One hundred years ago Thomas Ashe became the first Irish Republican to die on hunger strike. Ashe was imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin for delivering a ‘seditious speech’ to a public gathering in County Longford. On the 20th of September Ashe decided to go on hunger strike when he was denied the status of political prisoner. Five days later on September 25th he was dead.
Although Ashe is considered the first Irish Republican prisoner to die on hunger strike, his death was not the direct result of starvation, instead it was caused by force feeding. This brutal act carried out by prison authorities involved inserting a tube into the mouth of the hunger striker and pushing it down into their stomach. Gruel was poured down this ghastly device which caused gagging, vomiting and for Thomas Ashe – death.
Austin Stack was also a Republican prisoner who went on hunger strike around the same time as Ashe. Stack also underwent force feeding but lived to recall the terrible technique used by the prison authorities: ” It was very painful. My eyes watered during the whole time so that I could see nothing. I vomited during and after the process so that not one half of the food entered my stomach. My clothes were covered with vomit. There was no attempt made to examine me.”
The act of refusing food is a powerful weapon used by those who have nothing else left to fight with. This tool of protest against injustice was first used in the early 1900s by imprisoned British and Irish suffragettes. It was also the first time force feeding was used to break a hunger strike.
In 1912 Suffragettes Gladys Evans and Mary Leigh became the first prisoners in Ireland to hunger strike for political status and receive the treatment of force feeding. They were jailed along with Lizzie Barter who flung a hatchet at British Prime minister Herbert Asquith while he was visiting Dublin. She missed Asquith but hit Irish Home Rule leader John Redmond instead!
Barter evaded arrest but was apprehended the next day when she was involved in a disturbance at Dublin’s Theatre Royal where the British PM was due to speak. Barter hurled a burning chair into the orchestra pit while Leigh and Evans were caught at the same venue attempting to set fire to the royal box.
The Suffragettes were jailed in Mountjoy for “having commited serious outrages at the time of the visit of the British Prime Minister”. Leigh and Evans went on hunger strike and were force fed until they were released months later.
In September 1913 Labour leader James Connolly was arrested after speaking at a mass rally with Jim Larkin outside Liberty Hall in Dublin city. Connolly was sentenced to three months imprisonment and was labeled a common criminal. Inspired by the Suffragettes, he went on hunger strike which lasted eight days before he was released. While Connolly came out of his hunger strike unscathed, the same cannot be said for James Byrne.
In October 1913 Labour activist James Byrne was arrested on false charges of intimidation and he was sent to Mountjoy jail. The 38 year old father of six from Dun Laoghaire was a secretary of the trades council and when he was denied political status in prison he followed the example set by Connolly just months previously and he went on hunger strike. Byrne also undertook a thirst strike and his health rapidly declined while imprisoned. The authorities released Byrne when his condition worsened and just under two weeks later he died of pneumonia. His funeral drew thousands of mourners and James Connolly delivered the graveside oration.
In 1917 the death of County Kerry native Thomas Ashe resulted in an inquest which revealed the barbarity of force feeding. The inquest also revealed that he had been stripped of his boots, bed, bedding and clothes. Ashe was left with a single blanket and the cold stone ground to lie on. The pathologist’s report revealed markings and bruising around Ashe’s mouth and jaw indicating the brutality of force feeding.
The verdict of the inquest declared that Ashe “died of heart failure and congestion of the lungs….. that his death was caused by the punishment of taking away from the cell, bed, bedding and boots and allowing him to be on the cold floor.” British authorities refused to accept the result of the inquest and many copies of it were burned by order. The copies that survived ensured the truth was revealed and the act of force feeding was later abandoned but, the act of hunger striking for political status would remain a staple of protest for Republicans throughout the rest of the 20th century. Following the death of Thomas Ashe 100 years ago, 22 more Republicans would die in prison in the following years and decades after 1917.
Pauline Murphy is a freelance writer from Ireland.
Given the transcendent nature of this moment, we thought it would be a good time to summarize how we arrived at this point and to explain the special nature of the decision that Catalan Parliament took on Wednesday, September 6th.
1) Spain broke its own rules when the Constitutional Court nullified the 2006 statute of Autonomy.
The origins of all that that we have experienced over the last several years can be found in the Spanish Constitutional Court’s decision to strike down key elements of the 2006 Catalan statute of autonomy. Today it is widely recognized that this amounted to a de facto coup against the constitution that broke the judicial balance established at the end of the Francoist era. The relation of power between Spanish centralism and the Catalan Autnomist Government was based on the so-called “two keys”. Should a Catalan desire to alter its regime of autonomy arise, Madrid held the “first key” of being able to demand that the new law pass through Madrid’s legal filters where it would be subject to alteration. Catalonia’s “second key” was the right, should changes be made in Madrid, to reject the altered statute through a referendum. The process was clear, transparent and balanced. One key furnished guarantees to Spain, the other to Catalonia. Each side had a voice in the process. However, the forced entry into the process of a “third key” that had never existed and that was invented by the Popular Party destroyed this constitutional balance and broke the existing conditions of coexistence. The responsibility for bringing us to where we are today lies squarely with the Spanish state which, through its unilateral actions, abolished the pact forged in the transition to democracy.
2) Spain has refused to engage in dialogue with Catalonia about independence or, for that matter, anything else.
Catalonia does not have the right to impose secession upon Spain. Nor does Spain have the right to impose unity upon Catalonia. Should a conflict such as the one that is now being played out in the Principality of Catalonia arise, the only solution is negotiation, as the Supreme Court of Canada made clear in its opinion on the now widely celebrated referendum on the question of independence for Quebec.
Such a negotiation could have taken many forms and could have centered on many different aspects of the impasse. After the first September 11th (Catalan National Day) protests in 2012, the Catalan government proposed that the two sides engage in a renewed dialogue about fiscal matters and cultural rights. This proposal was not only rejected, but treated with open disdain. Catalan political forces have appealed on nearly twenty occasions for a negotiated solution to the celebration a referendum designed to clarify the true political will of the Catalan people. As is the case today, the party that has always refused to negotiate in the recent past has been Madrid. The Spanish state has consistently disdained the core democratic principle that disagreements should be resolved through good faith negotiations that respect the democratic expression of all political projects. This consistent pattern of disdain delegitimates the arguments of the Spanish government.
3) The people of Catalonia gave the Parliament of Catalonia a clear democratic mandate for a Proclamation of Independence.
In elections held on the 27th of September 2015, the citizens of Catalonia awarded the proponents of a program to pursue a proclamation of independence an absolute majority of the seats in the Catalan Parliament. The fact that this result fell just short of 50% of the popular vote has led the members of the winning coalition to the conclusion that they should seek validate their program through that most democratic of methods: a referendum. It has always been hoped that this referendum would be sanctioned through negotiations with the Spanish state. However, this has been impossible to do. It is precisely this refusal on the part of the Spanish Government to negotiate anything that justifies, and imbues with legal force, the unilateral vote that the Catalan Parliament will hold tomorrow. There is currently no other way that the representatives in Parliament can give voice to the political desires the people of Catalonia.
4) International law provides a legal basis for both self-determination and unilateral secession
The right to self-determination of all peoples is an essential element of international legal doctrine. It is an absolute right that trumps national legislation, as is spelled out in the two 1966 UN conventions on human rights which the Spanish constitution recognizes as the supreme law of the land. The Parliament of Catalonia is thus able to legitimately invoke this general principle as the basis for the referendum. In addition, there is the decision of the International Court of Justice regarding Kosovo that definitively resolved two important matters. The first is that there is no provision in international law that invalidates the unilateral proclamation of independence of a territory. The second is that the principle of the inviolability of borders only applies to conflicts between states and thus cannot in any way be used to impede the secession of a part of a state.
5) Recent international practice has given explicit support to processes of national self-determination thus creating a norm characterized by the acceptance of new states within the international community.
A few figures are worth bearing in mind. Since 1991, 53 sub-state entities, like Catalonia, have held referendums on self-determination. Of this total, 27 referendums were carried out in agreement with the states of which the entity seeking self-determination was then part. The other 26 were convened unilaterally. The Spanish state has recognized 26 of the 27 new states constituted in the world since 1991, the majority of which were proclaimed unilaterally. In fact, 7 states that today are part of the European Union were, in 1991, parts of other states and thus in situations quite similar to that of Catalonia today. These 7 European Union member states that were not independent in 1991 (Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic) were all created through unilateral mobilizations, and in 5 of those cases, through the specific modality of a unilateral referendum. All of them are recognized by Spain and are part of the European Union.
While the European Union has no provision spelling out what is to be done in the case of the secession of a part of a member state, there is a consistent practice when it comes to recognizing the results of referendums on self-determination. For example the EU took important decisions in response to the referendums of the Saar (1955), Greenland (1982) and Brexit (2016), and did not block the referendum in Scotland (2014). All of these referendums were held within the territory of the Union. And as we have seen, it accepted as member 7 states born of unilateral processes while also giving support to the practice of self-determination in cases such as that of Kosovo. This, in clear contradiction to Spain’s current posture in regard to Catalonia.
Summing up: If we have come to this point it is basically because of the legitimacy that the Catalan people bestowed on the Parliament of Catalonia in the September 27th, 2015 elections, and also, the legitimacy that the international community has bestowed upon the right of self-determination. But we have also arrived at this point as the result of the persistent delegitmation of the Spanish position, which flies in the face of international rules and practices as well as the provisions of its own constitution.
Now is the moment to take the next step, conscious both of the civic strength built up over the last decade, and the fact that the international community will react as it always has: by resolving a political problem that cannot be wished away through the deployment of legalistic maneuvering.
Vicent Partal is founder and director of the influential Vilaweb on-line newspaper in Spain.
James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, United States Secretary for Defence
Apart from the criminally insane, (John McCain, Lindsey Graham et al.) nobody wants war, particularly nuclear war. Unfortunately, however, war happens, sometimes by accident sometimes by design. The present standoff between the US/NATO and Russia and China is a case in point. The United States ever present hegemonic ambitions are hardly secret and have been displayed in their most virulent and openly aggressive forms since the collapse of the USSR.
This latter event was a key moment in the present historical conjuncture. During the 1990s Russia was prostrate and the US/NATO juggernaut was able to take full advantage of the situation. The war against what used to be called the third world, had always been a feature of US foreign policy, however now with the disappearance of the one geopolitical bloc which could hold the US in check, the US imperial leviathan was able to extend its aggression to both Russia and more lately China. Ex-soviet satellites, and even ex-Soviet republics in Europe were sucked into the voracious maw of NATO, which was to double in size and expand right up to Russia’s western frontier. In passing, we may note that the collapse of communism also had the effect of an abject surrender of the centre-left/social democratic currents in Europe, and their conversion to both neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
NATO membership meant that the US effectively controlled Europe’s foreign policy and this policy fait accompli was ratified in the Lisbon Treaty which meant that Europe’s defence and security policy was outsourced to a non-member of the EU, i.e. the United States, who control NATO. In short, the EU became a civilian wing of NATO. These events were of course a naked provocation as was the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 90s.
The continued policy of provocation became the order of the day. In 2008 NATO announced boldly that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO.” Thereupon Georgia’s comical President Mikheil Saakasvili bombarded Tskhinvali, capital of the self-declared Republic of South Ossetia that had resisted integration into the current Republic of Georgia since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this instance Russia defended South Ossetia, invading Georgia. It then recognized the independence, both of South Ossetia and of the Republic of Abkhazia, from Georgia. (This may be a tit-for-tat response to the U.S.’s decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence from Serbia six months earlier.) Then in 2014 came the ultimate provocation: the American backed coup in Ukraine which resulted in the ongoing and open-ended Ukrainian imbroglio 2014-2017. This resulted inter alia in the referendum and defection of the Crimea into the Russian Federation, and a nasty little war in the Russian-speaking Don Bass which chose to secede from the Ukraine.
US historian and foreign policy realist John Mearsheimer in 2014 argued, I think correctly, that:
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.
At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbour turned into a Western bastion.
For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labelled a “coup” — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West” Foreign Affairs – Autumn 2014
It should be understood that possible Ukrainian and Georgian membership of NATO is still on the table, which in itself constitutes a provocation. This much was made clear by the NATO Secretary-General – the wretched Jens Stoltenberg – who recently visited Kiev and held discussions with the Kiev Junta boss Poroshenko. US representative in the shape of ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis has also been a recent visitor. The issue of supplying lethal US arms to the Kiev Junta was certainly discussed but no definitive judgement has been made – yet.
So where is all this leading? To the fabled Mexican standoff that’s where. Regarding the issue of lethal arms. The Ukrainians already have these – they have been and were supplied covertly through the Baltics and Poland (naturally Poland) during the earlier period of the war 2014-2016. The Ukrainian Army (UAF) has been trained and equipped by NATO and has 200,000 men under arms, mostly wretched conscripts, who would rather be somewhere else, but with some more effective punitive neo-Nazi units. At present, there are all sorts of rumours circulating of a supposedly imminent invasion of the Don Bass by a rejuvenated Ukrainian military. Maybe, but in the past these rumours have generally come to nothing. But be sure that if this turns out to be the case it will be an American decision, not Poroshenko’s who is a US/NATO puppet. However, the US investment in the training and arming of UAF is no guarantee of battlefield effectiveness; the US also trained and equipped the Georgian Army as well as the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) both of whom who hardly distinguished themselves in the heat of battle.
If such an invasion does occur the relevant questions would seem to be how will Russia react. Putin is on record as saying he will ‘not allow’ a Ukrainian army to annihilate the people of the Don Bass, this is said to be a Red Line for Putin. As in previous clashes Russia did at least covertly intervene in the fighting; there were also Russian (and other national) volunteers who fought on the side of the Don Bass militias. As for the ethnic Russian population of the Don Bass they want under no circumstances to be reintegrated with their hated enemies in the west and central Ukraine. Too much blood has been split for an implementation of the Minsk agreements, which in any case the Kiev Junta has shown no interest in implementing.
Trying to force the Don Bass into a Ukraine governed by the same oligarch/Nazi coalition Junta ensconced in Kiev, would be like trying to force Protestant Northern Ireland into the Catholic Irish Republic. This would simply lead to a continuation of the war – albeit in a different form.
In the event of renewed hostilities and the Don Bass being in danger of being over-run, can Russia stand by and do nothing? In this case it would mean the neo-Nazi battalions will be right on Russia’s border less than 100 km from the city of Rostov-on-Don. Should Putin be taken at face value when he said he would not contemplate this eventuality?
In the event that the DPR/LPR do fall this would mean a massive victory for the NATO-backed UAF proxies and a strategic disaster for Russia who will then be seen as a paper tiger, thereby emboldening the Anglo-Zionist empire in its programme for the destruction of Russia as an independent sovereign state. If Putin does stand firm – as he must – what then will be the reaction of the US/NATO and what would be the political repercussions in Ukraine itself? After heavy defeats suffered by the UAF at Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo a third defeat would be likely to lead to very serious domestic political upheaval. In this scenario, I think both US/NATO would simply turn their backs on the whole failing project, particularly the EU. Who knows?
Ultimately Ukraine is of extreme strategic interest to Russia, but of negligible interest to the United States. Risking a nuclear war with Russia over a tin-pot regime in Ukraine and thereby exposing the US homeland to nuclear decimation over a war they don’t have to fight seems very unlikely. And as for the notion of winning (whatever that means) a nuclear war, I doubt any sane person believes that is possible. See below.
The Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) systems are so unreliable it would almost be an accident if they worked. They’ve never been tested under real conditions and they can be defeated by very basic countermeasures.”
Ted Postol, a professor at MIT and a former scientific advisor for the Pentagon.
When I think of the persistent history of the forlorn idea of the defence against a nuclear attack, I am tempted to think that the notion especially typifies Einstein’s grim and painfully realistic observation that ‘the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.’ It has certainly been normal in history to think of fashionable defences against evolving military threats. But nuclear weapons unleashed in a large-scale attack bring a sure destruction, one so massive as to rule out any successful defence. Defence in conflict, a traditional mode of thinking, is here no longer plausible. In a nuclear war, the long-standing ‘norm’ of reliance on defence has become a self-deception, a most human and understandable one, and one that is rooted in an aversion to the new reality.”William J Perry – Secretary of State for Defence for the United States 1994-1997.
(‘My Journey at the Nuclear Brink’)
Defending the United States against a major Russian or Chinese ballistic missile attack is currently not feasible. A reliable and affordable defence that could protect America against a Russian ICBM and SLBM force that could launch some 1,500 ballistic missile warheads simply does not exist. While the Chinese force is much smaller, numbering several dozen ICBMs, it probably includes countermeasures that would seriously complicate disruption by missile defines systems…
For the foreseeable future, offense wins the offense-defence relationship. Offensive ballistic missile technology is far more mature than that of missile defence, and cost considerations favour the offense. Adding fourteen more GMD interceptors by 2017 will require the Pentagon to spend about $1 billion. The Russians and Chinese can each add fourteen more warheads to their strategic offensive forces at considerably less cost. One reason that the Russians are building a replacement for their heavy SS-18 ICBM is to have a missile that can carry ten-fifteen warheads as a means of overwhelming a future American missile defence.
It is important to remember that the other side may not sit passively as the U.S. military develops missile defences. Other nuclear powers may choose to build up their strategic offensive forces in response, increasing the number of nuclear weapons targeted at the United States (China comes to mind). Indeed, it was concern that the ABM systems of the 1960s would spark an uncontrollable strategic offensive arms race that led to negotiation of the 1972 ABM Treaty.
None of this is to say that a future technological breakthrough might not produce a change in the offense-defence equation. Some new technology could be developed that would make defence against ballistic missiles far more lethal, cost-effective and attractive, tilting the equation to favour defence instead of offense. But that breakthrough does not appear to be on the horizon, at least not for the next fifteen-twenty years. And a key lesson of the past thirty-two years is that technology in the missile defence area often does not deliver on its potential—at least not as rapidly, or as inexpensively, as originally thought.” The National Interest. March 2015 – Steven Pifer
Steven Pifer directs the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative.
And Finally, from The National Interest 14-08-2017:
Technology, in effect, made Russia America’s insufferable but inescapable Siamese twin. The strategic reality is even more horrific. However demonic, however destructive, however devious, however deserving of being strangled Russia is, the brute fact is that we cannot kill this bastard without committing suicide.” Graham Allison
Setting aside the usual American self-righteous, messianic, ‘indispensable nation’, bombast, – vide supra – the central core of the above statements makes the realist-realpolitik argument very forcefully. (1) The US is not invulnerable and (2) It would suffer massive damage, possibly terminal, in a nuclear exchange, as would the whole world. Ideologues, fools, journalists and mountebanks may wish to assert otherwise but the truth is self-evident and sobering. The media, deep-state, Tweedledum-Tweedledee two party cartel and the MIC, national security state, are pushing America and the rest of the world towards this precipice hoping Russia will surrender. This is, to say the least, an extremely risky strategy. But what if Russia chooses not to surrender? Will any US President be willing to sacrifice New York for Moscow, or Los Angeles for St. Petersburg? I somehow doubt it. Sticking my neck out I think the whole thing is a bluff; to be sure a dangerous one, but I think the realist argument will trump (sorry about the pun) the ideological one. One thing we can be sure of is that appeasement has not worked with the Anglo-Zionist empire and it never will.
To quote Kipling;
He who pays the Dangeld never gets rid of the Dane.”
The United States shows the world such a ridiculous face that the world laughs at us.
The latest spin on “Russia stole the election” is that Russia used Facebook to influence the election. The NPR women yesterday were breathless about it.
We have been subjected to ten months of propaganda about Trump/Putin election interference and still not a scrap of evidence. It is past time to ask an unasked question: If there were evidence, what is the big deal? All sorts of interest groups try to influence election outcomes including foreign governments. Why is it OK for Israel to influence US elections but not for Russia to do so? Why do you think the armament industry, the energy industry, agribusiness, Wall Street and the banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc., etc., supply the huge sum of money to finance election campaigns if their intent is not to influence the election? Why do editorial boards write editorials endorsing one candidate and damning another if they are not influencing the election?
What is the difference between influencing the election and influencing the government? Washington is full of lobbyists of all descriptions, including lobbyists for foreign governments, working round the clock to influence the US government. It is safe to say that the least represented in the government are the citizens themselves who don’t have any lobbyists working for them.
The orchestrated hysteria over “Russian influence” is even more absurd considering the reason Russia allegedly interfered in the election. Russia favored Trump because he was the peace candidate who promised to reduce the high tensions with Russia created by the Obama regime and its neocon nazis—Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. What’s wrong with Russia preferring a peace candidate over a war candidate? The American people themselves preferred the peace candidate. So Russia agreed with the electorate.
Those who don’t agree with the electorate are the warmongers—the military/security complex and the neocon nazis. These are democracy’s enemies who are trying to overturn the choice of the American people. It is not Russia that disrespects the choice of the American people; it is the utterly corrupt Democratic National Committee and its divisive Identity Politics, the military/security complex, and the presstitute media who are undermining democracy.
I believe it is time to change the subject. The important question is who is it that is trying so hard to convince Americans that Russian influence prevails over us?
Do the idiots pushing this line realize how impotent this makes an alleged “superpower” look. How can we be the hegemonic power that the Zionist neocons say we are when Russia can decide who is the president of the United States?
The US has a massive spy state that even intercepts the private cell phone conversations of the Chancellor of Germany, but his massive spy organization is unable to produce one scrap of evidence that the Russians conspired with Trump to steal the presidential election from Hillary. When will the imbeciles realize that when they make charges for which no evidence can be produced they make the United States look silly, foolish, incompetent, stupid beyond all belief?
Countries are supposed to be scared of America’s threat that “we will bomb you into the stone age,” but the President of Russia laughs at us. Putin recently described the complete absence of any competence in Washington:
It is difficult to talk to people who confuse Austria and Australia. But there is nothing we can do about this; this is the level of political culture among the American establishment. As for the American people, America is truly a great nation if the Americans can put up with so many politically uncivilized people in their government.
These words from Putin were devastating, because the world understands that they are accurate.
Consider the idiot Nikki Haley, appointed by Trump in a fit of mindlessness as US Ambassador to the United Nations. This stupid person is forever shaking her fist at the Russians while mouthing yet another improbable accusation. She might want to read Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather. Everyone knows the movie, but if memory serves somewhere in the book Puzo reflects on the practice of the irate American motorist who shakes a fist and gives the bird to other drivers. What if the driver receiving the insult is a Mafia capo? Does the idiot shaking his fist know who he is accosting? No. Does the moron know that the result might be a brutal beating or death? No.
Does the imbecile Nikki Haley understand what can be the result of her inability to control herself? No. Every knowledgeable person I know wonders if Trump appointed the imbecile Nikki Haley US ambassador to the world for the purpose of infuriating the Russians.
Ask Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht the consequence of infuriating the Russians.
After 16 years the US “superpower” has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, who have no air force, no Panzer divisions, no worldwide intelligence service, and the crazed US government in Washington is courting war with Russia and China and North Korea and Iran.
The American people are clearly out to lunch in their insouciance. Americans are fighting among themselves over “civil war” statues, while “their’ government invites nuclear armageddon.
The United States has an ambassador to the world who shows no signs of intelligence, who behaves as if she is Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee to the 5th power, and who is the total antithesis of a diplomat. What does this tell about the United States?
It reveals that the US is in the Roman collapse stage when the emperor appoints horses to the Senate.
The United States has a horse, an uncivilized horse, as its diplomat to the world. The Congress and executive branch are also full of horses and horse excrement. The US government is completely devoid of intelligence. There is no sign of intelligence anywhere in the U.S. government. Of or morality. As Hugo Chavez said: Satan is there; you can smell the sulphur.
America is a joke with nuclear weapons, the prime danger to life on earth.
How can this danger be corralled?
The American people would have to realize that they are being led to their deaths by the Zionist neocon nazis who, together with the military/security complex and Wall Street, control US foreign policy, by the complicity of Europe and Great Britain desperate to retain their CIA subsidies, and by the harlots that comprise the Western media.
Are Americans capable of comprehending this? Only a few have escaped The Matrix.
The consequence is that America is being locked into conflict with Russia and China. There is no possibility whatsoever of Washington invading either country, much less both, so war would be nuclear.
Do the American people want Washington to bring us this result? If not, why are the American people sitting there sucking their thumbs, doing nothing? Why are Europe and Great Britain sitting there permitting the unfolding of nuclear armageddon? Who murdered the peace movement?
The World and the American people need desperately to rein in the warmonger United States, or the world will cease to exist.
An International Court To Preserve Life On Earth needs to be assembled. The US government and the war interests it serves need to be indicted and prosecuted and disarmed before their evil destroys life on earth.
A source has told Sputnik that US Air Force aircraft had evacuated a group of nearly two dozen Daesh (ISIS) field commanders and militants from Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria last month. Retired US Air Force Lieut Col. Karen Kwiatkowski says this is standard operating procedure for CIA black ops looking to cover their trail after an operation.
On Thursday, a military and diplomatic source told Sputnikthat USAF helicopters had evacuated 22 Daesh field commanders and militants from areas outside the city of Deir ez-Zor in late August, amid a successful operation by Syrian government forces to free the area from terrorist control. The militants were reportedly taken to northern Syria. The US-led coalition’s press office told Sputnik that the allegations were “false.”
Asked to comment, Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel turned anti-neoconservative activist, told Sputnik that these evacuees were likely people that the US military and intelligence establishment wanted to protect, “particularly people with evidence that could be used against the US [during] negotiations.”
“It makes a lot of sense that we would either want to kill those people or extract them before the Syrians could interrogate them,” Kwiatkowski said.
“That’s inconsistent with the top level message from President Trump for sure,” the retired officer added. “This set of relationships that the CIA, parts of the military and the State Department have with Daesh goes [back to before] Trump’s administration. It seems like they’re not following his orders here, but I’m sure there’s a larger agenda at stake.”
Kwiatkowski recalled that while Trump himself has been “consistent about eliminating these terrorists, the CIA runs its own operations, and they don’t consult with anybody; that would be consistent” from their standpoint.
The activist explained that CIA black programs don’t require day-to-day approval from the president. If that’s what this evacuation was, “this is standard operating procedure, and they don’t really care what the president says in a speech designed for the consumption of the American people.”
Kwiatkowski suggested that news of the Deir ez-Zor extraction stood in clear contrast to Washington’s public campaign against Daesh, including its operations against the Daesh convoy that’s currently stranded on the Syrian-Iraqi border.
“That’s populating our media – that the Americans are killing Daesh, not that the Americans are rescuing Daesh,” the Kwiatkowski said.
“Certainly, we are rescuing our allies. But to some extent, we are preserving people who have worked with us, people that are dealing with the financial aspects of our aid to Daesh, because that’s what’s going to be looked at in the autopsy of this operation. People are going to be saying: where did the money flow? Who knew about it? What was the American role? Americans will be asking that question too, not just the world.”
Ultimately, asked what impact this news would have on public support for the president, Kwiatkowski said that for those who have an understanding of the neoconservative trajectory which has dominated US policy for many years, “we don’t expect as much of Trump. [But] for Trump voters, there is a problem. [They] bought into his less interventionist type of policy. He ran on that, he was elected on that. He gave some early speeches relating to this concept. That was pleasing to his supporters; it angered the neoconservatives.”
Today, the observer said, it’s clear that either the neocons are wearing Trump down, “or have somehow otherwise convinced him to allow them to do what they want to do.”
The report on the alleged US operation to rescue Daesh in Deir ez-Zor commanders has led Russian experts to call on President Trump to comment directly on the claims, and to ignore any CIA or Pentagon commentary. Speaking to Sputnik, Russian defense analyst Igor Korotchenko said that Trump “must comment on this and declare clearly: either the evacuation of the Daesh field commanders was authorized by him personally and he assumes all political responsibility for this step, or the [US] special services acted without his approval.”
For those (mostly Christians) attracted to the idea that the ‘war on terror’ is a clash of civilizations (a poisonous notion guaranteed to foment decades of unrestrained violence), a caution: you might want to consider ignoring the old testament injunction an ‘eye for an eye.’ For if there is a moral equivalent to the dead on both sides an eye for an eye will mean literally thousands of terror attacks like the recent horrific one in Barcelona (sixteen dead).
The body count in the West’s criminal assault on Middle East nations is now in the millions. In Syria the death toll is now 470,000. In Iraq, it is a staggering 1,455,590 (not counting foreigners). In Afghanistan, 105,000 including Taliban and Afghan soldiers and police. In Yemen, pulverized by US-backed Saudi Arabia repeatedly accused of war crimes, the toll is now over 12,000 (including 1500 from war-induced cholera) mostly civilians. A child dies of malnutrition every ten minutes. It is impossible to get an accurate count for Libya which the West turned into a grotesque failed state as a result of its exalted ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine. Estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000.
Divide that roughly 2 million dead by 16 and you get a moral equivalent that would require 125,000 Barcelona attacks. Hard to imagine? Try imagining the daily horror in these countries with a combined daily death toll in multiples of sixteen, week after week, month after month, year after year.
And, of course, that doesn’t take into account the many more millions who have been wounded, displaced as refugees, died trying to get to Europe or permanently traumatized by war – categories that include millions of children whose lives will never be the same.
This is what we have done. What our governments have done in our name. And we are still doing it. The West either invaded these countries completely illegally (as in Iraq and Afghanistan) or encouraged and then betrayed dissident movements that our governments knew could not possibly prevail. Or, as in Syria, our governments quickly handed over the revolution to armed gangs and jihadists because they were more likely to prevail against Assad in the West’s goal of regime change. Or in Libya where we violated the UN resolution for a no fly zone and turned it into an assassination mission.
Does any of this absolve the guilt of the killers in Paris, London, Barcelona and other places? Of course not. Does it mean that every killer has a legitimate grievance against the West? No. But that, of course, is one of the perverse aspects of terrorism: anyone can be a jihadist by simply declaring membership.
It is stunning that there is almost never any connection made between the terrorist threat, which is very real, and the almost twenty year assault on the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Small wonder then that the popular responses to the terror attacks are almost always completely devoid of any recognition of the context of the slaughter. In response to the latest attack tens of thousands marched in Barcelona. The theme was ‘We are not afraid!’ The public response in Britain, France and elsewhere was almost identical.
Do people actually think this is a thoughtful let alone strategic response to terror? It implies that these attacks are similar to hurricanes – unpredictable, unstoppable, inevitable. In fact they should be afraid because more is coming. A more appropriate slogan might have been ‘Get the West out of the Middle East’ and in fact a few demonstrators actually made the point about Western foreign policy. They received little coverage.
Canada has been incredibly lucky that it has not been targeted by ISIL. Our contribution to the destruction and humiliation of Muslim countries was our eager participation in the ruination of Libya – a country which had boasted the highest standard of living and most generous social programs in Africa. It is a particularly egregious result of imperial hubris. Libya had done everything the West had asked of it: it co-operated fully with the war on terror, and it radically reduced the size of its military. It also abandoned its nuclear weapons program – a lesson North Korea will never forget.
In contributing to the assassination of Muamar Gadhafi Canada contributed to the unprecedented refugee crisis which has engulfed Europe. Gadhafi new exactly what would happen if he were forced from power and said so as Canadian jets pounded his country. He stated, in desperation: “Now you people in NATO listen to me – you are bombing the wall that stopped African migration into Europe. This wall stopped the terrorists from al Qaeda. This wall was Libya. You are destroying it, you fools.”
Even the Canadian air force pilots knew what the result of regime change would be knowing full well that the vacuum created would be filled by Al Qaeda and other Jihadist groups. They referred to themselves as “Al Qaeda’s air force.”
We as citizens face the consequences of our actions every day. If we threaten people or hurt them, we get arrested, if we burn down their house, we go to jail, if we drive recklessly, steal a loaf of bread, or fish without a licence, we face consequences. But our government can join in the complete destruction of a country and it – and we – don’t even get a reprimand.
Our new Middle East policy? It’s simple. We have no business being there, we have no lofty goals capable of being achieved, we have no genuine national interest, we are complicit in a senseless daily slaughter and we contribute to the creation of jihadists who want to kill us, not for “our freedoms” but because we treat them as less than human. We should just get the hell out.
MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years. He can be reached at murraydobbin@shaw.ca
It did not take more than a few hours after jets flew into buildings in lower Manhattan on September 11 sixteen years ago for analytical and critical observers to conclude that the official narrative being propagated by television and print media, regarding what had happened and who was to blame for it, was a bold lie concocted to induce a shocked population to support an agenda of sacrificing US troops to wage a perpetual war against Israel’s perceived adversaries in the Middle East, in order to create the preconditions for carrying out their long-term Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, in pursuit of the Zionist Utopia of a “Greater Israel”. Since Internet technology back then was not yet as advanced as it is today, it took a while for alert critics to compile and disseminate key video evidence extracted and compiled from the non-stop television coverage on that day, to expose the numerous contradictions in the official story, that covered up the facts, accompanied by rational arguments that made a compelling case for who the perpetrators of this attack were, and what specific motives compelled their involvement.
Meanwhile, after so many years of investigations published in the alternative media, anyone who was sufficiently curious, open-minded and capable of drawing logical and plausible inferences from the evidence disregarded the official lies and had to admit to themselves: Israel did it! What could have been a more obvious giveaway than former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, just “coincidentally”, appearing at BBC headquarters in London to suggest, as the tragic events were still unfolding, who should be blamed, and how the United States ought to respond? While he was out of high office in Israel, this same individual just happened to have earlier been an “advisor” to a private equity company in the US, which had in its portfolio a metallurgical company with the expertise to produce the type of super-thermite that had been methodically placed inside the three World Trade Center buildings beforehand, to facilitate their controlled demolitions. Larry Silverstein, who held a long-term lease to these buildings, even candidly admitted in a documentary film to having consented to the controlled demolition (“pulling”) of Building 7, which had not been hit by any aircraft, later in the afternoon.
Apparently the “hijackers” turned out to be a few influential and well-connected Zionist Jews in Israel and in the United States, who succeeded in taking over US foreign policy in the Middle East. For many, this realization led to a state of cognitive dissonance, and pointing out the obvious openly was made to be taboo under the threat of being reflexively denounced as being “anti-Semitic” by some Zionist stooge, even though nowadays this term has been so heavily abused to now be nearly meaningless. Nonetheless, given the power dynamics of top-level media control, a situation still prevails that is somewhat analogous to the famous fairy tale for children by Hans Christian Andersen, published 180 years ago in Copenhagen, The Emperor’s New Clothes, which was itself derivative of one of many stories in a book first published in 1335, Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio. A German translation of this particular story, So ist der Lauf der Welt, translates to This is the course of the world. That etymology, describing certain psychological realities of human nature, explains why this particular fairy tale by Andersen remains so popular — variations on this general theme, describing indications of blind and convenient conformist behavior, continue to regularly manifest themselves in contemporary political life. For instance, it is evident that, even within the ranks of the so-called alternative media, too many bloggers and other personalities have been shy about addressing this topic with the deserved degree of openness and honesty.
Three years ago an American investigative reporter, Christopher Bollyn, who had compiled a book on the topic of this milestone false-flag event, entitled Solving 911: The Deception that Changed the World, appeared on a one-hour broadcast on KPFA radio in Berkeley, to openly spill the beans on the airwaves in a matter-of-fact style, just like the proverbial young boy in Andersen’s tale shouted out the truth in a crowd of doubting onlookers as the naked emperor passed by in a procession. We live in a technologically based world in which scientific and logical inquiry reigns supreme over fantasy, lies, misdirection, and other forms of false propaganda. Therefore, maintaining a rational approach in confronting the realities surrounding the 9-11 event must take precedence over timid exercises in self-deception. Confronting a corrosive agenda of waging wars that are not in the national public interest entails not just understanding what actually happened sixteen years ago — staging yet another circus-like public sham investigation would only be counterproductive in light of the accumulated evidence — but also drawing the necessary consequences therefrom, namely apprehending and putting on trial the numerous perpetrators, most of whom are known by name.
For the first time in sixteen years America has a president who has promised the American people that he will “drain the swamp”, a prospect that many fear, which has led to an internal power-feud within the centers of power inside DC Beltway. Uncovering the truth has remained elusive because hiding behind crafted lies has permitted the swamp dwellers to thrive. Notwithstanding likely media distractions premised on covering a dangerous hurricane in Florida, Donald Trump, on the occasion of the annual 9-11 anniversary commemoration — his first as US President — should rise to the occasion and announce a new tone in dealing with the unresolved consequences of that mass murder event. This is essential and necessary, so that the country can begin to move forward and correct the dangerous war path it has been pursuing for so long. A simple Tweet, comprising no more than 120 characters, would be sufficient to finally get the ball rolling, for instance:
After 16 years: 911 perpetrators of those terror acts still remain free. I will seek their apprehension to face justice!
Syria’s victory in remaining still standing – still on its feet, as it were – amid the ruins of all that has been visited upon her, marks effectively the demise of the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East (of “the New Middle East”). It signals the beginning of the end – not just of the political “regime change” project, but also of the Sunni jihadi project which has been used as the coercive tool for bringing into being a “New Middle East.”
Just as the region has reached a geopolitical inflection point, however, so too, has Sunni Islam. Wahhabi-inspired Islam has taken a major hit. It is now widely discredited amongst Sunnis, and reviled by just about everyone else.
Just to be clear how linked were the two projects:
In the wake of the first Gulf War (1990-91), General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled: “In 1991, [Paul Wolfowitz] was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy … And I had gone to see him (…)
“And I said, ‘Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.’
“And he said: ‘Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region?—?in the Middle East?—?and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes?—?Syria, Iran, Iraq?—?before the next great superpower comes on, to challenge us.’”
Wolfowitz’s thinking was then taken up more explicitly by David Wurmser in his 1996 document,Coping with Crumbling States (following on from his contribution to the infamous Clean Break policy strategy paper written by Richard Pearle for Bibi Netanyahu earlier in the same year). The aim here for both these seminal documents was to directly counter the allegedly “isolationist” thinking of Pat Buchanan (now arisen again in parts of the U.S. New Right and Alt-Right).
Libertarian writer Daniel Sanchez has noted: “Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as ‘expediting the chaotic collapse’ of secular-Arab nationalism in general, and Baathism in particular. He [asserted that] ‘the phenomenon of Baathism,’ was, from the very beginning, ‘an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy’ … [and therefore advised] the West to put this anachronistic adversary ‘out of its misery’ – and to press America’s Cold War victory on toward its final culmination. Baathism should be supplanted by what he called the ‘Hashemite option.’ After their chaotic collapse, Iraq and Syria would be Hashemite possessions once again. Both would be dominated by the royal house of Jordan, which in turn, happens to be dominated by the US and Israel.”
Influencing Washington
Wurmser’s tract, Coping with Crumbling States, which together with Clean Break was to have a major impact on Washington’s thinking during the George W. Bush administration (in which David Wurmser also served). What aroused the deep-seated neocon ire in respect to the secular-Arab nationalist states was not just that they were, in the neo-con view, crumbling relics of the “evil” USSR, but that from 1953 onwards, Russia sided with these secular-nationalist states in all their conflicts regarding Israel. This was something the neo-cons could neither tolerate, nor forgive.
Both Clean Break and the 1997 Project for a New American Century(PNAC) were exclusively premised on the wider U.S. policy aim of securing Israel. The point here is that while Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region, he added: “Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter” – not even, he added, “for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism”. (Emphasis added).
In fact, America had no interest in stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism. The U.S. was using it liberally: It had already sent in armed, fired-up Islamist insurgents into Afghanistan in 1979 precisely in order to “induce” a Soviet invasion (one which subsequently duly occurred).
Asked, much later, in view of the terrorism that subsequently occurred, whether he regretted stoking Islamic extremism in this way, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbig Brzezinski replied:
“Regret what? 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? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’”
Fired-up Sunni radicals have now been used by Western states to counter Nasserism, Ba’athism, the USSR, Iranian influence, and latterly to try to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. One former CIA official in 1999, described the thinking at the time thus:
“In the West, the words Islamic fundamentalism conjure up images of bearded men with turbans and women covered in black shrouds. And some Islamist movements do indeed contain reactionary and violent elements. But we should not let stereotypes blind us to the fact that there are also powerful modernizing forces at work within these movements. Political Islam is about change. In this sense, modern Islamist movements may be the main vehicle for bringing about change in the Muslim world and the break-up of the old ‘dinosaur’ regimes.” (Emphasis added).
Protecting the Emirs
Precisely: This was what the Arab Spring was about. The role allocated to Islamist movements was to break up the nationalist-secular Arab world (Wurmser’s “Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter”), but additionally to protect the kings and Emirs of the Gulf, to whom America was obliged to tie itself – as Wurmser explicitly acknowledges – as the direct counter-party in the project of dissolving the nationalist secular Arab world. The kings and emirs of course, feared the socialism that was associated with Arab nationalism (— as did the Neocons).
Dan Sanchez perceptively writes (well before Russia’s intervention into the Middle East), that Robert Kagan and fellow neocon, Bill Kristol, in their 1996 Foreign Affairs article, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, sought to inoculate both the conservative movement and U.S. foreign policy against the isolationism of Pat Buchanan:
“The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America’s new peerless pre-eminence … [that] must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new ‘unipolar moment’ would last forever … What made this neocon dream seem within reach, was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia.”
And, the year after the Berlin Wall fell, war against Iraq marked the début of the re-making the Middle East: for America to assert uni-polar power globally (through military bases); to destroy Iraq and Iran; to “roll-back Syria” (as Clean Break hadadvocated) – and to secure Israel.
Russia Is Back
Well, Russia is back in the Middle East – and Russia is no longer “indifferent” to America’s actions – and now “civil war” has erupted in America between those who want to punish Putin for spoiling America’s unipolar moment in the region so thoroughly, and so finally – with Syria – and the other policy orientation, led by Steve Bannon, which advocates precisely the Buchanan-esque U.S. foreign policy which the neocons had so hoped to despoil (… plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).
It is very plain however, that one thing has changed: Sunni jihadists’ long “run” as the tool of choice for re-making the Middle East is over. The signs are everywhere:
The leaders of the five emerging market BRICS powers have for the first time named militant groups based in Pakistan as a regional security concern and called for their patrons to be held to account:
“We, in this regard, express concern on the security situation in the region and violence caused by the Taliban, (Islamic State) …, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates including Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, TTP and Hizb ut-Tahrir,” the leaders said in the declaration. (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will need to take note).
Similarly, an article published in an Egyptian newspaper written by Britain’s Middle East minister, Alistair Burt, suggests that London now whole-heartedly supports the Sisi regime in Egypt in its war on the Muslim Brotherhood. Burt attacked the M.B. for links to extremism, while emphasizing that Britain has imposed an outright ban on any contact with the organization since 2013 – adding that “now is the time for everyone who defends the Brotherhood in London or Cairo to put an end to this confusion and ambiguity.” Not surprisingly, Burt’s remarks have been greeted with profound pleasure in Cairo. … Full article
Many people still want to believe that the United Nations engages in impartial investigations and thus is more trustworthy than, say, self-interested governments, whether Russia or the United States. But trust in U.N. agencies is no longer well placed; whatever independence they may have once had has been broken, a reality relevant to recent “investigations” of Syrian chemical weapons use.
There is also the larger issue of the United Nations’ peculiar silence about one of its primary and original responsibilities, shouldered after the horrors of World War II – to stop wars of aggression, which today include “regime change” wars organized, funded and armed by the United States and other Western powers, such as the Iraq invasion in 2003, the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011, and a series of proxy wars including the ongoing Syrian conflict.
After World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunals declared that a “war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
That recognition became a guiding principle of the United Nations Charter, which specifically prohibits aggression or even threats of aggression against sovereign states.
The Charter declares in Article One that it is a chief U.N. purpose “to take effective collective measures … for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” Article Two, which defines the appropriate behavior of U.N. members, adds that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…”
However, instead of enforcing this fundamental rule, the United Nations has, in effect, caved in to the political and financial pressure brought to bear by the United States and its allies. A similar disregard for international law also pervades the U.S. mainstream media and much of the European and Israeli press as well.
There is an assumption that the United States and its allies have the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world at anytime solely at their own discretion. Though U.S. diplomats and mainstream journalists still voice outrage when adversaries deviate from international law – such as denunciations of Russia over Ukraine’s civil war – there is silence or support when a U.S. president or, say, an Israeli prime minister orders military strikes inside another country. Then, we hear only justifications for these attacks.
Shielding Israel
For instance, on Friday, The New York Times published an article about Israel conducting a bombing raid inside Syria that reportedly killed two Syrians. The article is notable because it contains not a single reference to international law and Israel’s clear-cut violation of it. Instead, the article amounts to a lengthy rationalization for Israel’s aggression, framing the attacks as Israeli self-defense or, as the Times put it, “an escalation of Israel’s efforts to prevent its enemies from gaining access to sophisticated weapons.”
The article also contains no reference to the fact that Israel maintains a sophisticated nuclear arsenal and is known to possess chemical and biological weapons as well. Implicit in the Times article is that the U.S. and Israel live under one set of rules while countries on the U.S.-Israeli enemies list must abide by another. Not to state the obvious but this is a clear violation of the journalistic principle of objectivity.
But the Times is far from alone in applying endless double standards. Hypocrisy now permeates international agencies, including the United Nations, which instead of pressing for accountability in cases of U.S. or Israeli aggression has become an aider and abettor, issuing one-sided reports that justify further aggression while doing little or nothing to stop U.S.-backed acts of aggression.
For instance, there was no serious demand that U.S. and British leaders who organized the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, should face any accountability for committing the “supreme international crime” of an aggressive war. As far as the U.N. is concerned, war-crimes tribunals are for the little guys.
This breakdown in the integrity of the U.N. and related agencies has developed over the past few decades as one U.S. administration after another has exploited U.S. clout as the world’s “unipolar power” to ensure that international bureaucrats conform to U.S. interests. Any U.N. official who deviates from this unwritten rule can expect to have his or her reputation besmirched and career truncated.
So, while harshly critical of alleged abuses by the Syrian military, U.N. officials are notoriously silent when it comes to condemning the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Israel and other countries that have been “covertly” backing anti-government “rebels” who have engaged in grave crimes against humanity in Syria.
The U.S. and its allies have even mounted overt military operations inside Syrian territory, including airstrikes against the Syrian military and its allies, without permission of the internationally recognized government in Damascus. Yet, the U.N. does nothing to curtail or condemn these clear violations of its own Charter.
Breaking the Independence
The reason is that, for much of this century, the U.S. government has worked to bring key agencies, such as the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), under U.S. control and domination.
This drive to neutralize the U.N.’s independence gained powerful momentum after the 9/11 attacks and President George W. Bush’s launching of his “global war on terror.” But this effort continued under President Obama and now under President Trump.
In 2002, after opening the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and effectively waiving the Geneva Convention’s protections for prisoners of war, Bush bristled at criticism from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary C. Robinson.
Soon, Robinson was targeted for removal. Her fierce independence, which also included criticism of Israel, was unacceptable. The Bush administration lobbied hard against her reappointment, leading to her retirement in 2002.
Also, in 2002, the Bush administration engineered the firing of OPCW’s Director General Jose Mauricio Bustani who was viewed as an obstacle to the U.S. plans for invading Iraq.
Bustani, who had been reelected unanimously to the post less than a year earlier, described his removal in a 2013 interview with Marlise Simons of The New York Times, citing how Bush’s emissary, Under-Secretary of State John Bolton, marched into Bustani’s office and announced that he (Bustani) would be fired.
“The story behind [Bustani’s] ouster has been the subject of interpretation and speculation for years, and Mr. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, has kept a low profile since then,” wrote Simons. “But with the agency [OPCW] thrust into the spotlight with news of the Nobel [Peace] Prize [in October 2013], Mr. Bustani agreed to discuss what he said was the real reason: the Bush administration’s fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would conflict with Washington’s rationale for invading it. Several officials involved in the events, some speaking publicly about them for the first time, confirmed his account.”
The official U.S. explanation for getting rid of Bustani was incompetence, but Bustani and the other diplomats close to the case reported that Bustani’s real offense was drawing Iraq into acceptance of the OPCW’s conventions for eliminating chemical weapons, just as the Bush administration was planning to pin its propaganda campaign for invading Iraq on the country’s alleged secret stockpile of WMD.
Bustani’s ouster gave President Bush a clearer path to the invasion by letting him frighten Americans with the prospect of Iraq sharing its chemical weapons and possibly a nuclear bomb with Al Qaeda terrorists.
Dismissing Iraq’s insistence that it had destroyed its chemical weapons and didn’t have a nuclear weapons project, Bush launched the invasion in March 2003, only for the world to discover later that the Iraqi government was telling the truth.
Compliant Replacements
In comparison to the independent-minded Bustani, the biography of the current OPCW director general, Ahmet Uzumcu, a career Turkish diplomat, suggests that the OPCW could be expected to slant its case against the Syrian government in the current Syrian conflict.
Not only has Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, been a key player in supporting the proxy war to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but Uzumcu also served as Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, which has long sought regime change in Syria and has publicly come out in favor of the anti-government rebels.
Another one-time thorn in the side of the U.S. “unipolar power” was the IAEA when it was under the control of Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian. The IAEA challenged the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq having a nuclear program, when one really didn’t exist.
However, being right is no protection when U.S. officials want to bring an agency into line with U.S. policy and propaganda. So, early in the Obama administration – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing for a hardline on Iran over its nascent nuclear program – the U.S. government engineered the insertion of a pliable Japanese diplomat, Yukiya Amano, into the IAEA’s top job.
Before his appointment, Amano had portrayed himself as an independent-minded fellow who was resisting U.S.-Israeli propaganda about the Iranian nuclear program. Yet behind the scenes, he was meeting with U.S. and Israeli officials to coordinate on how to serve their interests (even though Israel is an actual rogue nuclear state, not a hypothetical or fictional one).
Amano’s professed doubts about an Iranian nuclear-bomb project, which even the U.S. intelligence community agreed no longer existed, was just a theatrical device to intensify the later impact if he were to declare that Iran indeed was building a secret nuke, thus justifying the desire of Israeli leaders and American neoconservatives to “bomb-bomb-bomb” Iran.
But this U.S. ploy was spoiled by Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning’s leaking of hundreds of thousands of pages of U.S. diplomatic cables. Among them were reports on Amano’s hidden collaboration with U.S. and Israeli officials; his agreement with U.S. emissaries on who to fire and who to retain among IAEA officials; and even Amano’s request for additional U.S. financial contributions.
The U.S. embassy cables revealing the truth about Amano were published by the U.K. Guardian in 2011 (although ignored by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream U.S. news outlets). Despite the silence of the major U.S. news media, Internet outlets, such as Consortiumnews.com, highlighted the Amano cables, meaning that enough Americans knew the facts not to be fooled again. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Manning Help Avert War with Iran?”]
A Collective Collapse
So, over the years, there has been a collective collapse of the independence at U.N.-related agencies. An international bureaucrat who gets on the wrong side of the United States or Israel can expect to be fired and humiliated, while those who play ball can be assured of a comfortable life as a “respected” diplomat.
But this reality is little known to most Americans so they are still inclined to be influenced when a “U.N. investigation” reaches some conclusion condemning some country that already is on the receiving end of negative U.S. propaganda.
The New York Times, CNN and other major U.S. news outlets are sure to trumpet these “findings” with great seriousness and respect and to treat any remaining doubters as outside the mainstream. Of course, there’s an entirely different response on the rare occasion when some brave or foolhardy human rights bureaucrat criticizes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Then, the U.N. finding is just a sign of anti-Israeli bias and should be discounted.
In the far more frequent cases when a U.N. report is in line with U.S. propaganda, American journalists almost never turn a critical eye toward the quality of the evidence or the leaps of logic. We saw that happen this week with a thinly sourced and highly dubious U.N. report blaming the Syrian government for an alleged sarin incident on April 4. A major contradiction in the evidence – testimony given to OPCW investigators undercutting the conclusion that a Syrian warplane could have dropped a sarin bomb – was brushed aside by the U.N. human rights investigators and was ignored by the Times and other major U.S. news outlets.
But what is perhaps most troubling is that these biased U.N. reports are now used to justify continued wars of aggression by stronger countries against weaker ones. So, instead of acting as a bulwark to protect the powerless from the powerful as the U.N. Charter intended, the U.N. bureaucracy has turned the original noble purpose of the institution on its head by becoming an enabler of the “supreme international crime,” wars of aggression.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
It seems that very little time passed after her defeat in the 2016 presidential election before Hillary Clinton decided that the world had waited long enough for her understanding of that defeat. Advance copies of her new book, which will be released to the public on September 12, have been made available to select readers (this writer NOT being one of them), and some pearls of wisdom have been disclosed.
Let’s look first at a bit of history. Clinton has long been seen as the power behind the throne, beginning with orchestrating her husband’s comeback after his defeat for re-election as governor of Arkansas. Perhaps it was then that the taste of power proved so overwhelming as to become almost an obsession.
Yet it wasn’t only power that drove her; the pursuit of wealth has long been a motivating force for the former First Lady. From questionable investments with her husband’s donors back in their Arkansas days, to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for single speeches to corporate leaders, Clinton learned that money and power go hand-in-hand, and are an irresistible combination.
Her time as the United States’ First Lady was not uneventful; she worked on President Clinton’s failed health care policy, and became the first First Lady in history to testify before a grand jury. Then, toward the conclusion of her husband’s second term, she ‘surprised’ all and sundry by announcing what absolutely everyone expected: that she would seek a Senate seat in New York.
Although there was some criticism that she undercut NY elected officials who might otherwise have run, and that her main claim to fame was that she was married to a president, the voters of NY installed her as their junior senator.
From there, it seemed, it would be just a hop, skip and a jump to the White House, and in 2007, again surprising no one, she announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The road to the White House seemed clear.
It did, at least, until that upstart from Illinois entered the picture. With his youth, newness to the national scene, opposition to the war that Clinton had voted for, and a gift for oratory, it wasn’t long until Senator Barack Obama vanquished candidate Clinton, was nominated and elected, becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency.
But like a good corporate soldier, Clinton got on board, endorsing him at the convention, and campaigning for him. She then served as his Secretary of State, assisting him in destabilizing the Middle East, killing countless people and engendering more hatred toward the U.S.
As President Obama’s second term drew to a close, all was in place for her coronation. But Clinton is nothing if not pragmatic. She knew that there were large swaths of the electorate – Republican, Democratic and Independent – who despised the very sight of her. There might even be a sufficient number of them to deny her the nomination! What was a corrupt, power-hungry candidate to do?
Enter, the ‘Super Delegates’. While the primary season is ostensibly the time for the members of each party to indicate their choice for the party’s nomination, such trivialities as democracy and the will of the people must not stand in the way of the mighty Hillary Clinton. No, let the peons have their fun, voting in those little booths with the curtains, believing that pulling the lever actually means something. Behind the scenes, the Democratic Party would allow the head honchos to be king-makers, or rather, queen-makers, thwarting the will of the people, and doing the will of Clinton.
And, just to be sure, recruit Florida ‘Representative’ Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee (she was later forced to resign), to further tip the scales in Clinton’s favor, sealing the fate of the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
It seemed like the stars were all aligning for a Clinton coronation: the deck stacked in the Democratic Party, and the Republicans actually nominating Donald Trump – DONALD TRUMP! – as their candidate. Certainly, any wayward Democrats, those who had voted for Sanders, along with many Republicans and all Independents, would vote the Clinton ticket to prevent such a travesty as a Trump presidency.
Alas, no. Election night came and went, and with it, the dreams and aspirations of Hillary Clinton. True, she did receive the popular vote, but there does seem to be some kind of poetic justice in knowing that the system defeated her, after she manipulated her system, the Democratic Party, to defeat Bernie Sanders.
And now, according to information from her much-anticipated book, Clinton has pointed the finger of blame at Sanders, and former FBI director James Comey, who had the audacity to question Clinton’s use of private email servers when doing highly confidential government business. The blame is to be attributed anywhere but to the person to whom it rightly belongs (check out the mirror, Hillary).
Oh, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!
But let’s do a reality check, just for a moment.
As was mentioned, Clinton was perhaps the most polarizing candidate in modern history. There are those on one side who see her as a savior, a beacon of hope, showing that the glass ceiling can be destroyed, and all can be made right in the world, if only she can assume her destiny as President of the United States.
On the other side of the coin, however, are those who hold strongly to the belief that she is evil incarnate, the devil in a pantsuit, and there is no one, no, not even Donald Trump, who would be worse and more dangerous in the White House than she.
What could she have done differently? We’ll make a short list:
Not manipulate Democratic Party nominating rules to skew the results.
Avoid the ‘race car’ image; we all know how racing cars are covered with the logos and names of the companies that sponsor them. While Clinton stopped short of actually wearing such logos, she was as beholden to U.S. corporate giants as any racecar driver.
At least give the appearance that she cares about the working, and non-working, man and woman. Supporting every corporate scheme ever introduced, and hob-nobbing with millionaires and billionaires, makes it difficult to portray oneself as a champion of the people.
Give some attention to the wants and needs of U.S. citizens. Filling the coffers of the so-called charitable ‘Clinton Foundation’ with millions of dollars in donations from foreign countries does not support this concept
Of course, for Hillary Rodham Clinton to accomplish these tasks, she would need to be a different person. Not a new life script, but a new leading lady. Leopards cannot change their spots. There are numerous other pithy clichés that could be used, but we will spare the reader; he/she can come up with enough of their own.
If anyone thought that Clinton would fade into the woodwork after her Electoral College defeat, they were sadly mistaken. As long as there is money to be made, and the possibility, however remote, of grasping the seat of ultimate U.S. power, she will continue to make herself heard. Heaven help us all!
Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).
SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.
*****
The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.
The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.
It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.
In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.
In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.
Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.
Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.
The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.
Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.
In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.
All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).
Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.
A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.
When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.
When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.
Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.
The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.
Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.
The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.
Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.
The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.
First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.
Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).
Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.1
In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.
That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.
Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.
There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.
The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.
Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.
It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.
For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.
I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.
The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.
Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government2,3, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.4
Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.5 They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.
The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:
being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
being induced to commit suicide
being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage
The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.
No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.
For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.5
These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.6
Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.
As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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So where is all this leading? To the fabled Mexican standoff that’s where. Regarding the issue of lethal arms. The Ukrainians already have these – they have been and were supplied covertly through the Baltics and Poland (naturally Poland) during the earlier period of the war 2014-2016. The Ukrainian Army (UAF) has been trained and equipped by NATO and has 200,000 men under arms, mostly wretched conscripts, who would rather be somewhere else, but with some more effective punitive neo-Nazi units. At present, there are all sorts of rumours circulating of a supposedly imminent invasion of the Don Bass by a rejuvenated Ukrainian military. Maybe, but in the past these rumours have generally come to nothing. But be sure that if this turns out to be the case it will be an American decision, not Poroshenko’s who is a US/NATO puppet. However, the US investment in the training and arming of UAF is no guarantee of battlefield effectiveness; the US also trained and equipped the Georgian Army as well as the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) both of whom who hardly distinguished themselves in the heat of battle.
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