begins being burned, Australia’s “total emissions” are set to double, nothing less than an act of “environmental vandalism”. Work on the mine will also contribute to such despoliation: the clearing of 20,200 hectares of land will add to the climate chance quotient; the Great Artesian Basin’s groundwater system will also be affected.
Another graphic projection is also being suggested. For the duration of its projected 60 year lifespan, as epidemiologist Fiona Stanley reminds us, Adani’s venture will produce as much carbon as all of Australia’s current coal fired power stations combined. All this, even as the Indian state promises to phase out thermal coal imports, rendering the Adani coal project a white, if vandalising elephant. The only difference now is that the elephant proposed is somewhat smaller in scale and size.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Mission Essential is a government contractor, which primarily serves intelligence and military clients. It began as the US government’s leading provider of translation and interpretation services.
Source: Linked Screenshot
The preemptive job advert was posted on November 16th and seeks “linguist candidates who speak Ukrainian to provide foreign language interpretation and translation services to support classified Contingency Operations in support of the U.S. Military in Ukraine.”
The advert also requires candidates to be able to fit in the local culture and customs, in addition to “the ability to deal inconspicuously with local populace if necessary.” Which simply means that the interpreter needs to be able to hide the fact that he is not a Ukrainian citizen, at least partly.
Unsurprisingly, the individual needs to be able to serve in a combat zone “if necessary,” in addition to being able to “live, work, and travel in harsh environments, to include living and working in temporary facilities as mission dictates.”
Considering repeated claims by the US leadership that the US is not involved in the Ukraine conflict, the vacancy posting is an operational security failure by Mission Essential. Most other vacancies posted by the company are for analysts and various linguistical and project management positions, almost predominantly in different military facilities in the US.
It is quite possible that these specialists would assist US military personnel deployed in or near the “combat zones” in Ukraine – i.e. Eastern Ukraine, and as it was expected since as early as November 16th – the Sea of Azov.
This is another piece that reinforces the notion that the “provocation by Russia” in the Sea of Azov was somehow premeditated.
However, it also appears that, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s plans appeared to, at least partially, backfire. “Partially,” because he managed to instate martial law and make another step in his attempts to postpone elections in 2019, thus “democratically” holding on to power and not allowing the Ukrainian citizens to vote and most likely elect his rival and favored presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
US Senator Tom Cotton and Congresswoman Liz Cheney have introduced a bill that prevents extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia or the Stopping Russia Nuclear Aggression Act. It says “Under no circumstances should the United States agree to extend the New START Treaty beyond the current expiration in 2021 without drastic improvements to the deeply flawed deal.” The bill includes the provision of Russia’s agreement to verifiably reduce its stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons. It also stipulates that the new weapons mentioned in the President Putin’s famous speech in March must be included into the count.
New START limits the US and Russia each to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed strategic delivery vehicles. Effective since 2011, the agreement covers a 10-year period until February 2021 with the possibility of a five-year extension. So far, the talks on extending the agreement have not been kicked off to the dismay of many arms control wonks.
President Donald Trumphas announced his intention to jettison the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty citing Russia’s alleged “violation” and the “threat” supposedly coming from China. Decried by the president last year, New START may be next up on the chopping block. He does not like anything done during President Obama’s tenure. The other option is an analog of the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which limited deployed warheads without verification provisions. According to Andrea Thompson, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, the future of New Start depends on Moscow’s readiness to limit the new strategic systems President Putin mentioned in his famous speech in March.
It’s important to note that there are no Russian violations to blame for a US decision not to extend the treaty or pull out from it. President Trump will have to substantiate the reasons for another preemptive treaty withdrawal after the intention to pull out from the INF Treaty was announced. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly expressed interest in extending New START, although Moscow has concerns about the US removing nuclear weapons launchers from accountability under the agreement.
What’s wrong with the bill and why is it important to address the pertinent problems before it goes to the appropriate committees?
First, the tactical weapons in Russia’s inventory have nothing to do with strategic nuclear forces (SNF). Cruise missiles and nuclear-powered torpedoes are not part of any international agreement. There is no precedent of including them into the SNF agenda. The sea-based tactical nuclear weapons have been covered by presidential nuclear initiatives (PNIs). Tactical nukes have always been a separate subject. No treaty covers them. The condition of including them into strategic nuclear reduction talks is unacceptable. If the bill becomes law, no strategic arms agreement will be possible ever.
Now about the new weapons the Russian president told about. The Sarmat ICBM is replacing the Voevoda silo-based system, which is covered by New START. It does not add to the existing potential. The Kh-101 air-to surface missile has no relation to the treaty – it’s neither a strategic weapon nor a delivery means. The same way the Avangard glide vehicle does not breach New START when installed on the Sarmat or a carrier that does not fall into the category of heavy missiles. This system is neither a bomber, nor a ballistic missile. In theory, some of the weapons in question can be included into the agenda but it depends on Russia’s goodwill.
The overall deterioration of the relations between Russia and the US may provoke lawmakers into backing any anti-Russian bill. Adopting such an approach means shooting oneself into the foot.
When the bill goes to the floor, congressmen should remember two things. First, New START is not only about numbers. It includes the exchange of valuable information, which is hard to get by other means, and the unique and very reliable verification procedures. Second, with no SNF agreement in place, the world would have nothing to prevent an unfettered arms race. Another option is extending New START to buy time for thorough discussions on another treaty to replace it. But in this case they will have to say no the Cotton-Cheney-introduced bill.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Andrei Akulov is a retired colonel, Moscow-based expert on international security issues.
In a talk which garnered little attention, one of the Deep State’s prime operatives, National Security Advisor John Bolton, cautioned of the enormous and escalating US debt. Speaking before the Alexander Hamilton Society, Bolton warned that current US debt levels and public obligations posed an “economic threat” to the nation’s security:
It is a fact that when your national debt gets to the level ours is, that it constitutes an economic threat to the society. And that kind of threat ultimately has a national security consequence for it.*
What was most surprising about Bolton’s talk was that there has been little reaction to it from the financial press, the markets themselves, or political commentators. While the equity markets have been in the midst of a sell off, it has not been due (as of yet) to US deficits, currently in excess of $1trillion annually. Instead, the slide has been the result of fears over increase in interest rates and the continued trade tensions with China.
While Bolton’s warning about the debt is self-serving, it is accurate in the sense that the US Empire which, in part, he directs is ultimately dependent on the strength of the economy. “National security” is not threatened by a debt crisis which would mean a compromised dollar, but such an event would limit what the US could do globally. Real national security is defense of the homeland and border control – non intervention abroad.
War mongers like Bolton are fearful that a debt crisis would necessitate a decline in US power overseas. America is fast approaching what took place with the British Empire after its insane involvement in the two World Wars and its own creation of a domestic welfare state which exhausted the nation and led to the displacement of the British pound as the “world’s reserve currency.”
The US-led wars in the Middle East have been estimated by a recent Brown University study to have cost in the neighborhood of $4 trillion.** Despite this squandering of national treasure and candidate Trump calling the Iraq War a “disaster,” as president, Trump increased “defense” spending for FY 2019 to $716 billion.***
US Military Bases Around the World
Profligate US spending and debt creation has, no doubt, been noticed by those outside of the Empire. It is probably why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been so hesitant to take any serious action against the numerous provocations that the US has taken around the globe and against Russian interests directly. The wily Putin probably figures that an implosion of US financial markets would eventually limit America’s ability to foment mayhem and havoc internationally.
The Trump Administration’s latest bellicose act, engineered by – you guessed it – John Bolton, has been the withdrawal from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty (INF). The treaty, signed in 1987, was a landmark achievement of the Reagan Administration which de-escalated tensions between the two super powers and kept a lid on a costly arms buildup that neither can afford.
The next financial downturn will certainly dwarf the 2008 crisis, the latter of which nearly brought down the entire financial system. The next one will be far worse and will last considerably longer since nothing has been resolved from the first crisis. The only thing that has occurred has been the creation of more debt, not only in the US, but by all Western nation states.
Under current ideological conditions, a change in US foreign policy to non-intervention is unlikely. Public opinion is decidedly pro-military after years of indoctrination and propaganda by the press, government, academia, and the media. It will take a fall in America’s economic power, specifically the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will ultimately bring down the empire that has neocons like John Bolton concerned.
Unfortunately, until that time, the US will continue its rampaging ways. The day of reckoning, however, appears to be fast approaching and instead of a defeat on the field of battle, the US Empire will collapse under a mountain of debt. It would be more than fitting that such a scenario should play itself out which would thus begin the very necessary retribution process that may, at least in a small sense, compensate those who have suffered and died from America’s murderous foreign policy.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Notes
*Tyler Durden, “John Bolton Warns National Debt Is An ‘Economic Threat’ To The US Security.” Zero Hedge. 01 November 2018.
**Jason Ditz, “Study: US Wars Cost $4 Trillion, Killed 259,000.” Antiwar. 29 June 2019.
***Military Benefits, “2019 Defense Budget Signed byTrump.” Military Benefits. September, 2018.
December 2nd, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Trump administration today approved five permits that allow harm to whales, dolphins and other animals so companies can search for oil off the Atlantic Coast using loud seismic airgun blasts. Allowing these exploration activities from Delaware to Florida is the first step toward opening the Atlantic to new oil drilling, as the administration proposed in January.
“The Trump administration is giving the oil industry permission to launch a brutal sonic assault on North Atlantic right whales and other wildlife,” said Kristen Monsell, ocean program legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These airgun blasts will injure and kill marine animals, and are the gateway to opening the East Coast to offshore drilling and toxic oil spills. We’ll fight to protect endangered right whales from these deafening blasts and the drilling and spilling that could come next.”
The announcement comes following the death of at least 20 endangered North Atlantic right whales since April 2017, and years of population decline. Scientists estimate that the population now contains only 411 animals.
The permits allow the firing of seismic airguns from ships every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, for weeks at a time, at a noise level that would rupture a human eardrum. More than 220 municipalities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts have formally opposed oil and gas drilling and seismic airgun blasting.
Shortly before leaving office, the Obama administration denied these seismic applications, partly because of their harmful impact on right whales and other marine mammals. But in May 2017, the Trump administration revoked that denial and announced it was reconsidering the permits.
“It’s just so sad to see whales and dolphins acoustically attacked in the search for oil we shouldn’t be drilling anyway,” Monsell said. “We need to protect the Atlantic, not let industry destroy it.”
In 2015, 75 scientists found that opening the Atlantic Ocean to seismic airgun exploration “poses an unacceptable risk of serious harm to marine life.” The scientists also warned of “significant, long-lasting, and widespread” harm to fish and marine mammal populations should the blasting proceed.
The seismic blasts, which can reach more than 250 decibels, can cause hearing loss in marine mammals, disturb essential behaviors such as feeding and breeding over vast distances, mask communications between individual whales and dolphins, and reduce catch rates of commercial fish.
Today’s approvals were issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to Spectrum Geo Inc., TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company, ION GeoVentures, WesternGeco, LLC and CGG.
The companies also need permits from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Featured image is from Center for Biological Diversity
Global Research pays its respects to former president George Herbert Walker Bush who passed away in Houston at age 94.
At this juncture, it is important to address his unspoken political legacy.
Below is author Larry Chin’s September 2016 article together with a historical perspective and update.
Author’s update as of December 2, 2018
The atrocities and crimes of the Bush family, headed by George Herbert Walker Bush, are unspeakable and unimaginable in depravity and scale.
Decades of war, war crimes, and treason.
Global narcotics trafficking, money laundering, fraud and financial looting.
Mass murder, assassination; the extermination of political enemies and whistleblowers.
The absolute criminalization of military and intelligence agencies, and the corruption of entire governments, across all political parties.
Devastation and violence in every corner of the planet, from the killing fields of Asia to the Middle East and Latin America, to the United States itself.
The institutionalization of terrorism, criminal cover-up and The Big Lie.
George Herbert Walker Bush was one of the greatest architects of suffering the world has ever known. His New World Order, a criminal empire that continues to poison and corrupt; its tentacles still oppressing to this very moment, as you read this.
Do not mourn George Herbert Walker Bush. Mourn his victims. Mourn what has been lost. Mourn what has been destroyed. Mourn what he took. Mourn the “thousand points of light” that he snuffed out.
Let historical truth fully expose who and what the Bush family are, and what they have done. Let the mainstream corporate media’s desperate attempt to sanitize the Bush record utterly fail.
President Donald Trump promises to Drain the Swamp. George Herbert Walker Bush, his family, and his legion of associates do not merely epitomize the Swamp. They are the Swamp. They are the Deep State. Here is what the Bush family thinks of Trump. Trump must continue to deliver on this promise.
The following article was published in September 2016. Now over two years later, its case remains intact.
***
At a spring 2016 Republican debate attended by the Bushes, George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, looked directly at Donald Trump and gave him the “throat slit” gesture. The Bushes want the Clintons back in the White House.
“Poppy” trusted them with Arkansas in the 1980s, and with the White House in the 1990s, and he can trust them with the marching orders again. A Hillary Clinton presidency guarantees that all the things that the New World Order wants done will continue to get done.
The Clintons and Bushes have been criminal partners for more than 30 years. They and their colleagues have dominated the American government, the military-intelligence apparatus, the judicial system, the financial markets, and the banks. Their friends dominate the corporate media and Hollywood—the shapers of The Big Lie.
The endless repeated cycles and recycles of Bushes and Clintons, the endless presence of Bush/Clinton operatives in all positions of power is by design. The administrations of Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been a continuum, a line of succession, over which George H.W. Bush’s New World Order compatriots (including Henry Kissinger, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds) ultimately call the shots in relation to their political appointees, in all matters of importance. Most of Washington and much of the world, answers to them.
Iran-Contra: the family business
There would be no Clinton “dynasty” without the Iran-Contra.
Originally coined “Iran-Contra” (in reference to illegal arms sales to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon and arms to the Contra “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua), the moniker hides the fact that it became a vast and permanent criminal business and political machine that went far beyond then-current political concerns.
In The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider , Al Martin describes the Iran-Contra Enterprise that a vast operation that included (and was not limited to) drugs, weapons, terrorism, war, money laundering, criminal banking and securities fraud, currency fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail, extortion, and political corruption that involved countless Washington politicians of both Republican and Democratic parties.
Martin:
“Iran-Contra itself is a euphemism for the outrageous fraud perpetrated by government criminals for profit and control. Offhandedly, this inaccurate term entered history as shorthand for the public scandals of illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua. The real story, however, is much more complex…When George Bush, [CIA Director] Bill Casey and Oliver North initiated their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling, they envisioned using 500 men to raise $35 billion….they ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making over $35 billion.” In addition, the operation became “a government within a government, comprising some thirty to forty thousand people the American government turns to, when it wishes certain illegal covert operations to be extant pursuant to a political objective” with George [H.W.] Bush “at the top of the pyramid”.
Most of the operation’s insiders and whistleblowers place George H.W.Bush as one of its top architects, if not its commander. It was carried out by CIA operatives close to Bush since his CIA directorship and even stretching back to the Bay of Pigs. These included Oliver North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Felix Rodriguez, and others. Iran-Contra was a replication of the CIA’s Golden Triangle drug trafficking in Southeast Asia (operations also connected to Bush) but on a larger scale and sophistication, greater complexity, and far-reaching impact that remains palpable to this day.
In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley wrote that,
“many once-classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures.”
Tarpley further points out that George H.W. Bush created new structures (“special situation group”, “terror incident working group” etc.) within the Reagan administration—and that
“all of these structures revolved around [creating] the secret command role of the then-Vice President, George Bush…The Bush apparatus, within and behind the government, was formed to carry out covert policies: to make war when the constitutional government had decided not to make war; to support enemies of the nation (terrorists and drug runners) who are the friends and agents of the secret government.”
This suggests that George H.W.Bush (who prior to his appointment as Vice President headed the CIA) not only ran Iran-Contra, but much of the Reagan presidency. Then-White House press secretary James Baker said in 1981,
“Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups, he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings.”
Hundreds of insiders, witnesses and investigators have blown the lid off of the Iran-Contra Enterprise in exhaustive fashion. These include the investigations of:
Mike Ruppert (From The Wilderness, Crossing the Rubicon), Al Martin (The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider), Gary Webb (Dark Alliance), Rodney Stich (Defrauding America, Drugging America), Terry Reed (Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA), Stew Webb (and here), Dois “Chip” Tatum (The Tatum Chronicles) (summarized here), Pete Brewton (The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush) and Daniel Hopsicker (Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History), among others. The accounts of Barry Seal, Edward Cutolo, Albert Carone, Bradley Ayers, Tosh Plumley, Bill Tyree, Gunther Russbacher, Celerino Castillo, Michael Levine, Trenton Parker, Russell Bowen, Richard Brenneke, Larry Nichols, William Duncan, Russell Welch and dozens more implicate the Bushes, the Clintons and the CIA.
As described by Mike Ruppert,
“it stood, and still stands today, isolated and immune from the operating principles of democracy. It is autonomous and it operates through self-funding via narcotics and weapons trafficking. To quote [former CIA director] William Casey it is ‘a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.’ It, in fact, dictates a substantial portion of this country’s foreign, economic and military policy from a place not accessible to the will of a free people properly armed with facts.”
CIA deep cover agent pilot Chip Tatum, a key Iran-Contra player who flew drugs into Mena and Little Rock in Arkansas, worked alongside CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal. Seal was one of the central operatives, whose CIA career and work in Mena are detailed in Daniel Hopsicker’s Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History. It is believed that Seal was subsequently murdered by the Medellin Cartel, on the order of Oliver North and the Bushes, to prevent him from testifying about his activities. Before he was killed, Seal provided Tatum a list of Iran-Contra “Boss Hogs” who controlled the drug trade. The Pegasus File summaries Tatum’s activities, and features the “Boss Hog” list. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton feature prominently.
Arkansas
Then-Governor Bill Clinton managed the Arkansas operation in conjunction with the Bushes, Oliver North, Barry Seal and other deep cover operatives. Hillary Clinton was also a key player.
From Rodney Stich’s Drugging America:
“Mena became famous in the 1980s for the arms and drugs shipping through this western Arkansas airport by the CIA and other government agencies. It involved Oliver North, Vice President and then President George Bush, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and others who became involved in covert activities…My CIA sources indicate that the profits from drug sales far exceeded what was needed for these [black] operations. They report that most of the profits are hidden in offshore financial institutions, and much of these funds come back in well-disguised forms and corporations, acquiring properties and businesses of all types…My CIA contacts described Bush’s heavy involvement in Central American operations in which drug trafficking constituted a major role.”
Mena, Arkansas was the key transit points for cocaine coming into the United States from Central America, and weapons going the other way. The Rose Law Firm, of which Hillary Clinton and Webster Hubbell were senior partners, negotiated contracts for the CIA in Mena, Arkansas, and helped set up numerous fraudulent CIA fronts for cocaine and weapons transit. The very structure of the Arkansas state government was altered to accommodate the Enterprise. The Clinton-created Arkansas Development and Financing Authority engaged in money laundering on a mass scale.
The operation was byzantine, a network of connected government agencies, subsidiaries, and shell companies and corporations can be seen in the diagram provided by whistleblower Stew Webb:
Quoting the congressional testimony of Internal Revenue Service Agent William Duncan, who spent several years investigating drug-related activities in Arkansas under the Clintons and their operatives:
“…the Mena Arkansas Airport was on important hub-waypoint for transshipment for drugs, weapons. The evidence details a bizarre mixture of drug smuggling, gun running, money laundering and covert operations by Barry Seal, his associates, and both employees and contract operatives of the United States Intelligence Services. The testimony reveals a scheme whereby massive amounts of cocaine were smuggled into the State of Arkansas.”
Far from staying background, Clinton liked direct involvement. CIA asset and Air Force veteran Terry Reed described his experience in Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA. Reed trained Contra pilots at the Mena and Nella airports in Arkansas, and worked with Seal. According to Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon,
“[Reed’s] chief threat to the CIA and the American political establishment was that he could connect the Clintons, the CIA, Oliver North, Bill Casey and the drug running through the Mena, Arkansas, Intermountain Airport all into one package.”
In his book, Reed describes a meeting held in an ammunition bunker outside of Little Rock attended by Bill Clinton, CIA operative (and Bush associate) Felix Rodriguez, and Clinton Security Chief Raymond Young.
Iran-Contra’s whistleblowers, and investigators (many of whom are mentioned above) have been threatened, discredited, kidnapped, jailed, and some, such as Barry Seal, murdered.
The Clintons have gone to great lengths, (e.g Vince Foster), to maintain their cover-up of their CIA Arkansas operation. And George H.W. Bush famously and laughably insisted that he was “out of the loop”. This, even as the passage of time, increasingly available evidence, and the damning testimonies of his own former operatives have amply placed him as Iran-Contra’s boss. In the words of former CIA agent Phillip Agee,
“Bush was up to his neck in illegal drug running on behalf of the Contras.”
All attempts to prosecute were largely unsuccessful—blocked, stalled, or given a “limited hangout” treatment. As written by Mike Ruppert, one of many Iran-Contra whistleblowers, in Crossing the Rubicon:
“Iran-Contra was effectively ‘managed’ by Lee Hamilton in the House [of Representatives] and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operatives.”
Kerry would go on to become the Democratic nominee for President in 2004, and is now the Secretary of State.
The Clintons’ collaboration with the Bushes and the CIA made possible their rise to prominence. Their entry to the Washington was the reward and payoff for their fine service in Arkansas from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Cathy O’Brien (author of Trance Formation of America) claims to have witnessed and overheard meetings as far back as the early 1980s in which George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton planned to pass the White House between the two of them, and between their respective political clans, thereby maintaining the New World Order for the long term.
Iran-Contra as blueprint
The Iran-Contra Enterprise’s overseers, criminal associates and beneficiaries, to this day, remain at large, with most enjoying massive illegally-obtained wealth, privilege, and highest political and corporate positions. The imperial positions of the Bush and Clinton clans exemplify this.
The operation, in essence, evolved and metastasized into ever-more modern and sophisticated incarnation with even more global reach. New names, new banks, new drugs, new wars, same blueprint. It is not a “deep state” or a “shadow state” but a Criminal State that operates “in broad daylight”. It is the playbook of the New World Order. It is globalization at its finest.
The world is in flames. Corruption is rampant. The CIA is more powerful than ever. Terrorism, drugs and weapons flow freely through more geostrategic hot spots than ever. This is a “golden age for drug trafficking”. All of it can be traced back to Iran-Contra, the Bushes, and the Clintons.
The ultimate con that has been played on the world has been the illusion of a political system; of political parties and a democracy. In fact, the world is ruled by a criminal apparatus disguised as a political system. This apparatus serves no purpose except the continuation of itself. It exists to protect and expand a vast racketeering operation that has enjoyed control and power for generations.
Permanent criminal state, endless revolving door
A smooth line of succession, generation after generation, passing power and profits as seamlessly as possible through time is imperative. A Hillary Clinton presidency ensures this.
Every occupant since JFK has been a criminal insider, beginning with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom were likely involved with the Kennedy assassinations and willing beneficiaries of the wars and crimes that followed.
“Poppy” Bush was the real power behind the Ronald Reagan administration, while the actor fronted for it. From Bush himself, the “charming” and then unknown Clintons took on the role, which was passed back to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, then back to the so-called neoliberals (Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, etc.), and on and on.
Elections are rigged. “Contestants” are chosen based on propaganda purposes. Those deemed the most effective actor for any given period are chosen in advance. The consistent trick has been to stack the deck with figures who are unified behind the most important New World Order agendas, posing as opponents. George H.W. Bush versus Bill Clinton was a lie. George W. Bush versus John (Skull and Bones) Kerry was a lie. Barack Obama versus John McCain and Mitt Romney, the same. Those who were not fully on board, such as Al Gore, were dealt with and removed.
This kind of clever and successful charade was what the Obama campaign was about in 2008 and again in 2012. But even the most fervent and delusional Obama fans today know and feel that it was a fraud. There was no “change”. Obama, the obedient and malleable corporatist, was given a limited puppet role. The New World Order was careful to place Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in charge of foreign policy, and a right-wing Republican opposition to prevent any independent action on Obama’s part. The 2007 financial collapse by the outgoing Bush-Cheney administration and its banksters not secured major loot for the Bush syndicate, but ensured that Obama would be saddled with a weak economy.
Despite the fact that the Obama administrations have faithfully continued and expanded the Bush-Cheney agenda, Obama has been abused by his Bush-Clinton handlers anyway. The Bushes and Clintons are racists. The Clintons in particular hate the Obamas, and the Obama-Clinton working relationship has been frosty since Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 nomination to Obama.
The ideal plan for 2016 was to stack the deck again, with another fake contest, this time between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Unfortunately for the Bushes, Donald Trump is enormously popular, and his campaign attacks on all three Bush plants (Jeb, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) were effective. So tarnished is the Bush name as a public product that Jeb was forced to withdraw his bid, despite huge elite backing. Thus, the George H.W. Bush throat cut gesture aimed at Trump.
This leaves Hillary Clinton, who has aggressively sought the world’s highest public office for her entire life. She is hell-bent on getting it. She is fully supported by all of the leading neocon fascists, the Saudi royal family, Netanyahu, the CIA, and Wall Street, and all of the empire’s overseas criminal partners.
Power and perversion
What even knowledgeable outside observers might perceive about the Bushes and Clintons, the truth is more brutal. This brutality is the threat that a Bush-endorsed Hillary Clinton White House promises.
Leading members of the Criminal State are genuine psychopaths and sociopaths. Their violence and perversion is not simply private “dirty laundry”, but sickness that manifests in public action, with worldwide impact.
Cathy O’Brien (author of Trance Formation of America) is another whistleblower who has spoken out about her unfortunate personal experience with the CIA, the Bushes and the Clintons in Mena.
(O’Brien, who continues to speak out about her experience and CIA psychological operations, was allegedly rescued by former CIA operative Mark Phillips. It is not known if Phillips remains her handler, and if her story is being used as a limited hangout. Barbara Hartwell has also exposed the same criminality and more, from the perspective of a former CIA operative of rank.)
Whistleblower Stew Webb has fought the Bush-Clinton machine for decades, and his work helped break the S&L, HUD, and Denver Airport scandals, and major aspects of Iran-Contra.
Hillary Clinton: wolf in wolf’s clothing
Hillary Clinton is not a progressive, but a neocon war criminal of the highest order. Among her closest friends and allies are Henry Kissinger, John McCain, and the Bushes, with Daddy Bush as her godfather.
Contrary to her manufactured image, she is not a populist liberal, and is the opposite of a motherly or sisterly figure who cares about children and the disadvantaged and the poor. She is a racist and a pathological liar. One can make a strong argument that she, not Bill, has been the criminal brains of the Clinton apparatus.
The entire Clinton image is a lie, one of the countless frauds played on the American masses. Former Clinton insiders such as Larry Nichols attest to it.
Hillary Clinton’s mental instability, anger, re well known to those who have worked in the Clinton administrations in Arkansas as well as in the White House, and in more recent tenures as New York senator and Secretary of State. These include former Secret Service Agent Gary Byrne and many others.
Following her criminal CIA activities in Arkansas to her co-management of the Clinton White House tenure, Hillary became New York senator. As senator, she facilitated the Bush/New World Order agenda faithfully. Hillary Clinton supported Bush-Cheney’s Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
After a failed 2008 presidential bid that exposed her viciousness, Hillary Clinton joined the team of Bush/New World Order figures who served as the handlers of front man-puppet Obama. As suggested by probes into Clinton’s emails, and evidence from Wikileaks, the Hillary Clinton State Department ran foreign policy as its own shadow government apparatus, likely beyond the control of Obama, and engaged in illegal activities over all objections from the Obama faction. The discussion about whether or not Clinton followed “correct security procedures” is a red herring and distraction: Hillary Clinton ran her own secret foreign policy cell, with her own communications network.
The Clinton Foundation is a criminal apparatus, a classic secret call that exemplifies the kind of activity upon which the Clintons and Bushes thrive. Its business includes CIA black ops, the funding of terrorists (ISIS), the destabilization of nations, war provocations, extra-judicial political assassinations, currency fraud, money laundering, and treason.
Clinton’s CIA Benghazi operation was directly out of the Iran-Contra playbook: a covert arms deal funnelling weapons to vetted anti-Assad Syrian terrorist groups and Al-Qaeda.
Terrorists? Arms? Dead people? Cover-up? Treason? Hillary Clinton says:
It was Hillary Clinton whose actions helped install a puppet government integrated by Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, towards a full-blown war with Russia. The vicious Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, has played a key role in these crimes. Nuland is likely to be tapped for a cabinet position in a Hillary Clinton administration.
Leader of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Party SvobodaOleh Tyahnybok (Left) with Victoria Nuland, Former PM of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk
Hillary Clinton famously claimed that she is under attack from a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. In truth, Hillary Clinton is a right-wing conspiracy.
A campaign of fraud
The New World Order’s insistence on a Hillary Clinton presidency is desperate. She is reviled and even disliked among Democrats. Even actress Susan Sarandon has given up on her. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee destroyed the Bernie Sanders campaign with blatant fraud.
An elaborate cover-up continues to attempt to deny the fact that Clinton has been gravely ill for many years, likely suffering from likely neurological damage, possibly Parkinson’s disease (unconfirmed) , and a host of other problems. She is escorted by a Secret Service handler, a full medical team and vans full of hospital equipment (including anti-seizure devices). The cover-up is unconvincing. Yet Hillary Clinton is still trotted out as the Establishment choice.
If she is forced to quit her campaign, the Clinton-Bush crime syndicate will concoct another way to anoint another approved stooge or puppet to replace her—be it the neocon Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, or even Michelle Obama. But the Bushes want Hillary, and it is Hillary the world will get.
The silencing and suspected murder (alleged, yet to be fully investigated) of current and former insiders, whistleblowers and investigators continues to add up stretching back to the 1990s, which is topped in notoriety by the mysterious murder of Clinton insider Vince Foster during the Bill Clinton presidency. In recent months, Seth Rich, Joe Montano, Shawn Lucas, and John Ashe each died under suspicious circumstances. Each possessed information exposing criminal activities of Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee.
Trump: threat or compromised noise maker?
Is Donald Trump in any way a viable alternative to Bush-Clinton? He has offered relatively little in the way of specifics, along with many ideas that are divisive and as dangerous as some of Clinton’s.
Nevertheless, Trump represents a threat if some of his public statements on the big issues are in any way genuine, and as long as he uses the campaign as a bully pulpit for these views. Trump takes issue with the course of the current war, and supports negotiations with Russia. He has dared mention some of the past Clinton and Bush crimes, and is reportedly supported by a large number of military flag officers and intelligence operatives who oppose Clinton-Bush. Many of the Republicans hate him, and the Bush faction wants him gone.
It is not clear if Trump is simply another short-term distraction like Ross Perot, one that the criminal syndicate will ultimately corral and control through bribery or physical threat. Perot was a serious presidential challenger in 1992, until he and his family were threatened. Perot withdrew. Mike Ruppert, who worked on the Perot campaign. In Crossing the Rubicon, he wrote
“ I was greatly disappointed by Perot’s sudden withdrawal…which I later concluded had to do with assuring a Clinton victory. It was only later that pieces fell together for me which suggested that Perot had led us all on a wild goose chase in a campaign that he never intended to win.”
Bill Clinton was to take the reins from the Bushes in that fake election.
When will the Bush-Clinton enforcers convince Trump to bend to the will of the syndicate? Has this already taken place? The Bush throat-cut gesture suggests that a friendly deal will not be made. But Trump is a businessman.
Trump’s choice of Mike Pence as vice presidential running mate should crush all hope for those who believe that a Trump White House would be free of the Bush poison. Pence is a super conservative neocon, who has supported all things Bush. He supported the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, is pro-torture (opposes the closing of Guantanamo Bay), and supports war in the Middle East. He supported the toppling of Libya, and thanked Hillary Clinton for doing it. He supports globalization and free trade agreements, supported NAFTA and CAFTA. He is a corporatist who opposes banking and campaign finance reforms, who praised the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case that made “corporations people”. (i.e. corporate personhood)
If indeed Pence is Trump’s designated handler and control agent, that is the end of the idea of Trump as an agent of change.
End game
The next president will likely be a criminal, in a long line of criminals, or a puppet that is controlled by these same criminal forces. There is no way that the New World Order will permit a government that is not crawling with its own members, infested with Bush and Clinton operatives.
This is a virtual certainty, barring a total revolution that sees all members of the New World Order removed from power and punished, the CIA and other criminal entities shut down, an international cease fire, and an end to all wars.
Elections are Fake
Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis with little effective means to stop what is coming. There are no elections: votes do not and will not count. Elections are fake, and this one is no different. Elections are digitally hacked, rigged, and scripted, rigged the way they have for decades. There is no real choice in this charade anyway. One candidate is clearly and emphatically criminal. The other is not trustworthy and may be compromised.
This is the most dangerous hour the world has faced. This is end game, with the future of the planet at risk.
The final moves on the “Grand Chessboard” are before us: all of the Middle East and Central Asia, the world’s last reserves of oil, are in play, Syria is on the edge, Russia is under attack, and nuclear holocaust is a terrifying possibility. War with Russia and China are no longer “unthinkable”, but being planned in earnest.
A Hillary Clinton White House guarantees war, and a triumph for the Criminal State.
Stopping or at least slowing down the New World Order criminal machine is the urgent priority. The resistance must therefore be expressed by other means.
It will require creative and devastating work on behalf of Wikileaks and others who possess damning information to bypass the Bush-Clinton propaganda organs, directly to the minds of people. Even then, will people care? Will they understand?
Let us recall the words of John F. Kennedy from a tragically prescient 1961 speech that helped trigger his own murder:
“The word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, secret oaths and secret proceedings. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence. It depends on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice.
“It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined, and its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no secret revealed.
“I am asking your help in the tremendous task of information and alerting the American people.”
Federal regulators have turned a blind eye to the massive risks of using mercury as the propellant in thousands of communication satellites slated for launch in the next few years, according to a complaint filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The complaint charges that unregulated orbital mercury emissions could reverse global progress in reducing mercury in the environment.
The complaint concerns a plan by an American company, Apollo Fusion, to use elemental mercury as a propellant in thrusters for satellites to be launched by communications companies taking advantage of the coming boom in satellite “mega-constellations” designed to provide global Internet broadband service starting in 2019. Under these plans, the approximately 1,500 satellites currently orbiting the planet will soon be increased nearly ten-fold.
Due to its high density, mercury is an excellent propellant. Apollo Fusion has developed thrusters using liquid mercury as the onboard propulsion to maintain altitude and adjust orbits. The liquid mercury is vaporized into a gas, ionized, and accelerated out of the thruster. Those mercury atoms will then drift down through the stratosphere to the earth’s surface, mostly onto the world’s oceans.
“Using mercury as a satellite propellant is a cosmically bad idea,” stated PEER Staff Counsel Kevin Bell, noting that while relatively cheap, commercial use of mercury is increasingly avoided due to its major adverse environmental effects. “Unfortunately, the FCC is focused solely on the satellite payload and bandwidth while ignoring the emissions and downstream consequences of what is launched.”
The complaint takes FCC to task for its decision to let satellite operators self-certify their technology will have no significant impact on human health or the environment, a practice contrary to federal law and treaty obligations. Currently, the FCC only examines satellite payload and its electromagnetic frequency. By contrast, U.S. law requires any federal agency to assess the full environmental impact of its actions.
Mercury is a potent bio-accumulative neurotoxin. A global treaty, The Minamata Convention, obligates its 128 signatories to take steps to reduce mercury releases. The U.S. was the first signatory. However, large-scale orbital discharge of mercury could reverse planetary progress in reducing mercury emissions. In addition, a launch pad explosion of a satellite carrying liquid mercury would, among other problems, severely contaminate the local area under a cloud of mercury mist.
“Federal regulators need to take steps now to prevent this nightmare scenario,” Bell added, pointing out that mercury emissions in low orbit are effectively equivalent to mercury emissions from a powerplant. “The U.S. has both treaty and moral obligations to prevent this eco-catastrophe from occurring.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Speech by Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology, Western Washington State University. This was delivered to the Washington State Senate – Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee on March 26, 2013.
He points out ‘scientific’ points – which question that the thesis that all ‘climate change’ is ‘man-made’.
“Despite no global warming in 10 years and recording setting cold in 2007-2008, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) and computer modelers who believe that CO2 is the cause of global warming still predict the Earth is in store for catastrophic warming in this century.
The IPCC computer models have predicted global warming which would cause global catastrophe with ramifications for human life, natural habitat, energy and water resources, and food production. All of this is predicated on the assumption that global warming is caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and that CO2 will continue to rise rapidly.” Don Easterbrook (excerpt from article below)
December 1st, 2018 by The Palestinian Information Center
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) overwhelmingly adopted on Friday evening five resolutions in support of Palestine and a sixth one on the Golan Heights.
The first resolution, titled Jerusalem, was adopted by the UNGA by a recorded vote of 148 in favor to 11 against with 14 abstentions.
The resolution reiterates that any actions by Israel to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem are illegal and therefore null and void. It also stresses the need for the parties to observe calm and restraint and to refrain from provocative actions and calls for respect for the historic status quo at Jerusalem’s holy places.
It also rejects the recent relocation by the United States of its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
The second resolution was related to the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. It called for exerting all efforts to promote the right to self‑determination of Palestinians and supporting the achievement of an end to Israeli occupation.
The third resolution, which was adopted by a recorded vote of 156 in favour to 8 against with 12 abstention, called for a final peace settlement to the Palestinian issue.
The fourth of those texts titled “Special information programme on the question of Palestine of the Department of Public Information of the Secretariat” would have the Assembly request the Department disseminate information on all the activities of the United Nations system relating to the question of Palestine and peace efforts.
The fifth one, titled “Division for Palestinian Rights of the Secretariat”, called on the Division to continue to monitor developments relevant to the question of Palestine.
Commenting on the voting, Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour said that
“by voting in favor of the five resolutions, the international community affirms its support of our national cause, despite the efforts made by the US administration in international forums to resist this.”
The UNGA also adopted a sixth resolution on the occupied Syrian Golan, demanding the withdrawal of Israel from all of the territory and affirming Syria’s sovereignty over it, in line with the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is literally trying to buy Indian Prime Minister Modi off by getting him to ditch his country’s energy imports from Iran in exchange for billions of dollars of Saudi investment, and there’s a plausible possibility that this subtly American-backed strategy could succeed.
Indian Prime Minister Modi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) met in Buenos Aires right before the beginning of the G20 Summit there, where the two world leaders discussed various forms of cooperation with one another. Reuters reported that MBS “would soon be finalizing an initial investment in India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, a quasi-sovereign wealth fund, to help accelerate the building of ports, highways and other projects”, and the outlet also quoted Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale as saying that
“The crown prince also referred to future projects for investments, in sectors such as tech, energy and farm.”
If the Crown Prince’s plans succeed, then they could catalyze far-reaching geopolitical consequences for India’s relations with Iran.
MBS is basically trying to buy Modi off by getting him to ditch his country’s energy imports from Iran in exchange for billions of dollars of Saudi investment, with the tech and agricultural spheres being extra strategic for sweetening the deal, especially at this specific moment in time. Modi is running for reelection in May 2019 so everything that he does up until then should be seen in this domestic political context. Accordingly, Saudi investments in India’s tech industry would promote Modi’s much-touted “Digital India” initiative, while analogous commitments to the country’s agricultural industry could ease some of the growing grassroots resistance to the ruling BJP by the ever-restless farmers’ 263 million voting bloc. Taken together, MBS could be the secret to Modi’s reelection.
None of this is coming without any strings attached or being pursued in the interests of advancing both countries’ vision of so-called “multi-alignment” because MBS would expect India to curtail and ultimately stop its imports of Iranian energy, replacing them with Saudi resources per a strategy subtly backed by the US. It should be remembered that the US waived anti-Iranian sanctions on India for purchasing these resources and also conducting trade along the Chabahar Corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia, though knowing what just transpired between MBS and Modi, it can be interpreted in hindsight that America might have been buying time for its Saudi “frenemies” to make India a “deal that it can’t refuse”, especially in the sensitive context of the South Asian state’s upcoming elections.
There’s a plausible possibility that India will go along with this scheme in order to advance its leadership’s own self-interests, but also because of the masterful coordination between “bad cop” America and “good cop” Saudi Arabia, both of which have the shared goal of gradually weaning India off of Iranian energy imports without risking its domestic destabilization as a result of skyrocketing prices or other unintended consequences. The Kingdom’s investment carrot perfectly complement’s Trump’s sanctions stick, but the success of this tacitly anti-Iranian tag team maneuver could understandably raise suspicions of India’s long-term strategic intent in Tehran. It’s already disturbing enough for Iran that India is now allied with “Israel”, but succumbing to the Wahhabi Kingdom’s connivances might be the final straw.
Unlike Saudi Arabia’s promised investment in CPEC which is premised on the win-win paradigm of simultaneously enhancing its relations with Iran’s Chinese and Pakistani partners, its potential investments in India are basically a big bribe to Modi to get him to distance himself from the Islamic Republic, first in the energy sense and potentially even when it comes to commercial connectivity with Central Asia via the Chabahar Corridor. This latter objective might be at variance with the US’ own, but it could possibly be pulled off if Iranian suspicions of Indian intent set off a chain reaction of developments that inadvertently strengthen the Golden Ring of multipolar Great Powers by making it politically impossible for Tehran to continue cooperating with New Delhi on this project.
Unexpectedly, Saudi Arabia’s anti-Iranian bribe to India might therefore unwittingly end up being to its rival’s geopolitical benefit, especially if Tehran intensifies its strategic partnership with Islamabad in response to Riyadh’s relations with New Delhi prompting Modi to curtail his country’s import of Iranian resources with a wink and a nod from Washington. With India possibly being kept out of the Golden Ring’s Central Asian Heartland after Iran reconsiders the wisdom of facilitating its entry into this region through the Chabahar Corridor following New Delhi’s possibly forthcoming decision to decrease its energy imports from the Islamic Republic, Eurasian stability could more solidly be assured, so in a sense, there are indeed some multipolar proponents who might silently hope that Modi accepts MBS’ bribe and all that it entails.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
There are about 15,000 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists in the province of Idlib and Russia is ready to provide the Syrian government with help to eliminate them, Alexander Lavrentiev, Russian presidential envoy for Syria, announced during a press conference on the sidelines of the Astana talks on November 29.
Meanwhile, reports are appearing that radical militants have been amassing forces and deploying missiles as part of the preparation for a confrontation with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the demilitarized zone.
On November 29, there was another notable armed confrontation between the SAA and the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL) in northern Hama. NFL units attacked SAA positions near Karnaz but were forced to withdraw under intense artillery fire. The area near the Christian town of Mahardah is also point of constant clashes between the SAA and various militant groups.
The entire concept of the Idlib demilitarized zone has appeared to be flawed. On the one hand, Ankara is preventing the SAA from launching an advance on Idlib to deliver a devastating blow to the terrorists. On the other hand, Turkey and its proxies have done nothing to eliminate al-Qaeda and its allies within the deconfliction area.
From its turn, Syria, Iran and Russia have kept a wait-and-see stance and attempted to propel a settlement of the Idlib issue through the existing military diplomatic channels. The problem of this approach that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and similar groups have used the gained time to regroup and resupply their forces. Now, the terrorists are more capable of countering a possible SAA advance than a few months ago.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continue their low-intensity advance on ISIS positions in the Hajin pocket. No progress on the ground has been achieved recently, but the US-led coalition bombed an ISIS prison, where SDF members captured by ISIS were held.
The ISIS-linked news agency Amaq released a video to confirm the incident. A notable number of SDF members was captured by the terrorist group during its large counter-attack against the SDF in early November.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister as well as Defense Minister, Foreign Minister and Health Minister of the “only democracy” in the Middle East, declared that “the best answer to anti-Semitism is the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces”. These remarks were made in response to a CNN poll, which showed that more than 28% of Europeans believe that anti-Jewish sentiments in their countries are mostly fueled by the actions of the Israeli leadership itself.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Until five years ago, Fethullah Gülen and Turkey’s President Erdogan were allies who supported each other. Both use Islam as the basis for their doctrine, which made them ideologically different from the revolutionary secularist statesman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the new Republic of Turkey in 1923.
That said, historically, the two Islamic orientations of Erdogan and Gülen were at odds with each other. The Gülen-inspired Hizmet (“service”) movement assumes and practices a Sufi version of Islam open to dialogue with other religions and believes in bottom-up change through education. Conversely, Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) Party embraced political Islam mostly adopted from the early Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, believing in top-to-bottom change, which they effectuated by usurping authority and forcing people to change through the state powers.
In 2011, Erdogan founded the AK Party; in the following year’s election the Party won a relative majority and Erdogan became the Prime Minister. His commitment to make Turkey a model of Islamic democracy coupled with economic development and socio-political reforms earned him overwhelming support of the Turkish people, including the followers of Gülen.
During the following seven years, he first focused on inclusive economic development to meet the dire needs of the poor and less educated constituency, which comprises nearly half of the Turkish population. As economic development was underway, he embarked on social and democratic reforms, including the subordination of the military to civilian authority and recognition of minority rights, including those of Turkish Kurds. His ability to deliver on these critical fronts allowed him to consolidate his power and move to the next phase to promote his Islamic agenda.
These initial reforms created a high level of confidence and trust in the AK Party rule among Turkish people together with the Hizmet movement, believing that the AK Party would rein in corruption and institute democratic reforms that were denied by previous Turkish governments.
For Erdogan, as he himself stated, ‘democracy is like a train; once you reach your destination you get off.’ His best cover was the continuing membership negotiations with the EU, albeit there was no prospect that Turkey would become an EU member state, nor was he negotiating in good faith as that would be inconsistent with his Islamic agenda.
Conversely, the Hizmet movement has no formal structure, no visible organization, and no official membership, yet it has grown into the world’s biggest Muslim network. Hizmet is dedicated to promoting development projects and education for the common good. Gülen’s supporters maintain that they simply work together in a loosely affiliated alliance inspired by the message of Mr. Gülen.
Since his self-imposed exile in 1999, Gülen has built up an impressive business empire. “His network of media outlets in Turkey and abroad had become increasingly powerful; his schools were grooming the next generation… his banks facilitated the movement and transfer of funds…where some countries’ financial affairs are governed by Islamic principles”, reported Deutsche Welle. Despite Erdogan’s crackdown on Gülen’s finances, thousands of businesses in and outside Turkey, as well as hundreds of thousands of followers, continue to contribute handsomely to the financing of Hizmet.
Fethullah Gülen left Turkey in 1999 at a time when he was under investigation for undermining the government, which at that point was still firmly under the control of Turkey’s secular elite and backed up by the military. In 2000, he was found guilty, in absentia, of scheming to overthrow the government, by embedding civil servants in various governmental offices – an indictment which he vehemently denies that would come back to haunt him later under Erdogan.
Prior to 1999, Gulen operated within a constitutionally secular Turkey, and his followers have for the past four decades spread throughout Turkey’s institutions. His advocates call him the ‘guru of moderate Islam’, marked by his humanitarianism while he was promoting his ideology through a network of high-achieving schools in Turkey and in about 140 countries. Whereas Gülen educated the youth with sciences and foreign languages, Erdogan was not as keen about education which mirrors his base, largely comprised of the poor and less educated.
Erdogan never trusted Gülen, but initially decided to cooperate with him in order to gain the support of his followers. But once he solidified his base and gradually assumed dictatorial powers through constitutional amendments, he was then in a position to do away with his rivals – chief among them Gülen – to realize his long-awaited “Caliphate” dream while resurrecting elements of the Ottoman Empire.
Erdogan’s intentions were to exert influence on governments around the world, especially in Africa and Central Asia, to close Gülen-affiliated schools in their countries. “When we look at Erdogan’s own statements and the documents unearthed in recent years, we can easily say that Erdogan has never liked… Gülen”, says Sitki Ozcan, a US-based reporter for Zaman Amerika.
Aydogan Vatandas, an investigative journalist from Turkey, says that the main reason that the leadership of the Gülen movement failed to see Erdogan’s real ambitions was due to their belief that subordinating the military to civilian authority and limiting the influence of the judiciary would not have a dramatic adverse effect on Turkish democracy. “It was wrong to believe that weakening these institutions would lead to the emergence of a democracy.” According to him, Erdogan has already consolidated his power to reshape the society, which led to the entire cleansing of the Gülen movement from Turkish society.
Since the failed military coup in July 2016, nearly 445,000 people have been the subject of legal proceedings on bogus charges of membership in the Gülen movement, including judges, teachers, police officers, and journalists, while snatching over 100 alleged members of the Gülen movement from other countries.
Nazmi Ulus, the Gülen movement’s representative in Kosovo, said that although the movement maintains their schools (Mehmet Akif Colleges) and is sustaining their activities, they no longer feel safe anymore, especially in light of Erdogan’s kidnapping of six Turks living in Kosovo in March. “Considering the people of Kosovo, yes we can say we are safe, but again considering the self-assertion… and also the ability [of Erdogan to blackmail and]… operate in the region, it is impossible to say yes, we are safe”.
Although Erdogan was able to nearly destroy the Hizmet movement in Turkey, hundreds of thousands of followers are still fully but quietly entrenched in private and government institutions and are well-embedded in scores of countries, including the US, which are beyond his reach.
The rivalry between Erdogan and Gülen suggests that despite Erdogan’s efforts to decimate the Hizmet movement, he will end up on the losing side. The majority of the Turkish population has suffered greatly from his purges and gross human rights abuses; coupled with an alarming deterioration of the economy, he has become increasingly unpopular.
Unlike Erdogan, to whom history will not be kind, however, Fethullah Gülen enjoys a non-elected position and will remain deeply revered by his followers as long as he lives and beyond. His socially-oriented Islamic philosophy and humanitarian services will certainly outlive Erdogan’s political Islam, which may well diminish once he leaves the political scene.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com
Arbana Xharra authored a series of investigative reports on religious extremists and Turkey’s Islamic agenda operating in the Balkans. She has won numerous awards for her reporting, and was a 2015 recipient of the International Women of Courage Award from the US State Department.
It was to be expected. Some G20 leaders treated Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) like nothing happened in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate on October 2.
They ignored Riyadh’s genocidal war in Yemen (in cahoots with the US, UAE and other countries), pretending horrendous Saudi domestic human rights abuses and cross-border atrocities are a non-issue.
Various world leaders met with MBS on the G20’s sidelines and/or greeted him publicly one-on-one – including Trump, Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Theresa May, France’s Emmanuel Macron, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, South Korea’s Moon Jae-in, Mexico’s Enrique Nieto, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and perhaps others – eager for Saudi oil, investments, and purchases of what they’re eager to sell the Saudis.
Putin’s public greeting of MBS was a disturbing moment, nothing to be proud of, warranting harsh criticism and disdain.
Some, maybe most, world leaders in Buenos Aires tried distancing themselves publicly from MBS.
For them, he’s an unwelcome skunk at G20 garden party proceedings, sidelined for the family photo, standing at its far edge, who’d be willing to stand next to him, exiting the stage without shaking hands or talking with other leaders when taken.
Publicly he stayed largely on the periphery, most leaders likely uncomfortable about being photographed near him, let alone shaking hands and chatting amiably with a universally reviled despot.
Vladimir Putin greeted him warmly, caught on camera smiling with a high-five. Sputnik News said their public exchange “st(ole) the show at the G20…the video of their greeting going viral” online.
RT reported on the unsettling exchange, adding “(a)s the leaders were lining up for a traditional ‘family photo’, Trump was seen walking towards Putin – but at the last possible moment, the feed was cut to a closer shot of a different group.”
“The wide shot was back a few moments later, when Trump was already in his spot further down the line.”
Source: France 24
In greeting MBS on Friday, Putin opted for diplomatic graciousness instead of going out of his way to avoid him, the right thing to do, a ruthless tyrant, unaccountable for egregious high crimes – ongoing in Yemen, Syria, domestically and elsewhere while G20 leaders schmoozed in Buenos Aires.
France’s Macron acted like Putin and Trump, caught on camera chatting amiably with MBS, others likely doing it more discretely.
Realpolitik took precedence over honor and high-mindedness the way it most always does, disturbing scenes caught on camera indelibly etched in my mind, many others likely viewing them with disdain.
Ordering Jamal Khashoggi’s murder was a drop in the ocean compared to MBS’ Nuremberg-level crimes in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere in the region, its support for ISIS and likeminded jihadists, along with notorious domestic human and civil rights abuses – horrific enough to make many world leaders blush.
MBS is the Arab world’s most ruthless tyrant, not an issue for Putin, Macron, Trump, and others, greeting him like a close friend, an ordinary guy, far from it.
Other leaders were more circumspect, at least publicly, keeping their distance, cordiality with MBS on camera avoided.
Behind the scenes it’s another matter for some, meetings held with the crown prince – unannounced or made known in advance.
He was sidelined at the official family photo, largely ignored when taken, leaving the scene without shaking hands or other exchanges with G20 leaders.
Putin, Macron, Trump, and perhaps several other G20 leaders acted otherwise, caught on camera greeting MBS warmly, a figure to be shunned, rebuked, and held accountable for his high crimes.
Russia largely refrained from criticizing Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi’s murder, Sergey Lavrov saying:
“It is essential to complete the investigation as soon as possible. We note that the Saudi authorities are carrying out this investigation and note that they are cooperating with the Turkish authorities. We will wait for the final verdict to be delivered.”
Putin earlier said he lacked information about the murder, adding he won’t alter bilateral relations with the kingdom over it. Reportedly he met privately with MBS on Saturday.
The kingdom repeatedly lied about Khashoggi’s murder before admitting responsibility for what happened.
Claiming MBS had nothing to do with it was and remains a bald-faced lie. Riyadh investigating itself assures whitewash and coverup, convenient patsies to take the fall for his crime.
For Russia, the US, UK, France, and other countries, continuing dirty business as usual with the kingdom overrides all else.
Trump, Putin, and other G20 leaders refused to demand MBS be held accountable for his high crimes – Nuremberg-level ones far worse than Khashoggi’s murder.
As the saying goes, when lying with dogs, you get fleas. Treating war criminals like law-abiding figures shares guilt with their high crimes.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
Akhtar, a political scientist and self-confessed left-wing activist, documents the development of political power in Pakistan that with the military dictatorship in the 1980s of General Zia ul-Haq ended an era of more liberal and left-wing politics and put the country on a path of right-wing religious ultra-conservatism from which it has yet to deviate. In tracking that development, Akhtar’s book makes a significant contribution by focussing not only on its ideological but also its economic aspects as well as the religious right’s appeal to urban shopkeepers and traders. He projects the religious right as a vehicle for subordinate classes to access the state and claim a stake in status quo politics.
Akhtar’s contribution with this book is also his analysis of the waning of counter-hegemonic and transformative politics in Pakistan. Akhtar notes that the perceived benefits of carving out a stake in a patronage-based system far outstrip the cost and risk of efforts to transform the system. It is that cost-benefit analysis that has given Pakistan politics resilience and undergird a system in which religion is the ultimate source of legitimacy at the expense of any opposition to class and state power. In looking at how subordinate classes cope through the politics of common sense, Akhtar’s book represents a significant and innovative addition to the study not only of Pakistan but of an era in which religious, nationalist and populist forces are on the rise.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
On November 28, sixty-three U.S. Senators voted in favor of holding a floor debate on a resolution calling for an end to direct U.S. Armed Forces involvement in the Saudi-UAE coalition-led war on Yemen. Describing the vote as a rebuke to Saudi Arabia and the Trump Administration, AP reported on Senate dissatisfaction over the administration’s response to Saudi Arabia’s brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi last month. Just before the Senate vote, Secretary of State Mike Pompeocalled current objections to U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia “Capitol Hill caterwauling and media pile-on.”
The “caterwaul” on Capitol Hill reflects years of determined effort by grassroots groups to end U.S. involvement in war on Yemen, fed by mounting international outrage at the last three years of war that have caused the deaths of an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under age five.
When children waste away to literally nothing while fourteen million people endure conflict-driven famine, a hue and cry—yes, a caterwaul —most certainly should be raised, worldwide.
How might we understand what it would mean in the United States for fourteen million people in our country to starve? You would have to combine the populations of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and imagine these cities empty of all but the painfully and slowly dying, to get a glimpse into the suffering in Yemen, where one of every two personsfaces starvation.
Antiwar activists have persistently challenged elected representatives to acknowledge and end the horrible consequences of modern warfare in Yemen where entire neighborhoods have been bombed, displacing millions of people; daily aerial attacks have directly targeted Yemen’s infrastructure, preventing delivery of food, safe water, fuel, and funds. The war crushes people through aerial bombing and on-the-ground fighting as well as an insidious economic war.
Yemenis are strangled by import restrictions and blockades, causing non-payment of government salaries, inflation, job losses, and declining or disappearing incomes. Even when food is available, ordinary Yemenis cannot afford it.
Starvation is being used as a weapon of war—by Saudi Arabia, by the United Arab Emirates, and by the superpower patrons including the United States that arm and manipulate both countries.
*
During the thirteen years of economic sanctions against Iraq— those years between the Gulf War and the devastating U.S.-led “Shock and Awe” war that followed—I joined U.S. and U.K. activists traveling to Iraq in public defiance of the economic sanctions.
We aimed to resist U.S.- and U.K.-driven policies that weakened the Iraqi regime’s opposition more than they weakened Saddam Hussein. Ostensibly democratic leaders were ready to achieve their aims by brutally sacrificing children under age five. The children died first by the hundreds, then by the thousands and eventually by the hundreds of thousands. Sitting in a Baghdad pediatric ward, I heard a delegation member, a young nurse from the U.K., begin to absorb the cruelty inflicted on mothers and children.
“I think I understand,” murmured Martin Thomas, “It’s a death row for infants.”
Children gasped their last breaths while their parents suffered a pile-up of anguish, wave after wave. We should remain haunted by those children’s short lives.
The Iraq children died amid an eerie and menacing silence on the part of mainstream media and most elected U.S. officials. No caterwauling was heard on Capitol Hill. But, worldwide, people began to know that children were paying the price of abysmally failed policies, and millions of people opposed the 2003 Shock and Awe war.
Still the abusive and greedy policies continue. The U.S. and its allies built up permanent warfare states to secure consistent exploitation of resources outside their own territories.
During and after the Arab Spring, numerous Yemenis resisted dangerously unfair austerity measures that the Gulf Cooperation Council and the U.S. insisted they must accept. Professor Isa Blumi, who notes that generations of Yemeni fighters have refused to acquiesce to foreign invasion and intervention, presents evidence that Saudi Arabia and the UAE now orchestrate war on Yemen to advance their own financial interests.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, Blumi states that although Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman wants to author an IPO (Initial Public Offering), for the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, no major investors would likely participate. Investment firms know the Saudis pay cash for their imports, including billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, because they are depleting resources within their own territory. This, in part, explains the desperate efforts to take over Yemen’s offshore oil reserves and other strategic assets.
Recent polls indicate that most Americans don’t favor U.S. war on Yemen. Surely, our security is not enhanced if the U.S. continues to structure its foreign policy on fear, prejudice, greed, and overwhelming military force. The movements that pressured the U.S. Senate to reject current U.S. foreign policy regarding Saudi Arabia and its war on Yemen will continue raising voices. Collectively, we’ll work toward raising the lament, pressuring the media and civil society to insist that slaughtering children will never solve problems.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Kathy Kelly is Co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
CNN reports last week that: “The Trump administration is set to accuse Iran of violating the international treaty that bars the use of chemical weapons.
The White House notified lawmakers on Friday that it would declare Iran is violating the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention because it has kept the equipment and facilities needed to produce them, not because it is actively making or using such weapons.
Two senior US officials tell CNN that the charge will not trigger immediate penalties, but could be used as justification to file claims against Iran with international organizations going forward.”
P News Washington also reports that the announcement:
“is part of the administration’s effort to isolate Iran after withdrawing from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal in May and earlier this month re-imposing all U.S. sanctions that had been eased under the accord. President Donald Trump and his top national security aides have vowed to impose a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran to force it to halt destabilizing activities in the Middle East and beyond.”
For those of you that have read the newspapers and watched the horrors of America’s middle east slaughter, this comes straight out of the standard Washington regime change playbook.
Like Iraq and Syria before it, first comes the outraged human rights violations rhetoric we have become so used to, then the debilitating sanctions and international “pariah status” afforded to them – absolutely free of charge. For the final push comes unfounded chemical attack claims, a charge now being formally prepped and set in motion against Tehran by America and the West.
We have heard all this before, haven’t we? There is no doubt that Iran is attempting to assert itself in the Middle East. There should be no doubt it has used some terrible strategies and tactics in its aims to do so, but still, don’t most countries do that?
After the AP first revealed a week ago that the U.S. is set to accuse Iran of violating international bans on chemical weapons, an American diplomat has told the global chemical weapons agency in The Hague that Tehran has not declared all of its chemical weapons capabilities.
In Britain, we had the highly publicised Chilcot report. Sir John Chilcotsaid (rather charitably):
“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
The report criticised the way in which Tony Blair made the case for Britain to go to war. It was a false case, based on lies and the deception that Iraq had chemical weapons. It did not.
For ravaged, riven, destroyed Iraq, the Chilcot report did nothing. Lessons were not learned. We then enthusiastically engaged in Syria and in cold blood, willfully attacked Libya. Since then, British foreign policy and diplomacy in such matters has all but been destroyed by the Brexit debate.
Tony Blair, aided by the security services (on both sides of the Atlantic) and a totally complaint mainstream media took Britain into a catastrophic war which later led to the unleashing of al-Qaeda and Islamic State and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians along the way. It also led to slaughter on the streets of Britain – our compensation being the crushing of civil liberties and a 360-degree surveillance state in the name of ‘national security’.
The Chilcot report also said Blair presented a dossier to the House of Commons that did not support his claim that Iraq had a growing programme of chemical and biological weapons. In other words, Blair lied. The action of the security services and compliance of the so-called ‘free-press’ were just as guilty of this maniacal cry for the culling of the innocent.
The population of Iraq is about 38 million. America’s attack was a human catastrophe, can you imagine what the same attack would look like with Iran’s population of 82 million who posses a real army and defences. It would literally be a bloodbath.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
Fifty-eight years ago, a car-bomb exploded in Washington killing Chile’s ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, an act of state terrorism that the CIA and its director George H.W. Bush tried to cover up, Robert Parry reported on Sept. 23, 2000.
In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.
The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.
In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.
The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.
In the report, the CIA also acknowledged publicly for the first time that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination. The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the murders and included that suspicion in an internal cable the same month.
“CIA’s first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October 1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing, the CIA disclosed.
Nevertheless, the CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.
Image on the right: Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, murdered when right-wing terrorists blew up his car in Washington on Sept. 21, 1976. (Wikipedia)
Relying on the word of Bush’s CIA, Newsweek reported that “the Chilean secret police were not involved” in the Letelier assassination. “The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.” [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]
Bush, who later became the 41st president of the United States (and is the father of the 43rd president), has never explained his role in putting out the false cover story that diverted attention away from the real terrorists. Nor has Bush explained what he knew about the Chilean intelligence operation in the weeks before Letelier and Moffitt were killed.
Dodging Disclosure
As a Newsweek correspondent in 1988, a dozen years after the Letelier bombing, when the elder Bush was running for president, I prepared a detailed story about Bush’s handling of the Letelier case.
The draft story included the first account from U.S. intelligence sources that Contreras was a CIA asset in the mid-1970s. I also learned that the CIA had consulted Contreras about the Letelier assassination, information that the CIA then would not confirm.
The sources told me that the CIA sent its Santiago station chief, Wiley Gilstrap, to talk with Contreras after the bombing. Gilstrap then cabled back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Contreras’s assurances that the Chilean government was not involved. Contreras told Gilstrap that the most likely killers were communists who wanted to make a martyr out of Letelier.
My story draft also described how Bush’s CIA had been forewarned in 1976 about DINA’s secret plans to send agents, including the assassin Michael Townley, into the United States on false passports.
Image below: Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in a meeting at the White House on Feb. 12, 1981. (Reagan Library)
Upon learning of this strange mission, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, George Landau, cabled Bush about Chile’s claim that Townley and another agent were traveling to CIA headquarters for a meeting with Bush’s deputy, Vernon Walters. Landau also forwarded copies of the false passports to the CIA.
Walters cabled back that he was unaware of any scheduled appointment with these Chilean agents. Landau immediately canceled the visas, but Townley simply altered his plans and continued on his way to the United States. After arriving, he enlisted some right-wing Cuban-Americans in the Letelier plot and went to Washington to plant the bomb under Letelier’s car.
The CIA has never explained what action it took, if any, after receiving Landau’s warning. A natural follow-up would have been to contact DINA and ask what was afoot or whether a message about the trip had been misdirected. The CIA report in 2000 made no mention of these aspects of the case.
After the assassination, Bush promised the CIA’s full cooperation in tracking down the Letelier-Moffitt killers. But instead the CIA took contrary actions, such as planting the false exoneration and withholding evidence that would have implicated the Chilean junta.
“Nothing the agency gave us helped us to break this case,” said federal prosecutor Eugene Propper in a 1988 interview for the story I was drafting for Newsweek. The CIA never volunteered Ambassador Landau’s cable about the suspicious DINA mission nor copies of the fake passports that included a photo of Townley, the chief assassin. Nor did Bush’s CIA divulge its knowledge of the existence of Operation Condor.
FBI agents in Washington and Latin America broke the case two years later. They discovered Operation Condor on their own and tracked the assassination back to Townley and his accomplices in the United States.
In 1988, as then-Vice President Bush was citing his CIA work as an important part of his government experience, I submitted questions to him asking about his actions in the days before and after the Letelier bombing. Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, wrote back, saying Bush “will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”
As it turned out, the Bush campaign had little to fear from my discoveries. When I submitted my story draft – with its exclusive account of Contreras’s role as a CIA asset – Newsweek’s editors refused to run the story. Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas told me that Editor Maynard Parker even had accused me of being “out to get Bush.”
The CIA’s Admission
Twenty-four years after the Letelier assassination and 12 years after Newsweek killed the first account of the Contreras-CIA relationship, the CIA admitted that it had paid Contreras as an intelligence asset and consulted with him about the Letelier assassination.
Still, in the sketchy report in 2000, the spy agency sought to portray itself as more victim than accomplice. According to the report, the CIA was internally critical of Contreras’s human rights abuses and skeptical about his credibility. The CIA said its skepticism predates the spy agency’s contact with him about the Letelier-Moffitt murders.
“The relationship, while correct, was not cordial and smooth, particularly as evidence of Contreras’ role in human rights abuses emerged,” the CIA reported. “In December 1974, the CIA concluded that Contreras was not going to improve his human rights performance. …
“By April 1975, intelligence reporting showed that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta, but an interagency committee [within the Ford administration] directed the CIA to continue its relationship with Contreras.”
The CIA report added that “a one-time payment was given to Contreras” in 1975, a time frame when the CIA was first hearing about Operation Condor, a cross-border program run by South America’s military dictatorships to hunt down dissidents living in other countries.
“CIA sought from Contreras information regarding evidence that emerged in 1975 of a formal Southern Cone cooperative intelligence effort – ‘Operation Condor’ – building on informal cooperation in tracking and, in at least a few cases, killing political opponents. By October 1976, there was sufficient information that the CIA decided to approach Contreras on the matter. Contreras confirmed Condor’s existence as an intelligence-sharing network but denied that it had a role in extra-judicial killings.”
Also, in October 1976, the CIA said it “worked out” how it would assist the FBI in its investigation of the Letelier assassination, which had occurred the previous month. The spy agency’s report offered no details of what it did, however. The report added only that Contreras was already a murder suspect by fall 1976.
“At that time, Contreras’ possible role in the Letelier assassination became an issue,” the CIA’s report said. “By the end of 1976, contacts with Contreras were very infrequent.”
Even though the CIA came to recognize the likelihood that DINA was behind the Letelier assassination, there never was any indication that Bush’s CIA sought to correct the false impression created by its leaks to the news media asserting DINA’s innocence.
Image on the right: Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Reagan Library)
After Bush left the CIA with Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, the spy agency distanced itself from Contreras, the new report said.
“During 1977, CIA met with Contreras about half a dozen times; three of those contacts were to request information on the Letelier assassination,” the CIA report said.
“On 3 November 1977, Contreras was transferred to a function unrelated to intelligence so the CIA severed all contact with him,” the report added. “After a short struggle to retain power, Contreras resigned from the Army in 1978. In the interim, CIA gathered specific, detailed intelligence reporting concerning Contreras’ involvement in ordering the Letelier assassination.”
Remaining Mysteries
Though the CIA report in 2000 contained the first official admission of a relationship with Contreras, it shed no light on the actions of Bush and his deputy, Walters, in the days before and after the Letelier assassination. It also offered no explanation why Bush’s CIA planted false information in the American press clearing Chile’s military dictatorship.
While providing the 21-page summary on its relationship with Chile’s military dictatorship, the CIA refused to release documents from a quarter century earlier on the grounds that the disclosures might jeopardize the CIA’s “sources and methods.” The refusal came in the face of President Bill Clinton’s specific order to release as much information as possible.
Perhaps the CIA was playing for time. With CIA headquarters officially named the George Bush Center for Intelligence and with veterans of the Reagan-Bush years still dominating the CIA’s hierarchy, the spy agency might have hoped that the election of Texas Gov. George W. Bush would free it from demands to open up records to the American people.
For his part, former President George H.W. Bush declared his intent to take a more active role in campaigning for his son’s election. In Florida on Sept. 22, 2000, Bush said he was “absolutely convinced” that if his son is elected president, “we will restore the respect, honor and decency that the White House deserves.”
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
When evaluating the behavior of a sociopath, what constitutes success and failure can prove quite challenging. The US wars against Syria and Iraq were largely failures, as Washington failed to oust Assad and also failed to install a puppet government in Baghdad, which is now allied with Iran. The destruction of Yugoslavia was a resounding success, as the country was balkanized according to plan, the Serbs vilified, and liberal opinion was enthusiastically in favor of the “humanitarian intervention.”
It is conceivable that the Pentagon would regard the interventions in Afghanistan and Libya as a success, as throwing Libya into chaos, while maintaining a state of protracted civil war in Afghanistan could have been part of a deliberate strategy. What we can be certain of, is that the complete and utter loss of any moral credibility, coupled with the anger and de-dollarization that this has instigated, threaten the Empire, which is resorting to greater acts of violence and barbarism in order to retain hegemony.
In the never-ending quest for enemies, making Russia an antagonist is fraught with tremendous peril. Indeed, if the demonization of Putin follows the demonization of Milošević, Osama bin Laden (good for bombing almost any country), Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad the United States and Russia may very well be engaged in a hot war at some point in the not too distant future. Is the unthinkable soon to be a reality?
In an article in The National Interest titled “America and Russia: Back to Basics,” Graham Allison writes,
“However demonic, however destructive, however devious, however deserving of being strangled Russia is, the brute fact is that we cannot kill this bastard without committing suicide.”
That a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government could express such a crude hatred of Russians, is indicative of a virulent Russophobia that has become institutionalized, and is being relentlessly fomented by both academia and the mass media. That Poroshenko, when speaking of the Ukrainian army victory that drove the anti-fascist forces from Slovyansk, could refer to them as “gangs of animals” underscores the fact that when it comes to Russia neoliberals, neocons, and neo-Nazis are all marching to the tune of the same drummer.
The revival of Nazism in Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent Europe generally, serves the interests of the Empire, as Nazis exist first and foremost not to kill Jews per se, but to invade Russia. This revival of Nazism also constitutes a war on the past, as monuments honoring the Soviet victory over fascism are defaced, such as the monument to Red Army general Nikolai Vatutin, who liberated Kiev from the Nazis.
A monument to the obliterated Polish village of Huta Pieniacka in Lviv, which was destroyed by Ukrainian fascist collaborators during the Second World War, has not only been defaced, but destroyed beyond repair. The monument served as a memorial to the nine hundred Poles that lost their lives, with many residents being burnt alive in their homes and inside a Catholic church. In what is nothing short of a satanic image, only two stone blocks remain, one of which has been painted with the colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army flag, together with SS Bolts, an emblem popular with the SS. Now nothing remains of the town except this unconscionable desecration and the howling of the winds.
Following the Washington-backed Maidan coup, Petro Symonenko, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, denounced the criminal behavior of the Banderites and was physically attacked in the middle of the Rada. Indeed, the West has not only supported a resurgence of Nazism in Ukraine, but also in the Baltics, as marches held by Latvian SS veterans, previously outlawed during the Soviet Union, have become commonplace.
Russophobe extraordinaire Hillary Clinton has gone so far as to compare the reunification of Crimea and Russia with the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. Unlike sophisticated Americans who know what real democracy is, Crimeans now enjoy free medical care, having returned to their ancestral homeland. An impressive new terminal in the Simferopol Airport, an enormous new mosque currently under construction in Simferopol for the Crimean Tatars (allegedly suffering terrible persecution following “the annexation”), and an extraordinary new nineteen kilometer bridge across the Kerch Strait that has connected the Crimean Peninsula with the Krasnodar Region of mainland Russia, are just a few of the other chilling horrors wrought by this brutal military occupation.
Young people in Western Ukraine are being brainwashed to hate Russians in a manner reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, while children in the Donbass walk to and from school hoping that they won’t get killed by shelling from the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As children in the Donbass are ethnic Russians and regarded as subhuman, both by the Banderite regime and enlightened Western liberals, all is forgiven. For the brave Anna Tuv and many other Donbass residents, the deadly shells met their mark, killing and maiming loved ones.
Ominously, NATO drills on Russia’s western border have become increasingly menacing in size and scope. As Sergei Shoigu, Defense Minister of the Russian Federation, has pointed out,
“NATO’s military activity near our borders has reached an unprecedented level since the Cold War.”
The decision on the part of the Trump administration to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), signed by Gorbachev and Reagan in 1987, and which banned short-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles, has destroyed what was left of the Kremlin’s trust in Washington. This follows the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 – also done unilaterally and despite Russian protests – and which was likewise a lynchpin for maintaining global security. The INF formerly gave Russians a certain peace of mind, knowing that if an ICBM were launched from the US, it would take approximately thirty minutes to reach Russia, giving them time to evaluate whether the perceived threat were real or imagined, and allowing for a window with which to respond accordingly. Without the INF, a nuclear warhead launched from Poland or Romania could reach a major Russian city in a fraction of the time. Moreover, this also places Europe at risk of a retaliatory strike. Clearly, abolishing these treaties has dramatically heightened tensions and will unleash an arms race.
As Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of Russia’s National Defense Magazine, and other Russian analysts have noted, Washington appears to no longer be cognizant of the nuclear winter and mutually assured destruction that would unequivocally follow a nuclear war. Russians also see through the lies of American diplomats, who have repeatedly attempted to deceive Moscow, arguing that abrogation of the ABM and INF treaties are a necessary countermeasure to contain security threats from Iran, China, and North Korea. In an article on The Heritage Foundation website titled “Trump Right to Consider Pulling Out of INF Treaty,” the author writes that, “As challenges arise in the Pacific involving China and potentially North Korea, the INF Treaty prevents the United States from being able to freely develop and deploy our military capabilities to the fullest extent possible in support of our national security interests.” Some Russian analysts, such as socialist Semyon Bagdasarov, have argued that Russia should stop turning the other cheek and use her military to liberate Ukraine from the Banderite regime.
Furthermore, the idea that the Russian elite is concerned with who is elected president of the United States is an erroneous one, for as Putin has noted, they are acutely aware of the fact that US foreign policies remain unchanged regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. This underscores the fact that Russiagate is a lamentable and pitiful hoax.
Despite the mass media’s hysterical Russophobia and hatred of Putin, the fact is that the “annexation of Crimea” and the Russian military intervention in Syria, were both done legally and in accordance with the will of the people. This is in contrast with the endless chain of bloody US interventions, which have resulted in the destruction of so many countries over the past fifty years that it is difficult to keep track of all of them.
During the Cold War relations between Moscow and Washington were fraught with considerably less suspicion and hostility than they are today. Following the Salisbury attacks, the remarks of the British Defense Secretary, Gavin Williamson, that “Russia should go away and should shut up” would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, where certain norms of etiquette and diplomatic language were observed. This more respectful and professional state of relations between the two superpowers helped prevent a nuclear exchange on more than one occasion. With tensions between Washington and Moscow having reached unprecedented heights, the potential for deadly miscommunications that were formerly averted without incident, may not be resolved so peacefully in the future. In “Crazed US Presstitutes Drive The World To Nuclear War,” Paul Craig Roberts writes:
Humanity has on numerous occasions narrowly missed nuclear Armageddon. Each time it was averted by military officers, both American and Soviet, who understood that the relations between the US and the Soviet Union were not that strained. Today this situation has been radically altered by the corrupt American media, Democratic Party, and military/security complex, who, acting in behalf of Hillary’s political interest and the greed of the armaments industry, have demonized Russia and her president to the extent that malfunctioning warning systems or a temper tantrum of a crazed politician are likely to result in a fatal launch.
As tensions mount, the mainstream press, instead of attempting to report objectively on US-Russia relations, has resorted to greater and greater manifestations of Russophobia. In an article in The Huffington Post, by David Wood, titled “This is How The Next World War Starts,” the author writes,
“By now, it is widely recognized that Russia is waging a campaign of covert political manipulation across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, fueling fears of a second Cold War.”
This is “widely recognized” by who? By our mass media sycophants that will write any Russophobic nonsense to please their corporate masters, apparently. Moreover, the second Cold War began with Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. It is also irrefutable that this new Cold War is infinitely more dangerous than the first.
Russians are growing increasingly exasperated with the relentless vilification of their country by the Western elites and mass media. From blaming the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Russia before an investigation had even begun, to the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats, to the demonization of Michael Flynn for meeting with the Russian ambassador and advocating for detente, to the propaganda associated with the Salisbury poisonings, to the ludicrous accusations that Russia hacked the election, to blaming Russia for the carnage in Syria and Ukraine, Russians are increasingly of the opinion that their country is being targeted for an attack by the West, and their language – usually respectful and diplomatic – is beginning to reflect this. In an interview with Der Spiegel, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergey Karaganov, cautioned that “Russia will never again fight on its own territory.” He also had this to say about the relentless saber rattling emanating from the West:
This chatter that we intend to attack the Baltics is idiotic. Why is NATO stationing weapons and equipment there? Imagine what would happen to them in the case of a crisis. The help offered by NATO is not symbolic help for the Baltic states. It is a provocation. If NATO initiates an encroachment — against a nuclear power like ourselves — it will be punished.
The latest NPR also states that the US will invest in building low-yield nuclear weapons. In an article in Slate titled “Nuclear Posturing,” by Fred Kaplan, the author writes,
“Some of these weapons are said to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons—either because they’re mounted on planes or missiles that carry both types and because, in some cases, they’re much less powerful than most nukes—thus making the escalation to nuclear war more seamless and possibly more tempting.”
If Hitler and Napoleon were unable to conquer Russia, with Russians in a state of disarray and poor military readiness, what would be the result of a NATO attack on a united Russia armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons? Moreover, much has been said of the China-Russia alliance, but the reality is that even if Russia were isolated and friendless, a NATO attack on the Russian Federation would still pose a real danger of nuclear war.
In an article in Time titled “It All Looks as if the World is Preparing for War,” Mikhail Gorbachev writes of the rising tensions between NATO and Russia:
“More troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers are being brought to Europe. NATO and Russian forces and weapons that used to be deployed at a distance are now placed closer to each other, as if to shoot point-blank.”
Indeed, Gorbachev was given assurances that NATO would not expand in exchange for the reunification of Germany, and not only has this promise been egregiously violated, but the West has repeatedly accused Moscow of provocations, as if they were somehow to blame for moving Russia closer to NATO and not the other way around. As Paul Craig Roberts writes in “Washington Is Destroying The World,” published in 2014:
In 1999 President Bill Clinton made a liar of the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The corrupt Clinton brought Poland, Hungary, and the newly formed Czech Republic into NATO. President George W. Bush also made a liar out of his father, George H.W. Bush, and his father’s trusted Secretary of State, James Baker. “Dubya,” as the fool and drunkard is known, brought Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania into NATO in 2004. The corrupt and hopeless Obama regime added Albania and Croatia in 2009. In other words, over the past 21 years three two-term US presidents have taught Moscow that the word of the US government is worthless.
Andrey Belousov, the deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, said at the UN last month,
“At a recent meeting, the US stated that Russia is preparing for war. Yes, Russia is preparing for war, I can confirm it.”
“The aggressor must know that retribution is inevitable, that it will be destroyed.”
During the 2018 annual address to the Federal Assembly, Putin unveiled a number of advanced new weapons that the Russian military industrial complex has developed to counter the relentless pressure being brought to bear by Washington and its vassals, including a hypersonic missile which can attain a speed of Mach 20, and an underwater drone that is capable of traveling at great velocity and depths. These weapons are more advanced than anything currently in the possession of NATO, and there are presently no known defensive systems which could repel them.
Relations between Washington and Moscow are fraught with particular tension in Ukraine, regarded by many Russians as a brotherly nation, the Baltics, and Syria where the two superpowers are jockeying for control over Syrian airspace. In each of these three theaters, a miscommunication or a rogue fighter pilot could easily ignite a spark that could unleash a third world war. In an alarming development, Russian military officials have also determined that the drone attack on the Russian Khmeimim airbase in Syria last January, was coordinated from a US Poseidon reconnaissance plane.
Considering some of the threatening remarks emanating from Washington, one can’t help but wonder if the American ruling establishment has become so delusional that they have actually forgotten that Russia has nuclear weapons. Commenting on the Russian military intervention that saved Syria from being overrun by US-backed death squads, John Kirby said that Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has gone so far as to threaten Russia with a military blockade, an act of war. Perhaps confusing Russia with Iraq, the US ambassador to Nato, Kay Bailey Hutchison, recently threatened to “take out” Russian missiles that Washington has claimed, despite a lack of evidence, to be in violation of the INF agreement. This anti-Russian hysteria is undeniably good for the profits of the military industrial complex. It also bolsters the power of NATO, which in turn allows the Pentagon to keep European countries, who might otherwise start to wander off and do their own thing, on a short leash.
Is it possible to restore reason and morality to our countrymen, mired for so long in insouciance, mindlessness and apathy? How are we to reign in this crazed war horse that is driving us inexorably, frenetically, and insatiably towards the apocalypse?
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
David Penner‘s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Russia Insider and KevinMD. Also a photographer and native New Yorker, he is the author of three books: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at [email protected].
