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By Dr Joseph Camilleri

The AUKUS agreement reached in September 2021 has left Australia more deeply entangled with US strategic priorities and war preparations than ever before.

AUKUS reflects the prevalent view within the US security establishment that China’s rise poses a major threat to America’s regional and global dominance – a view, as it happens, strongly supported by Australia’s security elite.

Australian governments, under the previous conservative coalition and now under Labor, have repeatedly pointed to China’s misdeeds. In a major address in April, Foreign Minister Penny Wong took issue with China’s rapidly rising defence budget, its militarisation of disputed islands in the South China Sea, its ballistic missiles falling in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and its military drills and blockades around Taiwan.

By contrast, Australia has steadfastly refrained from criticising the United States for any of its provocative actions, not least Nancy Pelosi’s much publicised visit to Taiwan or Biden’s often stated position that US forces would intervene should Taiwan come under threat.

Meanwhile, Australian mainstream media have dutifully reported US and Australian portrayals of the China threat, and become increasingly vociferous contributors to the anti-China frenzy.

The rhetoric has been faithfully supported by action. The last few years have seen the steady expansion of joint US-Australian military exercises, notably Talisman Sabre and Exercise Pacific Vanguard.

In addition, the United States now controls or has extensive access to an ever larger array of military assets on Australian soil, including the high-technology bases cluster along the length of North West Cape in Western Australia, the port and air base of Darwin, and the Tindal air base.

To this must be added the large and still growing Pine Gap facility likely to play a key role in any US conventional and nuclear operations from Africa to the Pacific.

Simply put, once China’s rise came to be seen by the US security establishment as inimical to its interests, Australian governments have been quick to follow suit.

Unsurprisingly, the Australian government secured the services of two retired US admirals and three former US Navy officials as highly paid consultants to advise it during the negotiations to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology. This advice no doubt contributed to the cancellation of the French submarine contract and the establishment of AUKUS.

All of which prompts the question: what lies behind Australia’s subservience to US militarism? Much of it has to do with the fact that Australia’s policy makers have traditionally felt most comfortable when connected to the Anglophone world and at best uneasy when dealing with the East.

One other pull factor helps explain the addiction to imperial power. Australia’s political, bureaucratic, military and intelligence elites see themselves as having unique access to an exclusive and powerful club that confers status and privileges – once the British club, now the American club. They may have reluctantly accepted the demise of the former, but are in no mood to accept the slow but steady decline of the latter.

The first tangible commitment under the highly secretive AUKUS arrangements is the decision to provide Australia with eight nuclear powered submarines (SSNs) at an estimated cost of $368 billion. The plan, however, is fraught with uncertainty and danger. Will the submarines be delivered on time? Will the cost involved greatly exceed the current estimate?

Added to this are the complex technological and security problems that will inevitably arise.

First, to build nuclear powered submarines, Australia will need to be supplied not just with the technology for the nuclear reactors, but also with the nuclear fuel. Transport of such fuels over long distances raises the prospect of diversion to a third party, widely considered a major nuclear proliferation risk.

Secondly, the nuclear reactors used by the submarines will generate a significant amount of nuclear waste, which will have to be returned to the supplying country or stored in Australia. Either way, the country will face the highly contentious problem of nuclear waste disposal.

Thirdly, there is always the possibility of a nuclear reactor being breached, or at least of a leakage of nuclear materials. The AUKUS deal poses troubling questions that remain unanswered. If answers are ever offered, they are likely to prove less than reassuring.

In short, Australia has saddled itself with a vast military project of unknown cost and duration and dubious effectiveness. It will contribute to an ever-increasing defence budget that will divert scarce resources from urgent social and economic priorities.

Importantly, it will fan the flames of resentment in China not just amongst the Chinese leadership, but amongst a wide cross-section of Chinese society. Beijing has repeatedly argued that the AUKUS project will fuel an arms race and raise the level of mutual mistrust. It will certainly reinforce China’s perception that it is surrounded by a hostile coalition.

While the reactions of other countries have been generally more subdued, there is no denying the widespread unease AUKUS has already provoked. Some governments, it is true, have accepted the security partnership, but few have done so with undiluted enthusiasm.

Singapore has indicated support in principle for AUKUS insofar as it helps to balance China’s assertiveness and contributes to regional peace and stability. The Philippines, for its part, has gone so far as to characterise AUKUS as “essential to our national development and to the security of the region”.

Japan too has generally welcomed AUKUS which it sees as “strengthening engagement [of those three countries] in the Indo-Pacific region”. There have even been indications that Japan would cooperate closely with AUKUS. Some have even contemplated the possibility that Japan might join AUKUS at some future date. It is worth noting, however, that Tokyo has studiously refrained from open support of the submarines deal because the acquisition of nuclear submarines remains a highly contentious issue in the context of both Japanese politics and public opinion.

South Korea too has been guarded in its comments, expressing support for AUKUS insofar as it contributes to regional peace and security, but has said little about the nuclear submarine program.

The response of other ASEAN countries has ranged from unease to open criticism. Vietnam, notwithstanding its territorial dispute with China, has said little about AUKUS, confining itself to support for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Thailand has gone further and expressed concern that AUKUS could fuel a regional arms race.

Indonesia has been especially critical. It sees AUKUS as committed to the forward projection of military power which could well provoke China into adopting an even more assertive stance. In Indonesia’s view, Australia’s acquisition of nuclear powered submarines could “set a dangerous precedent” for other countries with similar ambitions “to follow suit”.

Malaysia too has expressed deep misgivings. While acknowledging the right of the countries concerned to upgrade their defence capabilities, it has more than once made it clear that it expects all countries, including the three AUKUS partners, to fully respect and comply with Malaysia’s requirements with regard to nuclear-powered submarines, as stated in the Law of the Sea Convention, the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, and the ASEAN Declaration on the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN).

India, for its part, has avoided public comment on the issue. While some commentators have suggested that AUKUS could help check “China’s aggression”, many others fear the prospect of an even more assertive China. A growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean cannot but pose a challenge to Indian interests.

It remains to say a word about the attitudes of Pacific Island nations. While some have indicated varying degrees of support, notably Fiji, several others have been sharply critical. Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare lambasted the Australian government’s lack of consultation on the AUKUS deal.

A communique issued by four former prime ministers (Marshall Islands, Palau, Kiribati and Tuvalu) described “the staggering $368 billion” earmarked for the AUKUS submarine deal as an affront to the region, suggesting that these resources could be better spent combatting climate change.

Current leaders in Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, and Kiribati, have also pointed to the likelihood that the AUKUS arrangements will make for an increasingly militarised and unstable region. These reactions are hardly surprising. A zone that has endured the catastrophic damage of nuclear testing is unlikely to welcome the intrusion of nuclear powered submarines into its seas.

These varied responses are themselves indicative of the deep divisions that have re-emerged in the Asia-Pacific region. The containment policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War years is back with a vengeance, except that the stakes are now much higher and containment is euphemistically described as “strategic competition”.

Recent years have seen frenetic efforts by the United States to construct an overwhelming military presence in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. AUKUS is but one prong in a multi-pronged “Indo-Pacific” strategy based on the unrelenting modernisation and expansion of America’s military alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia and its extensive security arrangements with Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Pakistan.

Bilateral and multilateral arrangements between the US and these countries involve large and increasingly frequent joint military exercises, vastly expanded programs in maritime surveillance, cybersecurity, construction of new military facilities, and access to a growing number of military bases.

All of this is unfolding in the context of greater interoperability between the US and allied forces, rapidly growing military modernisation investments, and the acquisition of new military platforms, including radar systems, drones, military transport aircraft and coastal and air defence systems, including multi-role fighter aircraft and an array of precision-guided air-to-surface and other missile systems.

The militarisation of the Asia-Pacific, which AUKUS will greatly accelerate, has seen military spending in this region rise to $575 billion in 2022. During 2018-2022, Asia and Oceania accounted for 41 per cent of global arms imports. The largest exporter by far was the United States and the largest importers were US allies. Arms imports by East Asian states increased by 21 per cent between 2013–17 and 2018–22, with the largest increases recorded by US allies: South Korea (+61%) Japan (+171), and Australia (+23%). Here lies one of the key drivers of the globalisation of NATO.

Unsurprisingly, US-based weapon manufacturers have recorded a massive increase in sales from $103.4 billion in 2021 to $153.7 billion in 2022. For them the Ukraine war and rising Sino-US tensions have been a godsend, except that God had little to do with it. The main drivers of these trends have been the principal beneficiaries, which include weapons manufacturers, armed private security contractors, a wide array of logistics and reconstruction firms and their combined ability to shape public opinion and policy making elites through their close connections with mainstream media and their funding of policy think tanks.

In this sense the AUKUS deal is emblematic of a deeply embedded militarisation of economy and society which risks shifting the Asia-Pacific region from competition to confrontation and eventually war.

Dr Joseph Camilleri is a Professor Emeritus at  La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is also Co-convener, SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth) and one of JUST’s International Advisor Panel Members.

25 June 2023

By Kim Petersen

During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.

Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.

Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”

That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]

Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.

Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a monstrous gap between them.

The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:

China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.

Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.

That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:

The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.

That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.

The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.

China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.

The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.

China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).

China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.

The Blinken-Qin meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.

Kim Petersen is an independent writer.

19 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

Laos is a country in Southeast Asia with a rich development potential based on vast water resources as well as minerals including gold. Its suitably located land trade routes had also contributed to the prosperity of the country in previous centuries. In more recent time its tourism potential has attracted much attention and the country even received the most favored tourist destination status from a leading European tourism organization, partly due to architecture, history and heritage aspects. In numerous villages of this rural-based economy there has been much potential for achieving food reliance in ecologically conducive ways.

Unfortunately all this potential was first harmed by the highly exploitative French colonial rule, then Japanese invaders, and then French colonialists again. The brave people of Laos continued to resist all this to finally achieve independence. Tragically, before they could properly tap the potential of various development opportunities, they were attacked in the most destructive ways by the USA Air Force as well as the CIA.

No, the people and the country of Laos had not harmed the far away located, mighty USA in any way at all. Despite this the people of Laos faced their heaviest destruction from the USA, worse than what they faced even during direct colonial rule, due to two factors.

First, in the course of their freedom movement, it is the communist force called the Pathet Lao which had emerged as the strongest, probably because it was the closest to protecting the interests of peasants and workers. Hence it could only be expected to be friendly to the communists in their neighboring country of Vietnam, particularly as the Vietnam communists were led by such a great and popular leader as Ho Chi Minh. To start with neither the communists of Vietnam or of Laos had any quarrel with the USA at all and in fact expected it to help them in their anti-colonial struggles.

However the USA establishment had by then taken a non-rational decision of coming down hard upon any and all communist forces and led by such thinking they got involved in a long and prolonged war first in Vietnam and then in Laos. In the case of Laos a more specific complaint of the USA was that some land routes of Laos were being used to supply provisions to the communists in Vietnam and these had to be cut off.

Anyway, the USA embarked on a twin strategy of very heavy aerial bombing of Laos, including its villages, and at the same time using the CIA to organize an illegal and secret land war on the land. The CIA organized war was largely kept secret from not just the world but even from the people and elected representatives of the USA for a long time. This illegal war initially also used the cover of development aid agencies to make contacts. Then ethnicity based groups which could be used to fight the communists were carefully identified and helped with money and arms to attack the communist forces and their supporters. This created such great divisions in the country that it became very difficult for certain people to live together in the same country again, as some of them were looked upon as traitors, and several of them had to be settled in the USA.

However even worse damage was done by bombing attacks, because of the very destructive weapons used as well as the extremely large scale of the bombings. Between 1964 and 1973, about 2.3 million tons of bombs were dropped in this small country, more than the 2.1 million tons dropped by the USA in Europe as well as in Asia together in the entire course of World War II. In terms of bombing relative to population or per capita bombing, no other country in the world has ever suffered heavier bombing than this. Over a period of about 9 years, one bombing was carried out every 8 minutes (day as well as night).

Nearly 270 million bombs, mostly cluster bombs, were dropped. Cluster bombs are known to be one of the most painful weapons. A single cluster bomb, which in turn can contain as many as 200 bomblets, explodes a little before hitting ground and the bomblets can be very violently dispersed, often getting lodged in critical organs of the person or child who has been hit, or resulting in several festering open wounds whose pain has been compared to acid burning. Completely innocent civilians and villagers were hit more often. It became impossible to live in several villages and these were deserted and people became refugees. In a small country nearly 200,000 persons died, nearly double this number were seriously injured, nearly 7,50,000 became refugees.

This was not all. About 30 per cent of the dropped bombs did not detonate immediately and remained hidden in various places to pose serious danger in future. Nearly 50,000 persons including a very large number of children have been killed, seriously injured and disabled in later years due to these hidden bombs. Many such injuries resulted in amputations. As several bombs resembled balls or toys for children, a large number of children were injured or died when they picked up bombs, despite the fact that a campaign of warning was launched.

This danger of unexploded ordnance (UXO) is likely to continue for long, with 63 such accidents being reported as late as 2021, because the USA has invested so little in removing this danger. According to one estimate, while the USA spent $16 million per DAY on the bombings for 9 years (on the basis of current prices), it has spent only average of $ 5 million per YEAR since it started contributing, that too very late, to the UXO clearing work in the 1990s. This contribution was increased after some time not so much by the USA government acting on its own, but because of the wide awareness generated by some good efforts like the Legacies of War project which increased public awareness of this great injustice and tragedy. A very small percentage of the estimated UXO has been cleared yet, probably less than 5 per cent. It has been estimated in US studies that the UXO risks can continue beyond 100 years.

It is important not only for the USA to contribute much more for UXO clearance but also to pay huge compensation to Laos because the bombings and the CIA land war in Laos were completely illegal. The USA war against Laos was for the USA just an extension of its war with Vietnam; it had no legal justification and was shockingly unethical in all aspects. The only reason, if it can be called a reason, the USA had was that it was committed to curbing any communist force, and isn’t it an irony that after all that happened, the tiny country of Laos with its 8 million people is today more committed to communism than China is!

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.

19 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Intensive hasbara aimed at obscuring Palestine’s history and stifling criticism of Israel also obscures Zionist fascism in Germany

I am new at using Chatbot, the computer program that deploys artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand questions and simulate human conversation. When I queried Chatbot about fascism in Germany, the response I got began with the statement: “That’s a complex and sensitive question.” I was impressed by this statement that implied human evaluation, but my sense of wonder did not last for long. When I asked about Israeli fascism, the Chatbot opined that “there is no definitive or objective answer to this question.”

My purpose in researching this question was my interest in learning how Germany was combating fascism in its education and legal systems, especially in the light of recent reports about the German-Israeli Society’s fascist attack on Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Deutchland. The former had filed a complaint with the Berlin police against Samidoun to classify it as a terrorist organization in Germany and to ban its advocacy of Palestinian prisoners on the basis of law 129b, which criminalizes organizations and individuals that establish or support so-called “foreign terrorist organizations.”

The Chatbot summarized for me a New York Times report that described measures such as “denazification, anti-fascist education, surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and prosecution of hate crimes.” There was nothing about Israeli fascism. When I asked specifically about dezionification, the Bot referred me to a wiki that categorizes dezionification efforts in every country by alphabet as “anti-Zionism.” In Germany, the antifa movement, which has its roots in the Antifaschistische Aktion set up by the Communist Party of Germany in the late Weimar Republic, “has splintered into different groups and factions, including one anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist faction and one anti-German faction who strongly oppose each other, mainly over their views on Israel.”

That Zionism is a fascist political philosophy is a fact as explicit and simple to me as are the words of one of the architects of the Zionist movement and a future Prime Minister of the settler-colonial Zionist Jewish state, Moshe Sharett. He saw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as “a lasting and radical solution” to achieving Jewish supremacy in Palestine:

“On this day (June 15) in 1948, future Prime Minister Sharett exulted to WZO [World Zionist Organization] head Goldman on Israel’s successful ethnic cleansing: “the most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine…is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population…The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state, are so far-reaching, as to take one’s breath away. The reversion to the status quo ante is unthinkable”, i.e., the refugees would not be allowed to return.”

The Bot not only failed to see that the facts about Palestine’s ethnic cleansing were indisputable, it also felt programmed confidence in giving me the following robotic advice: “In this context, a human might say that it is important to be critical and respectful when discussing such sensitive and complex issues.”

In this context, I chatted back to the Bot, you are bamboozled by Israel’s hasbara (Hebrew for propaganda), which has spread the false alternate historical narrative that justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and rationalizes the fascist, supremacist crimes of the settler-colonial Zionist Jewish state.

The robot’s summary of the googalized information about the issue of Zionist fascism is as follows: Yes, Zionism has been found by some critics to be a form of fascism or racism, and some have compared it to Nazism and some have also claimed that some of the founding fathers of Zionism were influenced by or were sympathetic to fascism and Mussolini and others have argued that Zionism shares some ideological features with fascism, such as nationalism, militarism, expansionism, and exclusivism. However, this is in “dispute” by other critics “who have strongly rejected and denounced” the accusations and challenged the validity and motives of the sources and arguments that make such accusations and accused them of being biased, antisemitic, or politically motivated.

Many in academia and outside are painfully aware of the well-funded hasbara that has infiltrated the media as well as educational institutions and controlled the outcome of research through lawfare as well as the threat of lawfare. Here are two examples of the latter currently playing out in the US.

The Deborah Project, a Zionist public interest law firm that claims to protect “Jewish Civil rights” launched a campaign against Critical Race Theory and Liberated Ethnic Studies for including Palestine in their curriculum:

“We have brought a legal challenge in federal court in California challenging ‘Liberated Ethnic Studies’ — which adopts the full complement of Critical Race Theory’s attack on Zionism, the goal of which is to teach all American public school children the canard that such attacks are not antisemitic because ‘Zionism and Judaism are two separate things.’ Those attacks have crept into the mainstream of the US conversation on race, through Critical Race Theory, which denounces the creation of the State of Israel as an exercise in land theft by white colonialists… Now these libelous attacks on the Jewish commitment to Zion [“the land of Israel”] are being injected into public school curricula in the guise of ‘anti-racism,’ through the vehicles of Liberated or Critical Ethnic Studies.”

What does “libelous attacks on the Jewish commitment to Zion” even mean? The Zionist hasbara of “they’re out to get us Jews” and the attachment to it of Western governments are very much like the story of Trump and his followers. Facts are irrelevant and there are two sides to every story, no matter how outrageous and blatantly untrue one of them is.

In the second example, this same Project is threatening to sue the American Anthropological Association just as its members are preparing to vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

On social media, Israel’s ongoing crimes are being documented by many organizations such as Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network and Institute for Middle East Understanding. They are amplified by Jewish Voice for Peace, which does not mince words when it comes to dezionification:

“The Israeli military’s mandate is enforcing Jewish supremacy and Palestinian subjugation, along with the ideology that upholds it: Zionism. Zionism targets all Palestinians, regardless of age, gender, or ability. These coordinated and terrifying attacks are strategic, and they share the goals perpetuated by the Israeli state since its inception: the complete and total ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land and the elimination of any resistance to it. The Israeli military’s nightly raids against Palestinians is yet another manifestation of the ongoing Nakba. This is why we unite against state-sponsored killing, ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism. We stand firmly in our anti-Zionism so every Palestinian can live a life free of daily violence, a life with freedom and dignity.”

The inability of the Chatbot to muster from the crystal ball of Google a clear and objective answer to my question about Zionist fascism is the result of intensive and successful hasbara aimed at obscuring Palestine’s history and stifling criticism of Israel. Its efforts to glean “objective truth” about Israel are about to get harder as Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has dedicated millions in a hasbara scheme enlisting high school students as trolls.

As for Germany, it makes no sense to denazify and not dezionize its culture and society. My title, “Israel teaches fascism to Germans, but my Chatbot doesn’t believe it,” is not just a provocative headline enticing you to read; it is meant to invite you to reflect on the appalling cognitive dissonance in Germany when it comes to the government’s unconditional support of Israel. The phrase “never again” was meant to express anti-fascist sentiment and to demand justice and accountability for the perpetrators and collaborators of Nazi crimes. But its scope is now much wider; it applies not only to Jewish suffering, but also to all forms of genocide and oppression. It applies to Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Note: First published on Medium

_________________
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

19 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Juneteenth is the newest federal holiday, signed into law by President Biden in 2021. It commemorates June 19th, 1865, the day enslaved people in Texas first learned they were free, more than two and a half years after they were declared free by President Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation.

For generations, formerly enslaved people and their descendants have observed Juneteenth. It has grown over the decades, embraced by an increasingly diverse population that realizes its historical importance. But despite Juneteenth’s long overdue acceptance as a federal holiday, the Black population of the United States still suffers intolerable levels of discrimination, de facto segregation, health and wealth disparity, and many other symptoms of systemic racism.

Olympic track and field star Tori Bowie was just 32 years old when she died at home last month. The Orange County, Florida medical examiner reported she was eight months pregnant and in labor when she died, most likely from eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy. Bowie, who was Black, won bronze, silver and gold medals in the 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro. The CDC recently marked Black Maternal Health Week in April, noting that Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women.

Bowie’s Olympic teammate Tianna Bartoletta wrote after learning of her death, “As of June 2023…3 of the 4 members of Team USA’s 4×100m relay team…who ran the second fastest time in history, and brought home the gold medal…have nearly died or did die in childbirth. We deserve better. #BlackMaternalHealthCrisis.”

18 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

The House of Oranje-Nassau, the Royal House of the Netherlands, earned at least 545 million euros (about 3 million guilders – $600 million) in modern money from the Dutch colonies, where slavery was widespread. The figure has been adjusted for inflation, and covers the period from 1675 to 1770. It is one of the results of the investigation into the country’s connection to the slave trade. The investigation was commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations at the request of Members of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Parliament.

Media reports said:

The study is an effort to study the role of the Dutch government and “related institutions” in slavery and its aftermath.

The country is also looking into returning looted artworks. While the country abolished slavery in 1863, some argue the pinnacle of its economic and cultural achievements was accomplished on the backs of forced laborers.

King Willem-Alexander is expected to publicly apologize for the country’s colonial predations on July 1, the 150th anniversary of the Dutch abolition of slavery in its former colonies. Prime Minister Mark Rutte made an official apology of his own in December for the country’s 250-year involvement in the slave trade, which he called a “crime against humanity,” but some activists argued this was not sufficient and demanded a further apology from the monarch.

Willem III, IV and V had an important political function as stead holder in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, a predecessor to the present-day Netherlands. As stead holders, they were essentially leaders, and their “colonial profit” accounts for half of the now known income that the stead holders received during the period that was researched.

The House of Oranje-Nassau benefited in various ways from the colonies and thus from slavery, the research showed. For example, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was an important source of colonial revenue. The noble family did not invest in the VOC directly, but at the time of incorporation the shareholders arranged to pay the Oranjes as if they owned approximately 3 percent of the shares. They then regularly used their influence to solve problems for the trading company.

Internal Affairs Minister Hanke Bruins Slot received the book, which will form the basis for further research, on Thursday at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague. The research was carried out by several institutes and was led by the Royal Institute for Language, Land and Ethnology in Leiden.

Historians have long said that the Van Oranje-Nassau family was very much involved in the colonial rule of the former Dutch East Indies, Suriname and the Caribbean islands. It had not been known how large their financial interests were. The authors of the book have made an initial estimate based on the sources currently known.

“Slavery was deliberately made a foundation in the colonial actions by the Netherlands in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The Dutch State and its predecessors were directly responsible for this,” said International Institute of Social History researcher Matthias van Rossum on Thursday. For example, policies were made and initiatives supported that “enabled” colonial slavery.

The University of Curaçao said the impact of colonial slavery on the Caribbean parts of the kingdom is enormous and that little has been discussed or studied for far too long. “The effects of slavery did not stop with abolition.” The effects can still be clearly seen in the countries which were colonized.

The study published on Thursday is therefore not only important for the Netherlands, but also “particularly for Suriname and other former colonized societies. It shows how formative the Dutch colonial slavery past has been and how much impact these effects still have.” NiNsee is the national institute for the Dutch history involving slavery.

The results were released at a sensitive time. On July 1, a commemoration will be held for the 150th anniversary of the practical abolition of slavery under Dutch rule. King Willem-Alexander will give a speech that day at an event at the National Slavery Monument in the Oosterpark in Amsterdam. Sources expect him to repeat the apologies that Prime Minister Mark Rutte previously offered for the country’s dubious past.

Former Leiden University professor Gert Oostindie is leading a more extensive study into the role of the House of Oranje-Nassau during colonial history. He started this at the end of 2022 and expects the research to take three years.

The Netherlands established a national advisory panel to interrogate its colonial history in 2020 after the death in police custody of black man George Floyd in the US initiated a wave of racial self-examination, protests, and recriminations globally.

The Dutch colonial empire included parts of what are now the Virgin Islands, Brazil, Mauritius, Suriname, Ceylon, and several Indonesian islands. Much of their Asian territory, administered by the Dutch East India Company, was captured from the Portuguese, who had previously colonized the area.

The Netherlands is not the only former colonial power investigating the possibility of atoning for its past sins against once-oppressed populations. The government of Jamaica last month announced it would introduce a bill that could potentially sever its centuries-old relationship with the British monarchy, which claimed the island as a colony in 1655 and allowed it nominal independence in 1962. A recent poll found that the majority of populations in nearly half of the British Commonwealth nations would become republics if they had the option.

In the U.S., New York recently became the second state to take the first steps toward establishing a commission to investigate financial reparations for the descendants of black slaves imported from Africa.

By Vijay Prashad

On July 11-12, 2023, the 31 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold their annual summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. To prepare for the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the agenda for the summit. They spoke about the importance of Western support for Ukraine “for the long haul” and Stoltenberg told Biden that “he looks forward to welcoming Sweden as a full member of NATO as soon as possible.”

In their joint press conference on June 13, neither Biden nor Stoltenberg mentioned anything about Ukraine’s membership of NATO, although both hoped that Sweden would become a member, “hopefully….very shortly,” as Biden said. Despite noises in the German Bundestag from Christian Democratic members—such as urging by Roderich Kiesewetter—to bring Ukraine into NATO, there seems to be no appetite for any such move at present, least of all from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who is being very cautious. Germany is wary of allowing Ukraine into NATO during a war, but has no problem—in principle—with Ukraine’s membership in NATO. With Sweden, the chessboard is far more complicated.

Finland Joins, but Not Sweden

In May 2022, Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO, a military alliance that had—at that time—consisted of thirty countries (the most recent entrant being North Macedonia in 2020). At that time, Stoltenberg said of the applications, “It is great to see you both.” Indeed, it was widely expected that these applications would be fast-tracked and that all four Scandinavian states would be within the military camp of NATO. Norway and Denmark were both founder members in 1949 (Denmark’s accession was particularly necessary so that the U.S. could build a vast base on Danish colonized Greenland—Pituffik Space Base, the northernmost U.S. military base—in 1951, displacing the local Inuit population).

Just short of a year later—on April 4, 2023—NATO welcomed Finland into the alliance. “Joining NATO is good for Finland,” said NATO’s Stoltenberg. “It is good for Nordic security, and it is good for NATO as a whole.” Finland shares a very long (832-mile) border with Russia, the longest border of any European Union or NATO state. By joining NATO, Finland has doubled the NATO-Russia border. Finland began to build a border fence along the “riskiest areas,” notably where Russian migrants might try to cross over. Social media in Finland mocked pictures released by the Border Guard of the fence, saying that it was just about useful for stopping horses; the “fence is not for horses,” responded Lieutenant Colonel Jukka Lukkari.

At the ceremony to welcome Finland into NATO, Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö said that his country’s membership is “not complete without Sweden.” Standing beside him, NATO’s Stoltenberg said, “I look forward to also welcoming Sweden as soon as possible.”

Why was Sweden not taken into the Western military alliance? In 1949, when NATO was established, the principle of decision-making adopted by the members was that of “consensus,” which means that all countries must agree to any decision; this consensus decision-making applies particularly to the question of membership. Two NATO members—Hungary and Turkey—ratified Finland’s entry into NATO but blocked that of Sweden. That they allowed NATO to welcome Finland, which—unlike Sweden—has a direct border with Russia, shows that it is not the war in Ukraine that troubles these two countries. They have other problems, directly with Sweden.

The Sweden Problem

At a press conference in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO’s Stoltenberg, Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal asked, “Are you concerned that Turkey is increasingly becoming a disruptive ally?” Both Blinken and Stoltenberg ducked the question, which led Kylie Atwood of CNN to ask directly about NATO membership for Sweden. Stoltenberg obliquely noted Turkey’s concerns regarding the presence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sweden. “All NATO allies are of course ready to sit down and address those concerns, including the threats posed to Turkey by PKK,” Stoltenberg said.

In 2009, when Sweden held the presidency of the Council of Europe, then-Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt promised to shepherd Turkey into the European Union. Relations, at that time, were robust. Turkey’s war in recent years on the Kurdish minorities in the southeast of the country and in northern Syria roused the exiled Kurdish community in Sweden. Protests in Stockholm have annoyed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly called in the Swedish ambassador to Ankara to complain about these protests. When an effigy of Erdogan was burnt by the Rojava Committee of Sweden, Sweden’s foreign minister Tobias Billström wrote on Twitter, “Portraying a popularly elected president as being executed outside City Hall is abhorrent.” This statement was not sufficient. Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that his country had weak “anti-terror” laws and that his government was in talks with Ankara to see what could be done.

On his way to Azerbaijan on June 14, Erdogan dismissed the possibility that Sweden would be allowed to enter NATO this July.

In May 2023, Hungary’s president Viktor Orban went to Doha to attend the Qatar Economic Forum. He was asked why his ruling alliance, Fidesz-KDNP, which dominates the parliament (135 out of 199 seats), refuses to ratify Sweden’s entry into NATO. Orban bluntly said that he would not back down because “Sweden unfairly expresses a damaging opinion about the situation of democracy and the rule of law in Hungary.” Sweden is not alone in these concerns, which have been made very strongly by thirteen Hungarian intellectuals in a powerful book (“Igazságosság—demokrácia—fenntarthatóság”) last year.

Orban was very upset with Sweden for its support of a European Union parliamentary report from September 2022 that described the Hungarian political system as “a hybrid regime with parliamentary autocracy.” Unless Sweden revokes this attitude, Budapest says, it will not allow it to join NATO.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

17 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst who revealed a years-long U.S. campaign to hide the true scale of U.S.’s the Vietnam War, has died Friday at this home in Kensington, California, U.S. He was 92.

Ellsberg passed away after a short battle with pancreatic cancer, but continued his anti-war activism until his final days.

Ellsberg never ran for office and only occasionally appeared on TV. But he altered the course of U.S. history in a way few private citizens ever have.

In March, Ellsberg posted on his Facebook page that doctors diagnosed him with inoperable pancreatic cancer on Feb. 17 following a CT scan and MRI.

In a statement, Ellsberg family said that in the months since the diagnosis, “he continued to speak out urgently to the media about nuclear dangers, especially the danger of nuclear war posed by the Ukraine war and Taiwan.”

“Daniel was a seeker of truth and a patriotic truth-teller, an antiwar activist, a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, a dear friend to many, and an inspiration to countless more. He will be dearly missed by all of us,” according to the statement

An NPR report said:

As a military analyst working on a Pentagon project in 1971, Ellsberg chose to release to the public an extensive, documentary record of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Known as the “Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg’s mammoth disclosure would help to end the longest U.S. war of the 20th century. It would also prompt a landmark Supreme Court decision on freedom of the press. And it would provoke a response from President Richard Nixon that led directly to the scandals that ended his presidency.

By the time he got to the Pentagon, Ellsberg, then 40, was a Marine Corps veteran with a Harvard doctorate who had worked for the Defense and State departments and the Rand Corporation. A “hawk” before going to Vietnam in 1965, Ellsberg had since turned against the war and the official justifications given for it.

Since 1969 he had been one of dozens of analysts studying and writing about the decisions behind the escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The study covered the years from 1945 to 1968, and had first been commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara toward the end of that period.

Ellsberg and a Rand colleague, Anthony Russo, had access to a copy of the 7,000-pages of classified documents and historical narrative kept at Rand. The pair photocopied them at night, one page at a time over a period of months.

Ellsberg showed the material to a few senators who had been critics of the war. He said he hoped they would hold hearings, or enter the report in the Congressional Record. But they were not willing to do so, and one encouraged him to go to the New York Times.

Ellsberg did just that, contacting a legendary reporter at the New York Times whom he had known in Vietnam, Neal Sheehan. Supported by the top editors at the Times, Sheehan led a team of writers and editors in distilling the immense document for newspaper use. On June 13, 1971, the first story ran atop the front page.

Sheehan wrote that the U.S. had gone to war not to save the Vietnamese from Communism but to maintain “the power, influence and prestige of the United States … irrespective of conditions in Vietnam.”

Revealing A Quarter Century Of War And Denial

The NPR report said:

The report that came to be known as the Pentagon papers said the U.S. had first been involved in Vietnam during World War II, when Americans helped Vietnamese resist Japanese occupation. After the war, the U.S. supported France’s attempt to reclaim its colonies in Southeast Asia, largely to keep France in the alliance against the Soviet Union.

As the French forces faltered in Vietnam, the U.S. shouldered more and more of the cost of the war. And when the French gave up and left in 1954, the U.S. remained to protect Western investments and bolster an anti-communist government in Saigon (South Vietnam) while a Communist regime in Hanoi held sway in the country’s northern half.

But almost none of this was known to the American public at the time, and when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961 he extended the commitments made by previous presidents. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, greatly expanded these commitments, escalating the war with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and relentless bombing campaigns in the mid-1960s.

Richard Nixon came to office in 1969 promising to end the war, but even as he reduced the U.S. troop presence he also widened the war into Cambodia and stepped up the bombing.

The most shocking revelation in Ellsberg’s report was the willingness of one president and one administration after another to continue the commitment — and the upbeat assessments of the situation — even as they each came to believe the mission would ultimately fail, that no amount of conventional military force would subdue the Vietnamese resistance.

Some of the papers from the archive of Daniel Ellsberg are shown in 2019. Ellsberg donated his archive to the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus. Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Ellsberg later summed it up by saying: “We always knew we could never win.” Yet the war went on and more lives were lost because American leaders were unwilling to acknowledge the futility of the war or to accept the humiliation of defeat.

Although he himself had been part of the war machinery for years, and remained silent even after turning against the war, Ellsberg later reported having a dramatic conversion at a conference for draft resisters at Haverford College in August 1969.

In an interview 50 years later on NPR’s Fresh Air, Ellsberg said: “Without young men going to prison for nonviolent protests against the draft, men that I met on their way to prison, [there would have been] no Pentagon Papers. It wouldn’t have occurred to me simply to do something that would put myself in prison for the rest of my life, as I assumed that would do.”

The Threat Of Prison Was Quite Real

The NPR report said:

The reaction to the papers’ publication was immediate. President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department got a federal judge to order the Times to cease publishing the stories. But Ellsberg was able to share another copy of the report with The Washington Post, which took up where its rival paper had left off. Other papers also stepped up. Besides the Times and the Post, at least 15 other newspapers stepped up to publish the Pentagon material in the critical days following the original release.

In that month, while the FBI searched frantically for the leaker, Ellsberg managed to elude his pursuers for11 days before turning himself in. The government charged him for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, a law passed during World War I and often abused to suppress dissent in that era. The sum total of the charges against him threatened a total jail term of 115 years, prompting reporters to ask if he had second thoughts about what he had done.

“How can I measure the jeopardy I’m in,” Ellsberg asked, “… to the penalty that has already been paid by 50,000 American families and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families?”

After his arrest, Ellsberg entered a period of legal limbo while awaiting trial, a period that would last nearly two years.

Meanwhile, the orders against the newspapers went to the Supreme Court on an expedited basis that June. The justices voted 6-3 to say “prior restraint” of publication required the government to meet a high test of necessity and irreparable harm — a test the court said had not been meant. The Times resumed publishing on July 1.

Why Did Nixon Pursue Ellsberg So Vigorously?

The report said:

The events and actions chronicled in the Pentagon Papers preceded Nixon’s time in the Oval Office and could be blamed on his predecessors (most of them Democrats). But Nixon was angered and dismayed at their publication, convinced it would undercut support for the war and undermine respect for the government.

“The principle of confidentiality either exists or it does not exist,” he said at a press conference. Tapes made in the Oval Office at the time recorded Nixon’s profanity-laced denunciations of Ellsberg: “Let’s get the son of a bitch into jail.”

Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who had known Ellsberg as a military analyst years earlier, now labeled him “the most dangerous man in America.” Both Nixon and Kissinger feared the revelations would torpedo their secret negotiations with Hanoi and Beijing. (As it happened, the Nixon administration was able to complete a withdrawal agreement for U.S. troops and a “breakthrough” diplomatic opening with China in the year after the papers were published.)

Ellsberg and others (including Nixon biographer John Farrell) have also contended that Nixon was worried by what Ellsberg would reveal about Nixon’s backdoor negotiations with the Saigon government before he was president. While still a private citizen and a candidate for president in 1968, Nixon had signaled the South Vietnamese not to agree to peace terms proposed by President Johnson — promising them better terms if Nixon became president.

In 1971, a secret operations unit known as “the plumbers” broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office looking for damaging information. This event was the first in a series of plumbers’ break-ins that included the Watergate Hotel, which eventually brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Whatever the source of his concerns, Nixon was not willing to wait for Ellsberg to come to trial. He directed various government agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, to find ways to discredit Ellsberg. In one conversation with his Attorney General John Mitchell (captured on the White House taping system in 1971) Nixon says: “Don’t worry about his trial. Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Everything, John, that there is on the investigation, get it out, leak it out. We want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?”

To that end, the White House created a covert squad known as “the plumbers” because they were hired to stop leaks of government documents that were embarrassing the administration — particular those leaked by Ellsberg. The operatives broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Los Angeles but failed to find his file. When these and other illegal activities came to light, a federal judge overseeing Ellsberg’s trial dismissed the charges. They were never reinstated.

While Ellsberg was still awaiting trial, the “plumbers” unit relocated from the White House to Nixon’s reelection campaign organization and carried on their unlawful activities. These included two subsequent burglaries at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., located in the Watergate office complex not far from the White House.

On their second visit, the burglars were discovered and arrested in June 1972. Thus began the unraveling and revelation of numerous crimes, “dirty tricks” and official cover-ups known collectively as the Watergate scandal. Investigations and impeachment proceedings would push Nixon to resign in August 1974.

A Quieter Life With Episodes Of Controversy

The NPR report said:

Ellsberg’s name and prominence receded as time went on, and he devoted most of his time to teaching and writing. But he was often seen and heard at various protests involving war and peace, nuclear weapons and the actions the federal government took against whistleblowers.

His name became synonymous with resistance to government power, especially power exercised in secret. And he continued that career of resistance into his tenth decade of life, as an advocate for peace and a critic of government secrecy.

Ellsberg opposed the war in Iraq that began in 2003 and was a speaker at numerous rallies and events protesting that war and the suppression of its critics. In 2013 he said on Democracy Now that the U.S. had never taken responsibility for the Iraqi and Afghani lives lost in the U.S. invasions of those countries.

He also spoke out in defense of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who has been fighting extradition to the U.S. for more than a dozen years. Ellsberg defended Wikileaks in 2010 for helping to build a better government. He also testified for Assange at an extradition hearing in 2020.

Assange has accused the U.S. of committing war crimes in Iraq and has published classified material such as diplomatic cables between the U.S. and other countries as well as documents on surveillance by the CIA and the National Security Agency. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Wikileaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.

Ellsberg also championed two of the whistleblowers Assange helped to make famous for releasing classified documents. The first was Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst who shared 750,000 records with Wikileaks in 2010. These included diplomatic cables, Army logs and diaries and videos of events such as a 2007 helicopter strike on a Baghdad street and another airstrike in Afghanistan in 2009, both of which appeared to have killed civilians.

Manning faced 22 charges, some under the Espionage Act and one of aiding the enemy, which could have carried a death sentence. She was sentenced to 35 years in confinement but had her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017 after she had served seven years.

Ellsberg also traveled to Moscow to visit and be photographed with Edward Snowden, a one-time computer intelligence consultant for the National Security Agency who had also worked for the CIA. In 2013, Snowden leaked information about surveillance programs run by the NSA and similar agencies of allied governments. Stories based on the documents involved appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian and other publications.

Snowden was charged with stealing government property and, like Manning and Ellsberg, for violating the Espionage Act. He left the country and received temporary asylum in Russia at the time. In September 2022, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship

A Life Of Ordinary Beginnings, Extraordinary Events

The report said:

Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931. His parents were European Jews who came to America and converted to Christian Science. He attended public schools in Chicago and Detroit and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1952 and won a Marshall Scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge in England. In 1954 he enlisted in the Marines and was commissioned as an officer, mustering out in 1957 and returning to Harvard to work on his doctoral degree in economics.

While still a graduate student in 1958 he began working for Rand. There, he studied nuclear defense policy, worked on an elaborate plan by which the U.S. could preserve its nuclear forces in the event of a first strike by the Soviet Union and saw war plans drawn up in that era for striking the USSR and China. In 2017 he published a book about this phase of his career called The Doomsday Machine. In 2021, Ellsberg released documents he had from that period because he said he was concerned about mounting tensions between the U.S. and China.

Ellsberg was married twice, the first time to the daughter of a brigadier general in the Marine Corps. The couple divorced in 1965. Five years later, Ellsberg married Patricia Marx, the daughter of a wealthy toy manufacturer, Louis Marx.

Current Risk Of Nuclear War

Other media reports said:

Back in March, Ellsberg announced that he had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, and had been given between three and six months to live. Ellsberg refused to undergo chemotherapy, and in a final statement to the press and his supporters, warned that “the current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.”

Ellsberg condemned both the U.S. and Russia for maintaining “first-use” nuclear doctrines, and called nuclear war plans and drills by both sides “immoral and insane.”

“Dan Ellsberg was a true American hero,” journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Twitter, pointing out that he “knowingly risked life in prison to show his fellow citizens that the U.S. government was lying about the war in Vietnam,”

Former CIA agent and fellow whistleblower John Kiriakou described Ellsberg as a “giant of modern American history, of transparency, truth, and human rights,” adding “we need more Americans like him.”

“When I spoke with Dan one month ago – who knew well how few grains of sand remained in his glass – he assessed the risk of a nuclear exchange to be escalating beyond 10%,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote on Twitter. “He had hoped to dedicate his final hours to reducing it, for all those he would leave behind. A hero to the end.”

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17 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Thambu Kanagasabai

President Ranil is expected to visit India from July 20 to 30 and a meeting with Prime Minister Modi is scheduled for on the 21^st July 2023. So far neither the agenda nor the issues to be discussed between them has been made public. It is highly likely that focus will be mainly on financial assistance for the desperate Sri Lanka. It is to be noted that the external debt of Sri Lanka now stands at more than $5 billion. Ranil’s statement while serving as a Prime Minister expressed his appreciation of India’s role when he acknowledged on June 19, 2022 that “India has really helped Sri Lanka in its reforms to cope with the Island’s economic crash” and added that “aid coming from different sources has put Sri Lanka in the middle of geopolitics” and further said on June 06, 2022 that “no country except India is providing money to the crisis hit nation for fuel”.

It is to be noted that India has provided emergency assistance of about $4 billion during the financial crisis in 2022 and already $1 billion credit line for Sri Lanka for a period of one year to back up infusion of dollars for essential imports. It is to be noted that Sri Lanka owes $7.1 billion to bilateral creditors with $4 billion owed to China, $2.40 billion to the Paris Club and $1.4 billion to India which had already provided nearly $4 billion as food and financial assistance to Sri Lanka in 2022.

With these commitments pressing Sri Lanka, Ranil made a conciliatory gesture when he visited Jaffna to celebrate “Thai Pongal” where he said that his government hopes to fully implement the 13^th Amendment not only in the Tamil’s North but also in the South”. This is nothing but a gesture of appeasement to the international community.

Earlier during India’s Foreign Minister Jaishankar’s visit to Sri Lanka in January 2023, Ranil assured him that “provincial council elections would be held and the devolution of powers would begin in all sincerity and seriousness”.

Above all, India’s moral and legal obligations to Tamils in Sri Lanka who possess cultural and historical ties with Tamil Nadu can never be forgotten, ignored, discarded or denied.

India’s commitment to implement the Indo-Ceylon Accord 1987 remains statutory and legally binding and it is India’s unshakable obligation and duty to ensure its full implementation to vindicate it’s role, standing, reputation and status while cementing the relationship with Sri Lanka.

However, it is disappointing to note that most of the provisions of the Accord remain on paper and unfulfilled, almost ignored like the provisions of internal or external investigative mechanism, release of all political prisoners, release of civilian lands occupied by security forces and has to be mentioned about the non-implementation of most of the UN and UNHRC Resolutions and their Recommendations passed since 2012.

It is a question, with no answer in sight whether Ranil would keep his promise to implement all the provisions of the 13^th Amendment and fulfill Sri Lanka’s obligations and commitments.

Past experiences with Sri Lanka’s past generous and readily granted promises and undertakings to UN, UNHRC and international community and how most of them have been discarded while some being flouted and some allowed to remain untouched except some piecemeal measures all of which show lack of seriousness and sincere commitment including genuine good-faith and intention. As such a complacent attitude should never be adopted by the UNHRC, UN and international community regarding Sri Lanka’s past and present numerous undertakings, promises and commitments.

With Sri Lanka carrying a $2.5 billion debt to the IMF, $5 billion to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, Sri Lanka is in dire straits economically and financially coupled with a politically unstable government headed by a president un-elected by popular support but by members of parliament, most of whom belonging to the Rajapaksa group. As such it is just a hope against hope that Sri Lanka will emerge unscathed successfully by beating out is economic and political pitfalls and uncertainties.

In conclusion, it can be stated that unless and until all the Sri Lanka’s political parties and their leaders unitedly get together to discuss and hold talks on the all the issues afflicting Sri Lanka particularly the festering 70-year-old ethnic problem which is the core and the root cause of Sri Lanka’s continuing malaise and reach a consensus with a written unanimous agreement, Sri Lanka’s economic and political survival will most likely remain a distant day dream if not a pipe dream. In this respect, India’s role and participation in reaching this goal is crucial and it is hoped India will play its role to maintain Sri Lanka’s political and economic stability, progress and prosperity ensuring equality of all its citizens and their rights.

Thambu Kanagasabai LLM (Lond), Former Lecturer of University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

15 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sumanta Banerjee

India  under  the  stewardship  of  our  Prime  Minister  is  gaining  accolades  from  global  authorities  of  all  hues  –  ranging  from  world  leaders  seeking  commercial  collaboration  on  the  one  hand,  to   international    entertainment   houses  promoting  Indian  female  dress  fashions  on  the  other.  In  fact,  Narendra  Modi  has made  himself   into  a  brand  –  like  a commodity  that  is  given  maximum  exposure  in  advertisements  to    highlight  its  USP  (Unique  Selling  Point).

Under  his  guidance  over  the  years,  a  meticulously  fashioned  strategy  of  public  relations  and  staging  of  events  both  at  home  and  abroad,  has  been framed   by  communication  professionals  to  promote  his  image .   As  a  result,  Narendra  Modi  today  appears  to  be  the  cynosure  of  all  across  the  world  –  if  one  goes  by  the  reports  sent  by   Indian  correspondents  covering  Modi’s  recent  whirlwind  tour.  Newspapers  splashed  pictures  of  the  head  of  one  state  bending  to  touch  Modi’s  feet.  There  were  reports  of  the  US  President  Biden  patting  him  and  telling  him  that  he (Biden)  had  been  so  overwhelmed  by  requests  from  his  constituency  in  America  to  listen  to  Modi’s  upcoming  speech  when  he  visits  the  US  in  June   that  he  has  no  invitation  cards  left !   Yet  another  Prime  Minister  –  from  Australia  –  described  him  as  the  `Boss’  !

At  around  the  same  time,   actresses  from   Modi’s  India  were  being  wooed  by  the  luxury  business  world.  During  recent  times,  they  have  been  gaining  attention  through  an  aggressive  style  of  promoting  Indian  films  at  international  film  festivals  by  our  government.  As  a  result,  they  are  now  sought  after  by  fashion  manufacturing  houses  to  promote  their  brands.  Deepika  Padukone  parades   as  the  global  ambassador  of  French  luxury  brands  Cartier  and  Louis  Vuitton,  Alia  Bhatt  captures  headlines  as  Gucci’s  latest  representative,  Priyanka  Chopra  dazzles  the  world  as  the  sales  promoter  of  BVLGARI’s  jewellery  at  Venice,  and  Ananya  Panday   represents  Dior’s  latest  handbag  designed  to  suit  Indian consumers.  India  is  set  to  be the  world’s  third  largest  fashion  market,  with  a  wide- spread  spectrum  of  nouveau  rich  consumers  who  are  seeking  expensive  luxury  items  from  these  global  agencies  so  that  they  can  display  them  as  marks  of  their  status.

Thus,  the  honeyed,  syrupy  rhetoric  indulged  in  by    Narendra  Modi  and  his  foreign  minister  Jaishankar   at  one  or  other  international  forum  to  woo  foreign  investors ,  and  the  simultaneous  ramp  walk  and  photo  shoots  of  Indian  actresses  at  global  advertisement  campaigns  by  luxury  brands  –  are  two  sides  of  the  same  strategy . It  is  a  strategy  known  as  `soft  power.’

Modi  brand  of  `soft  power’  –  foreign  and  domestic.

The  term  `soft  power’  was  coined  and  popularized  by  the  sociologist  Joseph  Nye  in  the  late  1980s.  It  implied  that  a  nation  could  exercise  power  through economic  and  cultural  influences  rather  than  coercion  or  military  strength.

Narendra  Modi  has  been  following  this  strategy  of  `soft  power’  in  his  foreign  policy  –  as  evident  from  his  speeches  where  he  cajoles  world  powers  by  offering  economic  opportunities,  and  at  the  same  time  reassuring  them  of  a  peaceful  environment  by    recalling  the  religio-cultural  tradition  of   India  (talking  of  Buddha)  and  uttering  the  slogan  `Basudhaiva  Kutumbakam’   (the  entire  world  is  our  family).

In  the  domestic  sphere,  Modi  has  successfully  used  his  `soft  power’  in  mesmerizing  vast  sections  of  the  people.   He  has  won  over  the  Hindu  majority  by    instilling   in  them  a  sense  of  national  pride  through  the  ostentatious  display  of  traditional  Hindu  religious  rituals ,  claiming  them  to  be  the  sole  symbols  of  Indian  nationalism.   The  latest   example  was  the  inauguration  of  the  new  Parliament  building  which  was  marked  by  the  installation  of  a  scepter  called  `Sengol’  –  an   antiquated  symbol  of  royal  power  that  was  in  use  in ancient  Hindu  kingdoms  in  south  India.

Through  his  contacts  in  the  Hindu  mutts  in  the  south,  Modi  discovered  that  a  replica  of  this  scepter was  presented  to  Jawaharlal  Nehru  on  the  eve  of  Independence  by  the  ancestors  of  these  mutt  priests.  Those  priests  welcomed  Nehru  as  their  new  ruler,  and  gifted  him  the  `Sengol’,  reassuring  him  that  this  scepter  would  protect  him  during  his  reign.   Nehru  in  his  usual  dismissive  attitude  towards  superstitious  religious  beliefs  and  symbols ,  dumped  away  this  particular  item   along  with  many  other  gifts  that  he  had  received  during  the  ceremony,  to  a  museum  set  up  in  his  ancestral  birthplace  in  Allahabad  (now  renamed  Prayagraj).

Modi  resuscitated  this  limp  stick  from  that  museum  and  installed  it  in  an  erectile  position  behind  the  chair  of  the  Lok  Sabha  Speaker.  The  occasion  was  marked  by  prayers  conducted  by  a  host  of  half-naked  male  sadhus  with  bulging  tummies  –  a  demonstration  which  would  have  otherwise  been   considered  obscene,  but  now  sanctioned  because  they  happened  to  be  Hindu  priests  with  their  lower parts  clad  in  the  sacrosanct   saffron  attire.  Their  performance  was  displayed  through  the  media,  and  watched  by  the  TV  audience  which  gleefully  hailed  it  as  the  revival  of  the  Hindu  roots  of  Indian  nationalism  made  possible   under  Narendra  Modi’s  leadership.  It  is  such  state-sponsored  religio-cultural  displays  which  appeal  to  popular  sentiments,  and   win  over  large  sections  of  the  Indian  people,  and  also  reinforce Narendra  Modi’s  image  as  the  saviour  and  protector  of  India’s  heritage.  Thus,  Modi’s  `soft  power`  strategy  in  the  domestic  sphere  has  worked  out  well  in  his  favour.

At  the  same  time,  he  is  extending  the  `soft  power’  to  the  Muslim  community  by  wooing  the  `Pasmanda’  sections  which  comprise  the  poor  laboring  classes  who  are  discriminated against  by  the  Muslim  elite.  He  is  promising  them  economic  opportunities  if  they  join  his  political  game,  and  vote  for  him  in  2024 .

The  other  side  of  the  picture  –  `Muscle  Power’ 

Parallel  to  this  overwhelming  flood  of  `soft  power’  propaganda  under  which  we  are  submerged,  there  is another  equally  overwhelming  downpour  of  `muscle  power’  that  the  Modi  government  has  been  demonstrating  in  the  domestic  sphere.  Incapable  of  using   his  muscle  power  to  oust  the  Chinese  aggressors  from  our  soil,  Modi   is  diverting  that  muscle  power  to  arm  the  recruits  of  the  Hindu  Sangh  Parivar  to  which  he  belongs.  These  young  recruits,   indoctrinated  in  the  ideology  of  Hindutva,     are  being  encouraged  to  satisfy  their  macho  instincts  and  demonstrate  their  power  in  public,  by  indulging  in  acts  like  lynching  of  Muslims  and  Dalits,  destruction  of  their  homes,  and  vandalizing  of  Christian  churches.  They  operate  under  various  names  in  different  states (Bajrang  Dal,  Hindu  Sena….). They  are  in  fact  acting  as  mercenaries  in  Modi’s  strategy  to  threaten  and  force  the  minorities  into  subjugation   to  his  rule.

At  the  administrative   level,   Modi’s  muscle  power  is  demonstrated  by  his  police  force  which  beats  up  women  wrestlers  who  demand  the  arrest  of  his  protégé ,  a  BJP  MP  accused  of  sexual  harassment.   He  further  uses  the   draconian  laws  to  suppress  his  political  opponents.  A  host  of  such  laws  like  the  National  Security  Act,  Unlawful  Activities (Prevention)  Act,  Public  Safety  Act,  Armed  Forces  (Special  Powers)  Act,   are  being  used  to  arrest  social  activists,  journalists,  lawyers  and  academics  among  others,  and  dragging  them  in  cases  that  go  on  for  years  –  thanks  to  our  slow  moving  judiciary.  The  most  notorious  example  of  such  denial  of  justice  is  the  Bhima  Koregaon  case,  on  which  the  judges  have  been  sitting  for  the  last  several  years  and  prevaricating  on  deciding  the  fate  of  some  of  the  most  eminent  academics,  lawyers  and  human  rights  activists,  who  are  languishing  in  jail.

In  this  connection,  we  must  admit  that  Narendra  Modi  has  been  lucky  enough  to  receive  blessings  from  a  section  of  the  judiciary.  Even  the  Supreme  Court  gave  sanction  to  the  building  of  a  Ram  temple  on  the  ruins  of  a  mosque  that  was  destroyed  by  members  of  his  Sangh  Parivar  –  an  act  that  was  demonstrated  in  public  view.  At  the  lower  level  of  the  judiciary,  in  the  high  courts  in  the  states,  we  hear  reports  of  judges  quoting  Manusmriti,  recalling  Hindu  mythological  legends  to  justify  their  verdicts.

With  such  allies  in  the  judiciary,  and  the  academic  institutions  which  he  has  filled  with  heads  and  members  aligned  with  the  RSS  ideology  (who  are `saffronizing’   the  syllabus  for  school  students),  Modi  hopes  to  win  over  the  urban  middle  class.

Thus,  Narendra  Modi  has  crafted  a  strategy  that   combines  extra-judicial  displays  of   muscle-power  by  his  followers  in  the  Sangh  Parivar  (e.g.  lynching  and  destruction  of  homes  and  places  of  worship  of  the  religious  minorities)  at  the  ground  level,   with  administrative  measures  sanctioned  by  the  judiciary  at  the  upper  level  that  allow  him  to  use  executive  agencies  like  the  CBI  and  ED  to  persecute  his  political  rivals.  It  is  a  stick  and  carrot  policy.  His  threat  of  a  CBI  or  ED  raid  is  dangled  as  a  stick  before  his  rivals,  along  with  the  carrot  that  offers  them  immunity  if  they  join  his  party.  Many  are  falling  for  the  carrot  –  as  evident  from  the  rush  at  the  doors  of  the  BJP  offices  in  many  states  by  Opposition  party  politicians  seeking  entry  into  the  party.

Limitations  of  Modi’s  strategy  of   `Soft  Power’  abroad  and  `Muscle  Power’  at  home

But  however  much  Narendra  Modi  may  try  to  woo  the  US  and other  global  powers  in  his  foreign  policy  endeavours,  the  abominable  record  of  his  regime  in  his  domestic  sphere  has  drawn  condemnation  from  reputable  international  organizations  which  index  the  level  of  success  and  failure  of  states  in  the  spheres  of  health  care,  human  rights,  freedom  of  the  press,  treatment  of  religious  minorities,  and  other  similar  areas  of  humanitarian  concerns.  The  UN Children’s  Fund,  the  World  Health  Organization  and  the  World  Bank  have  jointly  come  out  with  a  report  entitled  `Child  Malnutrition  Levels,’  this  year  in  2023,  which  reveals  that  every  fourth  stunted  child  in  the  world  is  to  be  found  in  India  –  indicating  the  extent  of  malnutrition.

Added  to  this  alarming  statistics  of  poverty  and  hunger,  is  the    data  relating  to  threats  to  press freedom.  In  the  annual  Press  Freedom  index  published  by  Reporters  Without  Borders,  India  fell  to  the  rank  of  150  in  2022.  Even Modi’s  hugging  friend,  the  US  President  Biden  disappointed  him  by  releasing  in  2020  the  US  Department  of  State’s  `Country  Reports  on  Human  Rights  Practices,’  which  highlighted  cases of  the  Modi  government’s  harassment   of  media  outlets  which  were  critical  of  him,  and  the  use  of  draconian  laws  against  journalists.   His  Secretary  of  State  Anthony  Blinken  in  2022,  released  the  International  Religious  Freedom  Report,  which  branded  India  as  one  of  the  worst  violators  of  religious  freedom  by  citing  cases  of  killing  of  Muslim  and  Christian  minorities  and  destruction  of  their  homes  and  places  of  worship.

Lest  these  reports  be  dismissed  and  denounced  by  the  Modi  government  as  `foreign  inspired  conspiracies,’  (the  term  usually  used  by  the  spokespersons  of  the  External  Affairs  Ministry)  we  should  reiterate  that  long  before  these  reports  by  global  agencies  came  out,  Indian  domestic  press  organizations  like  the  Editors  Guild,  Press  Club  of  India,  National  Alliance  of  Journalists  and  journalists’  trade  unions  had  been  protesting  all  these  years   against  the  Modi  government’s   persecution  of  journalists.  Similarly,  domestic  human  rights  bodies  like  the  PUCL  (Peoples  Union for Civil  Liberties),  PUDR  (Peoples  Union  for  Democratic  Rights)  and  other  groups  of  social  activists  have  also  over  the  last  several  years,   been  condemning  the  persecution  of  religious  minorities  by  Hindu  fanatical  groups   which  enjoy  the  patronage  of  Prime  Minister  Narendra  Modi’s   party  BJP.  The  investigative  reports  by  Indian  organizations  into  these  cases  of  atrocities  by  his  followers  are  available   on  the  web  sites.  It  is  these  domestic  reports  that  are  being  confirmed  now  by  the  international agencies,  which  independently  carried  out  investigation  into  allegations  of  human  rights  violation  in  India.

It  is  yet  to  be  seen  what  results  emanate  from   Narendra  Modi’s  forthcoming  visit  to  the  US  –  which  is  being  hailed  by  the  Indian  mainstream  media  (known  as  `GodiModi’)  as  a  once  in  a  life  time  historical  event.  Biden  recently  paid  a  left-handed  jocular  compliment  to  Modi,  saying  that  White  House  is  overwhelmed  by  demands  for  invitation  cards  for  attending  Modi’s  meeting !  The  joke  seems  to  have  gone  over  the  head  of  our  Prime  Minister  and  his  advisers  who  are  taking  it  at  its  face  value.  Let  us  see  what  happens  in  Washington.  Modi  may  be greeted  by  a  vast  audience  from  the  Indian  diaspora.  But  coming  down  to  brass  tacks  –  will  Biden  prioritize  his  commercial  and  military  deals  with  Modi,  and  ignore  the  issue  of  human  rights  violation  by  Modi  in  his  domestic  sphere,  that  is   being  raised  and  objected  to  by  Biden’s  own  administration  ?  How  will  the  two  wily  state  heads  reconcile  the  contradictory  positions  ?

Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008)

15 June 2023

Source: countercurrents.org