The Globalization of Hypocrisy

By Paul Buchheit May 21, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -”CD” - The damage caused by the relentless corporate drive for profits has become more clear in recent years. In the most important areas of American life, devastating changes have occurred: Health Care: Almost half of the working-age adults in America passed up doctor visits or other […]

Dr Amit Goswami ‘Consciousness, Quantum Physics and Being Human’

Video Interview by Iain McNay Author of many books including: ‘How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization,’ ‘The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist’s Guide to Enlightenment’ and ‘God Is Not Dead’ talks about his life and how discovering that consciousness of being changed his scientific thinking and also his approach to life as a human being. […]

Divisions between major powers dominate G-7 meeting

By Nick Beams 13 May 2013 A meeting of G-7 finance ministers held outside London over the weekend was marked by widening differences over economic policy and concerns about the implications of the “quantitative easing” monetary policies of the world’s major central banks. The differences over economic policy are being fuelled by the fact that […]

Capitalism and the crisis facing young people

13 May 2013 Perhaps more than any other section of society, young people around the world have been made to bear the brunt of the capitalist crisis. In the five years since the 2008 crash, youth unemployment has reached Depression-era levels, young workers’ wages have plummeted, and education opportunities have collapsed. As with the attack […]

Psychopathy, Politics and The New World Order

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society By Colin Todhunter May 10, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - When attempting to analyse what is happening in the world, it is important to appreciate past economic, social and political processes that led us to where we are today. Understanding the […]

The Game of Drones

Welcome to the Age of Murder.Gov By Jeffrey St. Clair May 05, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -”Counterpunch” – At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon. In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the […]

Putting People and the Planet Before Profits

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers May 02, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -  This past week of economic news reveals both the ruthlessness of big finance capitalism on people and the planet and that people are working for alternative, more just and sustainable, solutions. At the top of the list is more research on austerity. […]

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix By Matt Taibbi April 27, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -”Rolling Stone” -  Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, […]

The Five Stages Of Collapse, By Dmitry Orlov, Reviewed

By Carolyn Baker

April 08, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -”Carolyn Baker” – Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit (New Society Publishers, 281 pages). I first heard of Dmitry when I was writing for From The Wilderness in 2005 after FTW published “Post-Soviet Lessons For A Post-American Century,” one of Orlov’s first articles in the United States naming our predicament and likely outcome.

Since then I have been a huge fan of Dmitry’s work, and I must concur with Richard Heinberg who says, “Even if I believed collapse were impossible I’d still read everything Dmitry Orlov writes: he’s that entertaining.” Incisive articulation of reality tempered with irrepressible humor and sarcasm define his writing style and not only compel us to stay with what some describe as a “dark Russian perspective,” but reveal a man who has found a way to live with what is so and navigate it with buoyant humanity.

The Five Stages of Collapse is nothing less than a definitive textbook for a hypothetical course entitled “The Collapse Of Industrial Civilization 101” or perhaps a bible of sorts for an imaginary “Institute of Collapse Studies.” While to my knowledge no such courses or organizations presently exist, this book would be an essential aspect of any such entity’s credibility.

Early on, Orlov clearly and cogently defines collapse in general then proceeds to demonstrate the five stages or aspects of civilization in which it is almost certain to unfold: Finance, commerce, politics, society, and culture. In addition, he provides a variety of options for how these aspects of collapse might be navigated, attended by an actual case history relevant to each one. His intention in writing the book can best be summarized by a statement made in the book’s Afterword: “There is no agenda here — just the assumption that collapse will happen, the conjecture that it can be analyzed as unfolding in five distinct phases and, based on quite a bit of research, the conclusion that each phase will require a different set of adaptations from those who wish to survive it.”

Prior to launching into the Five Stages, Orlov states that before arguing for imminent collapse, we must be convinced of the finitude of fossil fuels and other resources, and we must understand that as resources become increasingly scarce, the capacity for global industrial growth ultimately vanishes. And while coming to terms with these two realities overwhelmingly advances the certainty of collapse, nothing persuades us like our own personal experience.

Once we have realized the extent of our predicament and the compelling likelihood of the collapse of industrial civilization, we exit exclusively mental territory and enter the psychological realm, for as Orlov says, “the main impediment to grasping its significance is not intellectual but psychological.”

Enter then the Five Stages of Grief as articulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or the Five Stages of Peak Oil explained by John Michael Greer in his recent book Not The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, And The Myth of Progress or the stages outlined by Linda Buzzell and Sarah Edwards in “The Waking Up Syndrome.” However, Orlov makes clear that what he wishes to provide in this book is not another list of emotional stages but a taxonomy or “mental milestones.” In other words, “Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo.” His intention is to help us gauge our own collapse preparedness by knowing the Five Stages and how they are likely to play out, then acting accordingly.

I believe that Orlov’s taxonomy is essential, and at the same time, I do not believe enough has yet been articulated about the emotional stages of collapse. I have provided an extensive toolkit of emotional and spiritual preparation in my 2011 book Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition, but as collapse unfolds, much more work needs to be done on the emotional stages of it, and two of my forthcoming books Collapsing Consciously:Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times and Love In The Long Emergencywill endeavor to offer even more comprehensive insights. I cannot overstate the fact that every stage of collapse is and will be fraught with myriad emotions, and assuming that one can weather them without an enormous commitment to emotional and spiritual preparation is naïve at best and foolhardy at worst.

Financial Collapse

This is a time when “faith in ‘business as usual’ is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to capital is lost.” Essentially, says Orlov, the way in which the financial aspect of collapse has been dealt with is through “extend and pretend” which does not address the root of the problem, usury. Yet, as he does with all of the stages of collapse, Orlov presents options for cashing out and at the end of the section on financial collapse, offers a vignette of his own family weathering the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s as well as a case history related to the financial collapse of Iceland.

Certainly, whether it be in financial markets or the loss of one’s employment or the vanishing of one’s retirement pension, the undermining of trust is ubiquitous. Of this Orlov says:

A cultural flip is needed to change from impersonal, commercial relationships to personal relationships based on trust, and the first hurdle, for many people, is in understanding what trust actually is,because there is no innate human quality called trustworthiness, possessed by some people, lacking in others. Rather, it is more along the lines of a generalization concerning a given individual’s behavior over time, within a given relationship. Trust is transactional: a person needs a reason to trust you, and you need a reason to trust that person. There is, however, such a quality as trustfulness: this is the property of small children, tame animals and, most unfortunately for them, many regular, salt-of-the-earth, mainstream Americans. It is of negative survival value in the context of financial collapse.

Referring to the writing of Russian scientist and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Orlov emphasizes that humans are social creatures who “thrive through cooperation,” and it seems that the smaller the scale, the more likely that trust will actually function without major conflict.

Ultimately, in financial collapse, decisions must be made about the viability of larger players and who benefits by continually propping them up. According to Orlov, “Iceland’s approach was to let financial companies go bankrupt rather than prop them up with public funds….But a further case can be made that the failure of financial institutions can be a good thing, because it frees up resources for productive activities that benefit the entire society rather than just the rentier class and the über-rich.”

Commercial Collapse

Financial collapse leads to commercial collapse which then leads to political collapse, and the effect of each shock is to make the system as a whole less resilient. In this section Orlov distinguishes the three kinds of commerce that function in the current commercial milieu: trade, barter/tribute, and gift. As financial, commercial, and political collapse exacerbate, Orlov sees trade, the dominant function in industrial societies, being superseded by gift. Whereas “barter involves an external conflict between two conflicting sets of interests that is resolved through negotiation, gift internalizes this conflict in each person. Explicitly and publicly one never gives gifts expecting to get something back. But gift also presupposes a debt of gratitude that is discharged through reciprocity. Nevertheless, with gifts one’s social status is based on one’s generosity and is destroyed by any explicit expectation of reciprocation.”

Orlov’s perspective on gift echoes Charles Eisenstein’s “gift economy” as explained in his groundbreaking book, Sacred Economics. In a video published by The Guardian, Eisenstein argues that, “such a model aims to bring about a workforce driven by passion rather than coerced by money and profit, and he highlights certain co-operative schemes already proving the ideal can be made real.” Eisenstein’swork offers one model for how communities and individuals might respond to financial and commercial collapse and provides an opportunity to begin practicing this strategy in current time.

Most importantly in preparing for commercial collapse, according to Orlov, “you can work on reducing your dependence on impersonal relationships and institutions. You can learn to avoid relying on money and monetary equivalents, and instead learn to rely on gifts and the various extensions and generalizations of gifts. You can create new custom and ritual, laying the foundation for a new culture that is right side up.”

Political Collapse

Following on the heels of financial and commercial collapse is political collapse which is a different animal altogether, and leaves the society open to chaos.

Realistically, however, the police, the military, and the bureaucrats will not quietly go away and “allow the people to self-organize, experiment and come together as autonomous new groups adapted to the new environment in their composition and patterns of self-governance.” The greatest fear of the hierarchy, and of the general population who are terrified of anarchy, is the lack of order. And of course, eventually the nation state itself will vanish. According to Orlov:

In its stead will come a myriad of tiny polities, some squabbling with their neighbors, some living side by side peaceably, but all incapable of launching a single aircraft carrier, never mind starting a world war. But they might be able to build some beautiful cathedrals and opera houses, lavish resources on the arts and on schools of philosophy and use artisanal methods to produce everyday items that will put to shame the mass-produced plastic rubbish of today.

Much of this depends, however, on the issue of scale. The smaller the scale, the greater the likelihood of sustained success. As political collapse exacerbates, state services go away, and we have only to consider some dramatic examples in the United States such as Flint, Michigan, Camden, New Jersey, and Fall River, Massachusetts to see what wider-spread collapse will look like.

What is certain is that law and order will disappear. “Once central authority does collapse,” says Orlov, “an area may lapse into chaos and warlordism for a time, disrupting both licit and illicit trade. Eventually new forms of governance begin to emerge.” Certainly, we can then expect to see mini-mafias proliferate which will opportunistically provide some kind of societal structure and do so with a certain amount of appearance of honesty and fairness without which they could not succeed.

For Orlov, attempting to effect political change in a collapsing society is more than futile. Not only is political collapse unavoidable, but as resources further deplete, the methods of communication on which we have relied for so long will eventually vanish. He suggests that we could make better use of our time by learning some effective ways of communication that do not rely on the Internet. Of this he says: “And so, if you want to achieve a serious political effect, my suggestion is that you sit back Buddha-like, fold your arms, and do some deep breathing exercises. Then you should work on developing someinterpersonal skills that don’t need to be mediated by electronics.”

This contention also reinforces mine, namely that emotional preparation/inner work/communication skills are every bit as urgent as the logistical preparations we are making in terms of food, water, shelter, security, and health maintenance.

Social Collapse

For Orlov, in social collapse: “Faith that ‘your people will take care of you’ is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.” For this reason, community organizing is futile because “the central problem with community organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it.”

The old rules must be supplanted by new ones. There will be no time or resources for the rules by which society currently operates to be changed through lobbying, deliberation, legislation, and litigation. Again, one can anticipate obstacles from the vested interests:

By default, the procedure for those who wish to survive will be to universally disregard the old rules and to make up new rules as they go along, but this is bound to cause mayhem and much loss of life. The best-case scenario is that the old rules are consigned to oblivion quickly and decisively. The public at large will not be the major impediment to making the necessary changes. Rather, it will be the vested interests at every level — the political class, the financial elite, professional associations, property and business owners and, last but not least, the lawyers — who will try to block them at every turn. They will not release their grip on society voluntarily, so it is best to make plans to forestall and thwart their efforts….The old rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they are. You might want to give the new rules some thought ahead of time, perhaps even test themout under the guise of emergency preparation training.

Here Orlov reminds us that as jobs and services go away, people will have much more time on their hands, and people will begin engaging with others who are in a similar situation so that the spontaneous regeneration of the community will automatically be engendered by the construction of new rules made by ordinary people who are no longer invested in the consumeristic system.

Some help can come from religious groups or communities and charitable organizations (many of which are religious). Historically, many of them have weathered extremely troubled times and have ensured the survival of their own and surrounding communities. In a disintegrating, corrupt, and unreformable political system, why fight battles that have already been won? Working with religious institutions or communities could prove extremely useful in making new rules and regenerating communities.

Like Orlov, I believe that collapse will not unfold in a monolithic, standardized manner. I am fond of saying that it will play out in a “lumpy” fashion with some regions looking very different from others. In some communities, people will come together and cooperate, and in other communities they will not.

Cultural Collapse

Orlov defines cultural collapse in this way: “Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for ‘kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.’ Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes ‘May you die today so that I can die tomorrow’.”

He suggests that we must consciously widen our circle of trust by beginning to trust people outside it in small ways and then deepening that trust when they prove trustworthy. To accomplish this, we need to swim upstream against the culture’s prevailing attitude of not recognizing or not seeing others. Let other know that you see them, and begin trusting in small ways.

Additionally, we must also preserve the knowledge we deem worth preserving by speaking it orally to each other and to our children. This is especially important in a collapsing world where electronic information, libraries, and many forms of written information may disappear. The second-best means of preserving this knowledge is by writing it down and teaching it to children.

In societal collapse, the family will become increasingly important. Orlov argues that “the family can be viewed as a microcosm of society — or society as a meta-family. This line of reasoning leads to a radical conclusion: that family is society, while larger groups are illusory. At the rock bottom of human survival, there is no individual and there is no state; there is only the family, or, if there isn’t, there is something that’s not quite human — or there is nothing at all.”

Orlov ends the book with an invitation to his readers to allow their absorption of collapse information to give them a “secret post-collapse identity” that will profoundly alter how they live their lives. Eventually, the reader will meet others who have adapted their own post-collapse identities, and very rich conversations might ensue. But of course, that will be all about trust, and trust, as Orlov reminds us, is built on actions, not words. Moreover, he cautions the reader not even to trust him “just because,” but rather he asserts, “you should think for yourself, act on your thoughts and, if that works for you, learn to trust yourself. All I want to do is give you a gentle nudge in that direction.”

Most importantly, Dmitry Orlov leaves us with perhaps the most profound and pivotal sentence of the book: “Collapse is not a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs but part of the normal, unalterable ebb and flow of human history, and the widespread tendency to block it out of our worldview is, to put it very mildly, maladaptive.” The Five Stages of Collapse, I believe, is required reading for long-term, strategic collapse preparation.

CAROLYN BAKER, Ph.D., was an adjunct professor of history and psychology for 11 years and a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years. (She is not, and never has been, a licensed psychologist.)

Her latest book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, is unique in its offering of emotional and spiritual tools for preparing for living in a post-industrial world. Carolyn’s forthcoming book is Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition. Her other books include: Coming Out From Christian Fundamentalism: Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred (2007) , U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You (2006) and The Journey of Forgiveness, (2000) All may be purchased at this site. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at carolyn@carolynbaker.net.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34543.htm

The South also rises

By Pepe Escobar

The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
by Vijay Prashad

It is not so far-fetched to imagine Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History succumbing to the temptation, and stressing that the time of the Global South has finally come.

Oh yes, it will be a long, arduous and winding road. But would the Google/Facebook generation need only one textbook detailing the stuff of dreams, trials and tribulations of the developing world in the early 21st century, this would be it, Vijay Prashad’s just published The Poorer Nations.

Call it the post-modern, digital follow-up to Frantz Fanon’s classicThe Wretched of the Earth.

This is an absolutely essential book to be read alongside another delight written by a global Asian, Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, which uses key figures such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore to tell an extraordinary story.

Prashad, director of international studies at Trinity College, Connecticut, and author of the splendid The Darker Nations, which should be read as a preamble to this book, sets the scene right from the start – using the requisite Fanon quote; by 1961, what was configured was a fight between the Third World Project (“for peace, for bread and for justice”) and the Atlantic Project. Key actors: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the de facto secretariat of the Third World Project, and the Group of 77 developing nations, created in 1964 to act on behalf of NAM in the United Nations.

The founders of the NAM enjoyed iconic status in the post-colonial world; Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia. Yet they knew this was an uphill battle. As Prashad notes, “the UN had been hijacked by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank had been captured by the Atlantic powers, and the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, precursor to the World Trade Organization] was designed to undermine any attempt by the new nations to revise the international economic order”.

As for the Atlantic Project, a 1969 quote from Henry Kissinger – co-destructor of Cambodia, Pinochet enabler, disgusted Saudi ally (the “most feckless and gutless of the Arabs”) and praiser-in-chief of the Iranian Shah (“a tough, mean guy”) – would suffice: “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”

Atlanticists were fiercely against the “no importance” Third World Project, but also against social democracy and communism. Their Holy Grail was to wallow in easy profits provided by a new global geography of production, “technological shifts that enabled firms to take advantage of differential wage rates” – most of all, those very low wages paid all across East Asia.

So the stage was set for the emergence of neoliberalism. Here Prashad moves in parallel with the indispensable David Harvey, detailing how the Global South became ripe to be fully (re)exploited; bye bye national liberation ideas of collective good.

Keep the barbarians out 
With the IMF currently part of the troika dictating austerity to most of Western Europe (alongside the European Commission and the European Central Bank), it’s easy to forget that in 1944 things were already pretty warped. The developing world had no say whatsoever in Bretton Woods, not to mention any sort of control over the UN’s five-member Security Council. It was the silence of the lambs; the wolves prevailed, and inequality was set in stone.

Prashad proceeds with the indispensable details of how the US dollar became the effective world currency, with the US swinging the price of the dollar globally, regardless of any consequences; the formation of the Group of Seven as essentially an anti-developing world mechanism (and not anti-Soviet); and of course the much-dreaded Trilateral Commission, set up by Chase Manhattan’s David Rockefeller to impose the will of the North against the South.

And guess who was the Trilateral’s intellectual architect? The ineffable Zbigniew Brzezinski, later president Jimmy Carter’s consigliere. Dr Zbig wanted to “contain the “contagious threat of global anarchy”. Divide and rule, once again; the periphery needed to be put in its place.

By the way, one should always remember that in his 1997 epicThe Grand Chessboard, Dr Zbig, who became the foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama in 2008, wrote, “The three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” For a long while the “vassals” were easily contained; but Dr Zbig, one step ahead of Kissinger, was already planning how to contain the two key “barbarians”, ascending Eurasian powers Russia and China.

The Group of Seven anyway was a roaring success, pushing its “theory of governance” everywhere, implemented by – who else – the Bretton Woods mafia. Prashad neatly defines it: “What went by the name of neoliberalism was less a coherent economic doctrine than a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance”, via the David Harvey-coined “accumulation by dispossession”, now also known by millions of Europeans under the codename “austerity”.

The numbers tell the story. In 1981, the net flow of capital to the Third World was $35.2 billion. In 1987, $30.7 billion left the Third World for Western banks. Praise the Lord and his law set in stone, also known as Structural Adjustment, based on “conditionality” (savage privatization, deregulation, destruction of social services, financial “liberalization”).

Paraphrasing Dylan, when you got nothing, you still got this nothing to lose. There was never any political strategy by the North to deal with the debt crisis of the 1980s. The Global South lambs were only allowed in a sorry procession to receive their structural adjustment consecrated host one by one.

But still that was not enough. With the fall of the USSR, Washington was free to develop Full Spectrum Dominance. Those who did not fully abide were branded “rogue states” – as in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and even, for a while, Malaysia (because it would not bow to the IMF).

But then, slowly but surely, the Global South began to rise. Prashad details the reasons – the commodity boom driven by China; commodity profits improving Latin American finances; more foreign direct investment roaming the world. The Global South started trading more within itself.

Then, in June 2003, at the margins of the Group of Eight gathering in Evian, France, emerged something called IBSA (the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue). IBSA was keen to “maximize the benefits of globalization” and promote sustained economic growth. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim defined it at the time as “an ideology in the best sense of the word – an ideology of democracy, diversity, tolerance, a search for cooperation”.

In parallel, China was – what else – booming. It’s essential to remind anyone at this point of that fateful November 1978 trip by Deng Xiaoping to Singapore, where he was hosted by Lee Kuan Yew; Prashad could have built a whole chapter around it. This was the clincher. Deng knew right away that he would milk the guanxi (“connections”) of the Chinese diaspora for all it’s worth. I’ll never forget my very own first visit to Shenzhen only one month after Deng’s fabled Southern Tour of January 1992. That’s when the boom really started. At the time, I felt I was mostly neck-deep in Maoist China.

Fast forward to China now helping to develop Africa. Vast swathes of the developing world would not consider blindly adopting a zhongguo moshi - the Chinese Model. It’s more like Prashad introducing this wonderful quote from Donald Kaberuka, a former minister of finance in Rwanda and now president of the African Development Bank: “We can learn from [the Chinese] how to organize our trade policy, to move from low to middle income status, to educate our children in skills and areas that pay off in just a couple of years.”

BRIC by BRIC
Which brings us to the BRICS, created as a group in 2009 out of the BRIC-IBSA union – and now the top locomotive of the Global South.

By then, inevitably, Blame China had already become an established fine art in Washington; the Chinese must imperatively become consumers. They are, and they will – but in their own rhythm, and following their own political model.

Even the IMF already admits that by 2016 the US may cease to be the world’s largest economy. So the great Fernand Braudel was already right when he wrote The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth- Eighteenth Century, stressing this would be the “sign of autumn” for Atlantic hegemony.

Of course there are huge problems with the BRICS, as Prashad details. Their domestic policies can indeed be interpreted as a sort of “neoliberalism with Southern characteristics”. They are far from being an ideological alternative to neoliberalism. They have been helpless to counteract the overwhelming military hegemony of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (see, for instance, the Libya fiasco). And they are not the embryo of a revolutionary shift in the world order.

But at least they are “allowing a breath of fresh air to oxygenate the stagnant world of neoliberal imperialism”.

The fresh air will circulate in the form of a new development bank, a BRICS Bank of the South version of the South American Banco del Sur, founded in 2009 (here’s Prashad’s critical take. China and Brazil have set up a $30 billion currency swap deal to pay for trade, bypassing the US dollar. Beijing and Moscow are deepening their strategic partnership. (See BRICS go over the wall, Asia Times Online, March 26, 2013.)

The BRICS as they stand – three major commodities producers plus two major commodities consumers trying to find a way out of a Western-conducted disaster – are just a start. They are already evolving as a powerful geopolitical actor stressing multi-polarity. They are bound to be joined by the next BRICS – the MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey). And don’t forget Iran. Time for BRICS MIIST?

What’s graphically obvious is that the Global South has had enough – from the ravages of casino turbo-capitalism to NATO playing Robocop from North Africa to Southwest Asia, not to mention Eurasia being encircled by that Dr Strangelove chimera – a missile shield.

The Global South remains fraught with absurdities; one just has to think of the oil and gas GCC petro-monarchies – those paragons of “democracy” – now configured as an annex to NATO. Few developments lately have been so appalling as the Arab League licking their NATO master’s boots, breaking international law to install dodgy Syrian “rebels” in the chair of a sovereign state, one of its very own founding members.

Weird scenes inside the goldmine 
The fall of neoliberalism will be bloody – and it will take time. Prashad attempts an objective analysis in terms of the unity of the Global South, drawing on the work of Indian Marxist Prabhat Patnaik.

Patnaik is a sound fellow. He knows that “a coordinated global resistance is not on the horizon”. Instead, “he emphasizes the centrality of building resistance within the nation-state, and his analysis can easily be extended to regions (he writes mainly of India, but the analysis he provides is equally applicable to the Bolivarian experiments in Latin America)”.

So the road map spells tackling the “peasant question”, which is essentially about land and rights; and to concentrate on the immediate struggles of improving people’s living and working conditions. Inevitably Prashad has to refer to Bolivian vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera, one of Latin America’s top contemporary intellectuals.

In many aspects, where the emancipation of the Global South is more advanced is in parts of South America; I was hugely impressed when I was in Bolivia in early 2008. Prashad neatly summarizes Linera’s analysis of how the process develops:

It begins with a crisis of the state that enables a ”dissident social bloc” to mobilize the people into a political project. A ”catastrophic stand-off” develops between the bloc of power and the bloc of the people, which in the case of Latin America was able to be resolved for the moment on the side of the people. The new government must then ”convert opposition demands into acts of state,” and build a deeper and broader hegemony by ”combining the ideas of mobilized society with material resources provided by or via the state.” The turning point (”point of bifurcation”), for Garcia Linera, comes through a ”series of confrontations” between the blocs that are resolved in unexpected ways, with either the consolidation of the new situation or the reconstitution of the old. We are at or near the point of bifurcation. What will come next cannot be predicted.

What is definitely known by now by the best minds in Asia, Africa and Latin America, is that there was never an end of history, as parroted by pathetic orphans of Hegel; and there was never an end of geography, as parroted by “world is flat” globalization dancing fools. The Global South’s intellectual liberation from the North is finally on. And it’s irreversible. There’s no turning back to the old order. If this was a movie, it would be 1968 replayed all over again – full time, all the time; let’s be realists, and demand, and implement, the impossible.

The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South by Vijay Prashad. Verso, March 2013. ISBN-10: 1844679527. Price US$26. 300 pages.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Posted Apr 5, ’13

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-050413.html

Crises of Capitalism

Video

David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?

This RSA Animate was taken from a lecture given as part of the RSA’s free public lecture programme. The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to driving social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information, visit http://www.thersa.org

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34459.htm

Man and Humanity in Search of Peace and New Future

By Mahboob A. Khawaja

March 28, 2013 “Information Clearing House“ -  “The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.” – (Robert Briffault. The Making of Humanity, London, 1918)

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. – (Alexander Pope “An Essay on Man”)

The mankind stands at its most tormenting crossroads – a time fraught with insane tragedies, man seeing man as a wild beast to be haunted and sadistic leaders and decadent superpowers forging bogus wars, planned massacres and environmental disasters all in a knowledge-driven, information age global culture of citizenry participation and political activism wanting to co-exist in peace and harmony within the encompassed and Living Universe. Throughout history men of power and influence commit horrible crimes against the humanity of which they are an essential part. Why? The answer rests with their individualistic absolutism and mindset. Is it part of the human nature that man should be cruel to man? The primitive scope is now enlarged to encompass crimes against all the living things, the universe and whatever it contains. We are at a RISK of Extinction.

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Global warriors are the elite class born to rule – the men of king, who are most often hated and feared and always dream of glory and triumph to achieve at a cost of ruthlessness, triviality and success leading to degeneration and viciousness across the human societies. They are influential to defy accountability for their crimes. George Bush and Tony Blair both despite being indicted by an International Tribunal for crimes against the humanity in Iraq are free and untouchable. Greg Felton (“1936 and the illusion of progress — Part I”: Mediamonitors.net: 3/31/2011) takes us to an historical insight – the aggression by a fascist regime against a helpless neighbor – a viewpoint very much intact in the contemporary global peace and security context:

“The lessons of history are lost because we are careful to compartmentalize them to the time they happened and treat them as museum pieces. Our governing myths of progress and the perfectibility of man instill in us the conceit that whatever happened “back then” could not have any meaning today because we know so much more and the world is so much different……..The criminals and victims may have changed in 75 years, but the polite rationalizations we offer up to appease international crime today are pretty much the same.”

Recently, a global Think-Tank gathering at Davos, Switzerland showed the organizing muscles of affluent bankers, politicians and billionaires and some ruling elite taken from the painful tragedies of the poor and left-over human beings in other parts of the world. It is unknown who invites who and what criterion is implied to select the rich and 1% affluent ruling elite under questioning in functional Western democracies. They have no legitimacy from the democratic masses to talk about their future. Does this mean only rich and most powerful entities are presumed intelligent and capable of change and future-making? This is naive historical thinking lingering on to this day. If so, it will undermine Reason and defy the logic of moral and intellectual advancements up to the 21st century. Bankers and few ruling elite are part of the problems, not solutions. Bankers would be obliged to save the banks, not the humanity as appears to be the case of Cyprus financial bankruptcy under the EU 10 billion Euro emergency loan. Bankers will deprive the common Cypriot folks of their lifelong savings and assets to impose the EU dictates. To them mankind is just numbers and digits and the same is viewed by the warmongers. Time and history have articulated new paradigms of change and future-making. Nobody is sure, how to imagine the future except some assumptions of the few affluent whose business will be at stake if future turns out to be problematic and uncertain. Charles A Kupchan (“From the American Century to the Competition Century- Problem of Grand Strategy” ISN- International Security Network: 11/19/2012) attempts to imagine the contextual framework:

While most emerging powers agree that we are entering a post-Western world, there is little consensus on what this world will actually look like. As a result, the grand strategies they develop will confront alternative and competing visions of what constitutes the new international order. “If the world’s emerging powers enjoyed a consensus among themselves about the nature of the post-Western world, they could drive the debate about the shape of the coming era. But rising powers are far from arriving at a shared view of the rules of the next order….. They know what they do not want — a world under the continued hegemony of the West. But they do not have a coherent vision of what should replace the Western order. Indeed, with the exception of China, which has well-funded ministries and think tanks tasked with mapping out the country’s grand strategy, other rising powers are just getting in the game. “

To many conscientious scholars, there are serious problems amongst the most powerful nations and political leaders about the future-making. They are bankrupt in ideas and practices and failure in the present, how could they be a guiding force for the future? It is no longer the world of 1945 after the German defeat that allied will be unchallenged. The new emerging powers and viable trading nations such as China, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan and Indonesia and few other could well be active participants in making a promising future irrespective of the former big powers. There is no end game in dealing with the challenges of future. One could imagine of increasing interactive inputs from the thoughts and priorities of the informed global citizenry to be a decisive force in future-making. It is the future of humanity, not of the 1% ruling and exploitative class.

Many theoreticians focus on competitive market strategies to change and societal development. Free markets and stock exchanges do not change human thinking and behavior nor do they create anew moral and intellectual future for the mankind. Markets are subservient to the will of the 1% whereas 99 % are outsiders – the oppressed species. Global bankers and financial strategists work in curves- patchwork – the work of hourly paid media jockeys to convince human conscience that something good will benefit the deprived and denied 99% out of the economy of the few- 1%. Those accumulating massive wealth and material resources will never share it with the neglected ones. If past and present are any reference point, a different future is highly contentious.

Adam W. Parsons (“Why We Should All Be Talking About Global Sharing.” Dissident Voice: 11/7/2012) attempts to outline a new foresight to make sharing – a global phenomenon:

It’s as if the age-old practice of sharing is being recollected, re-learned and re-invented in innovative new ways to deal with the multiple crises of the 21st Century. Far from being a primitive behaviour practised only in traditional societies, sharing presents a new field of study and a new way of life as well as being a simple, everyday practice among families and friends. There is much talk now of the exciting promise of the gift economy, barter systems, mutual aid societies, time banks and many other modes of exchange that are outside of the mainstream monetary system……… a wealth of literature has recently emerged that emphasises how human beings are hardwired to cooperate and share, with far-reaching implications for how we organise our political and economic systems. Together, these findings challenge many of the core assumptions of classical economic theory, in particular, the firmly-held notion that people are inherently selfish, competitive, acquisitive and individualistic by nature – assumptions that have long been used to justify an unfair economic system. Meanwhile, the resurgence of scholarly and public interest in ‘the commons’ is helping to design new systems for sharing and conserving the resources of both society and nature, including natural resources, cultural traditions and knowledge. As many people from all of these diverse fields are saying, the principle of sharing is a concept around which we can restructure our societies and use to help guide us in the urgent process of world rehabilitation.

Shamefully to many leading Western leaders, the concept of “Sharing” and “Hope” are not the practical economic-political manifestations for people-oriented change and globalization. One wonders, how would the so called militarily powerful but financially bankrupt nations – the Europeans, America and Asian and Africans-the poorest ones surviving on borrowed time and money could be equal partners in sharing with the rest of the world. Everywhere nationalism and national political interests are the corner stones of policies and practices. The 21st century age of knowledge and human expectations offer a grim picture of the present and future in-waiting. The so called civilized nations failed to produce intelligent and responsible leaders to serve the mankind. Many hourly paid intellectuals aligned with the mainstream news apparatus would not dare to touch such vital societal issues. Most politicians embracing leadership role are inept, greedy, self-centered who heavily rely on hired advisors and strategists to win the election campaigns, but not to lead the nation. Once in power, they become irrelevant, problematic and paranoid to see the people’s interests. They lose sense of reality and awareness and most importantly, consciousness of the self and the environment around them. People who become psychopath and who baffle with time and tides of political mismanagement and destroy culture and civilizations to overrun those who challenge obsessed ignorance and viciousness.

Charles A Kupchan (“From the American Century to the Competition Century- Problem of Grand Strategy” ISN- International Security Network: 11/19/2012) explains the contextual synthesis:

“As power becomes more broadly distributed across the globe, the diverging interests and strategic visions of emerging powers will ensure that the next world will be “no one’s world.” The global turn will bring to an end the era of the West’s material and ideological dominance. But what comes next will not be the Chinese century, the Asian century, or anyone else’s century. Rather, “no one’s world” will exhibit striking diversity. Alternative conceptions of domestic and international order will compete and coexist on the global stage. For the first time in history, an interdependent world will be without a center of gravity or global guardian. Previous eras were, of course, home to a multipolar landscape and a broad array of approaches to governance and commerce. But prior to the advance of globalization during the 19th century, centers of power rarely interacted with one another.”

Peace is an integral part of Man – the Chief Creation of God on Earth. Man, the embodiment of moral, intellectual faculties and reasoning synchronizing ideas and ideals within the physical construct to feel, think, live and flourish. Man will be disconnected with the Nature of Things if he fails to establish and maintain a balanced relationships within the Universe in which he exits. Man is humanity, humanity is Man- the organized grand network of natural processes which facilitate us to co-exist with the Nature of Things – the revealed enriched moral-spiritual Universe and of the inseparable natural bonds that the most hated and most feared contemporary political warlords of the globe are set to undermine for the self aggrandizement of the few. Those who violate the sanctity of this natural relationship, ultimately become egomaniac, fearful of the self to rundown others. How to safeguard the interests of the mankind and to ensure its survival from the known and unknown conspiracies, onslaught, and extinction of life and be able to live in harmonized global culture of peace, understanding and civilizations? Japan’s tsunami, Fukushima nuclear disasters and the global greenhouse effects and increasing pollutions and destruction of the living environment are ready-made time bombs to remind the mankind of ultimate extinction. The immense challenge and its on-going emerging critical implications deserve serious Thinking and moral and intellectual pondering role and responsibilities from the Thinking HUBS of the concerned global mankind.

The planet Earth is not created or built by the Nation States claiming membership at the UN. The comprehensive system of splendid and encompassed Universe and its resources on the planet Earth are God-given gift to mankind, and its violation and exploitation will be checked by God as it happened to many in the past only to be found as artifacts in museums and history books. History offers a learning role but nations and people denying the role of history ultimately cannot escape the wrath of history. Winning the wars was not part of the American aims and strategies but killing and destabilizing the poor nation was, and it has achieved that aim. All actions have reactions. The consequences are yet to come.

The Nation State is an abstract phenomenon existing on the 20th century rotten paper now on visible screen, words filled with dry ink to ensure governance of the few – the 1%. The net outcomes are political agents managing politics – a game of pretension but humanity is real and so are its rights, dignity, liberty and stance for justice. The gulf between the two is widening into conflicting time zones separating the rulers and the ruled being at odds. As if this political treason was not enough, the humanity is wired by man-made weapons of mass destruction from Planet Earth beyond to space. Nobody wants to talk about it to maintain indifference and pretension of the unknown. The ultimate aims appear to be to drive the most intellectual creation of God on the Planet Earth- the human being to a dogmatic outlook of life – into the lasting darkness of ignorant and absurd, evicting the moral conscience out of the mind and soul, torturing the body and intellect by sophisticated means of lies and deception, exhausting moral and spiritual values that distinctively characterize the human makeup and existence and coercing them to THINK and ACT in animalistic behavior. The military build-ups, sophisticated war machines and the on-going global wars in Iraq and Afghanistan expanded onward to Pakistan are the net products of this imposed tyranny. Where do you draw the defining pulse between rationality, and political tyranny surging into insanity all over the globe? Rick Rozoff (“Global Grandiosity: America’s 21st Century International Architecture” MediaMonitors.net: 9/16/2010), out of the composite dictionary provides a context to the afflictions in question, ones which are symptomatic of the two most severe forms of mental illness: Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: Rozoff further explains that: “Delusions of grandeur are associated with the manic phase of bipolar disorder and frequently with other delusional content typical of schizophrenics, especially delusions of persecution – paranoia. …….The reason the two are frequently linked and mutually reinforcing ….A normal person – or nation – doesn’t entertain that degree of self-importance in either respect.”

Fran Scott (“Who are we?” Mediamonitors.net 09/1/2010): Wonders – Who Are We? A real identity crisis the US political psyche faces but often denies its implication:

“Under assault by a consciousness control system that insists we are doing quite well even when evidence shows we’re on the critical list………If we, the people of these United States, are ever to be a united nation we have to penetrate the lead curtain of misinformation………. We have a serious social identity crisis and cannot save ourselves by making war against ourselves. But if we want a peaceful world and safe environment, we need to break out of the mental prison in which we’ll remain as long as we are kept separate, and unequal, by the controllers of what goes into our minds under the false label of information.”

To introduce Abb Pierre (1912-2007), French founder of Emmaus International, Ita Marguet wrote (Diva International):

“Acknowledging this Man of Humanity, Abb? Pierre received the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood amongst peoples … “For having fought throughout his life for the defence of human rights, democracy and peace, For having entirely dedicated himself to helping relieve spiritual and physical suffering, For having inspired – regardless of nationality, race or religion – universal solidarity with the Emmaus communities”

Surely, he was not a politician to perform staged pretension but a moral and spiritual being dedicated to the cause of mankind. Politics is increasing becoming a self-centered cycle of orchestrated cynicism of need and greed, implying civic norms and wickedness to rob off the people from their inborn rights, dignity and power to harmonize the socio –political culture of the society. But Ita Marguet points out that Abb Pierre had a unique character: “As social activist and militant, he was vociferous in his rebellion against political and social injustice and openly disagreed with the Church and Vatican on some issues. He was received by many of the world’s political, social and spiritual leaders, including three Popes.” But in the 21st knowledge-driven century there are no leaders- role models of political imagination for peace and the future. Likewise, the global institutions controlled by the FEW are a failure in offering a credible sense of intellectual security to the mankind. If Dr. Martin Luher King Jr. was alive, he would have been an excellent role model for the humanity and so is Professor Noam Chomsky of the MIT- a man of vision for peace and future-making, and so was late Professor Edward W. Said of Columbia University – a Palestinian, an embodiment of moral and intellectual hope for the mankind.

One wonders about the moving time span and recorded history in which people of conscience lived, shared imagination and reasoned. Why and what Shakespeare must have entailed and expressed his ingenuity to stage the politics “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” But is it a spring of our discontent or as to Shakespeare “Now is the winter of our discontent.” The global snapshot appears terribly cruel, horrifying and dehumanized, there is no man or the humanity co-existing with sense of originality, passion for the self- actualization – self awareness and realization who we are and our role and responsibility in the bigger picture of the globe, knowing oneself knows the mankind. Ones own forgetfulness with body and soul (the real person – Man) is to discord the value and bonds to the humanity.

Alexander Pope (“An Essay on Man”) it seems, had an in-depth knowledge, vision, and understanding of the human nature, spiritual values and search for truth and peace in quest for Change and Reason:

Of Man what see we, but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known, ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own. Then, in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain There must be, somewhere, such rank as Man; Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Wars kill people and destroy the human habitats. Yet, the paranoid and most hated maniacs put up the show of war celebrations – a success achieved by strangulating the humanity – cost of ruthlessness, human degeneration and lack of imagination. So what is there to celebrate for the tragedies of the WW1 and WW2? Not so, the modern genius , no matter how wicked and ignorant it is, camouflaged the scene by pumps and parades as if the wars were the blessings in disguise to manage the ever growing human herd by the few sadistic and egomaniac Draculas. Felicity Arbuthnot (“Remembrance Day: Let this Silence be a Scream for Peace” Dissident Voice: 11/14/2011) traces out the glued wrong thinking of the warmongers celebrating the acts of savagery by man against man and points out that:

“…Hypocrisy does not come more astounding than this. There has not been a single bloodless year since. More often than not, the US, Britain and European countries has been involved. …..the pain of others should surely be, and have been, of concern, distress and subject of mediation and conflict resolve.”

Those who dream of glory and triumph by having invincible armed forces are not new to the history. They live in a cycle of self-ingrained deceit and ultimate destruction. They use vicious strategies to poison the human mind with fear and hatred against others. George Bush and Tony Blair and their accomplice were masters of lies and deceptions using the 9/11 events to wage bogus wars on terror. Robert C. Koehler (“Soul Poison” Common Dreams : 3/22/2013) is well known Chicago-based journalist, author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound and nationally syndicated writer, attempts to put the focal issue in a rational context:

“We’ve lost a war without being able to surrender — and thus divest ourselves of the consciousness that got us into it. We are unable to look honestly at what we did and why, and determine not to do it again……How do we get the poison out of our system? As long as it’s present, we’ll go to war again. The shame and remorse that should be borne collectively are scattered among a million isolated souls: the soldiers and vets who bear, alone, the moral consequences of what they did and what they were a part of. Some of them speak out, and many of us hear, but their voices don’t reach the centers of political power, where future wars are being plotted.”

The knowledge-driven intellect and civilizations know-how to make the Man perform better for change and unto a promising future. But prevalent ignorance and systematic arrogance of the 1% FEW needs formidable intellectual and political challenge to make them RETHINK for a Navigational Change. The global humanity must RISE to challenge the few ignorant and egomaniacs –the modern Ivan the Terrible to stop blood lusted passion against the mankind. It is just these FEW have no sense of humanity or accountability even in Western people’s democracies. The pulse of time and highly sophisticated sense of Man and humanity look for men of new ideas, rational visions and enriched moral- spiritual leadership to lead the people out of the forced economic and political bondage of the few. The failure of the Western industrialized democracies is observable.

The passion and instinct of Man in search of Humanity does not pause nor end here. But despite living in a knowledge-driven global culture of the 21st century and widespread awareness and active participation of the global citizenry, be it through the internet, cell phones, facebook, twitter or other means of know-how and social networks, the human instinct of killing goes unabated. How to THINK to stop and change this perpetuated animosity and political vindictiveness of the few warlords and to start living as Chief Creation of God – the Man and Humanity – equipped to be rational being and interacting in a universe revealed as moral, spiritual and living entity, pursuing objective values and adaptation to the world of Reason, Human Dignity, Freedom of Thinking, Justice and Equality, not in a utopian construct but a proactive visionary world of CHANGE for MAN and the HUMANITY to be different and optimistic from the coerced, broken and sadistic present.

Eric Bogle wrote “The Green Fields of France” and it was sung by Fureys:

Did you really believe, when they told you the cause, Did you really believe that this war would end wars? Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame, The killing and dying it was all done in vain Oh Willy McBride it all happened again – And again, and again, and again, and again.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution, and comparative Western-Islamic cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest one: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, May 2012.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34447.htm

If I Ruled the World

By Antony Loewenstein

March 27, 2013 “Information Clearing House“ -“Tharunka” - The role of the US hegemony is over. Washington no longer controls the world by charm and force. It’s a multipolar planet with countless centres of power. Wouldn’t this be something to celebrate?

In theory, yes. But then, all of a sudden, in a long session of the United Nations Security Council, an Australian from Sydney is appointed to the new position of head chief to manage an unruly earth. Unlike the Secretary General, this individual wields real power to bring change.

That person is me. After thanking my parents and atheist deities, I give the following speech:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your belief in me. It is an honor to assume this position and I pledge to use it responsibly.

At this time in world history, it’s vital to speak truths that many of you will find unpalatable. The vision for a better world is easy to convey. Who doesn’t want a cleaner and safer planet for our children? But getting there is the challenge and, from today onwards, the following policies will be implemented with your generous consent.

The last centuries have seen countless countries commit genocide and gross human rights abuses. Without serious reparations for the crimes committed, from Britain in the Congo in the late 1800s, America through slavery and Australia’s treatment of its indigenous population, we will continue living in the shadow of these outrages. Without proper compensation for today’s generations, it is impossible to properly progress as a community.

All too often, our leaders talk about human rights as an abstract notion, without realising their populations recognise the hypocrisy at the heart of the pledge. Sales of deadly weapons to the world’s most despotic regimes have never been higher and this will stop. Today. Israel, America, Europe and other leading arms manufacturers will have to find new ways of making money, while nations such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia will no longer be able to repress their own people with guns assembled in the United States.

We have a responsibility as a connected world to not tolerate and enable injustice in one state while opposing it elsewhere. Applying international law and holding power to account, whether these officials or governments are sitting in Washington, London, Canberra, Tel Aviv, Kigali or Beijing, must be central in the 21st century. Accountability will be served if Syria’s Bashar al-Assad appears in the Hague alongside George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

A just planet also means a sustainable earth. Climate change is real and worsening. Renewable energy sources will be used in all nations as soon as is humanely position. This will, once and for all, reduce the reliance on dirty fossil fuels that are already causing severe health problems in China and extreme weather patterns in Australia, Antarctica, Africa and South America.

Closer to home, Australia’s two-party system is crumbling under its own internal contradictions. With minor differences between Labor and Liberal, and the Greens struggling to assume a larger political role, we should encourage smaller groups, such as the Wikileaks Party and Pirate Party, to oppose the growing surveillance state.

Tackling the world’s most serious issues requires a robust and diverse media. No one media owner will be allowed to own more than 50 per cent of newspapers, television, online or other sources. Tax breaks will be given to assist new ventures get heard above the often toxic and belligerent mainstream press.

I have only touched on some subjects that I believe must be addressed for the 21st century to avoid the human catastrophes that befall the 20th century. Undoubtedly, you will all have other ideas. My door is always open.

As an atheist Jew, I wish you all the best in your endeavours.”

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney-based independent freelance journalist, author, documentarian, photographer and blogger. He is the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. http://antonyloewenstein.com/ 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34437.htm

WWIII Is Coming Soon & Here’s Why !?!?!

Social Engineering and the 21st Century Truth Emergency

By James F. Tracy

March 20, 2013 “Information Clearing House“ -  On March 9, 1995 Edward Bernays died at the age of 103. His professional endeavors involved seeking to change popular attitudes and behavior by fundamentally altering social reality.[1] Since he laid the modern groundwork for deceiving the public we are for better or worse living out his legacy today.

Several years ago Project Censored directors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff identified and explained the “truth emergency” that is among the greatest threats to civil society and human existence. This crisis is manifest in flawed (or non-existent) investigations into 9/11 and other potential false flag events, fraudulent elections, and illegal wars vis-à-vis a corporate-controlled news media that fail to adequately inform the public on such matters. While neglecting or obscuring inquiry into such events and phenomena major media disparage independent and often uncredentialed researchers as “conspiracy theorists” or, more revealingly, “truthers.”[2]

The truth emergency continues today, and social engineers like Bernays long understood the significance of undermining the use of reason, for it is only through reason that truth may be determined and evaluated. To be sure, individuals and institutions that have successfully achieved legitimacy in the public mind are recognized as having a monopoly on the capacity to reason and are thus perceived as the foremost bearers of truth and knowledge. Through the endorsement of “experts”—figures perceived as authoritative in their field—the public could easily be persuaded on anything from tobacco use and water fluoridation to military intervention abroad.

Today reason is defined one dimensionally; its relationship to truth largely taken-for-granted. Yet as Leibniz observed, reason marks our humanity, suggesting a portion of the soul capable of a priori recognition of truth. With this in mind the modern individual in the mass has been rendered at least partially soulless through her everyday deferral to the powerfully persuasive notion and representation of expertise. However narrowly focused, under the guise of objectivity the institutionally-affiliated journalist, academic, bureaucrat, and corporate spokesperson have in many instances become the portals of reason through which the public is summoned to observe “truth.”

These agents of reason are largely bereft of emotion, moderate in temperament, and speak or write in an unsurprisingly formulaic tone. The narratives they relate and play out present tragedy with the expectation of certain closure. And with a century of commercial media programming the mass mind has come to not only accept but anticipate such regulation and control under the regime of institutionally-sanctioned expertise.

The selection and arrangement of experts by corporate media guarantees a continued monopoly on “truth,” particularly when presented to an uninquisitive and politically dormant public. Yet this phenomenon extends to ostensibly more trustworthy media outlets such as public broadcasting, where a heightened utilization of credentialed expertise is required to ensure the consensus of those who perceive themselves as more refined than the Average Joe.

This preservation of what passes for reason and truth cannot be sustained without a frequent dialectical struggle with unreason and falsity. Since many individuals have unconsciously placed their genuine reasoning faculties in abeyance and often lack a valid knowledge of politics and history, their unspoken faith in government and the broader political economy to protect and further their interests is groundless. Against this milieu those genuinely capable of utilizing their reasoning capacities in the pursuit of truth are often held up as heretical for their failure to accept what is presented as reality, with the requisite “conspiracy theory” label wielded in Orwellian fashion to denote such abnormal intellectual activity.

Lacking the autonomous use of reason to recognize truth, form often trumps substance. For example, a seemingly obscure news website with unconventional graphics or an emotional news presenter purporting to discuss the day’s affairs is typically perceived as untrustworthy and illegitimate by a public conditioned to accept forms of news and information where objectivity and professionalism often camouflage disinformation.

In 2013 the truth emergency is greater than ever, and in the era of seemingly never-ending pseudo-events and Potemkin villages presented by major media as the reality with which we must contend, the application of independent reason in pursuit of truth has all too frequently been replaced with an unthinking obeisance toward the smokescreen of expertise disguising corporate power and control.

James F. Tracy PhD, teaches classes on journalism and media at Florida Atlantic University. His work on media history, politics and culture has appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, edited volumes, and alternative news and opinion outlets.http://memoryholeblog.com

Notes

[1] Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency and Media Reform,” Daily Censored, March 31, 2009.

[2] “Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ and Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103,” New York Times, March 10, 1995.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34358.htm

Why Food Riots are Likely to Become the New Normal

The link between intensifying inequality, debt, climate change, fossil fuel dependency and the global food crisis is undeniable

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

March 13, 2013 “Information Clearing House“ -“Guardian“ -  Just over two years since Egypt’s dictator President Hosni Mubarak resigned , little has changed. Cairo’s infamous Tahrir Square has remained a continual site of clashes between demonstrators and security forces, despite a newly elected president. It’s the same story in Tunisia, and Libya where protests and civil unrest have persisted under now ostensibly democratic governments.

The problem is that the political changes brought about by the Arab spring were largely cosmetic. Scratch beneath the surface, and one finds the same deadly combination of environmental, energy and economic crises.

We now know that the fundamental triggers for the Arab spring were unprecedented food price rises. The first sign things were unravelling hit in 2008, when a global rice shortage coincided with dramatic increases in staple food prices, triggering food riots across the middle east, north Africa and south Asia. A month before the fall of the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported record high food prices for dairy, meat, sugar and cereals.

Since 2008, global food prices have been consistently higher than in preceding decades, despite wild fluctuations. This year, even with prices stabilising, the food price index remains at 210 – which some experts believe is the threshold beyond which civil unrest becomes probable. The FAO warns that 2013 could see prices increase later owing to tight grain stocks from last year’s adverse crop weather.

Whether or not those prices materialise this year, food price volatility is only a symptom of deeper systemic problems – namely, that the global industrial food system is increasingly unsustainable. Last year, the world produced 2,241m tonnes of grain, down 75m tonnes or 3%from the 2011 record harvest.

The key issue, of course, is climate change. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10-20% drop in rice yields over the past decade. Last year, four-fifths of the US experienced a heatwave, there were prolonged droughts in Russia and Africa, a lighter monsoon in India and floods in Pakistan – extreme weather events that were likely linked to climate changeafflicting the world’s major food basket regions.

The US Department of Agriculture predicts a 3-4% food price rise this year – a warning that is seconded in the UK. Make no mistake: on a business-as-usual scenario, this is the new normal. Overall, global grain consumption has exceeded production in eight of the past 13 years. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40% because of climate change alone.

But climate is not the only problem. Industrial farming methods are breaching the biophysical limits of the soil. World agricultural land productivity between 1990 and 2007 was 1.2% a year, nearly half compared with 1950-90 levels of 2.1%.

2008 also saw a shift to a new era of volatile, but consistently higher, oil prices. Regardless of where one stands on the prospects for unconventional oil and gas for ameliorating “peak oil”, the truth is that we will never return to the heyday of cheap petroleum.

High oil prices will continue to debilitate the global economy, particularly in Europe – but they will also continue to feed into the oil-dependent industrial food system. Currently, every major point in industrial food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. To make matters worse, predatory speculation on food and other commodities by banks drives prices higher, increasing profits at the expense of millions of the world’s poor.

In the context of economies wracked by debt, this creates a perfect storm of problems which will guarantee high prices – eventually triggering civil unrest – for the foreseeable future.

It’s only a matter of time before this fatal cocktail of climate, energy and economic challenges hits the Gulf kingdoms – where Saudi Arabia is struggling with an average total oil depletion rate of about 29%. If oil revenues reduce in coming years, this would lower subsidies for food and fuel. We’ve already seen how this can play out, for instance, in Egypt, whose domestic oil production peaked back in 1996, reducing government spending on services amid mounting debt.

The link between intensifying inequality, debt, climate change, fossil fuel dependency and the global food crisis is now undeniable. As population and industrial growth continue, the food crisis will only get worse. If we don’t do something about it, according to an astounding new Royal Society paper, we may face the prospect of civilisational collapse within this century.

The Arab spring is merely a taste of things to come.

Nafeez Ahmed – Bestselling Author, International Security Scholar, Investigative Journalist on the Deep Politics of the “War on Terror” in the context of the Crisis of Civilization - Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed writes at The Cutting Edge

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34284.htm

Child Marriages: 39,000 Every Day

By UN Women

Joint press release by UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO, UN Women, the United Nations Foundation, World Vision, Girls Not Brides, Every Woman Every Child, World YWCA and The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.

———- NEW YORK, 7 March 2013 – Between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides, according to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

If current levels of child marriages hold, 14.2 million girls annually or 39,000 daily will marry too young.

Furthermore, of the 140 million girls who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be under the age of 15.

Despite the physical damage and the persistent discrimination to young girls, little progress has been made toward ending the practice of child marriage. In fact, the problem threatens to increase with the expanding youth population in the developing world.

Child marriage is an appalling violation of human rights and robs girls of their education, health and long-term prospects,” says Babatunde Osotimehin, M.D, Executive Director, UNFPA. “A girl who is married as a child is one whose potential will not be fulfilled. Since many parents and communities also want the very best for their daughters, we must work together and end child marriage.”

Girls married young are more vulnerable to intimate partner violence and sexual abuse than those who marry later.

“Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death in young women aged 15-19. Young girls who marry later and delay pregnancy beyond their adolescence have more chances to stay healthier, to better their education and build a better life for themselves and their families,” says Flavia Bustreo, M.D., Assistant Director-General for Family, Women’s and Children’s Health at the World Health Organization. “We have the means at our disposal to work together to stop child marriage.”

On 7 March, a special session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will focus on child marriage. The Governments of Bangladesh, Malawi and Canada will jointly sponsor the session. It is held in support of Every Woman Every Child, a movement spearheaded by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that aims to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015.

The session will address the problems created by early marriages and ways to prevent them. Mereso Kiluso, a Tanzanian mother of five now in her 20s, who was married at 14 to an abusive man in his 70s, will describe her experience.

If child marriage is not properly addressed, UN Millennium Development Goals 4 & 5 – calling for a two-thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate and a three-fourths reduction in the maternal deaths by 2015 – will not be met.

Child marriage – defined as marriage before the age of 18 – applies to both boys and girls, but the practice is far more common among young girls.

Child marriage is a global issue but rates vary dramatically, both within and between countries. In both proportions and numbers, most child marriages take place in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

In South Asia, nearly half of young women and in sub-Saharan Africa more than one third of young women are married by their 18th birthday.

The 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are: Niger, 75 per cent; Chad and Central African Republic, 68 per cent; Bangladesh, 66 per cent; Guinea, 63 per cent; Mozambique, 56 per cent; Mali, 55 per cent; Burkina Faso and South Sudan, 52 per cent; and Malawi, 50 per cent.

In terms of absolute numbers, because of the size of its population, India has the most child marriages.

What progress has been made to stop the practice has been in urban areas where families see greater work and education opportunities for young girls.

A violation of the rights of girls

“No girl should be robbed of her childhood, her education and health, and her aspirations. Yet today millions of girls are denied their rights each year when they are married as child brides,” says Michelle Bachelet, M.D., Executive Director of UN Women.

Child marriage is increasingly recognized as a violation of the rights of girls for the following reasons:

• Effectively ending their education
• Blocking any opportunity to gain vocational and life skills
• Exposing them to the risks of too-early pregnancy, child bearing, and motherhood before they are physically and psychologically ready
• Increasing their risk of intimate partner sexual violence and HIV infection

“Child marriage is a huge problem in poor communities,” says Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary of the World YWCA. “Early marriage and child marriage robs the future. Girls lose the opportunity for education. They lose the opportunity to choose their partner and must live with that pain for the rest of their lives.”

The World YWCA will present a petition to CSW urging the group to pass a special resolution calling for an end child marriage. Signatories believe that by working collaboratively, member states and concerned groups can end child marriage by 2030.

Despite the fact that 158 countries have set the legal age for marriage at 18 years, laws are rarely enforced since the practice of marrying young children is upheld by tradition and social norms.

The detrimental effects of early child marriage

“Child marriage is not only wrong, it is dangerous. It exposes a young girl to profound health risks from early pregnancy and difficult childbirth and it exposes her baby to complications of premature birth,” says Anthony Lake, Executive Director of UNICEF.

According to the UN, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death for girls aged 15-19 years in developing countries. Of the16 million adolescent girls who give birth every year, about 90 per cent are already married. UNICEF estimates some 50,000 die, almost all in low- and middle-income countries. Stillbirths and newborn deaths are 50 per cent higher among mothers under the age of 20 than in women who get pregnant in their 20s.

In many poor countries, most young girls, regardless of age, are forced to demonstrate their fertility once they are married.

“These children, because that’s what they are, are discouraged from using contraceptives or might have to ask their husbands’ permission, or they have no knowledge of or access to what they need,” says Carole Presern, PhD, Executive Director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health and a midwife.

Violence common in child marriages

Loss of girlhood and health problems related to early pregnancy are not the only hazards confronting young brides.

Even though some parents believe early marriage will protect their daughters from sexual violence, the reverse is often true, according to UN studies.

Young girls who marry before the age of 18 have a greater risk of becoming victims of intimate partner violence than those who marry at an older age. This is especially true when the age gap between the child bride and spouse is large.

“Child marriage marks an abrupt and often violent introduction to sexual relations,” says Claudia Garcia Moreno, M.D., of WHO, a leading expert in violence against women. “The young girls are powerless to refuse sex and lack the resources or legal and social support to leave an abusive marriage.”

A complex issue with deep roots

Child marriage, which has existed for centuries, is a complex issue, rooted deeply in gender inequality, tradition and poverty. The practice is most common in rural and impoverished areas, where prospects for girls can be limited. In many cases, parents arrange these marriages and young girls have no choice.

Poor families marry off young daughters to reduce the number of children they need to feed, clothe and educate. In some cultures, a major incentive is the price prospective husbands will pay for young brides.

Social pressures within a community can lead families to wed young children. For example, some cultures believe marrying girls before they reach puberty will bring blessings on families. Some societies believe that early marriage will protect young girls from sexual attacks and violence and see it as a way to insure that their daughter will not become pregnant out of wedlock and bring dishonour to the family.

Too, many families marry their daughters simply because early marriage is the only option they know.

“Many faith leaders and their communities are already working to end child marriage and other forms of violence against children. Changing stubborn behavior is immensely challenging, so we must go further to positively influence beliefs and actions,” says Tim Costello, Chief Executive of World Vision Australia.

Malawi’s work to end child marriage

In Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, at least half of young women are married before the age of 18. The country is working to end the practice “to allow the girl child to continue with education, to become a learned citizen who can contribute to the development and economy of the country,” says Ms. Catherine Gotani Hara, Malawi’s Minister of Health.

Another reason for Malawi’s effort is the high teenage pregnancy rate and the fact that teen pregnancies contribute to 20-30 per cent of maternal deaths in the country. “By ending early marriages we can avert up to 30 per cent of maternal deaths and also reduce the neonatal mortality rate,” she says.

The Minister reports that Malawi has taken a number of steps aimed at ending the practice of child marriage. These include:

• Providing free universal access to primary education;
• Working with chiefs to sensitize their communities on the importance of sending children to school, with an emphasis on the girl child;
• Implementing a policy that allows girls who become pregnant during school to go back to school after delivery to continue their education;
• Working with parliamentarians to raise the age at marriage to 18 years by 2014; and
• Providing Youth Friendly Health Services. This outreach empowers youths with the information that would enable them to make informed choices about their reproductive health.

UN Millennium Development Goals

Ending child marriage is closely related to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Every Woman Every Child initiative and to efforts to reach Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 3, 4 and 5 to promote gender equality, to reduce child mortality and to improve maternal health.

The continued occurrence of child marriage has hindered the achievement of these MDGs, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

“I urge governments, community and religious leaders, civil society, the private sector, and families—especially men and boys—to do their part to let girls be girls, not brides,” says the Secretary-General.

Ending child marriage would also help countries achieve other MDGs aimed at eradicating poverty, achieving universal education and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and should also figure within a renewed development agenda.

“The needs of adolescent girls were overlooked in the Millennium Development Goals; they must have a central place in any new goals set by the international community,” said Lakshmi Sundaram, Global Coordinator of Girls Not Brides. “By using the rate of child marriage as an indicator to monitor progress against new goals, we can make sure that governments address the practice and focus on ensuring the welfare of their girls.”

Strategies for ending child marriage recommended to the Commission on the Status of Women include:

• Supporting and enforcing legislation to increase the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 years;
• Providing equal access to quality primary and secondary education for both girls and boys;
• Mobilizing girls, boys, parents and leaders to change practices that discriminate against girls and to create social, economic, and civic opportunities for girls and young women;
• Providing girls who are already married with options for schooling, employment and livelihood skills, sexual and reproductive health information and services (including HIV prevention), and offering recourse from violence in the home;
• Addressing the root causes of child marriage, including poverty, gender inequality and discrimination, the low value placed on girls and violence against girls.

Participants at the special session on child marriage will include: Margaret Mensah-Williams, Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Namibia; Michelle Bachelet, M.D., Executive Director of UN Women; Babatunde Osotimehin, M.D., Executive Director of UNFPA, Lakshmi Sundaram, Global Coordinator of Girls Not Brides; and Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia. Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary of the World YWCA, will moderate the session. Comments will be provided by government co-hosts of the event: H.E. Catherine Gotani Hara, Minister of Health of Malawi; H.E. Dr. A. K. Abdul Momen, Permanent Representative to the UN, Bangladesh, and Guillermo Rishchynski, Permanent Representative to the UN, Canada, Carole Presern, Executive Director, The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health will introduce government representatives.

Contacts:
Fadéla Chaib, WHO:  +41 22 791 3228 ,  +41 79 475 5556  (mob); chaibf@who.int
Mandy Kibel, UNFPA:  +1 212 297-5293 ;  + 1 917 310-8219  (mob); kibel@unfpa.org
Sarah Crowe, UNICEF:  +1 212 326-7206 ,  +1 646 209-1590  (mob); scrowe@unicef.org
Marshall Hoffman, H&H:  +1 703 533-3535 ,  +1 703 801 8602  (mob); marshall@hoffmanpr.com
Nils Hoffman, H&H Video:  +1 703 967-1490  (mob); nils@hoffmanpr.com

See also -

Child brides beaten up, killed in South Sudan: The 17-year-old beaten to death for refusing to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. The teen dragged by her family to be raped to force her into marrying an elderly man.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34229.htm

The Corporation

I believe this is one of the best and most important documentary films to be made in many years. 
This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit.

After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the common good of the people, and who will go to any lengths, legally and otherwise, in the pursuit of profit and the bottom line. Reviewer: C. Middleton (Australia)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12998.htm

Over four billion people worldwide lack adequate sanitation

By Bryan Dyne 

26 February 2013

One aspect of the global social crisis was revealed in a recent studypublished in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Using 2010 sewerage connection data available from 167 countries and sewerage treatment data from 77 of those countries, the study found that 4.1 billion people in the world to not have access to basic sanitation, double the previous estimate. This includes a lack of flush toilets and exposure to untreated sewage.

The research, conducted by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was done as an assessment of the United Nations’ 1990 Millennium Development Goal, which was supposed to cut in half “the proportion of the population without sustainable access to … basic sanitation” over 25 years.

Compared to previous studies, it broadened what can be considered “improved sanitation” such that only areas that treat sewerage before the discharging excreta into the environment were included.

The new definition raises the percentage of the population without basic sanitation in 1990 from 53 to 64, and estimates that the 2015 goal of the United Nations will not be met. Instead, the study projects that only five percent of the world’s population will have gained access to improved sanitation by 2015.

By the UN’s definition, basic sanitation is indicated by the percentage of people using facilities such as ventilated pit latrines, composting toilets and toilets connected to a sewer system, septic tank or pit latrine. Those without basic sanitation are those that have access only to basic pit latrines, chamber pots or use the bush or field. In general, basic sanitation “hygienically separates human excreta from human contact.” Under this definition, 4.3 billion people have access to basic sanitation.

However, this broad categorization does not make mention of sewerage treatment. Across the world, common practice is to simply dump untreated sewerage into nearby bodies of water. As a result, more than 50 percent of the world’s lakes and rivers are polluted with untreated waste water. Coastal areas are similarly contaminated.

This exposes the populations using these bodies of water to human excreta via drinking water, contamination of fish, pollution of irrigation systems, and direct contact. Viruses and bacteria associated with such exposure include E. coli and cholera, among a host of others. Annually, nearly 1.6 million people die from waterborne diseases directly caused by unsanitary water.

A more expanded definition of “improved sanitation” is also required to account for the inter-connectivity of human society. Under the current UN definition, human populations are treated as though they are isolated from one another, so while one area may remain sanitary by dumping waste into a body of water, those downstream face the full dangers.

Access to sewerage treatment in individual countries was found to be affected by the income levels of the countries. For low income countries, generally those whose populations subsist below the world poverty level of $1.25 per day, less than four percent of the population have access to sewerage at all. There is little to no waste treatment. Only high income countries have both sewerage connections and treatment, averaging at 80 percent of their populations.

Across the world, 1.5 billion people have sewerage systems that do not include treatment, thus affecting nearby populations. Asia accounts for 69 percent of this figure, with Europe and South America accounting for 12 percent and 11 percent respectively. This figure does not include the 2.6 billion people world-wide who are simply lacking adequate sewerage. Moreover, an investigation into the lack of other sanitation facilities that lead to contamination of the local and wider environment would no doubt reveal that even a larger majority of the world’s population is denied the basic social right to a healthy and safe environment.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/26/sani-f26.html

Rebels Stand Alone

By Chris Hedges

February 25, 2013 “Information Clearing House“- (Truthdig) -   I was in the Swiss village of Begnins outside Geneva shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. I spent three days there with Axel von dem Bussche, a former Wehrmacht major, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for extreme battlefield bravery, three times wounded in World War II, and the last surviving member of the inner circle of German army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

I was reminded of my visit with von dem Bussche, whom I was interviewing for The Dallas Morning News, by the 70th anniversary of the execution of five Munich University students and their philosophy professor who were members of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany. The BBC last week interviewed the 99-year-old Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, who hid leaflets for the group in her closet and helped make stencils used to paint slogans on walls. [Click here to hear the interview or click here to see the BBC’s article based on the interview.] The six White Rose members managed to distribute thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets before they were arrested by the Gestapo and guillotined. The text of their sixth and final set of leaflets was smuggled out of Germany by the resistance leader Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was arrested in 1944 and hanged by the Nazis in January 1945. Copies of the leaflets’ language were dropped over Germany by Allied planes in July 1943. Furst-Ramdohr, who was widowed during the war when her first husband was killed on the Russian front, also was arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned but eventually released.

The White Rose has been lionized by postwar Germans—one of its members, Alexander Schmorell, was made a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church last year, and squares and schools in Germany are named for the resisters—but in the BBC interview Furst-Ramdohr curtly dismissed the adulation of the group.

“At the time, they’d have had us all executed,” she said in speaking of most Germans’ hatred of resisters during the war.

Although history has vindicated resistance groups such as the White Rose and plotters such as von dem Bussche, they were desperately alone, reviled by the wider public and forced to defy the law, their oaths of national allegiance, and public opinion. The resisters, once exposed, were condemned in vitriolic terms by most of the German public, and their lopsided trials were state-choreographed lynchings. Von dem Bussche said that even after the war he was spat upon as he walked down a city street. He and those like him who made a moral choice to physically defy evil teach us something extremely important about rebellion. It is, when it begins, not safe, comfortable or popular. Those rare individuals who have the moral and physical courage to resist must accept that they will be pariahs. They must live outside the law. And they must be prepared to be condemned.

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start,” one of the White Rose members, Sophie Scholl, said on Feb. 21, 1943, at her trial in a Nazi court. “What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”

Von dem Bussche, who died in 1993, took part as a 20-year-old lieutenant in the invasions of Belgium, Luxembourg, France—where a French sniper blasted off his right thumb and he was shot through the shoulder—and Poland. He was stationed after the invasion of Poland in the town of Dubno in the western Ukraine. His military unit was ordered to secure an abandoned air base, and the young officer watched asthe SS took some 2,000 Jews into the airfield.

“The Jews were trucked in from the surrounding countryside, stripped and forced by the black-uniformed officers toward long, deep trenches,” von dem Bussche told me when I interviewed him. “They were shot in their heads by an SS officer with a machine pistol and then the next row was made to lie down and shot in their heads. It is not an easy memory to live with, especially as I considered myself, as an officer of the German army, to be an accessory to these murders.”

It was then that he decided to defy Hitler. But it would only be in 1943, when it was clear that the Germans were losing the war, that he and a small group of other officers led by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg began to plot to assassinate Hitler. The conspirators did not defy the Nazi regime on behalf of the Jews, von dem Bussche conceded, but to save the country from defeat, dismemberment and catastrophe.

“One motive, along with just stopping the killing, was the most valid, to stop the Russians east of Poland,” he said of the plotters. “If we had managed to keep the Russians out, Europe would have been spared the division and pain of the last 44 years.”

By 1943 von dem Bussche was a captain. He was asked to model the army’s new winter coat for Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, the Nazi leader’s headquarters in East Prussia. He and von Stauffenberg managed to get silent fuses—the German fuses hissed when lit—and plastic explosives from the British underground. Von dem Bussche also had two hand grenades. He planned to physically seize Hitler and ignite the grenades in a suicide mission intended to kill the führer and perhaps other high-ranking Nazi officials in the room. The code name for the operation was “Overcoat.”

Von Stauffenberg at the time told von dem Bussche, “I am committing high treason with all my might and means” and added that under natural law the rebels had a duty to use violence to defend the innocent from the horrific crimes of the state.

Von dem Bussche was summoned to Hitler’s headquarters in November 1943. He waited for three days about 10 miles away. He rarely left his room. He woke up every morning and wondered, he said, if he would be alive in the evening and “if my nerve would hold.” But the train carrying the winter uniforms was bombed by Allied warplanes, and von dem Bussche was sent back to the Russian front, where he lost a leg in the bitter fighting.

Von dem Bussche, 6 feet 5 inches tall and with cobalt-blue eyes and a voice that rumbled like a freight train during the interview, refused to describe what he or the other plotters did as heroism. He detested words like “honor” or “glory” when they were applied to warfare. He had no time for those who romanticized war. He said he had no option as a human being but to resist. He acted, he said, to save his “self-esteem.”

“There was no hero stuff involved, none at all,” he said. “I thought this was an adequate means to balance out what I had seen. I felt that this was justifiable homicide and was the only means to stop mass murder inside and outside Germany.”

His was the 10th thwarted attempt on Hitler’s life. There would be one more.

On July 20, 1944, von Stauffenberg carried two small bombs in a briefcase to a meeting with Hitler. He struggled before the meeting to arm the bombs with pliers, a difficult task as he had lost his right hand and had only three fingers on his left hand after being wounded in North Africa. He managed to arm only one bomb. He placed the briefcase with the bomb under the table near Hitler. He left the room and was outside at the time of the explosion, which killed four people—including Hitler’s security double—but only slightly wounded Hitler, who was shielded by a table leg. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels announced over the radio that Hitler had survived. Hitler spoke to the nation not long afterward. Von Stauffenberg and other conspirators were captured and hastily executed by a firing squad.

Von dem Bussche, recovering in a Waffen-SS hospital outside Berlin from the loss of his leg, anxiously followed the news of the assassination attempt on the radio. He listened to Hitler’s angry tirade against the “traitors” who had attempted to kill him. He knew it would not be long before the SS appeared at his bedside. He spent the night eating page after page of his address book, which had the name of every major conspirator who was under arrest or dead. The British explosive material from his aborted suicide bombing was in a suitcase under his bed. He asked another officer to spirit the suitcase out of the hospital and toss it into a lake. He was repeatedly interrogated over the next few days but because none of the other plotters had implicated him, even under torture, he managed to elude their fate.

He suffered lifelong guilt over his survival. As a rebel he did not succeed, at least not in killing Hitler and terminating the regime. He felt that as an army officer, even with his involvement in the assassination plots, he remained part of the murderous apparatus that unleashed indefensible suffering and death. He worried that he had not done enough. The brutality and senselessness of the war haunted him. The German public’s enthusiastic collusion with the Nazi regime haunted him. And the ghosts of the dead, including those he admired, haunted him. He understood, as we must, that to do nothing in a time of national distress is to be complicit in acts of radical evil.

“I should have taken off my uniform in the Ukraine,” he told me on the last afternoon of my visit, “and joined the line of Jews to be shot.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

This article was originally posted at Truthdig

Copyright © 2012 Truthdig

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34087.htm

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By Prof. John McMurtry

Global Research,

We bring to the consideration of our readers this incisive and carefully formulated analysis by Canada’s renowned philosopher Professor John McMurtry. 

The complete text published by the Journal of 9/11 Studies can be downloaded in pdf

*          *          *

I was sceptical of the 9-11 event from the first time I saw it on television. It was on every major network within minutes. All the guilty partieswere declared before any evidence was shown.The first questions of any criminal investigation were erased.  Who had the most compelling motives for the event? Who had the means to turn two central iconic buildings in New York into a pile of steel and a cloud of dust in seconds?[i]

Other questions soon arose in the aftermath. Why was all the evidence at the crime scenes removed or confiscated?

Who was behind the continuous false information and non-stop repetition of “foreign/Arab terrorists”when no proof of guilt existed? Who was blocking all independent inquiry?

Even 11 years on these questions are still not answered.

But those immediately named guilty without any forensic proof certainly fitted the need for a plausible Enemy now that the “threat of the Soviet Union” and “communist world rule” were dead.  How else could the billion-dollar-a-day military be justified with no peace dividend amidst a corporately hollowed-out U.S. economy entering its long-term slide? While all the media and most of the people asserted the official 9-11 conspiracy theory as given fact, not all did.

A Bay Street broker with whom I was improbably discussing the event in Cuba had no problem recognising the value meaning. When I asked what he thought about the official conspiracy theory, he was frank:

“You can call it what you want, but America needs a war to pull the people together and expand into new resource rich areas. That what it has always done from Mexico on. And that is what it needs now”.  When I wondered why none in the know said so, he smirked: “It would be impolite”, adding, “It affects the entire future prosperity of America and the West”. And all the deaths? “It had to be done –far less than it could have been”. The 19 Arabs with box-cutters reducing the World Trade Center buildings to powder in a few seconds?He shrugged.

Thus everyone since 9-11 is prohibited nail-clippers on planes to confirm the absurd – including 15 of the 19alleged hijackers being from Saudi Arabia and several apparently still alive after crashing the planes into the buildings.[ii]As for the diabolical mastermind Osama bin Laden, he is never linked by credible evidence to the crime and never claims responsibility for the strike since the videos of him are fakes. “Ground Zero” is a double entendre. All doubts are erased apriori.

Decoding the U.S. Theater of Wars and the Moral Driver Behind

One already knew that suspension of belief is the first act of fiction, and that instant culture rules the U.S. One already knew that monster technical events are America’s stock in trade. And one already knew the long history of false U.S. pretexts for war – so well established that a young strategic thinker a decade after 9-11 advises the right-wing Washington Policy Institute on how to create a crisis by deadly planned incident to make war on Iran – “it is the traditional way of getting into war for what is best in America’s interests”.[iii]

One further knew from past research that the U.S.’s strategic leadership since 1945 had been Nazi-based in information and connections and the dominant Central-European figures articulating it ever after across Democrat and Republican lineshave a common cause. For over 40 years, Henry Kissinger as Republican and Zbigniew Brzezinski as Democrat have been protégés of David Rockefeller, selected as Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group leaders, and capable of any mass-homicidal plan to advance “U.S. interests”. The banker-and-oil imperial line through David Rockefeller as paradigm case goes back to the Nazi period to John Foster Dulles (an in-law) and his brother Allen Dulles (OSS and then CIA Director), who Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg called “traitors” for their support of the Nazi regime.  The Rockefeller Foundation funded and developed German eugenics programs in the pre-war years, Standard Oil supplied oil in collaboration with I.G. Farben, and so on.[iv]

The supreme moral goal and strategic methods governing U.S. covert-state performance have not only have been very similar in moral principle, but have deeply connected Rockefeller protégés Kissinger and Brzezinski, and more deeply still the theoretical godfather of U.S. covert state policy, Leo Strauss, who was funded out of Germany by David Rockefeller from the start.

The inner logic of covert and not-so-covert U.S. corporate world rule since 1945unified under Wall Street financial management and transnational corporate treaties for unhindered control of commodities and money capital flows across all borders is undeniable if seldom tracked. This architecture of the grand plan for a New World Order is evident in both strategic policy and global political and armed action over decades that have seen the objectives increasingly fulfilled with constructed deadly crises as pretexts for war the standard technique.[v]Behind them as first post-Nazi historical turn lies the 1947 National Security Act (NSA) which created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and explicitly licensesdestruction of life, truth and other societies as institutional methods.

The CIA is charged with designing, planning and executing “propaganda, economic war, direct preventive action, sabotage, anti-sabotage, destruction, subversion against hostile States, assistance to clandestine liberation movements, guerrilla murders, assistance to indigenous groups opposed to the enemy countries of the free world”. The linkage back to Nazi methods and world-rule goal as the highest moral objective is not just one of corresponding ultimate principles and strategic policy formation. It relied on Nazi SS intelligence sources and means from the beginning of the covert terror state.[vi]

There is no heinous means that is not assumed as the highest morality by this long-standing covert institutional formation linking to the presidential office.It is an explicitly secret system involving at least the Defense Department and the CIA, the former with many more operatives and offices.

The Special Activities Division (SAD) to carry out NSA criminal operations, for example, also confers the highest honors awarded in recognition of distinguished valor and excellence – as did the earlier SS prototype in Germany. What people find difficult to recognise is that these actions, whether by the SAD or other system operations,are conceived as the highest duty, however life-system destructive and mass murderous they are. All participants are super patriots in their own view, as were the Nazis. Contradiction between declared and actual values, however, is a central mode of the covert system. For example, what can be considered a high duty in the perpetual U.S.“war on drugs”, the most morally obligatory commitment of the U.S. state,is at the same time a war against and with other drug operations to transport illegal hard drugs into the U.S. itself.[vii]

We might see here a parallel between foreign mass murder and domestic mass murder in 9-11, with both regarded as high patriotism in this supreme morality. In the background of America’s Reichstag Fire and likewise disclosing the unlimited geo-strategic action that can be operationalized as necessary and good, the post-1945 U.S. control of international sea-lanes made the covert U.S. state the world’s dominant narcotics controller so as to fund secret criminal war actions from South-East Asia to Latin America, entailing the addiction of its own peoples.[viii]This woeful method has been long known by experts, but came to be public knowledge in the Reagan-state funding of the death-squad Contras of Nicaragua as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers” (a tribute he is said to have given later to the drug-running warlords and jihadists of Afghanistan).

These moral contradictions seem insane, but this is so only if one does not comprehend the underlying supreme morality of which they are all expressions.

Even U.S.-sponsored death squads torturing and killing tens of thousands of poor people across Latin America before 2000 and their return as direct covert U.S.-state method from Iraq to Syria after 9-11 – called “the Salvador option”[ix] – is regarded as necessary and obligatory to “defend the Free World and our way of life”. They entail ever more total U.S. world rule and self-maximizing position by strategic deduction from the supreme morality’s first premises.

The covert nature of the mass-murderous operationalization is never from moral embarrassment. It is solely to ensure effectiveness of execution against “soft” and “uninformed” public opinion, to terrorize people in situ from continued resistance, and to annihilate its leadership and community agency all the way down. Throughout the deciding moments of execution of the underlying supreme value program, global corporate money demand multiplication is always the ultimate value driver -as may be tested by seeking any covert U.S. action or overt war which is not so regulated beneath saturating propaganda of lawful intentions of peace and freedom.

These lines of underlying moral institution, policy, strategic plan, and massive life destruction at every level are indisputable facts of the covert and official faces of the U.S. state, but are typically not connected to the September 11, 2001 attack. Since most people cannot believe their own government or the “leader of the free world” could execute such a sabotage action as “9-11” in which thousands of American themselves died, these behavioral reminders forge the unifying meaning.

Worse still occurred in the last “war”before 9-11. In the background providing graphic example of how the covert U.S. state apparatus is structured to attack and murder U.S. citizens themselves to strategically maximize implementation of its supreme value program of transnational corporate money sequences over all barriers, there is the now known Operation Northwoods. Very familiar to the 9-11 truth movement, but unpublicized since its release under freedom of information laws, this Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff plan proposed that the CIA and other operatives covert operatives “undertake a range of atrocities” to be blamed on Cuba to provide pretext for invasion.

“Innocent civilians were to be shot on American streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba were to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism was to be launched in Washington DC, Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did commit; planes would be hijacked”.[x]

All would be blamed on Castro the Communist in place of bin Laden the Islamicist, and invasion of desired resistant territory would be achieved as a triumph of American freedom and interests over its enemies.

Operation Northwoods was not, however, okayed by President Kennedy – perhaps another reason for his assassination and replacement by more pliant presidents to represent “America’s interests” in accord with the supreme morality. Underneath the stolen election of George Bush Jr.in contrast – whose family made its money, in part, by serving the covert financial requirements of the Nazi regime before and during the 1939-45 War – was a domestic and foreign administration which would push further than any in the past to advance “U.S. interests”to full-spectrum world rule. Its project included reversing the Roosevelt New Deal and the social state within the U.S. itself – “an anomaly” as Bush Jr. expressed the historical perspective and ethic at work.

This plan was more explicit in the published Project for the New American Century formed from 1997 on. It even supplied the need for a 9-11 event in its 2000 version, the year that Bush Jr. was elected and the year before 9-11. To indicate the “non-partisan” nature of the planning, Democrat National security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had already hinted at the usefulness of a 9-11-style domestic attack to move policy forward in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.[xi]

The Moral Compass of 9-11

As a moral philosopher with social value systems as my primary object of analysis, my first thoughts in understanding “9-11” were of the system motives,known methods, and objective interests driving the event which could coherently explain it. Whatever the immediate hold of the official conspiracy theory on the public mind,a rational explanation is required which is consistent with the suppressed facts and the organising geo-strategic plan on both sides of the event.

For over a decade before 9-11, there were three U.S.-propelled global trends that almost never come into the understanding of 9-11 itself. 9-11 truth seekers themselves have focused on the foreground technics and the transparent motive for oil. But these are undergirded by deeper sea-shifts of geopolitical and economic wars of seizure and destruction by other name against which the world’s people were rising. To compel books of analysis into one unifying frame, transnational corporate-rights treaties from NAFTA to the Maastracht Treaty to the WTO overrode all other rights across borders;the private “financialization”stripping of social sectors and welfare states had advanced across the world; and the totalizing movement of the system across all former “cold war” and cultural borders was “the new world order” in formation. Together these vast shifts towards transnational money-sequence rule of all reversed centuries of democratic evolution. And every step of the supreme value program was life blind at every step of its global operationalization.[xii]

Yet states and cultures were so sweepingly re-set into unaccountable transnational corporate and bank rule that few recognised the absolutist value program being imposed on the world.  Fewer still recognised all was unfolding according to plan.

What has been least appreciated about the long-term strategic plan unfolding on both sides of what was immediately called “9-11” – CallEmergency!–is that supreme banker and global money director David Rockefeller had summarized “the plan” to fellow money-party elites across borders at the Bildersberg meeting in Baden Baden Germany in June 1991 -exactly at the same time that the Soviet Union and its resistant barriers fell.[xiii] Bear in mind that Rockefeller among other initiatives appointed both Kissinger and Brzezinski for the lead in both the supranational Bilderberg and Trilateral strategic bodies of which he was the lead patron, not to mention financed the unemployed academic Leo Strauss out of Germany to be the godfather  “philosopher” of the “new world order”. Rockefeller speaks very precisely to his fellow “elite of the elite” of the Western world where only Americans and Europe are invited and reportage excluded:

“A supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries”, Rockefeller said.[xiv]

Observe the foundational new concepts in place of responsible government and democratic accountability. They are now consigned to “past centuries”. A “supranational sovereignty”has replaced them and is morally“preferable”. Rockefeller is not exaggerating. By 1991 a “supranational sovereignty” had already developed in the form of transnational treaties conferring override rights of “profit opportunity” on transnational corporations and private bank rule of government finances across borders – procedurally trumping any elected legislatures and their laws which are inconsistent with their thousands of treaty articles, even when the system eventually leads to world depression as now.[xv] The source of the legitimacy of governments, ultimate sovereignty, has now passed as preferable to “an intellectual elite and bankers”: more exactly, academic strategy servants and transnational money sequences overriding all human and planetary life requirements a-priori by the supreme moral goal.

Ask which function of the world’s people and means of life is not now in debt to Wall Street and the private global banking system it leads. Ask which means of life from food and water to autos and pension cheques is not thus ultimately controlled, or which commodity is not under oligopolist corporate sway. The “surely preferable” objective was already achieved by 1991 or in advanced global institutional motion. Now supreme over all else so that all else is now accountable to it, and it is not accountable to anything above it, “the plan”seemed all but accomplished by Rockefeller’s own considered words.

But what if people resist the new world rule with no life coordinate or constraint at any level of its execution? We may recall that during the death-squad rule of the Argentina generals at this time in which civilians were murdered and tortured in the thousands, National Security Adviser Kissinger congratulated the junta on their “very good results – – The quicker you succeed the better.”Kissinger also heartily approved of the earlier massacres and torture in Chile.

The resistance was in this way pre-empted long before the Soviet Union fell, and after 1990 had no block in the Middle East and Central Asia either. “The plan” has been very long term. Kissinger the geo-executer was originally appointed to high office by Rockefeller (to lead the Council on Foreign Relations back in 1954), and – to give a sense of the long-range trajectory of the plan design –was,incredibly,the U.S. administration’s first choice for an “independent 9-11 Commission”. The obviously not-independent Kissinger was still not a problem for “the free press” and official discourse. But when he was required to disclose his business connections, he withdrew to stay covert in his ongoing backroom capacities and enrichment.

MENA Saga and Lady Gaga

By Anis H. Bajrektarevic

Both are fully devoted, supported and promoted by the social media. Highly polarizing, both are fracturing any consensus. What is Lady Gaga (or similar sort of stage-acting à la Pussy Riot) for the human (gay) rights, these are the so-called Islamists for the Muslim world – strategic obstructer, assertively trivializing important larger contents that are essential for any human advancement. Does the placement on the right page of Facebook mean automatically being on a proper side of history?

Let’s get Sy(i)ria-ous: Where is the counter-narrative?

The MENA theatre is situated in one of the most fascinating locations of the world. It actually represents (along with the Balkans-Caucasus) the only existing land corridor that connects 3 continents. It also holds over a half of the world’s proven oil-gas reserves (56% – oil, 48% – gas). Further on, the Gulf OPEC states and Libya have -by far- the lowest costs of oil extraction thanks to the high crude ‘purity’ (measured by overall properties such as a state of aggregation, excavation gravity, viscosity, weight, degree of sulfuric and other contaminants) which is simplifying and cheapening the refinement process. These petrol-exporters also enjoy the close proximity to open warm seas for the low-cost, fast and convenient overseas shipments. (Hence, the costs per barrel of crude for Libya and the Persian Gulf states are under 5USD, for other OPEC members below 10UDS. This is in a sharp contrast to countries such as the US, Russia, Norway, Canada and many others that bear production costs of several tens of USD per barrel – according to the International Energy Agency /IEA/).

Therefore, it is an absolute imperative for the external/peripheral powers to dominate such a pivotal geo-economic and geopolitical theater by simply keeping its center soft (e.g. preventing any emancipation that might come through the indigenous socio-political modernization). This is the very same imperative that was a dominant rational of inner European and Asian machtpolitik for centuries.

No wonder that the competition in the MENA theatre, which has a lasting history of external domination or interference (and largely the Versailles, Anglo-French drawn borders), is severe, multiple, unpredictable. The region is predominantly populated by the Sunni (Arab) Muslims. With its high population density, and demographic growth stronger than economic one, this very young median population (on average 23-27 years old) is dominated by juvenile, mainly unemployed or underemployed, but socially mobilized and often angry males. Political radicalization (besides exploitation of the Shia-Sunni and of Muslim-Jewish antagonism) is surely one of the most convenient instruments of tacit control aimed at to preserve governing authorities weak, if not incapacitated.

It is of no surprise that in each and every of the predominantly Sunni-Muslim Balkans-MENA country of the secular republican type, where the external powers have brokered the political settlement, is enveloped in perpetuated instabilities, and thus paralyzed. So far, no single monarchy has been (significantly) affected. From Bosnia (nearly 20 years ago), then Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (as well as in the post-’Spring’ Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, all the way to ‘ungoverned’ Mali, South Sudan and Algeria’s south, up to the post-assessination revolt-torn Tunis or anti-Avanti Mursi’ Cairo), there is a purposely dysfunctional and indecisive central government put in place.

Conclusively, the most observers would agree that, while the so-called Arab Spring was of cross-Arab outreach, it was far from being pan-Arabic; more of a spontaneous social revolt (Al-Jazeera-connecting-pots) series of events, than any directional process. To channel something unexpectedly inflammatory and cross-Arab, but avoiding pan-Arabism as well as any sincere structural socio-economic reform and political emancipation can be achieved only by lightening the torch of Islamism. For one thing, as it now seems, the euphorically tam-tamed ‘Facebook revolutions’ across MENA were rather a strategic distraction ‘innocently’ dressed up in diverting banalities of social media networks. The very same role those networks well played elsewhere too.

Currently, the announced reductions of the American physical presence in Afghanistan, its limits in (nearly failed, nuclear, state of) Pakistan, massive overextensions suffered on the southwestern flank of the Euro-Asian continent as well as the recent US Army pullout from Iraq, is felt within the GCC (in France, Israel and Turkey too) as dangerous exposure to neighboring (increasingly anticipated as assertive) Iran, as well as Russia and China behind it. Right now, Syria pays a (proxy war) price for it: This multi-religious country may end up entirely combusted, creating a dangerous security vacuum in the heart of MENA. Or to use the words of frustration of the senior French diplomat who recently told me in Brussels: “we have to quickly delegitimize the legitimate Syrian government and topple al-Assad in order to convince Israel not to bomb Iran…”

As recently, the ‘Group of Friends of Syria’ – induced recognition of the so-called Syrian opposition means also that Turkey is now practically at war with Syria. At this point, let me be both instructive and predictive: Fall of al-Assad would most certainly trigger dissolution of Syria. It would also lead to a formalized federalization of Iraq in a desperate move to prevent its total decomposition as well as to a serious crisis of Lebanese and Jordanian statehood, probably beyond reparation. The (short-run) winner should than seem to be Israel along with the GCC monarchies. However, in a long run (even the northern portions of Syria being occupied by the Turkish army for quite some time), it would be Kurds and Shias. Consequently, any proclamation of Kurdish state the Erdoğan government (as well as Iraq) would not survive – as it already created enough enemies at home and in its near abroad. Ergo, besides the dispersed, rarified and terrified MENA Christians, the (modernized) Sunnis are definitely the long-term losers.

Possible, yet not probably epilogue

However, while the cacophony of European contradictions works more on a self-elimination of the EU from the region, Turkey tries to reinsert itself. The so-called neo-Ottomanism of the current (Anatolian, eastern rural power-base) government steers the country right into the centre of grand bargaining for both Russia and for the US. To this emerging triangular constellation, PM Erdoğan wishes to appoint its own rhythm.

Past the ‘Arab Spring’, neither will Russia effectively sustain its presence in the Middle East on a strict pan-Arabic secular, republican and anti-Islamic idea, nor will the US manage to politically and morally justify its backing off of the absolutistic monarchies energized by the backward, dismissive and oppressive Wahhabism. Ankara tries to sublime both effectively: enough of a secular republican modernity and of a traditional, tolerant and emancipating Islam, and to broadcast it as an attractive future model across the Middle East. Simply, Bosporus wakes itself up as an empiric proof that the Islam and modernity goes together. In fact, it is the last European nation that still has both demographic and economic growth.

Moreover, Ataturk’s Republic is by large and by far the world’s most successful Muslim state: It was never resting its development on oil or other primary-commodity exports, but on a vibrant socio-economic sector and solid democratic institutions. This is heavily contesting, not only for Russia, but primarily for the insecure regime of the House of Saud (and other GCC autocracies), which rules by the direct royal decree over a country of recent past, oil-export dependent and fizzing presence and improbable future.

No wonder that on the ideological battlefield, the two belligerent parties will be dominating the Middle East, which is currently in self-questioning past yet another round of calamities. The outcome will be significantly beyond the Arab world, and will reverberate all across the Sunni Muslim world. Ankara is attempting to justify that the Saudi-promoted Islam is actually a toxic, separatist/sectarian Wahhabistic ideology that self-constrains Muslims, and keeps them on a wrong side of history by hindering their socio-economic and political development. It does so by holding Muslims on a permanent collision course with the rest of the world, while Turkey-promoted Islam is not a weaponized ideology, but a Modus Vivendi, which permits progress and is acceptable for all (including the non-Muslims), with the centuries-long history of success.

Anis H. Bajrektarevic, Geopolitics of Energy Editorial Member

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/22-02-2013/123873-mena_saga_lady_gaga-0/

Humanity May Not Survive Obama’s Second Term

Upcoming Iranian Nuclear Talks

 By Stephen Lendman

 February 18, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - Multiple previous P5+1 talks were held. America manipulated them to fail. So did Israel covertly. Western nations were pressured to go along.

On February 26, new talks will be held in Almaty, Kazahhstan. Expect no more this time than earlier.

It bears repeating. Tehran’s nuclear program isn’t at issue. It’s red herring cover for imperial aims. It’s the oil, stupid, and regional dominance.

Iran’s sovereignty stands in the way. Its program is peaceful. It complies with NPT provisions. World leaders know it. So do IAEA inspectors.

Washington targets all independent governments. It wants pro-Western puppet ones replacing them. It invents reasons to do so. It operates extrajudicially in defiance of rule of law principles.

It gets UN Secretary-Generals to go along. Ban Ki-moon’s one of the worst. He shames the office he holds. He spurns UN Charter principles. He’s complicit in war crimes.

He’s well rewarded for doing so. He lies for Washington. He’s a longstanding imperial tool.

On February 14, the Washington Post headlined “Iran could use UN talks as cover to build bomb, Ban K-moon says.”

He knows Iran has no such intention. He lies and claims otherwise. Decisive swift action should prevent what doesn’t exist, he urges.

Accelerated action should be prioritized. “We should not give much more time to the Iranians, and we should not waste time,” he says. “We have seen what happened with the DPRK.”

“It ended up that they (were) secretly, quietly, without any obligations, without any pressure, making progress.”

The Security Council must “show a firm, decisive and effective, quick response.”

Like America and Israel, he wants Iran to prove a negative. He told Imam Khamenei he’s not satisfied with peaceful reassurances. He did so on orders from Washington.

He’s “frustrated” about failed international talks. He points fingers the wrong way. He blames Iran for Western intransigency.

He speaks with forked tongue. He mimics John Kerry. America’s new Secretary of State said progress depends on if Iran’s ready to “make and discuss real offers and engage in a real dialogue.”

Doing so is impossible without legitimate negotiating partners. Iran hasn’t had them in decades. It doesn’t now.

On February 16, Press TV headlined “Iran censures Ban Ki-moon for remarks on nuclear energy program.”

Iranian UN ambassador Mohammad Khazaei called what he said “unfortunate.” He acted “in contradiction to his duties and against international principles.”

He called on Ban to observe justice and confidence-building measures. He urged him to use his position responsibly. It’s his job to do so. He never once tried. He’s complicit in imperial crimes.

He makes unjust accusations. Iran has every right to object. It’s entitled to use nuclear power peacefully. Ban knows but won’t say. He regurgitates what Washington tells him to say.

America and Israel claim Tehran is months away from producing a bomb. No evidence whatever suggests it. Saying so is malicious propaganda.

Kerry picked up where Hillary Clinton left off. He represents imperial lawlessness. He’s Israel’s man at State.

He said “(w)e are not going to get trapped into a delay-after-delay process here.”

“It is incumbent on the Iranians to prove that they are prepared to meet our willingness, President Obama’s willingness, again and again stated by the president, to be open to a diplomatic resolution here.”

Washington doesn’t negotiate. It demands. Other countries are pressured to comply. Multiple threats follow otherwise. Iran’s familiar with American double-dealing.

It’s hard imagining why they put up with it so long. Job’s patience would be taxed. Tehran prioritizes peace and good relations. It won’t stop trying to achieve them. Washington and Israel obstruct them. Rogue states operate that way.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tehran’s willing to negotiate directly with Washington. At issue only is “the other side (coming) with authentic intentions.”

It hasn’t happened in decades and won’t now. Salehi knows it. So do other Iranian leaders. On February 16, Fars News Agency headlined “Leader Blasts American Officials’ Paradoxical Policies.” He referred to their “spirit of bullying.”

“Americans expect others to give in to their illogical words and bullying as some have done, but the Iranian nation and the Islamic Republic does not surrender because it has logic, ability and power,” Imam Khamenei said.

He stressed key points. They include illogical and contradictory US remarks, using nuclear negotiations to demand Iran surrender its legitimate rights, and lying about removing sanctions through talks.

He called America’s offer of direct talks disingenuous. It’s cover to bully Iran to surrender.

It’s because “they want to show to the revolting Muslim nations of the region that the Islamic Republic of Iran was eventually made to sit to the negotiating table despite all its resistance and toughness, and that they, thus, have no other option but to give up and surrender.”

Tehran keeps “its eyes wide open.” It understands Washington’s duplicity. It responds accordingly.

America previously offered direct talks. Iran’s “logical words” were spurned. It was blamed for doing so. Expect nothing different now.

At the same time, he said:

“If Americans show both in their words and actions that they are not illogical, then they would see that the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation are benevolent and favor interaction and logic.”

“This is the only way to interact with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in that case the US administration would receive a proper response.”

On February 16, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Big powers to offer easing gold sanctions at Iran nuclear talks.”

“Big powers,” of course, means Washington. It’s offer was duplicitous. It was made to be refused. It demands Iran shut down its newly expanded Fordow enrichment plant.

It operates legitimately. Tehran categorically refuses. Washington’s latest offer is contemptuous. It assures upcoming Almaty failure.

Reuters cited unnamed Western officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity. They’re embarrassed to attach their names to surrender demands. They should have kept silent and said nothing.

They said the new proposal largely replicates earlier ones. “We don’t think the Iranians (deserve) much more,” they added.

They claim Iran isn’t ready to deal ahead of its June 14 presidential elections.

Tehran’s ready for legitimate talks anytime. It needs legitimate partners to do so. Washington obstructionism prevents it. It’s no different now than earlier.

Pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment proves it. Claiming it’s for bomb development is false on its face. Knowing it’s true but saying otherwise shows what Iran is up against.

Saber rattling makes things worse. It repeats ad nauseam. It’s done so belligerently. False charges follow earlier ones.

Sanctions violate international law. They’re imposed to harm Iran’s economy, isolate it politically, and cause ordinary Iranians pain and suffering.

It’s done to turn them against their government. It’s been tried many times before. Every time it fails. Ordinary people blame responsible parties. Their governments are their last line of defense.

Iranians aren’t fools. They know Washington and Israel are Tehran’s main enemies. They’re enemies of peace, equity and justice.

They’re hegomonic partners. They violate international law. They spurn it with impunity. They commit crimes of war, against humanity, and genocide. So do complicit NATO partners and rogue regional allies.

At issue is advancing Washington’s imperium. It’s about regional dominance. It’s about controlling world energy supplies. It’s about turning Iran into a vassal state.

In 1979, Iran ended 2,500 years of monarchal rule. A generation of Pahlavi repression ended. It’s not about to roll over for Washington and return it.

Its sovereignty matters too much. It’ll do what’s necessary to protect it. Its leaders are responsible for doing it. They’ve done so for 34 years.

Castro’s Cuba alone remained independent longer. Both nations abhor imperial Washington’s aims. They do so for good reason. They prioritize peace and good relations, not conflicts and global dominance.

They’re targeted for doing the right things. Expect nothing ahead to get easier. Washington has longstanding war plans. It’s waging multiple ones already. It has others in mind.

They’ll be launched in the fullness of time. Today is the most perilous time in world history. Humanity may not survive America’s onslaught.

It’s shocking to imagine it’s come this far and perhaps no further. If it perishes, it’ll be the only species ever to do so.

It’ll prove higher intelligence was more liability than asset. Given Washington’s rage for dominance, things may turn out that way.

A Final Comment

In mid-February, FAIR’s (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)  Peter Hart asked if Iranian magnets are the new aluminum tubes.

In months preceding the 2003 Iraq war, media scoundrels, TV talking heads, and Bush administration officials lied. They said Saddam Hussein attempted to buy “thousands of specially designed tubes” to advance his nuclear weapons program.

Their “diameter, thickness and other technical specifications (had) persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program.”

None existed. Most people didn’t now. This and other false accusations became pretexts for war. Destroying the cradle of civilization followed.

Pre-2003 Iraq no longer exists. Millions died. Conflict continues. More die daily. Human misery is incalculable. No end in sight looks near.

Washington perhaps destroying Iran the same way. Propaganda wars precede hot ones. Tehran faces numerous false charges. New accusations follow earlier ones.

Media scoundrels march in lock step with imperial plans. Sources relied on are serial liars.

Henry Kissinger may or may not have said “If you can’t hear the drums of war you must be deaf.” It’s true either way. Permanent war is official US policy.

Current ones rage. More are planned. One country after another is ravaged. It bears repeating. Humanity may not survive Obama’s second term. Rogue administration policies make it appear less likely.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net .  His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour . 

http://www.dailycensored.com/upcoming-iranian-nuclear-talks/

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34004.htm

Currency wars hang over G20 meeting

15 February 2013

The meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers in Moscow over the next two days is being held amid a deep contradiction in the global capitalist economy.

On the one hand a certain stability has returned to financial markets, at least temporarily, with stock markets on the rise, while, on the other hand, economic growth continues to stagnate. Large sections of the world are at or near recession and the developed countries are now fighting over what theFinancial Times described as “slivers of economic growth”.

This mounting contradiction is the driving force behind the renewed warnings of a global “currency war”—an issue which will almost certainly dominate proceedings.

The danger of a global currency war was first raised in 2010 by the Brazilian finance minister Guido Mantega, who warned that the US Federal Reserve Board’s policy of “quantitative easing” (printing money) was cutting the value of the US dollar, thereby undermining the economic position of other powers and opening the way for possible retaliation.

The issue has again come into prominence following the change of government in Japan last December and the decision of the incoming Abe administration to demand that the Bank of Japan pursue its own version of “quantitative easing” in order to try to boost the stagnant Japanese economy. Further fuel was then added to the fire by the statement by French president François Hollande earlier this month that the high value of the euro was damaging the economy.

The extent of the tensions over currency issues was highlighted on the eve of the G20 meeting when the G7—Britain, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada—issued a statement insisting that currency levels should be determined by market forces and not central banks. The statement was initially interpreted as supporting Japan, but markets were thrown into turmoil when an official said that it was intended as a criticism of recent Japanese actions.

In its statement the G7 said its central banks were not targeting their respective currencies. “We reaffirm that our fiscal and monetary policies have been and will remain oriented towards meeting our respective domestic objectives using domestic instruments, and that we will not target exchange rates.”

But the very interconnectedness of the global economy and financial system means that this statement is as ludicrous as an assertion that increased carbon pollution in one country would not contribute to global warming because it would be merely a “domestic” measure.

Since the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008, the US Federal Reserve has increased its holdings of financial assets some threefold. It is now adding to its balance sheet at the rate of $80 billion a month or almost $1 trillion per year. These purchases of financial assets add to the supply of dollars and work to push down the exchange rate against other currencies, thereby benefiting American exporters at the expense of their rivals.

Furthermore, whether or not US interests directly benefit, the role of the US dollar as the paramount global currency means that its fall increases the relative value of all other currencies and worsens the position of these countries in the fight for export markets, while opening up their domestic markets to increased international competitive pressures.

At a certain point those pressures provoke demand for retaliation. This is why the Japanese measures are regarded as significant, leading to increased tensions and renewed warnings of currency wars.

There are other, longer-term, consequences that point to the fact that the financial crash of 2008 represented a breakdown in the global capitalist order.

The Fed’s quantitative easing program and consequent devaluation of the US dollar is unprecedented. While the dollar has been devalued in the past—for example, under the so-called Plaza Accord of 1985—that was done at least with the formal agreement and collaboration of the other major capitalist powers.

Now the US pursues its economic agenda unilaterally and completely recklessly. Its undermining of the foundations of the global monetary system carries with it the threat of a collapse of confidence in paper currencies and a return to the economic blocs that characterised the 1930s, with incalculable consequences for world trade and investment.

An even more immediate threat is that the ongoing purchases of financial assets by the Fed and other central banks will recreate, on an even broader scale, the conditions that led to the crash of 2008. Since the beginning of 2008 the Fed has expanded its balance sheet by 220 percent, the Bank of England by 350 percent and the European Central Bank by about 98 percent.

In the absence of any policies to enhance economic growth, the reliance on financial manipulation is creating new and explosive contradictions at the very centre of the world economy—a fact recognised by at least some of those in charge of the financial system. In a recent speech, the head of Britain’s Financial Services Authority Adair Turner warned that “exclusive reliance” on monetary and credit policy “carries significant long-term risks—a danger that, in seeking to escape from the deleveraging trap created by past excesses, we may build up future vulnerabilities.”

In the crisis of 2008, central banks around the world were able to act as “lender of last resort” and bail out banks and other financial institutions that would have gone bankrupt had they not received assistance. The central banks could perform this function because they themselves were not directly involved in the afflicted financial markets.

That situation has changed dramatically. The banks themselves now hold trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds and other forms of debt. A collapse in these markets would see the central banks attempting to bail out the major banks and investors while their own financial viability was being undermined.

In other words, the measures taken over the past five years have not only created the conditions for escalating currency wars, they have ensured that the next major financial crisis will involve the central banks themselves.

Some of those attending the G20 meeting will recognise, at least in their behind-the-scenes discussions, these looming dangers. But they will be powerless to advance any policies to meet them because the crisis is rooted in the very foundations of the profit and nation-state system they defend. The only answer to the enormous dangers posed by the ongoing capitalist breakdown is the initiation of a political struggle by the working class for the program of international socialism and the replacement of the anarchic profit system by conscious economic planning.

Nick Beams

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/02/15/pers-f15.html

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars

By Michael Rivero

I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this. Transcript here

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33903.htm

How Western Leaders Terrorized Muslim World Using A Fake Clash of Civilizations

By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja

A “war of religion” is unfolding, with a view to justifying a global military crusade. In the inner consciousness of many Americans, the “holy crusade” against Muslims is justified. While President Obama may uphold freedom of religion, the US inquisitorial social order has institutionalized patterns of discrimination, prejudice and xenophobia directed against Muslims.” Michel Chossudovsky, ”America’s Holy Crusade against the Muslim World”, Global Research, 8/30/2010

February 09, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - Does the US war strategy require other nations to follow the American policy lead of war against all – the terrorism of war instigated by the Clash of Civilizations theory? Stephen Lendman (“America’s Permanent War Agenda” 3/01/2010), an American political intellectual and a man of universal conscience puts the history in one nutshell:

“America glorifies wars in the name of peace, what historian Charles Beard (1874 – 1948) called “perpetual war for perpetual peace” in describing the Roosevelt and Truman administrations’ foreign policies – what concerned the Federation of American Scientists when it catalogued about 200 post-1945 conflicts in which America was, and still is, the aggressor”

Many contemporary politicians having small wisdom coupled with big common sense information could lead or mislead the masses. People are always the end recipient of the political dramas and onslaughts. Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations” 1993, and subsequently, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1995), argued many things to many minds. It was a time fraught with political tragedies and unthinkable changes after the demise of the former USSR from the global theater of ideological confrontations. It happened out of the nowhere sending shock waves to the Western political mythologists and self-made experts who would become irrelevant in their mastery of pretensions to pursue the ideological warfare between the USSR and USA.

Islam and China were at the epic center of the Huntington’s theory of the Clash of Civilizations. To many Western mythologists, it was a blessing in disguise to substantiate the continuity of their expertise with changed notions of militancy against Muslims and Islam as the next bloc of forces maintaining the “bloody borders.” Americana and European policy makers denied its existence but used its mythology and substantial framework to wage a new war according to George Bush ‘crusade’ against Islam. Huntington’s thoughts and warning were critical to the foreign policy makers operating under the influence of Western strategic priorities. There were visible political scenarios of clash of civilizations between the West and China-Islam axis, but the War on Terrorism served the purpose of all cherished policy objectives lasting more than a decade. The Western economies desperately needed new markets to dump their obsolete military hardware and know-how for expansion of businesses. But critical of all were the abundance of natural resources available across the Middle East to grab for future political hegemony and military control over these nations. Divided as they were, the Arab tribal clan-based rulers and other people of interest in the Muslim world made subservient to the American- West European political interests, were readily available to bring a Western dream of power and manipulation into reality.

From centuries of European colonization to the so called freedom time span after the WW2, Arabs and other Muslim societies had neither educated and intelligent leadership nor institutions to analyze the global affairs objectively and to develop a policy of mutual interests and strategic equilibrium in relations with the former Masters of the Western world. They were naïve and coward then, and they are proven dummy and stupid to this day. They willingly followed the George Bush dictum of military threats unless they should fully submit to the American doctrine of War on Terror. The US bogus War on Terror used the false pretext of the 9/11 attacks to pursue its pre-planned wars against the Muslim world.

Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003), British MP and Environment Minister in PM Tony Blair cabinet from May 1997 to June 2003 explain that the 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) written by the neo-conservatives in September 2000 before 9/11 – it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a “worldwide command and control system”. This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis.

John J. Mearsheimer (“Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism: Open Democracy: 5/18/2005), Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) ponders into reasoning of the neo-conservatives belief that the US must show its power to manipulate the world:

Neo-conservative theory – the Bush doctrine – is essentially Wilsonianism with teeth. The theory has an idealist strand and a power strand: Wilsonianism provides the idealism, an emphasis on military power provides the teeth……The key to understanding why the neo-conservatives think that military force is such a remarkably effective instrument for running the world is that they believe that international politics operate according to “bandwagoning” logic. Specifically, they believe that if a powerful country like the United States is willing to threaten or attack its adversaries, then virtually all of the states in the system – friends and foes alike – will quickly understand that the United States means business and that if they cross mighty Uncle Sam, they will pay a severe price. In essence, the rest of the world will fear the United States, which will cause any state that is even thinking about challenging Washington to throw up its hands and jump on the American bandwagon.

The War on Terror had wide range of unspecified agendas for long time to come:

• to occupy the Arab heartland and to offer extended strategic and political supremacy to Israel in the Middle East,

• to control and manage the oil and gas resources of the Arab Middle East,

• to inject fear and powerful hegemonic influence of the Western culture and varied civilizations,

• to divide and rule the Arab and Muslims people from distance powerhouses,

• to create new markets for the dollar and to block trade-business entry of China into the exclusive American Middle East market,

• to entice ignorant Arab population with false imagery of freedom, liberty and social justice and make the mindless rulers fearful of the US-Europe influence in their future-making,

• to distract attention from the decadent Western cultures and civilizations as Huntington warned them of its crumbling and immediate implication for the future,

• To dismantle the socio-economic and political infrastructures of the Arab-Muslim world, encouraging internal strife and sectarian bloodsheds and making them subservient to the US-European military and economic subjugation.

• And so many other short-long terms implications

Across the Western world, the mainstream news media propaganda campaigns made common folks fearful after the 9/11 attacks in believing that the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis was true and credible. The Arabs and Muslims authoritarian rulers elsewhere had no capacity or leadership to challenge the American political and military hegemony. The Arab and Muslim world was naïve and perplexed unable to THINK rationally or to challenge the West either in moral and intellectual domains and to question the relevance of the War on Terror. Even some of the leading Islamic thinkers failed miserably to understand the consequences of the bogus war on terrorism and to oppose the American policy and practices to attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. To date, the American led wars have killed approximately three millions people in Iraq, close to million in Afghanistan and million more displaced and made refugees in foreign lands, and some 40,000 to 50,000 civilians across Pakistan and continuing drone attacks bring horrifying details of daily killings of innocent children and women in Waziristan tribal belt of Pakistan. Should this deliberate genocide not be the major concern to the mankind?

Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003), British MP and Environment Minister in PM Tony Blair points out the planning of the war strategies and how it will encircle the other Muslim countries:

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October”. Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs” (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001). The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world’s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

Huntington warned of the coming of new age of disharmony is dawning and that the West lacked an ‘ennobling animosity’- from an economic perspective, the ‘golden age’ of low birth rates and aging population as reasoning contributing to Western moral and cultural decadence. But the match-maker political opportunists have come up with many answers to Huntington’s concerns and curiosities. Now, there are increasing trend of degeneration – more gay rights claims and marriages are making headways – gay priests and gay politicians – gay parades, women are replacing the work of men from sexual enlightenment to unknown domains of leisure and enjoyment. Secretary Panelta announced that America will strike a balancing act and recruit more women to enhance opportunities in front line military combat operations. But nobody seems to question that by nature women are not made aggressive or to stir animalistic killing skills, their feminism is more an embodiment of love, attractive nature of things and beauty to bless the physical, moral, spiritual and intellectual fabric of human life. Why should they be manipulated against their very Nature? Are women a commodity at the strategic market place to be defined by economic men of interests or military rules of engagement? Nobody talks what able men will do in their spare times and moments of self-reflection if there are no longer attracted to beautiful women. John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman) tells us first hand that Arab Prince love to have the companionship of blond American women. Would America consider this romantic strategy to built-in with its military sale package to the oil exporting Arab rulers? Ironically, none of the leading political thinkers appear to talk now if the Western culture is progressive or more decadent? Huntington must be speechless and wondering what to say next.

The global political affairs are not managed by rational people, with rational thinking, doing the rational practices for the interests of global citizenry. The 1% global elite – men of king operate the international institutions - the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few Western warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparallel global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history. Einstein (“The World as I see it”) made it known that he was against military campaigns, killings and destruction of the natural environment: “This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!.”

According to British MP and Minister Michael Meacher (“This War on Terrorism is Bogus.” Guardian, UK: 9/6/2003):

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the “global war on terrorism” has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Muslims were not born in the eye of the storm to threaten anybody. They are not the societies breeding terrorism against the West or anybody else. All Arab-Muslim rulers are subservient to the Western political-military dictates. Those individuals who were alleged to have attacked America for the 9/11 were the by-products of American warfare sponsorship and CIA indoctrination. Terrorism originates from the Western imperialism and military aggressions against the poor and helpless people. Time and encompassing opportunities warrant New Thinking, New Leaders and New Visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge from the obsolete, redundant and failed authoritarianism of the few insane leaders, be it the Western leaders or Muslim rulers.. None have the understanding of neither peace nor respect for human life and co-existence in a splendid Universe. To challenge the deafening silence of the US and Europeans for global peace and security, the humanity must find ways and means to look beyond the obvious and troublesome horizons dominated by the few warlords and continued to be plagued with massacres, barbarity against human culture and civilizations, destruction of the habitats and natural environment as if there were no rational being and people of Reason populating the God-given Universe. The informed and mature global community looks towards those thinkers, educated and honest proactive leaders enriched with coherent unity of moral, spiritual and intellectual visions and abilities to be instrumental to rescue it from the planned encroachment of the few Western warlords.

American historian Harry Elmer Barnes (“Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It’s Aftermath”) offered this stern warning to American politicians if the US led wars continue leading to man’s annihilation from this planet:

“If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on ‘the cultural traditions’ of mankind.”

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing Germany, May 2012.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33889.htm

The Global Water Grab

By Shiney Varghese

February 09, 2013 “IATP” –   Writing in National Geographic in December 2012 about “small-scale irrigation techniques with simple buckets, affordable pumps, drip lines, and other equipment” that “are enabling farm families to weather dry seasons, raise yields, diversify their crops, and lift themselves out of poverty” water expert Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Project cautioned against reckless land and water-related investments in Africa. “[U]nless African governments and foreign interests lend support to these farmer-driven initiatives, rather than undermine them through land and water deals that benefit large-scale, commercial schemes, the best opportunity in decades for societal advancement in the region will be squandered.”

That same month, the online publication Market Oracle reported that “[t]he new ‘water barons’—the Wall Street banks and elitist multibillionaires—are buying up water all over the world at unprecedented pace.” The report reveals two phenomena that have been gathering speed, and that could potentially lead to profit accumulation at the cost of communities and commons —the expansion of market instruments beyond the water supply and sanitation to other areas of water governance, and the increasingly prominent role of financial institutions.

In several instances this has meant that the government itself has set up public corporations that run like a business, contracting out water supply and sanitation operations to those with expertise, or entering into public–private–partnerships, often with water multinationals. This happened recently in Nagpur and New Delhi, India. In most rural areas, ensuring a clean drinking water supply and sanitation continues to be a challenge. For-profit companies such as Sarvajal have begun setting up pre-paid water kiosks (or water ATMs) that would dispense units of water upon the insertion of a pre-paid card. It is no surprise that these are popular among people who otherwise have no access to clean drinking water.

With climate change, however, the water crisis is no longer perceived as confined to developing countries or even primarily a concern related to water supply and sanitation. Fresh water commons are becoming degraded and depleted in both developed and developing countries. In the United States, diversion of water for expanded commodity crop production, biofuels and gas hydro-fracking is compounding the crisis in rural areas. In areas ranging from the Ogallala aquifer to the Great Lakes in North America, water has been referred to as liquid gold. Billionaires such as T. Boone Pickens have been buying up land overlying the Ogallala aquifer, acquiring water rights; companies such as Dow Chemicals, with a long history of water pollution, are investing in the business of water purification, making pollution itself a cash-cow.

But chemical companies are not alone: GE and its competitor Siemens have extensive portfolios that include an array of water technologies to serve the needs of industrial customers, municipal water suppliers or governments. (In the last year and a half two Minnesota based companies have become large players in this business—Ecolab, by acquiring Nalco and Pentair by merging with Tyco‘s Flow Control unit—both now belonging to S&P’s 500.)

The financial industry has also zeroed in on water. In the summer of 2011, Citigroup issued a report on water investments. The much quoted statement by Willem Buiter (chief economist at Citigroup) gives an inkling of Citigroup’s conclusion: “Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.” Once again, several others had already seen water as an important investment opportunity, including GE’s Energy Financial Services, Goldman Sachs and several asset management firms that are involved investing in farmland in Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.

Given these recent trends, initiatives that track the water use of companies or map information regarding water related risks could be double edged. Some examples include the ‘water disclosure project’ and the ‘water-mapping project’. Both are initiated by non-profits/ think-tanks, the former by UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project and the latter by the US-based World Resources Institute. While distinct, they are linked by their shared constituency: global investors concerned about water-related risks. These initiatives could help companies identify and reduce their water footprint, or could lead to company investments that follow water and grab it.

The Carbon Disclosure Project’s water disclosure project seeks to help businesses and institutional investors understand the risks and opportunities associated with water scarcity and other water-related issues. According to its most recent report, issued on behalf of 470 investors with assets of $50 trillion USD, over half the respondents to their survey have experienced water-related challenges in the preceding five years, translating into disruptions in operations, increases in expenses and other detrimental impacts.

Aqueduct Alliance and its water mapping project, which aims to provide companies with an unprecedented level of detail on global water risks, seems at one level a direct response to the findings of the global water disclosure reports by CDP. General Electric, Goldman Sachs and the Washington-based think tank World Resources Institute are the founding members of the Aqueduct Alliance. All of them identify water-related risks as detrimental to profitability, continued economic growth and environmental sustainability. The water maps, with their unprecedented level of detail and resolution, seek to combine advanced hydrological data with geographically specific indicators that capture social, economic, and governance factors. But this initiative has given rise to concerns that such information gives companies and investors unprecedented details of water-related information in some of the world’s largest river basins.

Many of these investors, described as the “new water barons” in Jo-Shing Yang’s article ”Profiting from Your Thirst as Global Elite Rush to Control Water Worldwide,” are the same ones who have profited from speculating on agricultural contracts and contributing to the food crisis of the past few years. The food crisis and recent droughts have confirmed that controlling the source of food—the land and the water that flows under or by it—are equally or even more important.

A closer look at the land-related investments in Africa, for example, show that land grabbing is not simply an investment, but also an attempt to capture the water underneath. At the recent annual Global AgInvesting Conference (with well over 370 participants), the asset management groups and global farm businesses showcased their plans, including purchases of vast tracts of lands in varying locations around the globe. With tools such as water maps, such investors are further advantaged. The global rush for land grabbing, as well as the resistance to it, shows that all stake-holders—pension funds, Wall Street or nation-states on the one hand or the people who currently use these lands and waters, and their advocates on the other—are well aware of the life-and-death nature of land (and water) grabbing, especially in the case of developing countries.

National and international regulatory mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that basic resources such as land, water and the means for accessing fresh water do not become merely the means for profit accumulation for the wealthy, but are governed in a way that ensures the basic livelihood of those most dependent on it. The last session of the Committee on World Food Security  (a United Nations mechanism set up to address the food crisis) was a good starting point, and has set in motion a series of consultations on principles for agricultural investments. Civil Society Organizations are tracking the various ways in which regulations may develop in national contexts: simply facilitate land grabbing, mitigate negative impacts and maximize opportunities or block (or roll-back) land grabbing altogether. Ultimately, any policy approaches must prioritize local communities’ access to food and water: Any water-related investments needs to be about allaying their livelihood risks and enhancing their ability to realize their rights, whether it is in developing countries or developed countries.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33885.htm

The People v. Tony Blair: How Mass Murderers Get Away With War Crimes and How to Stop Them

We need to remind ourselves of the sheer criminality of George W Bush and Tony Blair, to try and explain what was behind it and how they got away with it.

By Chris Nineham
Stop the War Coalition

This is the introduction to Chris Nineham’s new book, The People v. Tony Blair: Politics, the Media and the Anti-war Movement.

February 05, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - On Tuesday, 11 March 2003, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon phoned Donald Rumsfeld, his opposite number in the US, and told him Britain might not participate in the invasion of Iraq.

“We in Britain are having political difficulties,” he said, “real difficulties, more than you might realise.” He explained that there was a real chance an upcoming vote in parliament would go against the war, in which case Britain would have to ‘disconnect’ its troops from the operation.

That night, Donald Rumsfeld went public about Blair’s problems at a televised White House press conference, admitting Britain might not be showing up for the invasion. He reassured the media “there are workarounds.” Blair, Hoon and their colleagues were furious.

This was nine days before the invasion of Iraq.

Hoon’s phone call reflected panic in Blair’s camp. A few days earlier Home Secretary Jack Straw had told Blair that if he went to war with Bush without a second UN resolution, “the only regime change that will be happening will be in this room.” Next day, Jack Straw was apparently one of a number of senior figures arguing with Blair not to join in.

In Alistair Campbell’s words, “Jack S said that Rumsfeld’s idiotic comments gave us a way out.” One Guardian journalist reported in a piece headlined ‘Brought to the brink of defeat,’ “Senior civil servants began to check the procedures that might be necessary if Mr Blair was forced to quit.”

Whatever Donald Rumsfeld might have meant by ‘workarounds’ if Britain had pulled out of the war it would have been catastrophic not just for the government but for the whole Iraq operation.

As Hoon himself admitted later, the British and US forces were so intertwined there would have been a massive hole in military planning. Worse, the US would have lost vital political cover for an invasion that was leaving it more and more isolated.

The panic in Downing Street was largely a result of public opposition and protest, the impact of what the New York Times two days after the 15 February global protests called “the second superpower.” That day was the highest point of a movement that Blair admits shocked him and “reminded me of my isolation.” It took place at a time of maximum international disarray about the war. As Alistair Campbell noted in his dairy the morning of the march, they had both slept badly, “every part of the strategy was in tatters – re the EU, re the UN, re the US, re the party, re the country which was about to march against us.”

All this and more has found its way into the public record, at least in the last few years, but it is not in the standard account of the time. The received wisdom is that Blair and his team sailed through those months blithely ignoring all criticism, unimpressed by popular protest and unconcerned by public doubt.

Largely of course, this is because he did in the end get away with it; the parliamentary revolt was contained – just – and the war went ahead with all its predicted horror. But it is not just that. Panic and disarray don’t fit the ‘Teflon Tony’ image that has been constructed by Blair and his admirers. More generally the last thing rulers want to do is admit they have been shaken by the action of those they rule. So it should come as no surprise that it is only years after Tony Blair’s resignation that the full extent of the crisis caused by opposition to the Iraq war has begun to surface.

Accompanying this crisis was unusual media behaviour. The mainstream media normally ignores, marginalises or even criminalises radical protest. For a short period around the start of the Iraq war something different happened. Not only was there widespread and at times celebratory coverage – including demonstration supplements in the Sunday papers – but some newspapers actively encouraged their readers to participate in demonstrations with maps, arguments and even banner headlines.

While the Murdoch press was uniformly hostile and most of the media supported the war, the protests could not be ignored. The Mirror took the decision to actively back the antiwar movement. In the run-up to 15 February it regularly carried articles explaining why marching mattered. Senior staff from the Mirror actually met with march organisers to discuss how to promote the protest and produced thousands of placards to be distributed on the demonstration itself.

All this reflects the depth of the crisis created by the Iraq war and the movement against it. It is a challenge to the pessimistic view that marching and mass movements change nothing. The Stop the War movement generated not just the biggest demonstrations in British history but also an unprecedented outbreak of direct action, including the biggest wave of school walkouts in British history. In fact the movement broke a series of protest records. 15 February was the biggest protest of all time in Britain and many other countries. Britain’s biggest weekday protest took place when 300,000 confronted George Bush on his November 2003 visit to London; and its biggest protest in wartime took place when around half a million marched two days after the bombing started.

As the decade went on the movement also organised further massive demonstrations over Iraq and a series of important marches and protests against the occupation of Afghanistan. In 2006 Stop the War called two very large emergency demonstrations against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and in 2009 coorganised two massive demonstrations against the Israeli incursions into Gaza.

Most important, the real history of the anti-war movement suggests that in fact, co-ordinated mass action does have the power not just to change minds but to challenge governments.

This isn’t just a debate about the effectiveness of protest; there are also wider analytical questions at stake. Bush and his coterie were nothing if not self-confident. After a shaky start, ‘success’ in Afghanistan had the effect of supercharging both Bush and Blair’s sense of mission.

Anger at the massive build up of power at the centre of imperialism, the arrogance and cynicism of the Western leaderships, and the more and more obvious links between governments and the corporations can lead to an overestimation of the power of imperialism. Certainly some left-wing analyses of imperialism after the collapse of the Soviet Union reflected Western triumphalism more than real power relations.

Internal US foreign policy documents from around the turn of the 21st century in fact reveal a mixture of hubris and anxiety, reflecting the US’s still dominant but increasingly challenged position in the world. The anti-war protests at the time and in the ten years since the invasion of Iraq have underlined imperialism’s vulnerability just as much as its terrible capacity to unleash carnage on the world.

Media behaviour is a constant frustration to those who seek change. Owned and run for the most part by big corporations or governments, the media has a built-in tendency to favour the status quo. This can lead to a sense that the corporate media has a grip on the collective consciousness that can’t be loosened.

Nick Davies ends his brilliant critique of today’s news media Flat Earth News with a despairing description of the impact of the corporate media on our future by US radicals John Nichols and Robert McChesney:

In the place of informed debate or political parties organising along the full spectrum of opinion, there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertising. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticisation runs rampant, and a world where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge.

As the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the demonstrations comes around, we can assume that normal service has been resumed in the media for the time being, and that the anniversary of the historic protests will largely be ignored. It seemed wrong that the anniversary should pass without these demonstrations and their tremendous impact being reexamined.

We need to remind ourselves of the sheer criminality of Bush and Blair’s conduct, to try and explain what was behind it and how they got away with it, but also to underline, in very dangerous times, the power of mass, popular protest.

This article was originally posted at Stop the War Coalition

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33832.htm

France, Qatar, and the New World Disorder

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin

January 26, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - According to investigative journalist Silvia Cattori, the barbaric bombing of Aleppo University on January 15 has been officially claimed by the terrorist group the Al Nousra Front. This confirmation should not come as a surprise to those who have been following closely events in the Levant since March 17, 2011, when unknown snipers opened fire in the Southern Syrian town of Deraa killing several policemen and innocent protestors.

Since then, snipers and jihadist death squads from Libya, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and even France and the UK inter alia, backed by Nato intelligence and Gulf petro-monarch cash, have waged a genocidal non-conventional war upon the Syrian people which has relied heavily on a sophisticated international disinformation campaign in the corporate controlled press, whereby all crimes committed by the terrorists are systematically blamed on the Syrian government.

Eighty-two students in Aleppo University were murdered on Tuesday January 15 from a missile launched by the Western media’s beloved “rebels”: these gangs of convicts, drug-smugglers, rapists, child abusers, and common thugs presented to the gullible Western public as “revolutionaries.”

Since 2011, over 2000 schools and educational centres in Syria have been destroyed by the Western-backed jihadists, who are attempting to annihilate the Syrian state in order to construct a “New Middle East” that accords with Nato and Gulf state geopolitical objectives. When will this nightmare of terrorism end?

Meanwhile, there was an icy silence in Paris, London, and Washington, not a word of condemnation after last week’s Aleppo atrocity.

Unlike the Houla Massacre last year, committed by the rebels but blamed on the Syrian government, there were no calls from Paris, London and Washington for an international investigation after the Aleppo bombing. Everybody knows who the perpetrators are. So there is silence. Cowards hide. Cowards prey on the weak and defenseless. Cowards dissemble and use cover for their actions. The Western military-intelligence establishment are despicable cowards. They hide behind pompous newspeak about human rights and democracy while committing the most heinous crimes known to man. They bomb other countries while pushing buttons in computers, thousands of miles from the action. They send in drugged psychopaths to kill, rob and destroy the people of countries who get in their way.

The callous silence of the Western governments at the massacre in Aleppo contrasted sharply with the strong and unequivocal condemnations that came from Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, and China. The emerging powers in the world are bearing witness to the self-destruction of Western civilization through an excess of hubris, greed and megalomania.

There are no words in any language to describe the atrocities NATO‘s contras are committing against the people of Syria. But the world is looking on in horror and outrage. Large parts of Latin America know what is going on. Large parts of Asia and Russia too, know who is behind the violence in Syria. The truth will out in time. The balance of power in the world is shifting and sooner or later, the criminals behind these neo-colonial wars and their vast network of collaborators will be brought to justice. There are signs that Jordan may realign itself with Iraq, Iran, and Syria after signing new energy deals with Iraq on January. This could be fatal for the terrorists in Western Syria, as Jordan has hitherto been used as a base for the terror campaign. The Syrian state is strong enough to survive. The spirit of the Syrian people is indomitable. The illusions of the Arab Spring have faded. No one can argue now that the Arab Spring was about democracy and human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood have taken power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with Western support. No one can pretend any more that the conflict in Syria is about democracy.

The French military-industrial-media complex is currently buzzing with orgiastic delight as French troops re-conquer mineral and gas-rich Mali, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, while French Special Forces train and facilitate Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists in Syria — a geopolitical theatre of the absurd worthy of Ionescu!

France is one of the most culturally and politically literate civilizations in the world, and has a long and militant left-wing tradition. Yet, the only cause that rallies the official “left-wing” intelligentsia in Paris today is gay marriage. The French “left” are due to march on the streets of Paris soon in support of a new law permitting gay marriage. The French government bombed and destroyed two African countries in 2011. France is engaged in an endless colonial war in Afghanistan, while the “patrie de droits de l’homme” has been conducting a covert war in Syria since last year and is now attempting to bomb its way back into Mali with a view to destroying Algeria. Uranium-rich Niger will be next. In short, neo-colonial aggression by the French government has led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people and has ruined the lives of millions of others; it is complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity and is leading us closer to world war, yet the French “left “are only concerned about gay marriage rights! Furthermore, domestic repression in France is on the increase with more and more troops being brought out onto the streets of Paris to “protect” the population from potential “Islamists” the French government’s Gulf friends are financing, while France’s African and Magreb immigrant minorities are constantly stopped and harassed for no reason by the police. But who cares, as long as homosexuals can marry!

On a more positive note, there are some encouraging signs of increasing political dissent emanating from the more moderate officials of French imperialism. It would appear that the US strategy of chaos, the nihilistic policy of supporting Islamic terrorists in order to destroy one state while claiming to fight them in another is becoming impossible to ignore. Former French foreign minister Dominique De Villepin told radio France Inter on January 18 that the cause of the destabilisation in Mali was Nato’s war on Libya in 2011. De Villepin conceded that Libya is now overrun by jihadist militia.

Responding to a question from a caller concerning Qatar’s role in funding Islamist groups, De Villepin seemed to indicate that it was possible that “certain Gulf states” were financing Islamist extremist groups in Mali and Syria. It is unfortunately impossible to reproduce De Vilepin’s exact response to the question concerning Qatar’s role in Syria and Mali as France Inter edited this from their podcast version. They also edited out De Villepin’s highly significant suggestion that France should enter into negotiations with Russia in an effort to resolve the geopolitical impasse in Syria. In short, the three most important contributions by the former French foreign minister were edited out by the war propagandists running France’s state radio. In these strange, belligerent times even the voices of moderate imperialism are anathema to the roaring dogs of war.

Qatar’s financing of Islamist terror in Mali, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere and the incestuous relationship between the absolutist Gulf emirate and the Quai d’Orsay is now no secret to the more informed sections of the French public. Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far right party Front National told France Info on January 18: “I would like to point out an incoherence here. We are allies of Qatar, a country which is arming terrorists all over the world.” As I pointed out in previous articles, the absence of a genuine, anti-imperialist Left is opening the door to far right opportunism. Marine Le Pen is a clever operator. She understands that a significant portion of the French public are baffled by Quai d’Orsay’s love affair with the Gulf despots. Le Pen alludes to this but does not explain the real reasons for this relationship. The real reasons for the French elite’s love affair with gulf despotism has to do with the convergence of class interests. The Gulf despots support neo-liberal capitalism. They are authoritarian and neo-feudal. There is nothing Western capitalists love more than authoritarian regimes who comply with western economic interests and crush all dissent. For example, Qatari poet Mohammed Al-Ajami was imprisoned for liferecently for the crime of criticizing the Emir of Qatar.

The Far Right will never explain the class basis for the West’s alliance with Wahhabite terrorism. That is because the Far Right represents the same class as their “moderate” Right and “Centre” Left opponents. Therefore, Le Pen will use her access to mainstream media to hoodwink disaffected French citizens into supporting her candidacy for the next presidential election. By then, the chaos wrought by Hollande’s government in the Middle East and throughout Africa will set the stage for Le Pen’s fascist programme to “restore order.” Once in power, the true nature of the Front National’s tyranny will be unleashed on what is left of genuine left-wing opponents in France.

As in the 1930s, a weak “social democracy” paves the way for the ascendance of the Far Right. Only this time there is no communist party to fight them.

Instead there are farcical characters such as Jean-Luc Mélanchon, leader of the “left-wing” coalition known as Front de Gauche. Mélanchon also spoke to France Inter on January 18, where he simple expressed reserve at the legitimacy of the French intervention. However, when asked if he agreed with ultra-conservative Gisgard d’Estaing’s comment that the French intervention was “neo-colonialism,” Mélanchon said he would not use such terms. One should not forget that Mélanchon supported France’s bombing of the Libyan people in 2011 and also supports France’s covert war on Syria. Yet, this is a man who claims to be “left-wing” and an admirer of genuine anti-imperialist leaders such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela! Cherchez l’erreur!

This is not the first time Qatar’s funding of Islamic terrorism has been admitted by the mainstream French media. The widely read satirical journal Le Canard Enchainé published an article in June 2012 confirming the fact long exposed by the alternative media that France’s closest “partner” in the Middle East was in fact a state-sponsor of Islamist terrorism. Alain Chouet, the former chef de service of the French intelligence agency has also confirmed the role of Qatar in financing Islamic terrorism in Syria and Mali. It is now becoming impossible to ignore the horrible reality behind France’s foreign wars, as more and more officials and mainstream journalists are exposing the French government’s complicity in terrorism. Using the Special Forces and terrorist groups of the petro-monarchies to destabilize resource rich nations and attain geo-political objectives; only fools and simpletons could fail to see the devastating reality of this insane quest for global hegemony.

After the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the reactionary French government of Adolphe Thiers promoted the Catholic religion in education as a means of deflecting the desires of the French working class away for social justice towards piety and obedience to the bourgeois state. A similar policy was adopted in Ireland by the British imperial state after the failure of the Young Irelander uprising of 1848. Catholic seminaries proliferated and Irish workers were told to put up with their fate in this life in order to secure deliverance in the next. This is the current policy of many European governments, who are allowing the feudal monarchies of the Gulf to take control of their Muslim populated, proletarian suburbs. Thus Qatar is now the chief foreign investor in France’s poor suburbs where young, ignorant Muslims are indoctrinated in neo-feudalist obscurantism, thereby deflecting them from the path of class struggle and social liberation.

The absurdity of current French foreign policy becomes glaringly apparent when one considers the fact that secular, Baathist Syria, more than any other country in the Middle East, has deep cultural ties with France. Until last year, French tourists flocked to Syria’s hundreds of breath-taking historical and archeological sites. The Syrian government has always been a keen promoter of French culture. Syria is one of the few Arab countries where books by atheist authors are widely read. Secularism is as fundamental to modern Syria as it is to France.

In this sense, Bachar Al-Assad’s Syria is ironically the most pro-Western country in the Middle East and France could have no greater ally against Islamist terrorism than the Syrian Arab Republic, yet Paris backs the Islamists! Both the Syrian president and the Syrian UN Ambassador Dr. Bashar Ja’afari speak French. In spite of this, Dr. Ja’afari has never been invited to speak on French TV or radio. Not once has the Syrian government been allowed to present its side of the story to the French public. Paris’s corrupt elites are only interested in talking to the semi-literate thugs of the Gulf States who keep their own people in ignorance, while promoting the most barbaric form of anti-Islam around the world. After all, the state of bondage which subjects of these countries experience represents a model society for the degenerate transatlantic oligarchs.

Notwithstanding the efforts of some of France’s most authoritative Arabists such as world-renowned Franco-Syrian scholar Bassam Tahhan to inform the French public about the true nature of events in Syria, the French ruling elite continues to mask its crimes in palid pronouncements on human rights and democracy. Blogger Alain Jules puts it eloquently when he writes:

Storm and fury lurk behind a kneaded facade of goodness. The permanent refusal to shake hands, the dictat, the violence and the perpetual, morbid and mortifying logos.

Describing the French political scene in Paris during the 1930’s, Micheal Jabara Carley writes: “This was the “Republic of Pals” where “rigorously honest men were on good terms with fairly honest men who were on good terms with shady men who were on good terms with despicable crooks.”(1)

Despicable crooks are still running this world and as Malcolm X understood too well, their media servants in all languages work over time to make us love the crooks and hate their victims.

Gearóid Ó Colmáin was born in Cork, Ireland, and is currently based in Paris. He is a former bilingual columnist with Metro Eireann. His interests include geopolitcs, globalisation, philosophy and the arts. He is a member of Pôle de renaissance communiste en France (PRCF) a political movement which advocates Marxism-Leninism and the formation of a revolutionary communist party in France

1. Carley, Micheal Jabara, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was And the Coming of World War II, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999) p.15.

This article was originally posted at Dissident Voice

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33716.htm

War on Terror Forever

By Pepe Escobar

January 25, 2013 “Information Clearing House” - And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to… The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It’s now official – coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at theAFRICOM site, the Pentagon’s weaponized African branch.

Exit “historical” al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey’s words, AQIM “is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if… left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat.”

With Mali now elevated to the status of a “threat” to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn’t do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression “The Long War”, they really meant it.

Even under President Obama 2.0′s “leading from behind” doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali – and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will “attack American interests”.

Thus, the first 100 US military “advisers” are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana – the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.

Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending “advisers” was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.

Nobody, though, is paying attention. General Carter Ham is so excited with the prospect of AFRICOM accumulating more gigs than Led Zeppelin in its heyday, and himself acquiring iconic savior status (Carter of Africa?), that he’s bungling up his data. [2]
The general seems to have forgotten that AFRICOM – and then the North Atlantic treaty Organization (NATO) – irretrievably supported (and weaponized) the NATO rebels in Libya who were the fighting vanguard in the war against Muammar Gaddafi. The general does know that AQIM has “a lot of money and they have a lot of weapons”.

But he believes it was “mercenaries paid by Gaddafi” who abandoned Libya and brought their weapons, and “many of them came to northern Mali”. No, general, they were not Gaddafi mercenaries; most were NATO rebels, the same ones who attacked the US Consulate, actually a CIA station, in Benghazi, the same ones commuting to Syria, the same ones let loose all across the Sahel.

So what is Algeria up to?
Right on cue, British Prime Minister David Cameron followed His Masters Voice, announcing the intervention in Mali will last years “or even decades”. [3]

This Tuesday, the creme de la creme of Britain’s intelligence establishment is meeting to plan nothing else than a pan-Sahara/Sahel war, for which they want yet another Bush-style “coalition of the willing”. [4] For the moment, British involvement means yet more “advisers” in the usual “military cooperation” and “security training” categories, lots of money and, last but not least, Special Forces in shadow war mode.

The whole scenario comes complete with another providential “Geronimo”; Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka “The Uncatchable” (at least by French intelligence), the leader of MUJAO who masterminded the raid on the In Amenas gas field in Algeria.

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Of course we did. But now – it’s official – Mali is the new Afghanistan (as Asia Times Online had already reported - Burn, burn Africa’s Afghanistan, January 18, 2013). Here’s Cameron: “Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa.” Right; Belmokhtar is already rehearsing for his cameo appearance in a Zero Dark Thirty sequel.

So by now it’s clear where the Anglo-American Pentagon/Africom/British intelligence “special relationship” stands – with the French under President Francois Hollande, reconverted as a warlord, momentarily “leading” the way towards Operation African Quagmire. Crucially, no one in the European Union, apart from the Brits, is loony enough to follow in the footsteps of warlord Hollande.

By comparison, what is definitely not clear is where the key to this equation – Algeria – stands, from the point of view of the Western GWOT.

Number one fact is that the new “Geronimo”, Belmokhtar, and his Mulathameen Brigade (“The Masked Ones”), of which the “Signed in Blood Batallion” which attacked in Algeria is a sub-group, enjoy extremely cozy links with Algerian secret intelligence. In a way, this could be seen as a remix of the relationship between the Taliban – and “historic” al-Qaeda – with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Algerian military’s ultra-hardcore response to the Islamist raid was predictable (this is how they did it during the 1990s in their internal war against the Islamic Salvation Front). We don’t negotiate with terrorists; we kill them (along with scores of hostages). We do it by ourselves, without nosy foreigners, and we go for total information blackout.

No wonder this modus operandi raised a rosary of eyebrows across the Anglo-American “special relationship”. Thus the Washington/London bottom line: we cannot trust the Algerians. Our GWOT – the Sahara/Sahel chapter – will be fought without them. Perhaps, even against them.

A serious complicating factor is that the 40 or so Islamists (including Libyans, Syrians and Egyptians) crossed at least 1,600 kilometers of high desert coming from Libya, not Mali. They had to have serious “protection” – anything from intelligence provided by a foreign power to qualified Algerian insiders. Hostages told of kidnappers “with North American accents” (including a Canadian whom Reuters has named “Chedad”) and that all of them knew exactly where the foreigners were located inside the compound. [5]

Professor Jeremy Keenan of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London frames it in terms of an Algerian false-flag operation gone wrong. [6] Algiers may have wanted to signal to the West that French bombing in Mali would inevitably lead to blowback; but then Belmokhtar turned the whole thing upside down because he was furious the French were allowed to own Algerian airspace to bomb Mali. In a way, this could be seen as another remix of the Taliban revolting against the ISI.

Algerian public opinion is immensely suspicious, to say the least, of all the players’ motives, including the Algerian government and especially France. Here is a fascinating sample. This perspective, by a political science professor, is worth quoting at length, as it neatly summarizes the French “lead” in the new GWOT chapter.

In an interview with the French-language daily Le Soir d’Algerie, political science professor Ahmed Adimi described the intervention as an attempt to “undermine Algeria” and a “step in a plan for the installation of foreign forces in the Sahel region”. Adimi’s thesis is that France has worked for years to destabilize the Sahel as a means of strengthening its geopolitical stance.

Asked whether the French operation in Mali was consistent with United Nations security council resolution 2085, Adimi states that the resolution “does not pose much of a problem in itself. Western powers have used it to intervene and adopt resolutions to justify their military operations. This has already happened in Iraq. In fact, the French operation may seem legal since it comes at the request of the Acting Present of Mali. However, it is important to remember that the current government came to power in a coup. Regarding the intervention, it was certainly predictable but the French have precipitated matters. [...] These terrorist groups are being manipulated by foreign powers,” continuing to argue that these groups were “allowed” to move south to Konna as means of justifying the French intervention.

Adimi argues that Algerians have “been sounding the alarm about the situation in the Sahel in general. Ahmed Barkouk and myself have organized several seminars on this topic. We discussed the role of France and its commitment to the region. It was France that was behind the creation of the movement for the Azawad, and I speak of course of the political organization and not of the people of Azawad, who have rights as a community. The French knew that their intervention in Libya would lead to a return of the pro-Qaddafi military Tuareg to Mali. They also planned the release of Libyan arms stockpiles across the Sahel band. The project is to transform the region into a new Afghanistan, the result of long-term planning.”

Tariq Ramadan, in a devastating piece, [7] also unmasks Paris, drawing the connection between the dodgy Sarkozy “humanitarian” intervention in Libya and the current Hollande drive to protect a “friendly” country – all coupled with the hypocrisy of France for decades not giving a damn about “the people” suffering under assorted African dictatorships.

But the Oscar for Best Hypocritical Scenario certainly goes to the current French-Anglo-American concern about Mali being the new al-Qaeda playground, when the major playgrounds are actually NATO-supported northern Syria (as far as the Turkish border), north Lebanon and most parts of Libya.

Follow the gold, and follow the uranium
Even before it’s possible to fully analyze the myriad ramifications – many of them unforeseen – of the expanded GWOT, there are two fronts to be carefully observed in the near future. So let’s follow the gold, and let’s follow the uranium.

Follow the gold. A host of nations have gold bullion deposited at the New York Federal Reserve. They include, crucially, Germany. Recently, Berlin started asking to get back its physical gold back – 374 ton from the Bank of France and 300 tons out of 1,500 tons from the New York Federal Reserve.

So guess what the French and the Americans essentially said: We ain’t got no gold! Well, at least right now. It will take five years for the German gold in France to be returned, and no less than seven years for the stash at the New York Federal Reserve. Bottom line: both Paris and Washington/New York have to come up with real physical gold any way they can.

That’s where Mali fits in – beautifully. Mali – along with Ghana – accounts for up to 8% of global gold production. So if you’re desperate for the genuine article – physical gold – you’ve got to control Mali. Imagine all that gold falling into the hands of… China.
Now follow the uranium. As everyone who was glued to the Niger yellowcake saga prior to the invasion of Iraq knows, Niger is the world’s fourth-largest producer of uranium. Its biggest customer is – surprise! – France; half of France’s electricity comes from nuclear energy. Theuranium mines in Niger happen to be concentrated in the northwest of the country, on the western range of the Air mountains, very close to the Mali border and one of the regions being bombed by the French.

The uranium issue is intimately connected with successive Tuareg rebellions; one must remember that, for the Tuaregs, there are no borders in the Sahel. All recent Tuareg rebellions in Niger happened in uranium country – in Agadez province, near the Mali border. So, from the point of view of French interests, imagine the possibility of the Tuaregs gaining control of those uranium mines – and starting to do deals with… China. Beijing, after all, is already present in the region.

All this crucial geostrategic power play – the “West” fighting China in Africa, with AFRICOM giving a hand to warlord Hollande while taking the Long War perspective – actually supersedes the blowback syndrome. It’s unthinkable that British, French and American intelligence did not foresee the blowback ramifications from NATO’s “humanitarian war” in Libya. NATO was intimately allied with Salafis and Salafi-jihadis – temporarily reconverted into “freedom fighters”. They knew Mali – and the whole Sahel – would subsequently be awash in weapons.

No, the expansion of GWOT to the Sahara/Sahel happened by design. GWOT is the gift that keeps on giving; what could possibly top a new war theatre to the French-Anglo-American industrial-military-security-contractor-media complex?

Oh yes, there’s that “pivoting” to Asia as well. One is tempted to donate a finger – extracted Islamist-style – to know how and when will come the counterpunch from Beijing. 

Notes:
1. Mali conflict exposes White House-Pentagon split, Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2013.
2. African nations can, must do for themselves – with US support, December 4, 2012.
3. David Cameron: fight against terrorism in north Africa may last decades, The Guardian, January 20, 2013.
4. Intelligence chiefs and special forces plot Sahara mission, The Independent, January 21, 2013. 
5. In Amenas : les ex-otages racontent quatre jours d’angoisse, Liberation, January 20, 2013. (In French).
6. Algeria Hostage Crisis: Terror Attack ‘Inside Job’ Gone Wrong, Says Professor Jeremy Keenan, The Huffington Post, January 19, 2013.
7. Le Mali, la France et les extremistes, journaldumali.com, January 18, 2013. (In French).

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33708.htm

War on terror forever

By Pepe Escobar 

And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to… The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It’s now official – coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM site, the Pentagon’s weaponized African branch.
Exit “historical” al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey’s words, AQIM “is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if… left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat.”

With Mali now elevated to the status of a “threat” to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn’t do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression “The Long War”, they really meant it.

Even under President Obama 2.0′s “leading from behind” doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali – and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will “attack American interests”.

Thus, the first 100 US military “advisers” are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana – the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.

Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending “advisers” was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.

Nobody, though, is paying attention. General Carter Ham is so excited with the prospect of AFRICOM accumulating more gigs than Led Zeppelin in its heyday, and himself acquiring iconic savior status (Carter of Africa?), that he’s bungling up his data. [2]
The general seems to have forgotten that AFRICOM – and then the North Atlantic treaty Organization (NATO) – irretrievably supported (and weaponized) the NATO rebels in Libya who were the fighting vanguard in the war against Muammar Gaddafi. The general does know that AQIM has “a lot of money and they have a lot of weapons”.

But he believes it was “mercenaries paid by Gaddafi” who abandoned Libya and brought their weapons, and “many of them came to northern Mali”. No, general, they were not Gaddafi mercenaries; most were NATO rebels, the same ones who attacked the US Consulate, actually a CIA station, in Benghazi, the same ones commuting to Syria, the same ones let loose all across the Sahel.

So what is Algeria up to?
Right on cue, British Prime Minister David Cameron followed His Masters Voice, announcing the intervention in Mali will last years “or even decades”. [3]

This Tuesday, the creme de la creme of Britain’s intelligence establishment is meeting to plan nothing else than a pan-Sahara/Sahel war, for which they want yet another Bush-style “coalition of the willing”. [4] For the moment, British involvement means yet more “advisers” in the usual “military cooperation” and “security training” categories, lots of money and, last but not least, Special Forces in shadow war mode.

The whole scenario comes complete with another providential “Geronimo”; Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka “The Uncatchable” (at least by French intelligence), the leader of MUJAO who masterminded the raid on the In Amenas gas field in Algeria.

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Of course we did. But now – it’s official – Mali is the new Afghanistan (as Asia Times Online had already reported - Burn, burn Africa’s Afghanistan, January 18, 2013). Here’s Cameron: “Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa.” Right; Belmokhtar is already rehearsing for his cameo appearance in a Zero Dark Thirty sequel.

So by now it’s clear where the Anglo-American Pentagon/Africom/British intelligence “special relationship” stands – with the French under President Francois Hollande, reconverted as a warlord, momentarily “leading” the way towards Operation African Quagmire. Crucially, no one in the European Union, apart from the Brits, is loony enough to follow in the footsteps of warlord Hollande.

By comparison, what is definitely not clear is where the key to this equation – Algeria – stands, from the point of view of the Western GWOT.

Number one fact is that the new “Geronimo”, Belmokhtar, and his Mulathameen Brigade (“The Masked Ones”), of which the “Signed in Blood Batallion” which attacked in Algeria is a sub-group, enjoy extremely cozy links with Algerian secret intelligence. In a way, this could be seen as a remix of the relationship between the Taliban – and “historic” al-Qaeda – with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Algerian military’s ultra-hardcore response to the Islamist raid was predictable (this is how they did it during the 1990s in their internal war against the Islamic Salvation Front). We don’t negotiate with terrorists; we kill them (along with scores of hostages). We do it by ourselves, without nosy foreigners, and we go for total information blackout.

No wonder this modus operandi raised a rosary of eyebrows across the Anglo-American “special relationship”. Thus the Washington/London bottom line: we cannot trust the Algerians. Our GWOT – the Sahara/Sahel chapter – will be fought without them. Perhaps, even against them.

A serious complicating factor is that the 40 or so Islamists (including Libyans, Syrians and Egyptians) crossed at least 1,600 kilometers of high desert coming from Libya, not Mali. They had to have serious “protection” – anything from intelligence provided by a foreign power to qualified Algerian insiders. Hostages told of kidnappers “with North American accents” (including a Canadian whom Reuters has named “Chedad”) and that all of them knew exactly where the foreigners were located inside the compound. [5]

Professor Jeremy Keenan of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London frames it in terms of an Algerian false-flag operation gone wrong. [6] Algiers may have wanted to signal to the West that French bombing in Mali would inevitably lead to blowback; but then Belmokhtar turned the whole thing upside down because he was furious the French were allowed to own Algerian airspace to bomb Mali. In a way, this could be seen as another remix of the Taliban revolting against the ISI.

Algerian public opinion is immensely suspicious, to say the least, of all the players’ motives, including the Algerian government and especially France. Here is a fascinating sample. This perspective, by a political science professor, is worth quoting at length, as it neatly summarizes the French “lead” in the new GWOT chapter.

In an interview with the French-language daily Le Soir d’Algerie, political science professor Ahmed Adimi described the intervention as an attempt to “undermine Algeria” and a “step in a plan for the installation of foreign forces in the Sahel region”. Adimi’s thesis is that France has worked for years to destabilize the Sahel as a means of strengthening its geopolitical stance.

Asked whether the French operation in Mali was consistent with United Nations security council resolution 2085, Adimi states that the resolution “does not pose much of a problem in itself. Western powers have used it to intervene and adopt resolutions to justify their military operations. This has already happened in Iraq. In fact, the French operation may seem legal since it comes at the request of the Acting Present of Mali. However, it is important to remember that the current government came to power in a coup. Regarding the intervention, it was certainly predictable but the French have precipitated matters. [...] These terrorist groups are being manipulated by foreign powers,” continuing to argue that these groups were “allowed” to move south to Konna as means of justifying the French intervention.

Adimi argues that Algerians have “been sounding the alarm about the situation in the Sahel in general. Ahmed Barkouk and myself have organized several seminars on this topic. We discussed the role of France and its commitment to the region. It was France that was behind the creation of the movement for the Azawad, and I speak of course of the political organization and not of the people of Azawad, who have rights as a community. The French knew that their intervention in Libya would lead to a return of the pro-Qaddafi military Tuareg to Mali. They also planned the release of Libyan arms stockpiles across the Sahel band. The project is to transform the region into a new Afghanistan, the result of long-term planning.”

Tariq Ramadan, in a devastating piece, [7] also unmasks Paris, drawing the connection between the dodgy Sarkozy “humanitarian” intervention in Libya and the current Hollande drive to protect a “friendly” country – all coupled with the hypocrisy of France for decades not giving a damn about “the people” suffering under assorted African dictatorships.

But the Oscar for Best Hypocritical Scenario certainly goes to the current French-Anglo-American concern about Mali being the new al-Qaeda playground, when the major playgrounds are actually NATO-supported northern Syria (as far as the Turkish border), north Lebanon and most parts of Libya.

Follow the gold, and follow the uranium
Even before it’s possible to fully analyze the myriad ramifications – many of them unforeseen – of the expanded GWOT, there are two fronts to be carefully observed in the near future. So let’s follow the gold, and let’s follow the uranium.

Follow the gold. A host of nations have gold bullion deposited at the New York Federal Reserve. They include, crucially, Germany. Recently, Berlin started asking to get back its physical gold back – 374 ton from the Bank of France and 300 tons out of 1,500 tons from the New York Federal Reserve.

So guess what the French and the Americans essentially said: We ain’t got no gold! Well, at least right now. It will take five years for the German gold in France to be returned, and no less than seven years for the stash at the New York Federal Reserve. Bottom line: both Paris and Washington/New York have to come up with real physical gold any way they can.

That’s where Mali fits in – beautifully. Mali – along with Ghana – accounts for up to 8% of global gold production. So if you’re desperate for the genuine article – physical gold – you’ve got to control Mali. Imagine all that gold falling into the hands of… China.
Now follow the uranium. As everyone who was glued to the Niger yellowcake saga prior to the invasion of Iraq knows, Niger is the world’s fourth-largest producer of uranium. Its biggest customer is – surprise! – France; half of France’s electricity comes from nuclear energy. The uranium mines in Niger happen to be concentrated in the northwest of the country, on the western range of the Air mountains, very close to the Mali border and one of the regions being bombed by the French.

The uranium issue is intimately connected with successive Tuareg rebellions; one must remember that, for the Tuaregs, there are no borders in the Sahel. All recent Tuareg rebellions in Niger happened in uranium country – in Agadez province, near the Mali border. So, from the point of view of French interests, imagine the possibility of the Tuaregs gaining control of those uranium mines – and starting to do deals with… China. Beijing, after all, is already present in the region.

All this crucial geostrategic power play – the “West” fighting China in Africa, with AFRICOM giving a hand to warlord Hollande while taking the Long War perspective – actually supersedes the blowback syndrome. It’s unthinkable that British, French and American intelligence did not foresee the blowback ramifications from NATO’s “humanitarian war” in Libya. NATO was intimately allied with Salafis and Salafi-jihadis – temporarily reconverted into “freedom fighters”. They knew Mali – and the whole Sahel – would subsequently be awash in weapons.

No, the expansion of GWOT to the Sahara/Sahel happened by design. GWOT is the gift that keeps on giving; what could possibly top a new war theatre to the French-Anglo-American industrial-military-security-contractor-media complex?

Oh yes, there’s that “pivoting” to Asia as well. One is tempted to donate a finger – extracted Islamist-style – to know how and when will come the counterpunch from Beijing.

Notes:
1. Mali conflict exposes White House-Pentagon split, Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2013.
2. African nations can, must do for themselves – with US support, December 4, 2012.
3. David Cameron: fight against terrorism in north Africa may last decades, The Guardian, January 20, 2013.
4. Intelligence chiefs and special forces plot Sahara mission, The Independent, January 21, 2013. 
5. In Amenas : les ex-otages racontent quatre jours d’angoisse, Liberation, January 20, 2013. (In French).
6. Algeria Hostage Crisis: Terror Attack ‘Inside Job’ Gone Wrong, Says Professor Jeremy Keenan, The Huffington Post, January 19, 2013.
7. Le Mali, la France et les extremistes, journaldumali.com, January 18, 2013. (In French).

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/OA23Dj06.html

The world economy 2013: Illusions and reality

8 January 2013

When the economic history of the recent period is written, it may well be that the year 2012 is regarded as having been almost as important as 2008.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers four-and-a-half years ago was the trigger that set in motion the breakdown of the global capitalist system. But the past year has made its own mark. It has seen the destruction of a series of fictions assiduously promoted by the spokesmen of the ruling elites in the wake of the onset of the global financial crisis.

First of all, it has exposed the claim that the world economy would somehow right itself through the operations of the business cycle, and that the “magic of the market” would come to the rescue. But well into the fifth year of the global breakdown, the financial system is being sustained only by the activities of the world’s major central banks, which are providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the major banks and finance houses through various forms of “quantitative easing”—a euphemism for printing money.

Far from creating the conditions for “recovery,” however, these operations are simply financing the accumulation of profits through speculation—the very thing that led to the collapse of 2008—and setting the stage for another crash.

Writing in Monday’s edition of the Financial Times, Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive and co-chief investment officer of the giant bond trader Pimco, noted that “several asset classes now have highly manipulated prices due to experimental bank activities, both actual and signaled,” and that “this situation is reminiscent of 2006-07.”

The past 12 months have also put paid to the illusion that after a period of financial turbulence, “recovery” was just around the corner. All the data on the world economy point to continuing low growth or recession in all the major countries.

In its report on the world economy issued last month, the United Nations pointed to “weaknesses in the major developed economies” as being at the root of continued “global economic woes,” with most of these economies, particularly in Europe, being “dragged into a downward spiral” as high unemployment, reduced consumption spending, continued bank risk, fiscal tightening and slower growth “viciously feed into one another.” Reports from all other major international financial institutions highlight the same processes.

According to the UN, the euro area is expected to grow by only 0.3 percent in 2013 and just 1.4 percent in 2014, after a contraction of 0.5 percent in 2012. The growth rate for the US is predicted to fall to 1.7 percent in 2013 after reaching just 2.1 percent—well below the level experienced during every other “recovery” in the post-World War II period. Japan, which experienced a contraction last quarter, is expected to grow by just 0.6 percent in 2013, after growth of 1.5 percent in 2012.

The UN report also pointed to trade figures that highlight the underlying contractionary processes in the world economy. World trade fell by 10 percent in 2009, but then rebounded significantly in 2010. However in 2011, the growth of exports started to slow and then decelerated sharply in 2012, “mainly due to declining import demand in Europe… and anemic aggregate demand in the United States and Japan.”

The British economy is set to move into a “triple dip” recession this year, after activity in the services sector, which compromises around 75 percent of the British economy, experienced a sharp decline in December.

The manufacturing-based German economy is headed down the same road. According to the latest report published by the Kiel Institute for World Economy, Germany is now facing “pronounced economic slowdown” after experiencing “decelerating growth” throughout 2012. Aggregate output is expected to fall by 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter as a result of “sluggish exports” and a “significant decrease in enterprise investment spending.”

Economic events in 2012 also exposed the fiction that, notwithstanding the stagnation of the advanced capitalist countries, the so-called BRIC economies could provide a new base for the expansion of global capitalism. The claim that “emerging” markets would be able to “decouple” from the major economies has been shattered, as their dependence on the major markets is revealed in falling growth rates.

Last year, the growth rate in China dropped from 10.4 percent to 7.7 percent. Brazil, where growth reached 7.5 percent in 2010, recorded a rate of just 1.3 percent last year, while India’s growth has fallen from 8.9 to 5.5 percent.

A recent report published by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) makes clear that the world capitalist economy is not passing through a conjunctural downturn, but a breakdown comparable to that which began in 1914 and continued for the next three decades. This analysis, which was advanced by the World Socialist Web Site more than four years ago, is being confirmed by hard facts and figures.

The McKinsey report found that underlying the deepening recession in Europe was a collapse in private investment. Between 2007 and 2011, private investment in the 27-member European Union fell by more than €350 billion, “larger than any previous decline in absolute terms.” This represented more than 20 times the fall in private consumption and four times the decline in real gross domestic product.

Private investment is now 15 percent lower than in 2007, meaning companies will not generate some €543 billion in revenues between 2009 and 2020 that they otherwise would have. The MGI report noted that European companies had excess cash holdings of €750 billion for which they could not find profitable outlets. The piling up of cash points to a breakdown in the basic dynamic of capitalist production, in which investment leads to the accumulation of profit, which then results in further investment and economic expansion.

The same process is at work in the US economy, where companies are piling up cash while profits are increasingly being accumulated through speculation in financial markets.

The objective logic of the profit system is the driving force behind the austerity programs being implemented by the ruling classes in the US, Europe and the world over. They are seeking to resolve the crisis through the impoverishment of the working class, reducing its conditions to those of the 1930s and worse.

The international working class must respond with its own independent strategy based on the overthrow of the bankrupt profit system and the establishment of socialism. The worst mistake it could make is to believe that half-measures will suffice or that the capitalist economy will eventually right itself. The events of 2012 have shattered that illusion as well as laying the basis for major social struggles in the coming year.

Nick Beams

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/08/pers-j08.html

Global warming, the tool of the West

04.01.2013

By Stanislav Mishin

For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consiquent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new “science” to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.

What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save “Gia”. At the same time, they used this “science” as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear? Gia worship, the earth “mother”, has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.

Various groups have fought back. This is including Russian hackers, who published a huge database of UK government, scientific and university emails depicting the fixing of data to sell Global Warming, er Climate Change (as if it never changed on its own). And while taking hit after hit, the beast, like Al Quida, will not die. As a matter of fact, the beast is on a steady come back, as it is quite useful during the down times recession. The US alone spends $7 billion each year on warming “studies”, which is, in truth, nothing but a huge money laundering operation, as no real science is conducted and vapid alarmist reports the only product generated.

Amongst the newest claims of pending disasters, is a cry that icepacks are now melting at three times the rate of the 1990s, even though there has not been any significant warming in the past 20 years. Greenland’s icepack melt off, has been linked to volcanic activity under the ice, heating it. Must be the magmamen and their SUVs. These facts, however, do not faze the Gia crowd and their Elite/Governmental backers. The fact that a super storm hit the NE US is also being played as evidence of GW. Thank God that before GW no such things ever happened. How are they to explain that Russia and Eastern Europe are projected to have the coldest winter in 20 years? Oh, but I doubt my Western readers are even aware of that.

Now, with their economies in a spiral of debt laden, non-manufacturing recession (if not out and out depression), the Elites, who sense they are loosing their grip or toe hold on key economic regions outside their home regions, are once again calling out their inquisitors of Global Warming and sending them towards the developing world.

The first salvo has been fired by a British Warming dandy named Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford, who as an academic at Whitehall, has made a career and quite a bit of money off of this scam. Lord Stern, a former World Bank chief economist and author of the landmark Stern review of the economics of climate change, was a close associate of Gordon Brown and the Leftists, who with the Tory counterparts and in parallel to the American Democrats/Republicans set up the grand and self destructive economic schemes that have plunged their own nations and many many others into the abyss of poverty.

The good Lord Stern, in commentary on why countries such as Russia, China, India and Brazil, in other words, the BRICs, have to pony up cash and depress their own growth, made this statement for the Guardian paper: “It’s a brutal arithmetic – the changing structure of the world’s economy has been dramatic. That is something developing countries will have to face up to,”

His premiss is that even if you take out the deindustrialized West, run away Global Warming will not stop due to the industrialized world. Its now all the fault of those raising themselves up for the destruction of the world, from the phantom joke of GW. Lord Stern tried to assure that the opening salvo was not a salvo, by stating: “I am not pointing the finger at the developing world, just looking at what is necessary. I am not accusing or proposing, just calculating what is needed [to meet scientific estimates of the emissions cuts needed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change]“. More like a calculated accusation.  After all, this is not some light weight of the GIA cult, but the movement’s chief economist who enjoyed the ear of the UK government: a perfect tool of the Western Elites.

Expect the cries to get louder and more shrill in the months to follow.

Stanislav Mishin 

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/04-01-2013/123380-global_warming-0/

2013 – The big issues

02.01.2013

The huge issue this year is in the area of international politics, the gem in the geo-political crown and one focal point which involves east and west, the Middle East, the Arab World and a new terrifying vector in international relations: NATO’s use of terrorists as policymakers. In a year dominated by Mars, astrologists would forecast Armageddon.

Those who follow astrology and make prophecies based upon it would remind us of the qualities of Mars, the planet that dominates 2013: war, storms, drought, floods. Death – Mars is the enemy of peace. Those of us who follow astrology to the point of using it as an ice-breaker would not deny that in some cases, they get it right.

And in 2013, there is a hangover from 2012 threatening to blow up in our faces and create all the problems foreseen by the astrologers and broadcast by the astrologists. In a word, Syria.

Syria, the line in the sand

Syria, where the West got it wrong, where the FUKUS Axis (France, UK, US) once again got themselves involved with terrorists playing the same old moral high ground card about a dictator murdering his people (who is murdering his security services in their thousands? The government?) and the same hypocritical nonsense about freedom and democracy and so on.

Syria is all about an act of intrusion by FUKUS Axis powers who got themselves involved as soon as possible when they sensed incipient political unrest among certain sectors of Syrian society at a time when over seventy per cent of the people were fully in favour of President Assad and before the FUKUS Axis had launched hordes of terrorists into the fray, arming and training them and then unleashing them on Syrian society.

As the monster got out of control, the conflict became more bloody and as the west got more and more desperate, their terrorists became more and more violent, with western special forces active inside Syria working with the demonic scourge they have created. The result is that most of Syrian society is most certainly against the FSA.

But Syria is a line in the sand and a line that must not be crossed. A political settlement is the only way forward and this is as usual the stance of Moscow, while the FUKUS Axis’ modus operandi is once again violence, terrorism and subversion. We saw it in Kosovo, we saw it in Iraq, we saw it in Libya and we are seeing it in Syria.

Syria is the big issue because a stable Syria following a political roadmap drawn up by Syrians for Syrians, and respecting and understanding this country’s five-thousand-year-old culture, means a stable Middle East, it means a firm counterweight to the more sinister forces operating in Israel against the Two-State Solution and it means stability in an area of the world where massive natural resources are concentrated. And let us be honest, that is the question in a nutshell for the FUKUS Axis, is it not?

European Union or European Trading Association?

Another big issue for 2013 is the continuity of the European Union as it is and here, the Euro-skeptical United Kingdom has a word to say, its stance being the focal point around which the hearts and minds of the European people gather. And where the European people are at, is a very different place from the one their Euro-representatives inhabit, namely a cloud cuckoo land imposed top-down, in an exercise of anti-democratic policymaking going wholly against the will of the people.

Nobody asked for this Federal monster hastily stitched together by those who are desperate to create jobs for the boys and girls, sons and daughters, while everyone wants to do a fast rewind back before Lisbon, before Nice and before Maastricht. The Europeans want a loose, trading agreement in which countries are free to trade among themselves with a minimum of tariffs. Period. For once, the right wing of David Cameron’s Conservative Party strikes a chord with Europe and for his own good he had better listen to it otherwise the political scenario in the UK will veer to the right, into the hands of UKIP, now the third force in British politics. If that happens, David Cameron will have done for the Tories what Nick Clegg appears to have done for the Liberal Democrats. What was that song about the Grand Old Duke of York?

BRIC and CSTO v. NATO and the FUKUS Axis

On a wider front, the success of the BRIC group into forming closer relations forming an organism rivalling the G8, bringing in nations with a similar political attitude (respect for debate, dialogue and discussion, the fundamentals of democracy, which are apparently not the foundations upon which the NATO bloc is based as we see by the behaviour of the FUKUS Axis) and the success of the CSTO into forming a powerful military alliance with bite, involving all of Central Asia, will create a counter-weight to the said Axis and put a stop to the neo-imperialistic warmongering of countries with a very dubious past and an even more dubious present.

Sensible financial policy v. social terrorism

The reaction to the economic and financial crisis of 2008/9, after all yet another of the endemic faults built into the monetarist-corporatist economic system which market-based capitalism soon morphed into, destroying the social model, destroying the welfare state and creating all the ills we see today, was in the west staggeringly and utterly idiotic. Instead of pumping money into the economies, already held down in many cases by wonderful European Union “convergence” measures, the western governments restricted the supply, imposing taxes, ceasing to lend, freezing salaries, cutting benefits and sending societies back into the dark ages before the social develop movements created our modern societies.

In one fell swoop, workers’ rights were virtually destroyed. People now have to work longer, receive less money, see their timetables stretched, have less public services in return for their taxation contributions, it is easier to hire a worker with a temporary contract and easier to fire a worker without due cause.

When it comes to bailing out a bank, the governments collectively find trillions within a few hours of discussion. When it comes to providing services and guiding a society through a crisis, they say they do not have the funds. That works well, when public finances are virtually kept a secret and in-depth knowledge as to how things work is very difficult to find.

Basically, they got the model wrong, the checks and balances they desperately try to introduce into it do not work either and all the while the corporatist monsters were sweeping away the traders on the street corner who were the mainstay of the market-oriented capitalist system. The result is that these monsters have grown more powerful at the expense of these traders – the middle class – which has yet again disappeared. The result is social terrorism. The model does not provide enough jobs, it does not finance people to create them, it has turned higher education into a farcical financial scam (you pay, and therefore you get the degree) and its answer to its failures is to say “we’re all in the same bed”. Of whose making?

The analogy is a society which pays to see the clowns in the circus. Due to the incompetence of those who put up the tent, it collapses. Then they have to pay to get out.

The notion that there is no other way out is absurd. A one-per-cent tax on financial transactions would provide massive resources and, some say, would exonerate everyone from paying any additional taxes at all. The notion that you raise more money by raising tax brackets is equally nonsensical because doing so, you create the conditions for a parallel economy to appear, especially when you are reducing public services people are paying for. You want a consultation? With a receipt it is X+1; without, it is X-1. The difference, the fiscal authorities lose through their own ineptitude.

In fact, a “technically stupid” idea such as having one taxation bracket – 20 per cent – applying the 80/20 rule to society, in which people get used to the fact that they pay one fifth of what they earn to the kitty and keep four fifths for themselves, may just raise more revenue than the systems they are applying today.

The USA

If the USA is a major player on the world stage, then congratulations to generations of Americans and of course, the country is big enough to make a difference. It is, however, in free-fall. The point in being in economic free-fall is not that it hurts when you are falling but rather, when you reach the bottom of the pit.

And what is happening today is that both members of the political party divide are frantically digging the bottom deeper before the pit hits the fan. However, with every yard it falls, the nearer to the bottom it is. Printing money is a temporary measure to alleviate the symptoms but not to treat the cause.

The answer for the United States of America may be a very deep reflection as to what and where the country is and as to whether the current political model is the adequate one for the type of nation the USA has developed into. Most European countries had this reflection during their development, some of which were unfortunately violent.

Maybe the two-party system in the USA engenders more irresponsibility than responsibility, something the country needs to get its budget in order and let’s be honest: what right does a country with enormous internal economic issues have to dictate to others how to behave?

Inclusion and development v. exclusion and deployment

In conclusion, we need an inclusive world which respects cultural differences, one in which if we want to make a difference and change things, we allow the change to come from within through non-intrusive development programmes, not deployment of terrorists, killing people, raping women and destroying peaceful communities.

We need societies in which all members are players, whatever their race, colour, creed or sexuality and we need to start implementing the round-table approach in our societies and our companies, where again, all players communicate their needs eye-to-eye and short-, medium- and long-term strategies can be formulated.

We need a multi-polar world to counter the greed of the corporations that today control the FUKUS Axis and if Mars, the war planet, is the one that wants to dominate 2013 then let us collectively shut him out and let in Venus, the planet of love.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/02-01-2013/123359-new_year_issues-0/

Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left

WHY HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONISM IS A DEAD END

by Jean Bricmont

Unable to find a new ideological identity after the demise of its big Soviet brother, the European left has engulfed itself in societal issues at home and humanitarian interventionism abroad. In an inconsistent stance, it calls for the protection of peoples by U.S. imperialism. But how can it wish to protect anyone when it has given up its own freedom?

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | BRUSSELS (BELGIUM)

Ever since the 1990s, and especially since the Kosovo war in 1999, anyone who opposes armed interventions by Western powers and NATO has to confront what may be called an anti-anti-war left (including its far left segment). In Europe, and notably in France, this anti-anti-war left is made up of the mainstream of social democracy, the Green parties and most of the radical left. The anti-anti-war left does not come out openly in favor of Western military interventions and even criticizes them at times (but usually only for their tactics or alleged motivations – the West is supporting a just cause, but clumsily and for oil or for geo-strategic reasons). But most of its energy is spent issuing “warnings” against the supposed dangerous drift of that part of the left that remains firmly opposed to such interventions. It calls upon us to show solidarity with the “victims” against “dictators who kill their own people”, and not to give in to knee-jerk anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, or anti-Zionism, and above all not to end up on the same side as the far right. After the Kosovo Albanians in 1999, we have been told that “we” must protect Afghan women, Iraqi Kurds and more recently the people of Libya and of Syria.

It cannot be denied that the anti-anti-war left has been extremely effective. The Iraq war, which was sold to the public as a fight against an imaginary threat, did indeed arouse a fleeting opposition, but there has been very little opposition on the left to interventions presented as “humanitarian”, such as the bombing of Yugoslavia to detach the province of Kosovo, the bombing of Libya to get rid of Gaddafi, or the current intervention in Syria. Any objections to the revival of imperialism or in favor of peaceful means of dealing with such conflicts have simply been brushed aside by invocations of “R2P”, the right or responsibility to protect, or the duty to come to the aid of a people in danger.

The fundamental ambiguity of the anti-anti-war left lies in the question as to who are the “we” who are supposed to intervene and protect. One might ask the Western left, social movements or human rights organizations the same question Stalin addressed to the Vatican, “How many divisions do you have?” As a matter of fact, all the conflicts in which “we” are supposed to intervene are armed conflicts. Intervening means intervening militarily and for that, one needs the appropriate military means. It is perfectly obvious that the Western left does not possess those means. It could call on European armies to intervene, instead of the United States, but they have never done so without massive support from the United States. So in reality the actual message of the anti-anti-war left is: “Please, oh Americans, make war not love!” Better still, inasmuch as since their debacle in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Americans are leery of sending in ground troops, the message amounts to nothing other than asking the U.S. Air Force to go bomb countries where human rights violations are reported to be taking place.

Of course, anyone is free to claim that human rights should henceforth be entrusted to the good will of the U.S. government, its bombers, its missile launchers and its drones. But it is important to realize that that is the concrete meaning of all those appeals for “solidarity” and “support” to rebel or secessionist movements involved in armed struggles. Those movements have no need of slogans shouted during “demonstrations of solidarity” in Brussels or in Paris, and that is not what they are asking for. They want to get heavy weapons and see their enemies bombed.

The anti-anti-war left, if it were honest, should be frank about this choice, and openly call on the United States to go bomb wherever human rights are violated; but then it should accept the consequences. In fact, the political and military class that is supposed to save the populations “massacred by their dictators” is the same one that waged the Vietnam war, that imposed sanctions and wars on Iraq, that imposes arbitrary sanctions on Cuba, Iran and any other country that meets with their disfavor, that provides massive unquestioning support to Israel, which uses every means including coups d’état to oppose social reformers in Latin America, from Arbenz to Chavez by way of Allende, Goulart and others, and which shamelessly exploits workers and resources the world over. One must be quite starry-eyed to see in that political and military class the instrument of salvation of “victims”, but that is in practice exactly what the anti-anti-war left is advocating, because, given the relationship of forces in the world, there is no other military force able to impose its will.

Of course, the U.S. government is scarcely aware of the existence of the anti-anti-war left. The United States decides whether or not to wage war according to the chances of succeeding and to their own assessment of their strategic, political and economic interests. And once a war is begun, they want to win at all costs. It makes no sense to ask them to carry out only good interventions, against genuine villains, using gentle methods that spare civilians and innocent bystanders.

For example, those who call for “saving Afghan women” are in fact calling on the United States to intervene and, among other things, bomb Afghan civilians and shoot drones at Pakistan. It makes no sense to ask them to protect but not to bomb, because armies function by shooting and bombing. [1]

A favorite theme of the anti-anti-war left is to accuse those who reject military intervention of “supporting the dictator”, meaning the leader of the currently targeted country. The problem is that every war is justified by a massive propaganda effort which is based on demonizing the enemy, especially the enemy leader. Effectively opposing that propaganda requires contextualizing the crimes attributed to the enemy and comparing them to those of the side we are supposed to support. That task is necessary but risky; the slightest mistake will be endlessly used against us, whereas all the lies of the pro-war propaganda are soon forgotten.

Already, during the First World War, Bertrand Russell and British pacifists were accused of “supporting the enemy”. But if they denounced Allied propaganda, it was not out of love for the German Kaiser, but in the cause of peace. The anti-anti-war left loves to denounce the “double standards” of coherent pacifists who criticize the crimes of their own side more sharply than those attributed to the enemy of the moment (Milosevic, Gaddafi, Assad, and so on), but this is only the necessary result of a deliberate and legitimate choice: to counter the war propaganda of our own media and political leaders (in the West), propaganda which is based on constant demonization of the enemy under attack accompanied by idealization of the attacker.

The anti-anti-war left has no influence on American policy, but that doesn’t mean that it has no effect. Its insidious rhetoric has served to neutralize any peace or anti-war movement. It has also made it impossible for any European country to take such an independent position as France took under De Gaulle, or even Chirac, or as Sweden did with Olof Palme. Today such a position would be instantly attacked by the anti-anti-war left, which is echoed by European media, as “support to dictators”, another “Munich”, or “the crime of indifference”.

What the anti-anti-war left has managed to accomplish is to destroy the sovereignty of Europeans in regard to the United States and to eliminate any independent left position concerning war and imperialism. It has also led most of the European left to adopt positions in total contradiction with those of the Latin American left and to consider as adversaries countries such as China and Russia which seek to defend international law, as indeed they should.

When the media announce that a massacre is imminent, we hear at times that action is “urgent” to save the alleged future victims, and time cannot be lost making sure of the facts. This may be true when a building is on fire in one’s own neighborhood, but such urgency regarding other countries ignores the manipulation of information and just plain error and confusion that dominate foreign news coverage. Whatever the political crisis abroad, the instant “we must do something” reflex brushes aside serious reflection on the left as to what might be done instead of military intervention. What sort of independent investigation could be carried out to understand the causes of conflict and potential solutions? What can be the role of diplomacy? The prevailing images of immaculate rebels, dear to the left from its romanticizing of past conflicts, especially the Spanish Civil War, blocks reflection. It blocks realistic assessment of the relationship of forces as well as the causes of armed rebellion in the world today, very different from the 1930s, favorite source of the cherished legends of the Western left.

What is also remarkable is that most of the anti-anti-war left shares a general condemnation of the revolutions of the past, because they led to Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. But now that the revolutionaries are (Western backed) Islamists, we are supposed to believe that everything will turn out fine. What about “drawing the lesson from the past” that violent revolutions are not necessarily the best or the only way to achieve social change?

An alternative policy would take a 180° turn away from the one currently advocated by the anti-anti-war left. Instead of calling for more and more interventions, we should demand of our governments the strict respect for international law, non-interference in the internal affairs of other States and cooperation instead of confrontation. Non-interference means not only military non-intervention. It applies also to diplomatic and economic actions: no unilateral sanctions, no threats during negotiations, and equal treatment of all States. Instead of constantly “denouncing” the leaders of countries such as Russia, China, Iran, Cuba for violating human rights, something the anti-anti-war left loves to do, we should listen to what they have to say, dialogue with them, and help our fellow citizens understand the different ways of thinking in the world, including the criticisms that other countries can make of our way of doing things. Cultivating such mutual understanding could in the long run be the best way to improve “human rights” everywhere.

This would not bring instant solutions to human rights abuses or political conflicts in countries such as Libya or Syria. But what does? The policy of interference increases tensions and militarization in the world. The countries that feel targeted by that policy, and they are numerous, defend themselves however they can. The demonization campaigns prevent peaceful relations between peoples, cultural exchanges between citizens and, indirectly, the flourishing of the very liberal ideas that the advocates of interference claim to be promoting. Once the anti-anti-war left abandoned any alternative program, it in fact gave up the possibility of having the slightest influence over world affairs. It does not in reality “help the victims” as it claims. Except for destroying all resistance here to imperialism and war, it does nothing. The only ones who are really doing anything are in fact the succeeding U.S. administrations. Counting on them to care for the well-being of the world’s peoples is an attitude of total hopelessness. This hopelessness is an aspect of the way most of the Left reacted to the “fall of communism”, by embracing the policies that were the exact opposite of those of the communists, particularly in international affairs, where opposition to imperialism and the defense of national sovereignty have increasingly been demonized as “leftovers from Stalinism”.

Interventionism and European construction are both right-wing policies. One of them is linked to the American drive for world hegemony. The other is the framework supporting neoliberal economic policies and destruction of social protection. Paradoxically, both have been largely justified by “left-wing” ideas : human rights, internationalism, anti-racism and anti-nationalism. In both cases, a left that lost its way after the fall of the Soviet bloc has grasped at salvation by clinging to a “generous, humanitarian” discourse, which totally lacks any realistic analysis of the relationship of forces in the world. With such a left, the right hardly needs any ideology of its own; it can make do with human rights.

Nevertheless, both those policies, interventionism and European construction, are today in a dead end. U.S. imperialism is faced with huge difficulties, both economic and diplomatic. Its intervention policy has managed to unite much of the world against the United States. Scarcely anyone believes any more in “another” Europe, a social Europe, and the real existing European Union (the only one possible) does not arouse much enthusiasm among working people. Of course, those failures currently benefit solely the right and the far right, only because most of the left has stopped defending peace, international law and national sovereignty, as the precondition of democracy.

source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12…

[1] On the occasion of the recent NATO summit in Chicago, Amnesty International launched a campaign of posters calling on NATO to “keep up the progress” on behalf of women in Afghanistan, without explaining, or even raising the question as to how a military organization was supposed to accomplish such an objective.

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