Video: Syrian Forces Crashing ISIS In Tabqa Area

March 30th, 2017 by South Front

Last weekend, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mostly consisting of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), entered the Tabqa Airbase and took control of some nearby villages, including Ayed Kebir, from ISIS terrorists in the province of Raqqah. With this advance the SDF deployed in a striking distance from the ISIS-held town of Tabqa. If the town of Tabqa, the Tabqa Airbase and the Tabqa dam fully captured, the US-backed force will obtain an important base of operations southwest of the ISIS self-proclaimed capital of Raqqah that will allow the group to continue its operation to isolate this city.

The ISIS-linked media outlet “Amaq” reported that the Tabqa dam north of Raqqa is on the verge collapse after a number of US airstrikes had hit the facility. The dam reportedly went out of service and all of the dam’s gates shut automatically. The water level is increasing. A source among the dam workers informed Al-Mayadeen Channel that the dam was closed because of damage suffered from airstrikes. The US-led coalition said in a statement that the dam had not been structurally damaged, arguing that the coalition does not target the dam with strikes.

The SDF, backed up by the US Special Forces and the US Air Force, is now in control of the northern part of the facility. Clashes are ongoing in the area.

In the province of Aleppo, government forces liberated the villages of Rasm Jays, Abu Maqbara, Abu Maqbara Saghirah from ISIS. The Syrian army also entered the village Rasm Khamis Gharbi but it still has to be secured. Thus, government troops are now in less than 3km from the important crossroad town of Mahurah controlled by ISIS.

The Syrian army and its allies have once repelled a Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led attack on the town of Qamhana which is an important government defense site in northern Hama. Besides these clashes continued in the areas of Breidij, al-Mugheer, Kafr Nabbudah front, al-Bana and Tal al-Sakura. The situation remains very tense for government forces. However, deployed artillery units and Russian and Syrian warplanes allowed them to stabilize the situation in the area.

In eastern Damascus, government forces have got a full control over the industrial area separating Jobar and the Qalamun pocket. Fighting is continuing in the vicinity of the Qalamoun pocket.

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In Defense of Soft Targets

March 30th, 2017 by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

Another “puff” piece of hypocritical “justification” appeared in the Portuguese daily O Publico (24 March 2017) p. 5. It is the kind of standard issue article (Mockingbird-like) that appears in all the mainstream media to reiterate the official line that State-funded and managed mercenary operations are independent and that armed propaganda is motivated by foreign religious doctrines.  

Indians had no cannon

Algerians, Kenyans, Koreans,

Congolese, all Africans,

not to mention a few Chinese

For centuries past,

in century present

with aims sincere

could no gentle

(white) man

endear.

Where are those

Western values

cherished

at whose hands

whole peoples perished?

Where is that order

here maintained

closing hospitals and schools

profits to maintain?

Who feeds their armies

to starve the poor

Whose mouths

with stolen wealth

are fed

Whose bombs

destroy Syrian hospital beds?

Whose wolf

alone in Benghazi breeds?

Who owns the pack,

Who sows the seeds?

For centuries past

in century present

white gentlemen

defend their fellows

slaying soft targets

black, brown or yellow.

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fake_news

Fake News: The Unravelling of US Empire From Within

By Prof. John McMurtry, March 27 2017

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

fake media

Shooting the Messenger, The Last Bastions of Independent Thought

By Mark Taliano, March 26 2017

To counter the conspiracies against truth and justice, open debates about “forbidden topics” need to be amplified, not suppressed. Taboos need to be shattered. Hasty conclusions need to be rejected. And the modern-day Inquisition needs to be dismantled. Failing this, the “consensus of ignorance” will prevail, and humanity will continue on its downward spiral of death and destruction, as it rejects trajectories of Life and Prosperity.

yemen

US-NATO is Using Saudi Arabia, The West is the True Perpetrator of Genocide in Yemen Genocide

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, March 26 2017

What is undeniable is the fact that those who ‘promote human rights’ are the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, including the Genocide in Yemen. To deny their complicity is to deny humanity.

london attack

London Terrorist Attack: Westminster’s “Jihadis Come Home”

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin, March 26 2017

One year to the day after the Brussels terrorist attacks, a terrorist drove a car into Westminster parliament buildings killing four people and wounding several others. The British public are in shock. Westminster is considered to be a monument to British ‘democracy’. The date 3/22 will be remembered among those who mourn over the skulls and bones of loved ones lost to terrorism. Today, many of those mourners are in Syria. Just a few hours earlier, 50 destitute families staying at the al Badiya Dakhilya school in the village of Mansoura on the outskirts of Raqqa, were blown to pieces after an air strike by the ‘international coalition’. The Pentagon said it would “investigate” the atrocity. The British Government and its Western partners were silent. Thirty-three people were murdered.

Bill Clinton

Trump = Obama = Bush = Clinton, On Four Core Issues

By Washington’s Blog, March 27 2017

On a superficial level, Trump and Bush couldn’t be more different fromClinton and Obama. Indeed, pollsters say that many people voted for Trump because they wanted change … Just like they voted for Obama because he promised “hope and change” from Bush-era policies. But beneath the surface, Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton are all very similar on 4 core issues.

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What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the “wire tapping” of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging.

The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over “growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.” Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn’s former lobbying company FIG.

Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey.

Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey.  Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project.

Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story.

Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn’s pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position.

Flynn’s real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan:

In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting.

The meeting Woolsey described was under the “Turkish” Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network:

Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments.

It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue.

The Leviathan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been paid in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this:

An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a “friendly atmosphere” for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan.

After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria.

The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn’s conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such “wiretapping” of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.)

The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the “wiretapping” of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn’s dealing was and is used against Trump.

Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn’s lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is “coming clean” and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.)

The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of “hacking” of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.

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The road to Raqqa is now blocked by U.S. forces and their allies. The chances that Raqqa (and the surrounding region) will be returned to Syria are now slim to none. Foreign armies and their proxies are sharpening their carving knives.

U.S. Special Forces and Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters have just captured a “strategic air base” from Islamic State in northern Syria; in doing so, they have also “blocked” the advance of the Syrian Army as it approaches Raqqa from the west:

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Sunday that they captured the Tabqa air base, 45km west of Raqqa, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group’s de facto capital in Syria.

Earlier this week, US forces airlifted SDF fighters behind ISIL lines to allow them to launch the Tabqa assault, and on Friday the alliance reached one of the dam’s entrances.

SDF forces were within 10km of Raqqa from the north, and aimed to effectively surround the city before launching an assault.

But as RFE/RL quietly notes:

Besides recapturing the dam, SDF said the U.S.-backed operation also aimed to block any advance by Syrian government forces from the west.

The landing forces airdropped into Syria seized four small villages in the area west of Tabqa and cut a main highway that links the provinces of Raqqa, Deir al-Zor, and Aleppo, Scrocca said.

The SDF cut the last main road out of Raqqa earlier this month, narrowing in on the city from the north, east, and west.

The only way in or out of Raqqa now is over the Euphrates River that borders the city to the south.

Incredible, isn’t it? A foreign army that is illegally operating in a sovereign nation can just march in and cut off the legitimate army of said sovereign nation from liberating its own city from terrorists.

What a world — and so much for international law.

It will be interesting to see Moscow’s reaction. Was this always part of the “deal” in Syria? Or is Washington hoping that Syria, Iran and Russia will accept Raqqa’s U.S.-ordained fate?

Stay tuned.

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Pentagon Heads Toward Escalating Genocide in Yemen

March 27th, 2017 by Stephen Lendman

Yemen is Obama’s war, now Trump’s, complicit with Saudi terror-bombing, massacring civilians indiscriminately, causing vast destruction, human suffering and starvation.

A previous article explained millions of Yemenis face slow, painful deaths from lack of food needed to survive, blockaded coastal areas preventing it from entering the country.

Amounts airlifted in are woefully inadequate. The mainstream media suppress the ongoing horror, ignoring US responsibility for genocide.

On March 26, the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine headlined “Pentagon Weighs More Support for Saudi-led War in Yemen,” saying:

“Several Defense officials told Foreign Policy the prospect of more American help for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen was under discussion even as the administration examines its broader strategy in the region, including looking at ways to counter Iran and to defeat Islamic State militants.”

“The Pentagon views increased support for the Saudi-led coalition as one way of potentially pushing back against Iran’s influence in Yemen, as well as shoring up ties with an ally that felt neglected by the previous administration.”

What’s likely is escalated US-orchestrated aggression in a nation already devastated by two years of imperial war – besides years of US drone war since launched by the Bush/Cheney administration in January 2002, civilians overwhelmingly harmed.

Intensifying combat operations assures far more mass slaughter, destruction, chaos and human suffering, besides what’s already intolerable – achieving nothing but endless conflict, benefiting war-profiteers at the expense of countless numbers of innocent victims.

According to one unnamed Defense Department official, “(w)e’re interested in building the capability of the Saudis” to operate in Yemen and elsewhere regionally – free to commit atrocities with US help.

In a Saturday address, marking the second anniversary of imperial war on Yemen, Ansarullah movement leader Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi denounced Saudi terror-bombing war crimes, including use of chemical and other banned weapons – accomplishing nothing but mass slaughter and destruction.

Denouncing aggression on its second anniversary, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis demonstrated in Sana’a’s al-Sabin Square, waving national flags, chanting anti-Saudi slogans.

Supreme Political Council president Saleh al-Samad praised effective resistance against Saudi aggression, despite unlimited resources, weapons, munitions, and US-led Western aid.

Now in its third year, Washington apparently wants conflict escalated, not ended. The longer it continues, the greater the human toll.

The lives and welfare of millions of Yemeni civilians are at risk. Countless more numbers may perish before conflict ends.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Over thirty year ago a savvy Colombian peasant leader told me, “Whenever I read the word ‘peace accords’ I hear the government sharpening its knives”.

In recent times, ‘peace accords’ (PAs) have become a common refrain across the world. In almost every region or country, which are in the midst of war or invasion, the prospects of negotiating ‘peace accords’ have been raised. In many cases, PA’s were signed and yet did not succeed in ending murder and mayhem at the hands of their US-backed interlocutors.

We will briefly review several past and present peace negotiations and ‘peace accords’ to understand the dynamics of the ‘peace process’ and the subsequent results.

The Peace Process

There are several ongoing negotiations today, purportedly designed to secure peace accords. These include discussions between (1) the Kiev-based US-NATO-backed junta in the west and the eastern ‘Donbas’ leadership opposed to the coup and NATO; (2) the Saudi US-NATO-armed terrorists in Syria and the Syrian government and its Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies; (3) the US-backed Israeli colonial regime and the Palestinian independence forces in the West Bank and Gaza; and (4) the US-backed Colombian regime of President Santos and the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC).

There are also several other peace negotiations taking place, many of which have not received public attention.

Past and Present Outcomes of Peace Accords

Over the past quarter century several PAs were signed – all of which led to the virtual surrender of armed anti-imperialist protagonists and popular mass movements.

The Central-American PA’s, involving Salvador and Guatemala, led to the unilateral disarmament of the resistance movement, the consolidation of oligarchical control over the economy, the growth and proliferation of narco-gangs and unfettered government-sponsored death squads. As a consequence, internal terror escalated. Resistance leaders secured the vote, entered Congress as politicians, and, in the case of El Salvador, were elected to high office. Inequalities remained the same or worsened, and murders matched or exceeded the numbers recorded during the pre-Peace Accord period. Massive numbers of immigrants, often of internal refugees fleeing gang violence, entered the US illegally. The US consolidated its military bases and operations in Central America while the population continued to suffer.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations did not lead to any accord. Instead ‘negotiations’ became a thin cover for increasing annexation of Palestinian land to construct racists ‘Jews-Only’ enclaves, resulting in the illegal settlement of over half a million Jewish settlers. The US-backed the entire farcical peace process, financing the corrupt Palestinian vassal-leaders and providing unconditional diplomatic, military and political support to Israel.

US-Soviet Union: Peace Accord

The Reagan/Bush-Gorbachev ‘peace accords’ were supposed to end the Cold War and secure global peace. Instead the US and the EU established military bases and client regimes/allies throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Balkans, pillaged the national assets and took over their denationalized economies. US-based elites dominated the vassal Yeltsin regime and virtually stripped Russia of its resources and wealth. In alliance with gangster-oligarchs, they plundered the economy.

The post-Soviet Yeltsin regime ran elections, promoted multiple parties and presided over a desolate, isolated and increasingly surrounded nation – at least until Vladimir Putin was elected to ‘decolonize’ the State apparatus and partially reconstruct the economy and society.

Ukraine Peace Negotiations

In 2014 a US-sponsored violent coup brought together fascists, oligarchs, generals and pro-EU supporters seizing control of Kiev and the western part of Ukraine. The pro-democracy Eastern regions of the Donbas and Crimean Peninsula organized resistance to the putsch regime. Crimea voted overwhelmingly to re-unite Russia. The industrial centers in Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) formed popular militias to resist the armed forces and neo-Nazi paramilitaries of the US backed-junta. After a few years of mayhem and stalemate, a ‘negotiation process’ unfolded despite which the Kiev regime continued to attack the east. The tentative ‘peace settlement” became the basis for the ‘Minsk agreement’, brokered by France, Russia and Germany, where the Kiev junta envisioned a disarming of the resistance movement, re-occupation of the Donbas and Crimea and eventual destruction of the cultural, political, economic and military autonomy of the ethnic Russian East Ukraine. As a result, the “Minsk Agreement” has been little more than a failed ploy to secure surrender. Meanwhile, the Kiev junta’s massive pillage of the nation’s economy has turned Ukraine into a failed state with 2.5 million fleeing to Russia and many thousands emigrating to the West to dig potatoes in Poland, or enter the brothels of London and Tel Aviv. The remaining unemployed youth are left to sell their services to Kiev’s paramilitary fascist shock troops.

Colombia: Peace Accord or Graveyard?

Any celebration of the Colombian FARC – President Santos’ ‘Peace Accord’ would be premature if we examine its past incarnations and present experience.

Over the past four decades, Colombian oligarchical regimes, backed by the military, death squads and Washington have invoked innumerable ‘peace commissions’, inaugurated negotiations with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and proceeded to both break off negotiations and relaunch full-scale wars using ‘peace accords’ as a pretext to decimate and demoralize political activists.

In 1984, then-President Belisario Betancur signed a peace accord with the FARC, known as the ‘Uribe Agreement’. Under this agreement, thousands of FARC activists and supporters demobilized, formed the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal electoral party, and participated in elections. In the 1986 Colombian elections, the UP candidates were elected as Senators, Congress people, mayors and city council members, and their Presidential candidate gained over 20% of the national vote. Over the next 4 years, from 1986-1989, over 5,000 UP leaders, elected officials and Presidential candidates were assassinated in a campaign of nationwide terror. Scores of thousands of peasants, oil workers, miners and plantation laborers were murdered, tortured and driven into exile. Paramilitary death squads and landlord-backed private armies, allied with the Colombian Armed Forces, assassinated thousands of union leaders, workers and their families members. The Colombian military’s ‘paramilitary strategy’ against non-combatants and villagers was developed in the 1960’s by US Army General William Yarborough, Commandant, US Army Special Warfare Center and ‘Father of the Green Beret’ Special Forces.

Within five years of its formation, the Patriotic Union no longer existed: Its surviving members had fled or gone into hiding.

In 1990, newly-elected President Cesar Gaviria proclaimed new peace negotiations with the FARC. Within months of his proclamation, the president ordered the bombing of the ‘Green House’, where the FARC leaders and negotiating team were being lodged. Fortunately, they had fled before the treacherous attack.

President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2001) called for new peace negotiations with the FARC to be held ‘in a demilitarized zone’. Peace talks began in the jungle region of El Caguan in November 1998. President Pastrana had made numerous pledges, concessions and reforms with the FARC and social activists, but, at the same time he had signed a ten-year multi-billion dollar military aid agreement with US President Clinton, known as ‘Plan Colombia’. This practice of ‘double-dealing’ culminated with the Colombian Armed Forces launching a ’scorched earth policy’ against the ‘demilitarized zones’ under the newly elected (and death-squad linked) President Alvaro Uribe Velez. Over the next eight years, President Uribe drove nearly four million Colombian peasants into internal exile. With the multi-billion dollar funding from Washington, Uribe was able to double the size of the Colombian Armed Forces to over 350,000 troops, incorporating members of the death squads into the military. He also oversaw the formation of new paramilitary armies. By 2010 the FARC had declined from eighteen thousand to under ten thousand fighters – with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and millions rendered homeless.

In 2010 Uribe’s former Minister of Defense, Juan Manual Santos was elected President. By 2012 Santos initiated another “peace process” with the FARC, which was signed by the end of 2016. Under the new ‘Peace Accord’, signed in Cuba, hundreds of officers implicated in torture, assassinations and forced relocation of peasants were given immunity from prosecution while FARC guerillas were to face trial. The government promised land reform and the right to return for displaced farmers and their families. However, when peasants returned to claim their land they were driven away or even killed.

FARC leaders agreed to demobilize and disarm unilaterally by June 2017. The military and their paramilitary allies would retain their arms and gain total control over previous FARC- liberated zones.

President Santos ensured that the ‘Peace Accord’ would include a series of Presidential Decrees – privatizing the country’s mineral and oil resources and converting small family farms to commercial plantations. Demobilized peasant-rebels were offered plots of infertile marginal lands, without government support or funding for roads, tools, seed and fertilizer or even schools and housing, necessary for the transition. While some FARC leaders secured seats in Congress and the freedom to run in elections unmolested, the young rank and file FARC fighters and peasants were left without many alternatives but to join paramilitary or ‘narco’ gangs.

In summary, the historical record demonstrates that a series of Colombian presidents and regimes have systematically violated all peace agreements and accords, assassinated the rebel signees and retained elite control over the economy and labor force. Before his election, the current President Santos presided over the most deadly decade when he was Uribe’s Defense Minister.

For brokering the peace of the graveyard for scores of thousands of Colombian peasants and activists, President Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Havana, FARC leaders and negotiators were praised by Cuban President Raul Castro, President Obama, Venezuelan President Maduro and the vast majority of ‘progressives’ and rightists in North and South America and Europe.

Colombia’s bloody history, including the widespread murder of Colombian civil rights activists and peasant leaders, has continued even as the documents finalizing the Peace Accords were being signed. During the first month of 2017, five human right activists were murdered by death squads – linked to the oligarchy and military. In 2015, while the FARC was negotiating over several clauses in the agreement, over 122 peasant and human rights activists were murdered by paramilitary groups who continued to operate freely in areas controlled by Santos’ army. The mass media propaganda mills continue to repeat the lie that ‘200,000 people were killed by the guerillas (FARC) and the government’ when the vast majority of the killings were committed by the government and its allied death squads; a calumny, which guerilla leaders fail to challenge. Prominent Jesuit researcher Javier Giraldo has provided a detailed factual account documenting that over three quarters of the killings were committed by the Army and paramilitary.

We are asked to believe presidential regimes that have murdered and continue to murder over 150,000 Colombian workers, peasants, indigenous leaders and professionals are suddenly transformed into justice-loving partners in peace. During the first three months of this year, activists, sympathetic to the peace agreement with the FARC, continue to be targeted and killed by supposedly demobilized paramilitary murderers.

Social movement leaders report rising political violence by military forces and their allies. Even peace monitors and the UN Human Rights Office admit that state and paramilitary violence are destroying any structure that President Santos could hope to implement the reforms. As the FARC withdraws from regions under popular control, peasants seeking land reform are targeted by private armies. The Santos regime is more concerned with protecting the massive land grabs by big mining consortiums.

As the killing of FARC supporters and human rights activists multiply, as President Santos and Washington look to take advantage of a disarmed and demobilized guerilla army, the ‘historic peace accord’ becomes a great deceit designed to expand imperial power.

Conclusion: Epitaph for Peace Accords

Time and again throughout the world, imperial-brokered peace negotiations and accords have served only one goal: to disarm, demobilize, defeat and demoralize resistance fighters and their allies.

‘Peace Accords’, as we know them, have served to rearm and regroup US-backed forces following tactical setbacks of the guerrilla struggle. ‘PA’s are encouraged to divide the opposition (’salami tactics’) and facilitate conquest. The rhetoric of ‘peace’ as in ‘peace negotiations’ are terms which actually mean ‘unilateral disarmament’ of the resistance fighters, the surrender of territory and the abandonment of civilian sympathizers. The so-called ‘war zones’, which contain fertile lands and valuable mineral reserves are ‘pacified’ by being absorbed by the ‘peace loving’ regime. This serves their privatization programs and promote the pillage of the ‘developmental state’. Negotiated peace settlements are overseen by US officials, who praise and laud the rebel leaders while they sign agreements to be implemented by US vassal regimes . . . The latter will ensure the rejection of any realignment of foreign policy and any structural socio-economic changes.

Some peace accords may allow former guerilla leaders to compete and in some cases win elections as marginal representatives, while their mass base is decimated.

In most cases, during the peace process, and especially after signing ‘peace accords’, social organizations and movements and their supporters among the peasantry and working class, as well as human rights activists, end up being targeted by the military and para-military death-squads operating around government military bases.

Often, the international allies of resistance movements have encouraged them to negotiate PAs, in order to demonstrate to the US that ‘they are responsible’— hoping to secure improved diplomatic and trade relations. Needless to say, ‘responsible negotiations’ will merely strengthen imperial resolve to press for further concessions, and encourage military aggression and new conquests.

Just ‘peace accords’ are based on mutual disarmament, recognition of territorial autonomy and the authority of local insurgent administration over agreed upon land reforms, retaining mineral rights and military-public security.

PA’s should be the first step in the political agendas, implemented under the control of independent rebel military and civil monitors.

The disastrous outcome of unilateral disarmament is due to the non-implementation of progressive, independent foreign policy and structural changes.

Past and present peace negotiations, based on the recognition of the sovereignty of an independent state linked to mass movements, have always ended in the US breaking the agreements. True ‘peace accords’ contradict the imperial goal of conquering via the negotiating table what could not be won through war.

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How US Flooded The World With Psyops

March 27th, 2017 by Robert Parry

Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.

Raymond, who has been compared to a character from a John LeCarré novel slipping easily into the woodwork, spent his years inside Reagan’s White House as a shadowy puppet master who tried his best to avoid public attention or – it seems – even having his picture taken. From the tens of thousands of photographs from meetings at Reagan’s White House, I found only a couple showing Raymond – and he is seated in groups, partially concealed by other officials.

But Raymond appears to have grasped his true importance. In his NSC files, I found a doodle of an organizational chart that had Raymond at the top holding what looks like the crossed handles used by puppeteers to control the puppets below them. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what the doodler had in mind, the drawing fits the reality of Raymond as the behind-the-curtains operative who was controlling the various inter-agency task forces that were responsible for implementing various propaganda and psyops strategies.

Until the 1980s, psyops were normally regarded as a military technique for undermining the will of an enemy force by spreading lies, confusion and terror. A classic case was Gen. Edward Lansdale — considered the father of modern psyops — draining the blood from a dead Filipino rebel in such a way so the dead rebel’s superstitious comrades would think that a vampire-like creature was on the prowl. In Vietnam, Lansdale’s psyops team supplied fake and dire astrological predictions for the fate of North Vietnamese and Vietcong leaders.

Essentially, the psyops idea was to play on the cultural weaknesses of a target population so they could be more easily manipulated and controlled. But the challenges facing the Reagan administration in the 1980s led to its determination that peacetime psyops were also needed and that the target populations had to include the American public.

Walter Raymond Jr., a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist who oversaw President Reagan’s “perception management” and psyops projects at the National Security Council. Raymond is partially obscured by President Reagan and is sitting next to National Security Adviser John Poindexter.. (Photo credit: Reagan presidential library)

The Reagan administration was obsessed with the problems left behind by the 1970s’ disclosures of government lying about the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses both in overthrowing democratically elected governments and spying on American dissidents. This so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” produced profound skepticism from regular American citizens as well as journalists and politicians when President Reagan tried to sell his plans for intervention in the civil wars then underway in Central America, Africa and elsewhere.

While Reagan saw Central America as a “Soviet beachhead,” many Americans saw brutal Central American oligarchs and their bloody security forces slaughtering priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous populations. Reagan and his advisers realized that they had to turn those perceptions around if they hoped to get sustained funding for the militaries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the CIA-organized paramilitary force marauding around leftist-ruled Nicaragua.

So, it became a high priority to reshape public perceptions to gain support for Reagan’s Central American military operations both inside those targeted countries and among Americans.

A ‘Psyops Totality’

As Col. Alfred R. Paddock Jr. wrote in an influential November 1983 paper, entitled “Military Psychological Operations and US Strategy,

“the planned use of communications to influence attitudes or behavior should, if properly used, precede, accompany, and follow all applications of force. Put another way, psychological operations is the one weapons system which has an important role to play in peacetime, throughout the spectrum of conflict, and during the aftermath of conflict.”

Paddock continued,

“Military psychological operations are an important part of the ‘PSYOP Totality,’ both in peace and war. … We need a program of psychological operations as an integral part of our national security policies and programs. … The continuity of a standing interagency board or committee to provide the necessary coordinating mechanism for development of a coherent, worldwide psychological operations strategy is badly needed.”

Some of Raymond’s recently available handwritten notes show a focus on El Salvador with the implementation of “Nation wide multi-media psyops” spread through rallies and electronic media. “Radio + TV also carried Psyops messages,” Raymond wrote. (Emphasis in original.) Though Raymond’s crimped handwriting is often hard to decipher, the notes make clear that psyops programs also were directed at Honduras, Guatemala and Peru.

President Ronald Reagan leading a meeting on terrorism on Jan. 26, 1981, with National Security Advisor Richard Allen, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and White House counselor Edwin Meese. (photo credit: Reagan library)

One declassified “top secret” document in Raymond’s file – dated Feb. 4, 1985, from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger – urged the fuller implementation of President Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive 130, which was signed on March 6, 1984, and which authorized peacetime psyops by expanding psyops beyond its traditional boundaries of active military operations into peacetime situations in which the U.S. government could claim some threat to national interests.

“This approval can provide the impetus to the rebuilding of a necessary strategic capability, focus attention on psychological operations as a national – not solely military – instrument, and ensure that psychological operations are fully coordinated with public diplomacy and other international information activities,” Weinberger’s document said.

This broader commitment to psyops led to the creation of a Psychological Operations Committee (POC) that was to be chaired by a representative of Reagan’s National Security Council with a vice chairman from the Pentagon and with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency.

“This group will be responsible for planning, coordinating and implementing psychological operations activities in support of United States policies and interests relative to national security,” according to a “secret” addendum to a memo, dated March 25, 1986, from Col. Paddock, the psyops advocate who had become the U.S. Army’s Director for Psychological Operations.

“The committee will provide the focal point for interagency coordination of detailed contingency planning for the management of national information assets during war, and for the transition from peace to war,” the addendum added. “The POC shall seek to ensure that in wartime or during crises (which may be defined as periods of acute tension involving a threat to the lives of American citizens or the imminence of war between the U.S. and other nations), U.S. international information elements are ready to initiate special procedures to ensure policy consistency, timely response and rapid feedback from the intended audience.”

Taking Shape

The Psychological Operations Committee took formal shape with a “secret” memo from Reagan’s National Security Advisor John Poindexter on July 31, 1986. Its first meeting was called on Sept. 2, 1986, with an agenda that focused on Central America and “How can other POC agencies support and complement DOD programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama.” The POC was also tasked with “Developing National PSYOPS Guidelines” for “formulating and implementing a national PSYOPS program.” (Underlining in original)

Raymond was named a co-chair of the POC along with CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro, who was then Deputy Director for Intelligence Programs on the NSC staff, according to a “secret” memo from Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Craig Alderman Jr. The memo also noted that future POC meetings would be briefed on psyops projects for the Philippines and Nicaragua, with the latter project codenamed “Niagara Falls.” The memo also references a “Project Touchstone,” but it is unclear where that psyops program was targeted.

Another “secret” memo dated Oct. 1, 1986, co-authored by Raymond, reported on the POC’s first meeting on Sept. 10, 1986, and noted that “The POC will, at each meeting, focus on an area of operations (e.g., Central America, Afghanistan, Philippines).”

The POC’s second meeting on Oct. 24, 1986, concentrated on the Philippines, according to a Nov. 4, 1986 memo also co-authored by Raymond.

“The next step will be a tightly drafted outline for a PSYOPS Plan which we will send to that Embassy for its comment,” the memo said. The plan “largely focused on a range of civic actions supportive of the overall effort to overcome the insurgency,” an addendum noted. “There is considerable concern about the sensitivities of any type of a PSYOPS program given the political situation in the Philippines today.”

Earlier in 1986, the Philippines had undergone the so-called “People Power Revolution,” which drove longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos into exile, and the Reagan administration, which belatedly pulled its support from Marcos, was trying to stabilize the political situation to prevent more populist elements from gaining the upper hand.

But the Reagan administration’s primary attention continued to go back to Central America, including “Project Niagara Falls,” the psyops program aimed at Nicaragua. A “secret” Pentagon memo from Deputy Under Secretary Alderman on Nov. 20, 1986, outlined the work of the 4th Psychological Operations Group on this psyops plan “to help bring about democratization of Nicaragua,” by which the Reagan administration meant a “regime change.” The precise details of “Project Niagara Falls” were not disclosed in the declassified documents but the choice of codename suggested a cascade of psyops.

Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)

Other documents from Raymond’s NSC file shed light on who other key operatives in the psyops and propaganda programs were. For instance, in undated notes on efforts to influence the Socialist International, including securing support for U.S. foreign policies from Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, Raymond cited the efforts of “LedeenGershman,” a reference to neoconservative operative Michael Ledeen and Carl Gershman, another neocon who has served as president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), from 1983 to the present. (Underlining in original.)

Although NED is technically independent of the U.S. government, it receives the bulk of its funding (now about $100 million a year) from Congress. Documents from the Reagan archives also make clear that NED was organized as a way to replace some of the CIA’s political and propaganda covert operations, which had fallen into disrepute in the 1970s. Earlier released documents from Raymond’s file show CIA Director William Casey pushing for NED’s creation and Raymond, Casey’s handpicked man on the NSC, giving frequent advice and direction to Gershman. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]

Another figure in Raymond’s constellation of propaganda assets was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was viewed as both a key political ally of President Reagan and a valuable source of funding for private groups that were coordinating with White House propaganda operations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rupert Murdoch: Propaganda Recruit.”]

In a Nov. 1, 1985 letter to Raymond, Charles R. Tanguy of the “Committees for a Community of Democracies – USA” asked Raymond to intervene in efforts to secure Murdoch’s funding for the group.

“We would be grateful … if you could find the time to telephone Mr. Murdoch and encourage him to give us a positive response,” the letter said.

Another document, entitled “Project Truth Enhancement,” described how $24 million would be spent on upgrading the telecommunications infrastructure to arm “Project Truth, with the technical capability to provide the most efficient and productive media support for major USG policy initiatives like Political Democracy.” Project Truth was the overarching name of the Reagan administration’s propaganda operation. For the outside world, the program was billed as “public diplomacy,” but administration insiders privately called it “perception management.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of Perception Management.”]

The Early Years

The original priority of “Project Truth” was to clean up the images of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran security forces and the Nicaraguan Contras, who were led by ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza’s ex-National Guard officers. To ensure steady military funding for these notorious forces, Reagan’s team knew it had to defuse the negative publicity and somehow rally the American people’s support.

At first, the effort focused on weeding out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration denounced New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime’s massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job. But such efforts were largely ad hoc and disorganized.

CIA Director Casey, from his years crisscrossing the interlocking worlds of business and intelligence, had important contacts for creating a more systematic propaganda network. He recognized the value of using established groups known for advocating “human rights,” such as Freedom House.

One document from the Reagan library showed senior Freedom House official Leo Cherne running a draft manuscript on political conditions in El Salvador past Casey and promising that Freedom House would make requested editorial “corrections and changes” – and even send over the editor for consultation with whomever Casey assigned to review the paper.

In a “Dear Bill” letter dated June 24, 1981, Cherne, who was chairman of the Freedom House’s executive committee, wrote:

“I am enclosing a copy of the draft manuscript by Bruce McColm, Freedom House’s resident specialist on Central America and the Caribbean. This manuscript on El Salvador was the one I had urged be prepared and in the haste to do so as rapidly as possible, it is quite rough. You had mentioned that the facts could be checked for meticulous accuracy within the government and this would be very helpful. …

“If there are any questions about the McColm manuscript, I suggest that whomever is working on it contact Richard Salzmann at the Research Institute [an organization where Cherne was executive director]. He is Editor-in-Chief at the Institute and the Chairman of the Freedom House’s Salvador Committee. He will make sure that the corrections and changes get to Rita Freedman who will also be working with him. If there is any benefit to be gained from Salzmann’s coming down at any point to talk to that person, he is available to do so.”

By 1982, Casey also was lining up some powerful right-wing ideologues to help fund the “perception management” project both with money and their own media outlets. Richard Mellon Scaife was the scion of the Mellon banking, oil and aluminum fortune who financed a variety of right-wing family foundations – such as Sarah Scaife and Carthage – that were financial benefactors to right-wing journalists and think tanks. Scaife also published the Tribune Review in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who was later charged with genocide against indigenous populations in Guatemala’s highlands.

A more comprehensive “public diplomacy” operation began to take shape in 1982 when Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was transferred to the NSC. Raymond became the sparkplug for this high-powered propaganda network, according to an unpublished draft chapter of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation that was suppressed as part of the deal to get three moderate Republican senators to sign on to the final report and give the inquiry a patina of bipartisanship.

Though the draft chapter didn’t use Raymond’s name in its opening pages, apparently because some of the information came from classified depositions, Raymond’s name was used later in the chapter and the earlier citations matched Raymond’s known role. According to the draft report, the CIA officer who was recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a “specialist in propaganda and disinformation.”

“The CIA official [Raymond] discussed the transfer with [CIA Director] Casey and NSC Advisor William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC as [Donald] Gregg’s successor [as coordinator of intelligence operations in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities,” the chapter said.

Gregg was another senior CIA official who was assigned to the NSC before becoming Vice President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser.

“In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and abroad.”

War of Ideas

During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure, saying:

“We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas.”

One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers’ money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers. But President Reagan saw the American public’s “Vietnam Syndrome” as an obstacle to his more aggressive policies.

Along with Raymond’s government-based organization, there were outside groups eager to cooperate and cash in. Back at Freedom House, Cherne and his associates were angling for financial support.

In an Aug. 9, 1982 letter to Raymond, Freedom House executive director Leonard R. Sussman wrote that

“Leo Cherne has asked me to send these copies of Freedom Appeals. He has probably told you we have had to cut back this project to meet financial realities. … We would, of course, want to expand the project once again when, as and if the funds become available. Offshoots of that project appear in newspapers, magazines, books and on broadcast services here and abroad. It’s a significant, unique channel of communication” – precisely the focus of Raymond’s work.

On Nov. 4, 1982, Raymond, after his transfer from the CIA to the NSC staff but while still a CIA officer, wrote to NSC Advisor Clark about the “Democracy Initiative and Information Programs,” stating that “Bill Casey asked me to pass on the following thought concerning your meeting with [right-wing billionaire] Dick Scaife, Dave Abshire [then a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board], and Co. Casey had lunch with them today and discussed the need to get moving in the general area of supporting our friends around the world.

“By this definition he is including both ‘building democracy’ … and helping invigorate international media programs. The DCI [Casey] is also concerned about strengthening public information organizations in the United States such as Freedom House. … A critical piece of the puzzle is a serious effort to raise private funds to generate momentum. Casey’s talk with Scaife and Co. suggests they would be very willing to cooperate. … Suggest that you note White House interest in private support for the Democracy initiative.”

President Reagan meets with publisher Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, lawyers Roy Cohn and Thomas Bolan in the Oval Office on Jan. 18, 1983. (Photo credit: Reagan presidential library)

The importance of the CIA and White House secretly arranging private funds was that these supposedly independent voices would then reinforce and validate the administration’s foreign policy arguments with a public that would assume the endorsements were based on the merits of the White House positions, not influenced by money changing hands. Like snake-oil salesmen who plant a few cohorts in the crowd to whip up excitement for the cure-all elixir, Reagan administration propagandists salted some well-paid “private” individuals around Washington to echo White House propaganda “themes.”

The role of the CIA in these initiatives was concealed but never far from the surface. A Dec. 2, 1982 note addressed to “Bud,” a reference to senior NSC official Robert “Bud” McFarlane, described a request from Raymond for a brief meeting.

“When he [Raymond] returned from Langley [CIA headquarters], he had a proposed draft letter … re $100 M democ[racy]  proj[ect],” the note said.

While Casey pulled the strings on this project, the CIA director instructed White House officials to hide the CIA’s hand.

“Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III as Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.”

But the formation of the National Endowment for Democracy, with its hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government money, was still months down the road. In the meantime, the Reagan administration would have to line up private donors to advance the propaganda cause.

“We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” NSC Advisor Clark wrote to Reagan in a Jan. 13, 1983 memo, adding that U.S. Information Agency Director “Charlie Wick has offered to take the lead. We may have to call on you to meet with a group of potential donors.”

Despite Casey’s and Raymond’s success in bringing onboard wealthy conservatives to provide private funding for the propaganda operations, Raymond worried about whether a scandal could erupt over the CIA’s involvement. Raymond formally resigned from the CIA in April 1983, so, he said, “there would be no question whatsoever of any contamination of this.” But Raymond continued to act toward the U.S. public much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign country.

Raymond fretted, too, about the legality of Casey’s ongoing role. Raymond confided in one memo that it was important “to get [Casey] out of the loop,” but Casey never backed off and Raymond continued to send progress reports to his old boss well into 1986.

It was “the kind of thing which [Casey] had a broad catholic interest in,” Raymond shrugged during his Iran-Contra deposition. He then offered the excuse that Casey undertook this apparently illegal interference in domestic politics “not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the president hat.”

Peacetime Propaganda

Meanwhile, Reagan began laying out the formal authority for this unprecedented peacetime propaganda bureaucracy. On Jan. 14, 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled “Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security.” In NSDD-77, Reagan deemed it “necessary to strengthen the organization, planning and coordination of the various aspects of public diplomacy of the United States Government.”

Reagan ordered the creation of a special planning group within the National Security Council to direct these “public diplomacy” campaigns. The planning group would be headed by Walter Raymond and one of its principal outposts would be a new Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, housed at the State Department but under the control of the NSC. (One of the directors of the Latin American public diplomacy office was neoconservative Robert Kagan, who would later co-found the Project for the New American Century in 1998 and become a chief promoter of President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.)

On May 20, 1983, Raymond recounted in a memo that $400,000 had been raised from private donors brought to the White House Situation Room by U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick. According to that memo, the money was divided among several organizations, including Freedom House and Accuracy in Media, a right-wing media attack organization.

When I wrote about that memo in my 1992 book, Fooling America, Freedom House denied receiving any White House money or collaborating with any CIA/NSC propaganda campaign. In a letter, Freedom House’s Sussman called Raymond “a second-hand source” and insisted that “this organization did not need any special funding to take positions … on any foreign-policy issues.”

But it made little sense that Raymond would have lied to a superior in an internal memo. And clearly, Freedom House remained central to the Reagan administration’s schemes for aiding groups supportive of its Central American policies, particularly the CIA-organized Contra war against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Plus, White House documents released later revealed that Freedom House kept its hand out for funding.

On Sept. 15, 1984, Bruce McColm – writing from Freedom House’s Center for Caribbean and Central American Studies – sent Raymond “a short proposal for the Center’s Nicaragua project 1984-85. The project combines elements of the oral history proposal with the publication of The Nicaraguan Papers,” a book that would disparage Sandinista ideology and practices.

President Reagan meeting with Charles Wick on March 7, 1986, in the Oval Office. Also present: Stephen Rhinesmith, Don Regan, John Poindexter, George Bush, Jack Matlock and Walter Raymond (seated next to Regan on the left side of the photo). (Photo credit: Reagan library)

“Maintaining the oral history part of the project adds to the overall costs; but preliminary discussions with film makers have given me the idea that an Improper Conduct-type of documentary could be made based on these materials,” McColm wrote, referring to a 1984 film that offered a scathing critique of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. “Such a film would have to be the work of a respected Latin American filmmaker or a European. American-made films on Central America are simply too abrasive ideologically and artistically poor.”

McColm’s three-page letter reads much like a book or movie pitch, trying to interest Raymond in financing the project:

“The Nicaraguan Papers will also be readily accessible to the general reader, the journalist, opinion-maker, the academic and the like. The book would be distributed fairly broadly to these sectors and I am sure will be extremely useful. They already constitute a form of Freedom House samizdat, since I’ve been distributing them to journalists for the past two years as I’ve received them from disaffected Nicaraguans.”

McColm proposed a face-to-face meeting with Raymond in Washington and attached a six-page grant proposal seeking $134,100. According to the grant proposal, the project would include “free distribution to members of Congress and key public officials; distribution of galleys in advance of publication for maximum publicity and timely reviews in newspapers and current affairs magazines; press conferences at Freedom House in New York and at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.; op-ed circulation to more than 100 newspapers …; distribution of a Spanish-language edition through Hispanic organizations in the United States and in Latin America; arrangement of European distribution through Freedom House contacts.”

The documents that I found at the Reagan library did not indicate what subsequently happened to this specific proposal. McColm did not respond to an email request for comment about the Nicaraguan Papers plan or the earlier letter from Cherne (who died in 1999) to Casey about editing McComb’s manuscript. Freedom House did emerge as a leading critic of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and also became a major recipient of money from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 under the umbrella of the Casey-Raymond project.

The more recently released documents – declassified between 2013 and 2017 – show how these earlier Casey-Raymond efforts merged with the creation of a formal psyop bureaucracy in 1986 also under the control of Raymond’s NSC operation. The combination of the propaganda and psyop programs underscored the powerful capability that the U.S. government developed more than three decades ago for planting slanted, distorted or fake news. (Casey died in 1987; Raymond died in 2003.)

Over those several decades, even as the White House changed hands from Republicans to Democrats to Republicans to Democrats, the momentum created by William Casey and Walter Raymond continued to push these “perception management/psyops” strategies forward. In more recent years, the wording has changed, giving way to more pleasing euphemisms, like “smart power” and “strategic communications.” But the idea is still the same: how you can use propaganda to sell U.S. government policies abroad and at home.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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Security measures are often exercises in futility. Resembling placebos, they are the reassurance authorities make as acts of intrusive inconvenience. Queues are increased at airports in the vain hope that an elusive gel carrier will be nabbed before the next detonating device is activated on a flight. Shoes are checked to see if they pass muster. Devices are scrutinised.

Now, depending on certain routes, an electronics ban on carry on items has been imposed, most notably directed by the United States and United Kingdom. This latest exercise in Anglo-American futility has again done its bit to cause disruptions in the name of the questionable. A security “source” claimed that the ban was occasioned by a plot that would have involved the use of a fake iPad, amongst other factors.

The argument for such measures never changes: they might happen because of one incident that was an exception proving the rule. Such a case took place on a Somali plane in February 2016, involving a bomb possibly concealed in a laptop. It hardly justifies such electronic measures across eight countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

The other aspect of such responses is that it falsely layers a policy of supposed soundness with thoroughness. Prohibitions of such order, by their nature, tend to require a certain fanatical dedication to vigilance. Such vigilance is never going to be effective in the way asymmetrical lateralist thinking is. A potential terrorist might be a doctrinaire in thought, but not necessarily in method.

Airport security, whatever the delays, the piousness and the faith shown by officials to make the life of a passenger harder, is never able to entirely patch or plug gaps in what is so charmingly termed the architecture of the enterprise. Cheek and daring will out.

A look, then, at these measures, suggests unevenness. For one, the devices can be simply relocated to checked-in luggage, leaving the business classes irritated at a long-haul flight where work might be done. It also flies in the face of other aviation safety rules.

Another point is made by Shashank Joshi, defence and intelligence specialist at London’s Royal United Services Institute. Having such restrictions on “a tablet-sized, non-metallic bomb” might be sound (he, at least, believes the British officials might be on to something), but the scope would have to measure up.

Intelligence officials in other countries differ on this point, throwing various cats amongst flocks of pigeons. The restrictions between Britain and the UK, for instance, also vary, suggesting a postmodernism of sorts in the intelligence fraternities of the countries.

“This raises questions,” notes Joshi, “about why they have arrived at different conclusions, and specifically suspicious as to whether unstated political factors may be influencing the Trump administration.”

There was little surprise that the actions of the United States targeted eight countries, following the travel ban effort by the Trump administration which initially went for seven, then revised the number to six. It covers flights from 10 airports in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.[1]

The UK ban is specific to tablets, laptops, games consoles and devices larger than a mobile phone. Routes covered include inbound flights from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey.

This ban was an exercise that had the notable ancillary outcome of affecting the highly competitive Gulf carrier market and airlines that have been doing rather well over the last few years in a cut throat aviation market.

Western counterparts have been shrunk and shunned off those routes, with the US market receiving considerable interest from the airlines of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

“The billions of dollars in illegal Gulf carrier subsidies,” protested American, Delta and United in recent an open letter to Donald Trump, “are brazen violations of our Open Skies agreements and a perfect example of the type of trade cheating that President Trump abhors.”[2]

The US Department of Homeland Security was attempting to advance another rationale, claiming in a press release that,

“Evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation, to include smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items.”

Members of the legal fraternity and some policy makers have already noted a lukewarm, rather than enraged response, to the ban on large electronic devices. Trump’s March 6 executive order seemed to be considered of a different order, while an administrative and security measure of daft content is deemed more comical than a threat to liberties per se.

In the words of Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin, this suggests that the claim that Trump’s “hands are tied” by legal challenges is far from the case. A lawyer retained by Hawaii, Neal Katyal, has similarly observed that,

“Policies like that one, justified with respect to a particular (even if unspecified) new threat, implemented without accompanying statements of animus towards Islam, and in harmony with Congressional policies and the policies of our allies, raise no constitutional concerns.”[3]

As long as you keep Islam off the books of derision and criticism, and tailor nonsensical responses to the temper of Congress, such orders and actions are bound to sail through. Forget, however, the merit of logic in whether these are necessary, let alone effective, to begin with.

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

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On the morning of Sunday, March 19, Israeli tax authorities barged into the home of Omar Barghouti, the prominent Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for the freedom, justice and equality of the Palestinian people. They detained and interrogated Omar and his wife Safa for 16 hours that first day. Omar is currently enduring a fourth day of interrogation.

Below is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee’s (BNC) response to these developments and the Israeli government’s systematic efforts to criminalize the BDS movement, intimidate activists and stop free speech:

A prominent Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, has for years been subjected to intense threats, intimidation and repression by various arms of the far-right Israeli government, particularly after it considered the movement a “strategic threat” to its entire system of injustice against Palestinians.

At a March 2016 conference in occupied Jerusalem, several Israeli government ministers threatened Omar and key BDS human rights defenders with severe measures, including “targeted civil elimination” – a euphemism for civil assassination. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs last year established a “tarnishing unit,” as exposed in the Israeli daily Haaretz. This unit’s job is to tarnish the reputation of BDS human rights defenders and networks.

It is in this context that the Israeli tax department’s investigation of Omar and his wife, Safa, must be understood. After failing to intimidate them through the threat of revoking Omar’s permanent residence in Israel, and after the effective travel ban imposed on him proved futile in stopping his human rights work, the Israeli government has resorted to fabricating a case related to Omar’s alleged income outside of Israel to tarnish his image and intimidate him.

The fact that this investigation includes a travel ban and that it comes a few weeks before Omar Barghouti is scheduled to travel to the U.S. to receive the Gandhi Peace Award jointly with Ralph Nader in a ceremony at Yale University proves its true motive – repression.

The fact that the Israeli government publicized the inflammatory fabrications against Omar just 24 hours after he was taken in for investigation shows beyond doubt that the investigation’s real goal is to tarnish his reputation.

BDS - Freedom, Justice, Equality

No matter what extreme measures of repression Israel wields against the BDS movement or its human rights defenders and vast network of supporters, it cannot stop this movement for human rights. Bullying and repression can hardly affect a grassroots movement that grows in people’s hearts and minds, empowering them to do the right thing – to stand on the right side of history, against Israel’s fanatic regime of apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing, and for freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people.

This latest desperate chapter of repression and intimidation by the Israeli government against Omar Barghouti is the strongest indicator yet of the failure of the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid to slow down the impressive growth of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit www.bdsmovement.net and follow @BDSmovement.

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De Roma a Londres

March 27th, 2017 by León Bendesky

En el mundo de Facebook, 60 años de historia son tal vez demasiados. Ahora las cosas ocurren de manera inmediata, a la vez que el tiempo se aleja más rápidamente.

Las relaciones, además de instantáneas, son diferentes; ocurren con una mayor distancia en cuanto a su personalización. La forma en que se consiguen los amigos y el número de ellos que se tienen ha cambiado; en línea se cuentan por decenas y hasta por centenas, y lo único que se necesita para añadirlo a la lista es un like. No es necesario saber mucho de ese otro, tal vez mientras menos se sepa sea mejor, y de preferencia por medio de una pantalla de cualquier tamaño.

Esa empresa internacional persigue ahora el ensueño de su fundador. Según el manifiesto que publicó Zuckerberg recientemente, su proyecto es construir una comunidad global. Ahí plantea que Facebook ya no es solamente un negocio, ni siquiera una plataforma, sino que se está convirtiendo en un movimiento ideológico a escala mundial.

Al respecto es recomendable leer la crítica del historiador Yuval Harari sobre las implicaciones de este tránsito que se propone Facebook, en términos de las posibles repercusiones para la empresa y, sobre todo, como proyecto político (ver Financial Times, 25/3/17).

En todo caso, medido en relación con la vida de las personas, 60 años es un periodo considerable. Aunque es corto en un sentido histórico. Cuando menos en la mitad de ese tiempo ha habido un considerable proceso de innovación tecnológica en el campo de las telecomunicaciones. Hoy estamos en pleno impulso del efecto de esa tecnología, la misma que ha sostenido el surgimiento y la enorme expansión de Facebook, entre otras empresas de ese sector.

Pues hace 60 años, el 25 de marzo de 1957, se firmó el Tratado de Roma, que estableció la Comunidad Económica Europea, el origen de la actual Unión Europea. Aquel tratado creó un mercado común y también una unión aduanera, una forma incipiente de integración, entre los miembros.

El tratado lo firmaron Francia, Alemania Occidental, Italia, Holanda, Bélgica y Luxemburgo, y entró en vigor el primero de enero de 1958. Constó de cuatro instituciones: una comisión, un consejo de ministros, una asamblea parlamentaria y una corte de justicia.

La primera expansión de la comunidad fue en 1973, cuando entraron Dinamarca, Irlanda y Reino Unido; la más reciente fue en 2013, con la entrada de Croacia. Con esto la Unión Europea, creada en 1993, cuenta ahora con 28 países miembros. El Brexit, que podría implementarse próximamente, provocará la primera merma de la organización. No parece que vaya a ser la única.

A los 60 años el proyecto europeo expresa males geriátricos. Se parece demasiado a lo que sucede a las personas, incluso podría decirse que los achaques son anticipados, dados lo avances de la medicina, que por cierto no van de la mano de los avances de la política. Uno de los miembros, Reino Unido, quiere ser extirpado de ese cuerpo colectivo; en el camino se extiende el contagio y otros se alinean para salirse también.

El proyecto de integración europeo ha cambiado a esa región, pero en medio de grandes contradicciones que provocan el distanciamiento creciente de parte relevante de la población. En este proceso han contado la burocratización de los órganos de gobierno de la unión y las consecuencias de una profunda crisis económica desde 2009, que ha puesto en entredicho el funcionamiento del euro como moneda común. También han pesado las repercusiones de la guerra en Medio Oriente y el desquiciamiento social en el norte de África con su efecto en el incremento de la migración. Los instintos más individualistas se reafirman incluso como proyecto económico.

Políticamente existe en Europa un predominio del gobierno alemán, que expresa igualmente la preminencia de la economía de ese país. La idea de tener una Europa de dos velocidades se está imponiendo, lo que relegaría aún más a los países más pobres, como Grecia, y aun Portugal, y con ellos a otros.

El rebrote de la mancuerna de nacionalismo y populismo es muy visible y enmarca los procesos electorales en muchos de los países de la región: Francia, Italia, Polonia (el gobierno ni siquiera avala al ex primer ministro Donald Tusk como actual presidente del Consejo Europeo) y Hungría son casos visibles, también Reino Unido.

Tal como está la Unión Europea, ya es un instrumento insostenible. Aún no se advierte que la imaginación y la capacidad políticas de sus líderes puedan enderezar la nave. Es más, parece que la corriente aislacionista tiende a prevalecer. Hasta Trump afirma que los británicos hacen bien en dejar el barco.

La Unión Europea representará a finales de siglo sólo 4 por ciento de una población mundial que se calcula en 10 mil millones de personas. Estos 60 años, desde la firma del Tratado de Roma, se verán insignificantes en ese momento. Ese es el dilema que tienen los políticos europeos, tanto los que controlan la unión como los que quieren renunciar a ella. Mucho antes del final del siglo el mundo será muy distinto al que vivimos ahora. La idea de Europa, tal como es hoy, no puede trasladarse muy hacia adelante.

León Bendesky

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México – Desmilitarizar la seguridad pública

March 27th, 2017 by Carlos Fazio

Bajo una fuerte y sostenida presión política y deliberativa mediática del alto mando castrense, el Congreso mexicano discute sendas iniciativas que buscan dotar de un marco jurídico ad hoc la intervención de las fuerzas armadas en tareas de seguridad pública, funciones que la Constitución define como propias de las policías. Entre ellas, la prevención e investigación del delito; la detención de infractores de la ley; el aseguramiento de la escena del crimen y la evidencia; recoger testimonios; realizar peritajes penales, e instalar retenes para inspeccionar bienes y personas.

Los amanuenses promotores legislativos de esas iniciativas anticonstitucionales plantean, también, autorizar a los militares hacer uso de cualquier método de recolección de información, lo que potenciaría las acciones de inteligencia (espionaje de teléfonos móviles y fijos, vigilancia cibernética, etcétera) sobre toda la ciudadanía y legalizaría la práctica común de los apremios ilegales y la tortura.

En virtud de la amplia autonomía que les brinda su especialización y el monopolio de jure y de facto del máximo poder coercitivo del Estado (el control de los medios de fuego), y del empoderamiento político alcanzado por las corporaciones militares desde el gobierno de Vicente Fox, el cabildeo de los titulares de las secretarías de Defensa y Marina ha logrado imponer como eje de la discusión el concepto de seguridad interior, una categoría difusa nunca antes regulada e introducida bajo una lógica de seguridad nacional impuesta por Estados Unidos al calor de la guerra a las drogas (una misión de estricta naturaleza policial), que define al enemigo interno (el narcotráfico como sustituto de la subversión comunista), y que al amparo de gobiernos entreguistas ha venido acotando los mandatos constitucionales sobre la misión clásica de defensa exterior de la Federación: la defensa nacional y la preservación de la soberanía e integridad territorial.

La iniciativa del diputado priísta César Camacho define las acciones de orden interno como aquellas orientadas a prevenir amenazas a la seguridad interior en una zona geográfica del país, e incluye la instalación de puestos de vigilancia y de reconocimiento, patrullajes, seguridad en instalaciones estratégicas y las demás que se consideren necesarias, lo que indica una flexibilidad absoluta y abre la posibilidad de mayor militarización.

A su vez, la ambigua definición sobre la salvaguarda de la continuidad de las instituciones del Estado abre la puerta a la intervención militar en todo aquello que de manera discrecional sea considerado un peligro para la seguridad interna por el presidente de la República, incluidos el control de la disidencia política y la protesta social. Se contempla, también, que los militares podrán contrarrestar la resistencia no agresiva con el uso de la fuerza y armas.

En su lógica inicial, aunque ilegal y con base en un estado de excepción de facto, la guerra a las drogas de Felipe Calderón era una medida extraordinaria que debía ser temporal. Diez años después, la intervención militar en la represión del delito de narcotráfico ha resultado un fracaso. Según justificó el general Salvador Cienfuegos, los militares no estudian para perseguir delincuentes. Pero además, como dijo su antecesor en la Secretaría de Defensa, Guillermo Galván, la preparación castrense es para el ataque, no para la disuasión. Eso explica el elevado índice de eventos de letalidad perfecta (de combates donde sólo se registraron muertos y ningún herido) y exhibe la actuación sistemática de las fuerzas armadas en la comisión de ejecuciones extrajudiciales y el exterminio de presuntos delincuentes vencidos, muertes sobre las cuales se levantaron muy pocas averiguaciones previas.

Lo que realmente está en juego es el modelo de militarización del combate a las drogas, que ha devenido catástrofe humana: más de 200 mil muertos y 36 mil desaparecidos. De mantenerse ese modelo, significaría seguir postergando el fortalecimiento de las instituciones civiles del Estado y las policías, y profundizaría la militarización permanente de la seguridad pública y la vida nacional. La abdicación del Estado en su obligación de garantizar esa tarea que corresponde al ámbito civil, sería dar un paso más hacia un régimen discrecional y autoritario de nuevo tipo, sin los contrapesos de los poderes Legislativo y Judicial, y abierto, por tanto, a mayores arbitrariedades y flagrantes violaciones a los derechos humanos.

La formulación de una ley que legalizaría la actuación militar en tareas de seguridad en las que no están capacitados –y que ha generado desgaste dentro de las corporaciones castrenses− podría llevar a la toma de peligrosas decisiones de coyuntura, con el agravante de que, debido a que todo dato sobre seguridad interior se mantendría bajo reserva y discreción, se blindarían las responsabilidades y la rendición de cuentas de los militares –a las que están sometidos el resto de los servidores públicos−, al tiempo de que se difuminarían las posibilidades de control civil y ciudadano, transparencia y escrutinio público.

De hecho, en su función de policía militarizada orientada a enfrentar amenazas internas, las fuerzas armadas casi nunca proveen información detallada a los legisladores. Así ha ocurrido en casos como el de los niños Almanza, los estudiantes del Tecnológico de Monterrey, Tlatlaya, Iguala, Tanhuato, Nochixtlán y Tepic. Por lo que no se ejerce una cabal supervisión parlamentaria, limitándose el Congreso a aprobar el presupuesto castrense sin intervenir en su elaboración ni ejercer un control sobre el gasto. A ello se suma la falta de fiscalización sobre la variable mercenaria del Ejército y la Marina, gracias a los recursos extra que llegan como parte de los programas de entrenamiento y cooperación de Estados Unidos, incluidos los de la Iniciativa Mérida. Urge, pues, acotar la acción deliberativa de los mandos y el regreso de los militares a sus cuarteles.

Carlos Fazio

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¿Puede China liderar el mundo?

March 27th, 2017 by Xulio Ríos

Las medidas y planes de la nueva presidencia estadounidense que apuntan al proteccionismo en lo comercial y a un incierto repliegue en lo estratégico sugieren la hipótesis de un declive pronunciado del liderazgo global de Washington. Y puestos a ello, no falta quien sugiera a la segunda potencia económica del mundo que asome como un posible relevo. En un adelanto quizá de pronóstico, el presidente chino Xi Jinping no dudó en presentarse en Davos, en el mayor cónclave de la elite capitalista pro-globalización, como campeón del liberalismo comercial. Pero, ¿es verosímil a corto plazo esta posibilidad?

Desde 2009, China es el mayor exportador global de mercancías. En los últimos años, el proceso de transformación que impulsa internamente para dejar de ser solo la gran fábrica del mundo tiene un fuerte componente exterior. El expansionismo de su influencia económica llega a todos los rincones del planeta y se ha dotado de instrumentos propios para reforzar la seriedad de dicho envite. China es ya el mayor socio comercial de hasta 120 economías del mundo.

La ciudad de Xiamen, en el sur de China, acogerá en septiembre de este año una nueva cumbre de los BRICS, que atisba en el horizonte su primera década de existencia. El lugar elegido, una de las primeras Zonas Económicas Especiales del país, parece reiterar el mensaje de apertura y desarrollo como claves esenciales en las que este grupo de países debiera apostar ante la adversa perspectiva que con sus planes proteccionistas sugieren otros actores internacionales relevantes.

La cumbre de los BRICS en China llegará después del encuentro del G20 celebrado en Hangzhou en 2016. Y, previamente, en mayo, Beijing acogerá una gran cumbre mundial sobre la Franja y la Ruta de la Seda, el proyecto bandera de Xi Jinping. Todas estas iniciativas empujan en la misma dirección. Se trata de integrar las políticas económicas, exterior y de seguridad para avanzar en el objetivo de crear una esfera de predominio en comercio, comunicación, transporte y enlaces de seguridad.

¿Aspira China al liderazgo global?

El tema no es nuevo. Se ha especulado mucho sobre las implicaciones de la emergencia de China para el sistema internacional y su propio propósito. Nunca ha habido consenso sobre la existencia o no en Beijing de una voluntad hegemónica o revisionista en relación al orden global. Partiendo del abandono del enfoque ideológico de otros tiempos y la asunción del pragmatismo también en este ámbito, el objetivo de una gradual recuperación de la posición central en el sistema se acompañó de la reivindicación de la multipolaridad y la “comunidad de destino compartido”.

A esa finalidad de evitar a toda costa la Trampa de Tucídides, una resolución violenta y traumática de la alternancia en la hegemonía global, sirven diversas plataformas creadas en los últimos años, desde la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghái a los citados BRICS, en las que China se ha cuidado hasta ahora de moderar su predominio a fin de no incomodar a sus socios pero también para evitar su señalamiento como amenaza.

Lo cierto es que, tradicionalmente, China siempre ha rehuido posiciones de liderazgo prefiriendo actuar, en el mejor de los casos, a través de terceros y cuidando de “no encabezar la ola ni portar la bandera”, en palabras de Deng Xiaoping. Ese perfil bajo parte de la premisa de que la asunción de mayores responsabilidades internacionales le puede acarrear más problemas que beneficios.

En estos años, la mayor presencia global ha servido al objetivo interno de acelerar su desarrollo y no tanto a destacar internacionalmente. En este plano, sus acciones se han orientado a reivindicar reformas en el sistema y no a sugerir la conformación de poderes alternativos, a lograr en suma un mayor reconocimiento de su posición y en paralelo a fortalecer la legitimidad de unas instituciones que en buena medida hoy día han quedado obsoletas en su representatividad.

Esos intentos de modificar la actual configuración del poder global discurren en paralelo a la vocación de facilitar que sus hipotéticos aliados ganen autonomía con respecto a EEUU. Para recortar distancias, China pretende atraer a otros para evitar que participen de una hipotética estrategia de contención; otra cosa es que persiga consolidar una coalición para asaltar el  cetro del poder global.

Las autoridades chinas, por otra parte, en su discurso rehúyen cualquier vocación mesiánica. Su modelo económico no es exportable e insisten incluso ante sus más fervientes imitadores en que cada cual debe buscar su propio camino; su modelo político tampoco goza de predicamento incluso entre sus admiradores más entusiastas; su arquitectura social presenta grietas profundas que reclaman reparaciones en justicia; su cultura particular, muy desconocida globalmente, no tiene la dimensión suficiente para generar el acompañamiento universal que suscita Occidente; en el orden de la seguridad y la defensa, carece aún de atributos solventes.

China no está en condiciones de disputar la hegemonía militar, ni el papel del yuan puede suplir al dólar como principal moneda de reserva y tardará en situarse a la cabeza de la innovación científico-tecnológica a pesar del ingente esfuerzo inversor de los últimos ejercicios. Por no hablar del poder blando. Aunque su ascenso económico es evidente, ni de lejos dispone de los activos y recursos determinantes del poder global.

A China se le puede pedir que participe más, que asuma más responsabilidades y tal como señaló Xi Jinping en Davos recientemente, está en disposición de hacerlo; pero tanto por circunstancias estructurales como por sus propias taras internas, no dispone de la capacidad hoy día para sustituir a EEUU y Occidente en el liderazgo global, al menos  conforme a los patrones al uso.

Un pato cojo

Cabe recordar que la segunda potencia económica del mundo ostenta la posición 90 en Índice de Desarrollo Humano. Mejora posiciones, es verdad, pero le falta lo suyo. El desarrollo interno, de una parte, y el incremento de su influencia regional como trampolín para aumentar su proyección a escala global son sus prioridades. Su liderazgo no puede ser inmediatamente mundial. Eso no significa que China renuncie a ejercer más influencia o a reclamar reformas en el sistema global con más insistencia, ya sea en lo político, financiero o comercial. En esas está hoy día.

China abriga desde hace tiempo un sentimiento de exclusión de las grandes decisiones económicas y políticas mundiales. No se conformará con ser un socio menor y no secundará propuestas que suenen a subordinación o comparsa. Espera su momento y este podría estar al llegar.

La estratégica oportunidad que ahora parece abrirse con Donald Trump le facilitará el reforzamiento de su papel global pero la elevación precipitada y exacerbada de su perfil internacional puede alentar conflictos indeseados afectando negativamente a su ritmo de modernización. Algo de todo ello habrán podido constatar ya en su propio patio trasero en los años que llevamos de mandato de Xi Jinping quien puso bajo siete llaves la tradicional modestia del gigante asiático.

Xulio Ríos

Xulio Ríos: Director del Observatorio de la Política China.

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This report is yet to be fully confirmed (GR Editor)

Inside Syria Media Center has obtained proofs of plans to create a state of Great Kurdistan.

According to the documents at our disposal, the U.S. authorities and the Syrian Kurds reached an agreement past week on the boundaries of the Kurdish autonomy in the territory of Syria, which had been guaranteed to Kurds in case of capturing Raqqa and Al-Tabqah (34 miles to the West of Raqqa). This confirms the reports about the U.S. plans to divide Syria.

In addition, Washington has already defined the boundaries of the new state of the Great Kurdistan on the territory of Syria and Iraq. It is to be created after ISIS defeat and the final collapse of Syrian Arab Republic. According to the U.S. military, Kurds remain the only force capable of defeating ISIS.

Map of Great Kurdistan

In order to strengthen its positions the new U.S. administration announced the upcoming liberation of the so-called ISIS capital, Raqqa. To grease the wheels the Americans resorted to money, their weapon of choice. They bribe ISIS field commanders and increase payments to YPG and FSA units.

The U.S. government intends to capture Raqqa by April and to eliminate ISIS in Syria and Iraq this summer. The implementation of these plans requires making concessions to Kurds. This is why the U.S. promises them an independent state in case of victory.

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China, América Latina y la crisis de los commodities

March 27th, 2017 by Alfredo Toro Hardy

Cuando China y América Latina se topan a comienzos del nuevo milenio, la historia económica de ambas venía de transitar por caminos diferentes. Mientras la primera evidenciaba un crecimiento económico sin paralelos en la historia documentada de la humanidad, producto de una reforma económica pragmática, la segunda se encontraba inmensamente debilitada como resultado de la ideología neoliberal. La avalancha de los productos chinos de bajo costo vino, como en el caso de las afeitadoras de doble hojilla, a repasar a aquellas industrias que no habían caído con la súbita apertura de nuestros mercados.  

China evidenciaba sin embargo una importante virtud que la redimía: era voraz consumidora de nuestras materias primas y productos básicos. Es decir, lo que en economía se conoce como commodities. Gracias al apetito chino el precio de los mismos, excluyendo metales y energía, creció 60% en términos reales entre 2002 y 2006. En el caso de petróleo y metales el aumento en precios durante ese período alcanzó 150% y 180%, respectivamente. Por contraste, en las cinco décadas precedentes al boom de precios empujado por China, los commodities habían venido cayendo a una tasa anual de 1.6% en relación a los bienes manufacturados (BernardoKosacoff  y Sebastián Campanario, La Revalorización de las Materias Primas y sus Efectos en América Latina, CEPAL, 2007).

Así las cosas mientras la base industrial de la región sufría un segundo golpe de grandes proporciones, el precio de los commodities subía con fuerza inusitada. El 70% del crecimiento de las exportaciones latinoamericanas se sustentaba en aquellos, con China teniendo un efecto directo y otro indirecto sobre dicho proceso. Lo primero en virtud de un incremento del 370% en las ventas a China desde el año 2000. Lo segundo en virtud del aumento global en el precio de los commodities, empujado por la demanda china (Kevin Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski, The Dragon in the Room, Stanford, 2010).

Como resultado de lo anterior las tasas de crecimiento económico se dispararon en un conjunto de países latinoamericanos que representaban el 69% del PIB regional y que eran, precisamente, aquellos conectados a China o dependientes de commodities. Más aún, y a diferencia de los años signados por el Consenso de Washington, el período comprendido entre 2002 y 2011  dominado por el comercio con China, produjo importantes avances en lo social. El PIB per cápita promedio de la región se incrementó en casi 25% mientras que las tasas de pobreza decrecieron significativamente, con más de 50 millones de personas emergiendo de la pobreza moderada (World Bank, “Latin America and the Caribbean’s Long Term Growth: Made in China?”, Washington D.C., September 2011).

Sin embargo la relación con China resultó compleja. Para algunos representó la oportunidad de un crecimiento económico sostenido, conjugando mercado para sus productos e inversiones para sus economías. Para otros, por el contrario, sustrajo mercados tanto domésticos como de exportación y desvió inversiones. Entre esos dos extremos  aparece un grupo intermedio que ganaba por un lado pero perdía por el otro. Chile, México y Brasil son ejemplos nítidos de las tres opciones anteriores, dentro del mismo orden citado.

No obstante debido a la reducción en las tasas de crecimiento de China, al enfriamiento del comercio mundial y a la caída en los precios del petróleo, el ciclo expansivo de los commodities llegó a su fin en 2013. En palabras de Francisco Rojas Aravena: “El valor de las exportaciones de mercadería de la región muestra una importante contracción que alcanzó al 14%…Los países más afectados por la contracción de las exportaciones han sido los sudamericanos, como consecuencia en los precios de los productos básicos, el petróleo y la minería, principalmente por la caída en la demanda de los países asiáticos. Las exportaciones sudamericanas en 2015 alcanzaron a un menos 21%” (“América Latina en un ciclo de baja, pero con señales esperanzadoras”, Pensamiento Iberoamericano, enero, 2016).

Esta contracción de 21% genera un importante riesgo que Rojas Aravena expresa en los siguientes términos: “Uno de los principales peligros para la estabilidad democrática en la región está ligado al temor real de importantes segmentos de la población de recaer en la pobreza. Dicha situación impacta directamente sobre las aspiraciones generadas al ascender a clases medias” (Idem). Nada conlleva mayor potencial desestabilizador que el regreso a la pobreza de quienes habían ascendido a las clases medias.

Lo anterior resulta tanto más preocupante cuanto que no hay indicios de pronta recuperación por parte de la economía mundial. La era proteccionista iniciada por Donald Trump, a contracorriente de dicha recuperación, viene a echar más leña al fuego de la incertidumbre. Su controversia comercial con China y México, ahora acompañada del anuncio de revisar los acuerdos de libre comercio firmados con los demás países de la región, afectarán sin duda a América Latina.

Alfredo Toro Hardy

Alfredo Toro Hardy: Diplomático y académico venezolano.

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Republicans demand a healthcare bill (or medical system) that will simultaneously (and without sacrificing quality of healthcare) reduce their total expenses on medical care — including their insurance premiums and their out-of-pocket costs — and that will also be more free-market (with less government involvement and regulations) than in existing U.S. healthcare policy (both before and after Obamacare began); they want more free-market, and less cost, and also no sacrifice on quality.

The economic data show that (by far) the most cost-effective medical care is in countries that have socialized healthcare; the least cost-effective (meaning the least efficient) medical care is in countries that have not socialized healthcare, and the middle that’s between those two extremes is countries (there is only one: Switzerland) that are between those two categories: countries that legally require everyone to have health insurance but that remove the profit-motive from health insurance by having (as Switzerland puts it)

“60 government-approved non-profit insurance providers offer basic mandatory insurance and optional loss-of-earnings [disability] insurance in accordance with legal requirements and the supervisory authority’s directives.”

America’s propagandists for Obamacare had been saying such things as “Switzerland Has Its Own Kind of Obamacare — and Loves It”, and mentioned that “For many Americans, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which makes health insurance mandatory, is a bitter pill to swallow” but that it’s really “a victory for common sense,” but they were misrepresenting the extent to which the Swiss system is similar to Obamacare, and also misrepresenting (over-praising) the Swiss system’s track-record of performance.

Besides the Swiss system’s using only approved non-profit insurers, it importantly has nothing like Obamacare’s “insurance mandate.” One might wonder: how, then, could coverage be “mandatory” in Switzerland? The answer is that, “If you fail to insure yourself within three months, the canton will choose a provider for you and you will be sent a premium bill by the provider.” Consequently, whereas Switzerland really does have “universal coverage” (meaning 100% of citizens are insured), Obamacare leaves 10.9% of Americans uninsured. Prior to Obama’s coming into office, 14.6% of Americans had no health insurance; so, Obamacare increased the pre-Obama 85.4% of Americans who had health insurance, to 89.1%. He increased the insured percentage by 3.7%.

That’s all — nothing like increasing it to “universal insurance” (100% insured) which is what every other OECD nation has (besides their having better health care, at far lower prices, as will be documented in the paragraph immediately below). Democrats propagandize about their achievement, by comparing the current 10.9% figure versus the 18.0% peak figure that was the all-time high percentage of Americans who had no insurance, which was right before the Obamacare exchanges opened for business, on the first day of October in 2013.

Millions of Americans had simply dropped their existing insurance as Obama’s promised health insurance system came closer to reality, and especially after the U.S. Supreme Court gave it the go-ahead; but for propagandists to compare the 10.9% figure versus the 18% figure is fraudulent, which is par for the course in U.S. politics and government — thoroughly untrustworthy, like in a dictatorship. (Jimmy Carter calls the U.S. an “oligarchy” instead of a democracy; he’s correct, and an oligarchy is a dictatorship by the super-rich.

Democracy is impossible with a misinformed public, such as here. “Oligarchs” need it to be that way.) The Democrats’ touting that 18% pre-Obamacare uninsured figure includes the additional 3.4% of Americans who, after Obama became elected in 2008, abandoned insurance, because they were hoping for the Democrats to provide a much better health insurance system; but the Democrats, immediately after Obama’s win in 2008, yanked much that was best in their promised plan — for example, the promised “public option” was immediately abandoned by Obama; he never really intended it, except as an attractive campaign line. He knew that the insurance companies didn’t want to be competing against that, and he had a top executive, Elizabeth Fowler from WellPoint, America’s largest health insurance company, actually draft his Obamacare plan, in the Senate office of his buddy U.S. Senator Max Baucus.

The U.S. has the most-free-market healthcare system, and by far the most inefficient, with super-high costs, and the worst performance, among all the OECD countries. Here are the facts: the detailed data are right here. Look at it. Life-expectancy is used there as the measure of healthcare-quality, because the reliable data for calculating it in a trustworthy way are available for almost every nation on Earth.

So, look there at the graph, “Life expectancy vs. health expenditure over time, 1970-2014” and what you’ll see is shocking: The U.S. is alone in one category, of astounding inefficiency — high cost combined with low quality — and all other OECD nations are clumped close together in a very different category, where they all are remarkably similar, all of them having vastly higher efficiency: far higher life-expectancy, and far lower cost, than the United States. It looks like the U.S. is rip-off-ville — Reagan’s City on a Hell, to reverse his exaggerated claim, toward the extremity that it’s actually getting far closer to: his greed-is-good libertarian ideal (the Republican predilection) — the place where defrauding the public reigns without any effective challenge at all. Then look further down that page, at the “Appendix: Latest available data on life expectancy and spending on health per capita in OECD countries.” The exact figures are given there, “Life expectancy” and “Health spending per capita.”

Okay: so, Democrats are deluded when they say that Obamacare is anything close to the best that we can do, but Republicans are blithering fools who demand that we do even worse than we already are.

To make healthcare more free-market, with lower prices and without cheapening the quality, is proven by all the data to be a ridiculous ideal, which, the more that it is pursued, will suck up an ever-bigger percentage of the total national economy, while it makes the public sicker, shortens the public’s lifespan, makes the public more disabled, lowers workers’ productivity, and drives down the entire nation’s economic international rank. Such a nation is in decline, as compared to its economic competitors. Anyone who would want to buy that package, I would want to sell a bridge in Brooklyn to; and, to such a person: Good luck charging tolls on it, while motorists sue you for its potholes and the damages it has done to their cars and trucks (if not also to themselves).

Free-market-extremism can be very costly to a country, because anything that builds a country’s physical infrastructure (such as roads) or human capital (such as healthcare) is far more efficiently provided by the government than by the private sector; and this fact is recognized practically everywhere on Earth except in the suckered-by-oligarchs United States. And what results from that — the failing, and the falling — is now clear in the data.

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

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March 25th was the EU’s birthday. It was celebrated in London and elsewhere by anti-Brexit demonstrations. Initially organised by Unite for Europe, supported by European Movement and the 3 Million group of EU citizens living in the UK, there were some unhappy arguments about whether the London march should go ahead because of the terrible killings at Westminster three days before.

When it appeared that people were going to turn up anyway, the European Movement grudgingly issued a statement saying people should attend, while the press enjoyed publishing pieces about ‘infighting’ in the anti-Brexit camp.

Be that as it may, the police were happy for the march to go ahead and when I arrived in London, it was obviously business as usual. Policing was light, polite and friendly, and no, they weren’t all armed and wearing flak jackets, despite having to deal with a bigger demonstration than forecast.

Since the EU referendum many people have become angry about how the result was being portrayed. ‘An overwhelming win for Brexit’ claimed the Leave campaigners. Not so. The figures give a different picture:

Of the total votes recorded, 52 per cent voted to Leave the EU, and 48 percent wanted to Remain. But – 28 percent of the total electorate did not even vote; which means that 37 per cent voted leave and 35 per cent voted Remain. That, say the Remainers, is rather more ‘underwhelming’, and as more information on the perils of Brexit are revealed, people are changing their minds.

What has fueled the anger is that the Prime Minister Theresa May is leading her team to a ‘hard Brexit’ result, absolutely regardless of what half of the UK wants. That half is simply not being listened to. Saturday’s demonstration was their chance to make their voices heard.

The start of the march was delayed as far more people than expected were turning up. Many thousands came, much to the fury of the right-wing media which has been extolling the (very questionable) glories of a life outside the EU.

The original estimates were for 16-25,000. One media tweet, surprised at the numbers, said, “I’ve been standing here for 10 minutes and they are still going past!” Actually, it took over 2 hours. The media then gave estimates of ‘between 25-100,000’. Can’t they tell the difference? One police estimate was, at one point, given as 50,000. It was certainly well over that, and maybe it did approach 100,000. Who knows?

I joined the crowd waiting in Trafalgar Square for the march to arrive from its start in Park Lane. Straight away I was meeting fellow minds and instant friends. Everyone except me appeared to have come prepared with small and large EU flags and banners. At times it was like standing in a sea of blue and yellow. “Amazon must have made a fortune,” said the man I was talking to, implying everyone had ordered the flags online. And he kindly gave me the flag he was holding, which I carried – all the way back home.

What was obvious was that the whole event was a celebration of what Europe could and should be. From little babies to the very old, from large groups to people walking by themselves, citizens of the UK and from all other European countries were united. United in their determination to stop the ruination of their lives, and united most of all in their delight at being together, whatever their colour, their culture or nationality.

From Trafalgar Square, we marched down White hall to Parliament Square where the march would end and the speeches begin. I’d had my doubts some days before as to whether Parliament Square would be big enough. I was right.

At one point along White hall a loudspeaker was belting out John Lennon singing ‘All you need is love’ while the marchers sang along. One woman was playing the EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, on her clarinet as she walked. People chanted and cheered – and stopped outside Downing Street for the obligatory boo at the Prime Minister’s residence.

The joy and happiness of being with each other was palpable. We were being fed on the strength of being together. It seemed possible, after all the depression and despair felt by so many, that somehow we really could stop Theresa May’s incompetent government from wrecking our British and European lives.

Parliament Square rapidly filled up and the speeches began. Police directed marchers to other areas around the Square. But more kept coming and marshals had to tell people that no more could enter the Square, because it was so crowded.

The speeches ended, but still they were marching down White hall. Walking back towards Trafalgar Square, I wondered when I would find the end of the march. All I could ever see were more waving EU flags turning into White hall, and more placards to appreciate and photograph.

The placards were a joy. Most were handmade, in turns angry and funny, rude, despairing and clever.

Children everywhere had their personal versions of ‘I want my future back’

Dogs (and there was more than one taking part) said ‘Bones before Brexit’

Theresa May was not treated kindly. There were irreverent images of her, along with some plain messages:

No to Mayhem

No May – we’re here to stay

No we won’t let it Lie (referring to the fact that the Brexit campaign was based on lies)

Mrs May – the brewery is in Brussels (for non-British readers, someone judged incompetent is described as ‘can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery’.  It also refers to the fact that most people recognise the EU needs reforming. But that does NOT mean Brexit.)

There were the witty messages:

Sprout with Brussels or whither with Brexit

Brexit grass is greener because it is fertilised with bullshit

Brexit is a dog’s breakfast.  Make mine a Continental.

Some were based on quotes.  From a song:

You say democracy, I say right-wing coup – let’s call the whole thing off

And from a poem:

No man is an island, No country by itself.

And this:

British

Right wing coup

Extreme

Xenophobic

Ill-informed

Tosh

Watching the last of the march enter White hall, I spoke to a man who’d come down from the North of England (a very pro-Brexit area) for a short holiday with his wife. “I didn’t know this was going on,” he said, thrilled by what he saw. “I had to come and see – isn’t it wonderful!”

Mrs. May – when you trigger Article 50 on Wednesday, spare a thought for the sea of blue and yellow flags outside Parliament. The half of the United Kingdom that voted to stay with Europe, and the 3 million Europeans who live and work here aren’t going away, they won’t be silenced, and after Saturday’s demonstration are more united than ever in their anger and determination to stop your government from wrecking this country and their lives.

And Mr Corbyn – isn’t it time you acted as a real Leader of the Opposition and spoke up for all those people who didn’t vote to leave? That includes the many thousands who, like me, joined the Labour Party because of your socialist policies, and who are looking to you to fight for the rights and protections we have because of being part of the EU.

I walked back to the station, tired out but full of hope and happiness. I’ve been on many a demo, but none had left me feeling that I had just experienced such a happy, positive day. Getting off the train after a long journey home, someone spotted my little EU flag. “You were on the march,” he said.  He’d been there with his daughter. “Wasn’t it great!” he exclaimed.  “Yes,” I replied, “Yes.”

Yes, it was.

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The alternative media community, especially its social media iteration, is experiencing collective psychosis in hallucinating that “Israel” and Russia are on the verge of war with one another.

The prevailing narrative is that Israeli “Defense Minister” Lieberman’s threat to destroy Syria’s air defense systems is tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia, with the assumption being that Moscow is on a crusade against Zionism and has thus become Tel Aviv’s worst enemy.

There’s no diplomatic way to say this, but the presumptions on which such a crazy conclusion has been reached are absolutely and utterly wrong.

Far from being Israel’s hated nemesis like many in the alternative media community wishfully pretend that it is, Moscow is one of Tel Aviv’s closest allies, and this is entirely due to President Putin’s deliberate policies. Not only does he enjoy a very strong personal friendship with Netanyahu, but President Putin also sees a lot of opportunity to advance his country’s interests in Israel through the large Russian diaspora there.

Russia wants to compete with the US for influence in Israel for several interrelated reasons.

Firstly, Judaism is one of Russia’s four official religions as stipulated by the 1993 constitution, thus partially making Russia a “Jewish State” in the technical-legal sense. To be fair, though, Russia is also an Orthodox, Muslim, and Buddhist country too by the same measure.

Coupled with the Russian diaspora in Israel, Moscow seeks to leverage these religious-personal connections in order to acquire greater clout over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which in turn would be expected to boost Russia’s global Great Power prestige (which is exceptionally important to its leadership).

As a “reward” for its positive involvement in helping to resolve this seemingly intractable issue, Russia might expect Israel to grant its state companies important contracts in building, servicing, and/or investing in any potential Eastern Mediterranean pipeline from the offshore Leviathan gas field to the EU, which would exponentially increase Moscow’s influence on the global energy market and consequently on world affairs in general.

putinnetanyahu-1489080547

To be absolutely clear, I respectfully disagree with this approach for principled reasons, though I understand why Russia has embarked on it, and what it hopes to reap from its multifaceted engagement with Israel.

Returning to the current context and topic of this article, there’s no way whatsoever that Russia would ever even consider lobbying a volley of nuclear missiles at Israel no matter what Netanyahu does in Syria, even if he delivers on his government’s threats to destroy the country’s air defense systems.

In such a frightful scenario, Russia would assuredly issue a sharp diplomatic rebuke against Israel and probably take symbolic measures to express its disapproval, but it won’t ever preemptively intervene and stop Israeli jets from bombing Syria because its mandate is strictly to fight terrorism, and not defend Syria’s borders from outside state aggression.

Moreover, it’s an open fact that Russia and Israel have established mechanisms to coordinate their military action in Syria so as to avoid inadvertent clashes, which is hardly the behaviour that anyone would expect from two parties on the brink of an all-out nuclear exchange against each other.

Let’s face it — Russia and Israel are high-level and comprehensive strategic allies with one another, though this by no means signifies that Moscow is incapable of “balancing” its relations between Tel Aviv and Damascus.

In fact, it’s this very tricky diplomatic “balancing act” which might actually be somewhat restraining Israel from taking more aggressive action in Syria, as it understands that there’s a certain limit to what it can do and “get away with” before it overly embarrasses Russia and negatively impacts on bilateral relationships.

Everyone knows that Russia has deployed S-400 air defense missiles in Syria, and this fact was reported on with much fanfare and enthusiasm in the alternative media community, both through its professional outlets and on social media. Many people naively assumed that this would put a stop to Israel’s occasional strikes in Syria, yet several high-profile ones have occurred in the time since, in spite of the presence of the S-400s.

This can only be interpreted as proof that Russia has no desire to overstep its anti-terrorism mandate and defend Syria’s external borders, nor would it even want that heavy responsibility if Damascus offered it.

In addition, the fact that these strikes happened without any noticeable interference from the Russian side can be taken as visible confirmation that the mechanisms earlier described between Moscow and Tel Aviv are working properly in avoiding any inadvertent clashes between the two sides.

This does not mean, however, that Russia condones Israel’s illegal military activity in Syria (especially its latest bombing), but just that it passively stands by and chooses time and again to avoid becoming involved in what Moscow sees as a strictly bilateral issue between Tel Aviv and Damascus.

Nevertheless, a blatant act of state-on-state aggression such as attempting to obliterate Syria’s nationwide anti-air defense systems wouldn’t be tolerated by Russia, and would probably compel President Putin to freeze relations with “Israel” due to the unacceptable diplomatic embarrassment that Netanyahu would have inflicted on Moscow.

Netanyahu, for his part, is keenly aware of the limits of what he can and cannot do in Syria without risking Russia’s genuine ire, so it is extremely unlikely that he will carry through on his Defense Minister’s threat. That being said, however, Israel — being the quintessential rogue state that it is — might backstab Russia by doing this anyhow so long as its leadership believes that the “cost-benefit” calculation “justifies” such action.

The only realistic scenario for that to happen would be if Israel was convinced — whether “rightly” or wrongly — that Iranian and Hezbollah activity in Syria posed an “imminent threat” to its interests that would surpass any perceived indirect negotiating/”balancing” benefits vis-a-vis these parties that Tel Aviv’s alliance with Moscow provides.

It’s been speculated that Russia is very understanding of Israel’s concerns about Iran and Hezbollah in Syria, and that Moscow might even be discretely pressing for Damascus to draw up a “face-saving” plan for ensuring these forces’ post-war withdrawal from the country, so if that’s the case, then Israel has no reason to further escalate its aggression against Syria under the false pretexts of combating these two Resistance actors.

The fact that Tel Aviv issued its latest threats, however, indicate that this speculation might not be entirely true, since it would logically follow that any successful Russian efforts on this front would negate whatever “reason” Israel might have for jeopardizing its mutually advantageous alliance with Moscow.

Another possible explanation might be that Syria doesn’t agree with Russia’s rumored suggestions in this respect and therefore isn’t going along with them, which from Tel Aviv’s perspective might cause it to recalculate that its alliance with Moscow is disposable because it has failed to bear fruit on one of its most important fronts.

Much more likely, however, is that there isn’t any secret Russian-Israeli understanding to conspire against Iran and Hezbollah’s post-war presence in Syria, and that Israel’s latest threat was issued independently of its relationship with Russia, though of course only time will tell what the truth really is.

To get back to the topical issue at hand, any large-scale state-to-state attack that Israel might launch against Syria probably wouldn’t be stopped by Russia, but it would definitely ruin the relationship between Moscow and Tel Aviv. Russia isn’t going to go to war against Israel for the sake of saving Syria and formally going beyond its specific mandate, no matter how much millions of people might wish that it would under those circumstances.

Even so, Russia is a proud and dignified civilization-state which won’t accept the global humiliation that would ensue from passively allowing such a massive aggression to occur under its watch, despite it legally not being Russia’s responsibility to protect Syria’s external borders or to prevent state aggression against its military, which is why it would be forced to freeze all ties with Israel in response.

In that scenario, Russia’s “balancing” policy would come to an abrupt end and Moscow might reactively realign its regional priorities with the Resistance Bloc of Iran and Hezbollah instead of remaining “impartial” like it currently is, though still taking care not to do anything which could be perceived as stoking Israel’s paranoia that Russia might also be in the process of becoming a “threat” to it too.

To wrap everything up, no realistic case can be argued that Russia is on the verge of war with Israel. Historical facts such as the unprecedented Russian-Israeli Strategic Partnership, the public existence of bilateral military coordination mechanisms in Syria, and the sincere personal friendship between President Putin and Netanyahu, categorically disprove any such claims.

While it might be “fashionable” to pretend that Russia is opposed to Israel, that’s simply not true at all, no matter how much people in the alternative media community might deeply wish for it to be so. Even in the disastrous event that Israel decides to launch an all-out conventional attack against Syria and escalate its presently ongoing Yinon Plan of divide-and-rule “Arab Spring” Hybrid War into something much larger, there’s no way that Russia would intervene, although it would clearly be displeased and would have to take appropriate diplomatic countermeasures in order to save its prestige.

The bottom line is that supporters of the Syrian Arab Republic mustn’t let their optimistic well wishing desires cloud their analytical judgment and objective appraisal of reality, because failure to do so will only result in the creation of an alternative universe totally divorced from the world in which we truly live.

And that, folks, leads to legitimately “fake news” such as the hysterical claims that Russia is about to go to war with Israel.

 

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On January 15th, he told the Washington Post: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. … There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.”

On September 27th of 2016, while campaigning against Hillary Clinton he told CBS “60 Minutes”:

Donald Trump: By the way. Everybody’s got to be covered. This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, “No, no, the lower 25 percent that can’t afford private.” But —

Scott Pelley: Universal health care?

Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.

Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of how?

Donald Trump: They’re going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably —

Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?

Donald Trump: — The government’s gonna pay for it.”

But on CBS’s “Face the Nation, on Sunday, March 19th, Mick Mulvaney, Director of the White House Budget Office, said that Trump had lied on both occasions there:

DICKERSON: You mentioned getting care. The president has said as a candidate, he said about health care, “there was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it,” meaning health care, “that’s not going to happen with us.” He’s talking about universal care there. That’s not — you’re not going to have universal care after these changes.

MULVANEY: We don’t have universal — the only way to have universal care, if you stop to think about it, is to force people to buy it under penalty of law. So with this —

DICKERSON: So was he mistaken when he said there should be —

MULVANEY: OK, but keep in mind what we’re replacing. What you’ve got now is, we’re forcing people to buy it under Obamacare under penalty of law and people are still looking for a way not to buy it. So clearly the government mandate doesn’t work. The better process, the better function is exactly what we’re trying to do now, which is to encourage people and enable them to buy a policy they want and can afford.

DICKERSON: But with that — but universal care was not really a promise he could made.

MULVANEY: Again, universal — the only way to get truly universal care is to throw people in jail if they don’t have it.

DICKERSON: Right.

MULVANEY: And we are not going to do that.

DICKERSON: Let me switch to the budget.

Dickerson, there, having just begun to get deep enough into this crucial matter so as to be breaking major national news about what Trumpcare will provide — that Donald Trump had promised universal care before becoming President and abandoned it immediately when he became President — just proceeded to the next question on his list, as if there weren’t reason to explore further and dig deeper here, such as, for example, “And what was Trump talking about on January 15th and on September 27th, when he promised universal care?”

The next question on Dickerson’s list was about Trump’s many trips to his Mar-a-Lago vacation resort: “What does a coal miner or a single mom say about these trips down to Florida?” After all, Dickerson is a ‘news’ person, so he has a list he must read from, and get all the questions done before going home to dinner.

Besides, Dickerson already had accepted Mulvaney’s PR for the White House, that “universal care was not really a promise he could have made … right.” He thinks his viewers are that stupid. (After all, every other OECD nation has it, plus higher lifespans, and far less expensive healthcare — 100% universal, and it’s better, and far cheaper, than what we have — but ‘news’ persons aren’t interested in such trivia as policy-realities — nor, apparently, is the President of the United States (even if he knows what the realities are).

But the public are interested in it — and Trump’s lies like this, will eat away inexorably at his approval-rating. At the start of his Presidency, only people who hadn’t voted for him were noticing, and gloating, over his lies — after all, they were mainly about his taxes and other personal details, not about the policies he’ll pursue as President. But now, when the government rubber actually hits the policy road, even people who voted for him are noticing, because it’s real public policies he’s getting into — and they’re not gloating.

The failure of the Trump Presidency will thus become evident far faster than the failure of the Obama Presidency did, and the failure of the G.W. Bush Presidency did. Of course, there still are people who would vote for Bush (Republicans) or for Obama (Democrats), but at this rate, Trump soon won’t even have many Republican supporters remaining: his lies on policy will start embarrassing his Party, after Republicans can no longer deny that he’s not the man, and doesn’t support the policies, that he had said he was and does. Trump’s Presidency is heading off into a ditch. If there is a policy road, then the driver here, Donald Trump, cannot even see it.

Sooner or later, incessant lying about major public-policy issues depresses even the voters in that politician’s own Party. He has lied himself into a corner, and now will get eaten up by the creatures who are waiting for him there.

One by one, the policy-lies — about not only health care, but negotiating with Russia, ending America’s invasions, and placing the interests of the public above the interests of Goldman Sachs, Exxon/Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and etc. — will become evident, as they pile up higher and higher. Even Republicans will start to see that he’s just a big bluffing nothing-burger, a puffy bun with nothing inside it except, maybe, ketchup and mustard.

Perhaps he’s more afraid of being called a ‘socialist’ (dread, dread: but it’s normal in Europe), or even ‘Putin’s puppet’ (shiver, shiver), than he’s afraid of doing a lousy job as the U.S. President. Maybe, he’s so afraid of his enemies, that he’s even handing them the White House. The worst things about Hillary Clinton, which made her clearly unacceptable for me to vote for, Trump is turning out to be, himself. And the voters widely despised both candidates. This is a ‘democracy’?

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

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Fake News: The Unravelling of US Empire From Within

March 27th, 2017 by Prof. John McMurtry

Setting the Stage of the Press-President War

US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s ‘fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.

US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. ‘The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

Fake news is the medium of battle.

Tracking the Real Fake News Built into Corporate Globalization

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”.  In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

As for the Obama solution, “we need more Canadas”, fake news again conceals the reality. Beneath the global celebrity hype covering empty and broken promises, Canada’s Trudeau  regime is essentially a brand change of PM rhetoric to advance transnational corporate dictates as ‘free trade’ and to ensure oil pipelines out of the most polluting oil basin in the world, Alberta’s tar-sands, are built through water basins and indigenous lands across Canada and the US. One cannot help but observe this is Trump’s plan too, and overrides Trudeau’s promises to protect Canada’s first peoples.

I recently sent a letter to my local MP requesting evidence for what PM Trudeau promises over months of repetition that “more free trade” means “a better life for those in the middle class and those wanting to join the middle class”. As always, there is no evidence to support the non-stop false news from the PMO. Revealingly, the “middle class” turns out to be people making $180,000 a year slated to get significant tax cuts.

Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.

The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in ‘the free world’ or any policy of ‘globalization’.  The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.

Out of the Ruling Memory Hole with the Internet Commons

Joining the dots shows that every step of US money-party ‘globalization’ has, in fact, been driven by fake news.

No corporate media tolerance has been given in a quarter of a century to any voice demanding accountability to the common life-ground of citizens. A new game of numbers has proceeded instead. At most, a euphemistic ‘climate change’ has been endlessly debated while the totalizing destabilization of human and planetary life cycles remains without a name or collective response. Only more profitable market panaceas which do not reduce any pollution continue to divert from the deepest degenerate trends destroying the planetary life host.

On the upside, the big lies of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian wars’ have been called into official question for the first time by the Trump presidential campaign, and he has been elected against the official line. Yet opposing camps are still at each other’s throats. So the perpetual fallback on accusing the long-designated foreign enemy is triggered by the fallen establishment. The fake news chorus of Russia’s aggressions now includes collusion of the Trump administration with its officials to win the US election. This mainspring diversion from reality is called back from the dead witch-hunts of the past. As then tool, facts do not count, only accusations do. The official media line is almost predictable: Russia is behind Trump’s election victory. As always, reverse projection is the mass-psyche operation to blame an official Enemy to divert attention from the life-and-death facts. The Enemy is once again accused of doing what the US has always done worse as the reason for attacking It. Russia is the usual placeholder in this reverse-blame operation. The 2016 US election of Trump is the latest variation.

Meanwhile throughout the election and its aftermath, the new transnational internet commons including Wiki-leaks over a decade has increasingly laid bare the greatest propaganda machine in history now in many-leveled crisis. The long normalized half-truths, one-sided slanting of the facts, and non-stop fallacies of inference are coming out into the open as never before.  The pretexts and lies for US imperial bullying and war are exposed beyond any corporate-media gate.

This time the accusation is “interference and attack on the US presidential election” with no evidence of wrongdoing or vote manipulation whatsoever. Yet as in the long past, the method is smear with no evidence for the accusations. Ever more media repetition and shadowy insinuation does the job. It has always worked before, why not again since all the other media buttons pushed on taking down the Trump peace initiatives with Russia and opposition to globalization of US jobs have failed.

Having wondered during the election campaign whether we could be “friends with Russia” and promoted diplomatic relations into his administration, Trump can be named as the enemy in hiding to be rooted out. The real problem the fake news never mentions is that he threatens the cornerstone of the US war state over 70 years.

So when Trump won the election with his heresy still intact, the ever-ready accusation of evil-Russia connection moves into high gear although the target is the opposite of communist and an epitome of capitalist riches and connections. We see here the historical mind-lock compulsion to blame the Enemy Russia and smear whoever dissents from it, even if it is a bully-capitalist president. There are very big stakes in keeping the game going.

Yet the no-profit and unpaid analyses from the internet commons have no such ulterior motive and interest in false accusations. With more objectively informed analysts than the commercial press and unimpeachable facts like WikiLeaks going to tens of millions of readers across the world, the genie is out of the bottle. The official grand narrative and its normalized big lies are coming apart at the seams.

So blame as usual is diverted onto the accepted Enemy, now conniving with Trump to attack the 2016 US presidential election. Beneath the fake news, the fact is that positive diplomatic relations with Russia not only threaten to stop the highly profitable permanent war against it, but spike the longest pretext for US war and military domination now moving through Ukraine.

The free internet commons cannot be gagged for telling the truth. Freedom of speech in the US cannot be openly stopped without fatal loss of legitimacy of rule.

So the rest follows. All the non-corporate and non-profit messages from the critical sites on the internet commons which are speaking against the US war state inside are now vilified as ‘fake news’. A third, unofficial protagonist has entered the battle with no private profit or career motive or corporate boss to serve and a wealth of proven professional knowledge and talent at work. It has to be denounced to sustain the big lies of the ruling money-war game which is in deepening crises and conflicts all the way to the unprecedented US President-Press civil war.

The Harvard Proclamation of a New Memory Hole

The innermost fount of US ideology and war, Harvard University, has now stepped in. It is officially naming and denouncing US-critical internet sites for ‘fake news’.

Not even the medieval Church went so far in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum of prohibited writings. It was at least innocent of scientific method and openly declared its dogmas. Not Harvard.

Underneath notice, all the sites it attacks are internet commons, and none are financed by private corporate donors and captive institutions while Harvard and the corporate media are. This is the real battle agenda underneath, the long war  to privatize the news for profit as everything else with anti-establishment internet criticism now the target.

In the background, Harvard University has long propagated an unexamined academic method. It normally cuts off any faculty or learned source of opposition to the private corporate rule of America and the wars of aggression to impose it on the world.  Accordingly, the underling grand narrative equations of the US is Good and the designated Enemy is Evil is not questioned. It is presupposed. Malevolent motives are always assumed of the designated Enemy, down to Harvard-produced geostrategic economic and war models. So when a host of internet commons sites challenge the grand narrative framework, Harvard and satellites denounce them to stop people reading them. A long list of critical sites is accused without criteria, proof or evidence as all spreaders of ‘fake news’.

What is not recognised here is that only on the internet commons can the process of truth be free from ruling pressures to control message for external sponsors.

Here there is no commercial-profit condition to speak and write, and no livelihood dependence on private profit. There is no inducement to avoid life-and-death issues in academic obfuscation or ad-vehicle style. Internet authors not on the payroll can be free of the game of all games behind the scenes – enriching the rich further with no life-coherent criterion of truth.

These underlying conditions of the internet commons and free speech itself cannot be recognised by the academy or the corporate press without undercutting their proclaimed status as the only legitimate founts of truth. The internet commons is a new world of competitive capacities to research, understand and disseminate not bound by private money patronage (as over centuries in Harvard University).

When challenged in this way, Harvard (and the official press) are set back on their heels. They cannot think the facts through because their instituted presumptions have long been what they must presuppose and not question to acquire their credentials and pay for public speech. They must attack what calls all this into question if it effectively speaks truth to power to expose or de-legitimate the ruling system narrative as false. Harvard and the US press thus follow the reigning method of reverse projection. They accuse the effective opposition of ‘fake news’.

The most revealing fact here is that Harvard authority as other academic administrations proceed in name-calling without any valid argument or demonstration – the very basis of reasonable conclusion. Yet this is such a long tradition of presumptive accusation allowed against anyone designated as the Enemy, and anyone else exposing the falsehood of the ruling US story of moral superiority over all others and God’s blessing to lead the world by force or money.

This is why only dissenting sites from the official storyline of US freedom and rightness in all things are accused as ‘fake news’. Accusation of opposing positions is so well-worn into conditioned brains that endless repetition locks it in as self-evident. This is why attributions of vile motive are automatic from Harvard or the New York Times for any outside leader opposing US interference in their countries including elections. US hypocrisy here is staggering, but unreported. In fact, Harvard’s life-blind elite of war criminal geo-strategists, economic modellers and so on are fawned upon within the wider corporate rule they serve.

None can engage critical facts and thought challenging the US moral superiority assumptions because they have never been required to consider them. So they denounce them as once the Church denounced apostasy. In the end, US system worship is a war-state religion. It eliminates all enemies to its right to rule. Its globalizing system institutes the market laws of God. War crimes are God-blessed justice.

Freedom of Speech, the Process of Truth, and the US Constitution

Led by senior academics, journalists and technical expertise, the internet commons provide for the first time impartial witness and free speech open to public examination and circulation across borders. They are free from corporate-rank dictate and private copy-right control.

In consequence, the internet commons are liberated from private corporate profit as controlling goal. Those who know what they are talking about can speak truth to dogma and power without words to appease editors, business boards and ad revenues. Truth itself is not defined, but its principle of process is a more inclusively consistent taking into account towards life-coherent conclusion

Despite Google black-holing of radical legal facts, CIA penetration of Wikipedia, and so on, the internet commons’ freedom of speech is far beyond anything guaranteed in the US constitution. In fact, the ‘sacred US Constitution’ that all presidents give oath to “preserve, protect and defend” guarantees in the end only freedom of public speech to private money demand.

Long before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision reverse-titled as “Citizens United”, the US constitution was structured to one overriding end –  to remove prior limits to private-money right over all else, including to begin, the rule of British law and  the lands of the first nations West of the Appalachians.

This is why no common life interest exists in the US Constitution from the start. People’s universal human life necessities of water, food, protection and liveable environment are ruled out a-priori.  This is why civil rights themselves were first federally enforced by the ‘commerce clause’ protecting freedom of commercial bus passengers including blacks to cross borders.

It is also why the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the equal rights of freed slaves ended up being the legal basis for private-profit corporations and wealthy funds to acquire the constitutional rights of living persons (e.g., to freedom of speech for big money to buy elections and to avoid government access to financial records).

Even the iconic rights of “life, liberty and happiness” turn out to be in fact only private market rights which allow corporate ‘fictive persons’ to unlimited money wealth, protection against public redistribution, and the freedom of private wealth alone to  speak to America by buying corporate self promotions and election attack ads.

The US Constitution fix goes all the way back to 1787. As professor of constitutional law at Chicago’s iconic Kent College of Law, Matthew Stanton, explains in personal correspondence:

“[The fix] goes all the way back to the 1787 coup where the 39 signatories to the Constitution sequestered themselves in a Philadelphia meeting house, with locked doors and shuttered windows, to ostensibly make adjustments to the Articles of Confederation, but instead delivered an entirely new document that enabled creating a federal system centralizing control of the economy by  propertied wealth”.

Russia the Enemy: the Deus ex Machina of Fake News

We may recall that the corporate-press and Wall-Street-enriched candidate for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, started the accusation of ‘fake news’ to explain her defeat. As establishment mask of the politically correct masses with the money-war party as her paymaster, Clinton blamed her fall in the 2016 US election on the new enemy she saw arising against the official story and herself. When the ‘glass mirror’ story line did not take, she joined forces with the corporate media on another plane. ‘Fake news’ misled Americans. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV Networks, and other establishment tale tellers saw pay-dirt far beyond Clinton’s failed bid for president.

In fact, the corporate mass media were losing marketability by the escalating appeal of free social media. The once all-powerful press propaganda system has been increasingly deserted. The ‘fake news’ story provided a media base to condemn free internet news and commentary as immoral. The 2016 election became the leverage for a big market grab back.

Very soon it was not just ‘fake news’ to spike news cycles and subscriptions. War as peace and corporate globalization as freedom found its long place of rule – the enemy of Russia to blame. Now the news can be that Russia hacked and attacked the lost 2016 election. Russia may be a hollowed-out shell by global corporate and oligarch dispossession. But it can still continue as pretext for US-NATO war crimes and aggression reverse-blamed on it. As the European breadbasket and newly discovered fossil-fuel rich nation, Ukraine is a very big prize. Now in Ukraine’s US-led coup aftermath and ethnic civil war, evil Russia can be an ace card again to accuse for attacking the US election.

Since Russia led by Putin is drawing the line as in Crimea to support the Russia-speaking region against US-led war crimes under international law (documented in previous articles), all roads connect. “Russia’s uncontrolled aggression” is  reverse-projected onto the victim again in  a glorious new use. Reverse blame it  for interference in the US election of Trump and kill Russia-US peace initiatives at the same time. No fact is required to verify the accusation, and no law broken is needed to insinuate treason of whoever relates with Russia’s officials in peace initiative. It can work even against an elected US president.

At the same time, the US’s own record attacking other nations’ elections and societies is thereby erased as well – continually orchestrating mass-murder and dictatorship to sabotage the electoral process from Vietnam and Chile to Ukraine in 2010 and Latin America social democracies since.

If it were a story of reverse projection by a mass-murderous psychopath, it would be too much to believe. Yet it now runs the US news cycle as the big story unfolding with no evidence of US illegality, force, or non-compliance with international law. The accusations run by themselves in US media culture and across the empire. So as 2017 Spring breaks, endless media insinuations of treason seep into the populace from corporate media sites across borders with backrooms and Congress setting up for another presidential inquisition.

It is interesting to observe two precedents. Past inquisitions were unfolded soon after Bill Clinton said in India, “it’s time to level up rather than down in global trade” and Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protections Agency, stopped corporations from outsourcing US jobs, and made peace with China as Trump sought with Russia.

The ludicrous hypocrisy, factual vacuum, and war-drums of blame-the-enemy go into high-volume operation again, led by an attack-dog media against the elected US president whose only action has been to have business-like relations with Russia. Few observe the immense stakes of the US media and war establishments in this process. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is the question never asked.

What’s new?  The perpetual red herring of ‘Russia aggression’ takes everyone’s eyes off the ball – including the continuing US-drone mass murder and ecological wars built into the Trump agenda. Canada’s oil and mining corps and big banks sneak behind the pervasive fake news with a smiling Trudeau front. NATO demands more money behind Trump now fulsomely praising what he earlier campaigned on as “obsolete”, as he has done with the CIA he also condemned. Those hoping for a new departure under Trump from the big lies and war crimes as normalized operations watch in a combination of horror and hilarity.

Who connects the dots? Beneath official notice, the ruling goal of US empire is blind to its consequences of human and planetary life ruin. It has to cover itself in false news to carry on. This is why fake news is not a temporary phenomenon of the Trump era. It is the necessary veil of illusion of an eco-genocidal system. The symptoms and trends are everywhere. But a US-led prism of false inversions of reality regulates consciousness, perception and reaction to ‘steer the course’.

This is true of both sides of the Trump divide, and also in corporate Canada as the US’s largest trading partner, branch-plant and resource cornucopia. What is new is that the ruling illusions are divided against themselves at the top of the US political and ideological system. The Trump phenomenon reflects the rupture. The US empire is in deep crisis from its cumulative destruction of social and natural life support systems. Its carcinomic multiplication of private money demand with no tie to the production of means of life is the reality beneath all the false news.

Nothing is life secure. The ‘global security system’ protects only money values and sequences through life hosts. Peoples everywhere compete to make it go faster to survive. The ruling concept of ‘economy ‘inverts the systematic depletion, degradation and despoliation of the life capital of organic, social and ecological life. Universal necessities of human and fellow life are stripped, polluted and wasted as ‘efficiencies’.

President Trump has gone into the political ring to fight it out with the political establishment on a nationalist capitalist level. He is losing money in the short term. But his program in office is completely eco-blind, and the opposing mass media follow suit. All they can focus on is demonizing normal relations with the official Enemy Russia. Meanwhile Trump has all but abolished the EPA and cut off all federal funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, the most important source of fresh water heritage on the planet.

These supreme crimes under international law are recognised by none on stage. In Canada, a Nazi progeny and neo-Nazi supporter of the violent coup and civil war in Ukraine is made Foreign Affairs Minister and hustles her connections throughout the US to keep the attack-Russia juggernaut going as in the past under  a continuous barrage of ethnic prejudices and fake news.

The pattern is clear but unspoken. The Enemy Russia is the auto-pilot of fake news to divert from US and client leadership failure on almost every level. Relations of mutual respect with Russia’s ambassador are ‘collusion’ and taboo.

The Reality Beneath the Questions not Asked

How does disclosure of Hillary’s Clinton’s apparatus theft of the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders get blamed on Russia? The question is not asked. The Washington mass media and visible Congress focus instead on accused “collusion with Russia” with very big stakes in the new inquisition show. Suspicions without substance run free in the mass media once the designated Enemy is smeared onto the target, even if elected president.

Who knows that the US joined the armed forces of Britain, colonial Canada and Japan to crush the 1917 Russian Revolution on behalf of the Czarist autocracy and Western capitalism? More deeply, who names the governing objective behind all the shows of force and accusation over a century since? To be managed successfully, attention must be diverted from the facts of US-led war crimes and public looting within and without US empire proclaimed as ‘world freedom’.

The new President and his Exxon Secretary of State seek business-like relations with Russia. Very big powers are coming into conflict over business and war within the US empire. Big oil in both leviathan countries are pitted against the US Enemy-and-smear establishment which has long run the show with big oil formerly leading it. Now transnational big oil in the US and Russia are leading out of the blind alley of war against each other which has so totally failed to bring benefits to either side in the long term, and has almost reversed civilization.

The dots again are not joined. The completely counter-productive war against Russia to keep the US money-war state going is deepened by Wall Street. The falling price of oil is driven beneath notice by Wall Street which has successfully short-future-traded oil down to establish its money-printing powers by debt as supreme over its rival substitute, while diverting everybody’s attention from the greatest fraud in history still going. Observe that Wall Street remains untouched even from its multi-trillion dollar heist from public and pension coffers from 2007 on.

Blame Russia is the normal chorus which Wall Street benefits from as the ultimate leader of the ruinously anti-productive money-war system. It pays off so well to the money party in more public dollars appropriated by its control and issue of money debt for everything that exists; the pervasive military-industrial complex which never gets reversed even in the peace after the planned destruction of the ‘Evil Empire’; and the corporate mass media in front turning the fake news system over continuously to promote, idealize and divert from the global empire’s war and occupation powers. The neo-con and neo-liberal war strategists alike are built into the dark state as managers uniquely dependent on Russia as the Enemy.

So it is in all their self-maximizing interests to sustain perpetual accusations of some enemy’s evil as the great cover-up story of US empire and it inherited war-crime system. Joined to despotic local oligarchies, this axis dismantles ever more societies for corporate, bank and military plunder and jackal payoffs everywhere (including the academy). There is no limit or borders to the established system invasion, and all is at the expense of public treasuries and of life support systems across domains.

President Trump does not break the fatal ruling cycle. He demands that vassal states should pay for their US military protection, a new global extortion supporting new NATO oligarchies against change which accompanies his stripping of environmental protections to pay for more war powers. Trump behind his populist bluster is a paradigm example of instituted US capitalist greed and aggression. Yet the fact that hate of the Enemy is smeared even onto him for not hating Russia too reveals the ultimate pretext of the US-NATO war machine. Behind the US-led perpetual arms build-up, border threats and bombings of mostly innocents across the globe while blaming the terrorists for the horrors now built into the global ‘growth’ system is fake news as continuous cover story. The war-criminal drone mass murders continue on unnoticed. The bank looting of public wealth is instituted more broadly. The universities, health systems and public infrastructures are privatized for profit with no life criteria of outcomes.

Trump is dispossessing the American common wealth for big US money in line with the Reagan public-looting machine before him. It drained  public revenues into a black hole of US debt, blamed acid rain on trees, and portrayed orchestrated mass murderers of socialists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua as ‘freedom fighters’. What has changed in the corporate media’s fake-news today?

Trump in office is the opposite of the anti-establishment candidate he promised to be. He wars on the US Environmental Protection Agency (its only collective life protective organization). He fractions corporate taxes in a giveway to the rich beyond Reagan’s $500-billion tax cut. He privatizes the public’s falling infrastructure for speculators and developers’ long-term private tolls, profits and control for private profit at taxpayers’ expense.

Who in the corporate media or Congress questions any of it?

The Trudeau  regime to the north imitates the new massive scheme of privatizing public infrastructure. But it disguises it in terms of public investment in public goods. The big banks and speculators on both sides of the border are the winners whatever the corporate media and state cover story. The common wealth is sold off under pervasive fake news masquerading as responsible and for the public good. But the drive-wheel policy mechanisms for ever more dismantling of the living earth and redistribution of more public wealth upwards to the rich march on beneath conscious comprehension.

Trump does not hide the privatization for profit of America’s public infrastructure and stripping of public health and environmental protection policies once he has rising stockholder support in office. The Trudeau Liberal party masqueraded as the social democrat NDP in promising whopping public investment to win the election, but when in office lets the giant privatization boondoggle trickle out in sunny  avoidance of the facts.

The monumental schemes of robbing the commonwealth at every level are led by slanted and selective reports through every step across ever more domains. But a constant across US empire is Russia the Enemy to justify it all. In the deepening life support crises of this ruling axis, Russia’s projected ‘attacks’ still lead the show.

The Life-Blind Moral DNA of US Rule

With no common ground but belief in God’s blessing over all nations and the greatest killing machine in history to enforce it, US ideology may seem to be a psychopathic rationalization writ large.

Yet the US national morality tale governs perception so that the a-priori life-blindness is not recognised even by philosophers. The US continues to be ruled at home and abroad without life-value ground or compass. So as the US-led global market system multiplies its demands on organic, social and ecological life systems, it moves inexorably towards a few multibillionaires with more wealth than 99% of the population, steering planetary depredation to ruin as freedom and growth.

How else would a global cancer system behave? Yet almost none recognise that this system overrides life requirements at every level. The reformer Trump selects for even more wealth and power to the home rich. He attacks evolved environmental research and regulations with no better alternative. He seeks to repeal Obamacare with no public option considered. His nationalist and cost-cutting program is essentially life-blind.

The baseline of crisis goes all down to the moral DNA of the US project and its evolved economic, political and ideological system. The innermost value driver is long presupposed without question by even US moral philosophers and social scientists as the first principle of their models. Atomic self-maximization towards more private money-value without limit is the meta-program.

In consequence, the ‘global free market’ the US leads and imposes has no feedback loops to protect human or planetary life against hollowing them out for transient commodities, private profit and wastes on every level. The ruling system is structured only to ensure more money demand and commodities to those who have money to pay. Any accountability to universal life necessities is ruled out a-priori from the US Constitution, ruling market doctrine, and received theories.

As I have commented in articles prior to his presidency, “Trump is America come to meet itself”. But the US cover story has not yet been decoded in its master functions of legitimation and idealization. What makes the eco-genocidal system acceptable to human consciousness is an ultimate story line and moral syntax that transforms it into heroic liberty, individualism and moral supremacy.

This moral syntax has been imprinted into US empire since its original revolution against Britain to invade the America West to the Pacific Ocean to appropriate and  destroy all the life and life support systems of the developed first peoples there as ‘freedom’, ‘development’ and ‘self-defense’. What is required for the grand narrative’s success is to hide the reality of continuous eco-genocide by continuous false representations as the virtue and truth others fail to understand.

This first principle the justifying morality tale entails the second – that an alien Enemy must always be blamed for the system’s destructive attacks on barriers and resistance to it. Conversion of all life and life support systems to limitless self-maximization of the US system and its richest citizens then proceeds under cover of fake news with wars of acquisition and control represented as courageous and beneficent for all.

For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.

Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.

Prof. John McMurtry FRSC is the author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Solution  and the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems,  UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Paris-Oxford. 

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Trump = Obama = Bush = Clinton, On Four Core Issues

March 27th, 2017 by Washington's Blog

On a superficial level, Trump and Bush couldn’t be more different from Clinton and Obama. Indeed, pollsters say that many people voted for Trump because they wanted change … Just like they voted for Obama because he promised “hope and change” from Bush-era policies.

But beneath the surface, Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton are all very similar on 4 core issues.

More War

Bush intentionally lied us into the Iraq war … a war which had no relation with U.S. security or defense.

Clinton and Obama intentionally lied us into various “humanitarian wars” … which had nothing to do with our security or defense.

And the same idiots who lied us into the Iraq war are now trying to lie us into a cold (or maybe even hot) war with Russia.

And what about Trump?

He campaigned on peace and non-interventionism …

But he’s already ramped up the war in Syria.

And the war in Yemen. … where the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are committing war crimes.

And he’s already increased drone strikes by 432%.

And Trump’s top advisor is predicting war with China and Russia. He said:

We’re going to war in the South China Sea … no doubt

So it doesn’t look like peace is going to break out any time soon.

And sadly, top experts say the geopolitical policies pursued by Trump – which are very similar to those pursued by Obama, Bush and Clinton – will lead to more terrorism.

Lap Dogs for Wall Street … Making the Rich Richer

Obama, Bush and Clinton all pushed economic policies which made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Bush and Obama bailed out the big banks, threw fistfuls of money at the banksters, and otherwise rewarded Wall Street and penalized Main Street.

Clinton repealed the Depression-era law which separated regular deposit banking and speculation (Glass-Steagall), allowed the giant banks to grow into mega-banks, and acted as a cheerleader for unregulated derivatives. And Clinton – like Bush and Obama – decided that white collar financial fraud didn’t exist, or at least shouldn’t be prosecuted.

What’s the effect of these policies?

Rick Baum notes, using official U.S. governments statistics, that inequality steadily increased under all 3 presidents:

Inequality Clinton Bush Obama

Real wages plummeted through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

What about Trump?

He’s appointed the same old bankster cronies.  Nothing will change. (And unfortunately, it’s not too early to criticize a new president.)

Spying On Americans

The NSA’s mass surveillance on Americans started by 1999 or earlier … under the Clinton administration.

3 months before 9/11, the head of the NSA admitted that the NSA was collecting so much information from spying that it was drowning in too much data.

Mass surveillance expanded under Bush … and then even more under Obama.

It’s gotten to the point that the government is spying on virtually all of our electronic communications and transactions.

And Trump?

Given that he’s called for whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange to be executed for treason, and quickly implemented gag orders as soon as he took office, he is almost certain to continue the expansion of mass surveillance on the American people.

In other words, a president who severely punishes anyone trying to reveal the extent of spying on Americans probably has no intention of reigning it in.

Supporting Dictators Who Support Terrorism

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest sponsor of radical Islamic terrorists. The Saudis have backed ISIS and many other brutal terrorist groups. And the most pro-ISIS tweets allegedly come from Saudi Arabia.

According to sworn declarations from a 9/11 Commissioner and the Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry Into 9/11, the Saudi government backed the 9/11 hijackers (see section VII for details). And declassified documents only amplify those connections. And the new Saudi king has ties to Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and Islamic terrorism.

Saudi Arabia is the hotbed of the most radical Muslim terrorists in the world: the Salafis (both ISIS and Al Qaeda are Salafis).

And the Saudis – with U.S. support – back the radical “madrassas” in which Islamic radicalism was spread.

And yet the U.S. has been supporting the Saudis militarily, with NSA intelligence and in every other way possible through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

Trump?

He’s selling them massive amounts of armskeeping them off of the list of restricted countries for immigration, and supporting Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

It appears that the voters have been played … again.

Postscript:  If you think that the presidents are more different than we’re giving them credit for, then you must conclude that they have been overridden by other forces. In that case, you may wish to consider whether the Deep State and big banks have more power than democratically-elected officials.

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Introducción

Hace unos treinta años, un sagaz campesino colombiano me dijo: “Cuando oigo hablar de `acuerdos de paz´, escucho al gobierno afilar sus cuchillos”.

Últimamente se ha hablado mucho de acuerdos de paz en todo el mundo. En casi todas las regiones o países que sufren una guerra o una invasión se ha mencionado la posibilidad de negociar “acuerdos de paz”. En muchos casos, estos llegaron a firmarse y todavía no han logrado acabar con los asesinatos y el caos provocados por la parte beligerante apoyada por Estados Unidos.

Vamos a repasar brevemente algunas de estas negociaciones del pasado y del presente para comprender las dinámicas de los “procesos de paz” y los resultados subsecuentes.

El proceso de paz

Actualmente están en marcha diversas negociaciones supuestamente diseñadas para lograr acuerdos de paz. Entre ellas podemos citar: las discusiones en Ucrania entre la junta, con sede en Kiev y respaldada por la OTAN y EE.UU., y la dirigencia de la región de Donbas, situada al este del país, opuesta al golpe y a la OTAN; en Siria, entre la coalición saudí-EE.UU.-OTAN-terroristas armados y el gobierno sirio y sus aliados rusos, iraníes y de Hezbolá; en Palestina, entre el régimen colonial israelí respaldado por EE.UU. y las fuerzas por la independencia palestina en Cisjordania y la Franja de Gaza; y, en Colombia, entre el régimen del presidente Santos apoyado por EE.UU. y las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).

Hay otras negociaciones de paz en marcha que no han recibido atención pública.

Resultados de acuerdos de paz del pasado y del presente

A lo largo del pasado cuarto de siglo se firmaron diversos acuerdos de paz, todos los cuales llevaron a la rendición tácita de los protagonistas antiimperialistas armados y de los movimientos populares de masas.

En América Central, los acuerdos firmados en El Salvador y en Guatemala condujeron al desarme unilateral del movimiento de resistencia, la consolidación del control de la economía por la oligarquía y el crecimiento y proliferación sin trabas de bandas de narcotráfico y escuadrones de la muerte auspiciados por el gobierno. A consecuencia de ello se produjo una escalada del terror interno. Los líderes de la resistencia consiguieron votos, entraron en el parlamento como políticos y, en el caso de El Salvador, ocuparon altos cargos. Las desigualdades se mantuvieron o empeoraron al igual que los asesinatos, que llegaron incluso a superar las cifras del periodo previo al acuerdo de paz. Un gran número de emigrantes, con frecuencia refugiados que huían de la violencia de las bandas armadas, entraron ilegalmente en EE.UU. Este país consolidó sus bases y sus operaciones militares en América Central, mientras la población seguía sufriendo.

Las negociaciones de paz israelí-palestinas no produjeron ningún acuerdo, pero sirvieron para proporcionar una ligera tapadera al aumento de la anexión de tierras palestinas para construir enclaves racistas “solo para judíos”, provocando asentamientos ilegales a más de medio millón de colonos judíos. Estados Unidos respaldó por completo la farsa del proceso de paz, financiando a los líderes-vasallos corruptos palestinos y proporcionando apoyo diplomático, militar y político incondicional a Israel.

Estados Unidos-Unión Soviética: El acuerdo de paz

Se suponía que los “acuerdos de paz” entre Reagan-Bush y Gorbachov acabarían con la Guerra Fría y lograrían la paz global. Pero, en lugar de ello, Estados Unidos y la Unión Europea (UE) establecieron bases militares y regímenes clientelares por toda Europa Oriental, el Báltico y los Balcanes, saquearon los recursos nacionales y se apropiaron de las economías desnacionalizadas. Las élites con sede en EE.UU. dominaron el régimen vasallo de Boris Yeltsin y despojaron virtualmente a Rusia de sus recursos y su riqueza. En alianza con los oligarcas gansteriles, hundieron su economía.

El régimen postsoviético de Yeltsin compitió en las elecciones, promovió la multiplicidad de partidos y presidió un país desolado, aislado y cada vez más rodeado; al menos la elección de Vladimir Putin sirvió para “descolonizar” el aparato del Estado y reconstruir parcialmente la economía y la sociedad.

Las negociaciones de paz de Ucrania

En 2014, un golpe de Estado violento patrocinado por Estados Unidos unió a fascistas, oligarcas, generales y simpatizantes de la UE, que tomaron en control de Kiev y de la parte occidental de Ucrania. Las regiones orientales pro-democracia de Donbas y la península de Crimea organizaron la resistencia al régimen golpista. Crimea votó unánimemente la unión con Rusia. Los centros industriales del este de Ucrania (Donbas) formaron milicias populares para resistir a las fuerzas armadas y los paramilitares neonazis de la junta respaldada por EE.UU. Después de unos años de caos y habiendo llegado a una situación de punto muerto, se inició un “proceso de negociación” que no impidió que el régimen de Kiev continuara atacando al Donbas. El “intento de paz” se convirtió en la base del “Acuerdo de Minsk”, negociado por Francia, Rusia y Alemania, mediante el cual la junta de Kiev pretendía el desarme del movimiento de resistencia, la reocupación del Donbas y de Crimea y la eventual destrucción de la autonomía cultural, política, económica y militar del este de Ucrania, de mayoría étnica rusa. En consecuencia, el “Acuerdo de Minsk” ha sido poco más que un plan fracasado para lograr la rendición. Mientras tanto, el saqueo masivo de la economía de la nación perpetrado por la junta de Kiev ha convertido Ucrania en un Estado fallido en el que 2,5 millones de habitantes se han trasladado a Rusia y muchos otros miles han emigrado a Occidente a cavar patatas en Polonia o se han incorporado a los burdeles de Londres y Tel Aviv. La juventud desempleada restante ha quedado con la sola opción de vender sus servicios a las tropas de choque de los paramilitares fascistas de Kiev.

Colombia: ¿Acuerdo de paz o cementerio?

Si examinamos sus encarnaciones pasadas y la experiencia presente, resulta prematuro celebrar el “acuerdo de paz” de las FARC colombianas y el presidente Santos.

En las últimas cuatro décadas, los regímenes oligárquicos colombianos, apoyados por el ejército, los escuadrones de la muerte y Washington han convocado innumerables “comisiones de paz”, inaugurado negociaciones con las FARC y procedido a romperlas para relanzar guerras a gran escala, utilizando los “acuerdos de paz” como un pretexto para diezmar y desmoralizar a los activistas políticos.

En 1984, el que era presidente Belisario Betancourt firmó un acuerdo de paz con las FARC conocido como el “Acuerdo Uribe” por el cual miles de activistas y simpatizantes de las FARC se desmovilizaron, fundaron un partido legal, la Unión Patriótica (UP), y entraron en el juego electoral. En las elecciones de 1986, candidatos de la UP fueron elegidos senadores, congresistas, alcaldes y concejales y su candidato presidencial consiguió más del 20% del voto nacional. En los siguientes cuatro años, de 1986 a 1989, más de 5.000 dirigentes, cargos electos y candidatos presidenciales de la UP fueron asesinados en una campaña nacional de terror. Decenas de miles de campesinos, trabajadores del petróleo y jornaleros de las plantaciones fueron asesinados, torturados y empujados al exilio. Los escuadrones paramilitares de la muerte y los ejércitos privados de los terratenientes, aliados con las Fuerzas Armadas de Colombia, asesinaron a miles de líderes sindicales, periodistas, trabajadores y familiares. La “estrategia paramilitar” del ejército contra no combatientes y civiles de las aldeas había sido desarrollada en los sesenta por el general del ejército estadounidense William Yarborough, comandante del centro especial de la guerra del ejército estadounidense y creador de las fuerzas especiales conocidas como “boinas verdes”.

A los cinco años de su creación, la Unión Patriótica había desaparecido: sus miembros supervivientes se habían exiliado o pasado a la clandestinidad.

En 1990, el recién elegido presidente César Gaviria proclamó el inicio de nuevas negociaciones de paz con las FARC. A los pocos meses de su anuncio, el presidente ordenó el bombardeo de la “Casa Verde”, donde se alojaban dirigentes de las FARC y un equipo negociador. Afortunadamente, pudieron escapar antes del ataque traicionero.

El presidente Andrés Pastrana (1998-2001) demandó nuevas negociaciones de paz con las FARC que se llevarían a cabo “en una zona desmilitarizada”. Las conversaciones se iniciaron en la región selvática de El Caguan en noviembre de 1998. El presidente Pastrana había negociado con las FARC y activistas sociales numerosas promesas, concesiones y reformas pero, al mismo tiempo, había firmado un acuerdo multimillonario de ayuda militar por diez años con el presidente Clinton, conocido como “Plan Colombia”. Esta práctica de “dobles relaciones” culminó con el inicio por parte de las Fuerzas Armadas de Colombia de una “política de tierra quemada” contra las “zonas desmilitarizadas” bajo el recién elegido presidente Álvaro Uribe, relacionado con los escuadrones de la muerte. A lo largo de los siguientes ocho años, el presidente Uribe empujó al exilio interno a cerca de cuatro millones de campesinos colombianos. Gracias a la financiación de cientos de miles de millones por parte de Washington, Uribe pudo duplicar el volumen de las fuerzas armadas hasta superar los 350.000 hombres, a la vez que incorporaba a miembros de los escuadrones de la muerte al ejército. Asimismo, supervisó la formación de nuevos grupos paramilitares. Hacia 2010, el número de guerrilleros de las FARC había descendido de 18.000 combatientes a menos de 10.000, se habían producido cientos de bajas civiles y millones de personas perdieron su hogar.

En 2010, el antiguo ministro de defensa de Uribe, Juan Manuel Santos, fue elegido presidente. En 2012, Santos inició otro “proceso de paz” con las FARC, que fue firmado finalmente a finales de 2016. Según este nuevo acuerdo negociado en Cuba, cientos de oficiales implicados en torturas, asesinatos y desplazamientos forzosos de campesinos recibirían inmunidad mientras que las guerrillas de las FARC tendrían que enfrentarse a juicio. El gobierno prometió la reforma agraria y el derecho al retorno a los campesinos desplazados y sus familias. No obstante, cuando los campesinos regresaban para reclamar sus tierras, eran expulsados o incluso asesinados.

Los dirigentes de las FARC aceptaron la desmovilización y el desarme unilateral que tendría que realizarse en junio de 2017. El ejército y sus aliados paramilitares conservarían sus armas y obtendrían el control total sobre las zonas previamente liberadas por las FARC.

El presidente Santos aseguró que el “acuerdo de paz” incluiría una serie de decretos presidenciales para privatizar los recursos minerales y petroleros del país y convertir las pequeñas granjas familiares en plantaciones para la agroexportación. A los campesinos-rebeldes desmovilizados se les ofreció parcelas de tierra yerma y marginal, sin recibir apoyo del gobierno ni fondos para carreteras, aperos, semillas, fertilizantes, ni siquiera para construir las escuelas o viviendas necesarias para la transición. Aunque algunos de los líderes de las FARC obtuvieron escaños en el Congreso y la libertad para presentarse a las elecciones sin ser hostigados, las bases jóvenes de la guerrilla y los campesinos quedaban sin muchas alternativas, a no ser la de unirse a los paramilitares o las bandas de narcotráfico.

En resumen, este repaso histórico demuestra que sucesivos presidentes y regímenes colombianos han violado sistemáticamente todos los acuerdos de paz, asesinado a los rebeldes firmantes y mantenido el control de la economía y la mano de obra por parte de las élites. Antes de la actual elección, Santos presidió la década más letal siendo ministro de defensa con Uribe.

Por su intermediación para lograr la paz de los cementerios para decenas de miles de campesinos y activistas colombianos, el presidente Santos fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de la Paz.

En la Habana, los líderes y negociadores de las FARC recibieron los elogios del presidente cubano Raúl Castro, el presidente Obama, el presidente Maduro de Venezuela y la gran mayoría de “progresistas“ y derechistas de Norteamérica, Sudamérica y Europa.

La sangrienta historia de Colombia, con sus asesinatos generalizados de activistas por los derechos humanos y líderes campesinos, ha continuado incluso cuando se estaban firmando los documentos que señalaban el Acuerdo de Paz. Durante el primer mes de 2017, los escuadrones de la muerte, vinculados a la oligarquía y el ejército, asesinaron a cinco activistas por los derechos humanos. En 2015, cuando las FARC negociaban varias clausulas del acuerdo, más de 120 campesinos y activistas fueron asesinados por los grupos paramilitares que continuaban actuando libremente en zonas controladas por el ejército de Santos. La maquinaria propagandística de los medios de comunicación de masas continúa repitiendo la mentira de que “más de 200.000 personas perdieron la vida a manos de la guerrilla y el ejército”, cuando la inmensa mayoría de los asesinatos fueron cometidos por el gobierno y sus aliados, los escuadrones de la muerte; una calumnia que los líderes guerrilleros no han sabido desmontar. El prominente investigador jesuita Javier Giraldo ha documentado minuciosamente el hecho de que más de tres cuartas partes de dichas muertes fueron obra del ejército y los paramilitares.

Se nos pide que creamos que los regímenes presidenciales que han asesinado y continúan asesinando a más de 150.000 trabajadores, campesinos, líderes indígenas y profesionales colombianos se han convertido de un día para otro en socios amantes de la justicia para conseguir la paz. En los tres primeros meses de este año, activistas defensores del acuerdo de paz con las FARC siguen siendo el objetivo y siguen siendo asesinados por los paramilitares supuestamente desmovilizados.

Los líderes de los movimientos sociales denuncian un aumento de la violencia por parte de las fuerzas del ejército y sus aliados. Incluso los monitores de los acuerdos de paz y la Oficina del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos admiten que la violencia estatal y paramilitar está destruyendo cualquier estructura pensada por el presidente Santos para implementar las reformas. A medida que las FARC se retiran de las regiones bajo control popular, los campesinos que pretenden acogerse a la reforma agraria se convierten en objetivo de los ejércitos privados. El régimen de Santos está más interesado en proteger las apropiaciones masivas de tierras de los grandes consorcios mineros.

Mientras los asesinatos de partidarios de las FARC y activistas de derechos humanos se multiplican, mientras el presidente Santos y Washington intentan aprovecharse de una guerrilla desarmada y desmovilizada, el “histórico acuerdo de paz” se convierte en un gran engaño diseñado para expandir el poder imperial.

Conclusión: Epitafio para los acuerdos de paz

Una y otra vez, en todo el mundo, las negociaciones y los acuerdos de paz orquestados por el Imperio han tenido un solo objetivo: desarmar, desmovilizar, derrotar y desmoralizar a los luchadores de la resistencia y a sus aliados.

Los “acuerdos de paz”, tal y como los conocemos, sirven para rearmar y reagrupar a las fuerzas respaldadas por Estados Unidos tras los contratiempos tácticos de la lucha de guerrillas. Su objetivo es dividir a la oposición (la llamada “táctica del salami”) y facilitar la conquista. La retórica de paz utilizada en estas “negociaciones de paz” significa básicamente el “desarme unilateral” de los luchadores de la resistencia, la rendición del territorio y el abandono de los simpatizantes civiles. Las denominadas “zonas de guerra”, que contienen tierras fértiles y valiosas reservas minerales, se “pacifican” siendo absorbidas por el régimen “amante de la paz”. Ello contribuye a sus programas de privatización y a la promoción del saqueo por parte del “Estado desarrollista”. Los arreglos de paz negociados están supervisados por las autoridades estadounidenses, que elogian y loan a los líderes rebeldes cuando firman los acuerdos que serán implementados por regímenes vasallos del poder imperial… Este último se asegurará de que no se produzca ningún realineamiento en política exterior ni ningún cambio estructural socioeconómico.

Algunos acuerdos de paz permiten que los antiguos dirigentes guerrilleros compitan y en algunos casos ganen elecciones como representantes marginales, mientras su base de apoyo es diezmada.

En la mayor parte de los casos, durante el proceso y especialmente tras la firma del “acuerdo de paz”, las organizaciones y movimientos sociales y sus seguidores del campesinado y la clase trabajadora, así como los activistas por los derechos humanos, acaban siendo objetivo a abatir por el ejército y los escuadrones de la muerte paramilitares que operan en connivencia con las bases militares del gobierno.

Con frecuencia, los aliados internacionales de los movimientos de resistencia les han animado a negociar acuerdos de paz para demostrar a Estados Unidos que son responsables, con la esperanza de de mejorar las relaciones diplomáticas y comerciales. No hace falta decir que las “negociaciones responsables” simplemente servirán para reforzar la determinación del poder imperial para presionar futuras concesiones y estimular agresiones militares y nuevas conquistas.

Los “acuerdos de paz” justos se basan en el desarme mutuo, el reconocimiento de la autonomía territorial y la autoridad de la administración insurgente local sobre las reformas agrarias acordadas, al tiempo que mantienen los derechos sobre los recursos minerales y el control de la seguridad militar-pública.

Los acuerdos de paz deberían ser el primer paso de una agenda política implementada bajo el control del ejército rebelde independiente y monitores civiles.

El desastroso resultado del desarme unilateral es producto de la no implementación de una política exterior y cambios estructurales progresistas e independientes.

Las negociaciones de paz presentes y pasadas, basadas en el reconocimiento de la soberanía de un Estado independiente vinculado a los movimientos de masas, siempre han terminado con Estados Unidos rompiendo los acuerdos. Los genuinos “acuerdos de paz” son contrarios a la meta imperial de conquistar mediante la mesa negociadora lo que no pudieron ganar mediante la guerra.

James Petras

James Petras: Sociólogo estadounidense conocido por sus estudios sobre el imperialismo, la lucha de clases y los conflictos latinoamericanos.

Artículo original en inglés:

Peace Accords or Political Surrender? Latin America, the Middle East and Ukraine, publicado el 18 de marzo de 2017.

Traducido por Paco Muñoz de Bustillo para Rebelión.

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En un contacto especial con la 36 (Radio Centenario), el sociólogo estadounidense, profesor James Petras, analizó la coyuntura internacional, a raíz de los sucesos ocurridos en Londres. La oportunidad sirvió también para consultarle sobre la situación en Siria y en Medio Oriente en general, como así también la realidad de Argentina, donde se suceden las masivas movilizaciones contra el gobierno. 

Diego Martínez: Estamos recibiendo a James Petras desde Estados Unidos, nuevamente esta semana porque hay varios temas para abordar. Buen día Petras, ¿cómo está? 

James Petras: Estamos bien, congelados, pero bien.

Hernán Salina: hay conmoción a nivel internacional por lo que ha sucedido en Londres, en las cercanías del Parlamento.

JP: Me parece que Inglaterra entra ahora en el conflicto en su propio territorio. Toda la historia de Inglaterra pasa por invadir, masacrar y ocupar los países musulmanes en el Medio Oriente y en Asia, África e incluso partes de Europa.

El hecho es que las reacciones tomaron últimamente formas violentas, la resistencia de los países musulmanes y las fuerzas opositoras han tomado las armas y comienzan a aplicar represalias fuera de sus países.  Ahora, el caso particular que conocemos, ocurre el mismo día en que los europeos, particularmente los ingleses, comenzaron a bombardear en Siria y otros países como Irak  y Libia. Y podemos decir que estos actos han tenido impactos sobre algunos sectores de la población, de la segunda generación de los islámicos que se sientes  impotentes con los partidos existentes como el partido Conservador, liberal, Laboral, porque todos apoyan las guerras contra los partidos musulmanes. Entonces ellos sienten la falta de poder, se sienten aislados, se sienten indignados y empiezan a actuar por su cuenta tomando medidas violentas. Y eso no es parte de una red internacional, porque la acción fue con un camión, un cuchillo, y obviamente los grupos de Medio Oriente no son los organizadores de estos actos, pese que ellos proclaman que era un soldado de su organización, es decir, la declaración de ISIS diciendo que era un soldado de ellos es ficticia.

Creo que debemos condenar el terrorismo islámico en Europa pero también debemos condenar a los angloamericanos por el terrorismo diario y contundente contra los países islámicos.

DM: ¿Se pueden esperar respuestas del Reino Unido a partir de esto?

JP: A si, van a aumentar la represión, van a fomentar el Estado policial, van a aplicar medidas más anti inmigrantes, van a culpabilizar a toda la comunidad islámica, van a considerarlos como enemigos o sospechosos eternamente. Incluso podríamos ver la implementación de otras medidas como las que ha tomado Donald Trump (en Estados Unidos) restringiendo su circulación, los viajes, etc. No hay que esperar más que un autoritarismo creciente en los países angloamericanos.

DM: ¿Se complica la situación en Siria con los bombardeos que llevan adelante Estados Unidos y ahora Israel?

JP: Si, particularmente con Rusia, porque Rusia está en Siria defendiendo al gobierno de Bashar Al Assad contra los terroristas y ahora Israel está abiertamente abrazando a los terroristas tratando de destruir el gobierno existente, las mayorías que lo apoyan y buscan debilitar la presencia de Rusia. Es un juego muy peligroso, porque en el momento que Israel comience a tirar bombas sobre tropas y aviones rusos, Rusia tiene la capacidad de atacar Israel y destruir el país como factor político en Medio Oriente.

Las medidas de Israel son peligrosas para los gobernantes sirios, pero también  es una forma de provocar a Rusia y podría resultar en un boomerang, destruyendo  a Israel.

HS: Hemos hablado del papel de Turquía en esta situación y aparece un actor del que se habla menos que es el pueblo kurdo. ¿Qué papel juegan en todo esto?

JP: Los kurdos están divididos entre progresistas y reaccionarios; los que colaboran con el imperialismo, como (el presidente del Kurdistán iraquí, Masud) Barzani por ejemplo, los que están independientes e incluso los socialistas. Esta división existe en los conservadores en Irak, colaborando con Washington y los progresistas que están en el sur de Turquía y en Siria; y los que están en Siria reciben apoyo de los EEUU contra ISIS pero al mismo tiempo están luchando contra Turquía. Además, Turquía tiene el apoyo de Rusia en algunas cosas, pero ahora Rusia busca reunirse con los kurdos progresistas también.

Es una situación muy compleja.

En todo caso los kurdos están ganando, avanzando contra los islámicos en el norte, pero también enfrentan la posibilidad de una agresión amplia y profunda de parte del gobierno turco. En tanto, el gobierno del presidente (Recep Tayyip) Erdogan mezclado en una gran conflicto, por una purga de miles de turcos opositores, algunos metidos en el golpe pero otros opositores declaran que ellos se está preparando para imponer una dictadura bonapartista encabezada por Erdogan. Entonces, Erdogan tiene muchas luchas, tiene una lucha contra los kurdos, tiene lucha interna, tiene conflictos entre demócratas y autoritarios. No hay ninguna unidad sobre qué hacer en Turquía y al mismo tiempo tiene muchos conflictos con Europa, trata de dictar las políticas europeas… También quiere ganar las elecciones pero ha perdido muchos inversionistas turcos ,europeos y estadounidenses lo que va a debilitar el funcionamiento del país.

Turquía, a pesar de dar muchos gritos y declaraciones, está muy debilitado respecto a lo que tenía hace tiempo atrás.

DM: Para finalizar le pedimos una reflexión sobre lo que está sucediendo en Argentina, con masivas movilizaciones de maestros y trabajadores en general.

JP: Paso a paso, Argentina está en camino hacia una gran confrontación. No sé si llamarla hacia una guerra civil, pero poco a poco (el presidente Mauricio) Macri  está bajando los  estándares de vida, bajan los salarios, crecen los desocupados, las tarifas públicas –gas, luz, etc.- suben constantemente; podría ser una forma de provocar bancarrotas a pequeños y medianos sectores, o sea cada vez más servil a los grandes especuladores. Y todo esto está creando un escenario de grandes conflictos, ahora son marchas, mañana son huelgas generales y podríamos terminar con un levantamiento popular.

Ahora, Macri no es De la Rúa, no es Menem, es un  fanático militarista y muy represor. Si murieron 40 personas en 2001, pensamos en cientos sino miles de muertos en una posible confrontación. Pero tarde o temprano Argentina se encamina a eso, paso a paso. No debemos pensar que es un levantamiento para hoy o mañana, pero está pendiente y la trayectoria es clara: La tendencia del gobierno es cada vez más reaccionario y represivo y cada vez avanzan las luchas.

Como decíamos en otra oportunidad, los burócratas del CGT no tienen control de las grandes masas.Incluso en las empresas en que tienen control, pero el control puede escapárseles de la mano, la gente puede empezar a participar en marchas, cortes de rutas etc. Es inevitable una gran confrontación y no sabemos concretamente como van a terminar.

DM: Muy bien Petras, muchas gracias. Hasta el lunes. 

JP: Gracias, hasta el lunes.

James Petras

James Petras: Sociólogo estadounidense conocido por sus estudios sobre el imperialismo, la lucha de clases y los conflictos latinoamericanos.

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Thomas Guénolé (París, 1982) es un spin doctor, un consejero político. No tardó ni cinco minutos en aceptar esta entrevista en una cafetería al lado de la facultad de Sciences Po de París, donde ejerce como profesor. Esta disponibilidad es fruto de su presencia habitual en los diarios o en los platós de la televisión francesa en horarios de máxima audiencia. En un paisaje mediático en el que resultan habituales las tesis de intelectuales reaccionarios como Éric Zemmour o Alain Finkielkraut, Guénolé ha sabido transmitir una visión progresista sobre la globalización y las minorías, dos cuestiones recurrentes en el debate político francés. Aborda estos temas en sus dos últimas obras: La mondialisation malheureuse (2016) e Islamopsychose (2017).

Para Guénolé, son estos dos ejes políticos –la mundialización y las minorías– los que explican la fragmentación actual del paisaje político en Francia. Cuando faltan menos de dos meses para las elecciones presidenciales, hasta cinco candidatos tienen opciones para alcanzar la segunda vuelta: Marine Le Pen (extrema derecha), François Fillon (derecha republicana), Emmanuel Macron (centrista), Benoît Hamon (socialista) y Jean-Luc Mélenchon (izquierda republicana y ecologista). Esta fragmentación resulta inédita en un país de tradición bipartidista y refleja una incipiente crisis de régimen. Un sistema que se ve alterado, según Guénolé, “por la voluntad muy fuerte entre los perdedores de la globalización por sacudir el tablero político”.

A menos de dos meses para las presidenciales, cinco candidatos tienen opciones para clasificarse para la segunda vuelta. Un hecho inédito en Francia. ¿Cómo explica esta fragmentación del sistema político?

El duelo habitual entre la izquierda y la derecha ha sido alterado. Está sucediendo una cosa poco habitual. Tanto el candidato de la derecha como el de la izquierda llegan desestabilizados. Hay un candidato socialista del partido que está en el gobierno que está muy debilitado, porque François Hollande deja un balance muy difícil de defender. Además, hay una fractura ideológica muy profunda entre los votantes socialistas favorables a la globalización y los votantes socialistas que son altermundialistas. Luego está el candidato de la derecha tradicional, François Fillon. Este construyó su candidatura en torno al valor del trabajo, el rechazo al asistencialismo, el sacrificio y la honestidad. De repente, nos enteramos de que pagó lo que quiso (en torno a 1 millón de euros) a su mujer con el dinero del Estado. Es una ruptura de imagen total. Incluso entre los votantes de la derecha.

Más allá de la debilidad de los partidos tradicionales. ¿Cuáles son las principales diferencias ideológicas entre estos cinco candidatos?

Hay dos cuestiones que estructuran actualmente el paisaje político francés. La globalización y las minorías. Es decir, los pobres de la banlieue (barrios periféricos), los inmigrantes de origen magrebí. Pero también las minorías LGBT. Hay estas dos cuestiones estructurales y cuatro ofertas políticas posibles. La oferta abierta con las minorías y proteccionista respecto a la mundialización es la oferta altermundialista, de Mélenchon. Benoît Hamon intenta quitarle este espacio. También está la oferta abierta con las minorías y pro-mundialización, Macron. Luego, tienes la opción favorable a la mundialización, pero hostil con las minorías: Fillon. Finalmente, está la oferta hostil con las minorías y proteccionista: Le Pen. Esto es la cuatripolarización del paisaje político francés.

¿Por qué la globalización favorece esta fragmentación del sistema político francés?

El sociólogo británico Guy Standing ha desarrollado la noción de precariado como clase social. El precariado es una clase social que se encuentra en la incertidumbre permanente, no tiene acceso a un empleo estable ni a una situación profesional estable. El precariado en Francia representa la mitad de la población. Esto se refleja en una división entre los vencedores y los perdedores de la globalización. Estos últimos dejan de votar o bien votan a Le Pen o dudan entre Mélenchon y Hamon. Hay una voluntad muy fuerte entre los perdedores de la globalización de sacudir el tablero político.

Además de los efectos de la globalización, las distintas posiciones respecto a la UE dividen a los partidos.

La mayoría de los franceses están hartos de la Unión Europea bajo su forma actual. La única cosa que permite que no haya una voluntad masiva de un Frexit [salida del país de la UE] es que la mayoría de los franceses están en contra de la UE, pero quieren seguir formando parte de la construcción europea. El 54% de los franceses votaron en referéndum en contra de todos los tratados europeos. Porque la Constitución europea de 2005 incluía todos los tratados: Maastricht, Ámsterdam, Lisboa… Y los franceses dijeron no.

Durante los últimos años se ha repetido de forma recurrente la teoría de la derechización, la idea de que la sociedad francesa se ha vuelto más conservadora a causa de la parálisis económica y los atentados yihadistas. ¿Es esto cierto?

No creo que haya habido una derechización de la sociedad francesa. Lo que ha sucedido es una radicalización de los franceses en cada uno de los espacios políticos. Los franceses de extrema derecha son cada vez más xenófobos. Los franceses de derechas son cada vez más conservadores respecto a los temas sociales y favorables a la desregulación económica. Los franceses centristas son cada vez más radicales en su entusiasmo respecto a Macron. Los electores del Partido Socialista están cada vez más divididos entre los que son pro-mundialización y los altermundialistas. No hay una derechización, pero sí una radicalización de cada bloque de electores, cada uno en su pasillo.

¿Esto significa que la mayoría de los electores no estarán satisfechos con el próximo presidente?

El futuro presidente francés tendrá a tres cuartas partes del electorado en contra. A causa de la cuatripolarización del paisaje político francés, tres cuartas partes de los votantes estarán descontentos del presidente y su política. Para evitarlo, deberíamos escoger a los diputados a través de un sistema electoral proporcional. Esto forzaría a que hubiera una coalición realmente representativa.

Uno de los candidatos que más se está beneficiando de la fragmentación del sistema político es Emmanuel Macron, que se presenta sin el apoyo de ningún partido convencional. ¿Cómo explica el éxito de su candidatura?

La debilidad de los candidatos de la derecha y la izquierda abre el camino a Macron, que es en realidad un candidato de centro derecha. Algunos votantes de izquierdas que quieren votarlo no quieren verlo como un candidato de centro derecha. Pero Macron no es de izquierdas, ni de centro izquierda. Defiende la misma posición central que defendía François Bayrou en 2007 [el líder del actual Movimiento Demócrata resultó entonces el tercer candidato más votado, con un 18% de los votos]. Cuando el candidato del Partido Socialista se debilita, Macron da un volantazo hacia la izquierda. Cuando se debilita el candidato conservador, Macron da un volantazo hacia la derecha. Pero como ocupa un espacio central, su electorado es el más inestable.

¿Cuáles son las debilidades principales de la candidatura de Macron?

La principal debilidad de Macron es su inconsistencia. No transmite ni una visión clara, ni unos valores claros, ni unas propuestas claras. Construye simplemente una marca, como construiríamos la marca de un producto de consumo de masas. Practica el marketing electoral puro y duro. Dirige un eslogan a una categoría de electores, segmento por segmento, de la misma forma que una empresa se focaliza en partes del mercado. Su punto débil es que se trata de una candidatura oportunista e inconsistente.

En el caso de una hipotética segunda vuelta entre Le Pen y Macron, ¿volverá a repetirse el famoso frente republicano (la alianza entre la izquierda y la derecha republicana) para evitar que el FN gane? ¿O los votantes conservadores se sentirán atraídos por el discurso xenófobo de Le Pen?

Independientemente de quién sea el adversario de Le Pen, estoy convencido de que el frente republicano será suficientemente potente para impedir que la extrema derecha gane. Las elecciones regionales de 2015 lo volvieron a demostrar. En una segunda vuelta en la que se confronten el FN y otro partido, el FN será ampliamente vencido.

Según usted, hay dos candidatos que se disputan la misma oferta política altermundialista: Mélenchon y Hamon. Pero el acuerdo entre ellos dos resulta improbable. ¿Por qué?

Hay una competición por el liderazgo de la izquierda. Una alianza para las elecciones legislativas de junio aún resulta posible, pero no lo es una candidatura única para las presidenciales. Benoît Hamon dice: debemos tener un candidato único para las elecciones presidenciales, pero esto significa que el candidato único tengo que ser yo. Mélenchon ha dicho más o menos lo mismo. Ni Hamon ni Mélenchon renunciarán a sus respectivas candidaturas. La cuestión principal es cuál de los dos conseguirá fagocitar el electorado del otro. Y si lo hace, lo absorberá con suficiente fuerza para alcanzar la segunda vuelta de las presidenciales.

Además de la disputa por el liderazgo de la izquierda, Mélenchon y Hamon tampoco coinciden respecto a su posición sobre la UE. ¿Cómo dificulta la unidad de la izquierda esta posición divergente sobre las instituciones europeas?

Benoît Hamon quiere promover otra política europea que sea más de izquierdas, pero sin confrontarse con las instituciones europeas. Dice que quiere superar los límites del déficit, pero que no se confrontará con Bruselas, porque quiere conservar la construcción europea. Sin embargo, Mélenchon dice que esto no es posible, que es una tomadura de pelo. Recuerda que se trata del mismo discurso del Bourget que hizo François Hollande en enero de 2012. Un discurso en el que Hollande prometió reformar Europa y finalmente no pudo renegociar nada.

La propuesta estrella de la candidatura de Hamon es la renta básica universal (RBU). ¿Resulta posible construir una mayoría electoral en torno a una propuesta tan innovadora como polémica, como la RBU?

Sí que lo es. Ya hay un 40% de los franceses favorable a esta medida. La explicación es el aumento del precariado. Este fenómeno ha provocado que un cierto número de intelectuales apueste por esta medida, ya que, si no se apuesta por este tipo de medidas, las sociedades de los países ricos explotarán una detrás de otra. Esto significa la llegada al poder de dirigentes como Donald Trump. Una parte de las élites económicas que se benefician de la mondialisation malheureuse (la globalización desafortunada), como Facebook, apoya la renta básica universal. Cree que o bien hacen una concesión masiva al precariado o el sistema será derribado.

Además, la renta básica representa un cambio de paradigma. El modelo de todos los partidos, también los de izquierdas, era desarrollar las políticas que aportan crecimiento económico. Las diferencias se debían a la manera en la que se repartía la riqueza, pero no sobre la necesidad de impulsar el crecimiento. Lo que aporta Hamon de inesperado es que no quiere promover el crecimiento, ya que este no resulta sostenible desde un punto de vista ecológico. Los niveles de riqueza resultan estables y hay que hacer que las sociedades sean menos desiguales. La herramienta para ello es la renta básica universal. Es un cambio de perspectiva sin precedentes en Francia.

Pero Mélenchon también defiende este discurso ecologista.

Mélenchon rechaza seguir por el sendero del crecimiento y quiere una economía verde. Pero con la diferencia de que reivindica una planificación ecologista. Que el Estado recupere el control de la economía para planificar el abandono del despilfarro y el consumismo. Hay dos candidatos de izquierdas y los dos son ecologistas. Es algo completamente nuevo en Francia.

Numerosos analistas políticos aseguran que el electorado de Mélenchon resulta estable y limitado. ¿El líder de la izquierda radical tiene alguna oportunidad para clasificarse para la segunda vuelta?

Sí que tiene opciones de llegar a la segunda vuelta de las presidenciales. Porque tiene una dinámica en las redes sociales y en los mítines que es realmente masiva. O bien se trata de un grupo de incondicionales muy movilizado que le permitirá obtener un 10% o un 15% de los votos. O bien se está produciendo una dinámica en torno a él, una ola que le puede permitir sobrepasar el 20% de los votos. Hubo estudios en 2012 que mostraron que un votante de cada diez dudó hasta el último momento entre Hollande y Mélenchon.

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Mark Taliano is a former teacher, an activist and writer who visited Syria in 2016. Taliano interviewed Syrians who have lived under US bombs for years. 

The war in Syria is a NATO war. NATO has struck Syria not just with deadly unrelenting bombing, but has maintained total media control, deceiving millions of people around the world about NATO’s bloody unprecedented multinational invasion of Syria. Taliano says, “The war in Syria is brought to you by a sophisticated network of interlocking governing agencies that disseminate propaganda to both domestic and foreign audiences.”

To order Mark Taliano’s Book click here, directly from Global Research

He interviews a woman from the US who lives in Syria. She saw the Turkish-US armed Takfiri terrorists destroy her home and the entire village of Kesseb. They raped elderly women, dug up graveyard bones and fed them to hungry dogs. In Syria, Hillary Clinton is despised because she facilitated the transfer of arms from US puppet forces in Libya to the Turkish Army who then attacked Syria. And it was Clinton who campaigned to have the NATO lies about Syria spread through Western media, calling terrorist Al Qaeda and other takfiri murderers “moderates,” as they destroyed Syrian villages, cities, and killed and maimed tens of thousands of Syrian people. She and US/NATO propagandists vilified Syria’s legitimate and sovereign government.

Taliano interviews many people, a man grateful to the Russians for coming to Syria’s aid. Another Syrian showed how calling the events in Syria a “civil war” is a lie:

“The terrorists are sent by your government. They are al-Qaeda Jabhat al-Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans and the extremist jihadists sent by the West, the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al-Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country.”

Click image to order Taliano’s book 

One of the strongest voices for Syria is Mark Taliano. He says, “Syria refuses to submit. That is why the West is taught to hate it and the rest of the world learns to love and respect it.” His friends’ testimony and video evidence demonstrate the horrors: kidnapped individuals being put in cages and used as human shields in town squares.” And still Syria does not surrender.

“The Syrian War was planned … by the US since 2005. The Syrian soldiers and police were not even allowed to carry weapons until the “peaceful protesters” had slaughtered several hundreds of police and soldiers.”

Taliano shows how US attack on the water system of Iraq in the 1990s was the template for the same illegal campaign in Syria. He duplicates one Defense Intelligence Agency document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” in 1991, which states,

“THE ENTIRE IRAQI WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM WILL NOT COLLAPSE PRECIPITOUSLY, … FULL DEGRADATION OF THE WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST ANOTHER 6 MONTHS.”

Just as Iraq refused to bow to the will of the US, Taliano writes,

“Syria insists on choosing its own path and refuses to be a vassal of US-led forces of predatory capitalism that siphons the world’s resources for the benefit of a transnational oligarch class. Violating international law, NATO countries have been involved in this blitzkrieg “regime change” invasion of sovereign countries.”

Mark Taliano gives journalists, Syrians, and Facebook contributors credit for unmasking the truth. He cites Stephan Gowans who notes that the economies of all the countries the US/NATO has invaded have had a largely publicly-owned economies. He cites Vanessa Beeley, Michel Chussodovsky, Eva Bartlett, Dr Shaabban, Ghali Hassan, Katherine Shackdam, Tim Anderson, and other courageous journalists reporting the NATO genocide.

Nafeez Ahmed noted,

“Total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s…likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, … and could be as high as 6–8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.) …. US and UK “’refuse to keep track of the civilian death toll of military operations – they are deemed an “irrelevant inconvenience.”

In addition to mass murder and destruction of food, health care facilities, schools and homes, in addition to the trail of destroyed archaeological treasures from Ancient Syria, Taliano notes:

“Criminal mainstream messaging has created a state of mass political imbecilization,” stupefying the masses with lies.” They codified the deception. The US House of Representatives passed HR5181 ‘Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation,’ “which calls for countering any “disinformation” – the truth – that escapes from Syria. The US funds “Civil Society” groups to do official disinformation work. The “National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA, Mossad, etc., as well as oligarch-funded foundations, are all embedded with the terrorists … are the sources … for corporate/mainstream media “news” stories.”

Dr. Joseph Saadeh of Maaloula said to Mark Taliano:

“The Wahhabi terrorists destroyed Syria by destroying everything in Syria like factories, like anything working to build the culture. And they’re supported by America and the European governments.”

Voices from Syria is a small book with a big message. It would be perfect to use in a group of concerned activists meeting to discuss and disseminate the truth about US or NATO foreign policy in Syria. . It could be used in a classroom or in a library reading club.

Mark Taliano is from Canada, one of the reliable military vassals in the NATO cabal. He severely criticizes his own government’s crimes, and the crimes of the ruling class who have urged their imperial forces to overthrow the legally elected government of Bashar-Al Assad. US and UK and Canada openly provide military and economic support for AlQaeda, Al Nusra, and the terrorists. The oil-rich rich monarchies of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi -finance and arm the puppet armies and death squads attempting to destroy Syria’s sovereignty.

Mark Taliano is a passionate voice for peace, dispelling lies, urging solidarity with the people of Syria.

“Whereas the West supports the extremist Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, the teachings of Islam contradict this ideology, and they certainly contradict the crimes of the mercenary terrorists infesting Syria.”

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En Hong Kong no lloverá este domingo

March 27th, 2017 by Xulio Ríos

El 26 de marzo, Hong Kong elegirá un nuevo gobernador. No se hará mediante una elección abierta sino a través del voto secreto de una comisión electoral de 1.200 miembros, en su mayoría bajo la influencia de Beijing. A priori, esto debe garantizar que el elegido no se desmarque de los objetivos del gobierno central en la región. En dicho comité, la oposición demócrata cuenta con unos 325 asientos más o menos afines. El jefe ejecutivo saliente, Leung Chun-ying, renunció a postularse para un segundo mandato tras una legislatura marcada por la irrupción del contestatario Movimiento de los Paraguas.

En 2015, el Consejo Legislativo rechazó la reforma electoral propuesta por Beijing que permitiría abrir paso a la elección mediante sufragio universal pero con un numerus clausus de candidatos, máximo de tres, que deberían contar con el visto bueno previo del gobierno central.

Tres son ahora también los postulantes en liza: Carie Lam, la favorita de Beijing; Woo Kwok-hing, un magistrado con fama de rigor y apego al Estado de derecho, y John Tsang, la figura más popular de los tres y el menos simpático a Beijing por sus insinuaciones de carácter localista. Lam presentó 580 avales frente a los 180 y 165, respectivamente, de los otros dos candidatos. Los dos últimos están apoyados por los demócratas y Tsang sería el mejor visto por los independentistas. John Tsang fue secretario particular de Chris Patten, el último gobernador británico del enclave, y en su programa aspira a relanzar las reformas.

Quizá el apoyo de Beijing a cualquier candidato podría ser contraproducente de llevarse a cabo una elección popular pero con el Comité Electoral las cosas funcionan de otro modo. Aun así, China no ha expresado sus preferencias de modo rotundo aunque no falta quien ha asegurado (el ex gobernador Tung Chee-hwa) que de ganar John Tsang, Beijing no otorgaría su beneplácito. Es improbable.

Todos los candidatos promueven alternativas para garantizar la estabilidad política y socioeconómica de Hong Kong. Los tres comparten una singular querencia por la autonomía del territorio, afectada en los últimos años por los desencuentros con la capital continental. La hostilidad igualmente compartida con respecto a las injerencias políticas está matizada por la observación del marco general de “un país dos sistemas” que define el devenir de esta región administrativa especial que el 1 de julio celebrará sus primeras dos décadas de autonomía desde la retrocesión. China aspirar a llegar a esa fecha con la casa en orden.

Carrie Lam tiene una gran experiencia administrativa y de gobierno. Abierta a las cuestiones sociales, especialmente en materia de vivienda, es un valor seguro para Beijing. Según declaró, su mayor ambición es poner coto a los sentimientos de desafección de los hongkoneses, especialmente de los más jóvenes, respecto a China, lo cual la llevará a incidir en aspectos como el control del flujo turístico del continente o la búsqueda de salidas al fracaso de la reforma de 2015, además de las cuestiones de seguridad a la vista de las intromisiones crecientes de Beijing por causa, sobre todo, de las luchas palaciegas que tienen lugar a miles de kilómetros, en la capital, pero que tienen aquí una considerable proyección desestabilizadora. Son todos ellos temas correosos, más aún en un año tan importante como el actual pues en otoño el PCCh celebrará su XIX Congreso en el que debe renovar su dirigencia.

El gobierno central debiera aprovechar la hora del balance para limar asperezas y sugerir nuevas propuestas que contribuyan a desatascar el atolladero político en que se encuentra la región administrativa.

Xulio Ríos

Xulio Ríos: Director del Observatorio de la Política China.

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Relevant to the evolving Fake News saga, this incisive article was first published in 2014. The objective is to smear Truth in Media

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
What’s confusing you
Is the nature of my game

– The Rolling Stones

The reason that Internet trolls are effective is that people still don’t understand their game.

There are 15 commonly-used trolling tactics to disrupt, misdirect and control internet discussions.

As one interesting example, trolls start flame wars because – according to two professors – swearing and name-calling shut down our ability to think and focus.

And trolls will often spew divisive attacks so that people argue against each other, instead of bad actions and policies of the powers-that-be.   For example, trolls will:

Start a religious war whenever possible using stereotypes like “all Jews are selfish”, “all Christians are crazy” or “all Muslims are terrorists”.

Yesterday, the alternative news site Common Dreams caught a troll using scores of different user names to spew anti-Semitic bile. (Common Dreams discovered that the same troll was behind the multiple user names by tracking their IP addresses. And the troll confessed to Common Dreams.)

The troll is a “a Jewish Harvard graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website’s discussion of issues involving Israel”.

He posted anti-Semitic diatribes – such as Hitler should have finished the job and killed all Jews – using one alias.  Then – a couple of minutes later – he’d post an attack on the first poster using a different alias, claiming that criticism of Israel is the same thing as anti-Semitism.  (Note: Holocaust survivors and Israeli ministers say it’s not.)

Why would a Jew post vile anti-Semitic comments?  Because normal people are offended by – and don’t want to be associated with – pure, naked anti-Semitism, and so they will avoid such discussions.  If the discussion was originally criticizing a specific aspect of Israeli policy, the discussion will break down, and the actual point regarding policy will be lost.

Similarly, anti-Semitic posts weaken websites by making them seem less reputable. Indeed, Common Dreams says that the troll’s anti-Semitic comments drove away many of that site’s largest donors … dealing a severe blow to its continued viability. That’s exactly what trolls spewing anti-Semitic bile are trying to do: shut down logical discussion and discredit and weaken sites which allow rational criticism of policy.

It is well-known that foreign  governments and large companies troll online. See thisthis this, and this. For example, the Israeli government is paying students to post pro-Israeli comments online.

And American students are also attempting to influence internet discussion.

While the Common Dreams troll claims that he’s not sponsored by the state of Israel, government  agencies have manipulated  Internet discussion for years. This includes the use of multiple “socket puppet” aliases.  The potential for mischief is stunning.

Unless we learn their game…

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Nuevo cambio en el comercio internacional en el Pacífico

March 26th, 2017 by Antonio Gershenson

Por casi todo el mundo se publican informes acerca de un nuevo cambio en las relaciones comerciales internacionales en Asia-Pacífico.

En Sudáfrica, el Cape Times ( Tiempos del Cabo, de Ciudad del Cabo) dice que Donald Trump ha hecho un regalo, un platón de plata, a China. Al firmar una orden ejecutiva esta semana (la última de enero), que saca a Estados Unidos del tratado del TPP (Acuerdo Transpacífico de Cooperación Económica), ha impulsado a China sobre el comercio mundial.

En Manila, capital de las islas Filipinas, se dio una reunión, el 10 de este mes de marzo, de la ASEAN (en español, Asociación de Naciones del Sudeste de Asia). Se acuerda impulsar una asociación regional económica comprensiva (en inglés, sus iniciales son RCEP). También se había confirmado que en esa asociación estuvieran Brunei, Camboya, Indonesia, Laos, Malasia, Myanmar, Filipinas, Singapur, Tailandia y Vietnam, o sea, los 10 miembros de la ASEAN.

Se agregaron a la unión mencionada Australia, China, India, Japón, Corea del Sur y Nueva Zelandia, para la nueva y mayor organización. El gobierno de Filipinas expresó que el proceso de unificación, la formación total, culminaría este fin de año.

Japón se había alejado de Estados Unidos. Por ejemplo, Trump dijo que Japón tenía impuestos muy altos a las mercancías de su país.

La Bloomberg publica lo siguiente:

China había esperado una forma de comercio internacional que sustituyera al TPP. Y citan en relación con lo dicho, a un veterano de la Academia China de las Ciencias Sociales: este tratado es una buena opción para aquellos países que tienen difícilmente un comercio libre, incluyendo Australia, Singapur y Japón (rodeados de mar).

El banco HSBC, cuya base mundial está en Hong Kong, considera que este acuerdo representa un gran crecimiento.

Esto resume opiniones de lugares muy variados entre sí. Pero coinciden en algunos puntos:

La unión de estos 16 países en torno a un comercio libre entre ellos en el futuro cercano.

China tiene un papel importante. Lo hemos visto en artículos recientes. También es muy importante la presencia de India, y la de Japón.

Se suma todo esto a otros organismos con notoria participación asiática.

Uno de ellos es el Brics, palabra formada con las iniciales de los participantes: Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica. Tuvieron su más reciente reunión en India.

Esa reunión coincidió con otra, en el mismo lugar, del Bimstec, cuyos miembros son: Bangladesh, Bután, Myanmar (Birmania), Nepal, Sri Lanka (Ceilán), India y Tailandia. También hubo una reunión entre esta organización y el Brics.

Poco antes de esta última reunión, el presidente de las islas Filipinas, Rodrigo Ruterte, estuvo en China; habló incluso con el presidente de este país, para después hacer un recorrido por esa nación, junto con un numeroso grupo de técnicos y políticos, y firmar acuerdos con el gobierno chino.

Se había fundado también el Banco Asiático de Inversiones en Infraestructura, con sede en Shanghai, China. Se han financiado numerosas obras, incluso ferroviarias, en Asia.

En toda la primera parte de este artículo, incluimos información que no se había dado a nuestro público. Recordamos que los últimos países en los que Estados Unidos tenía antes una importante influencia en Asia eran Japón, Filipinas y Turquía. ¿Qué les queda de cada uno de ellos? Y más adentro del Océano Pacífico, están Australia y Nueva Zelandia.

Australia ha tenido a China como principal socio comercial durante los últimos ocho años. En 2016, el volumen del comercio entre Australia y China fue de más de 100 mil millones de dólares. En diciembre de 2015, entró en vigor un tratado de libre comercio entre los dos países.

Antonio Gershenson

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Venezuela defenderá la dignidad latinoamericana

March 26th, 2017 by Luis Beaton

IMAGEN: La canciller de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez.

La canciller de Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, comparecerá este lunes ante el Consejo Permanente de Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) y, según analistas, ese ejercicio debe convertirse en una defensa de la dignidad latinoamericana.

La reunión tendrá como escenario el salón Simón Bolívar en la sede del organismo en Washington, algo que debe recordar a los miembros de ese foro la alerta del Libertador el 15 de agosto de 1829 con sus históricas palabras: ‘Los Estados Unidos parecen estar llamados por la Providencia a plagar de miseria a los países de América en nombre de la libertad’.

Ahora hay países que se apartan se esa realidad y se unen a los planes estadounidenses contra Venezuela en una aparente defensa de su pueblo, algo que reiteradamente denuncian las autoridades de Caracas.

El Consejo Permanente se reunirá también el martes a petición de Canadá, Argentina, Barbados, Bahamas, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Estados Unidos, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, México, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Santa Lucía y Uruguay, sin dudas, en busca de una condena al Gobierno Bolivariano ordenada desde la Casa Blanca.

Pero, mientras tanto, el pueblo venezolano se movilizará el martes en defensa de la soberanía y la independencia, ante las constantes arremetidas por parte de ejes de poder imperial, según indicó Héctor Rodríguez, dirigente nacional del Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela.

Recientemente, el secretario general de la OEA, Luis Almagro, emitió un informe sobre la situación en esta nación que, según el ministro de Educación, Elías Jaua, está lleno ‘de insolencias, como insolente es la personalidad de Almagro; lleno de incoherencias, como incoherente es su moral; abundante en falsedades, como falsa es su actitud de demócrata’.

Según Jaua, Almagro, está justificando que la ‘solución’ a los problemas de los venezolanos y venezolanas venga desde el exterior.

Este documento del jefe de la OEA es un autoreconocimiento de su ineptitud de poder cumplir la tarea que le dieron sus empleadores de Washington de lograr los votos necesarios para aplicar la llamada ‘Carta Democrática’, puntualizó el ministro al referirse a los planes de utilizar ese papel contra el proceso bolivariano.

Al respecto, el académico y analistas Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, señaló que el problema ya no es la OEA, sino Almagro y su servilismo.

En un extenso artículo, Rodríguez describe el triste papel desempeñado por la organización desde que fue fundada en Colombia el 30 de abril de 1948, a la medida de los intereses de la Casa Blanca para ‘tener gobiernos serviles que lo sostuvieran y secretarios generales abyectos que se prestaran a poner la cara cuando a Estados Unidos se le ocurría un nuevo atropello’.

En otras palabras, precisa, el secretario general está actuando de manera ilegal cuando trata de aplicar la llamada Carta Democrática a esta nación, por lo que si la OEA fuera una organización seria, lo debería destituir.

En referencia al informe y las ‘decisiones’ del ex canciller uruguayo señala que es evidente ‘no existe ni en la Carta, ni en las reglas de funcionamiento de la OEA, la potestad de un secretario general de llamar a realizar elecciones en un país’, como trata de imponer a los venezolanos.

Almagro, señala el académico, es un militante durante la mayor parte de su vida del Partido Nacional de Uruguay que se define ideológicamente como nacionalista y panamericanista, un seguidor de este paradigma que expone lealtad hacia Estados Unidos y la oposición a la integración latinoamericana y caribeña.

Las reuniones en Washington esta semana deben mostrar si se mantiene que la OEA es aun el ‘Ministerio de Colonia’, que idearon su fundadores apegados a las palabras que pronunciara el 2 de diciembre de 1823, el estadounidense James Monroe, cuando dijo ‘América para los americanos’.

Por lo pronto, Venezuela debe alzarse como defensora de la dignidad latinoamericana ante las maquinaciones de Almagro, quien se vale del Ministerio de Colonias para congraciarse con el norte revuelto y brutal como lo describió el apóstol cubano José Martí, según reseña el historiador venezolano Antonio Manrique.

Luis Beaton

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Ucrania, sin presunción de inocencia para Rusia

March 26th, 2017 by Antonio Rondón García

Apenas conocerse el asesinato del exdiputado Denis Voronenkov en pleno centro de Kiev, el presidente ucraniano, Piotro Poroshenko, de inmediato responsabilizó a Rusia con el hecho, en un paso que tiene disimiles interpretaciones.

Lejos de alejar a Kiev del problema, Poroshenko con su apresurada acusación levantó fuertes sospechas en Rusia de quien podría estar, realmente, detrás de ese escandaloso asesinato, sobre todo cuando el matón resultó ser un ciudadano ucraniano.

Anton Guerashenko, consejero del ministro del Interior, publicó en su cuenta de twitter el nombre de Pavel Parshov, un ucraniano de 28 años, nacido en Sevastopol, a quien de inmediato situó como agente de los servicios secretos rusos.

Pero la propia fiscalía general ucraniana se negó a confirmar que fuera Parshov el nombre real del asesino.

Luego se conoció que Parshov era un joven procesado por lavado de dinero y otras violaciones que reclamó en la red social Vkontakt a qué se debía tanto interés de la prensa hacía su persona.

Así, está por confirmarse en realidad quién, ataviado con un traje gris deportivo, chaqueta negra, capucha y tenis rojos, disparó seis veces con una pistola TT contra Voronenkov, a la entrada del hotel de cinco estrellas Premier Palace, en el centro de Kiev.

El asesino llevaba una identificación de veterano de la operación de castigo de Ucrania contra la población sublevada en Donetsk y Lugansk y eso, en opinión del diputado radical Igor Popov, aleja la posibilidad de confirmar la ‘huella rusa’ en ese hecho criminal.

Poroshenko recibió una fuerte respuesta a la acusación que lanzó cuando ni siquiera había fallecido el asesino, producto de heridas en la cabeza y el pecho, causadas por disparos hechos por el guardaespaldas del diputado.

Ante la acusación del millonario chocolatero de que Moscú cometía un acto de terrorismo de estado con el asesinato de Voronenkov, el presidente de la Duma (cámara baja rusa), Viacheslav Volodin, estimó que Ucrania va camino a convertirse en un estado terrorista.

Voloshin estimó que ello está dado porque en el vecino país dejaron de funcionar las leyes y muchos asuntos se resuelven con violencia.

LA TRAGEDIA DE VORONENKOV

Afirma el diario Kommersant que casi en el momento del atentado, Voronenkov se comunicaba por messenger con el director del diario online Censor.net.ua, Yuri Butusov, para recomendarle otra de las entrevistas que de la noche a la mañana lo convirtieron en un extraño antirruso, sobre todo, tras sus ataques a Kiev desde la Duma.

Voronenkov fracasó en su intento de reelegirse en septiembre pasado como candidato por el Partido Comunista de la Federación de Rusia y estaba investigado por casos de malversación y abuso de poder.

Un mes después, viajó con su esposa, la exdiputada por Rusia Unida Maria Maksokova, antigua esposa del líder criminal Vladimir Tiurin, quien la habría ayudado a convertirse en legisladora.

El 6 de diciembre Voronenkov, con familiares en Jarkov, recibió la ciudadanía ucraniana. Ello provocó la indignación de nacionalistas, deseosos de conocer sobre qué bases se otorgaba esa condición a una persona conocida por sus ataques en el pasado contra Ucrania.

Para esa fecha, fue el fiscal general Yuri Lutsenko, quien llevó al estrellato a Voronenkov, al revelar que figuraba como testigo en el extendido proceso por supuesta traición contra Viktor Yanukovich, expulsado del poder por un golpe de Estado en febrero de 2014.

El exdiputado y, al parecer, su compatriota con igual condición Igor Ponomariov debían asistir como testigos en el citado proceso para demostrar, además, una presunta implicación de Moscú en una agresión contra Ucrania, algo que el Kremlin niega rotundamente.

La vocera de la Cancillería rusa, Maria Zajarova, declaró que el así llamado Estado-asesino, en alusión a Ucrania, dejó clara la imposibilidad de la realización de una pesquisa parcial del citado asesinato al acusar sin pruebas y de inmediato a Rusia.

Kiev eliminó desde hace algún tiempo la posibilidad de presunción de inocencia para Rusia y la acusa, además, de estar detrás del bloqueo organizado por los ultranacionalistas a Donetsk y Lugansk o de intervenir directamente en la guerra en el sureste ucraniano.

Sin embargo, Poroshenko pareció crear problemas para su propia imagen de político que controla Ucrania al acusar de inmediato a Rusia. Ahora, serán los propios radicales y neofascistas quienes le exigirán medidas drásticas contra Moscú. Y entonces, ¿Qué podrá hacer?

Antonio Rondón García

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The cyber-security company Crowdstrike claimed that “Russia” hacked the Democratic National Committee. It also claimed that “Russia” hacked artillery units of the Ukrainian army. The second claim has now be found to be completely baseless. That same is probably the case with its claims related to the DNC.

Sometime around May 2016, the Democratic National Committee lost control over its email archives. It claimed that its servers had been “hacked” by someone related to Russian interests. DNC emails were published by Wikileaks and provided that the DNC had worked during the primaries against its statutes and in favor of one presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. The DNC chair was forced to resign over the case.

The DNC had called in Crowdstrike, a company led by a one Dimitry Alperovich, a Senior Fellow of the NATO aligned “think tank” Atlantic Council. After a short investigation Crowdstrike claimed to found intruding software on the DNC servers that, it says, has been exclusively used by Russian intelligence services. From there followed claims that “Russia hacked the U.S. elections”.

When the DNC went public with the Crowdstrike claims the FBI never requested access to the servers to determine if a crime had been committed and to detect the culprit. Access to the servers had been informally denied by the DNC. The FBI simply followed (pdf), without any own forensic investigation of its own, the conclusions Crowdstrike had made.

Imagine that some white guy claims that his house has been broken in and a large amount of money has been stolen. He hires a private investigators who says a window was broken and therefore the crime must have been committed by those “niggers” down the road. But others ask if the man hides the money himself, or if the man’s son might have taken it. But the police does not investigate if a crime has actually happened. It does no forensics at the crime scene. It does not even check if a window has indeed been broken. It simply follows the conclusion of the private investigator and accuses the “niggers”. This is what happened in the DNC case.

Month later and in a different case the same Crowdstrike investigators claimed (pdf) that the artillery units of the Ukrainian army had had “excessive combat losses” of up to 80% in their fight with Ukrainian separatists. Crowdstrike asserted that Russian intelligence hacked an application used by the Ukrainians to aim their guns. The hack, it was claimed, enabled well targeted counter-fire that then destroyed the Ukrainian guns.

The author of the application denied that any such hacking had taken place. His software was provided only directly from him to Ukrainian army units. Independent cyber-security researchers also doubted the claims.

Crowdstrike had based its numbers for “excessive losses” of Ukrainian artillery units on statistics collected by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). The IISS now says that its statistic do not provide what Crowdstrike claimed. There were no “excessive losses” of Ukrainian artillery.

VOA first contacted IISS in February to verify the alleged artillery losses. Officials there initially were unaware of the CrowdStrike assertions. After investigating, they determined that CrowdStrike misinterpreted their data and hadn’t reached out beforehand for comment or clarification.

In a statement to VOA, the institute flatly rejected the assertion of artillery combat losses.

It seems that the whole “Ukrainian artillery hack” claims by Crowdstrike was simply made up. There was no “hack” and the claimed damage from the “hack” did not occur at all. Crowdstrike evidently found a “crime” and “Russian hacking” where none had happened.

In the case of the DNC hacking Crowdstrike also alleged a “crime” and “Russian hacking”. No hard evidence was ever provided for that claim, no competent police force ever investigated the crime scene and serious security researchers found that the Crowdstrike claims were likely taken from hot air.

The DNC was likely not hacked at all. Some insider with access to its servers may have taken the emails to publish them. On July 10 2016 the DNC IT administrator Sean Rich was found fatally shot on the streets of Washington DC. To this day no culprit has been found. The crime is unsolved. Five Congressional staffers and IT administrators from Pakistan, some of whom also worked for the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, are under criminal investigation for unauthorized access to Congressional computers. They had the password  of Wasserman-Schultz and may have had access to the DNC servers.

Crowdstrike’s claims of “Russian hacking” have evidently been false with regards to the Ukrainian artillery. Crowdstrike’s claims of “Russian hacking” in the case of the DNC have never been supported or confirmed by independent evidence. There are reasons to believe that the loss of control of the DNC’s email archives were a case of unauthorized internal access and not a “hack” at all.

A company related to a NATO aligned “think-tank”, which is financed by weapon producers and other special interests, raises allegations against Russia that are quite possibly unfounded. These allegations are then used by NATO to build up a public boogeyman picture of “the Russian enemy”. In consequence the budgets for NATO militaries and the profits of weapon producers increase.

It is a simple racket, but with potentially very bad consequences for all of us.

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Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet undetermined turning point. His first month in the White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of corporate lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy looks more like “Wall Street First.”

His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts, deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and assets already in place.

One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. Navient, the Department of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for financial fraud.

Foreclosure king Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,” e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may position Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been waiting for.

Photo by www.GlynLowe.com | CC BY 2.0

Photo by www.GlynLowe.com | CC BY 2.0

Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet undetermined turning point. His first month in the White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of corporate lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy looks more like “Wall Street First.” His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts, deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and assets already in place.

One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. Navient, the Department of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for financial fraud.

Foreclosure king Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,” e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may position Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been waiting for.

But not the neocons. His election rhetoric promised to reverse traditional U.S. interventionist policy abroad. Making an anti-war left run around the Democrats, he promised to stop backing ISIS/Al Nusra (President Obama’s “moderate” terrorists supplied with the arms and money that Hillary looted from Libya), and to reverse the Obama-Clinton administration’s New Cold War with Russia. But the neocon coterie at the CIA and State Department are undercutting his proposed rapprochement with Russia by forcing out General Flynn for starters. It seems doubtful that Trump will clean them out.

Trump has called NATO obsolete, but insists that its members up their spending to the stipulated 2% of GDP — producing a windfall worth tens of billions of dollars for U.S. arms exporters. That is to be the price Europe must pay if it wants to endorse Germany’s and the Baltics’ confrontation with Russia.

Trump is sufficiently intuitive to proclaim the euro a disaster, and he recommends that Greece leave it. He supports the rising nationalist parties in Britain, France, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of which urge withdrawal from the eurozone – and reconciliation with Russia instead of sanctions. In place of the ill-fated TPP and TTIP, Trump advocates country-by-country trade deals favoring the United States. Toward this end, his designated ambassador to the European Union, Ted Malloch, urges the EU’s breakup. The EU is refusing to accept him as ambassador.

Will Trump’s victory break up the Democratic Party?

At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these international reversals will be. What is more clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S. politics across the political spectrum.

The Democratic Party has lost its ability to pose as the party of labor and the middle class. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and California billionaires, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) strategy of identity politics encourages any identity except that of wage earners. The candidates backed by the Donor Class have  been Blue Dogs pledged to promote Wall Street and neocons urging a New Cold War with Russia.

They preferred to lose with Hillary than to win behind Bernie Sanders. So Trump’s electoral victory is their legacy as well as Obama’s. Instead of Trump’s victory dispelling that strategy, the Democrats are doubling down. It is as if identity politics is all they have.

jjunkecon

Trying to ride on Barack Obama’s coattails didn’t work. Promising “hope and change,” he won by posing as a transformational president, leading the Democrats to control of the White House, Senate and Congress in 2008. Swept into office by a national reaction against the George Bush’s Oil War in Iraq and the junk-mortgage crisis that left the economy debt-ridden, they had free rein to pass whatever new laws they chose – even a Public Option in health care if they had wanted, or make Wall Street banks absorb the losses from their bad and often fraudulent loans.

But it turned out that Obama’s role was to prevent the changes that voters hoped to see, and indeed that the economy needed to recover: financial reform, debt writedowns to bring junk mortgages in line with fair market prices, and throwing crooked bankers in jail. Obama rescued the banks, not the economy, and turned over the Justice Department and regulatory agencies to his Wall Street campaign contributors. He did not even pull back from war in the Near East, but extended it to Libya and Syria, blundering into the Ukrainian coup as well.

Having dashed the hopes of his followers, Obama then praised his chosen successor Hillary Clinton as his “Third Term.” Enjoying this kiss of death, Hillary promised to keep up Obama’s policies.

The straw that pushed voters over the edge was when she asked voters, “Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago?” Who were they going to believe: their eyes, or Hillary? National income statistics showed that only the top 5 percent of the population were better off. All the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during Obama’s tenure went to them – the Donor Class that had gained control of the Democratic Party leadership. Real incomes have fallen for the remaining 95 percent, whose household budgets have been further eroded by soaring charges for health insurance. (The Democratic leadership in Congress fought tooth and nail to block Dennis Kucinich from introducing his Single Payer proposal.)

No wonder most of the geographic United States voted for change – except for where the top 5 percent, is concentrated: in New York (Wall Street) and California (Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex). Making fun of the Obama Administration’s slogan of  “hope and change,” Trump characterized Hillary’s policy of continuing the economy’s shrinkage for the 95% as “no hope and no change.”

Identity Politics as anti-labor politics

A new term was introduced to the English language: Identity Politics. Its aim is for voters to think of themselves as separatist minorities – women, LGBTQ, Blacks and Hispanics. The Democrats thought they could beat Trump by organizing Women for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), LGBTQ for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), and Blacks and Hispanics for Wall Street (and a New Cold War). Each identity cohort was headed by a billionaire or hedge fund donor.

The identity that is conspicuously excluded is the working class. Identity politics strips away thinking of one’s interest in terms of having to work for a living. It excludes voter protests against having their monthly paycheck stripped to pay more for health insurance, housing and mortgage charges or education, or better working conditions or consumer protection – not to speak of protecting debtors.

Identity politics used to be about three major categories: workers and unionization, anti-war protests and civil rights marches against racist Jim Crow laws. These were the three objectives of the many nationwide demonstrations. That ended when these movements got co-opted into the Democratic Party. Their reappearance in Bernie Sanders’ campaign in fact threatens to tear the Democratic coalition apart. As soon as the primaries were over (duly stacked against Sanders), his followers were made to feel unwelcome. Hillary sought Republican support by denouncing Sanders as being as radical as Putin’s Republican leadership.

In contrast to Sanders’ attempt to convince diverse groups that they had a common denominator in needing jobs with decent pay – and, to achieve that, in opposing Wall Street’s replacing the government as central planner – the Democrats depict every identity constituency as being victimized by every other, setting themselves at each other’s heels. Clinton strategist John Podesta, for instance, encouraged Blacks to accuse Sanders supporters of distracting attention from racism. Pushing a common economic interest between whites, Blacks, Hispanics and LGBTQ always has been the neoliberals’ nightmare. No wonder they tried so hard to stop Bernie Sanders, and are maneuvering to keep his supporters from gaining influence in their party.

When Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no pro-jobs or anti-war demonstration. That presumably would have attracted pro-Trump supporters in an ecumenical show of force. Instead, the Women’s March on Saturday led even the pro-Democrat New York Times to write a front-page article reporting that white women were complaining that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The message to anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that their economic cause was a distraction.

The march was typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As Yves Smith wrote on Naked Capitalism:

“the track record of non-issue-oriented marches, no matter how large scale, is poor, and the status of this march as officially sanctioned (blanket media coverage when other marches of hundreds of thousands of people have been minimized, police not tricked out in their usual riot gear) also indicates that the officialdom does not see it as a threat to the status quo.”[1]

Hillary’s loss was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or her pro-war neocon stance, but on the revelations of the e-mails by her operative Podesta discussing his dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders (claimed to be given to Wikileaks by Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC leaker as Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI investigation of her e-mail abuses at the State Department. Backing her supporters’ attempt to brazen it out, the Democratic Party has doubled down on its identity politics, despite the fact that an estimated 52 percent of white women voted for Trump. After all, women do work for wages. And that also is what Blacks and Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves their needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves their needs, not those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.

Bernie did not choose to run on a third-party ticket. Evidently he feared being accused of throwing the election to Trump. The question is now whether he can remake the Democratic Party as a democratic socialist party, or create a new party if the Donor Class retains its neoliberal control. It seems that he will not make a break until he concludes that a Socialist Party can leave the Democrats as far back in the dust as the Republicans left the Whigs after 1854. He may have underestimated his chance in 2016.

Trump’s effect on U.S. political party realignment

During Trump’s rise to the 2016 Republican nomination it seemed that he was more likely to break up the Republican Party. Its leading candidates and gurus warned that his populist victory in the primaries would tear the party apart. The polls in May and June showed him defeating Hillary Clinton easily (but losing to Bernie Sanders). But Republican leaders worried that he would not support what they believed in: namely, whatever corporate lobbyists put in their hands to enact and privatize.

The May/June polls showed Trump and Clinton were the country’s two most unpopular presidential candidates. But whereas the Democrats maneuvered Bernie out of the way, the Republican Clown Car was unable to do the same to Trump. In the end they chose to win behind him, expecting to control him. As for the DNC, its Wall Street donors preferred to lose with Hillary than to win with Bernie. They wanted to keep control of their party and continue the bargain they had made with the Republicans: The latter would move further and further to the right, leaving room for Democratic neoliberals and neocons to follow them closely, yet still pose as the “lesser evil.” That “centrism” is the essence of the Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. It actually has been going on for a half-century.

“As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere quipped in the 1960s, when he was accused by the US of running a one-party state, ‘The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them’.”[2]

By 2017, voters had caught on to this two-step game. But Hillary’s team paid pollsters over $1 billion to tell her (“Mirror, mirror on the wall …”) that she was the most popular of all. It was hubris to imagine that she could convince the 95 Percent of the people who were worse off under Obama to love her as much as her East-West Coast donors did. It was politically unrealistic – and a reflection of her cynicism – to imagine that raising enough money to buy television ads would convince working-class Republicans to vote for her, succumbing to a Stockholm Syndrome by thinking of themselves as part of the 5 Percent who had benefited from Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies.

Hillary’s election strategy was to make a right-wing run around Trump. While characterizing the working class as white racist “deplorables,” allegedly intolerant of LBGTQ or assertive women, she resurrected the ghost of Joe McCarthy and accused Trump of being “Putin’s poodle” for proposing peace with Russia. Among the most liberal Democrats, Paul Krugman still leads a biweekly charge at The New York Times that President Trump is following Moscow’s orders. Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher and MSNBC produce weekly skits that Trump and General Flynn are Russian puppets. A large proportion of Democrats have bought into the fairy tale that Trump didn’t really win the election, but that Russian hackers manipulated the voting machines. No wonder George Orwell’s 1984 soared to the top of America’s best-seller lists in February 2017 as Donald Trump was taking his oath of office.

This propaganda paid off on February 13, when neocon public relations succeeded in forcing the resignation of General Flynn, whom Trump had appointed to clean out the neocons at the NSA and CIA. His foreign policy initiative based on rapprochement with Russia and hopes to create a common front against ISIS/Al Nusra seemed to be collapsing.

Tabula Rasa Celebrity Politics

U.S. presidential elections no longer are much about policy. Like Obama before him, Trump campaigned as a rasa tabla, a vehicle for everyone to project their hopes and fancies. What has all but disappeared is the past century’s idea of politics as a struggle between labor and capital, democracy vs. oligarchy.

Who would have expected even half a century ago that American politics would become so post-modern that the idea of class conflict has all but disappeared. Classical economic discourse has been drowned out by their junk economics.

There is a covert economic program, to be sure, and it is bipartisan. It is to make elections about just which celebrities will introduce neoliberal economic policies with the most convincing patter talk. That is the essence of rasa tabla politics.

Can the Democrats lose again in 2020?

Trump’s November victory showed that voters found him to be the Lesser Evil, but all that voters really could express was “throw out the bums” and get a new set of lobbyists for the FIRE sector and corporate monopolists. Both candidates represented Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. No wonder voter turnout has continued to plunge.

Although the Democrats’ Lesser Evil argument lost to the Republicans in 2016, the neoliberals in control of the DNC found the absence of a progressive economic program to less threatening to their interests than the critique of Wall Street and neocon interventionism coming from the Sanders camp. So the Democrat will continue to pose as the Lesser Evil party not really in terms of policy, but simply ad hominum. They will merely repeat Hillary’s campaign stance: They are not Trump. Their parades and street demonstrations since his inauguration have not come out for any economic policy.

On Friday, February 10, the party’s Democratic Policy group held a retreat for its members in Baltimore. Third Way “centrists” (Republicans running as Democrats) dominated, with Hillary operatives in charge. The conclusion was that no party policy was needed at all.

“President Trump is a better recruitment tool for us than a central campaign issue,’ said Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who is leading recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).”[3]

But what does their party leadership have to offer women, Blacks and Hispanics in the way of employment, more affordable health care, housing or education and better pay? Where are the New Deal pro-labor, pro-regulatory roots of bygone days? The party leadership is unwilling to admit that Trump’s message about protecting jobs and opposing the TPP played a role in his election. Hillary was suspected of supporting it as “the gold standard” of trade deals, and Obama had made the Trans-Pacific Partnership the centerpiece of his presidency – the free-trade TPP and TTIP that would have taken economic regulatory policy out of the hands of government and given it to corporations.

Instead of accepting even Sanders’ centrist-left stance, the Democrats’ strategy was to tar Trump as pro-Russian, insist that his aides had committed impeachable offenses, and mount one parade after another. “Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio told reporters she was wary of focusing solely on an “economic message” aimed at voters whom Trump won over in 2016, because, in her view, Trump did not win on an economic message.

“What Donald Trump did was address them at a very different level — an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level,” she said. “If all we talk about is the economic message, we’re not going to win.”[4]

This stance led Sanders supporters to walk out of a meeting organized by the “centrist” Third Way think tank on Wednesday, February 8.

By now this is an old story. Fifty years ago, socialists such as Michael Harrington asked why union members and progressives still imagined that they had to work through the Democratic Party. It has taken the rest of the country half a century to see that Democrats are not the party of the working class, unions, middle class, farmers or debtors. They are the party of Wall Street privatizers, bank deregulators, neocons and the military-industrial complex. Obama showed his hand – and that of his party – in his passionate attempt to ram through the corporatist TPP treaty that would have enabled corporations to sue governments for any costs imposed by public consumer protection, environmental protection or other protection of the population against financialized corporate monopolies.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s promises and indeed his worldview seem quixotic. The picture of America’s future he has painted seems unattainable within the foreseeable future. It is too late to bring manufacturing back to the United States, because corporations already have shifted their supply nodes abroad, and too much U.S. infrastructure has been dismantled.

There can’t be a high-speed railroad, because it would take more than four years to get the right-of-way and create a route without crossing gates or sharp curves. In any case, the role of railroads and other transportation has been to increase real estate prices along the routes. But in this case, real estate would be torn down – and having a high-speed rail does not increase land values.

The stock market has soared to new heights, anticipating lower taxes on corporate profits and a deregulation of consumer, labor and environmental protection. Trump may end up as America’s Boris Yeltsin, protecting U.S. oligarchs (not that Hillary would have been different, merely cloaked in a more colorful identity rainbow). The U.S. economy is in for Shock Therapy. Voters should look to Greece to get a taste of the future in this scenario.

Without a coherent response to neoliberalism, Trump’s billionaire cabinet may do to the United States what neoliberals in the Clinton administration did to Russia after 1991: tear out all the checks and balances, and turn public wealth over to insiders and oligarchs. So Trump’s his best chance to be transformative is simply to be America’s Yeltsin for his party’s oligarchic backers, putting the class war back in business.

What a truly transformative president would do/would have done

No administration can create a sound U.S. recovery without dealing with the problem that caused the 2008 crisis in the first place: over-indebtedness. The only one way to restore growth, raise living standards and make the economy competitive again is a debt writedown. But that is not yet on the political horizon. Obama’s doublecross of his voters in 2009 prevented the needed policy from occurring. Having missed this chance in the last financial crisis, a progressive policy must await yet another crisis. But so far, no political party is preparing a program to juxtapose to Republican-Democratic austerity and scale-back of Social Security, Medicare and social spending programs in general.

Also no longer on the horizon is a more progressive income tax, or a public option for health care – or for banking, or consumer protection against financial fraud, or for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, or for a revived protection of labor’s right to unionize, or environmental regulations.

It seems that only a new party can achieve these aims. At the time these essays are going to press, Sanders has committed himself to working within the Democratic Party. But that stance is based on his assumption that somehow he can recruit enough activists to take over the party from Its Donor Class.

I suspect he will fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh than to try to re-design a party (or any institution) dominated by resistance to change, and whose idea of economic growth is a pastiche of tax cuts and deregulation. Both U.S. parties are committed to this neoliberal program – and seek to blame foreign enemies for the fact that its effect is to continue squeezing living standards and bloating the financial sector.

If this slow but inexorable crash does lead to a political crisis, it looks like the Republicans may succeed in convening a new Constitutional Convention (many states already have approved this) to lock the United States into a corporatist neoliberal world. Its slogan will be that of Margaret Thatcher: TINA – There Is No Alternative.

And who is to disagree? As Trotsky said, fascism is the result of the failure of the left to provide an alternative.

Notes.

[1] Yves Smith, “Women Skeptical of the Women’s March,” Naked CapitalismFebruary 10, 2017.

[2] Radhika Desai, “Decoding Trump,” Counterpunch, February 10, 2017.

[3] “Pelosi denies Democrats are divided on strategy for 2018,” Yahoo News, February 10, 2018. https://www.yahoo.com/news/pelosi-denies-democrats-are-divided-on-strategy-for-2018-194337876.html

[4] Ibid.

Michael Hudson is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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Rush to Judgment. The Russian Hacking Saga

March 26th, 2017 by Justin Raimondo

The allegation – now accepted as incontrovertible fact by the “mainstream” media – that the Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee (and John Podesta’s emails) in an effort to help Donald Trump get elected recently suffered a blow from which it may not recover.

Crowdstrike is the cybersecurity company hired by the DNC to determine who hacked their accounts: it took them a single day to determine the identity of the culprits – it was, they said, two groups of hackers which they named “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear,” affiliated respectively with the GRU, which is Russian military intelligence, and the FSB, the Russian security service.

How did they know this?

These alleged “hacker groups” are not associated with any known individuals in any way connected to Russian intelligence: instead, they are identified by the tools they use, the times they do their dirty work, the nature of the targets, and other characteristics based on the history of past intrusions.

Yet as Jeffrey Carr and other cyberwarfare experts have pointed out, this methodology is fatally flawed.

“It’s important to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method,” writes Carr:

“Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is never proven right or wrong. Neither are claims of attribution admissible in any criminal case, so those who make the claim don’t have to abide by any rules of evidence (i.e., hearsay, relevance, admissibility).”

Likening attribution claims of hacking incidents by cybersecurity companies to intelligence assessments, Carr notes that, unlike government agencies such the CIA, these companies are never held to account for their misses:

“When it comes to cybersecurity estimates of attribution, no one holds the company that makes the claim accountable because there’s no way to prove whether the assignment of attribution is true or false unless (1) there is a criminal conviction, (2) the hacker is caught in the act, or (3) a government employee leaked the evidence.”

This lack of accountability may be changing, however, because Crowdstrike’s case for attributing the hacking of the DNC to the Russians is falling apart at the seams like a cheap sweater.

To begin with, Crowdstrike initially gauged its certainty as to the identity of the hackers with “medium confidence.” However, a later development, announced in late December and touted by the Washington Post, boosted this to “high confidence.” The reason for this newfound near-certainty was their discovery that “Fancy Bear” had also infected an application used by the Ukrainian military to target separatist artillery in the Ukrainian civil war. As the Post reported:

“While CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the intrusions and whose findings are described in a new report, had always suspected that one of the two hacker groups that struck the DNC was the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, it had only medium confidence.

“Now, said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, ‘we have high confidence’ it was a unit of the GRU. CrowdStrike had dubbed that unit ‘Fancy Bear.’”

Crowdstrike published an analysis that claimed a malware program supposedly unique to Fancy Bear, X-Agent, had infected a Ukrainian targeting application and, using GPS to geo-locate Ukrainian positions, had turned the application against the Ukrainians, resulting in huge losses:

“Between July and August 2014, Russian-backed forces launched some of the most-decisive attacks against Ukrainian forces, resulting in significant loss of life, weaponry and territory.

“Ukrainian artillery forces have lost over 50% of their weapons in the two years of conflict and over 80% of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”

Alperovitch told the PBS News Hour that

“Ukraine’s artillery men were targeted by the same hackers, that we call Fancy Bear, that targeted DNC, but this time they were targeting cell phones to try to understand their location so that the Russian artillery forces can actually target them in the open battle. It was the same variant of the same malicious code that we had seen at the DNC.”

He told NBC News that this proved the DNC hacker “wasn’t a 400-pound guy in his bed,” as Trump had opined during the first presidential debate – it was the Russians.

The only problem with this analysis is that is isn’t true. It turns out that Crowdstrike’s estimate of Ukrainian losses was based on a blog post by a pro-Russian blogger eager to tout Ukrainian losses: the Ukrainians denied it. Furthermore, the hacking attribution was based on the hackers’ use of a malware program called X-Agent, supposedly unique to Fancy Bear. Since the target was the Ukrainian military, Crowdstrike extrapolated from this that the hackers were working for the Russians.

All somewhat plausible, except for two things: To begin with, as Jeffrey Carr pointed out in December, and now others are beginning to realize, X-Agent isn’t unique to Fancy Bear. Citing the findings of ESET, another cybersecurity company, he wrote:

“Unlike Crowdstrike, ESET doesn’t assign APT28/Fancy Bear/Sednit to a Russian Intelligence Service or anyone else for a very simple reason. Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone. In other words  –  malware deployed is malware enjoyed!

“In fact, the source code for X-Agent, which was used in the DNC, Bundestag, and TV5Monde attacks, was obtained by ESET as part of their investigation!

“During our investigations, we were able to retrieve the complete Xagent source code for the Linux operating system….”

“If ESET could do it, so can others. It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as Crowdstrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will.”

Secondly, the estimate Crowdstrike used to verify the Ukrainian losses was supposedly based on data from the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). But now IISS is disavowing and debunking their claims:

“[T]he International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told [Voice of America] that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened….

“’The CrowdStrike report uses our data, but the inferences and analysis drawn from that data belong solely to the report’s authors,” the IISS said. “The inference they make that reductions in Ukrainian D-30 artillery holdings between 2013 and 2016 were primarily the result of combat losses is not a conclusion that we have ever suggested ourselves, nor one we believe to be accurate.’

“One of the IISS researchers who produced the data said that while the think tank had dramatically lowered its estimates of Ukrainian artillery assets and howitzers in 2013, it did so as part of a ‘reassessment” and reallocation of units to airborne forces.’

“’No, we have never attributed this reduction to combat losses,” the IISS researcher said, explaining that most of the reallocation occurred prior to the two-year period that CrowdStrike cites in its report.

“’The vast majority of the reduction actually occurs … before Crimea/Donbass,’ he added, referring to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

The definitive “evidence” cited by Alperovitch is now effectively debunked: indeed, it was debunked by Carr late last year, but that was ignored in the media’s rush to “prove” the Russians hacked the DNC in order to further Trump’s presidential ambitions. The exposure by the Voice of America of Crowdstrike’s falsification of Ukrainian battlefield losses – the supposedly solid “proof” of attributing the hack to the GRU – is the final nail in Crowdstrike’s coffin. They didn’t bother to verify their analysis of IISS’s data with IISS – they simply took as gospel the allegations of a pro-Russian blogger. They didn’t contact the Ukrainian military, either: instead, their confirmation bias dictated that they shaped the “facts” to fit their predetermined conclusion.

Now why do you suppose that is? Why were they married so early – after a single day – to the conclusion that it was the Russians who were behind the hacking of the DNC?

Crowdstrike founder Alperovitch is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, and head honcho of its “Cyber Statecraft Initiative” – of which his role in promoting the “Putin did it” scenario is a Exhibit A. James Cardenwriting in The Nation, makes the trenchant point that

“The connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is relevant given that the Atlantic Council – which is funded in part by the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk – has been among the loudest voices calling for a new Cold War with Russia.”

Adam Johnsonwriting on the FAIR blog, adds to our knowledge by noting that the Council’s budget is also supplemented by “a consortium of Western corporations (Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, The Blackstone Group), including weapons manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman) and oil companies (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP).”

Johnson also notes that CrowdStrike currently has a $150,000 / year, no-bid contract with the FBI for “systems analysis.”

Nice work if you can get it.

This last little tidbit gives us some insight into what is perhaps the most curious aspect of the Russian-hackers-campaign-for-Trump story: the FBI’s complete dependence on Crowdstrike’s analysis. Amazingly, the FBI did no independent forensic work on the DNC servers before Crowdstrike got its hot little hands on them: indeed, the DNC denied the FBI access to the servers, and, as far as anyone knows, the FBI never examined them. BuzzFeed quotes an anonymous “intelligence official” as saying “Crowdstrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything they have concluded is not accurate.”

There is now.

Alperovitch is scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, and one wonders if our clueless – and technically challenged – Republican members of Congress will question him about the debunking of Crowdstrike’s rush to judgment. I tend to doubt it, since the Russia-did-it meme is now the Accepted Narrative and no dissent is permitted – to challenge it would make them “Putin apologists”! (Although maybe Trey Gowdy, the only GOPer on that panel who seems to have any brains, may surprise me.)

As I’ve been saying for months, there is no evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC: nonezilchnada. Yet this false narrative is the entire basis of a campaign launched by the Democrats, hailed by the Trump-hating media, and fully endorsed by the FBI and the CIA, the purpose of which is to “prove” that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Hillary Clinton put it. Now the investigative powers of the federal government are being deployed to confirm that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the Kremlin in an act the evidence for which is collapsing.

This whole affair is a vicious fraud. If there is any justice in this world – and there may not be – the perpetrators should be charged, tried, and jailed.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

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Fake MSM media is now the norm. All mainstream media protects the lies about the Global War On Terrorism.

Instead of recounting the long-proven truth that the terrorists in the Middle East and beyond, but especially in Syria, are imperial appendages/Western proxies, used and manipulated to destroy one country after another, the mainstream protects the narrow interests of a cabal of international war criminals and their hollow stooge political representatives.

Politicians represent a corrupt and criminal Establishment, including the narrow interests of the Military Industrial Complex. They have long since stopped representing “the people”, although “the people” are largely unaware of this since they are bombarded with 24/7 lies that protect and the governing criminals and the oligarch classes globally. The New World Order is a fascist, totalitarian, supranational, and delusional project of “full spectrum dominance” that creates globalized chaos, mass murder, and impoverishment. It is this toxic endeavour that is being hidden from view.

And now the last bastions of truth and peace are being attacked. Professor Chossudovsky writes that the Harvard Index, a list of online publications which are tagged as “fake” and “false”,  

goes far beyond the Catholic Church’s Index which selectively banned books after careful reading, review and evaluation within the Church’s hierarchy. This frivolous decision by Harvard constitutes a violation of the most fundamental principles of university education which are debate, discussion, critique and analysis.

The Harvard Index acts as a Lynchpin. It establishes a “new normal”, a guideline to colleges and universities across the land, regarding what we can or cannot read, what we can or cannot write. 

Is it a conspiracy? Yes it is.  Harvard’s Index broadly undermines the foundation of University education. It instates academic mediocrity.

Universities are thought to be the last bastions of independent thought, where ideas and topics are tested and discussed by experts in research and critical thinking. But now universities are being hobbled by dark state agencies that require a deluded public to advance their criminal projects.

Dark state agencies advance narrow transnational corporate interests, not national interests, beneath the lies, the Public Relations courtesans, the CIA fabrications, and Pentagon overlords. The propaganda budget for the Pentagon alone is reported to be more than half a billion dollars annually.

Those who seek peace, truth, the rule of international law, as well as democratic political and economic systems, are the unstated enemies of our largely covert governing polities.

Whereas the current form of “globalization” engenders global death and destruction, the unheralded but rational and sane (rather than insane and criminal), version is swept under the carpet in this upside down world where left is right and white is black.

In Sovereign Corporations That Occupy The Commons, I write that

The “Fourth World”, as defined by Anthony J. Hall in The American Empire And The Fourth World, is a sustainable model of globalization that respects cultural, economic, and environmental pluralism, as it embraces globalized democracy, and the rights of self –determination. It represents trajectories towards Life and the rule of law, but needs to be allied with an effective apparatus of enforcement.

It is this form of globalization that is targeted precisely because it contradicts the current form of dystopian “globalization”. But this “forbidden truth”, the foundation for international law, is buried beneath the lies and manipulations of imperial agencies.

And the purveyors of these forbidden truths are targeted. Smear campaigns are launched, and careers are torpedoed.

To counter the conspiracies against truth and justice, open debates about “forbidden topics” need to be amplified, not suppressed. Taboos need to be shattered. Hasty conclusions need to be rejected. And the modern-day Inquisition needs to be dismantled.

Failing this, the “consensus of ignorance” will prevail, and humanity will continue on its downward spiral of death and destruction, as it rejects trajectories of Life and Prosperity.

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US Presence in South Korea Drives Instability

March 26th, 2017 by Ulson Gunnar

US and European interests continue to portray the government and nation of North Korea as a perpetual security threat to both Asia and the world. Allegations regarding the nation’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs are continuously used as justification for not only a continuous US military presence on the Korean Peninsula, but as justification for a wider continued presence across all of Asia-Pacific.

In reality, what is portrayed as an irrational and provocative posture by the North Korean government, is in fact driven by a very overt, and genuinely provocative posture by the United States and its allies within the South Korean government.

During this year’s Foal Eagle joint US-South Korean military exercises, US-European and South Korean media sources intentionally made mention of  preparations for a “decapitation” strike on North Korea. Such an operation would be intended to quickly eliminate North Korean military and civilian leadership to utterly paralyze the state and any possible response to what would most certainly be the subsequent invasion, occupation and subjugation of North Korea.

The Business Insider in an article titled, “SEAL Team 6 is reportedly training for a decapitation strike against North Korea’s Kim regime,” would report:

The annual Foal Eagle military drills between the US and South Korea will include some heavy hitters this year — the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden, Army Special Forces, and F-35s — South Korea’s Joon Gang Daily reports. 

South Korean news outlets report that the SEALs, who will join the exercise for the first time, will simulate a “decapitation attack,” or a strike to remove North Korea’s leadership.

To introduce an element of plausible deniability to South Korean reports, the article would continue by stating:

Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Gary Ross later told Business Insider that the US military “does not train for decapitation missions” of any kind. 

Yet this is a categorically false statement. Throughout the entirety of the Cold War, US policymakers, military planners and operational preparations focused almost solely on devising methods of “decapitating” the Soviet Union’s political and military leadership.

76345523

In more recent years, policy papers and the wars inspired by them have lead to documented instances of attempted “decapitation” operations, including the 2011 US-NATO assault on Libya in which the government of Muammar Qaddafi was targeted by airstrikes aimed at crippling the Libyan state and assassinating both members of the Qaddafi family as well as members of the then ruling government.

Similar operations were aimed at Iraq earlier during the 2003 invasion and occupation by US-led forces.

Regarding North Korea more specifically, entire policy papers have been produced by prominent US policy think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) devising plans to decimate North Korea’s military and civilian leadership, invade and occupy the nation and confound North Korea’s capacity to resist what would inevitably be its integration with its southern neighbor.

A 2009 report titled, “Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea,” lays out policy recommendations regarding regime change in North Korea. It states in its description:

The authors consider the challenges that these scenarios would pose–ranging from securing Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal to providing humanitarian assistance–and analyze the interests of the United States and others. They then provide recommendations for U.S. policy. In particular, they urge Washington to bolster its contingency planning and capabilities in cooperation with South Korea, Japan, and others, and to build a dialogue with China that could address each side’s concerns.

Preparations for these documented plans which include provisions for invasion, occupation and the eventual integration of North Korea with South Korea have been ongoing for years with the most recent Foal Eagle exercises being merely their latest, and most blatant manifestation.

The aforementioned Business Insider article would also report:

Yet a decapitation force would fit with a March 1 Wall Street Journal report that the White House is considering military action against the Kim regime. 

The SEALs boarded the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and should arrive in South Korea on Wednesday, Joon Gang Daily reports. 

South Korea has also made efforts toward a decapitation force, and international calls for action have increased in intensity after North Korea’s latest missile test, which simulated a saturation attack to defeat US and allied missile defenses.

While US-European and South Korean media platforms continue claiming such preparations are being made in reaction to North Korean military programs, careful analysis of North Korea and South Korea’s respective economic and military power reveal immense disparity and North Korea’s military capabilities as solely defensive with any first strike against its neighbors almost certainly leading to retaliation and the nation’s destruction.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and its expanding ballistic missile capabilities serve then only to raise the costs of any first strike carried out against it by US and South Korean forces. Claims that preparations by US and South Korean forces to carry out these first strikes are in response to North Korean provocations mirror similar political deceit that surrounded and clouded debate and analysis regarding US aggression in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two decades.

Ultimately, regardless of what political leaders in Washington or Seoul claim, the historical track record of the United States and its allies speaks for itself. Its annual military exercises and its adversarial approach to negotiations and relations with North Korea serve only to further drive tensions on both the peninsula and across the wider Asia-Pacific region.

For the United States, the perpetuation of instability helps justify its otherwise unjustifiable presence in a region literally an ocean away from its own borders. And while Washington cites “North Korean” weapons as a pretext for its continued presence in South Korea, its decades-spanning policy of encircling and attempting to contain neighboring China serves as its actual purpose for remaining involved in Korea’s affairs.

Provocative policies coupled with equally provocative military preparations including these most recent exercises openly aimed at North Korea’s leadership, guarantee continued instability and thus continued justification for a US presence in the region.

Washington’s careful cultivation of tensions on the peninsula serve as just one of many intentionally engineered and perpetuated conflicts across the region. Knowing well that nations targeted by US subversion and provocations will make preparations to defend against them, and possessing the media platforms to portray these preparations as “provocations” in and of themselves, the US has persuaded entire swaths of both its own population and those in regions inflicted by instability it itself drives, that Washington alone possesses the ability to contain such instability with its continued, extraterritorial presence.

In reality, the true solution for establishing peace and prosperity in these inflicted regions is for the US to simply withdraw.

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

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US Presence in South Korea Drives Instability

March 26th, 2017 by Ulson Gunnar

US and European interests continue to portray the government and nation of North Korea as a perpetual security threat to both Asia and the world. Allegations regarding the nation’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs are continuously used as justification for not only a continuous US military presence on the Korean Peninsula, but as justification for a wider continued presence across all of Asia-Pacific.

In reality, what is portrayed as an irrational and provocative posture by the North Korean government, is in fact driven by a very overt, and genuinely provocative posture by the United States and its allies within the South Korean government.

During this year’s Foal Eagle joint US-South Korean military exercises, US-European and South Korean media sources intentionally made mention of  preparations for a “decapitation” strike on North Korea. Such an operation would be intended to quickly eliminate North Korean military and civilian leadership to utterly paralyze the state and any possible response to what would most certainly be the subsequent invasion, occupation and subjugation of North Korea.

The Business Insider in an article titled, “SEAL Team 6 is reportedly training for a decapitation strike against North Korea’s Kim regime,” would report:

The annual Foal Eagle military drills between the US and South Korea will include some heavy hitters this year — the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden, Army Special Forces, and F-35s — South Korea’s Joon Gang Daily reports. 

South Korean news outlets report that the SEALs, who will join the exercise for the first time, will simulate a “decapitation attack,” or a strike to remove North Korea’s leadership.

To introduce an element of plausible deniability to South Korean reports, the article would continue by stating:

Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Gary Ross later told Business Insider that the US military “does not train for decapitation missions” of any kind. 

Yet this is a categorically false statement. Throughout the entirety of the Cold War, US policymakers, military planners and operational preparations focused almost solely on devising methods of “decapitating” the Soviet Union’s political and military leadership.

76345523

In more recent years, policy papers and the wars inspired by them have lead to documented instances of attempted “decapitation” operations, including the 2011 US-NATO assault on Libya in which the government of Muammar Qaddafi was targeted by airstrikes aimed at crippling the Libyan state and assassinating both members of the Qaddafi family as well as members of the then ruling government.

Similar operations were aimed at Iraq earlier during the 2003 invasion and occupation by US-led forces.

Regarding North Korea more specifically, entire policy papers have been produced by prominent US policy think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) devising plans to decimate North Korea’s military and civilian leadership, invade and occupy the nation and confound North Korea’s capacity to resist what would inevitably be its integration with its southern neighbor.

A 2009 report titled, “Preparing for Sudden Change in North Korea,” lays out policy recommendations regarding regime change in North Korea. It states in its description:

The authors consider the challenges that these scenarios would pose–ranging from securing Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal to providing humanitarian assistance–and analyze the interests of the United States and others. They then provide recommendations for U.S. policy. In particular, they urge Washington to bolster its contingency planning and capabilities in cooperation with South Korea, Japan, and others, and to build a dialogue with China that could address each side’s concerns.

Preparations for these documented plans which include provisions for invasion, occupation and the eventual integration of North Korea with South Korea have been ongoing for years with the most recent Foal Eagle exercises being merely their latest, and most blatant manifestation.

The aforementioned Business Insider article would also report:

Yet a decapitation force would fit with a March 1 Wall Street Journal report that the White House is considering military action against the Kim regime. 

The SEALs boarded the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and should arrive in South Korea on Wednesday, Joon Gang Daily reports. 

South Korea has also made efforts toward a decapitation force, and international calls for action have increased in intensity after North Korea’s latest missile test, which simulated a saturation attack to defeat US and allied missile defenses.

While US-European and South Korean media platforms continue claiming such preparations are being made in reaction to North Korean military programs, careful analysis of North Korea and South Korea’s respective economic and military power reveal immense disparity and North Korea’s military capabilities as solely defensive with any first strike against its neighbors almost certainly leading to retaliation and the nation’s destruction.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and its expanding ballistic missile capabilities serve then only to raise the costs of any first strike carried out against it by US and South Korean forces. Claims that preparations by US and South Korean forces to carry out these first strikes are in response to North Korean provocations mirror similar political deceit that surrounded and clouded debate and analysis regarding US aggression in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two decades.

Ultimately, regardless of what political leaders in Washington or Seoul claim, the historical track record of the United States and its allies speaks for itself. Its annual military exercises and its adversarial approach to negotiations and relations with North Korea serve only to further drive tensions on both the peninsula and across the wider Asia-Pacific region.

For the United States, the perpetuation of instability helps justify its otherwise unjustifiable presence in a region literally an ocean away from its own borders. And while Washington cites “North Korean” weapons as a pretext for its continued presence in South Korea, its decades-spanning policy of encircling and attempting to contain neighboring China serves as its actual purpose for remaining involved in Korea’s affairs.

Provocative policies coupled with equally provocative military preparations including these most recent exercises openly aimed at North Korea’s leadership, guarantee continued instability and thus continued justification for a US presence in the region.

Washington’s careful cultivation of tensions on the peninsula serve as just one of many intentionally engineered and perpetuated conflicts across the region. Knowing well that nations targeted by US subversion and provocations will make preparations to defend against them, and possessing the media platforms to portray these preparations as “provocations” in and of themselves, the US has persuaded entire swaths of both its own population and those in regions inflicted by instability it itself drives, that Washington alone possesses the ability to contain such instability with its continued, extraterritorial presence.

In reality, the true solution for establishing peace and prosperity in these inflicted regions is for the US to simply withdraw.

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

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US Expands De Facto Syrian Invasion

March 26th, 2017 by Tony Cartalucci

The recent expansion of US military forces in Syria follows a predictable, singular agenda targeting this nation for decades – and more specifically – during the most recent and ongoing conflict which began in 2011 amid the US-engineered “Arab Spring.”

The UK Independent in its article, “US marines sent to Syria to help assault on Isis’ Raqqa stronghold,” would report that:

Hundreds of US marines have arrived in Syria armed with heavy artillery in preparation for an assault on Isis’ de-facto capital of Raqqa.

However, the presence of US troops in Syria is entirely unsolicited by the Syrian government and constitutes a clear violation of Syria’s national sovereignty under international law.

CNN in its article, “Assad: US military forces in Syria are ‘invaders’,” would report that:

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad scoffed and questioned US actions in Syria, calling American troops deploying to the country “invaders” because he hadn’t given permission for them to enter the country and saying there’s been no “concrete action” from the Trump administration toward ISIS.

The fact that US policy remains absolutely unchanged despite a new president taking office is no surprise.

Further Evidence of Continuity of Agenda 

With Israel occupying Syria’s Golan Heights and Turkish troops occupying a northern “buffer zone” stretching from Azaz in the west to Jarabulus on the Euphrates River in the east, US troops continuing to carve out a permanent presence in Syria’s eastern most regions threatens to fulfill a decades old conspiracy to divide and destroy the Syrian state.

Recently declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency reveal that as early as 1983, the US was engaged in virtually identical covert and overt operations aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing the Syria government.

A 1983 document signed by former CIA officer Graham Fuller titled, “Bringing Real Muscle to Bear Against Syria” (PDF), states (their emphasis):

Syria at present has a hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the [Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey. 

The report also states:

If Israel were to increase tensions against Syria simultaneously with an Iraqi initiative, the pressures on Assad would escalate rapidly. A Turkish move would psychologically press him further. 

That a virtually indistinguishable agenda has transcended decades and multiple presidencies allows observers of Syria’s current conflict to sidestep tempting political diversions and focus solely on the strategic overlay of the actual conflict.

Despite claims across the Western media that Turkey and the United States are at odds – and specifically at odds regarding their respective illegal occupations and operations within Syrian territory – their decades long collaboration in the attempted division and destruction of the Syrian state indicates that in all likelihood, this collaboration continues, albeit behind a veil of feigned conflicting interests.

Likewise, attempts to portray Israel as a rogue nation amid this ongoing conflict affords US policymakers flexibility through plausible deniability. Airstrikes targeting Syrian forces impossible for the US or even Turkey to justify, are tolerated by the “international community” when carried out by Israel.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other lesser members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are similarly used to launder various aspects of US foreign policy targeting Syria through, including the arming, training, and funding of various terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) itself.

Should the US-NATO-Israeli-GCC axis be more overtly apparent, such flexibility would be significantly negated.

The True Endgame for US Troops in Syria

US ambitions versus the Syrian state have been significantly rolled back by both Syrian advances on the battlefield and the direct military support it is receiving from allies including Russia and Iran. Turkish forces attempting to advance deeper into Syrian territory under the guise of fighting “terrorists” and Kurdish fighters Ankara claims threaten Turkish national security are now chaffing against Syrian Arab Army forces changing places with Kurdish forces along the perimeter of Turkey’s “buffer zone.”

Likewise, US forces are facing similar obstacles in their attempts to incrementally seize Syrian territory. Additionally, their proxy forces consist of militant organizations disinterested in long-term cooperation with the United States or in carving out autonomous regions within Syria’s borders that will inevitably face sociopolitical and economic hurdles the US will have no interest in assisting them in crossing – meaning that eventually, any long-term deal will likely be struck with Damascus, not Washington.

But like Israel’s seizure and ongoing occupation of the Golan Heights, Turkish and American incursions and territorial seizures constitutes a similar, incremental dismemberment of the Syrian state. Facing the likely prospect that most of Syria’s territory will return to Damascus’ control sooner than later, the US and its collaborators in Ankara are attempting to take and hold as much territory as possible before this happens in a bid to weaken Syria ahead of future, yet to unfold rounds of targeted destabilization.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook”.  

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Israeli warplanes reportedly delivered airstrikes against Syrian army targets in the Qasioun Mount region near Damascus early on March 22nd. Israeli jets allegedly carried out four rounds of airstrikes. There were no reports about casualties or damage suffered by Syrian government forces.

Initially reports about the incident appeared in pro-militant social media accounts and then were widely spread by the Israeli media. If confirmed, the recent raids were the fourth round of airstrikes attributed to Israel in Syria in less than a week.

The reports about the fresh Israeli airstrikes in Syria came just a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue hitting targets in Syria. Netanyahu made this claim during a visit to China, adding that he had informed Putin of Israel’s intentions.

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned Israel’s Ambassador to Moscow to protest an Israeli military strike near the Syrian city of Palmyra last Friday. This was after Israeli jets breached Syrian air space and attacked a military target near Palmyra on the night of March 17th. According to Israel’s Channel 2, the Israeli strike hit close to Russian troops. In turn, the Syrian military fired several anti-aircraft missiles at Israeli warplanes and claimed that one of them was destroyed and another one hit. The Israel Defense Forces denied these claims and said that one missile fired from the ground was intercepted by the Arrow 2 anti-ballistic missile.

Following the incident, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, threatened to destroy Syrian air defense systems.

“The next time the Syrians use their air defense systems against our planes we will destroy them without the slightest hesitation,” Lieberman said on Israeli public radio.

At the same time, Israel continued to push the narrative that Russia and other powers must move to limit Iran’s military strength in Syria. The director-general of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, Chagai Tzuriel, repeated this in an interview to Reuters on March 21st.

The growing Israeli propaganda and diplomatic and military efforts over the conflict in Syria came amid the intensification of military operations of the so-called moderate opposition against government forces in northern Hama and eastern Damascus. Jaish al-Islam and other groups invited to the Astana format supported the military actions of Hayat Tahir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda). This showed that the negotiations in Astana brokered by Ankara, Moscow, and Tehran resulted in no progress in separating “moderate rebels” from their “radical counterparts.”

Most likely, this situation is a result of the fact covered by SF in its last two videos about the geopolitical standoff in the post-ISIS Middle East – Turkey provides a general support to the Israeli efforts aimed at undermining the Assad government and limiting the Iranian influence. Turkey and Israel also share the ground in supporting so-called moderate rebels operating in western Syria.

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Mosul, Iraq – Hasan thought he had seen everything after fighting Islamic State in Fallujah in Tikrit. Then he came to Mosul, and a boy no older then 10 tried to kill him.

“It was utterly shocking,” says the 40-year-old soldier, dragging nervously on a cigarette as he remembers the child among a group of young IS suicide bombers.

“I found myself in front of children full of hatred. They all had explosive belts and they were all ready to die. It isn’t anything like killing an adult. But we had to do it.”

“It’s a cruelty that has no end. For us it is a violent pain, we know we have to fight against children who have been indoctrinated in the name of a sick religion.”

This is the reality of war in northern Iraq, where IS is throwing everything – and everyone – at Iraqi forces as they slowly take back Mosul and the surrounding areas in a bitter war that has destroyed the very social fabric of the city.

Children have been spared nothing: poverty, malnutrition and cruelty under IS control; then forced onto the frontlines to be used as spotters, fighters, human shields and suicide bombers as the battles began to rage.

These are tactics that have destroyed family life in the city and its surrounding villages, where IS scooped up youngsters to teach them the ways of their “Caliph”.

In Hamam al-Alil, south of Mosul, Amir tells Middle East Eye of his own son, Mushak, who swore allegiance aged 11 soon after IS arrived in 2014.

“My children had never gone to school,” he said, his face a contortion of fatigue and pain.

“When Daesh arrived my son was a boy full of anger, he could not read or write. They taught him the hatred of the infidels. They taught him to kill.”

“In two-and-a-half years he became a soldier of the Islamic police. He wasn’t even 14. I tried to stop him swearing allegiance to the Caliph, and he told me: ‘Shut up or I’ll cut your head’.”

“One day he came home with a gun and threatened me – an armed child who comes into the house saying I cannot criticise Daesh – and broke his mother’s arm as she begged him to stop.”

All villages had recruiters, said Amir, adding that more than half of the children of Hamam al-Alil have been recruited, many of them never been seen again.

Amir has lost his son:

“I’m not scared he is dead. I do not care. Mushak is the shame of our family.

“Now here everybody hate us, we are desperate, we can not even go to the shop, we live locked in the house, for fear of being lynched in the street. We lost everything, a son, home, dignity, everything.”

An IS video of children from its ‘young lions’ division (screengrab)

IS has published dozens of videos of its “young lions” division, children dressed in combat uniform and training for war. In the worst, they have been filmed carrying out executions.

In Mosul, the group are believed to have set up at least one camp for children.

Even those who escape recruitment do not escape the war.

During an Iraqi advance through al-Shouhadaa in western Mosul last week, the cost on young lives was there to see in every liberated house: dozens of civilians huddling in the dark, waiting for the end to come.

“Daesh used our children as human shields,” said one man, Mahmoud, as he embraced a soldier who had stepped into the gloom.

“They entered our house, and forced us to follow them to prevent bombing. My son now cannot speak, he can only say ‘IS is great’.

“They wanted him to be a soldier, they taught him maths to count bullets for their magazines, they taught him how to kill someone by cutting his throat. What kind of future do you think he will have?” 

Threats still remain in areas liberated by Iraqi forces.

Ali reopened his clinic in the city’s east after Islamic State was kicked two months ago. The hallways stand derelict, the windows were smashed in a car bomb attack that killed Iraqi soldiers in November, but it is at least now providing basic care.

However, the 30-year-old doctor does not feel safe, and not just from the suicide bombers on the roads and drones dropping deadly payloads from the sky. He also fears the children.

He has seen child soldiers enter his clinic and threaten doctors, guessing they were “recruits” from a local orphanage cleared by IS when it was still in control.

“Daesh certainly recruited them,” he said. “Daesh fighters forced all the children and girls to leave the building, and they kept the girls as sex slaves and forced the boys to fight. This generation is a lost generation.”

Ali failed to escape from Mosul when IS arrived in 2014, and continued working as a doctor under the rule of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He knows he is now a target – he has seen a lot. Probably too much.

“Daesh is still among us. We know who hides them.”

But the fear of a child’s indoctrinated, immature rage is nothing next to Ali’s concern for the future of the lost generation that surrounds him.

Perhaps 30,000 children have been born in Mosul in two-and-a-half years under IS rule, and none of them has been vaccinated against the terrible diseases that prey on the weak: polio, smallpox, measles to name a few.

Nor do they have official birth certificates – IS documents do not count for Iraqi officials and many civilians chose not to register their children anyway, rendering them effectively stateless.

In Bartella, a town 20km east of Mosul liberated in November, Iraqi authorities have set up a mobile office to give people the choice to request new documents.

Marwa has three children, all without documents. The youngest daughter, Sara, was born after 2014 and her birth was never registered.

“My husband and I would never have accepted that Sara had a Daesh birth certificate, but now for us it’s all very difficult,” she said.

“I come here every day since January and no one gives me any answers. Intelligence officers interrogated me a dozen times, and they verified my family had no links with Daesh, but there’s no sign of our documents.”

Parents also face a battle to reclaim their identities. Many in Mosul had their Iraqi IDs destroyed by IS, who then issued new papers. These, in turn, were destroyed when Iraqi forces closed in for fear it would connect them to the group.

Aisha Salman clutched a picture of her son as she waits to submit her application for documents.

He was killed by IS fighters after they found out his father was in the army.

“After my son’s death, a Daesh militant stole his documents,” she said.

“They stole his life and they stole his identity. Today one of those murderers is defiling the memory of my son. And I do not know how to get justice.”

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Somalia: US Covert Operations (2001-2016)

March 26th, 2017 by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

US and UK covert operations in Somalia

The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is the lead agency in the covert ‘war on terror’ in Somalia, although the CIA also has a strong regional presence.

The US has been carrying out extensive covert military operations inside Somalia since 2001, as a major six-part investigation by the US Army Times recently revealed.

Elite troops from the Pentagon’s JSOC are routinely deployed on the ground for surveillance, reconnaissance, and assault and capture operations. In June 2011, the US began carrying out drone strikes in Somalia. JSOC has its own fleet of armed Reaper drones, which are flown from various bases in the region.

The CIA also operates a secret base at Mogadishu airport, according to a detailed investigation by Jeremy Scahill at The Nation. Unarmed US surveillance drones also regularly fly from the airport, according to a well-informed Bureau source. While some of these are part of the US ‘war on terror’, many provide support for peacekeeping operations in the region.

The US’s primary target is currently al Shabaab, the militant group which controls much of the country’s south. On February 9 2012, al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri announced that al Shabaab had formally become a franchise of al Qaeda.

In recent years, both Kenya and Ethiopia have invaded parts of Somalia, the latter allegedly with the military aid of the US. JSOC forces are reported to have taken advantage of these events to carry out more intensive operations against militants, often using helicopters, airstrikes, AC-130 gunships and “boots on the ground”.

Key reports of operations in Somalia

The Bureau has collated credible reports of known covert operations and other events in Somalia relating to the ‘war on terror’. These are drawn from major international news media and agencies, political and military memoirs and papers, and academic research. All sources are transparently presented.

Given the nature of covert operations and the difficulties in reporting from Somalia, the Bureau understands that this is an incomplete record. We welcome corrections and additions.

To Read the Complete report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism click here

 

 

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An American political commentator said the West is using the Riyadh regime as a tool to advance its political agenda, stressing that certain Western countries, which claim to be champions of human rights, are in actual fact the perpetrators of the ongoing genocide in Yemen.

“What is undeniable is the fact that those who ‘promote human rights’ are the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, including the Genocide in Yemen. To deny their complicity is to deny humanity,” Soraya Sepahpour Ulrich, an independent researcher and author from Irvine, California, told the Tasnim News Agency ahead of the March 26 anniversary of the start of Saudi Arabia’s aggression against Yemen.

She added,

“Today, while Saudi Arabia is being armed and directed to massacre fellow Moslems, it remains deaf to the chant ‘death to Saudis’ coming from the four corners of the ‘international community’. In spite of killing and dying for the political agenda of the US and its allies, the Saudis continue to be despised, hated – set apart. They will not be protected. They are dispensable”..

Following is the full text of the interview.

سپه پور

Tasnim: The Saudi-led coalition has been launching deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement for two years. According to the UN, the Saudi military campaign has claimed the lives of more than 11,000 Yemenis and left 40,000 others wounded. Local Yemeni sources have already put the death toll from the Saudi war at over 12,000, including many women and children. As you know the international community has remained passive in the face of the ongoing Saudi crimes. What is your take on this? Why do you think this issue, the war on Yemen, has been less received by Western media?

Ulrich: I tend to think of the “international community’ as the US and its allies and differentiate between the term ‘international community’ and global community. The indifference toward the plight of the Yemenis is owed to several factors one of which is the media.

There are 6 corporations that own and dominate the media.  It is important to note that what was once known as the military-industrial complex has become the ‘military-industrial-media complex’. Media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations have close links with the military industry and Washington’s foreign policy. This industry not only informs the public but frames issues.

This complex fails to inform the public of the plight of the Yemenis. Since the internet has managed to curb the monopoly of the media industry (alternate news sites and social networking), from time to time, the media industry is forced to acknowledge the horrors of Yemen, but it frames it in such a way so as to change the narrative. For example, it falsely presents the conflict as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Through repeated lies, the ‘international community’ has been indoctrinated to see Iran as an aggressive country and the Yemenis resisting the invasion of the Saudi-led war as the assailants, putting the blame on the victims.

In addition to the blame game, the international community is being distracted with news on its domestic front. The best example of this are the refugees in Europe and the pending elections there, and in the United States, it is the Donald Trump presidency that occupies the airwaves and censors all other news.

But censorship, framing, and propaganda do not mean that the governments in these countries (international community) are not aware. They are fully complicit either through their actions or inaction.

Tasnim: Certain Western countries are continuously claiming that they are champions of human rights. However, it seems that they are pursuing double standard policies on Saudi Arabia’s atrocities. On March 10, 2017, the administration of US President Donald Trump approved the resumption of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia which critics have linked to Riyadh’s killing of civilians in Yemen. What is your take on this?

Ulrich: Human rights is simply another tool in the arsenal of these nations used to justify their policies. (War on terror being another useful tool of theirs). Consider this and dwell on the irony of it: When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 (UN General Assembly), there were less than 60 UN members while dozens of countries were colonies. How could this be considered ‘rights’? Certainly, it is not universal or ideal else there would not have been a need for subsequent declarations such The American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man (Bogota, 1948), the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (known as the European Convention for Human Rights – Strasbourg,1950), African Charter on Human Rights (Nairobi, 1981), the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (Paris, 1981) , the Arab Charter on Human Rights (1994), the European Center on Fundamental Rights (2000), and so on.

What is undeniable is the fact that those who ‘promote human rights’ are the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, including the Genocide in Yemen. To deny their complicity is to deny humanity.

Tasnim: Since the start of its war on Yemen, the Saudi regime and its regional allies have failed to reach their objectives. Why are they continuing their heinous attacks on the Arab country despite their failures? How do you see the role of other regional Arab states in the ongoing war against the Arab country?

Ulrich: It is important to recognize that Saudi Arabia is not solely responsible nor is it the country that is independently fueling and promoting this conflict. One country often ignored is the UAE. As the world turns its anger and hatred towards the Saudis (with help from Western media which points their fingers at the Saudis for their actions in Yemen), UAE is kept above the fray. Whereas in fact, the UAE is home to Erik Prince, the founder of notorious Blackwater. It is training a UAE-led militia force and UAE’s complicity in the crimes deserve to be discussed separately. Suffice it to say that as the Saudis fall from grace, the UAE continues to climb (in America’s plots and those of her allies).

The Saudis, on the other hand, are being used by the West and sadly for them (and their victims), they continue to play the role of gladiators. As Cicero acknowledged of the Roman gladiatoria muner thattheir sponsorship was a political imperative. Even though the Roman gladiators were adulated, they were segregated and despised. The Saudis share the same fate. It is worthwhile remembering that in 2012 it was revealed that a course for US military officers had been suggesting that Mecca and Medina be obliterated without regard for civilian deaths, and it even suggested “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation … Islam reduced to cult status”.

As President Donald Trump wrote in his book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again.:  “Then look at Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s biggest funder of terrorism. Saudi Arabia funnels our petro dollars—our very own money—to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people, while the Saudis rely on us to protect them!”

Today, while Saudi Arabia is being armed and directed to massacre fellow Moslems, it remains deaf to the chant ‘death to Saudis’ coming from the four corners of the ‘international community’. In spite of killing and dying for the political agenda of the US and its allies, the Saudis continue to be despised, hated – set apart. They will not be protected.   They are dispensable.

Sepahpour Ulrich has a Master’s in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication. She is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on US foreign policy. Her articles and writings on Iran’s nuclear program, the Middle East developments and the US foreign policy have been published by several print and online publications

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Brexit – An Agent For Hope?

March 26th, 2017 by Peter Koenig

This is the transcript of an interview with Alex Knyazev from Russia TV24.

The occasion is the recent UK Parliament’s go-ahead for BREXIT – despite the massive pressure to reserve the people’s democratic choice. Today’s terror act on London’s Westminster bridge that left so far four people dead and many injured, may be another false flag to show the Brits that terror is everywhere and that they are better off staying within the confines of the protective EU. – My god! The protective EU. The destructive and genocidal EU! – Just look what they are doing to Greece.

Russia TV24: What does Brexit mean in terms of globalization?

Peter Koenig: Brexit is a clear sign that globalization doesn’t work. The common people have not only NOT benefited from ‘globalization’ – as they were purported to have done – but, to the contrary, they have suffered, some people tremendously – famine, more corporate monopolies that destroyed local farming and businesses – especially those in poor developing countries – and they continue to suffer throughout the world.

The Brits have had the courage to voice their discontent in a referendum last June which run against their government’s policy – as the UK – as a perfect vassal of Washington’s, as well as a mole for the US within the European Union – has always been a staunch supporter of globalization. The people have felt differently. And the government so distant of the people, hasn’t noticed it. This is the case in many other European countries.

The people of the UK who voted BREXIT – against the EU – are representative for the majority of people in the rest of Europe. If a similar referendum would be held today in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Hungary – and many more EU countries – the outcome would be similar. According to different polls, between 60% and 80% of the European people – not their puppet governments, but the people – would vote to get out of the EU and out of the Euro.

Russia TV24: What challenges might face the British economy after Brexit?

Peter Koenig: I think the hype, that the British economy will suffer from BREXIT, is just pure anti-BREXIT propaganda, largely driven by Washington and Brussels. Of course, BREXIT might inspire other countries to do likewise. Such lie-propaganda that the British economy will suffer, should intimidate other potential independence seekers. As we have seen, since the BREXIT vote, after an initial slump, the stock market recovered rapidly and today is as strong as always. And the anti-EU movements within Europe, Eurext, have rapidly proliferated.

At the very most, but not for sure at all, there might be some initial setbacks for the UK economy, when the actual separation takes place. But that only because Brussels wants to show its rubber teeth, indicating to other countries not to do likewise. But in the medium and definitely long run BREXIT is a clear winner for the British economy and the British people. The Brits will be free to enter into trade agreements with whomever they want and at whatever terms they sovereignly negotiate – without interference from Brussels.

In fact, the UK will be able to negotiate separately with each EU country trade and other bilateral or international business or intellectual exchange agreements. Switzerland, not a member of the EU, is the best example for this. Switzerland has currently more than 120 bilateral agreements with the EU and members of the EU – which makes her a de facto EU member, though de jure shenis not, and maintains her full sovereignty.

None of the EU members have kept their sovereignty, not politically, nor in terms of monetary policy. The latter is a tremendous drawback, as we see today – the Euro is obviously not sustainable; which for most serious economists was clear from the get-go. You cannot have a common currency for a group of countries that are not even united with a common constitution, let alone with common political goals and a common foreign policy agenda. There is no solidarity among EU countries – Greece is a case in point.

Russia TV24: How might it influence the relations with China who was thought to be interested in Britain being in the EU? Some English experts say industry might be damaged because of trade tariffs.

Peter Koenig: As far as I can see, not being a EU member will not interfere in any way with the UK’s relation with China. Quite to the contrary. Once BREXIT is completed, the Brits are free to make their own deals with China. First moves in this direction, I understand, have already been initiated through China’s President Xi. Let’s not forget, China represents not only the People’s Republic of China, but the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, which includes also Russia, Iran, most of Eurasia, the Central Asian countries (former Soviet Republics), as well as soon also India and Pakistan. This represents half the world’s population, and more than one third of the world’s GDP.

In addition, there is OBOR – the huge One Belt – One Road project – also called the New Silk Road initiative by China’s President Xi Jinping. This is one gigantic economic development belt for at least the next century – covering infrastructure for transport by land and sea, telecommunication, energy, agricultural and industrial development – as well as cutting edge research projects and emerging, interconnected university-type education schemes. OBOR aims at linking Vladivostok with Lisbon and Shanghai with Hamburg – and everything in between. The East is where the future lays, at least for the coming 100 years or more. The west is passé. Self-destroyed by wars for greed and power. Not recoverable. Not in the foreseeable, nor in the distant future.

The UK is now at least in theory free to join President’s Xi’s invitation to Europe – actually presented to Madame Merkel some three years ago – to join the New Silk Road initiative. Washington vassals Germany and the EU don’t dare to orient themselves East – yet. But the time will come when there is no alternative, because the west with its corrupt economy, fraudulent dollar based monetary system has no future. A constant drive for wars and conflicts – an economy built on death and destruction – has clearly and fortunately no future.

Britain will now be free to join OBOR, if they so decide – and if they dare to pull loose from the fangs of Washington. Maybe by doing that, they could also inspire the rest of Europe to follow. – So – I can see only positive consequences for Britain’s exit from the European Union, Of course, they still need perseverance, a lot of it, because from now to then, there are many hurdles, many opposing forces, who still want to reverse the BREXIT vote. But the major decisions even within the British Parliament, have already been taken. So, it’s merely a matter of time.

Russia TV24: How would the [UK] living standards be changed?

Peter Koenig: Considering the above – not at all. In fact, we have seen since BREXIT, as mentioned before, a quick recovery of the stock market, after an initial free fall. Let’s face it, these security moves are all speculative, carried out by banksters to make extra profit. So, they are no indication actually on how well or how badly an economy functions. In the case of the UK its clear – Britain is doing very well.

As far as living standards are concerned, they will most likely improve, simply because the Brits will no longer have to deal with Brussels’ rules and regulations. They will follow their own, thereby saving a lot of unnecessary costs. Such savings plus a less bureaucratic life for everybody, would certainly tend to increase living standards.

Russia TV24: How will the EU experience Brexit? Some experts say that financial centers as Frankfurt, Paris or even Madrid might strengthen their positions, whereas London might lose. What do you think?

Peter Koenig: First, I believe the EU will not survive much longer, with or without BREXIT.

Second, as long as she, the EU, teeters along, the financial centers, Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid will remain what they are – or maybe even lose out to a free London. Remember, the financial center London has existed long before the EU, and it is run by the Rothschild et al clan – always has. They will not let go. To the contrary, as a free – as in free from Brussels’ dictate, financial center – London may pick up steam and get closer to Asia – the Asian up-and coming market of economic growth, as discussed before through OBOR and related investment requirements.

As long as the UK seizes the opportunity breaking free of the corrupt and incompetent apparatus in Brussels, London will remain an important financial hub for the world. Possibly even THE financial hub of the west, of those in the west who want to get closer to the EAST – and her axis of economic development potential.

Russia TV24: What is your view on the Scottish referendum, what are the chances that it will happen?

Peter Koenig: There is no doubt in my mind that the Scottish referendum will happen. In fact, a few days ago, the Scottish PM, Nicola Sturgeon, announced that she will seek through the Scottish Parliament the procedures for the referendum to break loose from the UK; a referendum to take place in late 2018, or early 2019.

On the occasion of the BREXIT vote in June 2016, Scotland voted with 62% to remain in the EU, while as a whole 54% of Brits decided for BREXIT. This, possibly a majority of Scots believe will destabilize Scotland, therefore it would be better to seek independence from the UK, and possibly independent adherence to the EU.

Will the Scottish people vote yes in such a repeat-referendum this time? In 2014, the Scots voted 55% against 45% to stay with the UK. The situation has now changed. So, it’s entirely possible that the vote of a future referendum may also change.

In these turbulent times, between now and the fall of 2018 or Spring of 2019, earliest dates foreseen for such a referendum – a lot can happen. There will be crucial elections this year in France and Germany – and possibly even Italy. – Will these upcoming elections change the face and fate of the EU? – And if so, how? – All of that may affect a Scottish referendum. If there is no longer a EU to apply to – what then? Might it then be politically and economically more advantageous to continue as a part of the UK, help the UK to become stronger in her new role as an independent and fully sovereign country – possibly orienting herself gradually towards east?

Russia TV24: What would be the consequences for Britain, Scotland and the EU in case Scotland votes to stay with the EU?

Peter Koenig: Not so fast. First the referendum would not be to stay or not to stay in the EU, but to stay or not to stay with the UK. Only once this issue has been resolved, and the Scotts would indeed choose to become independent from the UK, only then could they seek membership with the EU. Such terms would then have to be separately negotiated with Brussels.

It’s way too early to say what would happen if —-. The dynamics can go in many directions. Even in case the Scots would decide to split form the UK, the terms of the EU – in case it then still exists – may not be at all favorable to Scotland. So even then, Scotland could easily decide to also stay independent and carry on with sovereign bilateral trade deals with her partners of choice.

The bottom line of BREXIT and the consequences is that a clear sign is being sent to the world that a large majority of people are tired of what is called Globalization and for which a New World Order is being prepared, i.e. a One World Order – or One Government, gradually but firmly doing away with all the cultural riches and differences between countries, seeking a boring uniformity à la Anglo-Saxon non-culture.

This should definitely not happen. And the signals are clear that it won’t.

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

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Trump’s budget for 2018, proposes cutting lots of stuff, from the EPA to the NEA and even small cuts at NASA. One of the few departments that will not see any cuts was the US Department of Defense.

In 2015, Politico estimated that there are 800 U.S. bases abroad. The cots to maintain this massive military global footprint runs up to $100 billion annually.

The Visual Capitalist has summed up the huge US military machine the Infograph and accompanying charts below…

us-personnel-chart-military

Via The Visual Capitalist..

If the proposed budget ultimately passes in Congress, the DoD would be allocated an extra $54 billion in federal funding – a 10% increase that would be one of the largest one-year defense budget increases in American History.

To put the proposed increase in context, the United States already spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined. Meanwhile, the additional $54 billion is about the size of the United Kingdom’s entire defense budget.

Screen Shot 2017-03-20 at 10.44.59 AM

Internationally, there are under 200,000 troops that are stationed in 177 countries. Here are the top 20 countries they are stationed in…

US military 

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Moscow and Beijing took another step towards de-dollarization with the announcement of the opening of a renminbi clearing bank in Russia on Wednesday. 

Local currency transactions were first used in both countries’ border regions. Today, more and more Chinese and Russian financial institutes and enterprises are using local currencies to invest and settle accounts, as the yuan-ruble trade platform is becoming more established and the transaction network is expanding amid deepening China-Russia economic and financial cooperation.

goodbye dollar, hello renminbi

The yuan clearing bank in Moscow will greatly accelerate trade in local currencies:

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) officially started operating as a Chinese renminbi (CNY) clearing bank in Russia Wednesday, a move set to facilitate the use of the currency and cooperation in various fields between the two countries.

“Under the guidance of the governments and central banks of both countries, ICBC’s Moscow branch will effectively fulfill its responsibility and obligation as a renminbi clearing bank by taking further advantage of its leading edge in renminbi businesses, providing customers with safe, high quality and convenient clearing services,” said Hu Hao, ICBC’s deputy governor, at the opening ceremony.

“Financial regulatory authorities of China and Russia have signed a series of major agreements, which marks a new level of financial cooperation,” said Dmitry Skobelkin, deputy governor of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.

“The launching of renminbi clearing services in Russia will further expand local settlement business and promote financial cooperation between the two countries,” the official added.

With the continuous deepening of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in recent years, the two countries are now starting to enhance local currency cooperation.

At the end of 2015, the Russian central bank announced the inclusion of the renminbi in its national foreign exchange reserves, making it Russia’s officially recognized reserve currency.

During Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s visit to China in June last year, the central banks of the two countries signed a memorandum of cooperation in starting renminbi clearing services in Russia, just three months before ICBC’s Moscow branch was appointed by China’s central bank as the clearing house for settling renminbi transactions there.

It’s no secret that Russia and China have employed a number of methods to slowly wean themselves off dollar dependency.

Russia became China’s largest energy exporter in February of last year after it agreed to accept payment in yuan.

The dollar is slowly losing its privileged place in international transactions.

We’re sure Washington is less than thrilled.

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Cyclone Watch in Australia

March 26th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The curious, sweaty mammals of North Queensland in Australia are bracing themselves for yet another cyclone with an anodyne name. Cyclone Debbie might have impressed you as a person who turns up at the door asking for donations for the Red Cross Appeal. But cyclones are rarely disposed to sweetness, featuring in a serious of catastrophes that have affected various continents.  The door is not so much knocked upon and fully blown open, along with roofs and dangerous objects finding their way across cities and suburbs. The only moral in this: stay indoors as much as you can.

As a review for PLOS Current Disasters begins,

“Cyclones have significantly affected populations in Southeast Asia, the western Pacific, and the Americas over the past quarter of a century.”[1]

Australia has also been privileged (dare one use that word?) to receive some of nature’s more tempestuous phenomena in that sense. Repeatedly, this ancient continent has been battered by weather systems that have either brought considerable drought, drenching floods, incinerating bush fires, or eviscerating storms.

Debbie has a bit of work to do before heading into the dizzying heights of Cyclone Yasi, which hit Queensland in 2011 in what was to be the highest category on the cyclone spectrum. When it did its good deal of damage, it was deemed one of the most powerful storms to have made landfall since humans decided to take records of such events on the Australian continent.[2]

Before Debbie develops, however, she was a less than conspicuous “tropical depression,” as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology tends to term it. Care must to be taken to observe the Tropical Cyclone Advice Numbers as to whether this depression deepens into a gloomy meteorological nightmare, which looks like a gorgeously moving animal of vapours and clouds on the charts.

Advice Number 4, in particular, issued on Saturday, March 25, before 5 a.m., is a tantalising picture of doom, seductively arresting yet imminently terrifying. Some of the locals have been busying loading up with sandbags; others have been just as busy sipping beer and observing the still ocean from sea fronts that will be shortly inundated.

The course of the cyclone’s eye is noted in clinical language in the various warnings, with predictions about possible strength as it draws up strength from the sea. Scientific precision matches unpredictable content. What matters is that the more laboriously it moves and lumbers, the more dangerous it will be in resisting dissipation.

“The forecast path shown above is the Bureau’s best estimate of the cyclone’s future movement and intensity. There is always some uncertainty associated with tropical cyclone forecasting and the grey zone indicates the range of likely tracks of the cyclone centre.  Due to the uncertainty in the future movement, the indicated winds will most certainly extend to regions outside the rings on this map. The extent of the warning and watch zones reflects this.”[3]

Erratic, uncertain, cheeky, the cyclone can be seen as an unpredictable insurgent, striking with deadly stealth against civilian populations. “The tropical low has moved slowly overnight while steadily developing.”  Like a cacoon ready to break, the tropical “low is expected to develop into a tropical cyclone and adopt a west-southwest track today, bring it towards the north Queensland coast.”

Then came the announcement from the ABC news centre: “Tropical Cyclone Debbie has been declared!”  Not exactly a time to bring out the fizz for a glorious environmental arrival, a celebratory urging on for a cataclysm, but the general sense in Australia at such events is much like an interest in an accidental conception. It may not have been intended, but we best deal with it.

By the evening of Saturday, the dreary language from the meteorologists assumes a sense of the inevitable. Progress is slow, which is exactly what no one wants to hear, except suicidal Millenarians keen to meet some curious cranky maker of their own belief:

“Tropical Cyclone Debbie is currently intensifying, and is now a category 2 cyclone. The system remains slow moving at the present time…. Conditions will remain favourable for the cyclone to develop further before landfall, which will likely be between Townsville and Proserpine on Tuesday morning.”

The rituals of readying one self for such an onslaught are familiar, and even peculiar, to those who have been living in this region for decades.  For one, the shelves are emptied with pious ferocity. Stockland, as one of the shopping centres, is rapidly unstocked. Bottled water makes it out of the door with blurring speed by the thousands. Special sections in the Coles supermarket are assigned for cyclone purchases. Favourite foods include the reliable canned spam, a legend that persists in Australia as potent as any wartime tucker. To that can be added baked beans and canned tuna.

The essentials are religiously outlined in what a cyclone emergency kit should contain: radios, batteries, matches, candles, torches. Make sure you have your insurance documents. Ensure that you unplug appliances. The home itself is to be cleared of unnecessary debris on lawns, and potentially dangerous trees trimmed with scrutiny. Families congregate and have “cyclone parties”. Even before what seems like catastrophe, there is a true human calm before the ferociousness that is about to hit. Time to bolt the doors, close the windows and wait.

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

Notes

[1]http://currents.plos.org/disasters/article/the-human-impact-of-tropical-cyclones-a-historical-review-of-events-1980-2009-and-systematic-literature-review/
[2]http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2016/02/australias-most-destructive-cyclones-a-timeline
[3]http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml

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Cyclone Watch in Australia

March 26th, 2017 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The curious, sweaty mammals of North Queensland in Australia are bracing themselves for yet another cyclone with an anodyne name. Cyclone Debbie might have impressed you as a person who turns up at the door asking for donations for the Red Cross Appeal. But cyclones are rarely disposed to sweetness, featuring in a serious of catastrophes that have affected various continents.  The door is not so much knocked upon and fully blown open, along with roofs and dangerous objects finding their way across cities and suburbs. The only moral in this: stay indoors as much as you can.

As a review for PLOS Current Disasters begins,

“Cyclones have significantly affected populations in Southeast Asia, the western Pacific, and the Americas over the past quarter of a century.”[1]

Australia has also been privileged (dare one use that word?) to receive some of nature’s more tempestuous phenomena in that sense. Repeatedly, this ancient continent has been battered by weather systems that have either brought considerable drought, drenching floods, incinerating bush fires, or eviscerating storms.

Debbie has a bit of work to do before heading into the dizzying heights of Cyclone Yasi, which hit Queensland in 2011 in what was to be the highest category on the cyclone spectrum. When it did its good deal of damage, it was deemed one of the most powerful storms to have made landfall since humans decided to take records of such events on the Australian continent.[2]

Before Debbie develops, however, she was a less than conspicuous “tropical depression,” as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology tends to term it. Care must to be taken to observe the Tropical Cyclone Advice Numbers as to whether this depression deepens into a gloomy meteorological nightmare, which looks like a gorgeously moving animal of vapours and clouds on the charts.

Advice Number 4, in particular, issued on Saturday, March 25, before 5 a.m., is a tantalising picture of doom, seductively arresting yet imminently terrifying. Some of the locals have been busying loading up with sandbags; others have been just as busy sipping beer and observing the still ocean from sea fronts that will be shortly inundated.

The course of the cyclone’s eye is noted in clinical language in the various warnings, with predictions about possible strength as it draws up strength from the sea. Scientific precision matches unpredictable content. What matters is that the more laboriously it moves and lumbers, the more dangerous it will be in resisting dissipation.

“The forecast path shown above is the Bureau’s best estimate of the cyclone’s future movement and intensity. There is always some uncertainty associated with tropical cyclone forecasting and the grey zone indicates the range of likely tracks of the cyclone centre.  Due to the uncertainty in the future movement, the indicated winds will most certainly extend to regions outside the rings on this map. The extent of the warning and watch zones reflects this.”[3]

Erratic, uncertain, cheeky, the cyclone can be seen as an unpredictable insurgent, striking with deadly stealth against civilian populations. “The tropical low has moved slowly overnight while steadily developing.”  Like a cacoon ready to break, the tropical “low is expected to develop into a tropical cyclone and adopt a west-southwest track today, bring it towards the north Queensland coast.”

Then came the announcement from the ABC news centre: “Tropical Cyclone Debbie has been declared!”  Not exactly a time to bring out the fizz for a glorious environmental arrival, a celebratory urging on for a cataclysm, but the general sense in Australia at such events is much like an interest in an accidental conception. It may not have been intended, but we best deal with it.

By the evening of Saturday, the dreary language from the meteorologists assumes a sense of the inevitable. Progress is slow, which is exactly what no one wants to hear, except suicidal Millenarians keen to meet some curious cranky maker of their own belief:

“Tropical Cyclone Debbie is currently intensifying, and is now a category 2 cyclone. The system remains slow moving at the present time…. Conditions will remain favourable for the cyclone to develop further before landfall, which will likely be between Townsville and Proserpine on Tuesday morning.”

The rituals of readying one self for such an onslaught are familiar, and even peculiar, to those who have been living in this region for decades.  For one, the shelves are emptied with pious ferocity. Stockland, as one of the shopping centres, is rapidly unstocked. Bottled water makes it out of the door with blurring speed by the thousands. Special sections in the Coles supermarket are assigned for cyclone purchases. Favourite foods include the reliable canned spam, a legend that persists in Australia as potent as any wartime tucker. To that can be added baked beans and canned tuna.

The essentials are religiously outlined in what a cyclone emergency kit should contain: radios, batteries, matches, candles, torches. Make sure you have your insurance documents. Ensure that you unplug appliances. The home itself is to be cleared of unnecessary debris on lawns, and potentially dangerous trees trimmed with scrutiny. Families congregate and have “cyclone parties”. Even before what seems like catastrophe, there is a true human calm before the ferociousness that is about to hit. Time to bolt the doors, close the windows and wait.

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

Notes

[1]http://currents.plos.org/disasters/article/the-human-impact-of-tropical-cyclones-a-historical-review-of-events-1980-2009-and-systematic-literature-review/
[2]http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2016/02/australias-most-destructive-cyclones-a-timeline
[3]http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml

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Rising Euroscepticism Cannot Solve The Eurozone Crisis

March 26th, 2017 by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos

Greece is in a terrible situation. It is worse than military occupation, because with a military occupation you see your enemy and it is clear. However, when your own government is doing what foreigners do, it is much worse.

For example, you had President Boris Yeltsin in Russia, who applied the policy that the USA wanted him to apply, and you could not protest even against the USA. So, this is why a military invasion would be, of course, more dramatic, but much better than what is happening now.

I believe that there is an international struggle and one of the battles is for peoples’ minds. It is the equivalent of Stalingrad in 1943. We have to struggle against the empire, which is using deceptions, which is using economic and intellectual power to subjugate human being.

If you believe in God then you believe also in Devil. The destinies of God and the Devil are interrelated. In the last month, we had a visit by the US Ambassador to the European Union. But he wasn’t dealing with the problems of Germany, France, Italy, the relationship between the USA and Europe, or the problems of sanctions with Russia. He was visiting almost every Greek TV station and explaining to us, as a very good friend of Greeks, why we should go out of the Eurozone for our own good.

When I hear such advice, I am getting really afraid. We have seen what Germany has done to our country. They did it “in order to save it”. Now we have the Americans who want to “save” it. Donald Trump said some years ago:

“Germany has to pay for Greece. But if Germany does not want to pay for Greece, Germany has to let Russia pay for Greece”.

But, as we know, we are living in the world of deception, everyone has competition. Politicians usually say something that is opposite of what they mean. You have to inverse their declarations to understand what to do. I hope Donald Trump is an exception. But until he has proved it, I will remain suspicious.

Why do so many people in Europe have a problem with the European Union? They have a problem because this union is not acting in the interests of the European people. It is acting in the interests of its real owners. And who are the real owners? They are hidden, but we know them. They are the huge international banks, huge international corporations, the oligarchy, the elites. These forces have hijacked the idea of European integration and are using it for their own purposes. Nevertheless, leaving the EU and going to the framework of competing nation-states does not mean that we will be free from the elites.

My own personal preference would be for European nations to be able to dominate over these forces and to unite against them. As Charles de Gaulle said: “We need Europe united from the Atlantic to the Urals, so I could move from Ireland to Vladivostok, if you want”. I think that is the direction we should follow.

What can we see now? On the one hand, we see the party of globalization, which has put the European Union under the domination of NATO. On the other hand, the Eurosceptic parties that make a very good critique of the European Union, but do not have any proposal or any plan. But in the case of the European Union, there cannot be a chaotic break-up. There must be collaboration and cooperation between European nations to create a democratic, social, ecological, and independent society. You cannot solve a problem only by speaking about what will be good for one particular country. You have to see a total perspective.

So, in order to find the solution to very complicated European problems, we should have a comprehensive strategy, and that means we have to begin taking back our countries from international finance and from the Americans, because this is not only the case of Greece. Everywhere in Europe, the political elite are in control. The second thing is that we have to take back the idea of European integration from the persons who have hijacked it.

But we do not need to destroy everything just because we do not like it. We have to have a positive program. And the program of the Eurosceptics is not enough. They do not have something to propose, even though they say that the European Union is a very bad structure and I agree 100%. And it is indeed a very totalitarian structure. The question is how and where do we go from here?

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Former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was officially released from prison yesterday. His lawyer provocatively informed the public that the 88-year-old had left the military hospital in the Cairo district of Maadi and had breakfast at his family’s home in the east of the Egyptian capital with some friends.

The ruling of the court of appeals is final. In early March, Egypt’s supreme court cleared Mubarak of any responsibility in the deaths of 800 demonstrators who were killed by his security forces in the first days of the Egyptian revolution. Before Mubarak was ousted on February 11, 2011, after 18 days of mass protests, he had ruled the country with an iron fist with the full support of the imperialist powers for thirty years.

The freeing of Mubarak is symbolic of the counterrevolution that has developed since the bloody military coup of July 3, 2013 against Islamist president Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Less than four years later, the new military rulers in Cairo, with the encouragement of the Western powers, have fully rehabilitated their former leader and are suppressing the Egyptian masses with even more brutal methods.

The junta led by the US-trained General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has incarcerated more than 40,000 opponents of the regime and condemned more than 1,000 to death. Shortly after the coup, according to Human Rights Watch, the “worst incident of extrajudicial mass killings in Egypt’s modern history” took place. The army and police stormed two protest camps set up by regime opponents and killed over 1,000 people, including women and children.

How is it possible that six years after the Egyptian revolution nothing appears left of it, and Mubarak, the ugly face of the old regime, is once again free to show himself in public? Who bears political responsibility for this, and what are the political lessons for the coming class conflicts?

The key to answering these decisive questions, which confront the working class in Egypt and internationally, is to be found in a study of the Russian revolution. In his lecture “Why study the Russian Revolution?,” David North, chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, explained the decisive precondition for the victory of the working class:

“The movement of the Russian working class, supported by a revolutionary uprising of the peasantry, assumed gigantic dimensions in 1917. But no realistic reading of the events of that year permits the conclusion that the working class would have come to power without the leadership provided by the Bolshevik Party. Drawing the essential lesson of this experience, Trotsky later insisted: ‘The role and the responsibility of the leadership [of the working class] in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.’ This conclusion remains as valid in the present historical situation as it was in 1917.”

The Egyptian revolution was without doubt a gigantic uprising, and the working class was its driving force. On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Cairo and other major industrial cities. On January 28, the “Friday of anger,” ever-growing numbers of demonstrators beat back Mubarak’s notorious security forces in street battles. In the days that followed, millions demonstrated throughout Egypt. On February 7 and 8, a wave of strikes and factory occupations, which broke out across the entire country, delivered the decisive blow to Mubarak.

The working class continued to develop as the decisive revolutionary force after February 11. In the days immediately following Mubarak’s overthrow, there were between 40 and 60 strikes per day. More strikes occurred in February than in all of 2010. Strikes and social protests continued to increase during 2012 and 2013. However, what was missing in Egypt, unlike Russia, was a political leadership with a revolutionary program.

The WSWS warned workers from the outset of the revolution against any illusions in the democratic character of the bourgeoisie. David North wrote in a February 1, 2011, perspective:

“As always in the opening stages of a revolutionary convulsion, the slogans that predominate are of a generally democratic character. The ruling elites, fearing the approach of the abyss, seek desperately to maintain what they can of the old order. Promises of ‘reform’ slip easily from their lips…

“However, the sort of democratic unity proposed […] will offer nothing of substance to the working class, the rural poor and broad sections of the youth who have come out into the streets. The vital needs of the broad masses of Egyptian society cannot be realized without the most far-reaching overturn of existing property relations and the transfer of political power to the working class.”

The strategic perspective that guided the Russian working class’ seizure of power in October 1917 was the Theory of Permanent Revolution developed by Leon Trotsky. It stated that in countries with a belated capitalist development, the democratic revolution could only be realized through the conquest of power by the working class and as a product of the socialist revolution. And it further stated that the victory of a revolution in one country was only possible based on an international strategy to unite workers around the globe.

The Egyptian revolution confirmed the perspective of permanent revolution in the negative. Every section of the bourgeoisie proved itself to be a counterrevolutionary force at every stage of the revolution by collaborating with imperialism and defending the same essential class interests as the military. This applies equally to the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as well as “liberal” bourgeois parties. Examples of this are Mohammed El Baradei’s National Association for Change or the Nasserite Popular Current of Hamdeen Sabahi.

The most treacherous role was played by petty-bourgeois pseudo-left groups like the Revolutionary Socialists (RS), which is aligned internationally with the International Socialist Organization in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and sections of the German Left Party. In every phase of the revolution, they worked to subordinate the working class to one or another faction of the bourgeoisie.

Immediately following Mubarak’s overthrow, they boosted illusions in his generals and claimed that the military, under the leadership of Mohamed Tantawi, would implement social and democratic reforms. As mass opposition to the military increased, they backed the Muslim Brotherhood. RS proclaimed the Islamists to be the “right-wing of the revolution” and called for the election of Mursi in the presidential election. When Mursi won, they celebrated this as a “victory for the revolution” and a “great success against the counterrevolution.”

When mass protests then broke out against Mursi in 2013, the RS swung back behind the military. They described the Tamarod alliance, which was financed by the military and intelligence services, as the “road to the accomplishment of the revolution.” The military coup, which was the basis for al-Sisi’s counterrevolutionary regime of terror, was described initially by them as a “second revolution.”

RS now fears that the junta’s repression and the mounting social catastrophe could provoke a new revolutionary upsurge of the workers. In a recent statement, RS declares,

“We need to rebuild the social and political opposition to the regime and its policies, through political organizations, workers’ unions, youth and student organizations and political fronts that can unite the forces of the 25 January revolution.”

In other words, they are persisting with their disastrous policies, subordinating the working class to “unity” with the parties and organizations of the bourgeoisie.

The key question of the Egyptian revolution remains the construction of an Egyptian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the anchoring of the perspective of permanent revolution in the Egyptian working class. The study of the Russian Revolution must serve as the preparation of revolutionary struggles by the working class in Egypt and around the world.

To register for the ICFI’s ongoing series of online lectures on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, visit wsws.org/1917

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The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. ..To hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of people, and the governments of the East and West, there are certain steps that can be taken now.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s address before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, New York City, 1953

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

The island nation of Japan is ranked third in the world in terms of the number of functioning nuclear reactors on its territory.

Why would the one country to experience the destructive potential of nuclear power in wartime, the culture that gave the world ‘Godzilla,’ and has endured the meltdowns of three reactors in 2011 continue to embrace nuclear power?

As part of the Global Research News Hour’s commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the Fukushima Daichii nuclear catastrophe, we focus on the historical and political context of the disaster.

First up, we hear from Professor Peter Kuznick about the early years after the War. He explains the role of Japan in America’s postwar geostrategy, and comments on the public relations campaign that convinced the population of the Asian country to stop worrying and love nuclear power.

Later, Canadian nuclear expert Gordon Edwards returns to the program to comment on Canada’s connections with the Japanese nuclear industry and on how the Fukushima disaster should have informed Canadian nuclear policy and regulations.

Finally, we hear from celebrated Kyoto-based anti-nuclear activist Aileen Mioko Smith about the evolution of the anti-nuclear movement within Japan.

We also hear from a short video produced by Fairewinds Energy Education (fairewinds.org) outlining the fallacy of nuclear power as a strategy for fighting climate change.

 Peter Kuznick is Professor of History at American University in Washington D.C. And Director of that university’s Nuclear Studies Institute. . He is co-author with Akira Kimura of ‘Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives’ (Horitsu Bunkasha, 2010), and co-author with Yuki Tanaka of ‘Genpatsu to hiroshima – genshiryoku heiwa riyo no shinso’ (Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power (Iwanami, 2011).He also worked on ‘The Untold History of the United States’, a ten part Showtime documentary film series and book co-authored with Oliver Stone. 

Gordon Edwards is co-founder and President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Recognized by Canadian Courts as a nuclear expert, he is recipient of the 2006 Nuclear Free Future Award and has also been awarded the Rosalie Bertell Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the YMCA Peacemaker medallion. He is based in Montreal. 

Aileen Mioko Smith is Executive Director of Green Action, a Kyoto based non-governmental environmental organization dedicated to creating a nuclear-power free Japan. Since the 1980s she has been a leading figure in the resistance against nuclear power in Japan. She is recipient of the 2014 Nuclear Free Future Award.

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in everyThursday at 6pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  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.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

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 

 Notes:

1)  Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, New York City.,” December 8, 1953. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9774.;

London Terrorist Attack: Westminster’s “Jihadis Come Home”

March 26th, 2017 by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

One year to the day after the Brussels terrorist attacks, a terrorist drove a car into Westminster parliament buildings killing four people and wounding several others. The British public are in shock.

Westminster is considered to be a monument to British ‘democracy’. The date 3/22 will be remembered among those who mourn over the skulls and bones of loved ones lost to terrorism.

Today, many of those mourners are in Syria. Just a few hours earlier, 50 destitute families staying at the al Badiya Dakhilya school in the village of Mansoura on the outskirts of Raqqa, were blown to pieces after an air strike by the ‘international coalition’. The Pentagon said it would “investigate” the atrocity.

The British Government and its Western partners were silent. Thirty-three people were murdered.

The United Nations – the international arm of US imperialism- was mute. The Syrian government asked them why. No answer was given.

On the same day, Al Nusra terrorists entered the village of Majdal, Northwest of Hama. Several women and children were reportedly killed. There are not enough reporters in Syria to cover all the atrocities committed almost every day by psychopathic killers the Western media calls ‘moderate rebels’.

Britain’s ‘jihad’ in Syria

In 2009, former French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas attended a meeting in London with British government officials. They told him they were planning to send Jihadi terrorists into Syria to take over the country. It was part of Britain’s contribution to the Greater Israel project.

Israel’s quest for Middle East supremacy was outlined in a policy paper written by Israeli official Oded Yinon in 1982. The Yinon Plan involved fomenting civil war in Arab and Muslim countries in order to establish Israeli suzerainty over all its hostile neighbours. Like its partners in France and the United States, the British government is a whore of Israel.

Westminster was finalising a grand strategy for the Middle East which would combine people-power uprisings and covert snipers, followed by Takfiri terrorism. The US grand strategy for the Middle East was announced by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 in her speech before the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where she proudly proclaimed that President George W. Bush had a “new policy” for the Middle East and North Africa.

The US launched an “unprecedented international venue for reform”, by training activists in social media and regime change tactics. The Centre for Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), Albert Einstein Institute, National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, Freedom House, Facebook, and many other CIA-affiliated US agencies brought about what came to be known as the “Arab Spring”. The American/Israeli plan for a New Middle East was fully backed by most soi-disant ‘anti-imperialists’, who couldn’t resist the romance and fantasy of revolution and “Marxists” waxed lyrical with “the masses make history”.

The consensus among the anti-war left that the Arab Spring was “spontaneous” and “popular” meant that NATO was able to carpet bomb Libya for 8 months, making the bombing look like a humanitarian intervention. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would perish. When Libya was destroyed, Syria was next on NATO’s target list. For 6 years this month, the Syrian Arab Republic has been fighting a war of national liberation from the international horde of Takfiri terrorists that British government officials were training in 2009 for deployment to the country.

The attacks on Westminster come at a time when Britain is set to “get tough” on immigration. Though Brexit holds out the possibility of economic and democratic progress in Britain – and immigration needs to be controlled and planned – reactionary forces and news outlets are increasingly pointing the finger at Muslims and Islam as the root of Britain’s problems. A similar process is taking hold in the United States and throughout the European Union.

Zionist terrorism

Since the Zionist false flag bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on the 22nd of July 1946, the Lavon Affair of 1954, the 911 attacks, the Brevik Massacre, and many others, Zionism has boldly carried out terrorist attacks and blamed them on Muslims or far right groups. The war on terror is a Zionist construct which is designed to goad the Western public into supporting foreign wars on behalf of Israeli interests, where recruits from Israel’s Gulf State partners are used as pawns and patsies in the infernal narrative of the “clash of civilisations”.

Today the terrorism or its simulacrum has struck Westminster. The script is typed on a well-worn palimpsest with exotic Arab names parroted in the non-stop media hysteria. Not until the public realises that the terrorists are, and always have been, inside the corridors of Westminster – an edifice that attests to the dictatorship of a decadent oligarchy over the toiling masses – will the reign of terror come to an end.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin is an Irish journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on globalisation, geopolitics and class struggle.

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Featured image: Depleted uranium ammunition, fired in FR Yugoslavia in 1999. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

First published on December 24, 2017

***

More than a decade and a half after the US-NATO- under international law illegal – war aggression against Yugoslavia using highly toxic and radioactive uranium projectiles, the enormity of this war crime becomes clear: In Serbia, aggressive cancer among young and old has reached epidemic proportions.

The suffering of the people cries out to heaven. Particularly affected is the south of Serbia and Kosovo. According to the Serbian Ministry of Health, every day a child suffers from cancer. The entire country is contaminated. By harming the genetic material (DNA) generation after generation,  malformed children will be born. Knowingly and willfully, a genocide was committed. Until recently, with the help of the media, politicians have withheld the truth from unsettled citizens under pressure from the perpetrators of the genocide. Brave and responsible physicians, former military officials, ex-politicians and scientists have now succeeded in breaking this wall of silence for the benefit of the Serbian people and the many other peoples of the world who share their fate.

Depleted Uranium weapons are weapons of mass destruction

When the US used the defoliant agent “Agent Orange” and napalm in Vietnam, the world was appalled. This was no longer war, it was slaughter of the civilian population and sustainable destruction of nature. 50 years later, generation after generation comes to this world severely handicapped (disabled)- born to die. However the arms industry, including the nuclear weapons industry, has been developing its business rapidly since Vietnam. All wars are, according to the legal norms of the Nuremberg Tribunal, illegal wars of aggression and they are becoming increasingly murderous, sneaky, more widespread, (and) more genocidal. So also the first war of the US-NATO on European soil against Yugoslavia 1999. Here, under tacit tolerance of NATO allies – including Germany – the US Army used a weapon of mass destruction which they have already tested in the second Gulf War in 1991 and in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1994/95: highly toxic and radioactive uranium weapons. NATO itself has admitted firing 30,000 missiles with Depleted Uranium (DU), while the Serbian military speaks of 50,000. That corresponds to 10 to 15 tons of uranium.

Since already extensive scientific literature and film footage (“deadly dust”) of this war crime are available in German, English and Serbian (1), here just a few comments. Due to the long degradation process of radioactivity and toxicity, waste from the uranium and nuclear industries – mainly DU from isotope 238 – are stored in secure landfills for a very long time. To reduce the high cost, DU is therefore gladly given free of charge to interested parties such as the military. DU has characteristics that are particularly attractive for the defense industry: The DU projectiles- developed according to German technology (Siegwart-Horst Günther) – have a high penetrating power because of the high density of the metallic uranium (1.7 times larger than that of lead) and are particularly suitable for breaking steel armor and underground concrete bunkers. DU is also a flammable material that ignites spontaneously when penetrating an armor plate and at 3000 degrees Celsius burns to uranium oxide dust while releasing highly toxic and radioactive substances (uranium oxide).

This uranium oxide aerosol with particle sizes in the Nano scale reaches the human body through the air, water and, in the long term, through the food chain.

Sites in Kosovo and southern Central Serbia where NATO used munitions with depleted uranium (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In the lungs, the DU dust particles are also attached to the red and white blood cells and thus reach all organs of the body, including the brain, the kidney and the testes, so that in many organs cancer is produced and the genetic material (DNA) irreversibly damaged. The strong carcinogenicity of DU is due to the synergistic effects of chemo- and radio toxicity. (2) Through the placenta, the DU can also reach an unborn child and cause serious harm to it. Potential long-term damage includes genetic defects in infants, childhood leukemia, cancer and kidney damage. Since the uranium oxide particles have- due to the heat of combustion- assumed the characteristics of ceramics, they are insoluble in water,they are firmly attached to the body and can develop their radioactive effect for years to come.

War on uranium weapons is knowingly and willfully brought about genocide

For the biochemist Albrecht Schott, DU is an example of interventions in the creation that endanger them existentially and not a weapon against states, but a weapon against the planet. (3) The well-known German journalist and filmmaker Frieder Wagner (“Todesstaub”/ “Deadly Dust”) referred to uranium weapons as an “extermination weapon” and the victims of these murderous weapons as “the dead of the silent dying”. (4) Uranium weapons are the “perfect weapon” to kill masses of people, that is, to commit genocide.Since the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide from 1948, is genocide a criminal offense in international criminal law that does not become time- barred. It is characterized by the specific intention of destroying in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. Therefore, the genocide is also referred to as a “unique crime”, as a “crime of crimes” or as “the worst crime in international criminal law”. (5)

The Australian doctor, nuclear weapons specialist and peace activist Helen Caldicott writes in her book “The New Nuclear Danger” (2002):

“It is clear that the Pentagon knew about the health risks long before Operation Desert Storm (2nd Gulf War 1991, author) emanating from uranium-containing ammunition. Numerous military reports have acknowledged that uranium-238 can cause kidney damage, lung and bone cancer, (non-malignant) lung disease, skin diseases, neurocognitive disorders, chromosome damage and birth defects.”(6)

For this reason, wars involving highly toxic and radioactive uranium weapons are both war crimes and knowingly and deliberately inflicted genocide – including the war against Yugoslavia in 1999. According to the UN Convention against Genocide, the contracting Parties commit to punish genocide or those who commit genocide, whether they are governing persons, public officials or private Individuals. A large team of lawyers and scientists from Serbia, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, England and Turkey are suing NATO for dropping bombs on depleted uranium during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia. This lawsuit will also help the peoples sharing the fate of Serbia. (7)

Wreckage of downed Yugoslav MiG-29 in Ugljevik on March 25, 1999. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Aggressive cancers in Serbia reach epidemic proportions

The bombing of Serbia lasted 78 days. 1031 soldiers were killed, 5173 soldiers and police were wounded, 2,500 civilians were killed – including 78 children – and over 6,000 civilians were wounded. In addition to the DU projectiles, which also showed traces of highly toxic plutonium, other explosive combinations and rocket fuels with certain chemical compounds have been used, which are very toxic in explosions and cause cancer. The rate of these cancers grew from year to year. Also, the number of newborns with deformities and the number of aggressive leukemia cases in children increased. (8) Over a year ago, estimates by the Serbian Association for the Prevention of Cancer were announced: Studies have shown that the use of uranium weapons have caused 15,000 cancers and 10,000 deaths between 2001 and 2010, according to the head of the association and oncologist Prof. Slobodan Cikaric. In total, there were 330,000 cancers in Serbia during this period. The death rate has increased annually since 1999 by 2.5 percent. (9)

Already in 2013, Prof. Cikaric said in the newspaper “Blic” that Serbia expected 14 years after the bombing with DU an explosion of cancers of all kinds. (10) He should be right. Transmitted are breakdowns of the immune system with increasing infectious diseases, severe dysfunction of kidney and liver, aggressive leukemia and other cancers (including multiple cancers), disorders in the bone marrow, genetic defects and deformities as well as abortions and premature births in pregnant women like after the Chernobyl disaster. If one reads a Serbian newspaper today or walks over a Serbian cemetery, one notices in the page-long obituaries or grave inscriptions the short lifetime of many dead people. It should read: “Died from the consequences of DU poisoning and radiation.”

Many citizens of Serbia have been severely mentally disturbed by years of compassion for sick relatives and anxious waiting to see if and when they may be caught by one of the most terrible and mostly fatal diseases. Even though most of them suspected the cause of the serious illnesses, there remained a great deal of uncertainty that triggered lasting feelings of stress. From the political point of view,in Serbia as well as in the other DU-infested countries in the Near and Middle East and in the NATO countries themselves one has deliberately not informed the population.They wanted to evade, among other things recourse claims and continue the murderous craft undisturbed. Stress, anxiety as well as depression additionally weaken the already burdened immune system and lead to a higher susceptibility to infections. This is shown by research results of the interdisciplinary Research area of psycho-neuro-immunology (PNI). (11)

The people have the right to truth

In order to make one’s own life and that of the family satisfying and prepare for the future, or to decide as a couple, whether or not you want to put children into the world, every citizen must be able to realistically assess the economic, social and political conditions in his country. But he cannot do that if he is deprived of the truth about incidents that can severely affect his life. Therefore, it is a moral obligation of all those who have dealt with the problem of contamination of the country – doctors, scientists, journalists, contaminated military and civilians – to enlighten and assist their fellow citizens.

In addition, the identity of a people is based on the citizens’ right to truth and the knowledge of their history. Historians and representatives of other sciences have for that an important contribution to make. The dispute may not be left to them alone. The search for the truth and the enlightenment of the people is also a political task, which is to be solved by political responsibility bearers and under no circumstances can be suppressed by them. Government and Parliament have to position themselves. How can citizens trust a government or people’s delegation who deprive them of the truth about a problem that affects them all existentially

Dr. Rudolph Hänsel is a renowned author and psychologist based in Lindau, Germany.

Notes

(1) Jovanovic, V., Petkovic, S., Cikaric, S. (2012). CRIME IN WAR – GENOCIDE IN PEACE. The consequences of NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Sluzbeniglasnik Beograd; Caldicott, H. (2003). Atomgefahr USA. Kreuzlingen/München;  Wagner, F. (2007). „Deadly Dust – Todesstaub “, https://www.youtube.com/watsch?v=GTRaf23TCUi sowie Artikel in NRhZ online und „Geopolitika“, Mai 2014; Bertell, R. (2013). Radioaktivität und die Auslöschung des Lebens – Sind wir die letzten Generationen? NRhZ online Nr. 436 v. 11.12.2013; Deutsche Sektion der Internationalen Ärzte für die Verhütung des Atomkrieges/Ärzte in sozialer Verantwortung e.V.: ippnw report (2012). Die gesundheitlichen Folgen von Uranmunition. Berlin.

(2) S. a.a.O.

(3) Schott, A. (World Depleted Uranium Centre e.V., WODUC e.V.) (2003). Fluch und Tragödie des Uranmissbrauchs. Berlin.

(4) Wagner, F. (2010). Uranbomben – Die verheimlichte Massenvernichtungswaffe. Berlin.

(5) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Völkermord.

(6) Caldicott, H. (2003). Atomkrieg am Golf und im Kosovo, in: Atomgefahr USA. Kreuzlingen/München, S. 260.

(7) S. Leukefeld, K. (2015). Uranwaffen gegen IS?  http://www.jungewelt.de/2015/03-03-/053.php.

(8) Mirjana Andjelkovic Lukic (2012). Serbien – gestern und heute, in: „Zeit-Fragen“. Zürich.

(9) http://derstandard.at/2000033576195/Serbischer-Verband-10-000-Krebstote-durch-NATO-Bomben-im-Jahr-1999.

(10) „Cikaric: Iduce godine ocekujemo ‚eksploziju’ malignih oboljenja“, in: „Blic“ online v. 13.12.2013. Belgrad.

(11) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunologie.

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Hybrid War: Wreaking Havoc Across West Africa

March 25th, 2017 by Andrew Korybko

The first of the four main countries to be explored in the West Africa Hybrid War analysis is Chad, the sparsely populated state located at the trilateral crossroads between West-North-Central Africa. A cursory glance at the map reveals the geostrategic significance of this country, but it also misleadingly presents it as a desert-strewn state in the middle of nowhere.

While this might be partially true, it’s an injustice to simplify Chad to such basic descriptions, as such blanket terms don’t reveal the wealth of diversity and Hybrid War vulnerabilities within its borders. Moreover, dismissing Chad as a wasteland in the middle of Africa also doesn’t explain why its military is one of the most ambitious and battle-hardened in the entire continent, nor why the country is of such importance to China’s New Silk Road plans. Therefore, a comprehensive approach is urgently needed in order to better understand Chad’s internal and external dynamics, which in turn can help observers and strategists alike identify the most likely destabilization scenarios that could afflict this highly important state.

The Chad analysis begins by discussing the country’s geo-demographic situation before transitioning into how this relates to its history of northern and borderland militancy. After that, the research highlights the irreplaceable role that the military plays in acting as the ‘superglue’ that holds the whole state together, as well as its direct involvement in promoting Chad’s regional leadership. After describing the country’s position in African affairs, the article then moves along to explaining how it fits into China’s New Silk Road designs, concluding with an investigation into the most likely Hybrid War scenarios that could sprout up or be externally manufactured against Chad.

Geo-Demographic Dynamics

The simplest way to describe Chad’s geo-demographic situation is to highlight the division of the country between north and south, but even that dichotomy in and of itself isn’t completely accurate. While most of the northern part of the country is populated by Muslims, so too is a lot of the southern region as well, though mostly in the southeast of Chad near the Sudanese border. The southwestern corner of Chad between the Cameroonian border and the Chari River is mostly inhabited by Christians. All in all, the CIA World Factbook states that Muslims account for around 58% of the population while Christians are 34%. Both, however, are equally impoverished and recognized by the World Bank as one of the poorest populations in the world, with Chad also ignominiously counting itself among the least developed and hunger-prone countries. These three facts plus the jaw-dropping illiteracy rate of 65% reasonably make Chad’s citizens inherently restless and susceptible to anti-government sentiment.

Extrapolating further on a geo-demographic plane, most of the country’s Muslims live along easily traversable desert or dry bushland terrain (Sahel), while the Christians inhabit the savanna, wetlands, and prairies. This is relevant because of the effect that it has on the internal military situation in the country, namely the ease with which northern Muslim rebels have been able to move throughout “their” part of Chad, which greatly contributed to the northern militancy that will be described in the next section. The Christians, however, have typically been sedentary people and have no recent history of moving their rebel forces all throughout the country. This has nothing to do with either group’s religion, but is an interesting factor that should be commented on nonetheless in order to acquire a more solid conception of the country’s geo-demographic dynamics. Digging deeper and peeling off the layers of difference that exist with both overly simplified categories of Chadian citizens, it should be remarked that Chad boasts an exceptionally diversified population that includes more than 200 ethno-linguistic groups. 44% of the population is under the age of 15, which indicates that a population boom can be expected in the near future, too. This could more than double Chad’s current 14 million or so citizens to over 35 million by mid-century while nearly doubling it once more to 68 million by the turn of the next century.

Being a country landlocked with such mostly inhospitable terrain as Chad has, this can be taken to mean that the government will become even more dependent on external trade routes than it is today and that the newly added members of the population might predictably gather closer to the agriculturally productive regions of the country. To the latter point, this could see an influx of northern Muslims to the southern Christian lands, which aside from the ‘civilizational’ sectarianism that might erupt between them, could even lead to ‘tribal’ tension as well. These two layers of destabilization could combine in such a way that the government would have extraordinary difficulty maintaining peace and order, which could thus contribute to ethnic cleansing and genocide in the event that the authorities lose total control (even temporarily) during a related identity-driven conflict. The only preemptive solution to such a calamity is the strengthening of the state and its supportive military institution, a trend which has been steadily underway for decades already and shows no signs of abating. Should anything happen to weaken either of these two related pillars of stability (such as the [forced] introduction of Western style “democracy”), however, then it’s almost certain that Chad’s identity differences will inevitably tear it apart soon afterwards.

Northern And Borderland Militancy

First Chadian Civil War:

Chad is no stranger to civil conflict, though, having been embroiled in some sort of insurgency for most of the time that it’s been independent. The First Chadian Civil War was launched by the Muslim Northerners against the country’s immediate post-independence leader François Tombalbaye, a Christian Southerner. This was the only time in Chad’s history that it was led by someone from that region and with that confession, which essentially amounted to the rule of the minority over the majority. This explains the fervency with which the Muslim Northerners fought, since they believed that Tombalbayne’s policies were discriminatory towards them and were unfairly elevating the role of Christian Southerners at their expense. After years of fighting and political miscalculations in ostracizing his own powerbase and the military, the President was overthrown in a 1975 coup and executed, after which the military briefly ruled the country during a short transitional period.

Second Chadian Civil War And The French-Libyan Proxy Conflict:

The Second Chadian Civil War broke out in the 1980s among disgruntled northerners that wanted to topple their fellow Muslim Northerner who took Tombalbaye’s place. The fight against President Hissène Habré quickly became internationalized as Libya started sponsoring the rebels and the French forces already stationed in Chad threw their weight behind N’Djamena. There was even a period of time where Libyan forces formally entered Chad in support of both their proxies and Tripoli’s claims to the uranium-rich Aozou Strip, which in turn prompted a more substantial French intervention after Libya and its surrogates undertook a desert blitzkrieg towards the capital. The Chadian-Libyan War came to be a major Cold War flashpoint in Africa between the West and Libya, with Tripoli aiming to create a friendly buffer state to its south while the West wanted to use their traditional client state as a proxy base for destabilizing southern Libya. The conflict ended when Libyan forces were expelled from the country in the late 1980s, though it was ultimately a pyrrhic victory for Habré because he was later overthrown by current President Idriss Deby in 1990.

Third Chadian Civil War And The Darfur Overspill:

Deby aimed to solidify this rule all throughout the next decade but wasn’t successful in completely purging the country of rebel groups. The problem was that some of them were being supported this time by Sudan, and the conflict in Darfur began spilling over the border and evolving into a larger Chadian-Sudanese proxy war in one of the most barren wastelands on the planet, one which was also being waged between two of the world’s most impoverished and already internally destabilized states. This triggered what could be referred to as the Third Chadian Civil War, which raged from 2005-2010 before N’Djamena and Khartoum signed a peace agreement with one another in which they agreed to jointly patrol their mutual border and normalize their political relations. The restoration of positive ties between these Saharan neighbors went a long way towards stabilizing both of their internal situations, with the war in Darfur quickly abating soon thereafter and Chad progressively becoming more peaceful as well. The landmark 2010 agreement also paved the way for joint projects between both sides, the most ambitious of which is the Chinese-proposed railroad which regrettably has yet to be built but still holds infinite potential for the betterment of the region.

Boko Haram:

On the western side of the Chadian borderlands, a new conflict was brewing precisely around the time that the eastern one near Darfur was cooling down. Boko Haram started gaining ground in northeastern Nigeria and aggressively expanding its territory, which saw it launching cross-border raids against all of the countries in the Lake Chad basin a few years later. Chad is highly sensitive to the terrorist group because its capital of N’Djamena is within very close proximity to Boko Haram’s northeast Nigerian homeland, and if the city were to be substantially destabilized by the militants, then it would shake the balance of power within Chad itself and create space for its own insurgents to rise up, a Color Revolution to happen, or even a military coup to be carried out by disgruntled and rebellious generals. Therefore, President Deby dedicated the Chadian Armed Forces to being the vanguard actor in the regional anti-Boko Haram coalition, knowing that if Chad’s military – the strongest in the area – didn’t take the lead, then the terrorists would continue to expand at a bristling pace and eventually become a fully unmanageable and existential threat against the state itself.

Summary:

The prevailing trend is that northern rebels are usually the main culprits when it comes to Chad’s internal militarized destabilization, but problems in the eastern and western borderland regions have lately come to dominate the country’s security concerns. Be it the overflow of the Darfur conflict into Chad’s borders or the spread of Boko Haram, N’Djamena is cognizant that external threats could have a very real impact on catalyzing internal conflicts, with the worst-case scenario being that a blend of international and domestic factors is unleashed in such a way that the military is overwhelmed from all angles. This doesn’t appear to be likely anytime soon, so long of course that the military remains successful in snuffing out all categories of threats as they emerge. This pressing imperative explains why the military is the most important institution in preserving Chadian unity as well as why it played such an active role abroad in intervening in several conflicts over the past couple of years.

Chad As The Regional Champion

Chad has positioned itself as the go-to actor for resolving regional military problems, interestingly having a much stronger and more direct role in West-Central African affairs than the presumed hegemon Nigeria does. This can be attributed to a confluence of two mutually enabling factors, the first being the military-strategic imperatives explained above vis-à-vis the existential security of the Chadian state (bolstered by French support), and the second being the catastrophic corruption and myriad domestic challenges that have plagued Nigeria for decades and held it back from assuming what would ordinarily be its rightful place as the transregional leader. As a perfect example in illustrating just how ambitious and effective the Chadian Armed Forces are in comparison to their Nigerian counterparts, one need only to look at N’Djamena’s interventions in the Central African Republic (2012-2014), Mali (2013), and even sporadically in Northeast Nigeria itself against Boko Haram (2015-present).

Chad’s failed involvement in its southern neighbor was to support the government in the face of a rebel onslaught but later morphed into a peacekeeping mission aimed at ending violence between Christians and Muslims, while its cross-Sahel operation was to aid French troops as they liberated northern Mali from Ansar Dine, an AQIM terrorist affiliate that seized control of 2/3 of the country amidst the Tuareg’s astoundingly successful post-Gaddafi offensive there. As for Nigeria, it was already explained in the previous section why Chad is so interested in putting a stop to Boko Haram’s cross-border terrorism. Altogether, N’Djamena’s moves point to its leadership’s ambition to carve out a regional sphere of influence and position their country as the champion in attempting to settle all military disputes.

Central African Republic:

Chad shares an extremely porous border with its southern neighbor, a state of affairs which has remained constant ever since independence but finally presented an urgent security threat during the Central African Republic’s (CAR) meltdown in late-2012. There was a moment when a Darfur-like overspill was frighteningly real, which is why N’Djamena heeded Bangui’s request to intervene in helping the government stave off the rebel advance. This was somewhat ironic from the frame of identity politics but perfectly understandable from the realistic pragmatic one, since the Muslim-led Chadian authorities were trying to fight back Muslim rebels that were intent on toppling the Christian government, but the authorities were on pretty good standing with Chad at that time so it would have been disadvantageous for N’Djamena to have them successfully ousted. Of course, the Muslim-Christian angle is a major oversimplification of the situation and the author doesn’t believe that such superficial descriptions could satisfactorily account for the depth of what was actually happening at that moment, but the reason why this understanding is being mentioned in the first is because of the future threat of a “Clash of Civilizations” going out of control in the Central African Republic and spreading to southern Chad, with gullible populations in both states falling for the narrow-minded “us versus them” approach to Christian-Muslim conflict.

Chad also seems to have been aware of just how easily this could happen when it decided to contribute troops to the peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, though it later withdrew them in 2014 after coming under heavy criticism for allegedly staging an unprovoked attack against civilians in one of the capital’s main markets. As Al Jazeera noted at the time, there were prior accusations that Chadian forces were favorable towards the Muslims, which to remind the reader, comprised most of the eastern-residing Séléka rebels who overthrew President Bozize in 2013. CAR, like it was pointed out in the relevant chapter about the Failed State Belt, has many Muslims living in the sparsely populated eastern savannahs of the country, while most of the population is Christian and lives in the jungled western interior. The “Clash of Civilizations” that sprung up in the country after Séléka’s victory was due in part to the mostly Christian antibalaka vigilantes carrying out reprisal killings against the Muslims, which quickly turned into a brief but very intense period of identity-driven civil warfare.

From Chad’s perspective, this presented a serious quandary, because its Muslim-led government felt obliged to protect its fellow co-confessionals despite their rebel leaders having been responsible for the fall of the government and inadvertently subsequent ethnic cleansing in the first place. Additionally, there are inherent fears that a mass influx of refugees into southern Chad could greatly upset the fragile balance in the country, particularly if the CAR’s fleeing Christian and Muslim communities end up on the ‘wrong side’ of the border, meaning that Christians find themselves in the mostly Muslim Chadian southeast and Muslims end up in the mostly Christian southwest. This could lead to domestic communal conflict within the state and demonstrate an instance of “Weapons of Mass Migration”. Chad presently has the Southern Christian population under control and doesn’t want to endanger the stability that set over the region, which is why it’s so sensitive to a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ in CAR leading to a domino effect that emboldens this demographic to rise up against the state. Having lost its influence over the entirety of its neighbor’s southern territory following its collapse into a total failed state status, Chad still has the potential to cultivate soft power and – if need be – selectivity intervene in the eastern part of the CAR to protect the indigenous Muslim population there, thus flexing its influence along part of its southern periphery.

Mali:

Chad’s support mission in Mali, to which it sent a few thousand troops, was very influential in gaining positive media coverage for the country and boosting its global prestige, despite its dismal domestic economic situation and widespread “human rights” criticisms. Furthermore, N’Djamena reinforced its strategic relations with Paris and reminded its former imperial master and one-time kingmaker in its affairs of why the present leadership is useful in promoting shared “Françafrique” interests. This could thus be interpreted as a proactive move on Deby’s part to preempt any future regime change schemes that France might be tempted into hatching, whether on its own prerogative or pressured to do so as part of the US-French trans-African alliance that’s been active over the past several years.

From a more self-interested standpoint, Chad was able to resolutely demonstrate its commitment to effectively fighting terrorism and also showcased the breadth and scope of its military reach. Being able to transport around 2,000 troops on short notice through the Nigerien Sahel to eastern Mali’s borders was an impressive feat, made even more striking by the fact that Nigeria has yet to demonstrate this capability. Moreover, from a grand strategic perspective, Chad showed that it has very close relations with Niger and Mali in order to do this in the first place, thus bearing proof that N’Djamena’s influence is confidently expanding past its borders and all along Nigeria’s northern frontier. It doesn’t mean that Chad is doing any of this with explicit anti-Nigerian intentions in mind, but it can’t be excluded that Abuja might interpret it in a zero-sum way to mean that its neighbor is ‘getting the best of it’ in its own ECOWAS sphere.

Anti-Boko Haram Coalition:

Through the mechanism of multilateral coordination against the shared threat of Boko Haram, Chad has been able to somewhat formalize its role as the regional hegemon of the Lake Chad basin. This doesn’t mean that it exerts full control over each of the countries that it’s allied with, but that it definitely holds the upper hand when it comes to military prowess in their related borderland regions. N’Djamena doesn’t isn’t set to abuse this, however, since it doesn’t want to isolate its Nigerien ally nor its Cameroonian one on which it depends for most of its international trade. Rather, Chad wants to establish a sort of buffer region in Northeastern Nigeria that would proactively prevent a rejuvenated Nigeria from ever becoming too self-confident in the borderland region. To remind the reader, the reason why Chad is so particularly sensitive to this is because its capital lies within very close distance to Nigeria itself, separated only by a very thin corridor of Cameroon’s Far North Region. Being the strong military power that it’s progressively evolved into being, Chad has the capabilities and the willpower to enforce its regional vision on its much more populous and wealthy Nigerian neighbor, despite the peculiar optics of such a small and absolutely impoverished country like Chad being able to strategically strong arm its much larger and oil-rich rival.

Going even further, there might be some very forward-looking logic to what Chad is trying to do. Many observers agree that Nigeria is deeply divided between its Muslim North and Christian South, with each region being far from homogenous and afflicted by its own local conflicts (such as Boko Haram against fellow Muslims in the North or MEND/”Avengers” against their Southern Christian counterparts). Although Nigeria is now divided up into dozens of states and this North-South dichotomy is no longer as clear cut nor administratively formalized like it was in the years right after independence, it’s unmistakable that this sense of oppositional identity has never gone away and could provocatively be said to have even strengthened in the past couple of years with Boko Haram and MEND/”Avengers”. Therefore, Chad’s active involvement in beating back Boko Haram and saving regular Muslims from its terror, a responsibility which would ordinarily fall on the Nigerian national government had it not been for the authorities’ absolute dysfunction in most regards, has considerable influence in warming up this northern population towards N’Djamena’s soft power advances, something which could be very useful for its foreign policy in the event that the North-South Nigerian split becomes more pronounced and results in the emergence of quasi-independent states (or statelets) in the future.

A Chadian-Angolan Tag Team?:

Chad’s rise as a regional heavyweight in the Lake Chad basin and surrounding territories occurs at the same time as Angola becomes more prominent in African affairs as well. Like it was explained in the appropriate chapter about that country, Angola and Nigeria appear to be on a strategic collision course in becoming undeclared rivals with one another, as Abuja fears Luanda’s creeping influence in the Gulf of Guinea and along Nigeria’s coastal energy deposits. From a mainland perspective in the opposite cardinal direction, Chad is also competing with Nigeria and seems to be on the winning side for now. If one takes for granted the supposition that smaller states typically bandwagon together in balancing against stronger ones (whether that said country is presently strong or has the potential to be so in the future), then it would make sense for Angola and Chad to coordinate their complementary actions in strategically ‘containing’ Nigeria.

Angola already competes with Nigeria in the energy sphere and has growing influence in the maritime and coastal reaches that Abuja believes constitute its exclusive sphere of influence, while Chad has proven that it is much more militarily capable than Nigeria and has heavier sway in the neighboring Francophone countries than the Anglophone state will ever have. Luanda and N’Djamena thus have corresponding advantageous that could harmoniously interlock with one another in keeping Nigeria in check. The author isn’t espousing this idea, but merely drawing attention to it and raising awareness about its obvious existence. Angola and Chad certainly have a shared interest in keeping Nigeria in its presently weakened state, yet neither of these potential strategic partners is physically close enough to the other to let their rivalry ever interfere with their respective interests. Angola is chiefly concerned about energy and potential maritime affairs vis-à-vis its insular and coastal partners, while Chad’s focus is on the Lake Chad basin and the Muslim communities in the region. If the two countries partner up, whether officially or informally, in ‘countering’ Nigeria and conspiring to perpetually keep it on the strategic defensive, then it could evolve into a real asymmetrical threat for Abuja which might even be exploited one day by unipolar powers such as France and the US.

New Silk Road Connectivity

Chad has somewhat surprisingly become the regional focus of China’s New Silk Road plans, though for the convoluted geopolitical reasons explained in the previous introductory chapter. Up until recently, China’s only interest in the country was oil, of which Chad has plenty in its Southern Christian region. There’s also substantial oil located in the Lake Chad basin, but it’s the reserves in the south which have garnered international attention. Exxon Mobil partnered up with Chevon and Petronas to build the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline in 2003 which connected the oil fields in Doba with the Atlantic port of Kribi, the latter of which is Central Africa’s only deep-sea port and is financed by China’s Export-Import Bank.  China eventually gained extraction rights to several nearby fields but ran into trouble with the authorities over environmental regulations in 2012-2013, which resulted in the government cancelling five of its permits in 2014. It’s likely that there was more to this scandal than initially met the eye and that Chad’s French and/or American allies might have put pressure on N’Djamena to make the business environment very difficult for Chinese energy companies, but the spat appears to have been resolved a year later with the Chadian government and its CNPC partners renegotiating a profit-sharing deal in 2015.

While energy ties are indeed the anchor of the Chadian-Chinese relationship, mutual ties between both partners have slowly begun to take on a more comprehensive form. “The Globalist” writes that “China created an African power” in Chad by purchasing so much of its oil that it helped fuel the state’s military expansion, which interestingly also worked out to the benefit of France when it came to ‘contracting’ N’Djamena’s forces for participation in Mali and the Central African Republic. The Chinese also envision Chad functioning as a crucial transit state for Nigerien oil and cross-continental trade in general, with the former being due to the plans for a prospective Niger-Chad pipeline through the country to connect with the Chad-Cameroon one, while the latter is epitomized by the CCS (Cameroon-Chad-Sudan) Silk Road to the Cameroonian port of Douala. Chad consistently ranks near the top of the list when evaluating the world’s poorest and most destitute countries, so even a comparably minimal expansion of real-sector trade through its territory could have the effect of immensely bettering its citizens’ standard of living and having visibly tangible effects on the country.

Another intriguing observation is that the more interconnected that Chad becomes to the outside world, especially through the framework of the New Silk Road, the more inadvertently dependent it becomes on Cameroon, which is its gateway to wider trade. Specifically, Chadian national security no longer ends at the country’s borders or its near environs (like Darfur, Northeastern Nigeria, or the Northern CAR), but now extends as far as the Cameroonian Atlantic ports of Douala and Kribi. This means that the country now has a very real stake in everything that happens with its southwestern neighbor, which has become elevated to the point of being its most strategic partner. It’s partially for this reason as well as self-interested ones of directly securing N’Djamena that Chad directly intervened in Cameroon’s Far North Region and helped Yaoundé expel Boko Haram from its territory. The effect that this had was highly beneficial in strengthening the Cameroonian-Chadian Strategic Partnership and showing the former that it can depend on its much militarily stronger counterpart so long as it continues to provide the latter with unrestricted access to the seas by means of its port facilities.

In the future and if everything goes according to plan with the CCS Silk Road, then Chad will diversify is dependency on Cameroon by expanding its commercial linkages with Sudan. It doesn’t seem at all feasible that Chad will ever come to rely on Libya as a northern vector of trade owing both to the complete dearth of trade-facilitating infrastructure between the two countries and the perpetually insecure situation in the former Jamahiriya. From the Western angle, it wouldn’t make much sense for Chad to detour as far as Benin’s Cotonou like Niger does, nor does N’Djamena have the money to invest in proper roads to make this happen. While the theoretical solution would be to use Nigeria as its premier access route to the global market, for strategic and security considerations, this isn’t something that’s viable or attractive to Chad’s leaders. Becoming reliant on Nigeria would totally reverse Chad’s erstwhile strategy of asserting itself as an independent actor vis-à-vis the expected (but not actual) regional heavyweight, and even if such a determination was eventually made to be in the country’s best interests, the fragile security situation in Nigeria makes it irresponsible for Chadian decision makers to place too much hope in safe transit through its territory.

Consequently, the Cameroonian-Chadian Strategic Partnership is the most dependable option that N’Djamena has for achieving New Silk Road connectivity, though it would be much better balanced if it made physical progress in its portion of the CCS Silk Road and began integrating its economy more closely with Sudan’s like China has been encouraging.

Hybrid War In The North-Central African Heartland

It’s now time to explore the handful of Hybrid War scenarios that could realistically occur in Chad. All of the following possibilities are connected and build upon the observations and conclusions previously made in the research. The salience to this part of the study is in identifying the driving forces that could contribute to Chad backsliding into the totally failed state that it was at the beginning of the 1980s, when warlords abounded and foreign powers had a free-for-all in intervening in its affairs. The implosion of Chad into a black hole of chaos would complete the process of trans-Saharan destruction initiated by Libya’s Western-inflicted collapse, making it nearly impossible for any dependable multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects to traverse through their territories. This in effect would prevent the supra-equatorial east-west integration of the continent and make it all the more difficult for grander transregional integration projects to succeed in Africa. Other than the inherent civilizational risk that violent ‘tribalism’ could develop among the country’s over 200 separate ethnic groups (though only in any case through a prior deterioration of the military and state’s control), the most likely Hybrid War scenarios facing Chad are as follows:

Color Revolution:

The traditional method of asymmetrical regime change that was first rolled out in the former communist bloc and then perfected in the “Arab Spring” is also very applicable to Chad, especially since 65.1% of the population is 25 years or younger and thus very susceptible to partaking in these events. There are two contexts through which a Color Revolution could occur in the country, and they can be divided into whether Deby is still alive and ruling the country or if he passes away. To begin by addressing the first, this could likely occur if an incipient Hybrid War situation develops in coastal Cameroon which ends up disrupting the routes that Chad depends on for most of its trade. It was earlier remarked that this could lead to a sudden surge in prices concurrent with product shortages, which together would exacerbate the already existing anti-government feelings among some parts of the country and might even push the Southern Christians over the edge, especially if the government’s response is plausibly interpreted as favoring Northern Muslims at their expense. A variation of this scenario would be if an ‘Islamic uprising’ is able to take hold in the country, whether independently occurring of any aggravated economic crisis or consequently related to it. The government has done an excellent job in preventing this from happening, even going as far as to ban the burka for security reasons, but it can’t be discounted that Islamic fundamentalist terror cells might already be embedded in the country and waiting for the right time to spring into action.

As for the second context in which a Color Revolution could occur, this would be in the immediate aftermath of Deby’s passing, which could prove to be a trigger event for initiating this sort of destabilization. The government would have to make sure that the uncertainty surrounding his successor is resolved as soon as possible, such as how the case was with Turkmenistan and recently Uzbekistan, since the longer that elite infighting goes on for, the more vulnerable the state as a whole becomes to non-state-actor destabilizations, be they Color Revolutionaries, terrorists, or their combined manifestation as Hybrid Warriors. On a related note, the military is indisputably the most powerful institution in the country, so it would end up having the final say over who succeeds Deby. If it’s sidelined in any way, or an irreconcilable split emerges or is brought to light by the president’s passing, then it could be possible that a military coup might be attempted by the dissatisfied segments of this bloc. For the moment, however, this is just analytical speculation about theoretical scenarios, since it’s extremely hard to get any information out of the country about the state of the military and its unity, but it’s important for observers to at least be made aware of this unlikely possibility so that it doesn’t take them off guard in the event that it indeed happens.

Breaching The Borderland:

The next related scenario that could transpire to upset Chad’s internal stability would be if border conflicts resume along its periphery and end up spilling over into its territory. The problem with Boko Haram is the most pressing for the moment, and it doesn’t seem as though it’ll go away anytime soon, which is why the Chadian military regularly remains on standby for sporadic cross-border raids into Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Chad cannot at all afford for Boko Haram to make any progress on its territory because of the geographically vulnerable position of its capital right near the front lines of the war, which would lead to a regional catastrophe and most likely a global crisis if it ever fell. This probably won’t happen because of the battle-hardened nature of the Chadian Armed Forces as compared to the much lesser experienced Boko Haram militants, but the problem might be if the terrorists breach the border in unconventional asymmetrical ways such as through their ideological appeal among the population. While Chad could easily defend itself from a conventional cross-border invasion by the group, it would have much more difficulty countering its ideological aggression, which might lay the seeds for many sleeper cells all through the country. The state would have a hard time responding to the coordinated uprising of multiple terrorist networks all throughout the country, especially if this occurred in the context of an uncertain leadership transition after Deby’s passing, for example, and if the military is caught off guard by this in any serious way, then it might creating an opening for rebel groups to advance on the capital like they did in 2008.

The other peripheral conflict that could easily spill over into Chad would be if there was a resumption of fighting in Darfur, though so long as N’Djamena has nothing to do with it, then it’s not expected that Khartoum would respond as it did in the mid-2000s by supporting its proxy equivalents in Chad. Actually, Chad and Sudan might be able to work together in the spirit of their recently renewed good neighborliness in jointly squashing any external attempts to foment violence in their shared borderland region, which could then end up making the two partners even closer than they’ve ever been before. However, if an atmosphere of distrust once more returns to the bilateral relationship (whether ‘organically’ or through the interference of a third-party actor such as the US or France), then the chances for a renewed round of crisis in Darfur would phenomenally rise, with the first metaphorical victim being the CCS Silk Road. Compared to an outbreak of cross-border conflict with Boko Haram, though, a continuation conflict in Darfur wouldn’t be as instantly destabilizing for Chad because of how far away it would occur from the country’s center of gravity along the western-southern periphery. The consequences could thus be more easily contained with refugee to deal with “Weapons of Mass Migration” and armed checkpoints to guard against insurgent infiltration.

In giving a comprehensive overview of all of the borderland threats which could affect Chad, it’s necessary to offer a few words on those emanating from Libya and the Central African Republic. The North African state is a dysfunctional mess and its Mediterranean coast is controlled by an ever-changing mix of terrorist and rebel groups. The southern Fezzan region abutting Chad is noticeably less destabilized, though that’s only in comparative terms. Tens of thousands of economic immigrants cross the Chadian-Libyan border en route to the northern coast on their eventual way to the EU, but for now at least, there isn’t any significant flow going the other way (though there was in the immediate aftermath of the NATO War on Libya). This is mostly due to the fact that the terrorists don’t have any control over this part of the country because they’re more concerned with achieving operational proximity to Europe, controlling the oil terminals, and administering populated and economically active areas from which they could procure ‘taxes’ (protection money). Also, just like with Chad’s eastern border with Sudan’s Darfur, the northern one with Libya is mostly deserted and easy to manage, meaning that any threatening cross-border activity such as the conventional spread of Daesh could be quickly dealt with. Thus, in all actuality, Libya doesn’t pose much of a danger to Chad’s national security right now, though the authorities would of course rest easier if their neighbor hadn’t turned into such a terrorist nest, despite these forces mostly being concentrated on the extreme northern side of the country.

“Weapons Of Mass Migration”:

Out of all of Chad’s neighbors, it might end up being the Central African Republic (CAR) that poses the most dangerous overspill scenarios of all of them. It was already explained how CAR is divided between Christians and Muslims, and how a low-scale “Clash of Civilizations” genocidally played out on its territory and prompted a French and African Union intervention. The country’s citizens have mostly stayed within their borders and haven’t engaged in any large-scale refugee outflows to their neighbors, but a return to violence there in the wake of Chad’s 2014 withdrawal and France’s future one at the end of 2016 could be catastrophic and lead to this eventuality, in which case and depending upon the specific conflict scenario and unfolding dynamics, could lead to western-based Christians going to Cameroon and northern Muslims fleeing to Chad. The reason why this is being discussed as part of the Hybrid War possibilities against Chad is because the prospective host country already has a very delicate internal balance between its 200+ ethnicities and the North-South rivalry between Muslims and Christians. Moreover, the southern part of the country is where most of the foreign-exported oil is located, which gives it an even more heightened strategic role for the state.

In such an important yet fragile region, the large-scale influx of religiously separate refugees would undoubtedly create a security problem for the state. Many of the individuals that would arrive in Chad would have been fleeing because they were targeted due to their identity, thus making them self-conscious and on guard when around locals of the ‘rival’ religion (as they’d interpret it after having just fled from marauding mobs of the opposition confession). The obvious tension that this would create in and of itself, multiplied by the social and economic stresses that would soon unfold after their arrival, could be enough to push the Southern Christians past the edge and into open rebellion, whether against the refugees, the government, or both. This demographic is aware of the strength of the Chadian Army which has managed to keep their otherwise restive sentiments under control for the past decades, but in a desperate situation where they’re already angry about not receiving what they feel is their fair share of natural resource revenue from under “their” soil, faced with sudden socio-economic challenges such as food shortages and inflation due to the refugee influx’s resultant spike in consumption, and confronted with what may be hostile and somewhat terroristic elements within their mix, it would be understandable why the Southern Christians might reckon that enough is enough and resort to agitational means (Color Revolution, Unconventional War) to resolve their plight.

‘Clash Of Civilizations’:

Finally, the most debilitating Hybrid War event that could occur within Chad would be Central African Republic-like ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the Northern Muslims and the Southern Christians. The author would like to emphasize at this point that he would hate to see this happen and that all Chadian citizens should ideally identify themselves by their inclusive, composite nationality and not by exclusive, separatist ethnic, tribal, or religious labels, but that it’s a fact of life that many people – especially the impoverished and uneducated, of which Chad unfortunately has a statistical plethora – are often prone to these sorts of simplistic and divisive self-identifications, thereby making them prime targets for provocative rabble-rousers intent on causing trouble. Having clarified that, the Southern Christians seem to be the super-demographic most at risk of turning against the government en mass, given that they could be corralled into believing that they share the same collective grievances despite their tribal differences. As was mentioned in the previous scenario and earlier in the text, these are animosity over what they might be led to believe is the unfair dispersal of the resource revenue gained from under “their” soil and the perception that the Muslim-led government mostly supports Muslim and Northern interests in general.

The mighty military, the only real (coercive) integrational force within the country, has thus far kept the region and its population in check and prevented any real uprising from occurring, but if the people are forced into desperation through “Weapons of Mass Migration” and/or the military is destabilized in any way due to an unexpectedly fierce border breach (let alone multiple simultaneously occurring ones from opposite directions) or an uncertain leadership transition fraught with elite infighting, then the space might open up for this to happen. Again, it’s not to predict that this will happen, but simply to identify the facts that would have to be in place for it to occur, thus giving observers certain indicators to monitor in tracking the progression of this scenario. Even though it’s of low certainty, it’s definitely a high-risk eventuality, which is why it must be seriously discussed and assessed by experts and relevant decision makers alike. This conflict template is so disruptive because of the speed with which it could generate international media coverage and prompt outside intervention, whether of the overt type that could potentially be carried out by France and its in-country military forces (possibly as “peacekeepers” in joint coordination with the African Union) or the covert one of Salafist terrorists and hostile/supportive state actors such as Sudan (depending on the circumstances of the bilateral relationship at that time).

A Southern Christian revolt against the Northern Muslims could quickly turn into a civil war that might then rapidly grow into an international one if “genocide” (whether real, imagined, or exaggerated) occurs and/or state failure follows. The eruption of another front in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (itself just a blueprint for how the US plans to divide and rule the Eastern Hemisphere in the post-Cold War era) could have the demonstration effect of encouraging similar sorts of conflicts in Chad’s neighborhood or emboldening the ones that are already occurring, potentially leading to a transnational zone of destabilization and an expansion of the Failed State Belt into the Sahel-Sahara region.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently residing in Moscow. Thew views expressed are his own. He is the author of the monograph “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

Hybrid Wars 1. The Law Of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Wars 2. Testing the Theory – Syria & Ukraine

Hybrid Wars 3. Predicting Next Hybrid Wars

Hybrid Wars 4. In the Greater Heartland

Hybrid Wars 5. Breaking the Balkans

Hybrid Wars 6. Trick To Containing China

Hybrid Wars 7. How The US Could Manufacture A Mess In Myanmar

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The Day Earth Was Murdered

March 25th, 2017 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

“Change you can believe in” disappeared in the early days of the Obama regime as the same Washington insiders filled the new government’s ranks. David Brooks sung the praises of those who made change impossible: “the best of the Washington insiders, Achievetrons who got double 800s on their SATs.”  

Eight years later Donald Trump was specific about the changes he intended, the two most important being normalized relations with Russia and the return home of the middle class jobs and associated state and local tax base that US corporations had moved offshore to foreign locations. But Trump’s government quickly became home to corporate polluters, Wall Street executives, defense contractors, and Russophobic generals.

Obama’s disappointed supporters held firm to their conviction that their man would set the agenda and not the Washington insiders who occupied his government. Trump’s disheartened deplorables are currently finding refuge in this same conviction. But it looks like we will not get the good part from Trump, only the bad part of more pollution and more damage to the social safety net.

Those who agree about this disagree over the explanation. Some insist that Trump, not Hillary, was the establishment’s choice from the beginning and that the fierce opposition to Trump played out in the press and on the airwaves was only an orchestration to convince flyover America that Trump stood for them. My view is different. Trump threatened the power and budget of the military/security complex and the profits of Wall Street before he had an organization and a team in place to impose his agenda. Unlike Michael Corleone, Trump was rash.

Consequently, the CIA, FBI, NSA, Democrats, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the presstitute media boxed Trump in by portraying him in collusion with Russian President Putin to steal the election from Hillary. Marches worldwide were instantly choreographed, and there were constant and escalating accusations portraying Trump and his associates as puppets on Putin’s string. Lists were made of Internet media sites that took exception to Washington’s wars and dangerous provocations of Russia, China, and Iran.

The attack on Trump seems to have succeeded. Trump lost his National Security Adviser who favored normalized relations with Russia. Trump was forced to prove he was not working for Putin by appointing a Russophobe as National Security Adviser. Trump backed off from an early meeting with Putin to reduce the tensions in the relationship caused by the past three US presidents.

The CIA won the fight by creating an atmosphere hostile to any thought that Russia is not a dangerous adversary and the main threat that the US faces. In other words, a preference for reduced tensions between nuclear powers has become evidence that one is a Russian agent or Putin’s dupe.

The CIA’s victory means that the prospect of nuclear Armageddon remains on the table, but the budget of the military/security complex is safe and rising. Is this an acceptable trade-off for you?

I was astonished to see the liberal/ progressive/ left line up with the CIA against peace and with globalism and Identity Politics against the working class. The liberal /progressive /left has turned against heterosexual white males and transformed the working class from a victim group into alleged victimizers of women, blacks, homosexuals, and Muslim refugees. The American left has degenerated into the Identity Politics that originated with Zionism. (See for example the article by Eric Draitser, the host of CounterPunch Radio.)

The political left, once a force for peace, has transitioned into a force for war, as war is the likely outcome of the high level of tension that now exists between the US and Russia. By helping the CIA handicap President Trump and prevent him from reducing these tensions, the liberal/progressive/left has responsibility for the impending danger.

These tensions are very dangerous. They have resulted in high-readiness nuclear alert postures, which together with short warning times, false signals of incoming missiles and distrust, create a dangerous strategic nuclear situation.

It is reckless for Washington to convince Russia (and China) that the US is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them. But that is what Washington is doing when it puts anti-ballistic missiles on Russia’s border and tells the Russians the lie that the missiles are there to protect Europe from Iranian ICBMs. The entire world knows that Iran does not have nukes or ICBMs. All Washington’s lie does is to make the purpose of the missiles obvious to the Russians.

The continuous anti-Russian propaganda issuing from Washington, NATO and the despicable Western presstitutes has the purpose of orchestrating a Russian Threat and preventing a reduction of tensions between the nuclear powers. The demonization of Russia’s president and the clearly false charges against Russia, such as interference in the US presidential election, invasion of Ukraine, reconstruction of the Soviet empire—are understood by the Russians as a propaganda campaign to prepare Western populations for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia. The conventional NATO forces conducting military exercises and deployed on Russia’s border are understood by the Russians as being too small and lacking in strength to be of any consequence. They are merely an orchestration to emphasize the Russian Threat for insouciant Western populations. The Russian government understands that all of this is preparation for an attack on Russia. Just as Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, and Assad were demonized by US government officials, now it is Putin. The dangerous situation could not be more obvious.

Yet Hillary supporters are completely blind to what is occurring in front of their noses, as is the liberal/progressive/left, the idiot EU governments, and the Western presstitute media. As President Putin himself has stated,

“no one listens to us when we point out the impending danger.”

As environmentally damaging as a pipeline can be, it is nothing compared to nuclear war. In the opposition to Trump, emotion has prevailed over reason and hate has prevailed over judgment. The consequences for life on earth will be dire.

Just as the CIA is indifferent to the threat to life on earth that the agency’s orchestration of the Russian Threat presents, and the liberal/progressive/left is too absorbed in hatred of Trump to comprehend that it is enabling the march to nuclear war, the Trump forces are enabling another catastrophic/apocalyptic threat by dismissing global warning as a hoax. That the obvious, observable melting of Arctic ice can be dismissed as a plot against capitalism by left-wing scientists demonstrates a detachment from reality that is difficult to fathom. For whatever reason the ice is melting, the consequence is the sudden enormous release of life-destroying methane into the atmosphere. As far as I am aware, the dire consequences of massive methane release are not controversial.

For a world that sees itself as based on science, it is amazing how uninfluential scientists are. They warn of the consequences of nuclear war, and Western governments continue escalating tensions between nuclear powers. Scientists warn of the consequences of global warming, and the polluting economic interests and their supporters cry “hoax.”

Read Dahr Jamail’s report on the latest published scientific report on the likelihood of a sudden and gigantic release of methane, and then go read the report itself. This is not the fake news that you get from the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Le Monde, MSNBC and the rest of the presstitutes. This report is peer-reviewed scientific opinion based on the known facts at hand.

What is known among scientists as the Artic “Methane Time Bomb” has been studied intensely. Scientists believe that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane could be released in a brief period of time from the melting of the Arctic ice. This would be the sudden addition to the atmosphere of ten times the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere. Scientists equate this to an increase in carbon dioxide of 1,000 gigatons.

In other words, based on our existing scientific knowledge, life on earth depends on the Arctic ice not melting. But it is melting.

With the two apocalyptic scenarios described in this article both possibly close at hand, why is the liberal/progressive/left concerned with tranny toilet facilities and the freedom of Muslims to immigrate to Europe and the US?  Is this the way they distract themselves from the real threatening issues?

Why are the timber companies cutting down forests and why are the remaining rain forests being massacred when it is trees that absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen?

Why is there intense commercial farming of beef and pork when the methane release from the vast numbers of animals is extraordinary and a factor in the rising temperatures that are melting the Arctic ice?

The answer is that profit-seeking has only short-term motivations, and the profits come mainly from the external costs imposed on third parties and the environment. The effort to control what economists call externalities requires thoughtful and determined regulation. Yet, the Trump administration declares regulation to be a hindrance to business. In other words, regulation interferes with the ability of capitalism to generate profits by externalizing its costs, and, thereby, regulation must be abolished.

We have reached the point where the externalities of economic activity and the externalities of the military/security complex’s need for a Russian threat are on the verge of bringing life on Earth to an end.

The idiocy of Identity Politics is that the ideology has no idea that we are all victims of the real victimizers—the US military/security complex and a carbon-based life style.

Considering the dire circumstances, it really doesn’t matter if more Muslim refugees, whose countries and prospects we have destroyed with our wars of hegemony and who may be seeking revenge for what they have suffered, are admitted to the West. The danger of being run over on a London bridge or at a German bus stop by a Muslim seeking revenge is miniscule compared to thermo-nuclear war and catastrophic changes in the biosphere.

But don’t expect any intelligent awareness from any Western government or from any member of the Western presstitute media. Truth is the last thing that interests these purveyors of fake news. They are interested in manufacturing fake threats, not confronting real ones.

What these hyper-criminals are doing is murdering planet Earth.

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Late on March 23, government forces, backed up by Russian warplanes, carried out a successful counter-attack against jihadists in northern Hama, recapturing the villages of Kawkab, Abdin and the strategic hill south of Maardas. The Syrian army’s Tiger Forces, the 5th Storming Corps, the Lions of the Desert and the National Defense Forces also advanced on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly the al-Qaeda branch in Syria) and its allies in Azrah, Zawr al Balah, Abu Ubaydah, Bilhusayn and Shayzar and recaptured these areas, according to pro-government sources. Militants denied this. Indeed, clashes are ongoing at the whole frontline and the situation is changing rapidly.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied militant groups had deployed about 2,500-3,000 fighters and over 20 units of military equipment for the operation in the area. They also actively use US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles.

The Syrian army’s Tiger Forces fully secured the area of Deir Hafer and took control of the nearby village of Um Tinah in the province of Aleppo. The further operations are developing in the direction of Al-Mahdum.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has captured villages of Mushayrfah al-Shahnat, al-Ghassaniyah, Fatsat Abd Ismail and Fatisat Bayram east of Raqqah. According to pro-Kurdish sources, US troops and SDF members are also in control of the Tabqa dam after a swift operation behind ISIS lines on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced that it had summoned the acting Russian envoy after one Turkish soldier was shot dead by cross-border fire from the Kurdish-controlled area of Arin in northern Syria.

“It is an attack on Turkey from a region that is said to be under YPG-PYD control,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Huseyin Muftuoglu explained. “However, the Russian chargé d’affaires was summoned because Russia is responsible for monitoring violations in this region. Through the visit of Russian chargé d’affaires, our views about the involvement of Russian military elements in Afrin were repeated.” Muftuoglu added that Turkey expects Russia to take steps to shut down PYD offices in the country.

The Turkish posture aimed at blaming PYD, Russia and Iran for Ankara’s inability to achieve own goals in the ongoing Middle Eastern crisis increased after the sides were not able to make any breakthrough agreements during the recent visit of President Erdogan to Moscow. Experts also link Ankara’s attitude with the boycott of the new round of the Astana talk from militant groups and the recent incensement of their military activity across Syria.

Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that some its units had been deployed to the Afrin region “in the contact area between detachment of the Kurdish militia and formations of the Free Syrian Army controlled by the Turkish party” in order to monitor the ceasefire and prevent any violations. Moscow denied initial reports that Russia may set up a military base in the region.

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Damascus: In the cancer ward at Damascus Children’s Hospital, doctors are struggling with a critical shortage of specialist drugs to treat their young patients — and it’s not just due to the general chaos of the Syrian civil war.

Local and World Health Organisation (WHO) officials also blame Western sanctions for severely restricting pharmaceutical imports, even though medical supplies are largely exempt from measures imposed by the United States and European Union.

Six years of conflict have brought the Syrian health service, once one of the best in the Middle East, close to collapse. Fewer than half of the country’s hospitals are fully functioning and numbers of doctors have dived.

The result is tumbling life expectancy — even after accounting for the hundreds of thousands directly killed in the fighting — and soaring deaths in pregnancy and childbirth.

On top of this, cuts in health spending by the government that is fighting a hugely expensive war, a drastic fall in the Syrian currency and indirect effects of the sanctions are all deepening the misery of patients who need foreign-made drugs.

Copy of 2017-03-16T180355Z_1713427651_RC1BBD31B430_RTRMADP_3_MIDEAST-CRISIS-SYRIA-SANCTIONS

 Children suffering from cancer at Damascus Children’s Hospital. Image credit: Reuters

For families with sick children, the situation is dire.

At the children’s hospital in government-held Damascus, the waiting room outside the cancer ward was crowded with relatives, many of whom had brought clothes, mattresses and blankets in case they had to spend long periods far from their homes outside the city.

One of them was Naim Der Moussa, 55, who has been living in Damascus for a year to secure regular treatment for his 10-year-old daughter Wa’ad. They left his wife and six other children behind in the eastern city of Deir Al Zor, where government forces are besieged by Daesh.

“My daughter was first diagnosed with kidney cancer and treated,” he said. “Now cancer has been found also in her lungs.”

Before the conflict, Syria produced 90 per cent of the medicines it needed but anti-cancer drugs were among those where it traditionally relied on imports.

Elizabeth Hoff, the WHO representative in Syria, said medicine imports have been hit by significant cuts in the government’s health budget since the war began in 2011 plus a 90 per cent drop in the value of the Syrian pound, which has made some pharmaceuticals prohibitively expensive.

However, a lack of cash is not the only reason why supplies of cancer drugs are falling far short of increasing demand.

“The impact of economic sanctions imposed on Syria heavily affected the procurement of some specific medicine including anti-cancer medicines,” said Hoff. The sanctions were preventing many international pharmaceutical companies from dealing with the Syrian authorities as well as hindering foreign banks in handling payments for imported drugs, she added.

The United States and EU have imposed a range of measures targeted both at the government and some of the many armed groups operating in the country.

Washington has banned the export or sale of goods and services to Syria from the United States or by US citizens.

The EU has imposed travel bans, asset freezes and an arms embargo, with sanctions also targeting financial ties with Syrian institutions, buying oil and gas from the country or investing in its energy industry.

President Bashar Al Assad has partly blamed the sanctions for turning many Syrians into refugees, often heading to Europe.

Both the US and EU regimes include exemptions for medicines and other humanitarian supplies. However, by clamping down on financial transactions and barring much business with the Syrian government, the sanctions are indirectly affecting trade in pharmaceuticals.

Many drugs companies have erred on the side of caution, avoiding any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently falling foul of the sanctions.

The US State Department said the Treasury had authorised services in support of humanitarian activities in Syria, adding that there were legal ways to bring medicine into the country.

The EU also rejected criticism of its sanctions.

“Such measures are not aimed at the civilian population,” an EU spokeswoman said. “EU sanctions do not apply to key sectors of the Syrian economy such as food and medicine.”

She acknowledged firms had increasingly pulled out of business with Syria but said this was also due to other reasons, including “security, reputation, commercial motivation, anti-money laundering measures” and the presence of militant groups.

The WHO brings essential medicines and medical supplies into Syria, procuring generic drugs from approved sources in Europe, North Africa and Asia. Branded US products cannot be imported due to the sanctions situation, Hoff said.

With funds from Kuwait, the WHO has delivered life-saving medicine to more than 16,000 cancer patients, of whom thousands are children with leukaemia.

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 Syrian girl Rahma sits on a bed as she receives treatment for cancer at Damascus Children’s Hospital. Image Credit:Reuters

But this does not meet demand. Besides cancer medication, there are critical shortages of insulin, anaesthetics, specific antibiotics needed for intensive care, serums, intravenous fluids and other blood products and vaccines, Hoff said.

The overall collapse in Syrian health care has contributed to a drop in life expectancy to 60 years for men and 70 for women in 2014, from 72 and 75 respectively in 2009. Only 44 per cent of hospitals are now fully functioning and more than a quarter aren’t working at all, the WHO said.

By 2014, the number of doctors in Syria had dropped to 1.3 per 1,000 people, less than half the level in neighbouring Jordan and Lebanon.

Against this deterioration, Damascus Children’s Hospital has also come under increasing pressure. Cancer units in the provincial cities of Aleppo and Latakia were both put out of service in fighting earlier in the war.

Now about 200 children visit the Damascus hospital every week, with more than 70 per cent from outside the capital, according to its head, Maher Haddad.

The weight of demand has delayed treatment for dozens of sick children by 15-20 days, affecting their prospects, overall health and response to medication, he added.

Haddad also singled out the sanctions. Pharmex, the state-owned company that buys drugs for government-funded hospitals across Syria, was able to provide only 5-10 per cent of the cancer medication that is required, he told Reuters.

“Most of the cancer medicines are imported. Pharmex used to import the stock of medicines that public hospitals need. But it has not been able to do so largely because of the economic sanctions, I believe,” he said.

His hospital has only 36 free beds, with 17 of those allocated to children with cancer.

In the waiting room, a woman who identified herself only by her first name Nawal, said she travels from the Qalamoun area north of Damascus every fortnight with her 14-year-old daughter who requires chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia.

“We don’t have hospitals or charities in Qalamoun. Free treatment is offered only at the Children’s Hospital in Damascus,” Nawal said.

One private charity, Basma, is trying to help out by funding cancer drugs for poor families. The proportion of patients who need assistance has risen from about 30 per cent to nearly 80 per cent since the war began, executive manager Rima Salem said.

Salem finds the delays in treatment worrying.

“A child with cancer might die waiting for his turn to get treatment,” she said.

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The Killers

March 25th, 2017 by Edward Curtin

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Individual U.S. Presidents come and go, but the Oval Office is reserved for the Killer-in-Chief. If, as these war-mongers like to say, “the buck stops here,” then our latest incarnation of a “leader,” Donald Trump, has in a few months accumulated enough guilt to last endless lifetimes. There are no excuses. While the headlines scream distractions from the bloodbath, Trump and his “team” are slaughtering innocents in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and countless other places off the American public’s radar.

That’s the way the story goes. That’s the way it always has gone. That’s the way the public and the killers want it to go. Pure innocents, killers at heart. The victims out of sight.

Let me retract that statement about guilt. Our chieftains feel no guilt; they seek the job because they lack a sense of guilt.  They relish killing, but always wash their hands and deny responsibility.  Or say “we didn’t mean it.”  They lie.

Forget the “deep state” for the moment, forget Obama’s and Bush’s and Clinton’s blood-stained hands, forget Obamacare and Trump’s ultimatums to Republicans, forget Neil Gorsuch, forget March Madness, and forget your forgetting.

Remember this: In the past few days in Mosul, Iraq, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, slaughtered 200-300 civilians, mostly women and children, through airstrikes. Read this article by Jason Ditz. This technological terror included a single strike against a large building that killed more than 130 civilians: This massacre is just one of many in recent weeks across the region in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Read further in this article by Bethan McKernan.

American exceptionalism has always justified the killers – yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Trump has ably succeeded his predecessors in this divine right to kill. The recent dead in Mosul just add to the total waged against Iraq since this criminal war was launched by George W. Bush on March 19, 2003.

Focus on Trump’s tweets or his hair or his face all you want, but if you look at his hands you will see they are covered in blood. He is an able Killer-in-Chief.

Tolstoy once said that the difference between state violence and rebel violence is the difference between bullshit and horseshit. He was right. The same can be said of our glorious leaders.

Bob Dylan first sang in 1963: “For you don’t count the dead/When God’s on your side.”

But some of us are counting, Mr. Trump.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

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Exposing Shabby Intelligence

March 25th, 2017 by Philip Giraldi

There is a perception among some of the public and within the alternative media that America’s burgeoning national-security state is a monolith, a collective entity pursuing its own interests regardless of what is good for the country or its people. From both progressives and conservatives who mistrust the government, I often hear comments such as, “Once in the CIA, always in the CIA”—as if onetime employment in the agency forms an unbreakable bond.

Those familiar with both the national-security community and the peace movement are aware that something like the reverse is true. Individuals who were attracted to careers in intelligence, law enforcement, or the military are often sticklers for doing what is right rather than what is expedient. That often puts them at odds with their political masters, leading sometimes to resignations and a resulting overrepresentation of former national-security professionals in the anti-war movement.

One manifestation of this is an organization of former national-security officers, including myself, called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS. VIPS was founded in 2003 out of revulsion on the part of many former officials over the shabby intelligence that was driving the decision to invade Iraq. The group includes officials from the whole alphabet soup of national security—CIA, NSA, FBI, FS (Foreign Service), and DOD. VIPS’s emergence and its ongoing letters of protest on national-security policy reflect a reality going back to the early debates surrounding the U.S. government’s stealthy escalation of the Vietnam War and its woeful handling of that conflict, ending in a humiliating defeat.

The lies that led to that Vietnam experience produced one of the first well-known rebels against intelligence corruption. Sam Adams, a CIA analyst who was assigned to the agency’s Vietnam desk in 1965, observed that the strength estimates for the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong guerrillas consistently underreported the true strength of the enemy. This led to a prolonged conflict with Army and White House officials, as well as with Adams’s own bosses, all of whom promoted the false notion that the Vietnam challenge was a limited insurgency easily defeated, a fabrication intended to ensure U.S. popular support for the conflict.

Michael Hogue

Though Adams eventually was forced out of the agency, he continued to expose how intelligence had been hijacked to suit a political agenda. He served as a witness in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the Pentagon Papers revelations. He wrote about the Vietnam “cover-up” and spoke to the House Intelligence Committee’s Pike Commission, which credited his allegations.

Today there are many former national-security officials in the mold of Sam Adams. For many, the disillusionment with the corruption of intelligence and betrayal of national security began with Iraq. CIA officers in the clandestine service such as European Division chief Tyler Drumheller pushed hard against CIA Director George Tenet and the White House, insisting that field reporting demonstrated that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Drumheller also dismissed “Curveball,” the German-Iraqi source of the false intelligence that Iraq was building mobile biological-weapons labs. The source, said Drumheller, was merely “a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth.”

CIA analysts also sought to expose false claims that Iraqi intelligence officials had met with al-Qaeda. Senior State Department officials John Kiesling, John Brown, and Ann Wright resigned over the march to an avoidable war.

For others, increasing governmental attacks on the Constitution proved decisive. National Security Agency (NSA) officer Tom Drake went through channels after he learned the agency was illegally collecting information on U.S. citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment. He was joined by former NSA officers William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Ed Loomis. Their efforts were rebuffed by the government. Despite whistleblower protections, Drake later was charged under the Espionage Act.

The large numbers of former foot soldiers in the national-security establishment who are now opposed to the warfare state should be an eye opener for many Americans, suggesting that there is no “high confidence” among many of those who are actually best positioned to know the truth regarding Washington’s perpetual warfare policies.

Which brings us back to VIPS and the dissident former national-security officers who have found a home there. One is Tom Drake, who was involved from the start, as was Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA analyst and presidential briefer. VIPS has produced 47 memos on national-security policy. Its first official action was a February 2003 memo to President George W. Bush condemning the United Nations speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell that established the pretext for invading Iraq. The memo said,

“you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond … the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

More recently, VIPS has raised serious questions about the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered “Russian hacking” designed to destabilize American politics and, if possible, put Donald Trump in the presidency. The group called on President Obama to release solid evidence of this, even if it creates difficulty for ongoing intelligence operations. The former security officials suggested the evidence released by the government thus far “does not pass the smell test,” and they noted particularly the lack of any public evidence linking the Russians to WikiLeaks, which published the bulk of the information in question.

“We urge you to authorize public release of any tangible evidence that takes us beyond the unsubstantiated, ‘we-assess’ judgments by the intelligence agencies,” said the VIPS statement, addressed to Obama. “Otherwise, we … will be left with the corrosive suspicion that the intense campaign of accusations is part of a wider attempt to discredit the Russians and those—like Mr. Trump—who wish to deal constructively with them.”

The VIPS statement didn’t get much attention. Indeed, such warnings from former intelligence, security, law-enforcement, and military personnel are largely frozen out of the establishment media. When VIPS presents its annual Sam Adams award for integrity in intelligence, the recipients get more media attention in Europe than in the U.S. Rarely do the 50-plus associates of VIPS appear in the U.S. mainstream media, although they are frequently interviewed by the foreign press, particularly in Western Europe.

The government also does its best to repress any dissident opinion by requiring many former intelligence and law-enforcement personnel to have their writings reviewed by security officers prior to publication. The reviews can take months, make no effort to accommodate publishing deadlines, and often result in a heavily redacted text that is unreadable. The government sometimes strikes back in less subtle ways. Ray McGovern’s 2006 return of his Intelligence Commendation Medal over reports of CIA torture led to a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2007 enabling Congress to strip retirees of their pensions.

Pushback from former national-security officials is a good thing for the country and the agencies once served by these dissidents. Just as the Founders envisioned a citizen army so the defense of the nation would be in the hands of the people, a national-security structure responsive to responsible dissent should be cherished. The Obama administration, to its discredit, routinely punished legitimate whistleblowers and covered up its misdeeds through invocation of the state-secrets privilege. We can hope that the new Trump administration will have the wisdom and confidence to call off the dogs.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

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Turkey is at a dead end in Syria.

Erdogan‘s dream of going on to Raqqa and Deir Ezzor or even Aleppo city has been blocked by an agreement between the U.S. and Russia. His proxy forces are stuck north-east of Aleppo city and have no way to go further south, east or west. They conquered a piece of rural land that gives Erdogan no negotiation leverage but potentially a lot of headaches. A small Russian contingent has moved into the Kurdish enclave in north-west Syria around Afrin blocking any serious Turkish move against that area.

Turkey and its paymasters in Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have lost the fight over Syria. Still tacitly backed by the U.S. they are currently trying a Hail-Mary pass to again achieve some negotiation power for the next round of Geneva talks. This is likely to again fail. Their proxy forces in the north west, including al-Qaeda, moved from the north towards the city of Hama (see map, red=Syrian government). Over the last days they captured 11 small villages which were only lightly defended. The Russian and Syrian airforce are now devastating them and a counter-attack by the Syrian army is prepared and will soon throw them back.

Source: Islamic World News – See bigger picture here

Coordinated with the Hama attack was an attempt to capture ground on the eastern periphery of Damascus and in the south around Deraa. The Damascus attack has run its cause. No ground was taken and held by the Takfiris and the counterattack against them is advancing. The attack in Deraa failed to break the Syrian army defense lines.

The head of the “White Helmet” propaganda gang in south Deraa was killed in an IED attack by al-Qaeda aligned forces. He was no Samaritan. He also commanded the 18 March Division, part of the foreign paid insurgency against the Syrian state.

The large Syrian army move on Idleb governate to liberate it from the Takfiris is still in preparation. No date has been set for its launch.

East of Aleppo city the Syrian army had blocked all Turkish proxy advances. It continued south to retake the country side from the Islamic State and is making good progress. The biggest city in the area, Deir Hafar, was nearly surrounded today by the Syrian army when the Islamic State fighters suddenly moved out. It is now back in government hands. [The sources were wrong on this. Deir Hafar is effectively surrounded but not yet in government hands. – Mar 23 1110 pm] The Syrian army in the area will continue to move south and south-east towards Raqqa and Deir Ezzor.

The U.S. proxy force in north-east Syria, the Kurdish anarcho-marxists of the PKK/YPK, have advanced on Raqqa. Raqqa lies slightly north of the Euphrates. The only way south and west from Raqqa that was left open was across the Tabqa dam that dams up the Euphrates and creates the Assad lake.

Source: Syrian Generation – See bigger picture here

Yesterday the U.S. and its proxy forces started a surprise attack to take the dam (map). Helicopters transported YPG fighters to the south of the Euphrates and improvised ferries (vid) carried their heavy equipment across the lake. Apache helicopters and heavy U.S. artillery covered the move. They blocked the road between Raqqa towards Aleppo in the west and they are now moving towards Tabqa city directly south of the dam. At the same time a YPG/PPK force is moving from the north towards the dam. There is some fear that Islamic State fighters could blow up the dam but the first to drown in the following flood would be all Isis fighters and their families in Raqqa and beyond.

In areas further south and east there is some fighting between the Syrian army and ISIS groups around Palmyra and in Deir Ezzor. The situations there seem mostly stable with slight advances by the Syrian government forces.

Israel recently made some splash by bombing Syrian government forces near Palmyra. This was against certain parameters the Russian and Israeli governments had agreed upon. While Russia will not hinder Israeli attacks on Hizbullah weapon transports going to Lebanon it will interdict should Israel (again) hit any forces in Syria fighting ISIS or other Jihadis. Israel was warned off by a Syrian anti-air missile launch. Loud noise was made thereafter by the Netanyahu government in Tel Aviv. But that is mere domestic grandstanding. Netanyahu is under criminal investigation and is fighting for his political life.

It is still unclear how the Trump administration plans to proceed on Syria.

The move south of the Euphrates may block the Syrian government forces from moving further east towards the enclave in Deir Ezzor which is still under siege by ISIS. But the Euphrates crossing may also be a purely military move without a political intent to simply to enable the taking of the Tabqa dam. As a military move it makes completely sense. If this is a political move it will complicate the already confusing situation.

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Is the US Ambassador to Israel A Citizen of Israel?

March 25th, 2017 by Global Research News

Is the US represented in Israel by a de facto citizen of Israel, supportive of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, committed to repealing Israeli citizenship to Palestinian Israelis? Not according to official documents and statements. 

According to Mat Staver, President of Christians in Defense of Israel:   “Friedman loves Israel and he loves America. He is a citizen of both and intimately understands both nations…. ” 

“While some who oppose him argue that he has divided loyalties because of his Israel and U.S. citizenship, his dual citizenship is actually a plus.” 

While the reports of his Israeli citizenship are unconfirmed, Ambassador Friedman is in conflict of interest.  According to Jonathan Cook, Friedman has “a long history of support not only for the Israeli right but for some of the most extreme elements in Israel’s settler movement.”

Is this not a contradiction? A de facto Israeli national aligned with the Zionist regime representing Washington. Does it not go against the rules of international diplomacy?

This matter seems to have been overlooked during the US congressional hearings. No questions asked regarding “de facto citizenship”. Imagine what would have happened if Trump had appointed a Russian citizen to head the US embassy in Moscow.

According to Zionists of America (ZOA) President Morton Klein,

 “This is a great day for America, Israel, the Jewish people and Amb. David Friedman. He will be the most pro-Israel pro-America Ambassador to Israel in history….”

It is worth noting that Israel’s current ambassador to the US Ron Dermer is a US citizen born in Miami Beach, educated in the US, who then decided to move to Israel. The Israeli government, however, required that he give up his US citizenship upon his first appointment to Israel’s embassy in Washington.
Michel Chossudovsky contributed to this report
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Trump’s Ambassador to Israel is Truly Terrifying

March 25th, 2017 by Josh Alvarez

In keeping with the logic of the Trump era, Senate Republicans (along with two Democrats) have hired an arsonist to prevent a fire. David Friedman, whom the Senate confirmed today as U.S. ambassador to Israel, spent most of his confirmation hearing either apologizing for or attempting to walk back everything he has ever said about Israel, Judaism, and the conflict with Palestinians.

Friedman was Donald Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer during the president’s Atlantic City debacles. Apparently, in Trump’s mind, that qualified him to serve as campaign advisor on Israel and the Middle East. During the campaign, Friedman contributed commentary to Arutz Sheva, an extreme right-wing publication based in Israel. In an August 2016 post, he called for an “end to the two-state narrative,” which he described as the product of a U.S. State Department “with a hundred-year history of anti-Semitism.” Friedman will now be collecting a paycheck from that evil institution. He continued,

“At this juncture, a Palestinian state is the last thing the [Palestinian] middle class wants—they know better than anyone how corrupt and inept their people are at self-government.”

According to him, no Palestinians in the West Bank (he prefers to call them “Arabs of Judea and Samaria”) are “under any physical threat by the Israeli government.” This was news to me. I’ve traveled repeatedly to Hebron, where I’ve seen the barbed wire surrounding the Palestinian part of town and the watchtowers with heavily armed Israeli soldiers facing toward the Arabs inside.

Friedman has also contributed money to illegal settlements in the West Bank as well as to the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, which works to purchase property and settle Jews in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The goal is obvious: push all non-Jews out of Jerusalem and “reclaim” the city.

A month before the election, Friedman matter-of-factly denied the existence of the explicitly anti-Semitic alt-right. Anti-Semitism, in Friedman’s view, is primarily a feature of the left.

“There is anti-Semitic sentiment among Clinton’s supporters,” he said.  “The danger in the U.S. is on the left, not on the right,” Friedman said. “I’m not saying that there aren’t neo-Nazis floating around in the United States, because I’m sure there are. But the movement we ought to be concerned about is on the left.”

But Friedman saved the bulk of his vitriol for liberal Jews. In one post, he equated being a Jewish liberal to a young Theodor Herzl (the forefather of Zionism) joining the German fraternity Burschenschaft, which became a breeding ground for pre-Hitler anti-Semites. Friedman appears to believe that liberal Jews are not simply misguided, but are actively seeking to destroy Israel while falsely proclaiming themselves to be pro-Israel.

There can be no other explanation, in his mind, for the liberal Israel lobby J Street’s public support of President Obama’s negotiations with Iran than intentionally undercutting the Jewish state and betraying true Jews. Liberal Jews, he wrote, are “worse than kapos,” the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the death camps. They are “just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.” Later confronted with his own words at a conference, Friedman doubled down, saying, “They’re not Jewish and they’re not pro-Israel.”

David Friedman

The difference between a mere religious bigot and a true fundamentalist is that a bigot mostly concerns himself with the Other—people outside his faith—while a fundamentalist concerns himself foremost with rival groups within his faith. Muslim fundamentalists, like the ones in ISIS, are more immediately concerned with cleansing their society of Muslims they deem insufficiently devout than with destroying Christendom or Judaism. Likewise, for people like Friedman, discussion of the inferiority of Arabs and Muslims and their coming subjugation is superfluous. The important thing is to marginalize the (so-called) Jews who don’t believe that the establishment of a Jewish theocracy over Greater Israel will bring redemption and God’s grace.

This is the man the Senate saw fit to entrust with America’s diplomatic mission in a place already suffering from a surplus of religious zealots. Despite his apologies, there is no reason to believe Friedman has suddenly abandoned his extremism, nor that he would be under the strict control of the president, who clearly has no real interest in or moral conviction on the conflict.

The potential impact of Ambassador Friedman would be tempered if not for the current makeup of the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leader of the Likud Party, which in recent decades has moved ever further to the right on the traditional Israeli spectrum. But even Likud has been outflanked by the rise of the Home Party, which could be considered Israel’s version of the alt-right. The Home Party is now in a coalition government with Likud and has enough seats in parliament to unseat Netanyahu. The defining features of its platform is the dismantling of secular democratic laws and institutions, the full annexation of the West Bank (a one-state solution), and the imposition of Israeli law on Palestinians, who would be denied full citizenship and civil rights and forcibly segregated from Israelis. In a word, apartheid.

It’s with this party that Mr. Friedman most closely identifies, and his nomination has already further emboldened its members and sympathizers. A Likud Party minister publicly broke ranks with Netanyahu, declaring the two-state solution dead and proposing his own Home Party-esque idea for a one-state solution. Practically speaking, Netanyahu was never in favor of a two-state solution and has done everything in his power to nip any negotiations in the bud. But now we have an ambassador who will not hold Netanyahu to even a vague rhetorical commitment to a two-state possibility.

Friedman’s appointment further discredits the Trump administration’s supposed toughness on Israel regarding the annexation of the West Bank. At his joint press conference with Netanyahu last month, Trump faced Netanyahu and said, “I would like to see you hold off” on further settlements. (It was at this same conference that Trump ended America’s commitment to a two-state solution.) Israel Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said he received a direct message from the Trump administration warning that “imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration.”

It appears Lieberman himself did not consider this to be a credible threat. He met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week and told him that West Bank settlements—which are, by definition, imposing Israeli sovereignty—are not an impediment to peace, and that the U.S. should leave the United Nations Human Rights Council and reconsider its support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Friedman’s appointment further undermines Trump’s public stance. This incoherence on the part of the administration, combined with a weak State Department and a growing morass of self-inflicted crises, is an open invitation for the Israeli right wing to keep pushing ahead with the settlements, further narrowing the possibility of ever getting rid of them.

Perhaps the only positive outcome is that Friedman’s Senate confirmation vote almost entirely fell on party lines: only two Democrats, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted in favor. Israel is no longer an axiomatic bipartisan issue. This process was helped along by Netanyahu and the Republican Party during the Obama administration, especially when Netanyahu, at the invitation of GOP congressional leadership, addressed Congress and directly undermined the sitting president’s foreign policy—an unprecedented and disgraceful spectacle that Democrats are unlikely to forget. Perhaps the United States will become host to the debate about what kind of country Israel should be, a debate the Israeli government and its enablers are currently uninterested in having.

On a broader level, Friedman’s appointment further establishes the conditions for Israel to go down a potentially irreversible moral path. The current occupation and creeping land theft is already a crime in slow motion. But the combination of a radicalized militant government with a monopoly on the means for mass violence, a strident messianic movement in the West Bank, and the presence of enablers in the West Wing and the American embassy opens the possibility for even greater sins from which Israel and the Israeli soul may never recover.

Josh Alvarez is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter – https://twitter.com/JshAlv.

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