Two British newspaper bosses claim that national security services prevented them from publishing allegations of a government pedophile ring in the 1980s on the grounds that it was intelligence that might damage national security.
The executives were issued with the D-notices in 1984, when they were due to print damning details enclosed in a dossier on the child sex abuse scandal handed to them by former Labour minister, Barbara Castle.
Officials say that no records of the media blackout notices can be found however, leading investigators into the case to believe that they were destroyed, further heightening suspicions of a government cover-up.
Security officials said that files “going back beyond 20 years are not complete because files are reviewed and correspondence of a routine nature with no historical significance destroyed.”
However, the security services deny a whitewash.
“I cannot believe that past D-notice secretaries would have countenanced the destruction of any key documents. I can only repeat that while any attempted cover-up of this incident might have been attributed to a D-notice the truth would be that it was not,” a spokesperson for the unit that handles D-notices said.
The case, which was finally exposed in June of this year, relates to a number of prominent politicians and security chiefs under Margaret Thatcher’s government who repeatedly sexually and physically abused young boys, holding ‘sex parties’ in a central London residence.
This month, a man who claims to have been a victim of the ring, revealed that he saw a Conservative Member of Parliament murder a young boy during one of these depraved sex parties, and that two other boys were killed by the gang.
London’s Metropolitan Police say they are taking the man’s account seriously and are now investigating a “possible homicide.”
After 30 years of gathering dust in the National Archives, the declassification of secret government files has revealed how far Margaret Thatcher and the Tory government went to ensure defeat of the 1984-85 miners‘ strike.
Among the chilling revelations are how they considered declaring a state of emergency and using troops to move coal, despite official government denials about their use, and material exposing the undeclared civil war the ruling class conducted against Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.
Although much of the ‘new’ material has slowly leaked out in recent years, or was widely suspected in advance of its release, these papers significantly confirm how close Thatcher and the Tories came to defeat in July and October 1984.
Victory possible
It underlines that if the Labour and trade union leaders had given full support to the miners, then at least a partial victory would have been won that could have helped stem the tide of job losses and closures.
The Socialist Party’s 2004 book on the strike, A Civil War without Guns, details much of what has been confirmed in the Cabinet papers – particularly the wobbles that Thatcher had around the time of the proposed docks strike in July and the Nacods [the colliery deputies and under-officials’ union] ballot for action in October.
Yet, as Thatcher wobbled, the book also showed that it was the right-wing leaders of the trade union movement and Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who came to her aid and allowed her to gain ultimate victory.
These new documents further confirm how historically justified the miners’ struggle was to defend their communities.
Britain’s coal industry would have been slashed to half its former size, at a stroke in 1984, had they not conducted their strike.
Lies and conspiracies
The newly released papers conclusively confirm the existence of a conspiratorial plan to close 75 pits and axe more than 60,000 jobs in the industry, something vehemently denied at the time. The Tory government and National Coal Board (NCB) always claimed that only 20 or so collieries were to close – an argument desperately repeated by the media and right wing in the labour movement to undermine the miners’ struggle.
NUM leader Arthur Scargill, the majority of the miners, and their supporters, knew that the government and NCB were lying, that the ‘economic’ justification for pit closures was rigged, and that the real number of job losses and pit closures was going to be far higher if they didn’t fight in 1984.
Critics of Scargill and the miners, like multi-millionaire former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, also choose to forget that the spark that started the strike at Cortonwood, South Yorkshire, in March 1984 was because the NCB had blatantly flouted the nationally agreed pit closure procedure.
This was a clear signal that the NCB – on behalf of the government – would move to a rapid downsizing of the industry on a scale unseen before. It also showed that the traditional negotiation platforms open to the unions were going to be brutally shunted aside.
While it may not be such a great revelation that Thatcher lied over the closure plans and other matters, the extent of the conspiracies and ‘abuse’ of power conducted by the prime minister and her allies exposed in these official documents is breathtaking.
It confirms the malicious cruelty of the British ruling class, epitomised by the former Tory chancellor during the strike, Nigel Lawson.
He said that preparation for the strike – in effect to de-industrialise Britan, because of the fear of trade union militancy – was “just like rearming to face the threat of Hitler in the 1930s”.
It was always widely suspected that NCB chairman MacGregor and Thatcher were colluding with senior politicians from all sides, civil servants, right-wing union leaders and media bosses to demonise the miners and win the dispute.
Now it is there on record of how far they went – a black and white confirmation of the preparations today’s activists seriously need to make to win future workers’ struggles.
In an important April 16 Russia Today op-ed piece, British investigative radio journalist Tony Gosling finally broached the media taboo against identifying the Iron Lady’s influential behind-the-scenespro-Israel “advisor” dubbed “the man in the shadows”:
The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy ‘advisory’ role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity’s Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, to be behind London’s top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned ‘Paying for Local Government’ the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London’s Poll Tax revolt of 1381.
And according to the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Lord Victor also initiated the sacking in 1987 of the last independent-minded Director General of the BBC, a castration from which the corporation never quite recovered.
One word captures the essence of the Thatcher legacy; ‘privatisation‘. As an exasperated former Tory Prime Minster Harold Macmillan put it “she’s selling off the family silver!”. And so tens of mind-boggling billions of pounds of silver were auctioned off to the highest bidders, mostly to Rothschild’s kith and kin. From shipyards and public housing to telephones, steel, oil, gas and water, anyone in the world was free to own the infrastructure and manufacturing heart of Britain that was once collectively ‘ours’. [emphasis added]
So, the next time you hear someone bemoan the consequences of “Thatcherism,” just tell them that the predictably oligarch-benefiting ideology should more accurately be called “Rothschildism.” Or if, like me, you’re in Japan, you could explain that the much-touted “Abenomics” — a deferential reference to Thatcherism’s “Chicago model” -based American counterpart “Reaganomics” — is simply the latest disastrous reincarnation of “Zionomics.”
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.
Former South African President and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela passed away Thursday evening at the age of 95 and eulogies from world leaders began to appear soon after his death.
US President Barack Obama was one of the world leaders who paid their glowing tribute to South Africa’s anti-apartheid legend.
“We’ve lost one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with,” the US President said. “He no longer belongs to us, he belongs to the ages … His commitment to transfer power and reconcile with those who jailed him set an example that all humanity should aspire to.”
Nevertheless, it was not until 2008 that the US government removed Mandela’s name from its terrorism watch list.
Following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when forces of South Africa’s apartheid regime shot 69 people dead in protests in the township of Sharpeville, Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was banned.
The apartheid regime designated the ANC as a terrorist organization because it fought against the regime’s apartheid system which legalized racial discrimination from 1948 to 1994.
The apartheid system banned the black people from voting, traveling without permission, or even possessing land.
In 1987, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also described Mandela’s ANC as a “typical terrorist organization.”
The US State Department under the presidency of Ronald Reagan also deemed Mandela’s ANC a terrorist organization and Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 passed by US Congress. Reagan’s veto was later overridden by Congress.
Eyebrows have been raised around the world to see Brits in their thousands dancing through the night in spontaneous street parties following the death of 1980s Prime Minister ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher.
As the nickname suggests, she had a fearsome reputation round the world for hitting hard for Britain, but at home it was a different story. In the industrial North most knew several families who lost their livelihood on her watch. Londoners saw ominous shifting sands, homeless youngsters begging on the streets whom her regime had turned it’s back on.
The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy ‘advisory’ role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity’s Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, to be behind London’s top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned ‘Paying for Local Government’ the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London’s Poll Tax revolt of 1381.
And according to the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Lord Victor also initiated the sacking in 1987 of the last independent-minded Director General of the BBC, a castration from which the corporation never quite recovered.
One word captures the essence of the Thatcher legacy; ‘privatisation’. As an exasperated former Tory Prime Minster Harold Macmillan put it “she’s selling off the family silver!”. And so tens of mind-boggling billions of pounds of silver were auctioned off to the highest bidders, mostly to Rothschild’s kith and kin. From shipyards and public housing to telephones, steel, oil, gas and water, anyone in the world was free to own the infrastructure and manufacturing heart of Britain that was once collectively ‘ours’.
Was this to pay the USA Lend-Lease second world war debts? To repay Britain’s humiliating 1976 IMF loan? Or simply to fill the hole left in the national accounts after Thatcher dropped income tax on Britain’s richest by more than half from 83% to 40%? Or was it just daylight robbery? When she refused to join the EMU, the forerunner to the vice-like Euro, she was promptly knifed in the back by those who sing her praises today.
Since Thatcher, City institutions have bought up much of our politics and mass media, leaving a post-industrial wasteland ‘museum’ of a nation where the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently estimated six-and-a-half million British adults are being cruelly blamed, punished and made destitute for ‘not wanting’ full-time jobs, that don’t exist.
Today the cracks that Margaret and Victor’s turbo-charged crowbar opened up have become a chasm which is reawakening this nation’s anger at injustice. The £10 million of taxpayers money being spent on Lady Thatcher’s state funeral, by the millionaires for the millionaires, is rubbing salt in the wounds. Hundreds of thousands of Britons who know right from wrong will turn away and raise a solemn glass to the damnation of Margaret Thatcher and her ‘rehabilitation of greed’ this week, demanding better. The sleeping giant of the British public is rousing from its slumber.
As millionaire Prime Minister David Cameron reads the Christian eulogy at Lady Thatcher’s lavish funeral, those of Britain’s ruling class who still have something resembling a conscience will do well to heed them.
Britain’s first woman Prime Minister – the Margaret Thatcher timeline
1925 October 13 – Margaret Thatcher is born in the market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire 1947 – Thatcher graduates from Oxford with a Chemistry degree 1954 June 1 – Qualifies as a lawyer 1970 – Enters the Cabinet as Education Secretary 1975 February 11 – Elected Conservative Party leader, beating Edward Heath. 1975-9 – Leader of the Opposition 1979 May 4 – The Conservative Party wins the general election, Thatcher succeeds James Callaghan as PM 1979 December 13 – Abolition of Exchange Controls 1980 – Buses deregulated and bus routes privatised 1980 – British Aerospace partly privatised 1980 – April – Local Government stopped from building council homes and tenants given the right to buy 1981 – March Prisoners at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison go on hunger strike to regain status as political prisoners 1981 – April-July Urban rioting in Brixton in London, Toxteth in Liverpool and St. Pauls in Bristol. 1982 – January Unemployment tops 3 million 1982 – April-June Falklands War 1983 – Associated British Ports (ABP) privatised 1983 – British Shipbuilding privatised 1983 June 9 – Second term as PM begins; the Conservatives secure a landslide election victory 1984-5 – Miners strike, amid the closure and privatisation of coal mines 1984 – British Leyland car manufacturers privatised 1984 October 12 – Narrowly escapes death after the IRA bombs the Conservative party conference in Brighton, killing 5 1984 November – British Telecom (BT) the old Post Office Telecommunications is privatised 1985 – Attempted suppression of former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s autobiography ‘Spycatcher’ which is then published in Australia & Scotland. 1985 June 1 – Battle Of The Beanfield, Britain’s traveller peace convoy destroyed near Stonehenge, Wiltshire by violent police action as recorded in the ‘Operation Solstice’ documentary 1986 – January Wapping dispute as Rupert Murdoch embraces electronic publishing and breaks the power of print unions, depicted in the documentary ‘Despite The Sun’ 1986 – British Airports Authority (BAA) privatised 1986 – March Abolition of Ken Livingstone’s opposition Labour controlled Greater London Council or GLC 1986 October 27 – Big Bang deregulation of the City of London financial sector which many believe contributed to the 2008 financial crisis 1986 December – British Gas privatised 1987 January – After several TV and radio programmes critical of the Thatcher government Victor Rothschild & Marmaduke Hussey sack BBC Director General Alasdair Milne 1987 February – British Airways privatised 1987 – Majority share in British Petroleum (BP) privatised 1987 – Rolls Royce aero engines privatised 1987 June 11 – Wins third term as Prime Minister 1988 – British Steel privatised 1989 – British Aerospace fully privatised 1989 – Water Boards privatised 1990 – The Electricity Act began the complex privatisation of electricity (except nuclear) 1990 March 31 – Poll tax riots culminate in a 200,000 strong march on central London, as portrayed in The Battle Of Trafalgar documentary 1990 October 30 – Thatcher No!, No!, No! speech in Commons makes it clear she is set against European Monetary and Political Union 1990 November 13 – Geoffrey Howe resigns in protest at Thatcher’s refusal to agree a timetable for European Monetary Union 1990 November 14 – Former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine challenges Margaret Thatcher for the party leadership 1990 November 28 – Thatcher resigns, despite having won the first ballot. She is succeeded by John Major 1992 – Thatcher leaves the House of Commons, joins the Lords as Baroness Thatcher 1994 – Praises Tony Blair and New Labour as her proudest achievement 2013 April 8 – Lady Thatcher dies in The Ritz hotel owned by Daily Telegraph proprietors the Barclay twins.
Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death yesterday brought waves of mostly flattering coverage of the divisive right-wing leader. It was striking to see the parallels between the way Thatcher was covered on the PBS NewsHour and Fox News Channel‘s most popular show, the O’Reilly Factor. Though some people like to think that PBS and Fox couldn’t be further apart, they were basically singing the same tune.
The main Thatcher segment on the PBS newscast was a discussion with two former Republican secretaries of State, George Shultz and James Baker. Of course, both were big fans of Thatcher’s foreign policy (which was closely aligned with their own priorities during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years). It was more than that, too; as Baker put it, Thatcher “emphasized the private sector and got rid of the oppressive influence of the trade unions.” And Shultz explained that Thatcher “was a very attractive woman. So you were certainly aware of that.”
PBS had one other guest: former Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who cheered both Thatcher’s defeat of unions but also her humanity: “It’s kind of touching to be reminded of what a lovely woman she was.”
On the O’Reilly show, the host paid tribute to Thatcher’s leadership, contrasting it with Barack Obama’s tenure. As O’Reilly declared:
Her accomplishments are many, but she was always a very controversial figure in her own country and here in America, because the British press and the American media are liberal and always have been.
Later in the show, he was joined by conservatives Brit Hume and Bernard Goldberg; ironically, the latter segment focused on the alleged hostility to Thatcher in the mainstream media. So the guest line-ups were more alike than different. But so was some of the reporting. On Fox, Thatcher rescued Britain from the clutches of an oppressive union movement, and the record speaks for itself. As O’Reilly put it:
In Britain, 13 percent unemployment…. That’s a catastrophe, 13 percent, all right. When she leaves office eight years later, 5.8 percent unemployment. But if the unemployment rate drops 7 percent, which means all those millions of people are working under this woman, give her some credit.
And he put it a different way:
In 1982, about two and a half years into her term, unemployment in Great Britain was 13 percent. It’s chaos, absolute chaos there. When she left office in 1990, she was the longest serving prime minister in British history. It was at 5.8 percent.
On PBS, meanwhile, reporter Margaret Warner declared that Thatcher “brought a free market revolution to Britain, lowering taxes and privatizing state industries…. Britain’s economy rebounded from her tough medicine.”
Neither report gives viewers a good sense of Thatcher’s economic policy. (The wording in the PBS segment about rebounding from medicine is difficult to comprehend.) The Guardiancompiled a list of economic indicators during Thatcher’s tenure; the short story is that inequality increased, and so did poverty–from 13.4 percent in 1979 to 22.2 percent in 1990.
O’Reilly is correct that unemployment dropped during part of Thatcher’s time in office; it also skyrocketed the first two years. When she left office in 1990, it was, according to the Guardian‘s figures, higher than when she took office. If that’s the record, then one would imagine it would be reflected somewhere–perhaps not at Fox News, for ideological reasons. But PBS is supposed to be about giving us the views that we’re not getting from the commercial media.
Margaret Thatcher died Monday, April 8, 2013, at the age of 87. While there is no dearth of hagiographic profiles of the former British Prime Minister in the mainstream press and scathing vitriol elsewhere, it should be remembered that, throughout her career, Thatcher was a staunch supporter of many of the world’s most brutal regimes, propping up and arming war criminals and dictators in service to Western imperialism, anti-Communism and neoliberal hegemony.
Throughout the 1980s, Thatcher’s government backed Iraq during its war against Iran, funneling weapons and equipment to Saddam Hussein in contravention of both international law and British policy, all the way up until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. She even sent Christmas cards to both Saddam and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1981.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a review of some of her other pals…
The Shah of Iran and Margaret Thatcher, 1978
In April 1978, prior to her ascension to Prime Minister, Thatcher visited the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in Tehran where she praised him as “one of the world’s most far-sighted statesmen, whose experience is unrivaled.”
Despite the popular protests against the Shah occurring across Iran with increasing frequency, Thatcher said of her host, “No other world leader has given his country more dynamic leadership. He is leading Iran through a twentieth century renaissance.” Exactly one month before her visit, street protests in over 55 Iranian cities resulted in the killing of more than 100 civilians, when police opened fire on the crowds.
Iran “holds a key strategic position in the defence of the Western World,” Thatcher continued, “Her strength and resolve are vital to our future.” She added, “Iran has been the West’s most resolute and stalwart ally in this crucial region.”
Upon his overthrow the following February, the Shah expressed his desire to seek asylum in England at his lavish country estate in Surrey. While the British government at the time wound up secretly helping the Shah make his way from Morocco to the Bahamas, it rejected his request to enter the UK.
Thatcher, who became Prime Minister soon thereafter, respected the decision of her predecessor for political reasons, but was “deeply unhappy” that Britain could not offer sanctuary to Pahlavi, whom she called a “firm and helpful friend.”
A longtime supporter of the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, Thatcher once received a memo from the UK Foreign Office referring to Mubarak as “no intellectual but… always friendly and cheerful,” noting that while “apt to express simplistic views, he has become an experienced and accomplished political operator.” The brief continued, “His affable exterior evidently conceals a degree of ruthlessness since it seems likely that he has conducted some successful political infighting to maintain his position” having “succeeded in ousting or at least surviving all other prominent figures in the government or armed forces.”
“Nevertheless his reputation is free of any taint of corruption or malpractice and he is not thought to have made many enemies,” the memo said of Mubarak, adding that he was “eager to improve relations with the Royal Air Force and to buy British [military] equipment.”
Over the years of her leadership, Thatcher routinely commended Mubarak for his “courage” and “strength.” In 1985, at a banquet in Cairo, she said she “admire[d] particularly, Mr. President, the leadership which you personally… have shown.” Five years later, while hosting Mubarak and his wife at No. 10 Downing Street, Thatcher declared, “You are among our very favourite visitors because we all know you as particularly good and close friends of this country, as we are of Egypt,” and once again expressed her admiration for the Egyptian president, this time for his “incredible energy.”
“You are as full of beans as ever,” she said. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people over the next 11 years, thanks largely to American and British largesse, she was right.
Thatcher was a steadfast defender of Augusto Pinochet, whose unspeakably brutal dictatorship of torture and repression terrorized Chile from 1973 to 1990. She visited Pinochet in 1999 during his house arrest in England, saying that her country “owed” him “a great debt” of gratitude for his help during the 1982 Falklands War.
Without any sense of irony, Thatcher added, “I’m also very much aware that it is you who brought democracy to Chile.”
Never one to mention his appalling human rights record, Thatcher expressed her “outrage at the callous and unjust treatment” of Pinochet during a speech that October at the Conservative Party Conference, called him “this country’s only political prisoner,” and hailed him as Britain’s “staunch, true friend in our time of need” and “who stopped the communists taking Chile.”
The next year, upon his release and return to Chile, for which she fought tirelessly, Thatcher sent Pinochet a silver Armada dish as a gift, condemned his detention in England as “a great injustice” and wished the deposed dictator and his family “all good wishes for a peaceful and secure future.”
When Pinochet died six years later, Thatcher said she was “deeply saddened” by his passing.
Subsequently, Robin Harris, a former official in Thatcher’s administration, wrote in The Telegraph that Thatcher “took a positive view of Pinochet’s 17 years in power” and “would not have spoken up for him if she had believed him a monster. She could not judge the merits of every allegation. But, clearly, the legal case against him was weak and the motivation of those involved suspect.”
Harris similarly praised Pinochet for “[leaving] behind a stable democracy,” concluding that “Margaret Thatcher has nothing to be ashamed of in defending Augusto Pinochet, when others refused to do so” and that Pinochet “was lucky to find such a champion.”
In March 1987, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, visited Thatcher. Beforehand, Thatcher said in an interview, “Relations between Saudi Arabia and Britain are excellent. We have common interests in peace and stability in the Middle East. The Al Yamamah Project for the sale of Tornado and other aircraft to Saudi Arabia has done much to focus Saudi attention on Britain and British attention on Saudi Arabia.”
The Al Yamamah arms deal, signed a year and a half earlier, was “the biggest export transaction in British history, estimated by a British Aerospace executive in 2005 to be worth £83 billion in past and future sales to Saudi Arabia of military hardware including aircraft ranging from Tornado fighters and Hawk trainer jets to Eurofighter Typhoons,” in addition to a wide range of arms, naval vessels, radar, spare parts, and a pilot-training program.
The deal was largely the result of Thatcher’s own lobbying initiative on behalf of the British defense industry and weapons manufacturers and, ever since its signing, allegations of corruption, fraud and bribery have abounded.
In 1993, in a speech to a Chatham House Conference on Saudi Arabia after leaving office, Thatcher maintained that “[o]ne of Al Yamamah’s achievements has been the training and equipping of the Royal Saudi Air Force by Britain. Both training and aircraft were put to the test of wartime combat far sooner than anyone expected. As we now know, both the aircraft and their RSAF pilots performed superbly in Operation Desert Storm.” She continued, “The Al Yamamah programme has continued steadily since the conflict. When this year’s new order of a further 48 Tornado aircraft for the RSAF has been executed it will be safe to say that Saudi Arabia will have one of the strongest and most effective Air Forces in the world.”
Beyond this, Thatcher described the kingdom as “a peace loving nation” and a “modern miracle,” touting its “domestic achievements” and the “stable framework” and “solid rock of a well established and respected monarchy.”
“We are strong partners in trade and defence. We share great strategic interests,” she said.
Regarding Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Thatcher was silent. “I have no intention of meddling in that country’s internal affairs,” she insisted. “It is one of my firmest beliefs that although there are certain basic standards and goals we should expect from every member of the international community, the precise pace and approach must reflect different societies’ cultural, social, economic and historical backgrounds. And Saudi Arabia, in particular, is a complex society which Westerners do not often fully comprehend.”
Again, without even the slightest hint of irony, Thatcher – in the very same speech – noted, “It is the surest signal to other dictators that the West lacks the resolve to defend justice. We have yet to see its full consequences — our lack of effective action will return to haunt us.” She was talking about Bosnia.
While Thatcher maintained throughout her political that she “loathe[d] apartheid and everything connected with it,” she referred to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, as “a typical terrorist organization” and refused, alongside Ronald Reagan, to back sanctions against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. “In my view, isolation will lead only to an increasingly negative and intransigent attitude in the part of white South African,” she said in December 1977.
In 1984, Thatcher invited South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha to visit London, the first such visit in 23 years, sparking understandable outrage in the anti-Apartheid movement. The next year, the Associated Press reported that she “rejected demands by the opposition Labor Party that she meet with Oliver Tambo, leader of the African National Congress guerrilla movement, who is visiting Britain…on grounds he espouses violence.”
“I do not accept that apartheid is the root of violence… nor do most other people,” Thatcher insisted and, during a speech before Parliament, stated that Botha’s “South African government has taken more steps to start dismantling apartheid than any of their predecessors.”
“I can see little point in sanctions creating more unemployment in this country only to create more unemployment in South Africa… It seems to me a ridiculous policy that would not work,” she added.
Five years later, during the last gasps of Apartheid, Thatcher was still opposing sanctions. In 2006, Tory leader (and now British Prime Minister) David Cameron apologized for Thatcher’s actions.
In response to her death today, Oliver Tambo’s son Dali told the press, “My gut reaction now is what it was at the time when she said my father was the leader of a terrorist organisation. I don’t think she ever got it that every day she opposed sanctions, more people were dying, and that the best thing for the assets she wanted to protect was democracy,” adding, “It’s a shame that we could never call her one of the champions of the liberation struggle. Normally we say that when one of us goes, the ANC ancestors will meet them at the pearly gates and give them a standing ovation. I think it’s quite likely that when Margaret Thatcher reaches the pearly gates, the ANC will boycott the occasion.”
In the midst of the bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor, Thatcher visited genocidal Indonesian dictator General Suharto, praised Indonesia’s “agricultural and industrial development” and, although East Timorese had been killed, starved, disappeared and herded into “resettlement camps” as part of Suharto’s “encirclement and annihilation” campaign, dismissed allegations of human rights abuses, explaining that East Timor was none of Britain’s business and that Suharto himself has “assured me that the International Red Cross not only had access to East Timor, but was very welcome there.”
She told the press, “Trade brings us together and identifies our interests, and I am sure that trade between Indonesia and Britain will increase as a result of the very friendly and warm atmosphere created by my visit here. We are clearly the best of friends and there is no sounder basis on which to construct future collaboration.”
In 2008, veteran journalist John Pilger recalled that Thatcher referred to Suharto as, “One of our very best and most valuable friends,” and how, “[f]or three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica ‘riot control’ vehicles.”
“A Foreign Office speciality was smearing witnesses to the bombing of East Timorese villages by British-supplied Hawk aircraft – until Robin Cook was forced to admit it was true. Almost a billion pounds in export credit guarantees financed the sale of the Hawks, paid for by the British taxpayer while the arms industry reaped the profit,” Pilger adds.
With this kind of record, it is clear that Thatcher’s constantly pledged support for “freedom and democracy” was really a violent, imperial campaign waged for free markets and domination.
The Durham Miners’ Association is celebrating the death of Baroness Thatcher as a “great day” for coal miners, local media reported.
“It looks like one of the best birthdays I have ever had. There’s no sympathy from me for what she did to our community. She destroyed our community, our villages and our people”, said David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association.
“For the union this could not come soon enough and I’m pleased that I have outlived her. It’s a great day for all the miners, I imagine we will have a counter demonstration when they have her funeral”, he added.
“Our children have got no jobs and the community is full of problems. There’s no work and no money and it’s very sad the legacy she has left behind”, Hopper said.
“She absolutely hated working people and I have got very bitter memories of what she did. She turned all the nation against us and the violence that was meted out on us was terrible. I would say to those people who want to mourn her that they’re lucky she did not treat them like she treated us.”
Darren Vaines, 47, a former miner who worked at Ackton Hall Colliery near Pontefract, West Yorkshire, and was on strike for the entire 12 months of the dispute.
“It’s a very strange emotional feeling because her death brings back a lot of memories and opens up a wound that has never really healed. The cut went so deep people have never been able to forget about it. It’s something they can never get out of their system”, he said.
Chris Kitchen, general secretary for the National Union of Miners, said: “We’ve been waiting for a long time to hear the news of Baroness Thatcher’s demise and I can’t say I’m sorry.
“I’ve got no sympathy for Margaret Thatcher and I will not be shedding a tear for her. She’s done untold damage to the mining community. I don’t think Margaret Thatcher had any sympathy for the mining communities she decimated, the people she threw on the dole and the state she left the country in.”
Hours after the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the history books are being re-written and the beatification of the Iron Lady is well underway.
Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having “saved Britain” and for making the has-been colonial power “great again”.
Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a “special friend”.
Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of “an historic world figure”. Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.
Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.
So, here is a people’s history of Thatcher’s legacy.
She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch’s squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano, by a British submarine.
By declaring war, rather than conducting political negotiations with Argentina over Britain’s ongoing colonial possession of the Malvinas, Thatcher salvaged her waning public support in Britain, and the bloodletting helped catapult her into a second term of office in Downing Street. Her political “greatness” that so many Western leaders now eulogize was therefore paid in part by the lives of Argentine and British soldiers, and by bequeathing an ongoing source of conflict in the South Atlantic.
It wasn’t just foreigners that Thatcher declared war on. Armed with her snake-oil economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, unleashing finance capitalism, pump-priming the rich with tax awards subsidised by the ordinary working population, Thatcher declared war on the British people themselves. She famously proclaimed that “there was no such thing as society” and went on to oversee an explosion in the gap between rich and poor and the demolition of social conditions in Britain. That legacy has been amplified by both successive Conservative and Labour governments and is central to today’s social meltdown in Britain – more than two decades after Thatcher resigned. Laughably, David Cameron, a protégé of Thatcher, claims that she “saved” Britain. The truth is Thatcher accelerated the sinking of British capitalism and society at large. What she ordered for the Belgrano has in a very real way come to be realised for British society at large.
During her second term of office in the mid-1980s, the Iron Lady declared war on the “enemy within”. She was referring to Britain’s strongly unionised coal-mining industry. Imagine declaring war on your own population. That is a measure of her pathological intolerance towards others who did not happen to share her obnoxious ideological views – ideological views that have since become exposed as intellectually and morally bankrupt.
For over a year around 1984, her Orwellian mindset and policies starved mining communities in the North of England into submission. Her use of paramilitary police violence also broke the resolve and legitimate rights of these communities. Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill would later be vindicated in the eyes of ordinary people, if not in the eyes of the mainstream media. Britain’s coalmines were systematically shut down, thousands of workers would be made unemployed, and entire communities were thrown on the social scrap heap. All this violence and misery was the price for Thatcher’s ideological war against working people and their political rights.
The class war that Thatcher unleashed in Britain is still raging. The rich have become richer, the poor decidedly more numerous and poorer. The decimation of workers’ rights and the unfettered power given to finance capital were hallmarks of Thatcher’s legacy and are to this day hallmarks of Britain’s current social decay. But that destructive legacy goes well beyond Britain. The rightwing nihilistic capitalism that Thatcher gave vent to was and became a zeitgeist for North America, Europe and globally. The economic malaise that is currently plaguing the world can be traced directly to such ideologues as Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan.
A final word on Thatcher’s real legacy, as opposed to the fakery from fellow war criminals, is her role in Ireland’s conflict. Her epitaph of “Iron Lady” is often said with admiration or even sneaking regard for her supposed virtues of determination and strength. In truth, her “iron” character was simply malevolent, as can be seen from her policies towards the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. In 1981, 10 Irish republican prisoners, led by a young Belfast man by the name of Bobby Sands, died from hunger strikes. The men died after more than 50 days of refusing prison food because they were demanding to be treated as political prisoners, not as criminals. Thatcher refused to yield to their demands, denouncing them as criminals and callously claiming that they “took their own lives”. No matter that Bobby Sands had been elected by tens of thousands of Irish voters to the British House of Parliament during his hunger strike. He was merely a criminal who deserved to die, according to the cold, unfeeling Thatcher.
As a result of Thatcher’s intransigence to negotiate Irish rights, the violence in the North of Ireland would escalate over the next decade, claiming thousands of lives. As with Las Malvinas dispute with Argentina, Thatcher deliberately took the military option and, with that, countless lives, rather than engage in reasoned, mutual dialogue. Her arrogance and obduracy blinded her to any other possibility.
As the violence gyrated in Ireland, Thatcher would also embrace the criminal policy of colluding with pro-British death squads. Armed, funded and directed by British intelligence, these death squads would in subsequent years kill hundreds of innocent people – with the knowledge and tacit approval of Lady Thatcher. It was a policy of British state terrorism in action, sanctioned by Thatcher. One of those victims was Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane, who was murdered in February 1989. He was shot 12 times in the head in front of his wife and children by a British death squad, after the killers smashed their way into the Finucane home on a Sunday afternoon.
Thus whether in her dealings with the Las Malvinas row with Argentina, the British working people or Irish republicans, Margaret Thatcher was an intolerant militarist who always resorted to demagoguery, violence and starvation to get her political way. She was a criminal fascist who is now proclaimed to be a national hero.
Reports this week say that Thatcher died with Alzheimer’s, the brain-degenerating disease in which the patient loses their faculty for memory. Western leaders, it seems, would also like to erase public memory of Thatcher’s criminal legacy.
On Tuesday, the results of the British Referendum on the Falkland/Malvinas Islands came in. According to the BBC, out of the 1,517 votes cast in the referendum, representing 90 percent of eligible voters on the island, all but three of them voted for having the islands remain territory of the U.K. As the British government must have realized before holding the poll, this is not surprising. Despite the relative proximity of the islands to the Argentine mainland, their inhabitants of the island have very few ties to Argentina: they are descendants of British colonizers, they speak English and maintain British traditions and citizenship.
An episode that aired Wednesday of the Russia Today TV program “Crosstalk” focused on the question of sovereignty and self-determination of the islands and featured an Argentine researcher, an analyst from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and a British historian who sided with Argentina’s legal claim for sovereignty on the islands.
Among the highlights from the episode is a discussion over whether the claim for the islands is an imperial project of the U.K. or whether the claim is legally legitimate. Luke Coffey, a “Margaret Thatcher Fellow” at the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, argues [9:40] that the islands are in no way a British colonial project, while British historian, Richard Gott, disagrees [10:07]: “I’m afraid it’s just not true. The British seized the islands in 1833 and subsequently settled it…”
As Gott and British journalist Richard Norton-Taylor both point out, Britain has always been aware that its claims to the islands may not have been very strong. Norton-Taylor writes:
The dispute over sovereignty has been going on for centuries, and Britain has never been really confident over its claim to the islands. In 1829, the Duke of Wellington observed: “I have perused the papers respecting the Falkland Islands. It is not clear to me that we have ever possessed the sovereignty of all these islands.”
Prior to the 1982 invasion of the islands by the leaders of the bloody Argentine military dictatorship, the two countries had been negotiating potential deals, with options on the table that included a lease-back plan and joint- sovereignty. Newly released British archives show that Margaret Thatcher was in favor of reaching a negotiated deal even after the April 2nd invasion.
Despite the British rhetoric behind this week’s referendum, other British analysts maintain that the 2,932 inhabitants of the islands– who are, by the way, outnumbered 167 to 1 by sheep- do not actually have a right to “self-determination” in this case. As Seumas Milne argues:
Self-determination requires a recognised and viably independent people, which is why the UN has rejected its application to the islands. Clearly the residents of, say, the Wallops in Hampshire, with a similar-sized population to the Falklands-Malvinas, can’t exercise such a right. Nor can forced colonisation of other people’s lands legitimate self-determination – otherwise Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank would have the right to decide the future of Palestinian territory.
Near the end of the Crosstalk episode referred to above, Luke Coffey insists on his position regarding self-determination: [18:20] “There is nothing to discuss here. As far as the U.K. is concerned, as far as the Falkland Islanders are concerned, this matter is settled. The Falkland Islanders voted overwhelmingly to be part of Great Britain. And we should respect that.”
Chuckles from all the other participants on the show follow as Richard Gott answers him: [21:19] “One of the purposes of the referendum is to use it as a propaganda point in the United States and I’m sure Luke, that you will be active in that… in trying to persuade the Americans to side with the British and not with Argentina.”
Something that nobody mentioned is the vested interest that the U.K. Defense Ministry probably has in maintaining control over the island. The Falkland-Malvinas are also home to a British military base, its 1,300 U.K. military personnel, and the various [PDF] artillery, aircraft, and missiles that are also stationed there.
Argentina has unanimous support from regional governments on its claim to the Falkland-Malvinas, as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and its 33 member countries, made clear in 2011. Part of this support is probably due to the presence of the British military base on the islands, as the region has been increasingly opposed to any foreign military presence in the region, and as can be seen in the cases of Ecuador expelling a U.S. military base from Manta, and the case of the U.S.-Colombia Defense Co-operation Agreement, which was met with disapproval in the region and finally rejected by Colombia’s supreme court.
To add to that, there is the issue of recent speculation over the possibility of oil reserves on the islands. Both of these might be sticking points in any attempts to get a new round of negotiating over the islands.
Britain’s refusal to negotiate with a democratic Argentina – when it was happy to talk to the country’s dictators – has no significant international support: least of all in Latin America, which has been booming for a decade, while Britain’s and Europe’s economies are on their backs.
By now we know that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has been built on a mixture of hype and massaged data. Various carbon tax schemes have been put forward, even unprecedented proposals for a world wide taxation authority to be overseen by the UN. Does it follow that the primary agenda behind the fraud was implementing these new taxes, or were these proposed tax schemes secondary and part of a proclivity on the part of the state to seize any opportunity to enhance revenue?
In the three decades since AGW was made into a political tool by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, tax laws have been “reformed” many times in Britain, as well as other Western nations dominated by the AGW meme. Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party were known for their opposition to social leveling through taxation. Reduction of public services, combined with hectoring the disadvantaged about self reliance, were hallmarks of British politics through the 1980’s and beyond. In Europe and North America, today’s overall level of taxation is not higher than that prevalent in 1979.
In Britain and the US, governments have been able to utilize the issuance of sovereign debt to increase military budgets while at the same time reducing capital gains and corporate tax rates creating an era of “borrow and spend” growth for the state sector. In the US, the higher income tax brackets have come down while middle class employees have seen increased social security deductions from their paychecks. These revenues were then “borrowed” by the general fund and in fact replaced the revenues lost due to the reduction of corporate taxes.
The burden of financing government spending has been increasingly shifted to the median wage earner and away from the investor and high income earner. Adoption of a tax collection system based on the consumption of energy would seem to fit into this general pattern, since working people spend a larger portion of their earnings on energy, and goods derived from energy, than do the wealthy. However, this outcome could be easily achieved by implementing a flat tax on income or a national sales tax. The rationale used to promote the flat tax is much simpler and would have been more likely to succeed than pushing the AGW carbon tax through fraudulent scaremongering. Right now a national sales tax would be politically far easier to implement in the US than a carbon tax.
Since the 1970’s we have seen capital controls lifted allowing for the free movement of capital through most of the world. New tax credits and deductions came into existence which were, in fact, incentives for multinational corporations to shift their operations from industrialized nations to the third world. Lower corporate tax rates could be found in the third world while profits were repatriated at favorable rates. This enabled the shifting of production, and later services, to the third world through tax policies. The Kyoto protocol looked suspiciously similar to these tax policies in that it also created an advantage for the deployment of capital in low wage nations.
A “free trade” regime without tariff barriers would allow for the hyper-exploitation of third world labor while at the same time driving down first world labor costs. But due to the combined competitive disadvantages of poor infrastructure, inexperienced workforces, and transport costs, as well as the necessity of writing off stranded production assets in the developed nations, corporations based in the advanced economies demanded that their governments finance the restructuring of the global economy. Lower labor costs just couldn’t compensate for the disadvantages of moving to China or India, at least not until infrastructure was improved and workforces were trained. Without government assistance, offshoring corporations would fail to compete in the marketplace with established industry at home. This motive, providing advantages to investment in the developing nations, is more plausible than the commonly assumed notion that the motive behind the AGW fraud was an excuse to raise taxes on consumers. There is a weakness in this proposition that is similar to the weakness described above regarding carbon taxes though, governments could have aided their corporations through tax advantages without all the complexity and risk involved in the AGW fraud.
Yet, there is another motive that is much more certain than either of the above possibilities, even more certain than the profits that Goldman Sachs stood to gain from carbon credits trading schemes. To understand this motive we must return to the time when the AGW meme was first promoted. Three Mile Island had recently been shut down following a near melt down. Unknown quantities of radioactive material were released across a vast area of Pennsylvania. 2,400 lawsuits were filed for death or disease suffered by family members which were ultimately denied access to federal courts. In the US, applications for construction of new nuclear power plants had a zero chance of approval by local authorities. The nuclear industry had come to a standstill. At the same time national policy makers, in conjunction with the military industrial complex, wanted to maintain a dynamic nuclear industry that included ongoing mining, milling, enrichment, research and development as well as a large pool of personnel with nuclear expertise. In fact, Thatcher’s situation was particularly strained in that she wanted to discharge tens of thousands of coal miners, replacing them with the politically poisonous nuclear power plants. This feat would require an overriding fear, something that calls for the public to acquiesce and reserve their strong objections. There would be no way to sell such policies to the public without resorting to a paradigm changing ruse, one that defines any dissidence as a danger to the safety of society. AGW would provide that cover. In fact, it is hard to imagine any other paradigm change that could have subverted the environmentalist opposition to the nuclear industry.
If the AGW theory could be planted within a co-opted or deceived environmental movement, general acceptance of the alarmism would be seen by many as a victory for the environment despite the fact that CO2 is not actually a pollutant. An entire field of “science” could be elevated with the sole purpose of confirming the AGW theory, creating a consensus of credulousness among its membership whose entire careers are always at stake.
The din of propaganda would remain constant until a state of emergency appeared imminent. Nuclear power plants would be presented as the way out while the absence of any solution for nuclear waste disposal would be ignored. The high financial cost of the nuclear facilities would be absorbed much later by rate payers while the government would underwrite the investor’s risks.
The AGW Svengali, Al Gore, is no stranger to promotion of the nuclear industry. Since the late 70’s, he has been outspoken in support of new reactors, defending the aborted Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was was scheduled to produce weapons grade plutonium, to the bitter end. Representation of nuclear interests is actually a Gore family tradition going back to the industry’s foundation. Keith Harmon Snow reports:
A 1957 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated “the consequences of a very large reactor accident at a hypothetically small nuclear plant near a large city” at 43,000 injuries, 3,400 deaths and $7 billion in 1957 losses. Congress passed the “Gore Bill” of 1956, championed by then U.S. Senator Albert Gore (Sr.) of the pro-nuclear Gore dynasty. This became the Price Andersen Act — reauthorized by Congress again in 2002 – shielding the industry from significant liability for any major nuclear accident. The 1989 Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Catastrophic Nuclear Power Accidents determined that private nuclear corporations would be unlikely to survive unless the federal government insured the industry against such “unexpected and unknown” potential liabilities as the Bhopal disaster (Union Carbide), Agent Orange (Dow) and the Dalkon Shield.
To better appreciate the imperative of maintaining the nuclear industry one must acknowledge the tenuous hold on power that the Western elites possess. The global mass of humanity have little interest in the perpetuation of the existing power structure. While it is possible for a minority to rule over the majority, without an overwhelming technological advantage, military dominance is too costly both in lives and finance. Weapons of mass destruction have provided the ultimate terror instrument necessary to check organized challenges to military supremacy. This was why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated. Pax Americana arose from the annihilation of non-combatants. The capability of mass murder is why some nations have seats on the UN Security Council with veto power while others have one vote in the General Assembly. Maintenance of this disparity in destructive power is essential to the continued dominance over the non-nuclear nations according to Peter Phillips:
The U.S. Government is blazing a trail of nuclear weapon revival leading to global nuclear dominance. A nuke-revival group, supported by people like Stephen Younger, Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons at Los Alamos, proposes a “mini-nuke” capable of burrowing into underground weapon supplies and unleashing a small, but contained nuclear explosion. This weapons advocacy group is comprised of nuclear scientists, Department of Energy (DoE) officials, right wing analysts, former government officials, and a congressionally appointed over-sight panel. The group wants to ensure that the U.S. continues to develop nuclear capacity into the next half century.
The US nuclear energy industry is overseen by the Department of Energy, which also oversees the nuclear weapons complex through the National Nuclear Security Administration. The reliable lifespan of the current nuclear arsenal is measured in decades. Due to the untested decay characteristics of plutonium it is possible that much of the present arsenal could become unserviceable with little advance warning. The existence of a robust nuclear industry is a prerequisite for new weapons production capability which may be the main factor in Energy Secretary Chu’s strident support for a new generation of nuclear power plants. AGW has been instrumental in the resurrection of nuclear power in the US and Britain. Seen in this light, the AGW fraud is not surprising.
The mass collusion in lies is actually a normal occurrence when “national security” is perceived to be involved. Institutions and foundations are relied upon to perform their roles. Entire industries conform to the dominant anticipated cap and trade system. Other nations have been co-opted or pressed into accepting the AGW meme. One only has to consider the warmongering lies about “Iraqi WMDs” or “Iranian nuclear weapons programs” to put the AGW fraud into perspective.
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.” … continue
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