JOHN PILGER: FROM YELLOW JOURNALISM TO CHINA BASHING, THE MEDIA’S ENDURING ROLE IN PROMOTING WAR

MAY 1ST, 2023

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By John Pilger

In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public, with more than a thousand turned away.

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and writers and journalists were responsible for speaking out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power.’

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:

On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.”

DOG WHISTLES AND AMERICAN POWER

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.

‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts.’ What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.

‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’

“WHERE ON EARTH ARE THE VOICES SAYING NO?”

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?

Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity.’ American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian taxpayer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra-low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.

The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you prefer. Ukraine, as modern Europe’s fascist beehive, has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine, and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

Marth Gallhorn, center, talks to Native American soldiers on the 5th Army on the Cassino Front in Italy, March 1944 during World War II. British Official Photo | AP

In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American-bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow.’ The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel,’ was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist,’ regardless of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who traveled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job, and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.’ Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity, and its critics are to be punished.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.’

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, and no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, and George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice,’ wrote Eagleton.

THE RE-GREENING OF AMERICA

Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, and a civil resistance known as ‘the movement’ had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like the revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’

At the time, I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialized his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense, it was.

Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. Make money, it said.

As for ‘the movement,’ its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure said the report ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately ten times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’

‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five percent of the population.

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al. — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality.’

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’

He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’

Gen. Tommy Franks, head of US forces in Iraq, speaks with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during an interview at the Coalition Media Center in Doha, Qatar, April 13, 2003. Steven Senne | AP

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat,’ and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’ spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women, and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies,’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

WAR BY MEDIA

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.

‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favorite presidential pastime, bombing and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016, Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of color: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, and shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target.’

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’

In 2011, Obama told the media that Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. ‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’

This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.

Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third was aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomized with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya, which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.

The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission,’ warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.’

In the year Nato invaded Libya, in 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia.’ Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China,’ in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose.’

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the center of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons.’

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

“OUR” PROPAGANDA

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon, and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognize the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes.’

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilization blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

US HAS KILLED MORE THAN 20 MILLION IN 37 NATIONS SINCE WWII

November 27, 2015

By James A. Lucas, www.countercurrents.org

Educate!

Above Photo: Allen Burney of Des Moines waves a Veterans for Peace flag during a protest at the Iowa Air National Guard base Monday in Des Moines. The .protesters were rallying against the use of drones to carry out military strikes. Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.

Comments on Gathering These Numbers

Generally speaking, the much smaller number of Americans who have died is not included in this study, not because they are not important, but because this report focuses on the impact of U.S. actions on its adversaries.

An accurate count of the number of deaths is not easy to achieve, and this collection of data was undertaken with full realization of this fact. These estimates will probably be revised later either upward or downward by the reader and the author. But undoubtedly the total will remain in the millions.

The difficulty of gathering reliable information is shown by two estimates in this context. For several years I heard statements on radio that three million Cambodians had been killed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. However, in recent years the figure I heard was one million. Another example is that the number of persons estimated to have died in Iraq due to sanctions after the first U.S. Iraq War was over 1 million, but in more recent years, based on a more recent study, a lower estimate of around a half a million has emerged.

Often information about wars is revealed only much later when someone decides to speak out, when more secret information is revealed due to persistent efforts of a few, or after special congressional committees make reports

Both victorious and defeated nations may have their own reasons for underreporting the number of deaths. Further, in recent wars involving the United States it was not uncommon to hear statements like “we do not do body counts” and references to “collateral damage” as a euphemism for dead and wounded. Life is cheap for some, especially those who manipulate people on the battlefield as if it were a chessboard.

To say that it is difficult to get exact figures is not to say that we should not try. Effort was needed to arrive at the figures of 6six million Jews killed during WWI, but knowledge of that number now is widespread and it has fueled the determination to prevent future holocausts. That struggle continues.

The author can be contacted at jlucas511@woh.rr.com

37 VICTIM NATIONS

Afghanistan

The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation. (1,2,3,4)

The Soviet Union had friendly relations its neighbor, Afghanistan, which had a secular government. The Soviets feared that if that government became fundamentalist this change could spill over into the Soviet Union.

In 1998, in an interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to President Carter, admitted that he had been responsible for instigating aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan which caused the Soviets to invade. In his own words:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” (5,1,6)

Brzezinski justified laying this trap, since he said it gave the Soviet Union its Vietnam and caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Regret what?” he said. “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” (7)

The CIA spent 5 to 6 billion dollars on its operation in Afghanistan in order to bleed the Soviet Union. (1,2,3) When that 10-year war ended over a million people were dead and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market. (4)

The U.S. has been responsible directly for about 12,000 deaths in Afghanistan many of which resulted from bombing in retaliation for the attacks on U.S. property on September 11, 2001. Subsequently U.S. troops invaded that country. (4)

Angola

An indigenous armed struggle against Portuguese rule in Angola began in 1961. In 1977 an Angolan government was recognized by the U.N., although the U.S. was one of the few nations that opposed this action. In 1986 Uncle Sam approved material assistance to UNITA, a group that was trying to overthrow the government. Even today this struggle, which has involved many nations at times, continues.

U.S. intervention was justified to the U.S. public as a reaction to the intervention of 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola. However, according to Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University the reverse was true. The Cuban intervention came as a result of a CIA – financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa1,2,3). (Three estimates of deaths range from 300,000 to 750,000 (4,5,6)

Argentina: See South America: Operation Condor

Bangladesh: See Pakistan

Bolivia

Hugo Banzer was the leader of a repressive regime in Bolivia in the 1970s. The U.S. had been disturbed when a previous leader nationalized the tin mines and distributed land to Indian peasants. Later that action to benefit the poor was reversed.

Banzer, who was trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas, came back from exile frequently to confer with U.S. Air Force Major Robert Lundin. In 1971 he staged a successful coup with the help of the U.S. Air Force radio system. In the first years of his dictatorship he received twice as military assistance from the U.S. as in the previous dozen years together.

A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977. (2) He has been accused of being responsible for 400 deaths during his tenure. (1)

Also see: See South America: Operation Condor

Brazil: See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but when President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia it caused major protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War.

There is little awareness today of the scope of these bombings and the human suffering involved.

Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power. Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.

So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge. (1,2,3)

Also see Vietnam

Chad

An estimated 40,000 people in Chad were killed and as many as 200,000 tortured by a government, headed by Hissen Habre who was brought to power in June, 1982 with the help of CIA money and arms. He remained in power for eight years. (1,2)

Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre.

Chile

The CIA intervened in Chile’s 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970 a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president. The CIA wanted to incite a military coup to prevent his inauguration, but the Chilean army’s chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, opposed this action. The CIA then planned, along with some people in the Chilean military, to assassinate Schneider. This plot failed and Allende took office. President Nixon was not to be dissuaded and he ordered the CIA to create a coup climate: “Make the economy scream,” he said.
What followed were guerilla warfare, arson, bombing, sabotage and terror. ITT and other U.S. corporations with Chilean holdings sponsored demonstrations and strikes. Finally, on September 11, 1973 Allende died either by suicide or by assassination. At that time Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, said the following regarding Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” (1)

During 17 years of terror under Allende’s successor, General Augusto Pinochet, an estimated 3,000 Chileans were killed and many others were tortured or “disappeared.” (2,3,4,5)

Also see South America: Operation Condor

China An estimated 900,000 Chinese died during the Korean War. For more information, See: Korea.

Colombia

One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. (1)

According to a 1994 Amnesty International report, more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies. Amnesty alleged that “U.S.- supplied military equipment, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of “counter-insurgency.” (2) In 2002 another estimate was made that 3,500 people die each year in a U.S. funded civilian war in Colombia. (3)

In 1996 Human Rights Watch issued a report “Assassination Squads in Colombia” which revealed that CIA agents went to Colombia in 1991 to help the military to train undercover agents in anti-subversive activity. (4,5)

In recent years the U.S. government has provided assistance under Plan Colombia. The Colombian government has been charged with using most of the funds for destruction of crops and support of the paramilitary group.

Cuba

In the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 18, 1961 which ended after 3 days, 114 of the invading force were killed, 1,189 were taken prisoners and a few escaped to waiting U.S. ships. (1) The captured exiles were quickly tried, a few executed and the rest sentenced to thirty years in prison for treason. These exiles were released after 20 months in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine.

Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway. (2)

Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire)

The beginning of massive violence was instigated in this country in 1879 by its colonizer King Leopold of Belgium. The Congo’s population was reduced by 10 million people over a period of 20 years which some have referred to as “Leopold’s Genocide.” (1) The U.S. has been responsible for about a third of that many deaths in that nation in the more recent past. (2)

In 1960 the Congo became an independent state with Patrice Lumumba being its first prime minister. He was assassinated with the CIA being implicated, although some say that his murder was actually the responsibility of Belgium. (3) But nevertheless, the CIA was planning to kill him. (4) Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

Much of the time in recent years there has been a civil war within the Democratic Republic of Congo, fomented often by the U.S. and other nations, including neighboring nations. (5)

In April 1977, Newsday reported that the CIA was secretly supporting efforts to recruit several hundred mercenaries in the U.S. and Great Britain to serve alongside Zaire’s army. In that same year the U.S. provided $15 million of military supplies to the Zairian President Mobutu to fend off an invasion by a rival group operating in Angola. (6)

In May 1979, the U.S. sent several million dollars of aid to Mobutu who had been condemned 3 months earlier by the U.S. State Department for human rights violations. (7) During the Cold War the U.S. funneled over 300 million dollars in weapons into Zaire (8,9) $100 million in military training was provided to him. (2) In 2001 it was reported to a U.S. congressional committee that American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Sr., were stoking the Congo for monetary gains. There is an international battle over resources in that country with over 125 companies and individuals being implicated. One of these substances is coltan, which is used in the manufacture of cell phones. (2)

Dominican Republic

In 1962, Juan Bosch became president of the Dominican Republic. He advocated such programs as land reform and public works programs. This did not bode well for his future relationship with the U.S., and after only 7 months in office, he was deposed by a CIA coup. In 1965 when a group was trying to reinstall him to his office President Johnson said, “This Bosch is no good.” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann replied “He’s no good at all. If we don’t get a decent government in there, Mr. President, we get another Bosch. It’s just going to be another sinkhole.” Two days later a U.S. invasion started and 22,000 soldiers and marines entered the Dominican Republic and about 3,000 Dominicans died during the fighting. The cover excuse for doing this was that this was done to protect foreigners there. (1,2,3,4)

East Timor

In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” (1,2) The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. (1,2)

Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea. (5)

El Salvador

The civil war from 1981 to1992 in El Salvador was financed by $6 billion in U.S. aid given to support the government in its efforts to crush a movement to bring social justice to the people in that nation of about 8 million people. (1)
During that time U.S. military advisers demonstrated methods of torture on teenage prisoners, according to an interview with a deserter from the Salvadoran army published in the New York Times. This former member of the Salvadoran National Guard testified that he was a member of a squad of twelve who found people who they were told were guerillas and tortured them. Part of the training he received was in torture at a U.S. location somewhere in Panama. (2)

About 900 villagers were massacred in the village of El Mozote in 1981. Ten of the twelve El Salvadoran government soldiers cited as participating in this act were graduates of the School of the Americas operated by the U.S. (2) They were only a small part of about 75,000 people killed during that civil war. (1)

According to a 1993 United Nations’ Truth Commission report, over 96 % of the human rights violations carried out during the war were committed by the Salvadoran army or the paramilitary deaths squads associated with the Salvadoran army. (3)

That commission linked graduates of the School of the Americas to many notorious killings. The New York Times and the Washington Post followed with scathing articles. In 1996, the White House Oversight Board issued a report that supported many of the charges against that school made by Rev. Roy Bourgeois, head of the School of the Americas Watch. That same year the Pentagon released formerly classified reports indicating that graduates were trained in killing, extortion, and physical abuse for interrogations, false imprisonment and other methods of control. (4)

Grenada

The CIA began to destabilize Grenada in 1979 after Maurice Bishop became president, partially because he refused to join the quarantine of Cuba. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying. (1,2) It was fallaciously charged that an airport was being built in Grenada that could be used to attack the U.S. and it was also erroneously claimed that the lives of American medical students on that island were in danger.

Guatemala

In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. He appropriated some unused land operated by the United Fruit Company and compensated the company. (1,2) That company then started a campaign to paint Arbenz as a tool of an international conspiracy and hired about 300 mercenaries who sabotaged oil supplies and trains. (3) In 1954 a CIA-orchestrated coup put him out of office and he left the country. During the next 40 years various regimes killed thousands of people.

In 1999 the Washington Post reported that an Historical Clarification Commission concluded that over 200,000 people had been killed during the civil war and that there had been 42,000 individual human rights violations, 29,000 of them fatal, 92% of which were committed by the army. The commission further reported that the U.S. government and the CIA had pressured the Guatemalan government into suppressing the guerilla movement by ruthless means. (4,5)

According to the Commission between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala – financed and supported by the U.S. government – destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide. (4)
One of the documents made available to the commission was a 1966 memo from a U.S. State Department official, which described how a “safe house” was set up in the palace for use by Guatemalan security agents and their U.S. contacts. This was the headquarters for the Guatemalan “dirty war” against leftist insurgents and suspected allies. (2)

Haiti

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was ruled by Papa Doc Duvalier and later by his son. During that time their private terrorist force killed between 30,000 and 100,000 people. (1) Millions of dollars in CIA subsidies flowed into Haiti during that time, mainly to suppress popular movements, (2) although most American military aid to the country, according to William Blum, was covertly channeled through Israel.

Reportedly, governments after the second Duvalier reign were responsible for an even larger number of fatalities, and the influence on Haiti by the U.S., particularly through the CIA, has continued. The U.S. later forced out of the presidential office a black Catholic priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, even though he was elected with 67% of the vote in the early 1990s. The wealthy white class in Haiti opposed him in this predominantly black nation, because of his social programs designed to help the poor and end corruption. (3) Later he returned to office, but that did not last long. He was forced by the U.S. to leave office and now lives in South Africa.

Honduras

In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316 in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Torture equipment and manuals were provided by CIA Argentinean personnel who worked with U.S. agents in the training of the Hondurans. Approximately 400 people lost their lives. (1,2) This is another instance of torture in the world sponsored by the U.S. (3)

Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations in the 1980s. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders.” (4)

Honduras was a staging ground in the early 1980s for the Contras who were trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John D. Negroponte, currently Deputy Secretary of State, was our embassador when our military aid to Honduras rose from $4 million to $77.4 million per year. Negroponte denies having had any knowledge of these atrocities during his tenure. However, his predecessor in that position, Jack R. Binns, had reported in 1981 that he was deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations. (5)

Hungary

In 1956 Hungary, a Soviet satellite nation, revolted against the Soviet Union. During the uprising broadcasts by the U.S. Radio Free Europe into Hungary sometimes took on an aggressive tone, encouraging the rebels to believe that Western support was imminent, and even giving tactical advice on how to fight the Soviets. Their hopes were raised then dashed by these broadcasts which cast an even darker shadow over the Hungarian tragedy.“ (1) The Hungarian and Soviet death toll was about 3,000 and the revolution was crushed. (2)

Indonesia

In 1965, in Indonesia, a coup replaced General Sukarno with General Suharto as leader. The U.S. played a role in that change of government. Robert Martens,a former officer in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, described how U.S. diplomats and CIA officers provided up to 5,000 names to Indonesian Army death squads in 1965 and checked them off as they were killed or captured. Martens admitted that “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” (1,2,3) Estimates of the number of deaths range from 500,000 to 3 million. (4,5,6)
From 1993 to 1997 the U.S. provided Jakarta with almost $400 million in economic aid and sold tens of million of dollars of weaponry to that nation. U.S. Green Berets provided training for the Indonesia’s elite force which was responsible for many of atrocities in East Timor. (3)

Iran

Iran lost about 262,000 people in the war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988. (1) See Iraq for more information about that war.

On July 3, 1988 the U.S. Navy ship, the Vincennes, was operating withing Iranian waters providing military support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. During a battle against Iranian gunboats it fired two missiles at an Iranian Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilian on board were killed. (2,3)

Iraq

A. The Iraq-Iran War lasted from 1980 to 1988 and during that time there were about 105,000 Iraqi deaths according to the Washington Post. (1,2)

According to Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, the U.S. provided the Iraqis with billions of dollars in credits and helped Iraq in other ways such as making sure that Iraq had military equipment including biological agents This surge of help for Iraq came as Iran seemed to be winning the war and was close to Basra. (1) The U.S. was not adverse to both countries weakening themselves as a result of the war, but it did not appear to want either side to win.

B: The U.S.-Iraq War and the Sanctions Against Iraq extended from 1990 to 2003.

Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the U.S. responded by demanding that Iraq withdraw, and four days later the U.N. levied international sanctions.

Iraq had reason to believe that the U.S. would not object to its invasion of Kuwait, since U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had told Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had no position on the dispute that his country had with Kuwait. So the green light was given, but it seemed to be more of a trap.

As a part of the public relations strategy to energize the American public into supporting an attack against Iraq the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. falsely testified before Congress that Iraqi troops were pulling the plugs on incubators in Iraqi hospitals. (1) This contributed to a war frenzy in the U.S.

The U.S. air assault started on January 17, 1991 and it lasted for 42 days. On February 23 President H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. ground assault to begin. The invasion took place with much needless killing of Iraqi military personnel. Only about 150 American military personnel died compared to about 200,000 Iraqis. Some of the Iraqis were mercilessly killed on the Highway of Death and about 400 tons of depleted uranium were left in that nation by the U.S. (2,3)

Other deaths later were from delayed deaths due to wounds, civilians killed, those killed by effects of damage of the Iraqi water treatment facilities and other aspects of its damaged infrastructure and by the sanctions.

In 1995 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. reported that U.N sanctions against on Iraq had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children since 1990. (5)

Leslie Stahl on the TV Program 60 Minutes in 1996 mentioned to Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think is worth it.” (4)

In 1999 UNICEF reported that 5,000 children died each month as a result of the sanction and the War with the U.S. (6)

Richard Garfield later estimated that the more likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000 – double those of the previous decade. Garfield estimated that the numbers to be 350,000 through 2000 (based in part on result of another study). (7)

However, there are limitations to his study. His figures were not updated for the remaining three years of the sanctions. Also, two other somewhat vulnerable age groups were not studied: young children above the age of five and the elderly.

All of these reports were considerable indicators of massive numbers of deaths which the U.S. was aware of and which was a part of its strategy to cause enough pain and terror among Iraqis to cause them to revolt against their government.

C: Iraq-U.S. War started in 2003 and has not been concluded

Just as the end of the Cold War emboldened the U.S. to attack Iraq in 1991 so the attacks of September 11, 2001 laid the groundwork for the U.S. to launch the current war against Iraq. While in some other wars we learned much later about the lies that were used to deceive us, some of the deceptions that were used to get us into this war became known almost as soon as they were uttered. There were no weapons of mass destruction, we were not trying to promote democracy, we were not trying to save the Iraqi people from a dictator.

The total number of Iraqi deaths that are a result of our current Iraq against Iraq War is 654,000, of which 600,000 are attributed to acts of violence, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. (1,2)

Since these deaths are a result of the U.S. invasion, our leaders must accept responsibility for them.

Israeli-Palestinian War

About 100,000 to 200,000 Israelis and Palestinians, but mostly the latter, have been killed in the struggle between those two groups. The U.S. has been a strong supporter of Israel, providing billions of dollars in aid and supporting its possession of nuclear weapons. (1,2)

Korea, North and South

The Korean War started in 1950 when, according to the Truman administration, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th. However, since then another explanation has emerged which maintains that the attack by North Korea came during a time of many border incursions by both sides. South Korea initiated most of the border clashes with North Korea beginning in 1948. The North Korea government claimed that by 1949 the South Korean army committed 2,617 armed incursions. It was a myth that the Soviet Union ordered North Korea to attack South Korea. (1,2)

The U.S. started its attack before a U.N. resolution was passed supporting our nation’s intervention, and our military forces added to the mayhem in the war by introducing the use of napalm. (1)

During the war the bulk of the deaths were South Koreans, North Koreans and Chinese. Four sources give deaths counts ranging from 1.8 to 4.5 million. (3,4,5,6) Another source gives a total of 4 million but does not identify to which nation they belonged. (7)

John H. Kim, a U.S. Army veteran and the Chair of the Korea Committee of Veterans for Peace, stated in an article that during the Korean War “the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million civilians – both South and North Koreans – at many locations throughout Korea…It is reported that the U.S. dropped some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm bombs, during the Korean War.” It is presumed that this total does not include Chinese casualties.

Another source states a total of about 500,000 who were Koreans and presumably only military. (8,9)

Laos

From 1965 to 1973 during the Vietnam War the U.S. dropped over two million tons of bombs on Laos – more than was dropped in WWII by both sides. Over a quarter of the population became refugees. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Branfman make the only estimate that I am aware of , stating that hundreds of thousands died. This can be interpeted to mean that at least 200,000 died. (1,2,3)

U.S. military intervention in Laos actually began much earlier. A civil war started in the 1950s when the U.S. recruited a force of 40,000 Laotians to oppose the Pathet Lao, a leftist political party that ultimately took power in 1975.

Also See Vietnam

Nepal

Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level. (1,2)

In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government. (3)

Nicaragua

In 1981 the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza government in Nicaragua, (1) and until 1990 about 25,000 Nicaraguans were killed in an armed struggle between the Sandinista government and Contra rebels who were formed from the remnants of Somoza’s national government. The use of assassination manuals by the Contras surfaced in 1984. (2,3)

The U.S. supported the victorious government regime by providing covert military aid to the Contras (anti-communist guerillas) starting in November, 1981. But when Congress discovered that the CIA had supervised acts of sabotage in Nicaragua without notifying Congress, it passed the Boland Amendment in 1983 which prohibited the CIA, Defense Department and any other government agency from providing any further covert military assistance. (4)

But ways were found to get around this prohibition. The National Security Council, which was not explicitly covered by the law, raised private and foreign funds for the Contras. In addition, arms were sold to Iran and the proceeds were diverted from those sales to the Contras engaged in the insurgency against the Sandinista government. (5) Finally, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990 by voters who thought that a change in leadership would placate the U.S., which was causing misery to Nicaragua’s citizenry by it support of the Contras.

Pakistan

In 1971 West Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. (1)

Millions of people died during that brutal struggle, referred to by some as genocide committed by West Pakistan. That country had long been an ally of the U.S., starting with $411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. $15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. (2,3,4)

Three sources estimate that 3 million people died and (5,2,6) one source estimates 1.5 million. (3)

Panama

In December, 1989 U.S. troops invaded Panama, ostensibly to arrest Manuel Noriega, that nation’s president. This was an example of the U.S. view that it is the master of the world and can arrest anyone it wants to. For a number of years before that he had worked for the CIA, but fell out of favor partially because he was not an opponent of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. (1) It has been estimated that between 500 and 4,000 people died. (2,3,4)

Paraguay: See South America: Operation Condor

Philippines

The Philippines were under the control of the U.S. for over a hundred years. In about the last 50 to 60 years the U.S. has funded and otherwise helped various Philippine governments which sought to suppress the activities of groups working for the welfare of its people. In 1969 the Symington Committee in the U.S. Congress revealed how war material was sent there for a counter-insurgency campaign. U.S. Special Forces and Marines were active in some combat operations. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. (1,2)

South America: Operation Condor

This was a joint operation of 6 despotic South American governments (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) to share information about their political opponents. An estimated 13,000 people were killed under this plan. (1)

It was established on November 25, 1975 in Chile by an act of the Interamerican Reunion on Military Intelligence. According to U.S. embassy political officer, John Tipton, the CIA and the Chilean Secret Police were working together, although the CIA did not set up the operation to make this collaboration work. Reportedly, it ended in 1983. (2)

On March 6, 2001 the New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications for Operation Condor. (3)

Sudan

Since 1955, when it gained its independence, Sudan has been involved most of the time in a civil war. Until about 2003 approximately 2 million people had been killed. It not known if the death toll in Darfur is part of that total.

Human rights groups have complained that U.S. policies have helped to prolong the Sudanese civil war by supporting efforts to overthrow the central government in Khartoum. In 1999 U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) who said that she offered him food supplies if he would reject a peace plan sponsored by Egypt and Libya.

In 1978 the vastness of Sudan’s oil reservers was discovered and within two years it became the sixth largest recipient of U.S, military aid. It’s reasonable to assume that if the U.S. aid a government to come to power it will feel obligated to give the U.S. part of the oil pie.

A British group, Christian Aid, has accused foreign oil companies of complicity in the depopulation of villages. These companies – not American – receive government protection and in turn allow the government use of its airstrips and roads.

In August 1998 the U.S. bombed Khartoum, Sudan with 75 cruise míssiles. Our government said that the target was a chemical weapons factory owned by Osama bin Laden. Actually, bin Laden was no longer the owner, and the plant had been the sole supplier of pharmaceutical supplies for that poor nation. As a result of the bombing tens of thousands may have died because of the lack of medicines to treat malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. The U.S. settled a lawsuit filed by the factory’s owner. (1,2)

Uruguay: See South America: Operation Condor

Vietnam

In Vietnam, under an agreement several decades ago, there was supposed to be an election for a unified North and South Vietnam. The U.S. opposed this and supported the Diem government in South Vietnam. In August, 1964 the CIA and others helped fabricate a phony Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin and this was used as a pretext for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (1)

During that war an American assassination operation,called Operation Phoenix, terrorized the South Vietnamese people, and during the war American troops were responsible in 1968 for the mass slaughter of the people in the village of My Lai.

According to a Vietnamese government statement in 1995 the number of deaths of civilians and military personnel during the Vietnam War was 5.1 million. (2)

Since deaths in Cambodia and Laos were about 2.7 million (See Cambodia and Laos) the estimated total for the Vietnam War is 7.8 million.

The Virtual Truth Commission provides a total for the war of 5 million, (3) and Robert McNamara, former Secretary Defense, according to the New York Times Magazine says that the number of Vietnamese dead is 3.4 million. (4,5)

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country.

From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S. (2)

Here are estimates of some, if not all, of the internal wars in Yugoslavia. All wars: 107,000; (3,4)

Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000; (5) Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000; (5) Croatia: 15,000; (6) and

Kosovo: 500 to 5,000. (7)

NOTES

Afghanistan

1.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p.135.

2.Chronology of American State Terrorism
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_
terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

3.Soviet War in Afghanistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan

4.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.76

5.U.S Involvement in Afghanistan, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in Afghanistan)

6.The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan, Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

7.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p.5

8.Unknown News, http://www.unknownnews.net/casualtiesw.html

Angola

1.Howard W. French “From Old Files, a New Story of the U.S. Role in the Angolan War” New York Times 3/31/02

2.Angolan Update, American Friends Service Committee FS, 11/1/99 flyer.

3.Norman Solomon, War Made Easy, (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) p. 82-83.

4.Lance Selfa, U.S. Imperialism, A Century of Slaughter, International Socialist Review Issue 7, Spring 1999 (as appears in Third world Traveler www. thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Century_Imperialism.html)

5. Jeffress Ramsay, Africa , (Dushkin/McGraw Hill Guilford Connecticut), 1997, p. 144-145.

6.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.54.

Argentina : See South America: Operation Condor

Bolivia

1. Phil Gunson, Guardian, 5/6/02,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/archive /article/0,4273,41-07884,00.html

2.Jerry Meldon, Return of Bolilvia’s Drug – Stained Dictator, Consortium,www.consortiumnews.com/archives/story40.html.

Brazil See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

1.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/ .

2.David Model, President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Bombing of Cambodia excerpted from the book Lying for Empire How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face, Common Courage Press, 2005, paperhttp://thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Nixon_Cambodia_LFE.html.

3.Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc.,http//zmag.org/forums/chomcambodforum.htm.

Chad

1.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 151-152 .

2.Richard Keeble, Crimes Against Humanity in Chad, Znet/Activism 12/4/06http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=11560&sectionID=1).

Chile

1.Parenti, Michael, The Sword and the Dollar (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1989) p. 56.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 142-143.

3.Moreorless: Heroes and Killers of the 20th Century, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,

http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/pinochet.html

4.Associated Press,Pincohet on 91st Birthday, Takes Responsibility for Regimes’s Abuses, Dayton Daily News 11/26/06

5.Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), p. 18.

China: See Korea

Colombia

1.Chronology of American State Terrorism, p.2

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html).

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 163.

3.Millions Killed by Imperialism Washington Post May 6, 2002)http://www.etext.org./Politics/MIM/rail/impkills.html

4.Gabriella Gamini, CIA Set Up Death Squads in Colombia Times Newspapers Limited, Dec. 5, 1996,www.edu/CommunicationsStudies/ben/news/cia/961205.death.html).

5.Virtual Truth Commission, 1991

Human Rights Watch Report: Colombia’s Killer Networks–The Military-Paramilitary Partnership).

Cuba

1.St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture – on Bay of Pigs Invasionhttp://bookrags.com/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion.

2.Wikipedia http://bookrags.com/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion#Casualties.

Democratic Republic of Congo (Formerly Zaire)

1.F. Jeffress Ramsey, Africa (Guilford Connecticut, 1997), p. 85

2. Anup Shaw The Democratic Republic of Congo, 10/31/2003)http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/DRC.asp)

3.Kevin Whitelaw, A Killing in Congo, U. S. News and World Reporthttp://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/patrice.htm

4.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p 158-159.

5.Ibid.,p. 260

6.Ibid.,p. 259

7.Ibid.,p.262

8.David Pickering, “World War in Africa, 6/26/02,
www.9-11peace.org/bulletin.php3

9.William D. Hartung and Bridget Moix, Deadly Legacy; U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War, Arms Trade Resource Center, January , 2000www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm

Dominican Republic

1.Norman Solomon, (untitled) Baltimore Sun April 26, 2005
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2005/0426spincycle.htm
Intervention Spin Cycle

2.Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Power_Pack

3.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 175.

4.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.26-27.

East Timor

1.Virtual Truth Commission, http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/date4.htm

2.Matthew Jardine, Unraveling Indonesia, Nonviolent Activist, 1997)

3.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

4.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 197.

5.US trained butchers of Timor, The Guardian, London. Cited by The Drudge Report, September 19, 1999. http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/indon.htm

El Salvador

1.Robert T. Buckman, Latin America 2003, (Stryker-Post Publications Baltimore 2003) p. 152-153.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 54-55.

3.El Salvador, Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador#The_20th_century_and_beyond)

4.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

Grenada

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 66-67.

2.Stephen Zunes, The U.S. Invasion of Grenada,http://wwwfpif.org/papers/grenada2003.html .

Guatemala

1.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

2.Ibid.

3.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.2-13.

4.Robert T. Buckman, Latin America 2003 (Stryker-Post Publications Baltimore 2003) p. 162.

5.Douglas Farah, Papers Show U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses, Washington Post Foreign Service, March 11, 1999, A 26

Haiti

1.Francois Duvalier,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier#Reign_of_terror).

2.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p 87.

3.William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest,http://www.doublestandards.org/blum8.html

Honduras

1.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 55.

2.Reports by Country: Honduras, Virtual Truth Commissionhttp://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/honduras.htm

3.James A. Lucas, Torture Gets The Silence Treatment, Countercurrents, July 26, 2004.

4.Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, Unearthed: Fatal Secrets, Baltimore Sun, reprint of a series that appeared June 11-18, 1995 in Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, School of Assassins, p. 46 Orbis Books 2001.

5.Michael Dobbs, Negroponte’s Time in Honduras at Issue, Washington Post, March 21, 2005

Hungary

1.Edited by Malcolm Byrne, The 1956 Hungarian Revoluiton: A history in Documents November 4, 2002http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/index2.htm

2.Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia,
http://www.answers.com/topic/hungarian-revolution-of-1956

Indonesia

1.Virtual Truth Commission http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

2.Editorial, Indonesia’s Killers, The Nation, March 30, 1998.

3.Matthew Jardine, Indonesia Unraveling, Non Violent Activist Sept–Oct, 1997 (Amnesty) 2/7/07.

4.Sison, Jose Maria, Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia, p. 5.http://qc.indymedia.org/mail.php?id=5602;

5.Annie Pohlman, Women and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Gender Variables and Possible Direction for Research, p.4,http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/2004/Pohlman-A-ASAA.pdf

6.Peter Dale Scott, The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967, Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, pages 239-264.http://www.namebase.org/scott.

7.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.30.

Iran

1.Geoff Simons, Iraq from Sumer to Saddam, 1996, St. Martins Press, NY p. 317.

2.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html.

3.BBC 1988: US Warship Shoots Down Iranian Airlinerhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm )

Iraq

Iran-Iraq War

1.Michael Dobbs, U.S. Had Key role in Iraq Buildup, Washington Post December 30, 2002, p A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52241-2002Dec29?language=printer

2.Global Security.Org , Iran Iraq War (1980-1980)globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm.

U.S. Iraq War and Sanctions

1.Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time (New York, Thunder’s Mouth), 1994, p.31-32

2.Ibid., p. 52-54

3.Ibid., p. 43

4.Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, (South End Press Cambridge MA 2000). p. 175.

5.Food and Agricultural Organizaiton, The Children are Dying, 1995 World View Forum, Internationa Action Center, International Relief Association, p. 78

6.Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, South End Press Cambridge MA 2000. p. 61.

7.David Cortright, A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions December 3, 2001, The Nation.

U.S-Iraq War 2003-?

1.Jonathan Bor 654,000 Deaths Tied to Iraq War Baltimore Sun , October 11,2006

2.News http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html

Israeli-Palestinian War

1.Post-1967 Palestinian & Israeli Deaths from Occupation & Violence May 16, 2006 http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/2006/05/post-1967-palestinian-israeli-deaths.html)

2.Chronology of American State Terrorism

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

Korea

1.James I. Matray Revisiting Korea: Exposing Myths of the Forgotten War, Korean War Teachers Conference: The Korean War, February 9, 2001http://www.truman/library.org/Korea/matray1.htm

2.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 46

3.Kanako Tokuno, Chinese Winter Offensive in Korean War – the Debacle of American Strategy, ICE Case Studies Number 186, May, 2006http://www.american.edu/ted/ice/chosin.htm.

4.John G. Stroessinger, Why Nations go to War, (New York; St. Martin’s Press), p. 99)

5.Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, as reported in Answers.comhttp://www.answers.com/topic/Korean-war

6.Exploring the Environment: Korean Enigmawww.cet.edu/ete/modules/korea/kwar.html)

7.S. Brian Wilson, Who are the Real Terrorists? Virtual Truth Commissonhttp://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

8.Korean War Casualty Statistics www.century china.com/history/krwarcost.html)

9.S. Brian Wilson, Documenting U.S. War Crimes in North Korea (Veterans for Peace Newsletter) Spring, 2002) http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

Laos

1.William Blum Rogue State (Maine, Common Cause Press) p. 136

2.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

3.Fred Branfman, War Crimes in Indochina and our Troubled National Soul

www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/00_branfman_us-warcrimes-indochina.htm).

Nepal

1.Conn Hallinan, Nepal & the Bush Administration: Into Thin Air, February 3, 2004

fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402nepal.html.

2.Human Rights Watch, Nepal’s Civil War: the Conflict Resumes, March 2006 )

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/03/28/nepal13078.htm.

3.Wayne Madsen, Possible CIA Hand in the Murder of the Nepal Royal Family, India Independent Media Center, September 25, 2001http://india.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2190.shtml.

Nicaragua

1.Virtual Truth Commission
http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

2.Timeline Nicaragua
www.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua/discovery_eng/timeline/).

3.Chronology of American State Terrorism,
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html.

4.William Blum, Nicaragua 1981-1990 Destabilization in Slow Motion

www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Nicaragua_KH.html.

5.Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair.

Pakistan

1.John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 1974 pp 157-172.

2.Asad Ismi, A U.S. – Financed Military Dictatorship, The CCPA Monitor, June 2002, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives http://www.policyaltematives.ca)www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/pakistan.html

3.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p.123, 124.

4.Arjum Niaz ,When America Look the Other Way by,

www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2821&sectionID=1

5.Leo Kuper, Genocide (Yale University Press, 1981), p. 79.

6.Bangladesh Liberation War , Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War#USA_and_USSR)

Panama

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’s Greatest Hits, (Odonian Press 1998) p. 83.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p.154.

3.U.S. Military Charged with Mass Murder, The Winds 9/96,www.apfn.org/thewinds/archive/war/a102896b.html

4.Mark Zepezauer, CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.83.

Paraguay See South America: Operation Condor

Philippines

1.Romeo T. Capulong, A Century of Crimes Against the Filipino People, Presentation, Public Interest Law Center, World Tribunal for Iraq Trial in New York City on August 25,2004.
http://www.peoplejudgebush.org/files/RomeoCapulong.pdf).

2.Roland B. Simbulan The CIA in Manila – Covert Operations and the CIA’s Hidden Hisotry in the Philippines Equipo Nizkor Information – Derechos, derechos.org/nizkor/filipinas/doc/cia.

South America: Operation Condor

1.John Dinges, Pulling Back the Veil on Condor, The Nation, July 24, 2000.

2.Virtual Truth Commission, Telling the Truth for a Better Americawww.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/condor.htm)

3.Operation Condorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#US_involvement).

Sudan

1.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang, (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p. 30, 32,34,36.

2.The Black Commentator, Africa Action The Tale of Two Genocides: The Failed US Response to Rwanda and Darfur, 11 August 2006http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091706X.shtml.

Uruguay See South America: Operation Condor

Vietnam

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine:Common Courage Press,1994), p 24

2.Casualties – US vs NVA/VC,
http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html.

3.Brian Wilson, Virtual Truth Commission
http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

4.Fred Branfman, U.S. War Crimes in Indochiona and our Duty to Truth August 26, 2004

www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6105&sectionID=1

5.David K Shipler, Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnamnytimes.com/library/world/asia/081097vietnam-mcnamara.html

Yugoslavia

1.Sara Flounders, Bosnia Tragedy:The Unknown Role of the Pentagon in NATO in the Balkans (New York: International Action Center) p. 47-75

2.James A. Lucas, Media Disinformation on the War in Yugoslavia: The Dayton Peace Accords Revisited, Global Research, September 7, 2005 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=
viewArticle&code=LUC20050907&articleId=899

3.Yugoslav Wars in 1990s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars.

4.George Kenney, The Bosnia Calculation: How Many Have Died? Not nearly as many as some would have you think., NY Times Magazine, April 23, 1995

http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/
war_crimes/srebrenica/bosnia_numbers.html)

5.Chronology of American State Terrorism

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/
ChronologyofTerror.html.

6.Croatian War of Independence, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence

7.Human Rights Watch, New Figures on Civilian Deaths in Kosovo War, (February 7, 2000) http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/nato207.htm.

• United States, War Crimes

WHY THE MEDIA DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NORD STREAM BLASTS

APRIL 11TH, 2023

Source

By Jonathan Cook

No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.

Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.

In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.

If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.

But, after the claim made the rounds of front pages for a week or two, the story of Russia destroying its own pipelines was quietly shelved. That was partly because it seemed too difficult to maintain a narrative in which Moscow chose to destroy a critical part of its own energy infrastructure.

Not only did the explosions cause Russia great financial harm – the country’s gas and oil revenues regularly financed nearly half of its annual budget – but the blasts removed Moscow’s chief influence over Germany, which had been until then heavily dependent on Russian gas. The initial media story required the Western public to believe that President Vladimir Putin willingly shot himself in the foot, losing his only leverage over European resolve to impose economic sanctions on his country.

But even more than the complete lack of a Russian motive, Western states knew they would be unable to build a plausible forensic case against Moscow for the Nord Stream blasts.

Instead, with no chance to milk the explosions for propaganda value, official Western interest in explaining what had happened to the Nord Stream pipelines wilted, despite the enormity of the event. That was reflected for months in an almost complete absence of media coverage.

When the matter was raised, it was to argue that separate investigations by Sweden, Germany and Denmark were all drawing a blank. Sweden even refused to share any of its findings with Germany and Denmark, arguing that to do so would harm its “national security.”

No one, again including the Western media, raised an eyebrow or showed a flicker of interest in what might be really going on behind the scenes. Western states and their compliant corporate media seemed quite ready to settle for the conclusion that this was a mystery cocooned in an enigma.

ISOLATED AND FRIENDLESS

It might have stayed that way forever, except that in February, a journalist – one of the most acclaimed investigative reporters of the past half-century – produced an account that finally demystified the explosions. Drawing on at least one anonymous, highly placed informant, Seymour Hersh pointed the finger for the explosions directly at the US administration and President Joe Biden himself.

Hersh’s detailed retelling of the planning and execution of the Nord Stream blasts had the advantage – at least for those interested in getting to the truth of what took place – that his account fitted the known circumstantial evidence.

At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:

"Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 27, 2023

Key Washington figures, from President Biden to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his senior neoconservative official Victoria Nuland – a stalwart of the murky U.S., anti-Russia meddling in Ukraine over the past decade – had either called for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines or celebrated the blasts shortly after they took place.

If anyone had a motive for blowing up the Russian pipelines – and a self-declared one at that – it was the Biden administration. They opposed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects from the outset – and for exactly the same reason that Moscow so richly prized them.

My latest: If, as seems likely, the US was behind the pipeline blasts, it shows it's ready to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield – and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has treated the Global South https://t.co/cIN1INfiOQ

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 6, 2022

In particular, the second pair of pipelines, Nord Stream 2, which was completed in September 2021, would double the amount of cheap Russian gas available to Germany and Western Europe. The only obstacle in its path was the hesitancy of German regulators. They delayed approval in November 2021.

Nord Stream meant major European countries, most especially Germany, would be completely dependent for the bulk of their energy supplies on Russia. That deeply conflicted with U.S. interests. For two decades, Washington had been expanding NATO as an anti-Moscow military alliance embracing ever more of Europe, to the point of butting up aggressively against Russia’s borders.

The Ukrainian government’s covert efforts to become a NATO member – thereby destroying a long-standing mutual and fragile nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow – were among the stated reasons why Russia invaded its neighbor in February last year.

Nearly a year into the Ukraine war, the western narrative of an 'unprovoked attack' by Moscow has become impossible to sustain https://t.co/xTaHEibKax

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 10, 2023

Washington wanted Moscow isolated and friendless in Europe. The goal was to turn Russia into Enemy No. 2 – after China – not leave Europeans looking to Moscow for energy salvation.

The Nord Stream explosions achieved precisely that outcome. They severed the main reason European states had for cozying up to Moscow. Instead, the U.S. started shipping its expensive liquified natural gas across the Atlantic to Europe, both forcing Europeans to become more energy dependent on Washington and, at the same time, fleecing them for the privilege.

But even if Hersh’s story fitted the circumstantial evidence, could his account stand up to further scrutiny?

PECULIARLY INCURIOUS

This is where the real story begins. Because one might have assumed that Western states would be queuing up to investigate the facts Hersh laid bare, if only to see if they stacked up or to find a more plausible alternative account of what happened.

Dennis Kucinich, a former chair of a U.S. Congressional investigative subcommittee on government oversight, has noted that it is simply astonishing no one in Congress has been pushing to use its powers to subpoena senior American officials, such as the secretary of the Navy, to test Hersh’s version of events. As Kucinich observes, such subpoenas could be issued under Congress’s Article One, Section 8, Clause 18, providing “constitutional powers to gather information, including to inquire on the administrative conduct of office.”

Similarly, and even more extraordinarily, when a vote was called by Russia at the United Nations Security Council late last month to set up an independent international commission to investigate the blasts, the proposal was roundly rejected.

If adopted, the UN Secretary-General himself would have appointed expert investigators and aided their work with a large secretariat.

Three Security Council members, Russia, China and Brazil, voted in favor of the commission. The other 12 – the U.S. and its allies or small states it could easily pressure – abstained, the safest way to quietly foil the creation of such an investigative commission.

Excuses for rejecting an independent commission failed to pass the sniff test. The claim was that it would interfere with the existing investigations of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. And yet all three have demonstrated that they are in no hurry to reach a conclusion, arguing that they may need years to carry out their work. As previously noted, they have indicated great reluctance to cooperate. And last week, Sweden once again stated that it may never get to the bottom of the events in the Baltic Sea.

As one European diplomat reportedly observed of meetings between NATO policymakers, the motto is: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” The diplomat added: “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering. It’s better not to know.”

It may not be so surprising that Western states are devoted to ignorance about who carried out a major act of international terrorism in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, considering that the most likely culprit is the world’s only superpower and the one state that can make their lives a misery.

But what should be more peculiar is that Western media have shown precisely no interest in getting to the truth of the matter either. They have remained completely incurious to an event of enormous international significance and consequence.

Media Ignore Seymour Hersh Bombshell Report of US Destroying Nord Stream II

It is not only that Hersh’s account has been ignored by the Western press as if it did not even exist. It is that none of the media appear to have made any effort to follow up with their own investigations to test his account for plausibility.

“ACT OF WAR”

Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked ­– and verified or rebutted – if anyone wished to do so.

He set out a lengthy planning stage that began in the second half of 2021. He names the unit responsible for the attack on the pipeline: the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, based in Panama City, Florida. And he explains why it was chosen for the task over the U.S. Special Operations Command: because any covert operation by the former would not need to be reported to Congress.

In December 2021, according to his highly placed informant, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a task force of senior administration and Pentagon officials at the request of Biden himself. They agreed that the explosions must not be traceable back to Washington; otherwise, as the source noted: “It’s an act of war.”

The CIA brought in the Norwegians, stalwarts of NATO and strongly hostile to Russia, to carry out the logistics of where and how to attack the pipelines. Oslo had its own additional commercial interests in play, as the blasts would make Germany more dependent on Norwegian gas, as well as American supplies, to make up the shortfall from Nord Stream.

By March last year, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the precise site for the attack had been selected: in the Baltic’s shallow waters off Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where the sea floor was only 260ft below the surface, the four pipelines were close together and there were no strong tidal currents.

A small number of Swedish and Danish officials were given a general briefing about unusual diving activities to avoid the danger that their navies might raise the alarm.

The Norwegians also helped develop a way to disguise the U..S explosive charges so that, after they were laid, they would not be detected by Russian surveillance in the area.

The story no one wanted told. Seymour Hersh reveals how the US blew up the Nordstream gas pipelines, one of the great environmental disasters of our time. I'm guessing Hersh published on Substack because no establishment media outlet dared touch his expose https://t.co/B2IxQj5kuh

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 9, 2023

Next, the U.S. found the ideal cover. For more than two decades, Washington has sponsored an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic every June. The U.S. arranged that the 2022 event, Baltops 22, would take place close to Bornholm Island, allowing the divers to plant the charges unnoticed.

The explosives would be detonated through the use of a sonar buoy dropped by plane at the time of President Biden’s choosing. Complex arrangements had to be taken to make sure the explosives would not be accidentally triggered by passing ships, underwater drilling, seismic events or sea creatures.

Three months later, on September 26, the sonar buoy was dropped by a Norwegian plane, and a few hours later three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.

DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN

The Western media’s response to Hersh’s account has perhaps been the most revealing aspect of the entire saga.

It is not just that the establishment media have been so uniformly and remarkably reticent to dig deeper into making sense of this momentous crime – beyond making predictable, unevidenced accusations against Russia. It is that they have so obviously sought to dismiss Hersh’s account before making even cursory efforts to confirm or deny its specifics.

The knee-jerk pretext has been that Hersh has only one anonymous source for his claims. Hersh himself has noted that, as with other of his famous investigations, he cannot always refer to additional sources he uses to confirm details because those sources impose a condition of invisibility for agreeing to speak to him.

That should hardly be surprising when informants are drawn from a small, select group of Washington insiders and are at great risk of being identified – at great personal cost to themselves, given the U.S. administration’s proven track record of persecuting whistleblowers.

But the fact that this was indeed just a pretext from the establishment media becomes much clearer when we consider that those same journalists dismissive of Hersh’s account happily gave prominence to an alternative, highly implausible, semi-official version of events.

In what looked suspiciously like a coordinated publication in early March, The New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspapers printed separate accounts promising to solve “one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine.” The Times headline asked a question it implied it was about to answer: “Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?”

Instead, both papers offered an account of the Nord Stream attack that lacked detail, and any detail that was supplied was completely implausible. This new version of events was vaguely attributed to anonymous American and German intelligence sources – the very actors, in Hersh’s account, responsible both for carrying out and covering up the Nord Stream blasts.

In fact, the story had all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign to distract from Hersh’s investigation. It threw the establishment media a bone: the chief purpose was to lift any pressure from journalists to pursue Hersh’s leads. Now they could scurry around, looking like they were doing their job as a “free press” by chasing a complete red herring supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Which is why the story was widely reported, notably far more widely than Hersh’s much more credible account.

So what did the New York Times’ account claim? That a mysterious group of six people had hired a 50ft yacht and sailed off to Bornholm Island, where they had carried out a James Bond-style mission to blow up the pipelines. Those involved, it was suggested, were a group of “pro-Ukrainian saboteurs”– with no apparent ties to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who were keen to seek revenge on Russia for its invasion. They had used fake passports.

The Times further muddied the waters, reporting sources that claimed some 45 “ghost ships” had passed close to the site of the explosion when their transponders were not working.

The crucial point was that the story shifted attention away from the sole plausible possibility, the one underscored by Hersh’s source: that only a state actor could have carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The highly sophisticated, extremely difficult operation needed to be concealed from other states, including Russia that were closely surveilling the area.

Now the establishment media was heading off on a completely different tangent. They were looking not at states – and most especially not the one with the biggest motive, the greatest capability and the proven opportunity.

Instead, they had an excuse to play at being reporters, visiting Danish yachting communities to ask if anyone remembered the implicated yacht, the Andromeda, or suspicious characters aboard it, and trying to track down the Polish company that hired the sailing boat. The media had the story they preferred: one that Hollywood would have created, of a crack team of Jason Bournes giving Moscow a good slapping and then disappearing into the night.

WELCOME MYSTERY

A month on, the media discussion is still exclusively about the mysterious yacht crew, though – after reaching a series of dead-ends in a story that was only ever meant to have dead-ends – establishment journalists are asking a few tentative questions. Though, let us note, most determinedly not questions about any possible U.S. involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper ran a story last week in which a German “security expert” wondered whether a group of six sailors was really capable of carrying out a highly complex operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. That is something that might have occurred to a less credulous newspaper a month earlier when the Guardian simply regurgitated the Times’ disinformation story.

But despite the security expert’s skepticism, the Guardian is still not eager to get to the bottom of the story. It conveniently concludes that the “investigation” conducted by the Swedish public prosecutor, Mats Ljungqvist, will be unlikely ever to “yield a conclusive answer”.

Or as Ljungqvist observes: “Our hope is to be able to confirm who has committed this crime, but it should be noted that it likely will be difficult given the circumstances.”

Hersh’s account continues to be ignored by the Guardian – beyond a dismissive reference to several “theories” and “speculation” other than the laughable yacht story. The Guardian does not name Hersh in its report or the fact that his highly placed source fingered the U.S. for the Nord Stream sabotage. Instead, it notes simply that one theory – Hersh’s – has been “zeroing on a Nato Baltops 22 wargame two months before” the attack.

It’s all still a mystery for the Guardian – and a very welcome one by the tenor of its reports.

The Washington Post has been performing a similar service for the Biden administration on the other side of the Atlantic. A month on, it is using the yacht story simply to widen the enigma rather than narrow it down.

The paper reports that unnamed “law enforcement officials” now believe the Andromeda yacht was not the only vessel involved, adding: “The boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general.”

The Washington Post’s uncritical reporting surely proves a boon to Western “investigators”. It continues to build an ever more elaborate mystery, or “international whodunnit,” as the paper gleefully describes it. Its report argues that unnamed officials “wonder if the explosive traces – collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners – were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.”

The paper then quotes someone with “knowledge of the investigation”: “The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture.”

How does the paper respond? By ignoring that very warning and dutifully distracting itself across much of its own report by puzzling whether Poland might have been involved too in the blasts. Remember, a mysterious Polish company hired that red-herring yacht.

Poland, notes the paper, had a motive because it had long warned that the Nord Stream pipelines would make Europe more energy dependent on Russia. Exactly the same motive, we might note – though, of course, the Washington Post refuses to do so – that the Biden administration demonstrably had.

The paper does inadvertently offer one clue as to where the mystery yacht story most likely originated. The Washington Post quotes a German security official saying that Berlin “first became interested in the [Andromeda] vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a ‘very concrete tip’ from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage”.

The German official “declined to name the country that shared the information” – information that helpfully draws attention away from any US involvement in the pipeline blasts and redirects it to a group of untraceable, rogue Ukraine sympathizers.

The Washington Post concludes that Western leaders “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved”. And, it seems the Western media – our supposed watchdogs on power – feel exactly the same way.

“PARODY” INTELLIGENCE

In a follow-up story last week, Hersh revealed that Holger Stark, the journalist behind Die Zeit’s piece on the mystery yacht and someone Hersh knew when they worked together in Washington, had imparted to him an interesting additional piece of information divulged by his country’s intelligence services.

Hersh reports: “Officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. [Holger] said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials.”

Holger, Hersh says, was entirely uninterested in Washington’s haste and determination to have exclusive access to this critical piece of evidence: “He answered, with a wave of his hand, ‘You know what Americans are like. Always wanting to be first.’” Hersh points out: “There was another very obvious explanation.”

Hersh also spoke with an intelligence expert about the plausibility of the mystery yacht story being advanced by the New York Times and Die Zeit. He described it as a “parody” of intelligence that only fooled the media because it was exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear. He noted some of the most glaring flaws in the account:

Any serious student of the event would know that you cannot anchor a sailboat in waters that are 260 feet deep’ – the depth at which the four pipelines were destroyed – ‘but the story was not aimed at him but at the press who would not know a parody when presented with one.’”

Further:

You cannot just walk off the street with a fake passport and lease a boat. You either need to accept a captain who was supplied by the leasing agent or owner of the yacht, or have a captain who comes with a certificate of competency as mandated by maritime law. Anyone who’s ever chartered a yacht would know that.’ Similar proof of expertise and competence for deep sea diving involving the use of a specialized mix of gases would be required by the divers and the doctor.”

And:

How does a 49-foot sailboat find the pipelines in the Baltic Sea? The pipelines are not that big and they are not on the charts that come with the lease. Maybe the thought was to put the two divers into the water’– not very easy to do so from a small yacht – ‘and let the divers look for it. How long can a diver stay down in their suits? Maybe fifteen minutes. Which means it would take the diver four years to search one square mile.’”

The truth is that the Western press has zero interest in determining who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines because, just like Western diplomats and politicians, media corporations don’t want to know the truth if it cannot be weaponized against an official enemy state.

The Western media are not there to help the public monitor the centers of power, keep our governments honest and transparent, or bring to book those who commit state crimes. They are there to keep us ignorant and willing accomplices when such crimes are seen as advancing on the global stage the interests of Western elites – including the very transnational corporations that run our media.

Which is precisely why the Nord Stream blasts took place. The Biden administration knew not only that its allies would be too fearful to expose its unprecedented act of industrial and environmental terrorism but that the media would dutifully line up behind their national governments in turning a blind eye.

The very ease with which Washington has been able to carry out an atrocity – one that has caused a surge in the cost of living for Europeans, leaving them cold and out of pocket during the winter, and added considerably to existing pressures that have been gradually deindustrializing Europe’s economies – will embolden the U.S. to act in equally rogue ways in the future.

In the context of a Ukraine war in which there is the constant threat of a resort to nuclear weapons, where that could ultimately lead should be only too obvious.

Iraq and Syria Survived the U.S.-NATO Attack and the Destruction

March 24, 2023

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By Steven Sahiounie

March 2003 and March 2011 have a great deal in common, but that is not where the story begins, Steven Sahiounie writes.

The 20^th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq for regime change coincides with the 12^th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Syria for regime change. March 2003 and March 2011 have a great deal in common, but that is not where the story begins.

The destruction of two nations, sitting side by side in the Middle East, began in 1996 with the strategy paper called “A Clean Break”, written by the man known as “The Architect of the Iraq War”.

“A Clean Break” was authored in part by Richard T. Perle, an American Jew from New York. Being born a Jew is not paramount to this story, but being an Israeli agent is. There should be a test when working on sensitive and top-secret plans for the U.S., that your allegiance is sworn to the U.S. and no other country on earth. Perle was an American, but his allegiance lay elsewhere.

Perle delivered the paper to Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just been elected as Prime Minister of Israel. The paper presents the reasons for the U.S. to attack and destroy Iraq and Syria. After President Bill Clinton took office, the paper was presented to him for action, but he declined. But, by the time of the 9/11 bombing of the WTC in NYC in 2001, the time was ripe to dust off the paper and Perle and his associates found President George W. Bush a willing partner.

Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which was responsible for developing reasons for the U.S. to attack other countries. The Pentagon does not develop policy, they simply are asked to report if a planned attack can be carried out successfully, or not. There is an old saying, “A soldier’s job is not to question why, a soldier’s job is to do or die”. Wars and attacks by the U.S. cannot be blamed on the Pentagon, that blame must rest on the Oval Office, the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Policy Board.

The 9/11 attack was carried out on the orders of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national living in Afghanistan, and a leader of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group following the political ideology of Radical Islam, which is the same ideology as the Muslim Brotherhood, with hundreds of followers in the U.S.

The trick was how could the Bush administration connect Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq? The director of the CIA, George Tenet, repeatedly told Bush that there was no connection.

The second strategy of the Bush administration, was to build the case for invading Iraq based on Saddam Hussein having “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD). The CIA was able to support that premise, not based on any facts, but based on the idea that Hussein might have WMD. When Tenet was asked about the WMD, he replied “We will find it when we get there.” That proved to be wishful thinking, as no WMDs were ever found by thousands of armed and highly skilled U.S. soldiers who combed every nook and cranny in Iraq, for years.

So how did the U.S. public and Congress come to believe the Bush administration’s lies? That was accomplished by the U.S. mainstream media. The Bush administration spoon-fed false information to key journalists in the most reputable media outlets. The journalists were unable to personally verify the information on WMD, and they refused to reveal their sources who were the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. government. Without the complicity of the media, the case for going to war in Iraq could never have been believed.

The events leading up to the first day of the bombing in Baghdad were unfolding so rapidly, that the ‘red flags’ of doubt were overlooked. Hans Blix was returning to his hotel in Baghdad when Bush announced to the world on TV that he would order the beginning of the bombing in 24 hours. Blix was blindsided when confronted by a microphone thrust in his face at the entrance of the hotel. At first, he didn’t believe the Bush order, and reiterated the results of his visits to numerous sites in Iraq, that Hussein had no WMD, they had been destroyed previously.

But, that never stopped the bombing from commencing on time. While the bombs were falling across Baghdad, Blix was back in NYC delivering his detailed report to Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General, which made the case that the Bush attack was based on a lie. All of this was covered in the media, but it was too late to stop the war machine.

The U.S. was not alone. The UK and many of the NATO allies signed up for the Bush war on Iraq. All of them bear responsibility for their participation in an unjustified war that cost millions of lives. The U.S. coalition partners blame their decision to participate on the fact they believed in U.S. intelligence, and they believed in the lies. Another factor in their decision to follow the U.S. lead was the fact that the U.S. had been the sole ‘Super Power’. Those days are over, as the international community recognizes the new multi-polar world.

When Perle penned “A Clean Break” in 1996 for the leader of Israel, the attack on Syria was included, sort of a ‘2 for 1’ idea. Take out both Iraq and Syria at the same time, and Israel will be a safer place. Once Donald Rumsfeld became involved in planning the 2003 attack on Iraq, he counseled against including Syria. His decision was based on knowing two countries’ destruction is too big of a goal to be accomplished. He decided to focus on destroying Iraq only.

Syria was not attacked, and the war next door did not spill over the border. Syria accepted 2 million Iraqi refugees, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt came to Damascus in 2009 and met President Assad because of his open-door Iraqi refugee policy.

The plans to destroy Syria began in the 1996 paper by Perle, and by March 2011 the President Obama administration had already started on their plans to create a ‘new Middle East’ and Obama utilized NATO to assist in the attack, invasion, and occupation of Libya. The U.S.-NATO attack on Libya was the precursor to the attack on Syria which used Syrian followers of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and later were replaced by international terrorists following Radical Islam, such as Al Qaeda and finally ISIS.

Today, Iraq lies destroyed. It has never been reconstructed. Large areas still have no water, electricity, or medical care. The infrastructure of Iraq is broken. The Iraqi constitution was drafted by the invaders and has set the parliament up as a sectarian and ethnic quota system. In the U.S., it would be unthinkable to base elected offices on religion or ethnicity, but it was the U.S. invaders who developed the Iraqi constitution which has locked the country into an unworkable system of corruption based on who your parents were, and where did they live. The U.S. also insisted the Iraqi form of government be a Parliamentary system, which has kept the country locked into chaos as there is no central leader who can get things done, unlike the U.S. Presidential system.

Syria resisted the U.S.-NATO attack and the people fought back. Now, after 12 years there exists a possibility that brighter days are ahead for the Syrian people and the hope of reconstruction. In Iraq, there is also hope that the suffering they endured at the hands of brutal invaders, who committed atrocities against civilians, can be relegated to the pages of history, and a new chapter in security and prosperity can begin.

Iraq War 20 Years On… Collective Western Amnesia Over Anglo-American Crime of Century

March 24, 2023

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The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after, the Western media are at it again.

This week, March 20, saw the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war launched on Iraq. The war resulted in over one million deaths and a decade of brutal military occupation. It spawned sectarian civil war, millions of displaced and destitute, and terrorism that engulfed the entire Middle East, as well as large swathes of Africa and Asia. Iraq and several other ancient nations have been destroyed because of the Anglo-American war. And it was a war based on flagrant American and British lies over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was also supported by NATO partners, should be an occasion for proper accounting with Nuremberg-standard war crimes prosecutions of American and British political and military figures. Persons such as George W Bush, the former U.S. President, and Tony Blair, the ex-British premier, should be facing jail time for capital crimes. The current U.S. President Joe Biden should also be in the dock since his role as a senior Senator at the time was crucial in enabling the war. Also up for indictment are several Western media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post which promulgated the lies that made the case for war.

Despicably, the man who shed so much light on the crimes, publisher Julian Assange, is the one who languishes in a prison torture dungeon.

Twenty years on, there is an eerie sense of collective amnesia among Western politicians and media over the colossal war crimes associated with Iraq. It’s almost as if it did not happen. The Western protagonists and their propaganda outlets have gotten away with mass murder.

This week marked another odious anniversary, which shamefully, was met with the same Western silence and indifference. On March 24, 1999, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance unilaterally began bombing former Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days. Thousands of civilians were killed in a military assault on that country – under the cynical pretext of “humanitarian protection” – which was not approved at the time by the United Nations. The bombing campaign was conducted, like the Iraq War only four years later, on the basis of unilateral action by Washington and its Western allies.

Lamentably, a glance at the calendar would throw up countless such vile anniversaries of unlawful American and Western military aggression. March 19, for example, marked the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011.

In a powerful essay by Ron Ridenour for Strategic Culture Foundation we are reminded of the extraordinary warmongering record of the United States and its imperialist partners. In terms of the number of countries invaded and the consequent death toll, including from the first use of atomic bombs, the U.S. is certainly “exceptional” for all the wrong reasons.

Yet what makes the record all the more horrendous is the impunity. The collective amnesia towards the Iraq War is perhaps the most damnable symptom of impunity in recent decades. It also exposes the rank hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the so-called “rules-based global order” that Washington and its Western minions continually spout about. The “rules-based global order” is an Orwellian blandishment for lawlessness and predation by rogue regimes that trample all over the United Nations Charter and international law.

The chronic impunity that the United States has come accustomed to in the murderous pursuit of its imperialist objectives means that it never stops its rogue state rapacity. It’s a repeat offender because it never has been held to account. There is an analogy here with the way Washington relentlessly abuses the privileges bestowed on the dollar as a global reserve currency. Washington parasites off the globe by printing dollars and levying undue rights for unearned services and goods. The racket never seems to stop because there is no accountability.

Likewise, the warmongering of the United States never ceases. The blood lust of its capitalist power and imperialist needs never ceases. The criminality is permitted because in large part the Western media serve to cover up the crimes with fabricated excuses and lies. The wars in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s were whitewashed as “crusades against communism” instead of being reported as the genocidal imperialist rampages that they were. The impunity from those enormous crimes then led to more wars and crimes. The Iraq War fits into this rolling context.

But there is also the historical factor of the Soviet Union and the supposed victory of the Cold War by the United States. Without a checking counterforce, the U.S. rulers became consumed with the arrogance of presumed “unipolar” dominance. It is no coincidence that after 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States embarked on an even more licentious pursuit of imperialist wars and the tyrannical notion of “rules-based global order”. There came in short order a state of permanent war on the planet by the U.S. and its Western allies. The wars and covert interventions led by the United States in Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, among other places, were all commensurate with the self-ordained right of expansion by the NATO alliance toward Russia. The same U.S.-led military expansionism is underway toward China.

This is the proper context by which the current war in Ukraine should be understood and assessed. As well as the relentless militarist build-up against China in the Asia-Pacific.

The United States and its NATO allies are fueling a conflict in Ukraine by pouring endless amounts of weapons into that country. The latest step to further escalation is Britain announcing it is supplying depleted uranium artillery shells to Ukraine. These toxic weapons were used by the U.S., Britain and NATO forces in former Yugoslavia and Iraq which have resulted in unprecedented cancer deaths and birth defects among civilian populations. Again, the crime of impunity is followed by more crime.

The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after aiding and abetting the crime of the 21st century, the Western media are at it again. These organs and their grinders are trying to tell the world that Russia is an aggressor in Ukraine and that Russia and China are posing “a threat to Western democracy”.

In a state visit to Moscow this week, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin declared the need for earnest diplomacy to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. The Western powers and their media lackeys reacted by disparaging any such diplomacy and instead sought to vilify Russia and China as being somehow villains against global security.

It’s quite easy to tell who the real villains and liars are. The Iraq War is one of many such touchstones.

Historic Year… Ukraine War Exposes U.S. Imperialism as Foremost Global Threat

February 24, 2023

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Most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.

The war in Ukraine is now entering its second year, having reached its first anniversary this week. On February 24 last year, Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory. The conflict has taken many twists and turns over the past 12 months. But there seems to be one inescapable, paramount development. The contours of hostility have emerged to identify the primary global threat – the United States and its zero-sum obsession with imperialist hegemony.

Strictly speaking, the war in Ukraine is entering its tenth year because the origins of the conflict are traced to the coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 sponsored by the American CIA and other NATO agents. The NeoNazi regime that was installed then and which continues in power (headed up by a Jewish president nonetheless) was weaponized and covertly supported by the United States and its NATO partners to aggress the Russian-speaking people of formerly southeastern Ukraine. The bigger objective for the regime was to draw the Russian Federation into an existential confrontation that is now underway.

The Western governments and their media propaganda outlets assert the nonsense narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. The Western propaganda system – whose names include household brands like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, DW, and France 24, and so on – completely whitewashes the preceding eight years to the war erupting.

Putin reiterated the claim this week in an annual state-of-the-union type speech when he said “the West started the war”. The Russian leader was predictably vilified in the West for saying such. But the facts of history are on Putin’s side.

American scholar Professor John Mearsheimer is one of several eminent voices who confirm that the war in Ukraine was presaged by NATO and NATO’s relentless expansion toward Russia over many years. Ukraine was but the tip of the spear pointed at Russia.

Other sources on the ground in the Donbass region – formerly of Ukraine – also confirm that the NATO-backed Kiev regime was escalating its aggression during February last year before Russia’s military intervention. This would account for why American President Joe Biden was confidently predicting at the beginning of last year that Russian forces would “invade” Ukraine. The American paymasters of the Kiev regime knew that Russia would be compelled to intervene in order to forestall an incipient deadly assault on the Russian-speaking population inside the then-Ukrainian border.

The Donbass region has since seceded from Ukraine in referenda held last year and joined the Russian Federation following the footsteps of the Crimean Peninsula. Western media/propaganda outlets talk about Russia “annexing” the Donbass and Crimea, ignoring the referenda verified by international observers. But then the same Western media refuse to report on how the U.S. in an act of international terrorism blew up the Nord Stream pipelines five months ago. Thus, say no more about their craven credulity.

Lamentably, the hostilities in Ukraine have been exacerbated and unnecessarily prolonged because of the massive flow of American and NATO weapons into that country. At least $100 billion of armaments has been pumped into the regime whose foot soldiers model themselves on Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazi Third Reich in World War II. This is while Western populations suffer record levels of poverty and austerity imposed by callous elitist rulers.

Just this week, the Biden administration pledged another $2 billion in military aid to the Kiev regime, including the resupply of HIMARS long-range rockets. The sophisticated U.S.-supplied artillery is being used to target and kill civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions which are now part of the Russian Federation. Reliable information shows that the HIMARS artillery units are being operated by NATO mercenaries, not Ukrainian troops.

The grave implication is that the United States and NATO are at war against Russia. This is no longer a proxy war of indirect support. The visit to Kiev this week by President Biden and the ludicrous talk about “defending world democracy” against “Russian aggression” clearly demonstrates that Washington is commanding the conflict and its dangerous charade of hoodwinking the world.

Russia’s stated aims of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” the Kiev regime are far from met – yet. The aforementioned would-be offensive by the NATO-backed regime against the Donbass region in February last year was thwarted by Russia’s intervention and countless lives were no doubt spared. Nevertheless, the truth is that the people in the newly constituted parts of Russia are continuing to live under deadly conditions imposed by the NATO axis. Just this week, several civilians in Petrovsky near Donetsk City, including ambulance workers, were killed by NATO-backed shelling.

The war in Ukraine has escalated into an existential one that Russia cannot afford to lose. Likewise, the investment of political and financial capital by Washington and its imperialist allies is such that they also face an existential challenge whereby they cannot back down without losing fatal prestige.

There is barely any diplomatic or political effort to find a peaceful solution. China this week unveiled a 12-point peace plan to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, but the plan was quickly dismissed or undermined by the U.S. and European leaders. The ultimate problem is Washington and its imperialist minions are seeking a zero-sum hegemonic result, one where Russia is defeated, which will, in turn, pave the way for bigger ambitions of confronting China. Already, the American imperialists are well on their way to reinforcing the military encirclement of China.

The war in Ukraine is really a manifestation of underlying historical forces. The supposed end of the Cold War in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to subsequent decades of unbridled American military lawlessness and wars of impunity. Arguably, one can go further back and contend that the United States and its imperialist gang of powers are the inheritors of the Third Reich’s task to conquer Russia’s vast landmass. Western capitalist powers backed the rise of the Third Reich, and only for a brief period expediently switched sides to defeat Nazi Germany in 1945 because Hitler had gone rogue, only for the Western powers to quickly resume the historic objective of vanquishing Russia under the guise of the Cold War. The truth is the Cold War never ended. Because the American-led capitalist warmongering order never ended. (And there will never be peace under this order.)

Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, in an address to the Security Council this week cited figures that showed that the U.S. engaged in illegal foreign military interventions on over 250 occasions since the ostensible end of the Cold War some three decades ago.

For its part, China this week denounced the United States as the major instigator of world conflicts, claiming that 80 percent of foreign wars and hostilities were attributable to covert and overt American actions.

No nation has overseen the number of coups, regime-change operations, mass killings, and assassinations compared with the United States. Its ruling regime even assassinated one of its own presidents – John F Kennedy in 1963 – because he stood in the way of imperialist objectives.

In the make-believe fairytale world of Western governments and media (a deluded global minority, it must be noted), the war in Ukraine is laughably portrayed as being about “defending democracy and freedom”. The reality is Ukraine has become a money-splurging war racket in which Western war and banking industries are drooling at the profits facilitated by a corrupt cabal in Kiev propped up by NeoNazi paramilitaries and NATO mercenaries who are killing Russian civilians. A gruesome video emerged this week showing NATO-backed murderers in uniforms hanging a man and his pregnant wife in the Lugansk region, an atrocity confirmed by the state prosecutor for the region.

It is estimated that up to 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed over the past year, while the United Nations estimates that about 7,200 civilians have died. Russia claims to be trying to minimize civilian casualties.

The United States and its NATO accomplices are fighting an imperialist war “to the last Ukrainian” and bequeathing another failed state as they have done elsewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen among others. This time, however, the American Empire is pushing a war against nuclear power, Russia, which is not going to back down. Two existential forces are incrementally going head-to-head. And most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.

The Next Stage in Western Escalation

January 27, 2023

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by Batiushka

Introduction: The Story So Far

So far the US has carried out regime changes and created military conflicts in countries friendly to or important to Russia: Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Georgia, Syria, Libya. All this was to make Russia lose important interests or deploy its own forces. It has also staged PR events such as Litvinenko, Pussy Riot, MH17, Skripals, Navalny, Bucha, the destruction of Nordstream – in order to try and blame Russia and make it into a pariah state.

In particular, in 2014 in the Ukraine it carried out a $5 billion coup with the murder of and terror against Russian-speakers. It then installed a puppet government, promoted Nazism through racist indoctrination, besmirched the historic legacy through rewriting history and toppling memorials, terrorised and banned all opposition, set up US military biolabs, supplied and trained an army, made military threats against Russia, threatened the Crimea, and promised that the Ukraine could soon join the US-puppet NATO and install nuclear weapons.

A Message from Boris: Deaths and Sackings

When Boris Johnson turned up in Kiev a few days ago, you knew events would follow. He is after all the office boy for Biden. So last week came the resignation of Zelensky’s spinmaster, Alexey Arestovich, for telling the truth about the Ukrainian military – that it had killed civilians by destroying an apartment block in Dnepro in a military accident and could not win the war. The next day the interior minister Monastyrsky, a longtime aide of Zelensky, and his first deputy died in a helicopter crash in Kiev a week ago (‘caused by flying low in fog’). Strange, since the neo-Nazi militias operate through his ministry.

Then there was the murder of Denis Kireev, who was an important participant in the March peace talks with Russia. It is rumoured that he was too keen on peace – which the US and the UK are totally opposed to. He had to go, so the CIA/SBU (same thing) did the job. Next came a major purge on 24 January following corruption claims, involved a deputy prosecutor general, the deputy head of the president’s office, the deputy defence minister and five regional governors.

Interestingly, Poroshenko, last seen in a luxury hotel in London, living off his now very active cremation business in the Ukraine, promised peace with Russia in one week. Once in power he did not bring peace and lost the next election. He was replaced by Zelensky, who also promised a peace settlement with Russia in the Donbass, but instead prepared war and even sought nuclear weapons. The Ukrainian people are promised peace, but are not given it. Zelensky’s support base is small and there is a majority that wants peace. Is Zelensky the next to be purged?

Escalation: Germany Declares War on Russia Again

Germany is going to send Leopard tanks to the Kiev regime. For the third time since 1914 Germany is now, on paper at least, at war with Russia. The Russians have a choice: they can intervene in the Ukraine from the north-west (Belarus) and the south-west (the sea) and cut off the whole of the Ukraine from all its arms supplies, including several dozen German, American, British and other tanks – and it will take months for the promised tanks to arrive across the Polish border. Or else Russia can bomb anything that comes across the Polish border. It has already warned that anything coming across that border into the Ukraine will be destroyed. Thus, in any case, a barrier will be created. Western Europe must be cut off, for it has become the source of the evil, providing weapons to Neo-Nazis.

Otherwise, the Poles and their reservists too may intervene (in their Leopard tanks? Remember Tiger tanks?) to take over the west of the Ukraine. Is Russia really going to allow the division of the Ukraine into the Russian East and the Polish-led Western West, in other words, its Koreanisation or Vietnamisation? (And we know how those divisions ended). Otherwise, the Anti-Russia of the Ukraine will remain forever. Western Europe must be cut off. What began as a small operation to liberate the two Russian provinces of the Donbass, is now, as a result of Western (= US-led) escalation, an operation to liberate the whole of the Ukraine. Only total Russian victory can work. Only establishing a Russian-led Kiev Protectorate, like the situation in Belarus, can work. All those who disagree with that and have not yet fled for the West had better leave now.

Interestingly, we know that the Russian Black Sea Fleet with its landing craft left port last week. On 25 January Dmitry Medvedev wrote publicly that the Ukraine would have no need of submarines, as it would soon become landlocked. The day before, the President of Belarus, Lukashenko, rejected the offer of a Non-Aggression Pact from the Ukraine (= the US on behalf of Poland). Meanwhile, the somewhat senile Biden has blurted out that the US will support the Ukraine ‘for as long as it exists’. This is not what he used to say. Then it was ‘support to victory’. The only problem here is that the US never admits failure, it never admits that it backed the wrong horse at huge expense to the US taxpayer. How will it get out of this one?

The War

In the Ukraine the NATO war has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in just the last eleven months is continuing with hundreds more victims today, the same as yesterday, and the same as tomorrow. The doomsaying pessimists with their conspiracy theories of nuclear Armageddon foretell that this war will continue for years, ‘perhaps even a decade’. Others, the optimists, are thinking that the Kiev regime may collapse within weeks, or in three or four months at most, or there will be a coup in Kiev with Kiev forces either surrendering en masse or else turning around and marching on their murderous US puppet-commanders in Kiev. It does sound like wishful thinking. With yet more NATO weaponry and tanks to be destroyed, I think it will all take longer. Not years, as those happy souls, the doomsaying pessimists with their conspiracy theories of nuclear Armageddon foretell, but another 15 months. But I really hope that I am wrong and that the wishful thinkers are right and that it will all be over very soon.

As the Saker in his penetrating analysis has pointed out, if the US cannot prevent a Ukronazi/NATO defeat, it can at least make the war as costly as possible for Russia. Find another attacker. Poland will do. Promise them the five provinces in the far west of the Ukraine, Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, and the Poles will do anything you tell them to. After all, there are Poles, and most of them seem to be part of its current incredibly stupid government, who still have a messianic complex, who still dream of glory, of ‘saving Europe from the barbarian Russian hordes’, of a ‘Poland stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea’, and of becoming the most powerful country in Europe, dwarfing those nasty Germans ‘who are going to give us back trillions’. Well, there have always been fantasists. Hitler was one of them. And the American Empire has always known how to manipulate them for its own ends, whether in Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Baltics, the Ukraine or Poland.

The fact is that the American Empire knows that it cannot defeat Russia in a straightforward war, so it has always used proxies. In 2008, it took the absurd step of using Georgia. This was far too small, far too weak and irrationally nationalistic. As a Georgian told me quite seriously just a few years ago: ‘God only speaks Georgian and does not understand any other language’. I was surprised to learn that God has such limited linguistic abilities, however, there are plenty of Ukrainians who believe much the same today, not to mention Poles.

And both the Ukraine and Poland are a lot bigger than Georgia. Hence the American choice. Once they are both defeated, the US will be turning to Germany – as they almost did in Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable plan to attack the Red Army on 1 July 1945, using British, American, Polish and German forces to destroy Russia (1). Or why not use Sweden, Turkey, Japan? Why not China? Why not just overthrow Putin with the ‘masses’ of Russians who do not like him? Such today are also the fantasies of ‘the crazies in the basement’ at the Pentagon. No wonder they get on with the Polish government. And don’t forget the biggest crazy in the US basement was Polish: Zbigniew Brzezinski.

For Russians, 2022 was simply a repeat of 1812 and 1941. The Third Great Patriotic War. The West doing its barbaric thing, as usual. The fact is that, though some historians deny it, history does repeat itself, simply because human pride, arrogance and hubris repeat themselves. German tanks with their black crosses trying to destroy Russia on the Ukrainian steppes? We Russians shrug our shoulders. We have seen it all before. The Anti-Russia of the Ukraine will simply never happen. Zelensky is on drugs and so is the Ukraine, addicted to Western transfusions of blood, money, mercenaries and arms.

Afterword: Another Future

Famously, or rather infamously, the British Establishment figure who was the first NATO Secretary General boasted that the aim of NATO was ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ (2). As for us, we wish to see a renewal of Kennedy’s ‘Alliance for Progress’, a World Alliance of Sovereign Nations, a global version of the Gaullist spirit (though not the precise words) of ‘l’Europe des Patries’ (Europe of the Nations’). We wish to see a for now geriatric Europe reattached to its historic destiny with Russia and so with Eurasia, where it is all happening. Therefore, our aim is: ‘To keep Russia in, the Americans out and the Germans up’.

Some write that Russia can only win the war in the Ukraine as long as it can help the US to save face after its defeat and then the collapse of NATO and the EU. Remember Saigon? Remember Bush and his ‘Mission Accomplished’? (The world laughed at his farce, but plenty in the US were convinced by it). Remember Kabul? The US just left them and pretended to be in denial about them. Like the British at Dunkirk in 1940, who left their French allies in the lurch, they just ran away back to their island, declaring victory, though leaving lots of their equipment behind them. The Americans can also run away, saying: ‘Forget it. They are not worthy of us’.

Self-isolation would be such a good thing. Go back to the big island of Northern America. If you want, build Trump’s long-promised wall across the south to keep those nasty Latinos out. Lick your wounds and at last start trying to deal with the massive internal problems that you already have: great poverty, racial division, mass shootings, debt, social injustices, lack of healthcare, unemployment, exploitation, an education system that deliberately makes people stupid, drugs, crime and so mass imprisonment. Leave the Europeans to sort themselves out. No more Americans are going to die for or pay for those lazy Europeans. Just don’t tell the American people that this would make those same lazy Europeans only too happy. The only problem is that the US never admits failure, it never admits that it backed the wrong horse at huge expense to the US taxpayer. How will it get out of this one?

27 January 2023

Notes:

1. https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/operation-unthinkable-churchill-s-plans-to-invade-the-soviet-union/#:~:text=The%20plan%20called%20for%20a,his%20domination%20of%20East%20Europe

2. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_137930.htm

HOW ELON MUSK IS AIDING THE US EMPIRE’S REGIME CHANGE OPERATION IN IRAN

JANUARY 17TH, 2023

Source

Alan Macleod

Elon Musk has announced that he is helping to smuggle hundreds of Starlink satellite communications devices into Iran. The South African-born billionaire made the admission on December 26, replying to a tweet lauding female Iranian protesters for refusing to cover their hair. “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran”, he tweeted, clearly implying a political motivation to his work.

That Musk is involved in Washington’s attempts to weaken or overthrow the administration in Tehran has been clear for some months now. In September – at the height of the demonstrations following the suspicious death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the U.S. was “taking action” “to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people” and “to counter the Iranian government’s censorship,” to which Musk replied, “Activating Starlink…”

While this could be understood as a positive step, unfortunately, what Washington means by internet freedom and the free flow of information (as we at MintPress News have covered before) is nothing more than the liberty of the U.S. government to flood foreign countries with relentless pro-U.S. messaging.

Starlink is an internet service allowing those with terminals to directly connect to one of over 3,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. Many of these satellites were launched by Musk’s SpaceX technologies company. Terminals are, in effect, small, portable satellite dishes that can be used by those in the near vicinity to skirt national government restrictions on communications and get online anywhere at any time.

The process of smuggling Starlinks into Iran has been far from easy – or cheap. Each terminal has cost more than $1000 to purchase and transport, as couriers have charged high premiums on the risky cargo. Nevertheless, some sources have suggested as many as 800 have made it over the border unscathed.

KEEPING UKRAINE FIGHTING

Musk’s Iran operation bears a striking resemblance to his actions earlier this year in Ukraine – another current top priority of the United States. In the aftermath of February’s Russian invasion, Musk garnered worldwide goodwill after declaring that he was “donating” thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine in order to keep the country online. However, these were inordinately given to the Ukrainian military and soon became the backbone of its efforts at stalling Russian advances. Ukraine’s hi-tech, Western-made weaponry relies upon online connections, the military using Starlink’s services for everything from thermal imaging, target acquisition and artillery strikes to Zoom calls.

With more than 20,000 terminals in operation, Starlink is, according to Western media, a “lifeline” and an “essential tool” without which Ukrainian resistance would have been broken. The government agrees; “SpaceX and Musk quickly react to problems and help us,” deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov said recently, adding that there is “no alternative” for his forces, other than Musk’s products.

A Starlink antenna covered with a camouflage net in use by Ukrainian fighters in Donetsk, December 2022. Maxym Marusenko | NurPhoto via AP

It soon transpired, however, that Musk’s donation might not have been as generous as first thought. USAID – an American government agency that has frequently functioned as a regime-change organization – had quietly paid SpaceX top dollar to send what amounted to virtually their entire inventory of Starlinks to Ukraine.

In December, Fedorov said that more than 10,000 extra terminals would shortly be heading to his country. It is not clear who will pay for these, but it is known that, two months earlier, SpaceX and the U.S. government were in negotiations about funding for additional devices to be sent to Ukraine.

MUSK AND THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

While the controversial billionaire’s role in American regime change operations and proxy wars might surprise some, the reality is that, almost from the very beginning of his career, Elon Musk has enjoyed extremely close connections to the U.S. national security state.

The Central Intelligence Agency was integral to both the birth and the growth of SpaceX. Of particular importance in the company’s story is Michael Griffin, the former president and chief operating officer of the CIA’s venture capitalist wing, In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel was established to identify individuals and businesses that could work with or for the CIA, with the goal of maintaining the U.S. national security state’s technological edge vis-à-vis its opponents.

Griffin was an early believer in Musk, calling him a future “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. So strong was Griffin’s desire to get the South African on board that in early 2002 (even before SpaceX had been founded) he accompanied him on a trip to Moscow in order to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russian authorities – a fact that, in today’s geopolitical reality, beggars belief.

Musk’s attempts to buy Russian rockets failed, and for many years, it appeared likely that SpaceX would be a giant flop. In 2006, the company was in difficult financial waters and was still years away from making a successful launch. But Griffin – who by this time was head of NASA – took a huge “gamble” in his own words, his organization awarding SpaceX with a $396 million contract.

Nevertheless, even this giant cash injection was not enough to stop the company hemorrhaging money. By 2008, Musk thought it likely that both SpaceX and his electric vehicle business, Tesla, would both go under. Fortunately, SpaceX was saved again by an unexpected $1.6 billion check from NASA.

Thanks to the government’s largesse, SpaceX has grown into a behemoth, employing around 11,000 people. Yet, its ties to the U.S. national security state remain as close as ever. The corporation’s primary clients are the military and other government agencies, who have paid billions of dollars to have their spy satellites and other hi-tech equipment blasted into orbit. In 2018, for example, SpaceX won a contract to deliver a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS system into space. Although spokesmen were keen to play up the civilian benefits of the satellite, it is clear that its primary purposes were military and surveillance.

SpaceX has also won contracts with the Air Force to deliver its command satellite into orbit, with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space, and with the National Reconnaissance Office to launch its spy satellites. These satellites are used by all of the “big five” surveillance agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.

This collaboration has only been growing of late. Documents obtained by The Intercept showed that the Pentagon envisages a future in which Musk’s rockets will be used to deploy a military “quick reaction force” anywhere in the world. The Department of Defense has also partnered with SpaceX in order to explore the possibility of blasting supplies into space and back to Earth, rather than flying them through the air, thereby allowing the U.S. to act faster worldwide than ever before.

And in December, SpaceX announced a new business line called Starshield, an explicitly military hardware brand that CNBC reported would be focussed on securing big money Pentagon contracts. The brand’s new motto is “supporting national security.”

Therefore, Musk and his organization can be said to be cornerstones of both the global surveillance program that individuals like Edward Snowden warned us about, and crucial to the United States’ ability to carry out endless global warfare.

IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Ever since the revolution of 1979 that deposed the American-backed shah, Iran has been a prime target of U.S. regime change. A 2012 report from the National Endowment for Democracy explains that the U.S. is involved in a “competition” to promote color revolutions (i.e. regime change operations) in Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Iran and other countries, while those governments seek to prevent them.

Iran has been the subject of international attention since September and the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini had been detained by Iranian authorities for not wearing a headscarf correctly. Very quickly, Western media began claiming that she had been beaten to death, an accusation that sparked nationwide protests.

Iranian authorities released footage of Amini’s collapse and medical records suggesting that she had an ongoing serious brain condition, and announced they were reviewing their policy of mandatory headcovers for women. Yet even as protests continued, they were overtaken by much more violent confrontations between authorities and Kurdish separatist movements, with Western media not caring to differentiate between them.

Twitter was crucial in drawing the world’s attention to Iran. The platform’s moderators put news of the protests on its “What’s Happening” sidebar, alerting users around the world to them. Pro-demonstration and anti-government hashtags were also boosted across Western countries to a remarkable degree. According to the Twitter Trending Archive, on September 18 alone, there were 1.6 million tweets from American users using the Farsi-language Amini hashtag (#مهسا_امینی). This total was beaten two days later when over 2 million tweets were sent using that hashtag, making it by far the most used in the United States that month.

On Sep. 19, 2022 alone, US-based users supposedly generated 1.6 million tweets in Farsi with the hashtag: #مهسا_امینی (Mahsa Amini).

In Israel, however, the astroturfing was turned up to 11. In just four days between September 21 and September 24, accounts based in Israel sent over 43 million tweets about the protests – quite an achievement, given that only around 634,000 Israelis have a Twitter account – an average of 68 tweets per account.

Musk, center, stands next to the very pro-Israel Jared Kushner, left, during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, December 18, 2022. David Niviere | Sipa via AP Images

It is far from clear whether these huge displays of support from Western governments help or harm genuine activists in Iran. What is certain, however, is that Twitter and other big social media companies work closely with the U.S. government in order to advance attempts at regime change. Late last year, for instance, the Twitter Files revealed that the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) had given Twitter lists of dozens of accounts it operated as part of a psychological operations program against Iran, Syria, Yemen and across the Middle East. Twitter aided them in this process, whitelisting those accounts, protecting them from scrutiny and artificially boosting their reach. Many of these accounts, The Intercept reported, accused the Iranian government of lurid crimes, including flooding Iraq with crystal meth and harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.

This is merely the latest episode in a long history of collaboration with U.S. authorities to destabilize Iran, however. In 2009, at the behest of Washington, Twitter postponed a scheduled site maintenance which would have required taking its platform offline. It did this because the U.S.-backed leaders of a large anti-government protest were using the app to coordinate. Meanwhile, in 2020, Twitter announced that it was partnering with the FBI, and that, at the bureau’s insistence, it had removed around 130 Iranian accounts from its platform.

In addition to the cyberwar, the U.S. government is also prosecuting an economic war on the country. American sanctions have severely hurt Iran’s ability to both buy and sell goods on the open market and have harmed the value of the Iranian rial. As prices and inflation rise rapidly, ordinary people have lost their savings. Even crucial goods like medical supplies are lacking, as Washington’s maximum pressure campaign makes sure to punish businesses that trade with Iran.

Despite this, the U.S. government has been very careful to ensure that big social media companies are not affected by the sanctions and continue to operate inside Iran – a fact that suggests that Washington sees them as a crucial tool in its arsenal. Indeed, even as the State Department was announcing new rounds of sanctions, supposedly in response to Tehran’s handling of the protests, it also revealed that it was taking steps to make sure Iran was opened up as much as possible to digital communications such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.

BIG TECH AND BIG GOVERNMENT

On Iran, Silicon Valley has long collaborated with the national security state. After the Trump administration’s assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, big tech companies blocked any messages of support for the slain statesman, on the grounds that the Trump administration had declared him a terrorist. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

This ban stood even for individuals inside Iran itself, where Soleimani was overwhelmingly popular. A University of Maryland study found that, even before he was turned into a martyr, more than 80% of the country saw Soleimani positively or very positively, making him the most admired figure in the country. This was because Soleimani and his IRGC were crucial in crushing terrorist groups like ISIS and the al-Nusra Front – a fact that Western media once frequently acknowledged. Yet Iranians were blocked from sharing majority opinions across social media and messaging apps like WhatsApp with other Iranians – even in Farsi – because of the proximity of big tech and big government.

Another indicator of how closely the national security state works with social media is the extraordinary number of former spooks and spies now work in the upper echelons of big tech corporations. Twitter itself is swarming with feds; a June MintPress study found dozens of former FBI agents working at Twitter, most of whom held influential positions in politically sensitive fields such as security, trust and safety, and content moderation. Also present at Twitter were a considerable number of ex-officials from the CIA or the Atlantic Council. Many of them directly left their jobs in government for roles at Twitter, suggesting that either the company is actively recruiting agents, or that the national security state is infiltrating social media in order to influence it.

In Part 7 of the recently-released Twitter Files, journalist Michael Shellenberger built upon this, noting that there were so many FBI agents working at Twitter that they had their own private communications channel on Slack. The former feds even created a translation cheat sheet so that agents could turn FBI jargon into its Twitter equivalent.

The FBI was instrumental in deciding what accounts to suppress and which to promote, sending the company lists of users to ban and demanding Twitter comply with its witch hunt against what it saw as an all pervasive network of Russian disinformation. When Twitter executives replied that, after investigating the FBI’s leads, they could find little to no evidence of a Russian operation of any note, the bureau became exasperated.

Thus, current FBI agents were sending information and orders to “former” feds working at Twitter in an attempt to control online speech worldwide – something that undermines the oft-quoted line that Twitter is a private company and therefore not subject to the First Amendment. It also raises profound national security questions for every other government in the world about whether they should allow a platform that is so obviously controlled by the U.S. national security state and used as a gigantic psychological operation to be available in their countries at all.

Despite this collaboration, the Twitter Files also revealed that the FBI bemoaned Twitter’s relative lack of compliance with their dictates in comparison to other big social media networks. Yet, while Musk himself has very publicly fired thousands of employees, it appears that relatively few of the spooks have been among those losing their jobs. Indeed, when asked point blankly last month “how many former FBI agents are currently employed at Twitter?” he responded with a bizarre non-answer, simply stating, “To be clear, I am generally pro-FBI, recognizing, of course, that no organization is perfect, including [the] FBI,” thereby ducking the question.

Twitter is far from alone in bringing in armies of state officials to decide what content the world sees and does not see, however. Both Facebook and Google have done the same thing, employing dozens if not hundreds of ex-CIA agents to run their internal affairs. Meanwhile, in April, a MintPress investigation uncovered what it termed a “NATO-to-TikTok pipeline”, whereby copious numbers of individuals associated with the military alliance had mysteriously changed careers to work for the video platform.

This relationship between the government and tech is far from new. In their 2013 book, “The New Digital Age,” then Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen (both of whom left top national security state jobs to work for Google), wrote about how companies like theirs were fast becoming the U.S. empire’s most potent weapon in retaining Washington’s control over the modern world. As they said, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Indeed, writers like Yasha Levine have argued that Silicon Valley from its very beginning was a product of the U.S. military.

While it remains to be seen what impact sending hundreds of Starlinks into Iran will have, the intention of those involved is clear. Equally plain-to-see is that big tech is not a liberatory force in modern society but is a critical weapon in the U.S.’ regime change arsenal. And while Musk continues to present himself as a renegade outsider, he has a very long history of working closely with the security state. This Iran operation is merely the latest example.

Finis Sinarum: Why I think China Cannot Win This

November 26, 2022

America Has Infiltrated China

By Thorsten J. Pattberg

In this naturally calm and composed piece of art, I will expose the global blueprint for the defeat of China and how the Americans have already subverted Chinese top universities. This many-eyewitnesses report could knock you off your guard and make you question your—now utterly pointless—Masters in China degree, so maybe you want to find a quiet place for the next 45 minutes or so of unremitting verity and veritas.

1. S. Since I am also creaking out critical gov-intern about the US subversion of China, this could always be my last piece, so thank you for indulging me. [Special forces raided my German place but I wasn’t there, blah!] BUY THIS BOOK!

So, this story begins in Beijing in the autumn of 2004. I was attending a dorm meeting of just eight international students in Shaoyuan, the on-campus Foreigners Building at Peking University (PKU). The host was Sergei, a 20-years healthy, strong, and charismatic Russian. Sergei means protector or guardian, and a protector of others he was.

IMAGE 1 Sergei the Russian and Shaoyuan of Peking University

Sergei announced to his guests that he was about to self-sabotage his compulsory Chinese language year or Dui Wai Hanyu—literally: Chinese for Outsiders—which meant he would henceforth NOT be eligible to enter Peking University and study International Relations.

Tens of thousands of foreign students like Sergei are expected to pass the HSK Chinese Proficiency Test at Level 6—the highest level and comparable to near-native speaker fluency—to advance to a real Chinese undergraduate degree. Peking University limits full-time preparatory language work to 2 years, in rare cases 3 years. Sergei had done one full year and passed HSK Level 4. The school extended a year on his behalf, normal procedure, but Sergei was determined to quit language school and drop out of university. He thought the compulsory language school part wasn’t academic at all, but some form of bureaucratic torture and chicanery.

It certainly was infantilizing. Grownups were put back in school classes like they were 12-year-olds. The textbooks were childish. You could just buy them in bookshops everywhere. And imbalanced. Japanese and Koreans already know Hanzi (Chinese characters), the Europeans and South Asians don‘t. Some Africans registered for visa purposes, then disappeared into the Wu Daokou underworld. There were mothers, business people, and illiterate overseas Chinese mixed in with South Asian teenagers. The teachers came from the crowds. Certainly not Peking University liao—material. If this was Higher Education in China, Sergei called it a waste of time and a scam—zaijian, goodbye!

Part I. Know Thy Place [And Your Port Of Entry]

Sergei came from a well-to-do family of Moscow state officials. His father had two other sons, one of who had also studied in China and became a scientist at Moscow State University. Sergei was the only son of his father’s second wife. We knew because his mother visited him this summer in Shaoyuan. She was astonishingly young and beautiful. She came to check on his progression, and, immediately, she found herself appalled by the sanitary situation in the student dorm. The toilets were just holes in the ground and no doors.

IMAGE 2 Squat Toilets vs Trench Toilets

Sergei was extremely well-educated, handsome, and funny. He made friends easily because everyone could see he had great charisma and leadership potential. He spoke English like Sergey Lavrov and German like Vladimir Putin. Sergei knew the canon of European literature, could talk about any topic except fashion, and seemed mature beyond his age. So, he travelled around China with his mother during the summer break, flew back to Russia, returned in time, and had made up his mind about his future career path. And that evening at his farewell party in autumn, surrounded by other foreign students, he said this to me which I could not forget. He said: “I quit, who gives a shit about Russians here. You are German, so maybe you Germans have it better. If I was American, I would be famous in China!”

Sergei. That was not his real name. I have to disguise the identities of my heroes to protect them. I met him again, six years later. He was visiting the PKU lake site, a popular day trip for tourists, pushing a baby boy in a stroller with his newlywed beautiful Caucasian wife in tow. He seemed happy. To my surprise, he had not left China or Beijing, except for family visits and on holidays of course. Instead, he moved to the other part of town and became a self-employed entrepreneur. A trader—not the international scholar he had once aspired to be. “Well, I am an international businessman now!” We exchanged a few lines about student dorms. The toilets with no toilet paper. The showers with No-pissing signs. He matured faster than anyone I knew, I thought. Now he was a family man, too. His wife, like his mother… gorgeous! “Don’t get too jealous,” he smirked. “They are hard work!” Sergei had dropped out of academia, or better: He had pulled out his head just before they could pull him in. We had nothing more in common.

Sergei proved his case. He had been realistic enough to see that Shaoyuan was an elaborate educational racket. The two years compulsory language program for future undergraduate hopefuls was indeed beyond chicanery. It was an insult. Personally, I crashed into Shaoyuan twice but did not live there. I lived in rented apartments off-campus. My Chinese degree was real.

Scholarship is serious. It leads to a cold mountain top and solitary life. You don’t work. You study. You go where no one has gone before with your brains. You know you were made for this since childhood. It is a calling.

Had they put me into a funny class with teenage Eastern Europeans, Koreans, and Japanese, and taught me school-Chinese by some job-center dudes, I would have despaired too. A university is the highest place of learning, never a school! School time is over, and you can do whatever you want in a university.

But those Shaoyuan foreigners don’t seem to know this. And how could they? This was the second intelligence test of Peking University… and they failed it! [The first intelligence test was of course that there was no application process in Russian, Korean, Italian, or Swahili language. If you had to apply in the American language in China, maybe your life is heading toward… a burger degree?]

Sergei was correct: Had he been an American, or shall we say a certain type of American, he would have been treated very differently. I am telling you now a hidden truth, a truth so brutal, unfair and seemingly evil, that you might want to pause reading now, switch the website, read Chekov’s Ward No 6, perhaps, or The Menticide Manual,… but do not read further. Especially not if you have carelessly sent your own teenage kids off to college in a foreign land.

Sergei was sent to China, a foreign country, by his calculating father, a government official, to fetch the name of Peking University; real or just imagined prestige, who cares: This was very clever.

However, it was also desperate. And for desperate people, there is a special hell reserved in a university.

If you are a Russian, or a Chinese, or a lesser European, or—Heaven forbids—some lower tier human from the Congo or Venezuela or Iraq, you are terrestrially speaking a mind slave. You probably don’t even know what you want to study until you are told and placed.

Only a solid connection to the ruling elites in the United States of America can save you from mandatory global exam plantation. If you are not connected to extremely influential Americans, or at least the European upper crust, all the higher tiers in the Human Hierarchy are going to bully you, abuse you, and torture you. They’ll tell you what to study, how long, where and how. That, my friends, is plantation work. You are not even close to any mountain!

The rulers of this planet invented all kinds of silly exams, prep courses, waiting periods, ridiculous programs, and stupefying requirements for the hoi-polloi [the too-many]. Why are Third World parents sending their teenagers abroad to foreign language plantations? Especially their daughters! The Chinese shepherds figure out in two minutes if you are a fellow shepherd person or a sheeple. And if Peking University really was your dream school, why start learning Mandarin after the event?

During the four summers that I hadn’t seen Sergei, Shaoyuan had wasted a combined 3,600 years of human life. If Sergei had been the son of a US Democrat with an American BA in Table-tennis, he would have been accommodated like a respectable human being, and Peking University 2022 would have placed him in a 1-year fast track Yenching Academy English program Master of Public Administration, next station Oxford or Brussels or the United Nations in New York. And to top it off… and this is a fact: No man who knows himself would lower himself and study years of Chinese like this. It is just a language, Heaven! You learn it on the loo! On the side! While doing astrophysics or running a business school!

The Americans would have put an “American Sergei” on CNN Cable News Network, mentioned him in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and, BAMM!… he would have become a global public intellectual, cited and referred to by millions.

Or maybe, just maybe, you are “the leading families” in some irrelevant, insignificant country, and you are desperately hoping for affirmative action or the figurative 10% Western attention span quota. There was a Thai princess at Shaoyuan once. Thailand in Asia has a population of 69 million. In comparison, England in the West has barely 53 million people. But the world is not equal, and nobody at the top of the Human Hierarchy gives a bottom burp about Thai nobility. Can we even begin to imagine man-made climate change and the sixth intellectual revolution in the US-UK planetary race if Meghan Markle and Prince Harry had attended a trench toilet at Peking University?

Of course, PKU administration immediately handed Princess Sirindhorn a Peking University Honorary Doctorate Degree [means she didn‘t have to enroll in a 5 years program like the rest of you sheeple!] and even gave her her own PKU Sirindhorn Research Center. So if Peking University can arrange all this for such irrelevant third-tier Asian-nation leaders, imagine what it can do and will arrange for the truly planetary, globalist Western master-blaster class…

Part II. The Arrival of The Meta People

I stated in another piece that Americans do not mingle with Europeans in Asia. We are not friends and not partners, not even close. We live in a masters-emissaries arrangement. The intellectual Europeans who serve the American Empire are called Transatlantiker or Trans-Atlanticists. That is an ugly word monster, so they refer to themselves as just “Westerners.” Those pro-American EU opportunists unfortunately get all the Empire’s goodies, promotions, and praise.

The minority Europeans who want to eject America from Europe are dangerous terrorists. That’s a huge problem for the entire world. See, Asians can always convert to the West. They are always given the benefit of doubt. But not so Europeans. They can only betray the Western cause and go criminally insane. Therefore, the traitors in the West are always kicked down to the bottomless pit of the global hierarchy, far below the Orientals, the fish, and the infectious diseases.

That is why the transatlantic Europeans in China insist on being equally idolized like Americans, and unitedly canonized with them as xifangren— “the people of the West.” Under no circumstance do the Polish, the Austrians, the Czech, the Finnish, the East Germans, and so on want to be separate from America as mere ouzhouren—”Europeans,” or, God help us, as dong’ouren—“the people of Eastern Europe.” Can you imagine how average the Chinese would treat them? By disguising their true identity, all those bogus Westerners hope they will be venerated just like Americans are, and treated way better and above the Asians and Orientals. And they are damn right they will, as “the united West” signal-religiously inspires fear and awe throughout the world.

***

The Western control over China is blatantly obvious. And because it is so blatant and obvious, you would be considered a baichi—an idiot—to speak about it. A baichi is a person who is oblivious to social conventions. Which makes him a tragic hero, to some. But more generally speaking, an idiot does more damage than good to a harmonious society. If the baichi does not die from immediate consequences, he transforms into a huairen or bad person. In the West we would call him a villain. All the idiot heroes who point out the obvious situation that Chinese education is already westernized will be considered terrorists as well.

Example. One baichi German guy at Beijing Foreign Language University pointed out that the 50,000 holders of the Chinese Government Scholarships (CSC) are NOT looked after by the Chinese side, and that the applications were pre-sorted and forwarded by Western governments. Two months later, the guy died in an accident.

Most nationals do not realize this, but the West controls education globally. Not just all the standards. Not just the Anglo-Satan BA, MA, MBA, PhD degrees, publications, and university structures, but also international exchange, scholarship, and permissions. Chinese degrees, Benke, Shuoshi, Boshi, etc., on the other hand, are invalid.

An Englishman who carelessly studied in China on his own, with no UK governmental backing, is holding a worthless degree. UK universities, including Cambridge and Imperial College, prohibit their students from studying in mainland China unless they are part of their many state-supervised exchange programs. The entire West has huge barriers to its citizens learning in China unsupervised. This is also the reason why most British students miraculously end up in exchange years in pro-Western Hong Kong or Taiwan. British scholars are not free, and they are definitely not autarch. They are children of the Empire,… and suck their owners’ titinob.

***

Much of the progress in the humanities in the last 100 years still lies hidden. We see spacecraft and satellites and computers everywhere, which is the progress of engineering and the sciences, but we do not at first recognize the advancements of our cognizance.

To caricature it in the most simplistic way possible, humanity has fallen into two separate types of people, the selected meta and the rejected infra. I use these terminologies for better illustration as we go along. But think of them as a new breed of magicians or creators or enlightened beings. The meta (Greek for hidden) are the manipulators who switch everything and do what they want. The infra (Greek for subpar) is everyone else. The infra people lead banal lives and produce all the stuff for the advancement of meta. In the past, throughout human evolution, a tiny minority of elites had always been able to accumulate all the labor, resources, and technologies to cement their rule. But this time, around the turn of the third millennium, the first human beings who had experimented with it have literally spaced out into a new, Fifth Dimension—the Dimension of Differences only they can see naturally.

For everyone else in the Human Hierarchy, for the left behind humans, the infra people, the Fifth Dimension is still hidden, permanently so until they die. The old humans can be as intelligent or educated as they like, they cannot see the hidden world, only strange behaviors and unstoppable quakes to our lives. So that’s why I call it the hidden verse, here’s a sketch:

IMAGE 3 Meta and Infra

The meta elites can freely converse about their plans for us since they are the only ones who see the world of differences, distances, and all relations. They are not per se evil in the traditional, biblical sense. Rather, they need no morals and, as a matter of their trade, treat their subpar fellow beings very similar to how the old humans treated their pet dogs, mended their forests, or bred their farm animals.

I met my first one in Münster, Germany, while working in the German judiciary. He led me to two others. So, it was altogether three meta persons who I watched for years. That was all of them I knew back then. That was 27 years ago. They said that there are more, many more, that they are everywhere, but that there are national and international chapters, and they prefer to gather where there are high concentrations of their source of power: portals to the Fifth Dimension.

They seemed strangely languid and alien to me, so I called them “Meister der Rede“ —literally: the Masters of Speech. They completely messed up their environment and controlled everybody with their fancy words and superior minds. So at least it seemed to me. These three specimens alone affect the entire judiciary of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. And their world, the world only they could see, I called a Law, “die Lehre vom Unterschied“—literally: the Law of Difference. I was just so overwhelmed by their secret that I wanted to throw my life away and kill myself.

But I couldn’t do it. I just had to find those portals. I showed myself. The meta have unlimited access to all the world’s top universities, so they sent me to Oxford University. That is now 21 years ago. Since then, I have been tracing them down, one portal after the other, all over the world. First Oxford. Next was Paris. I followed a Chinese meta called Ji Xianlin to Beijing in China. He knew. They know. They kept him in a psychiatric ward, the meta at Peking University, and he passed away just before I got to meet him. Next was Boston. Shanghai. Teheran. Tokyo. There are several points of contact now in the world, and I have discovered their portal to the Fifth Dimension here at IAHS at Peking University, the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies.

***

Peking University is part of a global set of elected top universities, controlled by the great manipulators. It is NOT controlled by the Chinese government. PKU or “Beida” (for Beijing Daxue) is the mother lode of Chinese education because… who said so? Not the Chinese. Why would Shanghai people or Nanjing people or Xi’An people say, “Oh the best university is not here but 1000 miles away”? Beijing people don’t even speak their language [Beijing speaks Putonghua, a dialect]! It is insane, and humiliating to a billion people here, to say their bestest best are over there—so who is piling and pushing this monstrous global shite? It is of course the authors of the Global University Ranking racket in the West, Rothschild in the City of London, the Meta Covenant. Peking University and Tsinghua University were partly founded by missionaries. They are the heaviest infiltrated. There is a portal here. Western meta people come and go… as if this was their own house!

For the sake of argument, let us go along with their grand scheme. Idealized as the best school for the humanities in China, PKU should be able now to pick and choose the best talent from a population of 1.4 billion. That, however, amounts to statistical phantasmagoria. In real life, see, one either gets 100% accepted or 0% admission. If it were an evenly distributed statistical probability, nobody with a brain would ever plan for PKU or any other top university, because your chances to win a lottery go against 0. So, it can’t be a lottery, do you understand this?

Certain people just walk straight right in, 100% of the time. Others are rejected on the spot. The vast majority of the Chinese have absolutely no statistical chance to enter this place, ever, so a cruel game was concocted: exam farming. If the slaves underwent the most horrible path of self-mutilation and torture, they, too, could pass a nebulous, enigmatic National University Entrance Exam, then win a prize ticket for entering Peking University.

The results are horrific. Most of exam plantation’s churned-out “winners” look like freaks or abominations, with terrible eyesight, whimsical body frame, and severe mental illnesses like autism and depression. They sacrificed their childhood, never played with toys, were emotionally abused by their parents and teachers, and never experienced—I claim—happiness, love, and Self.

IMAGE 4 The Chinese Practice A LOT but who tells them to

Peking University indeed allotted quite a few places to these mutants with their tiny hands and oversized heads and absolutely no social skills. However, you will be shocked to know that for most Chinese leaders it is a walk in the park to get into Peking University. No torture camp is required. And we need to know why.

The owners and caretakers of the system do not sit their own tests. There are several other ways for them to get the positions they want. Democratic ways, even. For example, all presidents, directors, professors, researchers, and so on, are handpicked, selected, nominated by… guess by whom… their mentors and peers. Next, the entire spectrum of graduate education and research runs on nepotism, recommendation letters, and vague, flexible ideas about excellence. Excellence is deliberately kept vague, and the plantation owners change the definition at any time.

One year excellence could be enrolling more minorities, the other year it could be enrolling athletes. Money and guanxi—connections—are always excellent, see. During the last twenty years of globalism, excellence was enrolling the kids of parents who had overseas qualifications. That is also the reason why Chinese elites send their kids to Western universities where there are no entrance examinations. When they return to China, all entry barriers here have also disappeared—excellent! Western education means global. It also means: local rules do not apply.

This leaves us only with undergraduate education in China that requires the rites of mass examination, which is also mass deception. It is a silly demonstration of power, no more, but also no less. Think. You have the elites who have all the time and resources in China. They rule supreme. But the crowds got angry: Where is your legitimacy! The first Emperors set up a cruel annual slaughter-the-sheep wolf festival: The Imperial Exam System, today morphed into the Gaokao—”Important Test.”

IMAGE 5 Sheep or Sheeple No Difference Really

It is totally unnecessary. That is why in the West we don’t have it so cruel. Sure, America has SAT scores, Britain has A-Levels, Germany has the Abitur, France has the Baccalaureate, and so on. But these are just rituals of graduation for the elite class. The West has practiced social class segregation since the beginning of time. The lower half of the population doesn’t even know universities exist. They can’t see them. For the elites, however, if they have set their minds on a top university, they just go. There is no competition. And if junior doesn’t get the ubiquitous first grades he allegedly needed, no problem. In Germany, we have exactly 52 other ways to get into a university. It is just common sense. Therefore, any standardized College Entrance Exams in the West or China is superfluous.

China for some reason was historically a very autocratic and collective place. EVERYONE, even the average and low-intelligence sheeple populations, were herded to take part in mass exercises. Think. This will elevate the High Mandarins even higher. If everyone says, Oh that one at Peking U was selected from millions and millions of test-takers, he will eventually come to believe it himself. It is therefore in the interest of the Peking-U people, the Harvard-U people, the Oxford-U people, and all the U-people in the world, to have as many non-starter people as possible taking part in exam plantation rackets and, by design, collectively fail by the hundreds of millions. Because the higher the rejection rate, the bigger the egos of the [unelected] few.

Our so-called Western China Experts bought into the examination legend—hook, line and sinker. They, too, act as if they were the winners of a planetary fair competition with all the Chinese, so they stroke their Western egos. In reality, there never was such a competition for them.

They know they didn’t win any competition; they know their own students didn’t take part in such elaborated nonsense, but maybe—so the delusion—the Chinese peasants, millions upon millions, really had to be herded through the ultimate Bloodsport Kumite or something, who knows. In reality, (almost) nobody here at PKU took it. Of my hundreds of Chinese classmates during undergraduate education at Fudan University in Shanghai and Peking University in Beijing, none took the annual University Entrance Examination, or rather: Most participated but did not get the highest marks. Instead, they received school recommendation letters… schools, of course, where their parents—mayors, doctors, foremen, party officials—bore considerable influence.

Only the science majors are hard to cheat, but that is everywhere in the world the same, isn’t it? So, scientists do not rule a society. Society is ruled by humanists—politicians, lawyers, bankers, culture makers, artists, businessmen, writers, and historians. And to top it off, the ruling caste in China are intermarried and have their elite preparation schools anyway, so they don’t cross paths with the general population.

Next are the foreigners. If you are American, you just apply and walk into PKU. You have read this correctly. You just walk and bypass the 1.4 billion Chinese, pay maybe a symbolic $4000 study fee, and, voila, you are now a Peking University affiliate. This is what I mean by meta knowledge, or the hidden world.

Has Albert Einstein taken an English exam to get into Princeton University? No! Did the daughter of Xi Jinping pass an entrance exam to get into Harvard University? No! Are there even any entrance examinations at American Universities? Only for unwanted people, yes. Not for the ruling class though. Did Bill Gates need a degree for any of the things he did: Run a trillion dollars metaverse, run a trillion dollars real estate empire, run global pharmacy? Did Elon Musk pass a HSK Chinese exam to do anything he wants in China? No! “Oh, these are exceptions to the rule!” No, they are not, and You, sir, are a complete moron!

They think I am a Martian. It is hopeless. Listen, I had a friend in Aberdeen in Scotland from the oil business whose entire family went to Oxford University. His brother went, too. The professor told my friend he can’t take him on this year, because there’s a new India quota. So he was relined to Edinburgh University and told to later come back to Oxford as a postgraduate, no big deal. If you know what you want, and if there are no major catastrophes that could prevent you, then you simply go to Oxford University. Oh no, the Chinese say to me, you have to pass the Cambridge First Certificate English preparation class or the British Council IELTS mandatory language requirements. “Nonsense,” I cried. “An English person just walks in. A EU person just walks in. An American person just walks in.”

But the homework! Oh my god, the Asians have to do an insane amount of homework! I never did any homework in German school in my entire life. But the grades and marks! What about it? There is an American guy in International Relations at Peking University who doesn’t know a sentence in Chinese and doesn’t need to, because his father is a diplomat. I know plenty of visiting professors here at Peking University who do not speak Chinese fluently. The British held Hong Kong for 100 years and still, nobody bothered to speak Cantonese.

About 660,000 candidates take the HSK Chinese language exam each year, according to the Chinese government. A friend of mine from the States, an American-Chinese, does not give a sweat. He has hidden knowledge. He bypassed the entire system by simply calling up a Harvard Professor, donated $50k for a good cause, and became a Doctoral Candidate at Peking University, then went to Harvard also. What, you didn’t know this? There is a straight tunnel beneath those universities. Like the tunnels beneath Disneyland. I went to Harvard, too.

***

Comes along the University of Tübingen, the China Center, a second-class Normal University in Germany. Its students are of no significance and absolutely not selected at all. China Studies is something everybody can study in Germany, and it’s better than unemployment or the welfare check. Peking University is world-class and would never collaborate with Tübingen University, right? Wrong! First, Tübingen has clean and seated toilets. Second, a multi-million euro German industrialist sold his billion euro companies to China under the condition that Peking University accepts his million euro donations so that some German kids can study here.

IMAGE 6 What is Tübingen or How Do We All Get Into PKU

So now we have these off-the-mill German students hanging around in the EU Center at Peking University which really is the Tübingen deal. They are morons, and none of them will ever become a top scholar in the world. They attend special classes, away from real PKU students, as in: They are attending classes for special students. Retards, in other words. They get retard classes. Can you imagine this? But it is true.

The director is a meta guy, alright. Very bright, just not American but German. Anyway, he tries to find maybe one or two outstanding German characters who will see through this bullshit, break loose, and find their own ways. He did not discover a single German meta in ten years. In fact, his students are so retarded, he probably wasted his teacher life but we shall see.

There are also funny moments to take away from this, of course. The Europeans want to mimic the Americans, fair enough. They tell their piss-poor [I work for free!] graduates that, in order to hang around and work some more unpaid years at a top university, they must publish two papers and their doctoral dissertation in some prestigious American journals. If those morons had put any attention to their director and trusted supervisor, they would have noticed that he did not fulfill his own requirements—at all! Directors are made by knowing the right people, and this is how meta persons operate in this world. Then they turn around to the infra and tell them: There is the requirement circus around the corner, go queue!

It is hopeless. People don’t see it. The current German Minister of Education is Anja Maria-Antonia Karliczek. She earned an online degree from a correspondence course from the Online University of Hagen. That‘s it. She became the MINISTER FOR ALL EDUCATION IN GERMANY, and you, Great Scholars of Moo, have been lied to all your farm lives!

You won‘t believe this next one, but it is real,… it is, it is… it really is. So those Tübingen University students are not at all qualified to study at Peking University, alright? Well, now they are here. What do they do? They are doing activism, of course! Below is a recruitment advertisement for China Studies from Tübingen University. Hold your chest, this is the stuff of ridicule. The Department for China Studies is looking for… wait for it… females, morons, and the mentally ill!

IMAGE 7 Tubingen U hires females morons and the mentally ill for Taiwan Studies

It is real. Who wrote this abomination? They are preying on mentally disabled people! It gets better. If you read the area description, it is a job for “Taiwan Studies.” Wait, what? Tübingen U separates Taiwan from China? That means that Peking U is in a partnership with Tübingen U that actively hires Taiwan activists and promotes secession from Beijing. At this stage of cancer, could we please all agree that we can’t blame the Germans. The German metastasis just grows and grows… but it is the Chinese deans and dons who are the corrupt push-overs.

***

Most meta, certainly the most powerful ones, operate out of the UK and America—not Europe. Europe has bled too many of them, I think. That’s why today Europe is losing its grip on the hidden dimension. For example, since the “normal” professors in Europe are state employees—much like teachers, nurses, and mailmen—they have internalized all those infra rules and regulations intended for the slave classes.

For example, European professors seem to believe in salaried work and state pensions. It means they expect a fixed salary and retirement at age 65. What, are you coal miners and bus drivers? A human being, if he or she has meta knowledge, has no fixed salary and no retirement age. Who washed your brains?

Elite universities are life-extension facilities for the meta. I bumped into professor Hans Küng, the alternative pope, age 82, at Peking U. And with Noam Chomsky, age 82, at MIT. Most directors I met in China were in their 70s and 80s. They were sages. Henry Kissinger got another honorary professorship from PKU, age 90. He visited us again, age 95. My active director, Tu Weiming, was age 80. When all his buddies came together, they were older than Time. Ji Xianlin, the Sage of Beida, refused to rest until age 98. The great practitioners of Dao enhance their lives to 150 years.

We have thousands of European professors forced into arbitrary retirement in France and Germany who are desperate to apply for meta posts… in America or Asia. “I can work Saturdays and Sundays in China, and phone my business partners after 6 p.m.—it’s awesome!” a Swedish philanthropist, age 81, told me. “Oh, and they respect Old Age.” Europe could become the most depraved place within a century.

One Chinese teacher took me aside: “We have a saying in China: Bao ren bu zhi eren ji.” I knew that one, it literally says “The satiated don’t know the starvers’ agony.” It is never used on food. Satiated in our language is derived from Latin satia and means “enough.” “The have-enoughs look down on the having-nothing-at-alls” would be a living transliteration, I suppose. The Chinese are starved-out people, exhausted. They do not know how the hidden world works. They think they can beat the West by working twice as hard for half the wage. They repeat what their ancestors did for the last 3,000 years, even if that what total shite, got their last Dynasty collapsed, got their people enslaved by Western powers [and the Japanese, harrumph], and got their space-galactical Summer Palace burned down to the naked stone.

“But what can we do,” said one Chinese Law student. Well, it helps to disgrace your ancestors. Maybe drop the name your parents gave you and pick a neat Western one? Justin Yifu Lin? Vincent Tao? Or how about adding the suffix “-berg,” as in Zuckerberg, Goldberg, Spielberg, or Pattberg?

Warped in Mark Zuckerberg to Tsinghua University, in 2015. Tsinghua is just across the street, cross-opposite PKU. The meta CEO lectured the hungry Chinese about global success. But Mr. Zuckerberg embodied everything the Chinese students are not: He is a Berg, he attended Harvard, he dropped out, and he is American. His audiences didn’t read the situation. If they had been successful, they wouldn’t be here. And so Mr. Zuckerberg mocked them even more, with talks about meta and the metaverse. Mr. Zuckerberg laid out his and his companies’ plans for world domination, and nobody in the grand auditorium here in Tsinghua seemed to notice. [Six years later, in 2021, he officially changed the Facebook empire into Meta Group.] The audiences were ecstatic. Mr. Zuckerberg could have plainly said: “Listen, we Americans control Higher Education in China. In fact, we own Peking U with our Stanford and Harvard portals, own Tsinghua U with Schwarzman, the banks and big tech; we are building a New Humanity, but all is hidden plainly in sight under your noses, so I am telling you everything is hidden, and you think us Bergs are some magicians.”

Part III. Famebation and Chinahilation

More meta techniques. One Austrian guy from Tsinghua never studied there. Instead, he flashed his brand-new business cards with the Tsinghua U logo on them. Not fiddling about the legal edges, he set up a [fake] Tsinghua U affiliated Consulting Group, an International English school, and a Tsinghua U Technology Review. One American guy claimed he was the International Director for Baidu, the Chinese search engine.

One lady, American also, of course Harvard, used the Tsinghua brand to become the top China feminism scholar. If you are a Chinese person and you do something similar with Western names, they will delete you. But for Western people, it is a quick and easy conquest. Soon four, five, six Western papers will mention you. If the Chinese complain, hundreds of Western papers will side with the Westerners, so that in the end the Chinese names, brands, and trademarks are now Western properties, controlled by Western persons.

Strike together, not divided. There is no way the Chinese can defend this. It is a global gang-up and loot and appropriation of everything Chinese. One Italian meta guy came out of nowhere and to Peking University. He was exceptionally wealthy, ruthless, and lying like a politician. He quickly joined the meta list and they said to him “Write a book on Chairman Mao.” That book, and not the 100,000 other texts written by infra Chinese nobodies, will be made THE book on Chairman Mao. There was a sarcastic frenzy among Western China Experts. In case you don’t know this, the first Western imperialists who messed up China in the 17th century were Italian Jesuits. It was an Italian priest, Matteo Ricci, dispatched by Rome, who became the real Pope of China, the God of Chinese Science, the Founder of the Catholic Church in China, the First Translator, the First Cartographer. If you study China Studies, you will be studying Italian Ricci as the closest thing to the Founding of China. Chinese Religion basically is Matteo Ricci, and not just him, but all those Roman Jesuits. They had their part in founding Peking University, too. Sending in a new Italian meta mafioso, 400 years later, is just so brutal and genius. It is a great metaphor for the Western powers cutting up China and dividing the meat plate.

American imperialists are by far the most reckless. They don’t see the harm they inflict and they cannot be repelled. Within 6 years I stayed in Beijing (2006-2012), the Americans fabricated global experts on Chinese politics, Chinese food, Chinese family planning, and Chinese spacecraft. In my book The Xin-Civilization, I explained how a single detachment from the Harvard battalion here in Beijing—composed of journalists, scholars, and informants—was working systematically on attaching American Harvardians to Chinese intellectual property. The Americans are making sure that everything of importance that ever happens at Peking University will end up being attributed and referenced to some Harvard person.

IMAGE 8 Harvard People Attach Themselves To China Stories In The New York Times

While everything of relevancy and immediacy is picked up by US command and control centers (CC&Cs) in North America and Western Europe, the scribblers of the Empire of Lies [and Sanctions] are pumping toxic hate and nefarious falsehoods about China into the global media. About this, I have also written a protocol, Press Soldiers – How Western Journalists Subvert and Destabilize China. [GET YOUR COPY!]

The press soldiers boost the [bogus] China experts who in reality are agents of the West. Here’s on outline:

IMAGE 9 Press Soldiers Fabricate The Leaders For China

Next the press soldiers promote Chinese dissidents to real heroes, saints, and martyrs. Here’s an overview:

IMAGE 10 Press Soldiers Fabricate The Heroes For China

Let’s not give them even more attention. Instead, let’s use the worn-out image of Albert Einstein again—pars pro toto, one case stands for all cases:  Everybody in the world knows this person for a reason. He looks the part of a mad scientist. He was chosen as the front-facing public persona to represent physics, even though physics back in 1905 was a 1,000,000-people-strong science.

The celebrity propaganda is so strong that Americans today believe scientist Albert Einstein to have invented time, time travel, the universe, and atom bombs, and that he is the No. 1 American Scientist of all time. Even though he was a German with a Swiss passport who wrote in a language no real American can read. He also belonged to a certain ethnic tribe, but this aside.

Now, since you probably cannot remember I’ll help you out: You actually know everything about Albert Einstein—except his papers! Because the papers, as I said, are in German, and physics is a 1,000,000-people-strong research team, and those researchers know the research anyway, regardless of Mr. Einstein. They could tell you physics was a vegetable sitting in a wheelchair, and you would believe that as well. In China, it is exactly the same. The Chinese learn, like the rest of the world, Albert Einstein the American scientist, Albert Einstein the global brand, and Albert Einstein the public intellectual. For what? Who put this celebrity pornography into our brains?

No Chinese, and none of us humans in general, has chosen this person to represent physics or time travel or the universe or America. It was all well-crafted but a certain syndicate, and we must all learn its ways. Now look at all global public figures and you will see the pattern. It is in plain sight, even if it is hidden: The West is the inventor of ALL historical figures in the world.

Part IV. The Digital Invasion of China

 Around 2006, America launched the digital invasion of China. The Internet was always American. The World Wide Web… American. But not all websites. The global take-over was quick. Europe had fallen, online. There are no European Internet firms today. China still has them but was quickly outclassed. Beijing’s lawmakers fought back against the righteous US Empire’s tech firms, but that, as I hope we can all agree on now, amounts to human rights abuse.

IMAGE 11 Search results for Xi Jinping are all US or UK owned

At Stanford University, Yale, Durham, Princeton, the (British) University of Hong Kong, Berkeley, and hundreds of Western universities and their subsidiaries in China and everywhere in Asia (you didn’t know they run overseas operations?), groups had formed who transferred China knowledge to themselves. All Western universities built laborious websites with research topics, researchers, and biographies intended to draw Internet traffic away from China toward the West.

They called it meta coding. It means you manipulate the Internet in such a way that you become the expert on all the topics. The Internet search engines, encyclopedias, and social networks—all US global tech monopolies—would give preference to US scholars, US schools, and US sources of all knowledge available on the planet. So, nation states like China were pretty much over.

IMAGE 12 Search results for Confucius are all US or UK owned

At Peking University in 2004, we barely had a university website or Internet representation online. The Americans owned Peking University from the very first day of the Internet since all searches pointed away from China towards the United States.

You will see in the two screenshots above that, even now in 2022, all search results on the Internet for “Confucius” or the Chinese President “Xi Jinping” will send you to US-UK platforms. It is the same FOR EVERYTHING that ever existed or exists or will exist in China. China in the digital realm is completely taken hostage by a foreign force. That is a fact, and the Chinese didn’t see it coming. They thought the British would come again with opium and gunboats.

Western universities that were the beneficiaries of 400 years Western colonialism, now put up their China collections online. It was the final humiliation, I think. Before the Internet, the Chinese had to travel to the West to study China. Now, they just click away and land in the West.

You can confirm this yourself. Just use Google and search for “Chinese Classics.” The top ten results are Western authorities: Wikipedia, Routledge [the publisher], Goodreads, Chinese Text Project [Harvard], Amazon [the bookseller], a library in Toronto [how did this get in?], a cultural center in Sydney [probably Australia is up on Googling], Google Books [Google’ own ads, yeah!], Springer [the academic monopolist], and Princeton University. Your results will differ slightly, but please do try.

By 2012, almost every Western academic had been given a Wikipedia profile. US Wikipedia is the global Internet Encyclopedia, the first destination for research using the Internet. Suddenly, all China experts were listed in global encyclopedias, while the object of their studies, the Chinese scholars, were not. No Chinese professor had an internet persona, so they might as well have not existed at all.

The Harvard and Stanford teams at Beida worked weeks and months on profiling American-Chinese professors who had a proven US track record and US degrees, and ignored all the rest of the Chinese-Chinese talent. [Now you might say, if you know all this, why is PKU not inserting the missing Chinese professors into the global database themselves? That is impossible, but PKU and others tried, yes. Short story: Everybody who is not known in the West is immediately marked for deletion. China set up its own Internet Encyclopedia, Baike. Needless to say, having just a Chinese profile is an even greater reason for deletion in the West.]

IMAGE 13 Which Chinese Professors Do Get Mentioned and Which Do Not

Western tech firms and Western content creators elevated their own universities and research groups and favorite Western celebrities to total world domination, not just .edu landing pages, but Research databases, newssites, publishers, think tanks like the Asia Society or Foreign Policy. At the same time, they blew out the lights on unwelcome Chinese contemporaries, forever. Above is a snapshot of the Academic Committee of my former Research Institute at Peking University. These are all geniuses. This is 2022. Only the three professors who studied at Harvard got a global Internet profile from the Harvard wiki team. The other six professors, even though we sent two of them as Visiting Scholars to Harvard, were blocked or deleted as irrelevant. Their research and achievements in literature, history, and philology are then attributed to Western rivals with similar interests.

One American student googled a superb English translation of the Book of Tao by a Peking University professor canceled in the West. The American simply used it as if the words were his, set up a US Youtube channel, got boosted by US Google, and attracted tens of millions of views to Chinese Taoism. Tens of millions! [I laughed so hard. Peking University is kind of superfluous now. Kids can do it!]

Whoever said that “the test of merit was survival” had a point, but probably meant it in an organic, natural way. But nothing today is organic or natural, it is synthetic and fabricated. US tech command & control do suppress pro-China voices. [Good luck finding the opinions of Josef Gregory Mahoney or Larry Romanoff organically.] Those who side with China are not going to survive in history.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia… are now all blocked in China. The Americans withdrew from China in rage and with bloody revenge fantasies, I can tell you this much. “Withdrawal” is too strong a word anyway, because Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and all monopolies are still here, or shall we say especially here, at Peking and Tsinghua University, and in Zhongguancun, the Silicon Valley of China. They just cannot operate in the open as they wished, not with fancy billboards and tv commercials and ad campaigns. What they still do in China, however, is data mining, surveillance, and subverting the Chinese internet.

In fact, all American cartels are operating in China. I recall 2011 when US Apple opened its Apple Showcase Room inside Peking University Library. Or when US Subway Fast Food Chain opened its Sandwich store close to the Democracy Triangle. All three locations were unreal and proved to be clever US marketing. Provoke controversy and brand awareness.

IMAGE 14 Inside Peking University Apple Showcase Room and American Subway Fastfood Chain

Between 2004 and 2020, there were more US cyber-attacks on Chinese data than there were US bio-attacks on Chinese food supply chains and livestock. It was never reported. Beijing warned the United Nations that America was up to no good in the Asia Pacific. By 2016, it was too late. Way too late. China outside America is wholly embargoed. It ceases to exist. Instead, on any topic, you will be redirected to some Chinese dissidents, Western journalists, and Western books. And the Internet is all more or less anti-Chinese.

When we wanted to meet a [fake] scholar at Stanford University, Francis Fukuyama, he demanded $20k fees. Our institute booked $50k flights and accommodation for the directors, and non-professors had to self-pay. It added nothing of substance to scholarship, if you still live in the four-dimensional world. But if you see the five-dimensional world, it means EVERYTHING.

What can be done against Western world supremacy? Nothing. The meta people are going to unleash five-dimensional war and destruction. Peking and Tsinghua University are subverted. China has no counter attack. It can’t even see it. It is finished. Finis Sinarum.

The author is a German Writer and Cultural Critic. BUY HIS BOOKS!

IMAGE 15 The Portal

Western Media Smear President Xi’s ‘Aggressive China’ As CIA Front Holds Secessionist Summit in Taiwan

October 25, 2022

Source

By Finian Cunningham

Beijing might be better taking Taiwan now – once and for all – before it festers anymore under American influence.

President Xi Jinping’s re-election for a record-breaking third term as China’s leader was promptly ambushed by Western media smears.

Xi becomes the first Chinese leader since Chairman Mao to hold three terms in office after he was re-elected by delegates at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing last weekend.

Western media rushed to predict that China would become more autocratic and repressive, without providing any substantiation for its lurid claims, and while ignoring the phenomenal economic and developmental successes of the People’s Republic under Xi during the past decade.

The U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations cited the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which predicted that China would become “more assertive and aggressive” in its foreign relations over the next five years.

The BBC ran a particularly scurrilous hit piece by its veteran anti-China apparatchik, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, which alleged that President Xi’s policies are “creating the hostile world that he claims he is defending against”.

Quoting Susan Shirk, a “China expert” dredged up from the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s, the BBC accused China of “self-encirclement”, “picking fights” with neighboring countries, “ramping up tensions with Taiwan” and “taking on America and trying to run it out of Asia”.

“It is a kind of self-encirclement that Chinese foreign policy has produced,” the so-called China expert obligingly commented for the BBC.

The negative focus on China’s government sounds absurdly misplaced coming from U.S. and British media whose own nations are assailed with political crises over governance. Polls show unprecedented numbers of American citizens losing faith in their political parties and election system. In Britain, the country is reeling from the sacking of a third prime minister in as many years.

But what’s asinine about the smears against Xi purportedly turning China into a more aggressive power is that they turn reality on its head.

This week sees the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) holding a summit for “world democracy” in Taiwan. The event is being attended by over 300 activists and policymakers from some 70 nations to “promote freedom” and other virtue-signaling causes.

The NED describes itself as a “non-governmental organization” even though it is bankrolled by the U.S. government and works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. As American author, the late William Blum pointed out, the NED took over the CIA’s covert roles in the 1980s because it was more politically palatable given the agency’s notoriety for fomenting deadly coups and assassinations.

Taiwan is officially recognized under international law as an integral part of China, albeit having an estranged relationship since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The One China Policy is recognized legally by the United Nations and by most governments including the United States since the late 1970s.

Washington nevertheless maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” whereby it proclaims to support Taiwan’s defense from China’s ambitions to incorporate the island territory under Beijing’s sovereign authority.

President Joe Biden has stretched this duplicity to breaking point by declaring on four occasions since he took office in January 2021 that the US would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the Chinese mainland. Despite subsequent White House denials, Biden’s utterances are a flagrant violation of the One China Policy and a brazen attack on Chinese sovereignty.

Since the strategic Pivot to Asia in 2011 taken by the Barack Obama administration, Washington has ramped up arms sales to Taiwan. The flow of arms and covert stationing of U.S. military trainers to Taiwan continued under Trump and now Biden.

The calculated signals from Washington are promoting a more secessionist political climate in Taiwan, which feels emboldened that it has America’s backing to declare independence from China. Beijing has repeatedly warned against U.S. incitement in its backyard.

When Democrat House of Representatives Leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, the incident infuriated Beijing to mount massive military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. For a few days, it looked as if an invasion could take place.

Since President Xi was first elected in 2013, he has strongly asserted China’s historic right to rule over Taiwan, preferably by peaceful means but also through force of arms if necessary. He repeated that aim during a keynote address to the 20th Congress.

Any reasonable observer can see that Beijing’s resolve is being cynically provoked by Washington’s interference in China’s internal affairs with regard to Taiwan’s sovereign status. Arming the island to the teeth with American missiles and thumbing noses at Beijing with pro-separatist political delegations would be not tolerated in the slightest if the shoe were on the other foot. Indeed, the U.S. would have gone to war against China already in a reverse scenario.

For the Western media to make out that Xi is taking China in a more aggressive direction is a ludicrous distortion that conceals who is the real aggressor – the United States and its NATO partners who relentlessly accuse Beijing of expansionism. The only “expansionism” China is engaging in is building mutual trade and commerce with other nations through its global Belt and Road Initiative.

The National Endowment for Democracy [read “Destabilization”], the CIA’s very own Trojan horse, is this week calling on “activists” in Taiwan to overthrow autocracy. It is a veritable call to arms by the CIA conducted on Chinese sovereign territory.

Not only that, the NED summit declares that Taiwan and Ukraine are “two major frontlines of the struggle for democracy”.

NED was a major driver of the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 which ushered in a fascist anti-Russia regime in Kiev and which led to the current war with Russia. The Americans are blatantly using the same playbook for Taiwan.

And yet China and President Xi are being smeared as the aggressors!

Beijing might be better taking Taiwan now – once and for all – before it festers anymore under American influence.

As Russia is finding out, to its cost, delaying the disease can lead to more fatal conditions.

من رمال الصحراء إلى القوقاز العين على الصين…

محمد صادق الحسيني

كلّ الأنباء التي تلفّ الكون في هذه الأيام تشير الى حقيقة واحدة باتت أوضح من الشمس…

الأميركيّ الذي كان يوماً القطب الأوحد في العالم والآمر الناهي وشرطي الجهات الأربع في الكون غدا مأزوماً ومهزوماً في كلّ جبهاته وميادينه، ولكن بخاصة على الجبهة الأوروآسيوية، حيث المستنقع الأوكراني او الحفرة التي حفرها بنفسه ظناً منه أنه قادر على تشتيت الاتحاد الصيني الروسي الاستراتيجي الجديد من جهة وجعل أوروبا تخضع له دون شروط!

لكن هذا الأميركي المتعجرف ولشدة عناده ومكابرته، وانغماسه في المستنقع الأوكراني لم يجد خلاصاً له على ما يبدو بعد كلّ جهوده التي ذهبت هباء لهزّ عرش بوتين إلا أن يفعل خديعة تحالف الناتو المزعوم بين أصحاب التيه وأصحاب ما بعد التيه في الرمال العربية المتحركة مغرياً إياهم بأنظمة دفاع جوي حديثة تقيهم خطر إيران المزعوم ويحقق لابنه «الإسرائيلي» المدلل لعبته المفضلة وحلمه بقيادة تحالف «شرق أوسطي» ليدمج وجوده المؤقت الزائل بكيانات مصنوعة من الشمع مثله…

فيما عقل واشنطن البراغماتي، لا يزال مشدوداً نحو التهديد الصيني وكيفية ضرب البيئة الحيوية للصين وطريقها وحزامها الواحد الممتدّ من شنغهاي مروراً بالجغرافيا الحيوية لروسيا ـ آسيا الوسطى والقوقاز، ومن ثم إيران، وصولاً إلى المياه الدافئة يعني بحر الشام وخليج فارس…

لذلك لا بدّ من النظر بريبة شديدة الى خططهم وحشدهم الحقيقي هناك ودور كلّ واحد من لاعبيهم الصغار في منطقتنا وهم البيادق المتحركة بأوامر الشيطان الأكبر…

وفي هذا السياق، يفيد مصدر ديبلوماسي إقليمي مطلع، تعليقاً على الحملة الدعائية لما يُسمّى «حلفاً دفاعياً عربياً إسرائيلياً»، بما يلي:

أولا ـ ان لا وجود لهذا التحالف إلا في عقلية المسؤولين «الإسرائيليين» الأمنيين والعسكريين وأسيادهم في الدولة العميقة الأميركية وليس إدارة بايدن، وهو طرح بعيد عن الاستراتيجية الأميركية العملية.

ثانيا ـ انّ الهدف الاستراتيجي الحالي للولايات المتحدة الأميركية (ادارة بايدن)، في «الشرق الأوسط» ودول أواسط آسيا، هو استكمال الحشد الاستراتيجي ضدّ الصين الشعبية وروسيا وإيران.

ثالثا ـ انّ ادوات واشنطن لتحقيق ذلك هي التالية:

ـ نظام أردوغان، الذي يقدّم التدريب العسكري والإمداد والتزويد، لكلّ العناصر التي تخدم الاستراتيجية الأميركية في المنطقة المشار إليها أعلاه.

والذي سبق أن درّب المجموعات الإرهابية المسلحة، التي عاثت خراباً واسعاً في جمهورية كازاخستان السوڤياتية السابقة، بداية العام الحالي. وهي التي أشرفت الاستخبارات العسكرية التركية على تنفيذ عمليات تسلل وإنزال جوي لها، من خلال طائرات نقل مستأجرة ولا تحمل شارات أيّ دولة، في مطار ألماآتا (العاصمة القديمة لكازاخستان) بعد أن سيطر المخرّبون المسلحون الإرهابيون على هذا المطار في اليوم الأول من الموجة الإرهابية التي ضربت البلاد.

ـ النظام السعودي، الذي يقوم بتمويل ثمانية عشر ألف منظمة غير حكومية، في جمهوريات آسيا الوسطى السوڤياتية السابقة، وهي قوات احتياط بيد الولايات المتحدة جاهزة للاستخدام، إما في ثورات ملوّنة أو في هزات مسلحة وتخريبية، عندما يصلها أمر العمليات من واشنطن.

ـ مشيخات قطر والإمارات، بالتعاون مع حركة طالبان، من خلال إدارة المطارات الأفغانية الرئيسية الثلاثة، حيث وقعت الإمارات العربية اتفاقية خاصة بذلك، مع حكومة طالبان، بتاريخ ٢٤/٥/٢٠٢٢، وهو الأمر الذي يعني سيطرة أميركية غير مباشرة، على تلك المطارات، وما لذلك من أهمية قصوى في نقل الأفراد والمعدات الى أفغانستان، خاصة في ضوء تمركز تركي قطري «تقني» في تلك المطارات، منذ بداية العام الحالي، وذلك بناءً على اتفاقيات موقعة مع حكومة طالبان.

ـ حركة طالبان نفسها، والتي تجري معها الولايات المتحدة محادثات متواصلة تتعلق بمجموعة طلبات أميركية للحركة وعلى رأسها السماح للمسلحين الإيرانيين، سواء من «مجاهدي خلق» الإرهابية المقيمة في ألبانيا، أو غيرهم، بالعمل من الأراضي الأفغانية مقابل رفع تدريجي للتجميد الأميركي المفروض على الأموال الأفغانية.

ـ فلول تنظيم داعش، الذين نقلت منهم القيادة المركزية الأميركية، من العراق وسورية، ما يزيد على ثلاثة آلاف مسلح تمّ نشرهم في محافظة:

*بدخشان/ شمال شرق أفغانستان/ بالقرب من الحدود الصينية والطاجيكية.

*محافظتا تخار وقندوز/ في شمال أفغانستان/ والمحاذيتان لحدود طاجيكستان.

وهنا لا بدّ أن نستذكر موجة التحركات التخريبية المنظمة التي تجتاح محافظة: كاركال باكستان الأوزبيكية، منذ عدة أيام، والتي حاول فيها المشاغبون الاستيلاء على الأسلحة من المباني الحكومية الرسمية.

رابعا ـ انّ الولايات المتحدة الأميركية هي من يقف وراء الحملة الدعائية، التي يروّج لها الإعلام «الإسرائيلي» وبعض الإعلام العربي، بما في ذلك للأسف الشديد بعض وسائل إعلامنا، حول التحالف المزعوم والمشار إليه اعلاه. وذلك لحرف الأنظار عن ساحة الفعل الحقيقي الأميركي، في جمهوريات آسيا الوسطى، بهدف السيطرة عليها واستخدامها كمنصات هجومية او رؤوس جسور استراتيجية، ضدّ جمهورية الصين الشعبية من جهة الشرق، وجمهورية روسيا الاتحادية من جهة الشمال، والجمهورية الإسلامية الإيرانية في الغرب، لزعزعة تحالف الشرق الصاعد هذا…

واحلوا قومهم دار البوار

بعدنا طيّبين قولوا الله…

The High Cost of American Friendship

June 19, 2022

Source

By Eamon Mckinney

Democracy is easily defined by most, but to America it means any country that subverts its own national interests to those of the U.S.

Henry Kissinger once famously said, “To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend can be lethal.” The aged but far from venerable Kissinger’s words have never been truer than they are today. America has a habit of redefining words to suit its own purposes. What the word “friend” means to America is interpreted differently by other nations. Of course friend is not the only word that means something different to America than it does to everyone else. Democracy is easily defined by most, but to America it means any country that subverts its own national interests to those of the U.S. The recent Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles hosted a number of notable Latin America statesmen. There were however many notable absentees, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the latter two are undeniably democracies but by virtue of their independent government policies they were not welcome at the American-hosted summit. According to America’s twisted version of democracy, only right-wing, neo-liberal, America-friendly countries can qualify as legitimate democratic governments, and by extension “friends.”

The days when America can dictate and bully Latin American nations are over. Though not as intended by the hosts, there was much unity and friendship in evidence at the Summit. The head of Mexico’s socialist Government Manuel Lopez Obrador refused to attend in protest at the exclusion of the three absent nations, a lower-level official was sent in his stead. The heads of state of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador also declined the invitation citing the same reason. This principled and courageous stance came with the understanding that they would be positioning themselves as American enemies, but they did it anyway. After two hundred years under the imperialist Monroe doctrine they will no longer tolerate being considered America’s backyard. The message from Latin America was clear, “we don’t need your version of friendship, and we will take our chances as your enemy.”

Although unstated, one of the main U.S. objectives at the Summit was to dissuade further Latin American engagement with China. The problem for America is that “south of the border” they prefer the Chinese version of friendship. That entails actually listening to the needs of their “friends”, something America is lamentably bad at. All the Latin countries are struggling with burdensome IMF debt and many are seriously close to default. They need investment in their economies and their infrastructure. China offers both without the internal interference in the nations’ domestic affairs. Respect for sovereignty and self-determination is what Latin Americans having been fighting for since the Spanish conquest more than 400 years ago. For the first time in centuries countries can see how that can now be achieved, and China is a big part of that scenario. America only offers co-operation on security, Latin America has security concerns but most of that concern is directed at America. The tone deaf empire needs to understand that Latin America has a new, much better friend.

The message the U.S. got from the Summit was a clear continent-wide rejection of American policies and its attempts to create an anti-China block. We can assume that American officials are getting used to such rejection by now. Attempts to create an anti-China alliance in Asia have also failed miserably, for many of the same reasons. No Asian country sees China as a threat, they see it as a regional leader whose economic miracle has concurrently raised the economies of its neighbours. The U.S. attempts to create security concerns where they don’t exist has gained zero traction among Southeast Asian nations. With the exception of the occupied nations of South Korea and Japan, China’s relationships with its Asian neighbours are excellent. “Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Jaakob said that “When Americans come to Asia they only want to talk about security, we have no pressing security concerns, when Asian nations get together we talk about trade, any problems can be resolved through negotiation and diplomacy”. The main security concern among Asian nations is the talk of the need for an Asian NATO. The recent U.S. attempts to place missiles aimed at China in six Asian countries unsurprisingly found no takers. If America was listening (doubtful), they would have heard that it is neither needed nor wanted in a region that just wants to do business. American friendship in Asia means making any enemy of China, and none consider that worth the price.

Another of America’s enemies, Russia has defied all attempts to destroy its economy and has rebounded to have the world’s strongest currency. The transparent motivations behind the Ukraine conflict have many nations quietly cheering Russia on in their fight against the common enemy, the Empire. The sanctions designed to destroy Russia found little support outside the usual suspects in the NATO clique. With the world facing catastrophic shortages of food, energy and capital it is increasingly Russia and China that countries are turning to for help.

While America’s enemies continue to enjoy much goodwill, how are America’s friends doing? Not so good. By joining in the absurd Anti-China Covid rhetoric spurred by Trump, Australia, Canada and Britain have committed economic suicide by alienating a valuable trade partner, just to please America. American friends in Europe will suffer through horrific food and energy shortages together with rapidly increasing inflation, all largely a result of the Ukraine provocation. Not forgetting the instigation of an unnecessary and dangerous war in their neighbourhood, a war that no one but America (NATO) wanted. And of course the Ukraine itself, goaded into a disastrous war against a much stronger foe, now finds itself facing defeat and destruction. All attempts by the hapless Zelensky at a negotiated peace are blocked by the West. Not while there are some Ukrainians still alive apparently. Despite the encouraging words of his American masters, the disposable Zelensky finds himself very much alone. The once prosperous post-Soviet Ukraine has turned into a bankrupt, burned-out shell of its former self. Zelensky may well retreat to his $45mil in Miami when it is all over, but the unfortunate Ukrainian people will suffer the consequences of American friendship for generations to come.

If America has its way, its “friends” in Taiwan will soon suffer the same fate as the Ukraine. Despite all attempts to provoke China into an action that would draw International outrage, and presumably sanctions, China has demonstrated considerable restraint. It understands the game being played and absent a foolish Declaration of Independence from Taiwan, it is unlikely to be drawn in. South Korea and Japan have been occupied nations since 1944. The American presence is overwhelmingly objected to by the citizens, yet they owe fealty to America. In the event of a China conflict, their U.S. bases would likely be the first targets in any China response. Yet both nations declined American requests to host China facing missiles in their countries.

The loss of American influence has accelerated tremendously in recent months, and it came at a bad time. America needs friends more than ever now and it is finding them increasingly hard to come by. Even long time “friends” and supplicants like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are shunning America’s call to produce more oil. Biden couldn’t even get MBS to take his phone call. Shamelessly they also turned to Venezuela to ask for oil, unsurprisingly they found no friends or solutions there either.

Returning to Henry Kissinger, by his definition, being a friend or enemy of America can be equally dangerous. “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”

Those that consider themselves American “friends” should heed his words.

But credit where it is due, the U.S. is indeed inspiring a new spirit of friendship and co-operation among the nations of the world. Economic and security blocs of like-minded countries are expanding in Central Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. All of these blocs are anti-imperialist in nature, and by definition anti-American. More than a century of American imperialism is coming to a rapid end.

CHRIS HEDGES: NO WAY OUT BUT WAR

MAY 23RD, 2022

By Chris Hedges

Source

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.

The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today Show”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

اقتراب الطلقة الأولى في حرب إقليميّة

الثلاثاء 24 أيار 2022

 ناصر قنديل

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يعرف الذين يعطون الأحداث حقها أن المبالغات العراقية واللبنانية في قدرة الانتخابات في لبنان والعراق على تشكيل منعطف مصيريّ ومفصليّ لا تعبر عن حقيقة الواقع، وأن الأحداث الجارية في العالم والمنطقة ترسم مسارات يغفل عنها الغارقون في التفاصيل والشكليات، لن يكون لبنان والعراق بمعزل عنها. فالحرب الجارية في أوكرانيا جذبت العالم كله نحو مرحلة جديدة حدد الرئيس الروسي فلاديمير بوتين عنوانها، إنهاء القطبية الأميركية الأحادية المهيمنة على العالم، وبات واضحاً أن هذا العنوان يعيد رسم التوازنات والمعادلات في منطقتنا، حيث الأميركي يعيد ترتيب أوراقه على قياس المواجهة العالمية الكبرى، التي تدق أبوابه بيدين عملاقتين روسية وصينية، ما يضعف مكانة المنطقة في حساباته من جهة، ويخلق وزناً مضافاً لصالح توازناتها الإقليمية المعاكسة لمصالح حلفاء واشنطن، ما يدفع بعضهم لترتيب أوضاعهم عبر التسويات مع القوى الصاعدة في الإقليم وفي طليعتها إيران، كما تفعل السعودية، ويدفع بعضهم الآخر الى الشعور بالذعر الذي بشروا به بعد الانسحاب الأميركي من أفغانستان، ويتصرفون بوحيه اليوم، بصورة تعبر عن عدم التوازن، والوقوع في ارتكاب الحماقات كما هو حال كيان الاحتلال.

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تضيف تداعيات حرب أوكرانيا على المنطقة، الى الذعر الإسرائيلي من الانكفاء الأميركي، تصاعداً في التباينات الروسية الإسرائيلية، وتصاعداً في الأداء الروسي الضاغط على واشنطن في الكثير من الساحات، بحلفائها الأشد قرباً، ومنهم كيان الاحتلال، ما جعل ملف التصعيد الذي يحكم مسار العلاقة بين موسكو وتل أبيب مرشحاً للمزيد، أوضح بعض المتوقع منه ما قاله الملك الأردني بعد زيارته لواشنطن وهو يحمل ملف القلق من تطورات دراماتيكية في سورية، ليكشف لاحقاً عن معطيات ومؤشرات على قرار روسي بالانسحاب من جنوب سورية، وانتشار قوات إيرانيّة وحلفاء لإيران، مكان القوات الروسية المنسحبة، وخشيته من تداعيات خطيرة تنجم عن هذه الخطوة، ليس من بينها فقط قلق الملك الأردني من تحول حدود الأردن الشمالية إلى منطقة تنتشر فيها القوات الإيرانيّة، بل أكثر ما يقلق هو خطر انفجار مواجهة عن مسافة صفر بين إيران وكيان الاحتلال.

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سبق تداعيات الحرب في أوكرانيا على المنطقة، تصاعد المواجهة بين محور المقاومة وكيان الاحتلال، عبرت عنه مواقف قادة محور المقاومة، سواء لجهة الرد على أي اعتداء بصورة فورية وقوية، كما قال الأمين العام لحزب الله السيد حسن نصرالله، أو لجهة ما أعلنه رئيس حركة حماس في قطاع غزة يحيي السنوار، حول نية إنهاء حصار غزة بالقوة إذا تعذّر على الوساطات الأممية والإقليمية تحقيق ذلك، وجاءت هذه المواقف على خلفية مسار تصاعديّ في المقاومة الشعبية والمسلحة التي يخوضها الفلسطينيون بوجه جيش الاحتلال. وجاءت زيارة الرئيس السوري بشار الأسد الى طهران علامة فارقة على مستوى من التعاون والتنسيق كثرت التخمينات حول ارتباطه بتحضيرات معينة ليست بعيدة عن ما لحقه من إعلان الملك الأردني حول انسحاب روسيّ من جنوب سورية، وانتشار قوات لإيران وقوى المقاومة بدلاً منها، وليست بعيدة عن معادلات محور المقاومة في مواجهة كيان الاحتلال، ومكانة سورية والجولان فيها.

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يأتي اغتيال العقيد في فيلق القدس من الحرس الثوري الإيراني حسن صياد خداياري، وما تبعه من تصعيد في المواقف الإيرانيّة بوجه جيش الاحتلال ومخابراته، بعد مؤشرات تدلّ على قيام المخابرات الإسرائيلية بتنفيذ الاغتيال، وتعهد إيراني على أعلى المستويات بالرد على الاستهداف بقوة.

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كل شيء يقول إن الطلقة الأولى في حرب إقليميّة تقترب، فإن لم تكن انطلاقاً من هذه الحادثة فما هو سواها؟

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Pepe Escobar : Interview with The Press Project

May 22, 2022

From a unipolar to a multipolar world.  This is my itvw with the wonderful folks at The Press Project in Greece.  In English, with Greek subtitles.

زلّة لسان

الإثنين 23 أيار 2022

بثينة شعبان 

صحيح أن العيون تتّجه إلى أوكرانيا لمعرفة نتيجة الحسم العسكري بين روسيا وحلف الناتو العدواني هناك، ولكن ما يجري بالتوازي من إعادة تشكُّلات وصياغات في عالم اليوم قد يكون هو الأهم.

لم تكن زلّة لسان الرئيس جورج بوش الابن لتحدث في ظروف أكثر مواءمة وخدمة لما تحاول الصين وروسيا أن تؤكداه، وسط أحداث متسارعة ومعقدة؛ فقد قال الرئيس بوش الابن: ” قرار رجل واحد لشن غزو وحشيّ غير مبرّر للعراق… آه… أقصد لأوكرانيا”، وضحك الجمهور، وأعاد هو: “العراق، العراق”، وسط أنباء جادة يتحدّث بها الرئيس الصيني شي جين بينغ عن شكل العالم المقبل، في كلمته المهمة في الـ 21 من نيسان/ أبريل لمنتدى بواو الآسيوي، ووسط إعلان وزارة الخارجية الروسية بعد مناقشة نسخة جديدة من مفهوم السياسة الخارجية الروسية في ضوء الحرب الغربية على روسيا باستخدام أوكرانيا.

زلّة لسان

وبدلاً من أن يستنكر القرّاء والمشاهدون كل القرارات الأحادية والحروب غير الشرعية التي شنّتها الولايات المتحدة على الشعوب الآمنة في أفغانستان والعراق وليبيا وسوريا واليمن، فقد أتت زلّة لسان جورج بوش الابن، المسؤول هو وأبوه عن مقتل الملايين من المدنيين العراقيين حصاراً وقتلاً وإرهاباً ووباءً، لتكشف ما حاول هو وإدارته والإدارات السابقة واللاحقة أن يخفوه، وبرهن (ولتبرهن) أنه يسكن في “لا وعيهم” من غزو ظالم وغير مبرر للعراق، ما زال الشعب العراقي يدفع ثمنه في كل يوم من حياة أبنائه.

كما أنّ عمليات النهب الأميركية للموارد العراقية والليبية والسورية جريمة تطال لقمة عيش جميع أبناء الشعب العربي في هذه البلدان، لأن هذا النهب الاستعماري لموارد الشعب السوري واحتلال أرضه وسرقة نفطه وقمحه قد تمثّل زلّات لسان لرؤساء ومسؤولين أميركيين في المستقبل، ولكنه (ولكنها) جريمة إبادة جماعية لما سببه (سبّبته) من آلام وموت للمدنيين المحاصرين.

ولكن العالم اليوم لم يعد بحاجة إلى الكشف عن المستور، لأنه لم يتبقَّ هناك مستور أصلاً سوى حملات التضليل الإعلامية التي يصدّرها الغرب للعالم، وينسج من خلالها أكاذيبه وأوهامه. والخطوة الأولى المجدية في عالم اليوم هي أن يتبنّى جميع الحريصين على حياة البشر إما مقاطعة هذا الإعلام الغربي المزيّف، وإما التساؤل بشأن كل سردية يتبنّاها حيال أي قضية في العالم. إنني أجد نفسي أعيد صياغة ما أقرأه من إعلام غربي حول سوريا أو فلسطين أو لبنان أو إيران أو أوكرانيا أو الصين، وأتساءل اليوم ما هي جدوى قراءة إعلام أصبحنا نعلم علم اليقين أنه مكرّس لخدمة أهداف استعمارية لمن يشنّون الحروب على دولنا ويقومون باحتلال أرضنا ودعم الإرهاب ضد شعبنا وتمويله وإرسال الإرهابيين وتسليحهم واحتلال أرض أشقائنا وأصدقائنا، ويعطّلون أيّ قرارات أمميّة تحاول أن تحقق ولو جزءاً من العدالة للشعوب المستضعفة؟؟ 

فإذا كان اجتماع وزارة الخارجية الروسية قد ناقش مهامّ السياسة الخارجية الروسية في ضوء الحقائق الجيوسياسية المتغيّرة جذرياً، فإن هذه الحقائق قد تغيّرت بالنسبة إلى العرب منذ وعد بلفور وسايكس بيكو واحتلال فلسطين من قبل عصابات الإرهاب الصهيونية، ومنذ غزو العراق وقصف ليبيا، وشنّ حرب إرهابية على مدى عقد ونيّف على سوريا، وتدمير حياة المدنيين العرب في اليمن، ومع ذلك لم يعقد العرب اجتماعاً واحداً لدراسة الوضع المستجد حيالهم، ودراسة الخطوات التي يمكن اتخاذها لحماية أنفسهم من سياسة التشظّي وتفتيت البلدان والشعوب إلى طوائف وأعراق وإثنيات على حساب اللُحمة الوطنية المنشودة، وهي سياسة فرّقْ تسُدْ الاستعمارية التي تستهدف العرب جميعاً.

إنّ النقاش الدائر في روسيا والصين يُري أن البلدين يدركان أن العالم قد تغيّر، وأن لا عودة تُرتجى إلى عالم ما قبل الـ 24 من شباط، وهو تاريخ انطلاق العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا، ولذلك فإنهما منشغلان بوضع المرتسمات الجديدة لعالم ما بعد اليوم وعالم المستقبل. ومن يقرأ كلمة الرئيس شي جين بينغ يجد أنها تضع رؤية للتحديات التي طرأت على عالم اليوم، ومساراً للتعامل معها بجدية لضمان السير إلى الأمام رغم كل التحديات. ويؤكد خطاب بينغ أن زمن الحرب الباردة ونزعة الهيمنة وسياسة القوة ستكون جزءاً من الماضي، وقد طرح مبادرة الأمن العالمي من خلال التمسّك بمفهوم الأمن المشترك والشامل والتعاوني والمستدام، والعمل معاً على صيانة السلام والأمن في العالم، ومعارضة السعي إلى الأمن القومي على حساب الأمن القومي للغير.

في هذه المرحلة المفصلية بتشكُّل عالم جديد وسعي الأطراف في الشرق لأن تكون فاعلة في تشكيل هذا العالم، لاقتناعهم بأنّ أسس الهيمنة الغربية آيلة إلى الزوال، وأنها أصبحت مرفوضة وغير قادرة على الاستمرار، وأنها تخوض معركة منازعة أخيرة مهما بدت أنها طويلة اليوم، ولكنها ستكون الأخيرة.

في هذه المرحلة يتهدّد العرب جميعاً خطران أساسيان، إضافة إلى خطر الصهيونية الجاثمة على ضمير الأمة وأرض فلسطين والجولان، ألا وهما: الخطر العثماني الإخواني، وخطر أن لا يجد العرب لأنفسهم موطئ قدم إذا ما استمروا في حالة الفرقة والتشظّي التي يعيشونها اليوم، والتي لا يبدو أن هناك جهداً حقيقياً وواعداً للتخلص منها. فالخطر العثماني الإخواني اليوم حقيقي على سوريا والعراق وليبيا، حيث يحتل الأرض ويقيم القواعد وينشر لغته وثقافته وأكاذيبه وعملاءه من إخوان الشياطين، ويُلبس هيمنته لبوس الحرص على اللاجئين أو المسلمين أو محاربة التنظيمات الكردية، وهو لبوس لا يقل خطراً علينا جميعاً من وعد بلفور واتفاقية سايكس بيكو.

واللافت أنه بدأ بأسلوب مختلف بمحاولة تدنيس أرض الجزائر الطاهرة، من خلال اتخاذ الجزائر بوابة للدخول إلى شمال أفريقيا وأفريقيا، بعد أن فشل في أن تكون تونس منصة انطلاقه لنشر فكر الإخوان المسلمين وعقيدتهم في شمال أفريقيا. وفي هذه البلدان تتعدّد أساليبه وأدوات مكره؛ فحيث لا يستطيع (يتمكّن من) الاحتلال المباشر، قد يلجأ إلى التسلل الاقتصادي أو العقائدي كي يثبّت أقدامه في المكان، وينطلق منه لتحقيق غاياته وأهدافه التي لا تختلف بين شمال قبرص والشمال السوري والشمال العراقي والليبي والعمق الجزائري.

صحيح أن العيون تتّجه إلى أوكرانيا لمعرفة نتيجة الحسم العسكري بين روسيا وحلف الناتو العدواني هناك، ولكن ما يجري بالتوازي من إعادة تشكُّلات وصياغات في عالم اليوم قد يكون هو الأهم، لأنه هو الذي يُرسي أسس العالم الجديد وشكله، وسوف تكون الغلبة، ولا شكّ، لمن يخطط ويفكّر من اليوم أو من البارحة، أين سيكون تموضعه في هذا العالم، وكيف وما هي الميزات والأدوات التي يمتلكها كي يكون رقماً صعباً في عالم يسهم في بنيانه ويشكّل جزءاً من هويته وتوجّهاته.

إن الآراء المذكورة في هذه المقالة لا تعبّر بالضرورة عن رأي الميادين وإنما تعبّر عن رأي صاحبها حصراً

Blinken Plays With Fire With Morocco and Algeria. Can Trump Stop This Crazy Arms Race and Prelude to War Though?

May 17, 2022

By Martin Jay

Source

The more the West pours money into the Ukraine, the more the UN and its member states have to bang on this drum which is really the worst setback Morocco could imagine over the incendiary subject of Western Sahara.

Lavrov’s visit to Algiers to shore up support for Ukraine war has shown how ineffective and dangerous Blinken’s moves are in the region. Some might argue he is making an already dangerous situation between Morocco and Algeria worse.

Is the Biden administration looking to start a war between Algeria and Morocco? At first glance, this may seem a little far-fetched as a scenario but it’s a valid enough question when you study the movements and statements of its diplo supremo Anthony Blinken. Just recently, the secretary of state jetted into Morocco for a few hours to pay his respects to the kingdom’s dapper foreign minister, before swiftly leaving to visit Algeria, Morocco’s arch enemy based on the latter’s support for the Polisario movement in the disputed Western Sahara. Leading up to the final days of Trump’s period in the White House, the former president signed a decree officially acknowledging (by America) Morocco’s claim that the disputed territory is a legitimate sovereign part of the kingdom. Until that point, relations between Algeria and Morocco were icy, but cooperative.

Biden has always opposed this move by Trump but is limited in what he can do to turn it around. On the one hand, Morocco has always traditionally had good relations with Washington and he doesn’t want to be the first president to jeopardise that; on the other though, his own political views are at odds with the idea of a country colonising another one regardless of the circumstances and is aligned to what many in the United Nations would prefer: some sort of democratic diligence to decide the outcome, probably a referendum.

In the summer of 2021, eight months after Biden took office, the Algerians decided that the situation needed a radical rethink, confident that a dithering Biden wasn’t going to overturn the Trump decision, neither on paper nor in gesture. The Algerians cut off one of its two gas pipelines which crossed Morocco territory before it reaches Spain causing mayhem as this pipeline effectively allowed Madrid to sell on to Morocco natural gas.

Six months later, the worst possible thing for Rabat, which was hoping to exploit the Trump decision, happened. The Ukraine war began, which for Morocco, was not good news as, quite apart from wheat imports being affected, it shifted backwards a more modern idea beginning to emerge that the Rabat elite had about occupied countries around the world. The Moroccan upper classes were beginning to think that the world was getting used to them – East Timor, Taiwan, West Bank and Gaza, Kashmir, Transnistria, Northern Cyprus – and that with the help of the U.S., the Western Sahara would slowly but surely metamorphosise into Moroccan Sahara. Perhaps it would take a generation. But it was a wait worth waiting for, the mindset in Rabat believed. Occupations hadn’t become cool as such; more that people are becoming dumber, media sloppier and the UN sensationally ineffective – an organisation most associate with sex scandals and corruption rather than being an international arbiter of disputes which it once was during the reign of Morocco’s Hassan II (who made the decision to incorporate Western Sahara into Morocco proper in 1975 when it was abandoned by its former colonial power Spain).

But the Ukraine invasion by Russia has sparked a new impetus in the UN, breathing new life into the once somnolent ‘no colonisation’ mantra. And the more the West pours money into the Ukraine in a blatant attempt to topple Putin, the more the UN and its member states have to bang on this drum which is really the worst setback Morocco could imagine over the incendiary subject of Western Sahara, or Moroccan Sahara if you like.

Biden can’t save the situation, that’s clear. But to some, it may seem that he is actually making matters worse. He wants to keep good relations with Rabat (he may even think that the king can fund his next presidential bid in 2024) but he desperately needs to find both a solution to the Trump problem and to get Algerians on board with the delusional idea that America can crack the hegemony whip and Algeria will stand to attention and show some respect. The visit at the end of March to Algiers was a clear example of how deluded the Biden administration is in this part of world and how its own meddling threatens to take the crisis between Algeria and Morocco to a new level. The visit was hilariously mistimed and misjudged in that Blinken actually believed that with an endearing speech he could actually just win over the Algerians, who would presumably just throw their relationship with Russia in the bin, give Europe more natural gas and basically stop backing the Polisario militants in Western Sahara.

If none of this were to happen but just merely a silence would follow, perhaps Biden could have salvaged some political gravitas out of it. But in the event, it had the opposite effect. The Algerians merely cranked up their relations with Russia to the next level and within merely 48 hours, there were even reports circulating on social media that Moscow would help Algeria’s support for the Polisario. The preposterous suggestion by Blinken triggered a response by the Algerians who immediately contacted Moscow and – presumably – invited Sergei Lavrov to come to Algiers on 10^th May, calling for more investment from Russian companies and talking up the 3bn dollars of trade between the two countries. They also reduced their gas sent to Spain in their second pipeline by 25% as an act of solidarity with Russia, presumably.

This reaction by Moscow and Algiers puts Morocco in a very difficult position as it realises that Biden’s people do not have the diplomatic skills to find a compromise which puts the Western Sahara dossier in a place where Rabat is happy, finds a solution to cooling tensions and getting a sensible energy deal from Algeria for both Europe and Morocco. None of the above, Anthony but thanks for trying. Whether Morocco’s foreign minister Nasser Bourita likes to admit it or not, he, like most of Rabat and the Palace are all standing in line with the Gulf Arab states, waiting for 2024 when Trump comes back for the great reset. Everything that the blithering Blinken touches seems to turn toxic blinding everyone near to him. He is arguably the most dangerous man in U.S. politics who belongs to a different period in time when the U.S. really was the sole superpower and could wield such power around the world. Pity the Moroccans who are charmed by his diplomatic endearments and refinements. They will soon learn that strong words often don’t come from a strong stomach.

The Ukraine and the End of the History

April 26, 2022

Source

by Batiushka

Introduction: 1492-2022

The present conflict in the Ukraine is clearly not really about the Ukraine – that artificial collection of territories is only a tragic battlefield between the West and the Rest. The conflict is about the organised violence and extraordinary arrogance of the West, the US/UK/EU/NATO, against the rest of the world, specifically Russia, supported by China, India and indeed all other peoples. Therefore, the coming Russian victory in the special operation in the Ukraine essentially signifies the end of the West’s 500-year long domination of the planet. This is why the tiny Western world, some 15% of the planet, is so virulent in its opposition to the Russian people.

The Russian victory will undermine the remnants of illusory faith in the mythical superiority of the West and above all in the USA, fear of which long discouraged the resistance of the ‘Rest’ to the West. Neither Iran, nor even China risked challenging the USA – Russia has. The Ukraine is the USA’s ‘unsinkable’ Titanic and Russia the iceberg to sink US hubris and overreach. When the world sees the Russian victory, four continents at least, Europe and Asian China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, as well as Latin America and Africa, will vote for freedom from the American Empire. It is the end of Western domination, ‘the end of the history’ of ethnocentric Westerners like Francis Fukuyama. For Russia and Europe themselves we foresee five main consequences. These are:

1. America’s Withdrawal from Europe

The Russian victory will lead to the major reduction or even withdrawal of US forces which have occupied Western Europe since 1945 (the UK since 1942) and Central and Eastern Europe from 1991 onwards. In the US, isolationist sentiments are already strong after the humiliating US routs in Iraq and Afghanistan and violent internal divisions in the United States will only be reinforced. The USA will retreat to its divided island. Transatlantic unity will collapse. Then Western Europe can at last come out of its isolation at the tip of the western peninsula of the Eurasian Continent and rejoin the mainstream of a liberated Eurasia, led by the Russian Federation.

2. The End of the EU

The EU was a US concept in every respect, destined to become a USE, a United States of Europe. There are already a large number of tensions within it. Brexit, the result of English, that is, anti-British and anti-Establishment, patriotism, has taken place. The other tensions will demand solutions following the Russian victory. After that victory, room for any further EU expansion and economic colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe, including in the western Balkans, will end. The end of new colonisation after the loss of the Ukraine, rich in natural resources, will undermine the remains of the already divided EU. Ukraine was a buffer-state and resource centre for the colonial EU. Its liberation means direct EU proximity to Russia and the restoration of Russian influence. With the Russian victory, Western Europe will have to make strategic agreements with Moscow on European security, this time without US meddling.

3. The Renewal of Imperial Russia

The billions spent on bribing treasonous pro-Western puppet elites in former Soviet Republics like the Baltic States, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan and the four other Central Asian ‘stans’ will have been wasted. The myth of Western superiority on which these elites were created will give way to reality. This will put an end to their opportunities to earn dollars and make careers from Russophobia by renting out national territories for US bases, CIA torture facilities or racist germ warfare biolabs to create diseases.  Georgia was the first to understand this in early 2022, refusing to join in anti-Russian sanctions. In Moldova the deadline is approaching, as Russian troops prepare to liberate Odessa and break through the land corridor to unite Transdnistria to Russia.

4. Russian Values to Reshape Central and Eastern Europe

The strengthening of Central and Eastern European identities in nation-states like Hungary, Slovakia and Poland will lead to their rapprochement with Russia. Russia’s victory will mean an increase in sympathy for it in a number of Central and Eastern European nation states, not just in Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, but also in the Baltic States, Austria, the Czech Lands, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Mediterranean Cyprus. Once their venal, anti-patriotic, US-appointed elites have fallen, Russian values will return to these countries as an influential force.

5. Russian Values to Reshape Western Europe

The EU, founded immediately the SU (Soviet Union) had collapsed, was from the outset an artificial construct, built on the rejection of patriotism in favour of a non-existent supranational European identity. Patriotism is an existential threat to Brussels. This is partly why as long ago as Common Market days De Gaulle, who had wanted a confederation of homelands, was overthrown in the US regime change in 1968. Then in 2016 patriots voted for Brexit against the Establishment elite and the Democrat President Obama. The EU was always about the rejection of national identities in favour of post-Christian, indeed anti-Christian, anti-national and anti-family values, mass immigration of paid slaves, the imposition of the LGBT agenda, the restriction of freedoms for anti-EU views etc. These are not Russian values.

Conclusion: Global Denazification

Just as in 1814 Russian troops liberated Paris and in 1945 Berlin, so in the 2020s Brussels will be liberated, or rather will collapse, under the pressure of Russian values. We are talking about the disintegration of the US-created European Union and also of US bases in Eastern Europe and the former eastern Soviet Union. We shall see the emergence of national centres, from Scotland to Cyprus, from Catalonia to Mongolia, from Slovakia to Central Asia. The bubble of Western, US/UK/EU, hubris is being burst by Russia’s liberation and denazification of the Ukraine. In order to preserve its identity as an imperial nation, protect the integrity of the Orthodox Faith and guarantee the peace of the whole multipolar world, Russia will spread this process of denazification to all.

كيف ستعيد أميركا تشكيل العالم بعد أوكرانيا

 السبت 2 نيسان 2022

رأي أسعد أبو خليل

ملامح مرحلة جديدة في تكوين العالم وتوزيع القوى والقوّة فيه ترتسم بسرعة. الحكومة الأميركيّة في طور تأنيب الضمير (الإمبريالي) ومراجعة الذات (الحربيّة). هي غير راضية عن شكل الكوكب. كانت تظنّ أن انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي سيضمن لها السيطرة على الكون لأجيال وأجيال. ما مِن إمبراطوريّة تظنّ أن سيطرتها يمكن أن تزول أو أن تضمحلّ. ضمان الاستمراريّة الأبديّة للسطوة الأميركية هي الشغل الشاغل لمخطّطي البنتاغون. كان واحد من أولى أعمال وزير الدفاع الأميركي الأسبق، دونالد رامسفيلد، تشكيل لجنة من الخبراء والمؤرّخين لاستخلاص دروس عن انهيار الإمبراطوريّات في التاريخ (أتى ببرنارد لويس، المستشرق الصهيوني، من أجل أن يشاركهم انطباعاته عن الخطر الإسلامي وعن دروس انهيار الإمبراطوريّات الإسلاميّة.). كل تقارير «استراتيجيّة الأمن القومي» التي تصدر عن كل إدارة جديدة تكون مهووسة بالأخطار المحتملة من جهات محدّدة، خصوصاً الصين. لم تكن أميركا تحسب حساباً للخطر الروسي. هي اليوم في مرحلة إعادة النظر. من المرجّح أن هناك إعادة تنظيم للميزانيّة العسكريّة والاستخباراتيّة لرصد ميزانيّة أكبر لمواجهة الخطر الروسي (الكونغرس زاد على رقم الميزانية التي طلبها منه بايدن). لا تزال أميركا تستخف بالقوّة الروسيّة مقارنة بخوفها من الخطر الصيني الداهم. القوة الاقتصاديّة هي أهم عناصر القوّة في الحسبان الأميركي لأنها هي التي تؤهل لميزانيّات عسكريّة ضخمة. ميزانيّة روسيا العسكريّة لا تصل إلا إلى 8 في المئة من الميزانيّة العسكريّة الأميركيّة العملاقة. اللحاق مسألة صعبة، والحصار الاقتصادي الخانق الذي باتت أميركا تتقنه لخنق الشعوب فعّال للغاية في إضعاف القوة العسكريّة. وحدهما إيران وكوبا، أوجدتا طرقاً ووسائل للخروج من الحصار الجائر بخسائر أقلّ (نسبيّاً، لكن الـ«إيكونومست» اعترفت قبل أسابيع أن اقتصاد إيران أفضل ممّا كان وممّا تريده له أميركا).

ميشال مورو غوميز ــ كوبا

أميركا غير راضية عمّا يجري في أوروبا اليوم. هي كانت واثقة أنها حاصرت روسيا وستمنعها من ممارسة أي نفوذ خارج حدودها. حتى في داخل حدودها، هي كانت ناشطة في التجسّس وفي الاختراق عبر منظمات المجتمع المدني ومن قبل الإعلام المُسمّى «جديد» و«مستقل» (ماذا لو أطلقنا على الإعلام المُموَّل من إيران وصف «المستقل» كما تطلق وسائل إعلام «جديدة» على نفسها وصف المستقلّة فقط لأنها تتلقّى التمويل من حكومات ومؤسّسات أوروبيّة رجعيّة، لكنها تجزم أن لا أجندة عند حكومات أوروبا لأنها منزّهة). وكان أي معارض روسي، ولو لم يحظَ بشعبيّة في بلاده، يتلقّى تغطية واسعة وبطوليّة في إعلام الغرب. وكل معارض روسي يمرض، يكون هدفاً لمؤامرة من بوتين. وقبل أسابيع نشرت صحف غربيّة خبراً عن مقتل صحافيّة روسيّة كانت قد انتقدت بوتين. هكذا كانت العناوين. لكن عندما تقرأ الخبر تدرك أن الموضوع هو عنف شخصي، وأن صديقها قتلها وأنه ليس من أسباب سياسيّة لما جرى. ولنتذكّر أن يحيى شمص (المتهم بصلات مخدراتيّة) تلقّى تغطية واسعة في إعلام الغرب فقط لأنه معارض لحزب الله. فلنتوقّف لبرهة عند هذه المفارقة: تلقّى يحيى شمص تغطية في إعلام الغرب أكبر بكثير من تغطية النائب محمد رعد، الذي نال أكبر عدد أصوات في آخر انتخابات. هذا يعطينا فكرة عن معايير وحسابات الغرب (أشكّ أن واحداً من المراسلين الغربيين، أو واحدة، التقت بمحمد رعد). أميركا قلقة من التحدّي الذي لاقته من بوتين في هذه الأزمة. لم تكن تتوقّع ذلك مع أنه كانت هناك مؤشرات على نقمة روسيّة-صينيّة من سلوك الغطرسة الأميركي والذي تجلّى في الغزو الغربي لليبيا.

الحكومة الأميركية غاضبة جداً وهذا يظهر في سلوكها. حظر الإعلام الروسي وإصدار تنبيهات تويتريّة عن روابط لإعلام معاد ــــــ مع دولة ليست أميركا في حالة عداء رسمي معها ــــــ يشي بحلول مرحلة جديدة في العلاقة الدوليّة وفي إدارة الوضع الداخلي. ما إن تحرّك الجيش الروسي حتى اضمحلّ الخلاف في الداخل الأميركي وأصبح اليسار الصغير في الكونغرس الأميركي متحمّساً للحرب، ويشارك القوى المتنفّذة في الحزبيْن في عنفوان الوطنيّة والإصرار على السيطرة الأميركية الكليّة. لم تعد مساحة النقاش في الغرب كما كانت حتى في سنوات الحرب الباردة. كانت هناك إمكانيّة مناقشة فرضيّات الإدارات الأميركيّة عن الاتحاد السوفياتي، لكن هذا غائب اليوم. تجول بين الصحافة الأوروبيّة والأميركيّة ولا تجد أي مساحة نقديّة. ليس هناك من رأي معارض أو مختلف. حتى الكتّاب الذين يعارضون ــــــ أو كانوا يعارضون ــــــ توجّهات إمبراطورية الحرب سكتوا، لا بل أسهموا من خلال كتاباتهم في المجهود الحربي (هالني مثلاً كتابات ميشيل غولدبيرغ، الكاتبة في «نيويورك تايمز»، والتي عرفتها بعد 11 أيلول وكانت في موقع «صالون» من القلّة المعترضين على التعامل الأميركي مع المسلمين).

ماذا ستفعل أميركا في خلال الأزمة وبعدها. على الأرجح أن الإدارات المتعاقبة ستلجأ إلى جملة من السياسات والأعمال بما فيها:

أولا- تدعيم حلف شمال الأطلسي وزيادة الإنفاق العسكري فيه. ألمانيا باشرت بزيادة الإنفاق العسكري وسيكون مطلوباً منها الأكثر. ألمانيا أعلنت على الفور زيادة إنفاقها العسكري بنسبة 112 مليار دولار، ممّا يزيد نسبة الإنفاق من مجمل الناتج القومي إلى 2 في المئة من 1.53 في المئة والتزمت ستّ دول في حلف شمال الأطلسي بزيادة الإنفاق العسكري بنسبة 133 مليار دولار. حتى السويد الحيادية المسالمة التزمت بالزيادة. وسويسرا ضربت بحياديّتها التاريخيّة عرض الحائط كي تمتثل للمطالب الأميركيّة بالإذعان والطاعة من قبل كل دول أوروبا، في «الناتو» وفي خارجه. ونسبة الـ 2 في المئة من الناتج القومي على الإنفاق العسكري كانت قد وصلته دول اليونان وكرواتيا وبريطانيا وإستونيا ولاتفيا وبولندا ولتوانيا ورومانيا وفرنسا ــــــ وهذه النسبة كانت قيادة «الناتو» قد طلبتها. أميركا كانت في مرحلة إعداد للمعركة المقبلة. وبدلاً من تخفيض عدد أعضاء الحلف، ستصرّ أميركا على زيادة الأعضاء وقد تصرّ في مرحلة لاحقة على ضمّ أوكرانيا إلى الحلف لاستفزاز روسيا واستدراجها إلى مواجهة عسكريّة. وليس مستغرباً لو أن أميركا أصرّت على حيازة ألمانيا على السلاح النووي (تحتفظ أميركا بسلاح نووي على الأرض الألمانيّة بالرغم من معارضة الشعب هناك لذلك في السبعينيّات والثمانينيّات). وعدد الأسلحة النوويّة الأميركيّة في أوروبا غير معروف (سرّي) وهو يُقدَّر بـ 100 منتشرة في ست دول على الأقلّ. وهذا السلاح نُشر منذ الخمسينيّات ولم يؤثّر انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي على وضعه. أي أن أميركا تستعمله ليس فقط لتخويف الاتحاد السوفياتي بل لبسط سيطرة أميركيّة تامّة على القارّة.

ما إن تحرّك الجيش الروسي حتى اضمحلّ الخلاف في الداخل الأميركي وأصبح اليسار الصغير في الكونغرس الأميركي متحمّساً للحرب

ثانيا- التفكير الجدّي في إنزال السلاح النووي التكتيكي إلى الميدان. والسلاح النووي التكتيكي هو سلاح يقضي على أحياء في مدن بدلاً من تدمير مدينة بكاملها. و«نيويورك تايمز» نشرت قبل أيّام مقالة تحاول فيها جعل فكرة استعمال النووي التكتيكي مقبولة من العامة. وقد أدلى مسؤول استخبارات سابق في أميركا برأيه، وقال: «لا يمكنك إدارة الخدّ الأيسر كل الوقت». والحديث عن السلاح النووي التكتيكي سبق هذه الأزمة. ومن المعروف أن أميركا هدّدت نظام صدّام به. ففي اللقاء الشهير قبل الحرب في 1991 بين جيمس بابكر وطارق عزيز، هدّد جيمس بابكر، في تلميح كان أقرب إلى التصريح، بأن أميركا ستردّ بصورة فظيعة إذا أصاب جنودها سلاح كيماوي عراقي (لم يكن النظام العراقي يملك سلاحاً كيماوياً كما هو معروف). وأميركا كانت على وشك استعمال النووي التكتيكي في معارك تورا بورا في أفغانستان كي تهدم الجبال فوق رؤوس المختبئين فيها عندما أصيبت بالحنق من الفشل في العثور على حليفها السابق، أسامة بن لادن. طوّرت أميركا بعدها قنبلة الـ«مواب» وهي قنبلة ذات قدرات تدميريّة هائلة لا يفوق قدرتها إلا السلاح النووي. ولم تتوقّف أميركا عن رمي الـ«مواب» على أفغانستان ــــــ التي لم تعانِ، بنظر إعلام الغرب، وإعلام التمويل الغربي إلا بعد مغادرة جيش الاحتلال الأميركي لها.

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اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة

ثالثا- جعل حلف شمال الأطلسي حلفاً عالمياً. لقد رُفعت مرتبة قطر في التحالف مع أميركا. في الوقت الذي كان فيه حكام العرب ينتظرون الفرصة للقاء بايدن (الذي لا يزال يرفض مهاتفة محمد بن سلمان)، دعا بايدن الأمير القطري إلى لقاء خاص وحميم في البيت الأبيض، وتمّ الإعلان عن رفع مرتبة قطر إلى «حليف أساسي من خارج الناتو». واللقاء بين بايدن والحاكم القطري سبق الحرب على أوكرانيا وهو تضمّن حديثاً عن مدّ ألمانيا وأوروبا بالغاز القطري (يبدو أن أميركا كانت مستعدّة جيداً لهذه الأزمة، قبل أشهر من التدخّل العسكري الروسي). ولقد أخذت قطر مرتبتها الجديدة على محمل الجدّ وهي تحاول جاهدة الظهور بمظهر الدولة الغربيّة في عواطفها الجيّاشة نحو الشعب الأوكراني. لم يلقَ شعب فلسطين هذه العاطفة الجيّاشة من قطر من قبل. إعلام النظام القطري لم يكن في هذه الأزمة إلا اجتراراً لإعلام حلف شمال الأطلسي، وتتعامل «الجزيرة» وغيرها مع أوكرانيا أنها هي قلب العروبة النابض.

رابعا- إيلاء الحلفاء بين الأنظمة الاستبداديّة أهميّة أكبر وتولية مصالحهم في العلاقات. أسابيع فقط من الحرب الروسية على أوكرانيا وأميركا تصلح علاقاتها مع النظام السعودي والإماراتي. النظام القطري لا يحتاج إلى عناية خاصّة لأنه مطلق الطاعة والولاء ومرتبته التحالفيّة ارتفعت في نظر واشنطن. والنظام السعودي عبّر عن امتعاضه في حديث مع «وول ستريت جورنال» عن كثرة الإشادة الأميركيّة بالحليف القطري. لكن تحفّظ الحكومة السعودية والإماراتيّة، وحتى حكومة العدوّ، عن اعتناق موقف «الناتو» بالكامل (بالنسبة إلى روسيا) أزعج الحكومة الأميركيّة. لكن بدلاً من رفع العصا بوجه الحلفاء، عمدت واشنطن إلى إرضائهم وتكرار مواقف الدعم والتعهد بالدفاع عن أمن النظام. لم تعد أميركا تتحمّل رقصات توازن بينها وبين العدوّ الروسي. وأميركا هي اليوم في حالة عداء مطلقة ضد روسيا. والحلفاء من أمثال السعودية والإمارات سيحظون بالمزيد من الدعم الأميركي، السياسي والعسكري. سنسمع عن شحنات سلاح جديدة وعن قواعد أميركية جديدة وعن وفود وزيارات كثيرة. والحاكم السعودي الشاب بات في موقع تفاوضي حول صعوده إلى العرش، وحظوظ نيله الرعاية الأميركيّة لصعوده باتت شبه محسومة. الاهتمام بطغاة الخليج كان بادياً هذا الأسبوع، حيث حرص وزير الخارجية الأميركي، أنتوني بلينكن، على ترضية محمد بن زايد ومبعوثين سعوديّين. والأكاديمي الشاب، غريغوري برو، على حق عندما علّق قائلاً إن هذا الاهتمام من قبل إدارة بايدن بالأنظمة الاستبداديّة بالخليج ينسف نظريّة هنتنغتون من أساسها.

خامسا- حظر التسليح الروسي. هناك قانون أميركي من عام 2017 يُعرف بأحرفه الأولى، قانون «كاتسا» وهو يفرض عقوبات على الدول التي تدخل في عقود مع روسيا في مجال الدفاع والاستخبارات «بصورة كبيرة». أي إن القانون ضبابي وهو كان يفترض أن يعاقب تركيا والهند لاستيرادهم شبكة «أس 400». لكن مرتبة الحلفاء أدّت إلى التساهل كما أن علاقة تركيا بروسيا وبأوكرانيا أفادت أميركا لتمرير رسائل. لكن مساعي التفاوض التركيّة قد لا تكون مُحبّذة في واشنطن لأن أميركا تريد من هذه الحرب أن تستمرّ إلى ما لا نهاية لو أمكن من أجل استنفاد طاقات وموارد روسيا. وقد كتب ديفيد شينكر (عرّاب نخبة «ثوّار» لبنان) مع زميل له من «مؤسّسة واشنطن» مقالة في «وول ستريت جورنال» يدعوان فيها إلى التشدّد في العقوبات على الحلفاء الذين يستوردون السلاح من روسيا. لن تتساهل أميركا في هذا الخصوص بعد اليوم. أي إنه من المتوقّع أن تزيد المبيعات الأميركية من الأسلحة.

اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة

سادسا- التعامل مع مثلّث القوة في العالم. ريتشارد نيكسون نظر إلى توزيع القوى في العالم ورأى أن العالم المثلث الأقطاب يحتّم محاولة طرف فيه جذب طرف آخر له. هذا ما حفّزه على تجاوز موانعه العقائديّة من أجل أن يبيع تايوان ويغضّ النظر عن عدائه المرضي ضدّ الشيوعية لكسب الصين إلى صف أميركا. لم تصبح الصين حليفة لكن كل ما يحتاجه المُخطّط في العلاقات الدوليّة أن يكون طرفه أقرب إلى طرفٍ ثانٍ من الطرف الثالث في المثلّث. وهذا ما حصل وأضعف الموقع السوفياتي. كان وضع الاتحاد السوفياتي سيكون أفضل بكثير لو أنه اعتنى أكثر بإصلاح العلاقة مع الصين لتفويت الفرصة على التآمر الأميركي ضدّه. اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة وهي أوثق بعد أزمة أوكرانيا لأن الصين تحتاج إلى تعاون روسي من أجل اجتراح سبل تجاوز العقوبات الأميركية القاسية والوحشيّة (هي وحشيّة على الشعوب قبل أن تكون ضد الأنظمة). ومهما حاولت أميركا أن تُبعد الصين عن روسيا، فليس لديها ما تعطيه للصين غير تخفيف حدّة العداء الشديد. وتخفيف حدة العداء لا يغيّر من التخطيط الاستراتيجي الأميركي الذي يتعامل مع الصين على أنه الخطر الأكبر. أميركا كان لديها الكثير لتقدّمه للصين في عام 1970: عضويّة مجلس الأمن وطرد تايوان من الأمم المتحدة بالإضافة إلى إنشاء علاقة ديبلوماسيّة، بالإضافة إلى التعامل مع الصين على أنها دولة أكبر مما كانت في حينه. ماذا تستطيع أن تقدّم أميركا للصين اليوم؟ اعتبارها دولة عظمى وهي كذلك من دون مبالغة أميركية ديبلوماسيّة.

سابعا- جرّ روسيا إلى حروب إنهاك. هناك نظريّة أن الحرب الروسية في أوكرانيا لم تكن إلا فخّاً نصبته أميركا لها. وأميركا تحمّست كثيراً لهذه الحرب وكان واضحاً أنها كانت تعدّ لها. كانت القوّات الأميركيّة قد انتشرت في أنحاء مختلفة من أوروبا خصوصاً في بولندا، بالإضافة إلى تولّي أجهزة الاستخبارات الأميركيّة مهمّة تقرير أجندة الصحف الأميركيّة. فتحتُ ثلاث صحف من باب التجربة: «نيويورك تايمز» و«واشنطن بوست» و«غارديان» البريطانيّة. نفس الأخبار والعناوين موجودة في الصحف الثلاث، ومنسوبة كلّها لمصادر عسكريّة واستخباراتيّة أميركيّة. كانت الصحف البريطانيّة تتميّز عن الصحف الأميركيّة لكن ذلك تغيّر منذ الحرب في سوريا حين تطابقت التغطية بالكامل وأصبحت الـ«غارديان» أكثر تصلّباً في الصهيونيّة وفي تأييد آلة الحرب الأميركيّة من صحف أميركا. قد تصل أوكرانيا وروسيا إلى تسوية لكن أميركا ستعطّلها. طلع المبعوث الأوكراني إلى مفاوضات تركيا بين الطرفيْن بتصريحات متفائلة لكن وزير الخارجيّة الأميركي سرعان ما أبطل مفعول التفاؤل وخفّض منسوب الترحيب بشأن التقدّم في المفاوضات. أميركا تبحث عن حرب أفغانستان جديدة كي تغرق روسيا في حرب لا تنتهي إلا بانهيار الدولة. ليس هناك من تعداد للسلاح الذي هطل على أوكرانيا، لكن تذكّر أو تذكّري أن حتى السويد والنروج شاركت في الحرب الأوكرانيّة.

ثامنا- التركيز على دول العالم النامي في الاستراتيجيّة الأميركيّة لصنع تحالف عالمي ضد أعدائها. الصحف الغربيّة ضجّت بقوّة التحالف العالمي الذي تقوده أميركا (طبعاً تحت مسميّات الحريّة ــــــ وتحالف الحريّة هذا يضمّ مستبدّين من كل حدب وصوب)، لكن الوقائع في تصويت الجمعيّة العاميّة للأمم المتحدة أثبتت عكس ذلك. كانت أميركا تريد أن تحصل على إجماع كل دول العالم لكن تحالفها كان غربيّاً صرفاً. دول كبرى في العالم النامي حاولت الحفاظ على مسافة من موقف أميركا. الهند وجنوب أفريقيا والصين وباكستان كلّها تحافظ على علاقة وديّة مع روسيا. ستضطرّ أميركا إلى إنفاق المزيد من المال وشحن المزيد من السلاح وشنّ المزيد من الحروب لجلب المزيد من دول العالم النامي إليها. لقد فضحت هذه الحرب الطابع العنصري الصارخ للتحالف الغربي ومعاييره. لم يعد ممكناً ستر طبيعة سيادة العنصريّة البيضاء في صلب التحالف الغربي. لا يمحي ذلك الترحيب بمسؤول من هذه الدولة الآسيويّة أو نشر خطاب وزير الخارجية الكيني الذي هو في الأساس أداة بيد الإدارة الأميركيّة. (واختفى وزير الخارجية الكيني عن الساحة بعد خطابه في الأمم المتحدة، والذي أرادته البروباغندا الأميركيّة أن يصبح شهيراً لأنها استعملته بصورة عنصريّة كي تُكسي عدوانيّتها بلسان فرد أفريقي).

تاسعا- الحرب الدعائيّة ستستعر أكثر من أي وقت. رأينا ذلك على مرّ الأسابيع الماضية. «واشنطن بوست» (وهي أكثر مطبوعة ملتصقة بأجهزة الاستخبارات الأميركيّة) دعت جهاراً إلى تكرار تجربة الحرب الباردة في شنّ «حرب ثقافيّة» ضد روسيا وغيرها من أعداء أميركا. لكن الصحيفة نسيت أن الحرب الثقافية الماضية تضمّنت نشر عقيدة بن لادن وصحبه حول العالم لأن تلك العقدية كانت مؤاتية ضد الشيوعيّة.

نحن في مرحلة قلقة ومضطربة من العلاقات الدوليّة. صحف الغرب (وتوابعه في بلادنا) مشغولة بالتدخّل العسكري الروسي في أوكرانيا. لكن التدخّل الأميركي في أوكرانيا لا يقلّ عن تدخّل روسيا. هل من شكّ أن ضبّاطاً أميركيّين يقودون كل العمليات العسكريّة الأوكرانيّة؟ هل من شك أن هناك شركات علاقات عامّة تكتب خطب القادة الأوكرانيّين (لقد علمنا رسميّاً أن شركة علاقات عامّة استأجرتها حكومة بايدن كي تكتب خطب سفيرة أوكرانيا في أميركا). أميركا لن تتوقّف، هي ستستمرّ لأنها في طور الانتقام من تحدّي روسيا لها. والانتقام الأميركي، كما رأينا بعد 11 أيلول، أبشع بكثير من عوائد القبائل العربيّة القديمة.

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Gonzalo Lira: News & Views 2022.04.04

APRIL 04, 2022