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By Robert Kowalczyk

Reflections on Our Tenuous Future

3 Aug 2020 – The year 2020 will long be remembered as the year of the coronavirus, unless more dramatic scenarios lie just ahead. Covid-19 has touched, perhaps transformed, humanity’s consciousness, and it will never be the same. Never before have so many of us been brought so close together while being requested to stay so far apart.

Over the first half of this year, most of the 8 billion of us have been advised to practice social distancing while experiencing the fear of being locked down.

All this long while, we find ourselves reflecting on our individual solitudes, along with pondering our children’s futures.

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

The Hibakusha, those who 75 years ago survived the fires and black rains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, know this well. They’ve lived through hell and have brought the world a message, a prayer to humanity that remains unanswered. A softly spoken hope, now nearly gone.

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it has been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima (and Nagasaki).”
— ­John Hersey

If John Hersey is correct, then perhaps we need to ask, how well do we remember? Have we evolved as quickly as necessary, towards what has long been so very essential? Have we now become more conscious of our fragility as a species?

If so, why have we so inadequately addressed this most existential issue, especially since the threat has been constant all these years, right up to this writing. Could it be mere complacency?

Or perhaps it’s the inherent pathological crack in our thought process, “Unless we possess the bomb we will not be safe.” / “Possession of the bomb will make all of us safe.” Belief in this madness makes us all perpetrators of a deadly serious yet global fallacy, nuclear deterrence.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
(Leonard Cohen)

WATCH: Leonard Cohen – Anthem (w/lyrics) London 2008 -> YouTube

Many of the Hibakusha and their dependents have long held a light over the horrors of the August 1945 atomic bombings of their homes, families, cities . . . their existence. While doing so, they have never pointed any fingers of blame at either side of those engaged in that long and bitter war. For the Hibakusha were the humble accepting victims, along with countless others throughout the world who suffered in other ways.

However, only the Hibakusha have experienced a first instant of collective mass horror. A blinding yet illuminating flash that has lasted throughout their entire lives.

Mrs. Koko Kondo of Kobe, whose father, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who inspired John Hersey’s writings, was one of them.

Perhaps the man often called The Father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed it most eloquently when explaining the results of the first testing of the bomb,

“We knew the world would not be the same, (a) few people laughed, (a) few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, The Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty. And to impress him, (He) takes on His multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I’m become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Atomic Age – J. Robert Oppenheimer Quote – YouTube:

Thus, the human story somehow carries on.

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Peace Mask Project, a Kyoto City registered international NPO worked with 100 of the Hibakusha (from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the USA) and their descendants, (ages ranged from 8 to 92 years old) from October 2015 to March 2017. The goal was to create 100 Peace Masks, Washi paper facial impressions for exhibition. These Peace Masks were exhibited in Hiroshima with an event at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum on March 26, 2017, that included a talk by Professor Ikuro Anzai, Honorary Director of the Kyoto Museum for World Peace and current General Coordinator of the International Network of Museums for Peace.

Two of the goals of that endeavor have been completed. The first was the making of the 100 Peace Masks with a subsequent exhibition and event program in Japan.

The second goal was the exhibiting of the Hibakusha Peace Masks at an appropriate international location. This was achieved at the Inaugural Summit of Emerging Leaders, November 28 to 30, 2018 at the United Nations Conference Center, Bangkok.

Along with the 100 Hibakusha Peace Masks exhibited behind the 347 participants from 46 countries, one of five Keynote Addresses was given by Kya Kim, Director of Peace Mask Project. The Founding Artist of PMP, Myong Hee Kim was also invited there to set up the exhibition and to conduct a demonstration mask-making workshop.

The third and final goal of the Hibakusha Peace Mask Project is to find a permanent home for the 100 Hibakusha Peace Masks at a meaningful and most appropriate international location. Peace Mask Project believes that the successful completion of this goal will contribute to a visible metaphoric presence of the Hibakusha as a reminder of their contributions to the grand endeavor to both limit and eventually abolish nuclear weapons.

It is sincerely believed that such a presence would greatly add to the expression and spirit of their 75-year prayer.

Peace Mask Project heartily welcomes all independent anti-nuclear organizations and individuals in the fulfillment of this meaningful goal.

Hiroshima Nagasaki Peace Mask Project | PEACE MASK PROJECT

Peace Summit 2018

For further information and consideration, please write to the International Coordinator of Peace Mask Project, Robert Kowalczyk at journey04@mac.com.

Robert Kowalczyk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

3 August 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By David Adams

The American empire is crashing. What will it be like. Let us look at recent precedents.

1 Aug 2020 – The last empire to crash was the Soviet empire 30 years ago. At the time it was led by Mikhail Gorbachev, a man of peace and harmony, its population was not seriously divided or heavily armed, and the army stayed in their barracks. As a result, there was very little physical violence when the empire collapsed, although in the ensuing years there was great economic suffering because of the devaluation of the ruble (by a factor of almost 10,000) and in subsequent years, there were armed conflicts with the Ukraine and Georgia. In the end, the oligarchs (Russian mafia, etc.) and the secret police (Putin had been head of the KGB) consolidated their power.

The American empire is dying in the hands of Donald Trump, and the situation is completely different.

In recent months, we have said that to survive the United States needs the resignation of Trump and a non-violent revolution, but that does not seem to be coming soon. Many city administrations are progressive and progressive Congressional candidates are being nominated, and some elected. However, that, by itself, will not change a system where the electoral process is mostly in the hands of big money. Progressive mayors and Congressional candidates would have to be supported by mass movements in city halls, town meetings and on the streets if the military priorities of American society can be transformed into a new national unity that puts the priorities on racial and economic equality and full employment.

What seems more likely in the short term is a risk of civil war, as discussed in this article in The Nation and this Youtube video. Here’s why this must be taken seriously.

Trump’s campaign was formally endorsed recently (July 16) by the National Rifle Association, which claims over 5 million members, and they are armed, not just with hunting rifles, but often with military-grade weapons designed to kill efficiently large numbers of people. They are mostly white males without higher education, a group that supports Trump according to the polls. I suppose it is safe to assume that they live more in rural areas than in the big cities. With increasing unemployment and impoverishment they are angy against the bankers of New York and the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who are gaining enormous wealth during this crisis, but they take out their anger on women, Blacks and Hispanics who are more accessible.

The American military, on the other hand, has not agreed with Trump’s attempts to engage it in his support. It is perhaps relevant that the proportion of active military personnel that is Black and Hispanic has been growing, and as of 2017 it was already 43%, not to mention a growing proportion of women. Their families are more urban than rural.

The Trump presidency has made racism a major tactic in its campaign strategy for re-election. And while Trump is trailing in the polls, there are serious suggestions circulating that he and his supporters may refuse to accept an election result that is not in his favor.

Meanwhile, the rate of unemployment and families being thrown into poverty has reached proportions in the United States not seen since the 1930’s, and it seems likely to grow further, given the continued need for shutdowns to counter the coronavirus epidemic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it reverted to its constituent republics where there were relatively unified cultures, nurtured over the decades by Soviet support for cultural development. There is no such history of culturally uniform states and regions in the United States. One suggestion, that of Johan Galtung, is that there will be an East-West divide with the West Coast linking to Asia and the East Coast linking to Europe. But Galtung does not consider what will happen with the rest of the country, the South and the Middle West. It is there that we may expect the greatest risk of violence, rural versus urban.

A civil war would be bloody, but hopefully not to the extent of the first American Civil War in the 1860’s when tens of thousands were slaughtered in terrible battles between two distinct armies.

Perhaps more relevant that the crash of the Soviet Empire was the crash of Syria. When a revolt broke out against the government, the Syrian military split with some supporting the government and some going to the opposition. The civil war was especially bloody because of external interventions. The opposition received major support, though covert, from the United States and several Arab States, while the government received support from the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran and Russia.

Unlike Syria, it seems less likely that an American civil war at this moment will receive much external intervention, and it is more likely that it will be decided by the balance of forces in the US. The need for a nonviolent revolution would then become more evident than ever.

What would be the effects in the rest of the world in the face of an American civil war? Would it reinforce the idea and make possible the reformation of the United Nations into a force for the culture of peace? Or would it look more like the 1930’s with the rise of fascist governments and the threat of another World War? We are at a turning point in human history!

Dr. David Adams is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network.

3 August 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Pepe Escobar

The battle for the contested maritime region is over before the shooting even begins and China has won.

30 Jul 2020 – When the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz carrier strike groups recently engaged in “operations” in the South China Sea, it failed to escape cynics that the US Pacific Fleet was doing its best to turn the infantile Thucydides trap theory into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The pro forma official spin, via Rear Admiral Jim Kirk, commander of the Nimitz, is that the ops were conducted to “reinforce our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, a rules-based international order, and to our allies and partners.”

Nobody pays attention to these clichés, because the real message was delivered by a CIA operative posing as diplomat, Secretary of State Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo. “The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region,” he proclaimed, in a reference to the nine-dash line that lays claim to most of the disputed sea.

Once again, nobody paid attention, because the actual facts on the sea are stark. Anything that moves in the South China Sea – China’s crucial maritime trade artery – is at the mercy of the PLA, which decides if and when to deploy their deadly DF-21D and DF-26 “carrier killer” missiles.

There’s absolutely no way the US Pacific Fleet can win a shooting war in the South China Sea.

Electronically jammed

A crucial Chinese report, unavailable and not referred to by Western media, and translated by Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Wing Polin, is essential to understand the context.

The report refers to US Growler electronic warplanes rendered totally out of control by electronic jamming devices positioned on islands and reefs in the South China Sea.

According to the report, “after the accident, the United States negotiated with China, demanding that China dismantle the electronic equipment immediately, but it was rejected. These electronic devices are an important part of China’s maritime defense and are not offensive weapons. Therefore, the US military’s request for dismantling is unreasonable.”

It gets better:

“On the same day, former commander Scott Swift of the US Pacific Fleet finally acknowledged that the US military had lost the best time to control the South China Sea. He believes that China has deployed a large number of Hongqi 9 air defense missiles, H-6K bombers, and electronic jamming systems on islands and reefs. The defense can be said to be solid. If US fighter jets rush into the South China Sea, they are likely to encounter their ‘Waterloo.’”

The bottom line is that the systems – including electronic jamming – deployed by the PLA on islands and reefs in the South China Sea, covering more than half of the total surface, are considered by Beijing to be part of the national defense system.

I have previously detailed what Admiral Philip Davidson, when he was still a nominee to lead the US Pacific Command (PACOM), told the US Senate. Here are his Top Three conclusions:

1) “China is pursuing advanced capabilities (e.g., hypersonic missiles) which the United States has no current defense against. As China pursues these advanced weapons systems, US forces across the Indo-Pacific will be placed increasingly at risk.”

2) “China is undermining the rules-based international order.”

3) “China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”

Implied in all of the above is the “secret” of the Indo-Pacific strategy: at best a containment exercise, as China continues to solidify the Maritime Silk Road linking the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Remember the nusantao

The South China Sea is and will continue to be one of the prime geopolitical flashpoints of the young 21st century, where a great deal of the East-West balance of power will be played.

I have addressed this elsewhere in the past in some detail, but a short historical background is once again absolutely essential to understand the current juncture as the South China Sea increasingly looks and feels like a Chinese lake.

Let’s start in 1890, when Alfred Mahan, then president of the US Naval College, wrote the seminal The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Mahan’s central thesis is that the US should go global in search of new markets, and protect these new trade routes through a network of naval bases.

That is the embryo of the US Empire of Bases – which remains in effect.

It was Western – American and European – colonialism that came up with most land borders and maritime borders of states bordering the South China Sea: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam.

We are talking about borders between different colonial possessions – and that implied intractable problems from the start, subsequently inherited by post-colonial nations.

Historically, it had always been a completely different story. The best anthropological studies (Bill Solheim’s, for instance) define the semi-nomadic communities who really traveled and traded across the South China Sea from time immemorial as the Nusantao – an Austronesian compound word for “south island” and “people”.

The Nusantao were not a defined ethnic group. They were a maritime internet. Over centuries, they had many key hubs, from the coastline between central Vietnam and Hong Kong all the way to the Mekong Delta. They were not attached to any “state”. The Western notion of “borders” did not even exist. In the mid-1990s, I had the privilege to encounter some of their descendants in Indonesia and Vietnam.

So it was only by the late 19th century that the Westphalian system managed to freeze the South China Sea inside an immovable framework.

Which brings us to the crucial point of why China is so sensitive about its borders; because they are directly linked to the “century of humiliation” – when internal Chinese corruption and weakness allowed Western “barbarians” to take possession of Chinese land.

A Japanese lake

The Nine Dash Line is an immensely complex problem. It was invented by the eminent Chinese geographer Bai Meichu, a fierce nationalist, in 1936, initially as part of a “Chinese National Humiliation Map” in the form of a “U-shaped line” gobbling up the South China Sea all the way down to James Shoal, which is 1,500 km south of China but only over 100 km off Borneo.

The Nine Dash Line, from the beginning, was promoted by the Chinese government – remember, at the time not yet Communist – as the letter of the law in terms of “historic” Chinese claims over islands in the South China Sea.

One year later, Japan invaded China. Japan had occupied Taiwan way back in 1895. Japan occupied the Philippines in 1942. That meant virtually the entire coastline of the South China Sea being controlled by a single empire for the fist time in history. The South China Sea had become a Japanese lake.

Well, that lasted only until 1945. The Japanese did occupy Woody Island in the Paracels and Itu Aba (today Taiping) in the Spratlys. After the end of WWII and the US nuclear-bombing Japan, the Philippines became independent in 1946 and the Spratlys immediately were declared Filipino territory.

In 1947, all the islands in the South China Sea got Chinese names.

And in December 1947 all the islands were placed under the control of Hainan (itself an island in southern China.) New maps duly followed, but now with Chinese names for the islands (or reefs, or shoals). But there was a huge problem: no one explained the meaning of those dashes (which were originally eleven.)

In June 1947 the Republic of China claimed everything within the line – while proclaiming itself open to negotiate definitive maritime borders with other nations later on. But, for the moment, there were no borders.

And that set the scene for the immensely complicated “strategic ambiguity” of the South China Sea that still lingers on – and allows the State Dept. to accuse Beijing of “gangster tactics”. The culmination of a millennia-old transition from the “maritime internet” of semi-nomadic peoples to the Westphalian system spelled nothing but trouble.

Time for COC

So what about the US notion of “freedom of navigation”?

In imperial terms, “freedom of navigation”, from the West Coast of the US to Asia – through the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean – is strictly an issue of military strategy.

The US Navy simply cannot imagine dealing with maritime exclusion zones – or having to demand an “authorization” every time they need to cross them. In this case the Empire of Bases would lose “access” to its own bases.

This is compounded with trademark Pentagon paranoia, gaming a situation where a “hostile power” – namely China – decides to block global trade. The premise in itself is ludicrous, because the South China Sea is the premier, vital maritime artery for China’s globalized economy.

So there’s no rational justification for a Freedom of Navigation (FON) program. For all practical purposes, these aircraft carriers like the Ronald Reagan and the Nimitz showboating on and off in the South China Sea amount to 21st century gunboat diplomacy. And Beijing is not impressed.

As far as the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is concerned, what matters now is to come up with a Code of Conduct (COC) to solve all maritime conflicts between Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and China.

Next year, ASEAN and China celebrate 30 years of strong bilateral relations. There’s a strong possibility they will be upgraded to “comprehensive strategic partner” status.

Because of Covid-19, all players had to postpone negotiations on the second reading of the single draft of COC. Beijing wanted these to be face to face – because the document is ultra-sensitive and for the moment, secret. Yet they finally agreed to negotiate online – via detailed texts.

It will be a hard slog, because as ASEAN made it clear in a virtual summit in late June, everything has to be in accordance with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS).

If they can all agree on a COC by the end of 2020, a final agreement could be approved by ASEAN in mid-2021. Historic does not even begin to describe it – because this negotiation has been going on for no less than two decades.

Not to mention that a COC invalidates any US pretension to secure “freedom of navigation” in an area where navigation is already free.

Yet “freedom” was never the issue. In imperial terminology, “freedom” means that China must obey and keep the South China Sea open to the US Navy. Well, that’s possible, but you gotta behave. That’ll be the day when the US Navy is “denied” the South China Sea. You don’t need to be Mahan to know that’ll mean the imperial end of ruling the seven seas.

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian independent geopolitical analyst.

3 August 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)

Ethiopia’s announcement on 21 July that it had already filled its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) to its first year’s target has temporarily quelled tensions between it, Egypt and Sudan. The GERD, which will be the largest dam in Africa when completed, has been a source of great tension between these three states since it was initially announced in April 2011. Sudan and Egypt, downstream from Ethiopia on the Nile River, regard the dam as a threat to their water security and dominance over the Nile. But the current easing of tensions is temporary. The three countries will return to talks, under the auspices of the African Union (AU), to negotiate future filling of the GERD and the conclusion of a comprehensive agreement. This will be no easy task, especially since Cairo stubbornly insists that it is entitled to the bulk of the Nile water, and should have a veto over upstream dam construction or other developments. This attitude, which originates in the British colonial era, is, however, incompatible with the changing balance of power in the Nile Basin and with international norms regarding water-sharing.

Historic overview

The two tributaries of the Nile flow through eleven countries, and are relied upon by over forty per cent of the African continent’s population. Its small capacity (eighty-four billion cubic metres relative to other large rivers, such as the Amazon River (5 500 billion cubic meters), Congo River (1 250 billion cubic meters), and even the Niger River (180 billion cubic meters), and large number of dependent people and countries means that it has often been seen as having the potential to create conflict. This is especially since two downstream states, Egypt and Sudan, individually receive less than twenty-five millimetres of rain annually, thus contributing little to nothing to the river, but consuming more of its water than any of the other Nile riparian states. Egypt, particularly, is dependent on the Nile for over ninety-five per cent of its fresh water and irrigation needs.

The Nile River originates through two main sources, Lake Victoria (bordered by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya) giving rise to the White Nile, and Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile, with feeder tributaries from Rwanda and Burundi. The White Nile comprises around fifteen per cent of the river, and the other eighty-five per cent is the Blue Nile. Both tributaries meet in Khartoum, Sudan, and then flow into Egypt. Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan and Ethiopia are very highly dependent on the Nile; Uganda is highly dependent; Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya and Burundi are moderately dependent on it; and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a low dependence on it.

Although the Nile has, for thousands of years, played a critical role in the lives of communities through which it flows, two more recent factors have influenced its current water usage: British colonisation of most of the area comprising the basin, and, thereafter, Egyptian attempts to ‘secure’ the river for itself. In relation to British colonialism, two main treaties regarding the Nile were agreed upon, one between Egypt and Britain, which, at the time, ruled many of the upstream states such as Tanzania and Uganda, and the other between Egypt and the Sudan. Egypt continues to cite these colonial-era treaties as its justification to deflect attempts to make Nile usage more equitable. The 1929 treaty recognised Egypt’s ‘natural’ and ‘historic’ rights to the river, and affording it the major share of the water. The treaty also tasked Egypt with monitoring the river, and gave it a veto vote over any Nile projects in upstream states.

The second treaty, signed in 1959 by Egypt and the Sudan, renewed the 1929 treaty, granting Sudan the use of four billion cubic metres of water, and Egypt 48 billion. This second treaty hinted at the possibility of other states sharing the water, but Sudan and Egypt would first have to agree to such usage. The water allocation to Sudan and Egypt has since been revised upwards as a result of the construction of the High Aswan Dam in Egypt, and the Roseires Dam in Sudan. Sudan is now allotted 18.5 billion cubic meters, and Egypt 55 billion. The two countries have historically negotiated between themselves regarding the building of dams in either of their territories, and regarding water allocations, and they have generally adopted a common stance in negotiations with upstream states. In light of the clean slate and Nyerere Doctrines on treaty succession, both of which assert that newly-independent states can choose which colonial era treaties to remain bound by, the legitimacy of the 1929 and 1959 treaties is questionable.

Egypt is almost totally dependent on the Nile, especially since ninety-seven per cent of its population resides in the Nile valley; it is reliant on the river for over ninety-five per cent of its fresh water needs. The Egyptian state therefore threatened to use force to secure the river’s flow through its territory. In order to do so, both Egypt and Sudan even supported Ethiopian rebel groups, including the Eritrean and Tikrayan liberation movements, to weaken the country. This ultimately led to the 1993 secession of Eritrea. Egypt also pressured financial institutions to refrain from funding dam construction projects in upper riparian states. Thus, even if they had wanted to, it was no financially not possible for most Nile basin states to carry out construction on the river.

Political and power balance alterations

Since the mid-1990s, the power balance in the region has been shifting. Ethiopia has strengthened politically, economically and militarily, while Egypt and Sudan have weakened. Sudan split into two entities in 2011, with the Republic of Sudan losing much of its oil and agricultural resources to the new South Sudan state. Funding difficulties were alleviated for some states with the entry of China into the continent; it funded a number of dam projects, including the Tana Belez and Tekez dams in Ethiopia and the Marowe Dam in Sudan. Furthermore, the global discourse around water usage has changed. Whereas treaties and hard power had previously been the norm, human security and equity are now increasingly being promoted. The Helsinki and Berlin rules on water usage developed by the international law association, and the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, emphasise equity in water usage allowances.

A combination of these factors resulted in the 1999 creation of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), between the ten countries through which the Nile traversed. The NBI’s aim was to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development through the equitable utilisation of the Nile. A new water-sharing framework, the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA or Entebbe agreement) was conceptualised to replace the outdated 1959 treaty. Although Egyptian and Sudanese opposition stalled the process, it was adopted since upstream states had a majority of members The CFA provided for Nile water to be shared equitably among all Nile Basin countries while causing as little harm to downstream counties as possible. It also stipulated that upstream countries would no longer require Egypt’s consent for water projects. Water security rather than ‘historical rights’ would be the criterion for water usage, according to Article 14B of the CFA, resulting in it being vehemently opposed by Egypt and Sudan. They claimed this had crossed a ‘red line’, and Egypt predicted that it lead to the NBI’s collapse. Six states – Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia – have signed the agreement, making it legally enforceable.

GERD and its consequences

Following the overthrow of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Ethiopia saw an opportunity to assert itself in the matter of the Nile. In April 2011, it announced the creation of the Millennium Dam, now known as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The idea had previously been touted by the US National Bureau of Reclamation in 1966, in response to Soviet funding of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, as part of the US-Soviet proxy war in Africa. The proposed dam was conceived as a strong source of hydroelectrical power for the country, which could supply over 6 000 megawatts annually. Sixty-five million of Ethiopia’s 110-million population could receive energy from it. Former Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi also asserted that it would be used to irrigate 500 000 hectares of land. However, Addis Ababa subsequently asserted that it would used solely for electricity generation.

Funding for the dam was generated through a variety of measures, including the issuance of bonds to Ethiopian citizens and businesses, and public servants being docked a month’s salary. Wealthy Ethiopian businesspeople such as Mohammed Al-Amoudi also invested in the project, but this was minimal compared to the amount raised through public funding. Ethiopia thus did not require foreign funding, a factor Egypt had initially hoped would prevent the project going ahead. Costing around five billion dollars, the dam is being built in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia, about twenty kilometres away from the Sudanese border. It will be the largest dam on the continent, the tenth largest in the world, and its reservoir will hold around seventy-four-billion cubic metres of water once completed. Originally planned to be completed in 2017, delays and the suicide of its chief engineer meant that it is currently only seventy per cent complete. The current level of completion did, however, allow filling to begin in 2020.

Egypt and Sudan have opposed the dam from the planning stages, arguing for their ‘historical right’ to determine the Nile’s usage. Egypt insisted it would impair the Nile’s flow, and the electricity generation capacity of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam. Some studies, which were confirmed by Ethiopian officials during negotiations, put the losses at between eight and twenty billion cubic metres annually, accounting for between twenty and forty per cent of the Blue Nile’s flow to Sudan and then Egypt, which could drastically impact fresh water access for Egypt’s ninety million people. Further, the Aswan High Dam’s electricity generation capacity will drop by between twenty-five and forty per cent. However, this risk will be realised only if Ethiopia fills the dam in four years. Although this was the original intention, Ethiopia subsequently agreed to fill it in seven to nine years. Tensions came to a head in May 2013, when Ethiopia diverted the river’s course to facilitate the dam construction. Egyptian politicians in a parliamentary meeting, accidentally livestreamed by Egyptian television, called for the bombing of the dam and Egyptian support to rebel groups to destabilise Ethiopia. Both Ethiopia and Sudan condemned the calls.

Sudan subsequently dropped its opposition to the GERD in December 2013, mainly because it would also benefit with increased electricity supply through its connection to Ethiopia’s electricity grid. The dam would also regulate the flow of the river to South Sudan and Sudan, thus reducing floods during the rainy seasons and enabling Sudan to increase crop rotations to three times annually from the current once a year. It would also reduce sediment flow; currently, Sudan is able to use only half the water capacity of the Saddar and Roseires dams because of sediment. Sudan uses only around twelve billion of its eighteen billion cubic metre water allocation from the Nile, even though it is a water scarce country; the Sudanese are less dependent on Nile waters than Egypt. Sudan is also less dependent on the Blue Nile, whose flow Ethiopia will impede, because the White Nile, unaffected by the GERD also flows through it.

Sudan’s changed position, together with Ethiopia’s obduracy, forced Egypt to also alter its position. I August 2014, Cairo acquiesced to the GERD’s construction, insisting on an expert panel’s technical analysis of the dam’s impact, but dropping its demand that construction be halted until the completion of the analysis. This paved the way for a March 2015 agreement, the ‘Agreement on Declaration of Principles between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan on the GERDP’ The agreement recognised that Sudan and Egypt would be impacted by the dam’s construction, but stipulated water sharing among the three states. Principle four of the ten-principle declaration also acknowledged usage rights based on river drainage; Ethiopia has the third largest land drainage of the whole river, including its Blue and White branches, after Sudan and South Sudan. The agreement further clarified that the dam would only be used for electricity generation and not irrigation, which was a victory for Egypt. However, it implicitly excluded the International Court of Justice from adjudicating on the dam’s legality, instead proposing for mediation and negotiations in the case of differences. Egyptian politicians had touted the ICJ as a means of delaying and halting the GERD’s construction. By endorsing the agreement, Cairo acquiesced to the validity of the GERD’s construction, and, since then, has sought only to ensure that the filling period is extended as much as possible.

Following the election of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister of Ethiopia in April 2018, relations further warmed between Cairo and Addis Ababa, especially since Abiy has been, in general, critical of dam projects. He argued that such projects were used for ‘political expediency’. At a 2018 summit between him and Egyptian President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, Abiy told Sisi that he would never harm Egyptians, a comment seen by Egyptians as an acknowledgement of his opposition to the GERD.

Current situation

Despite Ethiopia’s assertion that it has already filled the dam to its first year carrying capacity, agreement on its ongoing filling has not yet been concluded. Taking advantage of the heavy rains, Addis Ababa rapidly filled the dam unilaterally in about two weeks, causing much consternation in Sudan, which saw its dam levels drop, and Egypt.

In November 2019, Egypt had roped in Washington and the World Bank to mediate. The US Trump administration continues to see Cairo as an important ally, and thus supported its position during negotiations. A draft ‘agreement’ on the filling process, signed only by Egypt in February 2020, was criticised by Addis Ababa. Abiy’s mind seems to have changed on both his previous willingness to negotiate, and his previous opposition to dams, especially after Cairo’s attempts to involve the USA in negotiations, and because of his loss of domestic support.

There remain a number of contentious issues regarding the dam. One of them is about the period of the filling of the dam. Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia agree that it should be phased, with the first phase spread over two years and the dam being filled to a depth of 595 metres, thus allowing for small-scale electricity generation and testing. Egypt, however, insists that Ethiopia releases over forty billion cubic metres of water each year, while Ethiopia wants to release thirty-billion cubic metres. Egypt currently receives forty-seven to forty-nine billion cubic metres of water from the Blue Nile annually. Ethiopia has conceded to providing a maximum of thirty-seven billion cubic metres annually, an amount Egypt will probably have to reluctantly accept. Addis Ababa is concerned that Cairo also wants it to empty the GERD’s reservoir to supplement the river’s flow in times of drought.

The parties have also not yet agreed on a monitoring and dispute resolution mechanism to ensure compliance. The UN asserts that the legality and binding nature of a possible agreement has not yet been agreed upon by all parties. Egypt and Sudan want the agreement to be legally binding and enforceable, while Ethiopia is wary that this may constrain it in the future, especially since it has a growing economy and because the GERD provides only one-fifth of the possible energy it could generate from the Nile.

Negotiations are being made more difficult by Egypt and Ethiopia both viewing the dam as an existential matter for their regimes. Article Forty-Four of Egypt’s constitution tasks the state with protecting the country’s ‘historic right’ to the Nile. Sisi already received much backlash for handing over the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia in June 2017, including from Egyptian nationalists and military officials who saw his act as a betrayal of Egypt’s territorial claims. He would be careful about creating another such scandal. With Egypt’s population predicted to rise to 150 million by 2050, the country will become even more dependent on the Nile for its survival. Egypt’s annual water capacity per capita is already predicted to be forced to diminish from 570 cubic metres per person annually to 500 cubic metres in the coming years as a result of climate change.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, the fact that many Ethiopians purchased GERD bonds to fund the building of the dam means that the regime has minimal wiggle room. Popular songs have been written in support of the dam, with some likening its construction to the 1896 battle of Adwa, when Ethiopians united to defeat Italian colonisers. The current domestic political context worsens the situation. Abiy’s popularity is waning, and the decision to postpone elections to 2021 has been criticised. Further, in recent weeks, the assassination of popular Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa sparked riots in Oromia, with the Oromo people, who comprise a third of the country’s population, arguing that the prime minister was not benefiting them. Abiy thus sanctioned the filling of the dam unilaterally, without obtaining consent from Sudan and Egypt as the two countries had expected, partly in an attempt to deflect from his domestic travails. His unstable position will likely influence any negotiations regarding the second year’s filling process, and will likely be deployed in electoral campaigns, making compromise less likely.

Sudan, on the other hand, has adopted a more balanced approach, siding with Ethiopia and refusing to agree to a March 2020 Arab League resolution condemning the GERD. Although largely agreeing with Egypt regarding the GERD’s filling and the need for a binding agreement, Khartoum has recently indicated a further willingness to compromise. It has conceded that Ethiopia will have to have flexibility regarding releasing water from the reservoir during drought, and also accepted that Addis Ababa might want to build more dams on the Nile in the future. However, it wants an agreement between the three states to be binding and enforceable. Moreover, consistent with the emphasis on ‘historic rights’, Sudan wants Ethiopia to notify it and Egypt before any dam construction.

Ethiopia and Sudan requested the AU, in June, to mediate between the three states. This was after the failures of trilateral negotiations between the states themselves, and after Ethiopia accused the USA of being biased towards Egypt. Before this, the AU had been relatively uninvolved in the GERD issue, calling on the states to negotiate among themselves. Some commentators argue that the continental body did not want to be involved in mediating a conflict between two powerful member states, especially since this would inevitably be perceived as it siding with one side if an agreement was not concluded. Following a failed first round of AU mediation at the end of June, which was to result in an agreement within two weeks thereafter, the three countries again announced, on 22 July, their willingness to accept AU mediation. The issues under mediation are especially contentious since they may be precedent-setting, and upsetting either Egypt or Ethiopia is not what the AU would want. However, successfully dealing with the Nile matter can position the AU as a serious continental structure that can resolve conflicts even between its strongest members, especially after external structures and foreign states were unable to bring the matter to conclusion.

Conclusion

The AU’s involvement in the Nile dispute has the potential to both resolve the matter, and enhance the reputation of the body. However, while on many substantive issues the parties have come closer, there remains much ground still to be covered and many disputes still requiring compromises. Ethiopia’s unilateral filling of the dam and its announcement that the first year filling process has completed has deescalated the situation temporarily, giving the AU some breathing space to address the more with cooler heads. However, a few of the serious issues will continue to make negotiations difficult. Whether the agreement should be legally enforceable, and whether Ethiopia should accept Cairo’s demand to release large water reserves during droughts are among those thorny issues.

It is highly unlikely that differences over the GERD issue could result in military conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia, despite the rhetoric from both sides. Cairo is involved in a seemingly-unwinnable conflict against the Islamic State group’s ‘Sinai province’, and is getting itself mired in Libya. It is unlikely that it will want to open up a third front. Moreover, the balance of power in the Nile is shifting, with Ethiopia gaining influence regionally and continentally. Addis Ababa’s confidentially filling up the dam unilaterally in the past few months, without any consequences, clearly indicates this shift.

A comprehensive solution will need to be based on the Entebbe agreement if it is to have a chance of long-term success. Egypt will need to give up on its insistence that it has a ‘historic right’ to the Nile waters, and on its demand that upstream states obtain its approval before undertaking construction projects on the river. Climate change, coupled with the increasing growth of countries such as Tanzania and Ethiopia, will result in these states seek to use the river’s water much more than previously to sustain their growing populations.

AMEC insights is a series of publicly-accessible publications, providing trenchant analyses of topical issues related to the Middle East and North Africa. If you want to be added to our mailing list, please email info@amec.org.za

2 August 2020

Source: amec.org.za

By Dr Mike Ghouse

On Friday, July 31, 2020, over a billion and a half Muslims around the world, will be slaughtering millions of goats, camels, and cattle to carry out Abraham’s tradition of sacrificing the symbolic lamb. Is there an alternative to the ritual of slaying animals on Eid Al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice? The answer is yes!

Rituals are the pathways to accomplish milestones of peace for oneself and with what surrounds one; life and environment. None of us can escape from the ceremonies. Each of us instinctively follows certain routines, from waking up to the time we go to sleep. Whether we shower, eat breakfast, go to the office, or gym, we follow the rituals.

The essence of Islam is to create cohesive societies where every human feels secure about his/her faith, race, religion, region, or ethnicity. It is time for Muslims to consider the essence of sacrifice rather than the ritual itself.

Real sacrifice requires us to give up some of what is dear to us. It is about parents going to sleep without food but feeding their kids; it is clothing their kids while waiting to get their own. In the case of extremities, we would instead get the bullet and save our loved ones, we are willing to rescue an individual from a freezing lake risking our own lives, and even strangers do that.

A thousand years ago, a man’s assets were made up of his goats, camels, and cattle. The ultimate sacrifice one would make was to give away his precious assets in gifts. Today, the most cherished possession is money, and people must be willing to part some of it to give the ability to the receiver to spend on his/her critical needs.

One of the examples set up for guidance was the test of Abraham’s faith, love, and devotion to God, which humans do routinely, “If you love me, you would do this for me.” A simple assurance would suffice, be it your fiancé, spouse, kids, siblings, or parents.

It was Abraham’s turn to face the command of God to sacrifice his son. Upon hearing this, he prepared to submit to God’s will and places his son on the block. Right at that moment, a lamb appears as an alternative. Then God revealed to Abraham that his “sacrifice” has already been fulfilled.

Does God want animals to be sacrificed?

Not at all. Qur’an, Al-Hajj 22:37 (The Pilgrimage) is clear: “Never does their flesh reach God, and neither their blood. It is only your God-consciousness that reaches Him. It is to this end that we have made them subservient to your needs so that you might glorify God for all the guidance with which He has graced you. And give thou this glad tiding unto the doers of good.”

The act symbolizes our willingness to give up a part of our bounties to strengthen and preserve the web of the universe and help those in need. We recognize that all blessings come from God, and we should open our hearts and share with others.

What would you sacrifice instead?

It is customary for Muslims to sacrifice an animal on the day of the Hajj, a symbolic representation of Prophet Abraham’s act. What are our alternatives?

We can put that money to a different use that will do greater good like lending to a street hawker who can sell things from a cart and take care of his family or a single mom who can weave baskets or make sweaters to take care of her family. The beauty of this practice is you can make the same money repeatedly work for the common good. Muslims call it Sadaq-e-Jariah, which is continual giving.

Dr. Nauman Anwar: “Sacrificing animals without making a public spectacle is still a good idea, as long as no wastage of the meat and hides occur. Many Muslim countries have a lot of poverty, and if the meat reaches the deserving population, it will help improve the nutritional status of the poor.

Let your single sacrifice multiply rather than the one-time sacrifice of animals. Prophet Muhammad had emphasized service to fellow humans as the highest service to God. Quran (4:152) says, if you are kind to your fellow humans, which is my creation, you will earn my grace regardless of your faith.

Honoring police, firemen, and soldiers

Every day our police officers and firemen risk their own lives to protect ours, our freedom is protected by our men and women in the uniforms. I urge fellow Muslims to stop and salute every one of these men and women, honoring them for their love for humanity. Better yet, call the firemen, policemen, and let them know that as a Muslim you appreciate their sacrifice, and this festival is about appreciation for such sacrifice.

I did that in Louisville; within minutes, the officer had emailed the article to his fellow officers, appreciating the Muslims.

Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) had said the least you can do as a charity is to smile and appreciate the otherness of the others.

You can wish your Muslim friends by saying, Eid Mubarak, Eid Saeed, Happy Eid, Happy Festivities, etc.

Dr. Mike Ghouse is the founder and president of the Center for Pluralism.

30 July 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” —  Bertolt Brecht

In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death.

Cataclysmic conditions afflict Yemen as people try to cope with rampant diseases, the spread of COVID-19, flooding, literal swarms of locusts, rising displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed economy. Yet war rages, bombs continue to fall, and desperation fuels more crimes.

The highest-paying jobs available to many Yemeni men and boys require a willingness to kill and maim one another, by joining militias or armed groups which seemingly never run out of weapons. Nor does the Saudi-Led Coalition  which kills and maims civilians; instead, it deters relief shipments and destroys crucial infrastructure with weapons it imports from Western countries.

The aerial attacks displace traumatized survivors into swelling, often lethal refugee camps. Amid the wreckage of factories, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools and hospitals, Yemenis search in vain for employment and, increasingly, for food and water. The Saudi-Led-Coalition’s blockade, also enabled by Western training and weapons, makes it impossible for Yemenis to restore a functioning economy.

Even foreign aid can become punitive. In March, 2020, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) decided to suspend most aid for Yemenis living in areas controlled by the Houthis.

Scott Paul, who leads Oxfam America’s humanitarian policy advocacy, strongly criticized this callous decision to compound the misery imposed on vulnerable people in Yemen. “In future years,” he wrote, “scholars will study USAID’s suspension as a paradigmatic example of a donor’s exploitation and misuse of humanitarian principles.”

As the evil-doing in Yemen comes “like falling rain,” so do the cries of “Stop!” from millions of people all over the world. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

• U.S. legislators in both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars in weapons and maintenance to Saudi Arabia and its allies. But President Trump vetoed the bill in 2019.
• Canada’s legislators declared a moratorium on weapon sales to the Saudis. But the Canadian government has resumed selling weapons to the Saudis, claiming the moratorium only pertained to the creation of new contracts, not existing ones.
• The United Kingdom suspended military sales to Saudi Arabia because of human rights violations, but the UK’s international trade secretary  nevertheless resumed weapon sales saying the 516 charges of Saudi human rights violations are all isolated incidents and don’t present a pattern of abuse.
• French NGOs and human rights advocates  urged their government to scale back on weapon sales to the Saudi-Led coalition, but reports on 2019 weapon sales revealed the French government sold 1.4 billion Euros worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
• British campaigners opposing weapon transfers to the Saudi-Led Coalition have exposed how the British Navy gave the Saudi Navy training in tactics essential to the devastating Yemen blockade.
• In Canada, Spain, France and Italy, laborers opposed to the ongoing war refused to load weapons onto ships sailing to Saudi Arabia. Rights groups track the passage of trains and ships carrying these weapons.

On top of all this, reports produced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Commission of the Red Cross repeatedly expose the Saudi-Led Coalition’s human rights violations.

Yet this international outcry clamoring for an end to the war is still being drowned out by the voices of military contractors with well-paid lobbyists plying powerful elites in Western governments. Their concern is simply for the profits to be reaped and the competitive sales to be scored.

In 2019 Lockheed Martin’s total sales reached nearly 60 billion dollars, the best year on record for the world’s largest “defense” contractor. Before stepping down as CEO, Marillyn Hewson predicted demand from the Pentagon and U.S. allies would generate an uptake between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion in net earnings for the company in 2020 sales.

Hewson’s words, spoken calmly, drown out the cries of Yemeni children whose bodies were torn apart by just one of Lockheed Martin’s bombs.

In August of 2018, bombs manufactured by Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin fell on Yemen like summer rain. On August 9, 2018, a missile blasted a school bus in Yemen, killing forty children and injuring many others.

Photos showed badly injured children still carrying UNICEF blue backpacks, given to them that morning as gifts. Other photos showed surviving children helping prepare graves for their schoolmates. One  photo showed a piece of the bomb protruding from the wreckage with the number MK82 clearly stamped on it. That number on the shrapnel helped identify Lockheed Martin as the manufacturer.

The psychological damage being inflicted on these children is incalculable. “My son is really hurt from the inside,” said a parent whose child was severely wounded by the bombing. “We try to talk to him to feel better and we can’t stop ourselves from crying.”

The cries against war in Yemen also fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn–and quickly–to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

29 July 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Goldman Sachs has issued a bold warning Tuesday that the dollar is in danger of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has put a spotlight on the suddenly growing concern over inflation in the U.S.

With the U.S. Congress closing in on another round of fiscal stimulus to shore up the pandemic-ravaged economy, and the Federal Reserve (Fed) having already swelled its balance sheet by about $2.8 trillion this year, Goldman strategists cautioned that U.S. policy is triggering currency “debasement fears” that could end the dollar’s reign as the dominant force in global foreign-exchange markets.

While that view is clearly still a minority one in most financial circles – and the Goldman analysts don’t say they believe it will necessarily happen – it captures a nervous vibe that has infiltrated the market this month: Investors worried that this money-printing will trigger inflation in years ahead have been bailing out of the dollar and piling furiously into gold.

Gold is the currency of last resort

“Gold is the currency of last resort, particularly in an environment like the current one where governments are debasing their fiat currencies and pushing real interest rates to all-time lows,” wrote Goldman strategists including Jeffrey Currie. There are now, they said, “real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.”

The Goldman report makes clear that Wall Street’s initial reluctance to sound the alarm on inflation back when the pandemic began is fading. Having been burned badly by ominous forecasts of runaway price gains following the fiscal and monetary stimulus that followed the 2008 financial crisis, many analysts have been hesitant to repeat such calls now, especially as the economy sinks into a deep recession.

But with gold surging to record highs and bond investors’ inflation expectations climbing almost daily, albeit from very low levels, the debate on the long-term effects of stimulus has gotten louder.

The 10-year breakeven rate, the gap between nominal and inflation-linked debt yields, has risen to about 1.51%, up from as low as 0.47% in March. That’s seen real yields, which strip out the impact of inflation, plunge further below zero — to about -0.93% on similar-maturity bonds.

“The resulting expanded balance sheets and vast money creation spurs debasement fears,” the analysts at Goldman wrote. This creates “a greater likelihood that at some time in the future, after economic activity has normalized, there will be incentives for central banks and governments to allow inflation to drift higher to reduce the accumulated debt burden,” they said.

Gold’s record-breaking rally highlights growing concern over the world economy.

Goldman raised its 12-month forecast for gold to $2300 an ounce from $2000 an ounce previously. That compares with a value of around $1950 currently. The bank sees U.S. real interest rates continuing to drift lower, boosting gold further.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is on course for its worst July in a decade. The drop comes amid renewed calls for the dollar’s demise following a game-changing rescue package from the European Union deal, which spurred the euro and will lead to jointly issued debt.

The dollar is used in 88% of all currency trades, according to the latest triennial Bank for International Settlements survey. And it still accounts for about 62% of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves, although that’s down from a peak of more than 85% in the 1970s, IMF data show.

Ballooning debt pile

For Goldman, the growing level of debt in the U.S. – which now exceeds 80% of the nation’s gross domestic product – and elsewhere, boosts the risk that central banks and governments may allow inflation to accelerate.

Investors are poised to hear more about the Fed’s view on inflation with its latest policy decision Wednesday.

“Until we get through the Fed, the dollar could strengthen as investors lock in profits,” Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at Oanda Corp. said in a note.

Goldman Sachs has tied the metal’s rally to a “potential shift in the U.S. Fed towards an inflationary bias against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions, elevated U.S. domestic political and social uncertainty and a second wave of Covid-19 related infection.”

“Gold is the currency of last resort, particularly in an environment like the current one where governments are debasing their fiat currencies and pushing real interest rates to all-time lows,” the bank said. “With more downside expected in U.S. real interest rates, we are once again reiterating our long gold recommendation from March.”

Year-to-date, gold has gained more than 27% and is currently trading near $1,940 an ounce.

Fed faces currency threat

Predictions of the mighty U.S. dollar’s fall from its place as the ultimate measure of value are nothing new.

“Gold bugs” — the slightly disrespectful term for people convinced the yellow metal is the only truly safe investment — roll out an attack on the U.S. dollar’s safety every few years.

The euro has been an aspiring candidate, but has had many troubles of its own. Countries that do not get along with the U.S., including Iran, have complained about the absurdity of having to sell their oil to third parties priced in U.S. dollars.

After the global financial meltdown of 2008, China’s then central banker, Zhou Xiaochuan, criticized the use of a single country’s currency for a world standard, calling it a historical anomaly.

“The crisis again calls for creative reform of the existing international monetary system toward an international reserve currency with a stable value, rule-based issuance and manageable supply,” wrote Zhou.

But the comments from New York bankers Goldman Sachs just as gold is hitting new highs and the greenback is hitting new lows are quite different from bellyaching from those who would like to take the dollar’s place.

The Goldman comments act as a warning of what might happen if the U.S. currency eventually becomes debased through too much government spending and too much borrowing at interest rates close to zero.

The Canadian dollar is up two cents against the U.S. currency in the last month. But as usual, that is deceptive. With most of our trade happening with the U.S., the loonie tends to rise and fall with the U.S dollar. The loonie continues to trade lower against the euro.

The Goldman Sachs report is making lots of headlines and offers a little thrill of dread to those who are looking for an even more dire outcome from the current pandemic. But gold quite regularly rises in value during times of financial uncertainty and it tends to fall shortly after.

Russia and China speed up de-dollarization process

After years of talking about abandoning the U.S. dollar, Russia and China are doing it for real. In the first quarter of 2020, the share of the dollar in trade between the countries fell below 50 percent for the first time.

Just four years ago, the greenback accounted for over 90 percent of their currency settlements.

According to Moscow daily Izvestia, the share has dropped to 46 percent, tumbling from 75 percent in 2018. The 54 percent of non-dollar trade is made up of Chinese yuan (17 percent), the euro (30 percent), and the Russian ruble (7 percent).

The dollar’s reduced role in international trade can mainly be blamed on the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

In January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained that Moscow is continuing “its policy aimed at gradual de-dollarization” and is looking to make deals in local currencies, where possible.

Lavrov called the rejection of the greenback “an objective response to the unpredictability of U.S. economic policy and the outright abuse by Washington of the dollar’s status as a world reserve currency.”

Movement away from the dollar can also be seen in Russia’s trade with other parts of the world, such as the European Union. Since 2016, trade between Moscow and the bloc has been mainly in Euros, with its current share sitting at 46 percent.

30 July 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter

8 Jul 2020 – Editor’s Note: As of the publication of this article, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is awaiting a decision from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding the request for correction that AE911Truth and ten family members of 9/11 victims submitted to NIST on April 15, 2020. The request seeks corrections to eight separate items of information in NIST’s 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, any of which would effectively force NIST to reverse its conclusion that fires caused the building’s destruction.

NIST informed AE911Truth on June 12, 2020, that it was unable to meet its goal of responding within 60 days. Under the procedure governing such requests, NIST must provide a decision within 120 days of the submission, which would fall on August 13, 2020. If NIST elects not to take the corrective action being sought, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters would then have 30 days to file an appeal with NIST. Should NIST fail in any way to comply with the procedure governing requests or should it fail to rectify the information quality violations documented in the request, AE911Truth and its fellow requesters are prepared to take legal action.

In the meantime, AE911Truth is taking one further step toward correcting the record on the destruction of the Twin Towers with the publication of this article. This exhaustive review of 70 hours of 9/11 news coverage reveals that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters covering the events in New York City on 9/11 but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.

The 36 reporters who brought us the Twin Towers’ explosive demolition on 9/11 include, by network, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Cynthia McFadden; CBS’s Harold Dow, Tom Flynn, Mika Brzezinski, and Carol Marin (appearing on WCBS); NBC’s Pat Dawson and Anne Thompson; CNN’s Aaron Brown, Rose Arce, Patty Sabga, and Alan Dodds Frank; Fox News’ David Lee Miller and Rick Leventhal; MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield and Rick Sanchez; CNBC’s John Bussey, Ron Insana, and Bob Pisani; WABC’s N.J. Burkett, Michelle Charlesworth, Nina Pineda, Cheryl Fiandaca, and Joe Torres; WCBS’s John Slattery, Marcella Palmer, Vince DeMentri, and Marcia Kramer; WNBC’s Walter Perez; New York 1’s Kristen Shaughnessy, Andrew Siff, John Schiumo, and Andrew Kirtzman; USA Today’s Jack Kelley; and two unidentified reporters (1 and 2) who attended a press conference with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki. Video clips of each reporter’s statements on 9/11 can be viewed below.

***

“The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.”

This observation was first made 14 years ago in the article, “118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.” A review of interviews conducted with 503 members of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in the weeks and months after 9/11 revealed that 118 of them described witnessing what they interpreted that day to be explosions. Only 10 FDNY members were found describing the destruction in ways supportive of the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.

The interviews of fire marshal John Coyle and firefighter Christopher Fenyo explicitly support this finding. Coyle remarked in his interview, “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards. . . . Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.” Similarly, Fenyo recalled in his interview, “At that point, a debate began to rage [about whether to continue rescue operations in the other, still-standing tower] because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.”

News reporters constitute another group of individuals who witnessed the event firsthand and whose accounts were publicly documented. While many people have seen a smattering of news clips on the internet in which reporters describe explosions, there has never been, as far as we know, a systematic attempt to collect these news clips and analyze them.

We decided to take on this task for two reasons. First, we wanted to know just how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters. Second, anticipating that this would be the more prevalent hypothesis, we wanted to determine exactly how it was supplanted by the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse.

In this article, we present our findings related to the first question. In a subsequent article, we will examine how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.

Television Coverage Compiled

To determine how prevalent the explosion hypothesis was among reporters, we set out to review as much continuous news coverage as we could find from the major television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates covering the events in New York.

Through internet searches, we found continuous news coverage from 11 different television networks, cable news channels, and local network affiliates. These included the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC; cable news channels CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC; and local network affiliates WABC, WCBS, and WNBC. We also incorporated coverage from New York One (NY1), a New York-based cable news channel owned by Time Warner (now Spectrum), which we grouped with the local network affiliates into a local channel category.

Unfortunately, we were not able to find coverage spanning most of the day for every channel. Thus, while the collection of news coverage we compiled is extensive, it is not comprehensive. To fill in the gaps where possible, we included excerpts of coverage that aired later in the day if we found that coverage to be relevant. We also included one excerpt from USA Today’s coverage that we found to be relevant and three excerpts from an afternoon press conference with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki that aired on almost every channel. In general, the times at which these excerpts aired are unknown, though in some cases we were able to identify an approximate time.

The news coverage we compiled and reviewed totaled approximately 70 hours.

Table 1: Television Coverage Compiled

Networks

ABC 8:50 AM to 6:07 PM
CBS 8:52 AM to 12:00 PM + one excerpt at ~12:15 PM
NBC 8:51 AM to 6:30 PM
Cable News Channels
CNN 8:32 AM to 12:00 AM (midnight)
Fox News 8:51 AM to 5:00 PM
MSNBC 8:52 AM to 1:42 PM
CNBC 8:50 AM to ~4:16 PM
Local Channels
WABC 8:50 AM to 10:50 AM + nine excerpts from various times
WCBS 8:50 AM to 11:33 PM, 11:40 AM to 12:04 PM + six excerpts from various times
WNBC 8:50 AM to 10:30 AM (switches permanently to NBC network at 10:30 AM)
NY1 8:50 AM to 11:20 AM

Note: We invite anyone who has portions of the television coverage we were not able to find to send them to us at info@AE911Truth.org. We will incorporate anything we receive and update this article accordingly. For anyone who wishes to replicate our work, the entire collection of footage can be downloaded here.

Criteria for Defining ‘Explosion’ Versus ‘Non-Explosion’ Reporters

We sought to answer one main question in our review of the news coverage: How many reporters described the occurrence of explosions — both the raw number of reporters and as a percentage of all reporters who covered the Twin Towers’ destruction — and what was the nature of their reporting? To answer this question, we needed to establish clear criteria for identifying what we will call “explosion reporters” and “non-explosion reporters.”

We should make clear that this article addresses the statements of reporters only and does not address the statements of anchors, except for in the case of one anchor (CNN’s Aaron Brown) who had a direct view of the Twin Towers. In our next article, we will address statements made by anchors, who were also interpreting the Twin Towers’ destruction but without having witnessed it firsthand.

Because the airplane impacts were often referred to as explosions, we were careful to exclude any instances where it was not absolutely clear that the reporter was referring only to the destruction of the Twin Towers.

As we studied the news coverage and began to recognize patterns in how the Twin Towers’ destruction was reported, we developed three separate categories of reporting that would classify someone as an “explosion reporter”: (1) eyewitness reporting, (2) narrative reporting, and (3) source-based reporting. Below we provide definitions of each.

Eyewitness Reporting

“Eyewitness reporting” is when a reporter is an eyewitness with a direct view of or in close proximity to the destruction of one or both of the Twin Towers and perceives an explosion or explosions in conjunction with the destruction — or perceives one or both of the towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting. Although we usually excluded the word “boom,” which could apply either to an explosion or to a collapse, we included it in one case because the totality of what the reporter (Nina Pineda) described indicated that she viewed the event as being explosion-based.

We did not include reporters who described only a “shaking” or “trembling” of the ground. The perception of the ground shaking was widespread and constitutes important eyewitness evidence, but it does not necessarily reveal much about how the reporter interpreted what she or he was witnessing. Among reporters who mentioned demolition, we excluded the ones who merely compared the destruction to a demolition whenever it was clear that the reporter believed it to be a collapse caused by structural failure. We also excluded reporters who used the word “implode” or “implosion” whenever it was clear that the reporter used it to describe the building collapsing in on itself, as opposed to a demolition.

Here is an example of eyewitness reporting:

David Lee Miller, Fox News, 10:01 AM:

“Suddenly, while talking to an officer who was questioning me about my press credentials, we heard a very loud blast, an explosion. We looked up, and the building literally began to collapse before us. . . . Not clear now is why this explosion took place. Was it because of the planes that, uh, two planes, dual attacks this morning, or was there some other attack, which is — there has been talk of here on the street.”

Narrative Reporting

“Narrative reporting” is when a reporter refers to the Twin Towers’ destruction as an explosion-based event when speaking of it in the course of his or her reporting. This could be a reporter who was an eyewitness to the destruction or a reporter who otherwise understood the destruction to be an explosion-based event.

The main distinction between eyewitness reporting and narrative reporting is that eyewitness reporting involves an eyewitness describing his or her direct perceptions, often uttering them spontaneously, while narrative reporting involves interpretation and/or outside influence, either of which inform the reporter’s developing narrative of what took place. (In several cases, reporters go from engaging in eyewitness reporting around the time of the destruction to engaging in narrative reporting later on, with their direct perceptions informing their developing narrative).

This distinction is not meant to imply that one type of reporting is more valuable or reliable than another. In this analysis, eyewitness reporting tells us about what reporters perceived and immediately interpreted during, or shortly after, the event. It thus gives us more information about the actual event. Narrative reporting, by contrast, tells us how reporters interpreted the event after having more time to process their perceptions and to synthesize additional information from other sources. Narrative reporting thus tells us about the collective narrative that was developing among reporters covering the event.

Here is an example of narrative reporting:

George Stephanopoulos, ABC, 12:27 PM:

“Well, Peter, I’m going to give you kind of a pool report from several of our correspondents down here of basically what happened down here in downtown New York between 9:45 and 10:45 when the two explosions and the collapse of the World Trade Center happened. At the time, I was actually in the subway heading towards the World Trade Center right around Franklin Street. And after the first explosion the subway station started to fill with smoke. The subway cars started to fill with smoke, and the subways actually stopped. They then diverted us around the World Trade Center to Park Place, which is one stop beyond the World Trade Center. We got to that train station at around 10:35, Peter, and it was a scene unlike I’ve ever seen before in my entire life.”

Source-based Reporting

“Source-based reporting” is when a reporter reports on the possible use of explosives based on information from government officials who said they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers.

Source-based reporting is similar to narrative reporting in that it involves outside influence. The main distinction is that source-based reporting is based on information from government sources. Information from government sources inherently indicates how government agencies were interpreting the event and is sometimes given extra weight by reporters and viewers.

Here is an example of source-based reporting:

Pat Dawson, NBC, 11:55 AM:

“Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 o’clock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device— that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. . . . But the bottom line is that, according to the Chief of Safety of the New York City Fire Department, he says that he probably lost a great many men in those secondary explosions. And he said that there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people in those two towers when the explosions took place.”

Non-Explosion Reporters

The main criterion we developed for classifying someone as a “non-explosion reporter” was that she or he reported on the destruction of one or both of the Twin Towers and did not engage in any of the types of explosion reporting defined above. To qualify as a non-explosion reporter, it was not necessary for the reporter to explicitly articulate the fire-induced collapse hypothesis. The mere absence of explosion reporting was enough to classify someone as a non-explosion reporter.

The challenge here lay not in identifying the absence of explosion reporting but in defining what constituted “reporting on the destruction.” In the end, we decided this should mean that the reporter had to describe the event of the destruction and not simply mention it in passing.

We should note that a reporter’s use of the word “collapse” did not necessarily qualify that person as a non-explosion reporter. Many explosion reporters described the occurrence of an explosion followed by collapse and they used the word “collapse” in their reporting (David Lee Miller, quoted above, is a prime example). Thus, use of the word “collapse” is not incompatible with being an explosion reporter and did not qualify someone as a non-explosion reporter.

Also, if a reporter made a statement that qualified him or her as an explosion reporter and then subsequently made a statement explicitly supporting the fire-induced collapse hypothesis (which is the case for WABC’s Joe Torres), we classified this reporter as an explosion reporter because he or she engaged in some explosion reporting at some point during the day. In this analysis, being classified as an “explosion reporter” does not imply a permanent stance. Rather, it just means that at some point in the day he or she reported the occurrence of explosions or the possible use of explosives in relation to the Twin Towers’ destruction.

Before we move on to the next section, it is important to note that because non-explosion reporters had to describe the event of the destruction and not simply mention it in passing, the only way to make a valid numerical comparison between explosion reporters and non-explosion reporters is to include only those who engaged in eyewitness reporting. According to the criteria we developed, explosion reporters who engaged in narrative reporting were not describing the event of the destruction but rather were referring to it as an explosion-based event in the course of their reporting, i.e., in passing. A comparable classification does not exist for non-explosion reporters, because we excluded those who only mentioned the event in passing (most commonly using the word “collapse”).

Numerical Analysis of ‘Explosion’ and ‘Non-Explosion’ Reporters

In total, we identified 36 explosion reporters and four non-explosion reporters in the approximately 70 hours of news coverage we reviewed. The 36 explosion reporters and their statements are listed in Appendix A. The four non-explosion reporters and their statements are listed in Appendix B. In addition, there were three borderline cases that we determined could not be clearly classified as either explosion or non-explosion reporters. Those cases are listed in Appendix C.

Of the 36 explosion reporters, 21 of them engaged in eyewitness reporting, 22 of them engaged in narrative reporting, and three of them engaged in source-based reporting. Recalling our definitions from above, this means the following:

• 21 reporters witnessed what they perceived as an explosion or explosions during the destruction of the Twin Towers or they perceived the Twin Towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting.
• 22 reporters (eight of whom also fall into the eyewitness reporting category) referred to the Twin Towers’ destruction as an explosion or an explosion-based event when speaking of it in the course of their reporting.
• Three reporters (two of whom also fall into the narrative reporting category) reported on the possible use of explosives based on information from government officials who said they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers.
• Four reporters reported on the destruction of the Twin Towers and did not report explosions in any way (either having witnessed explosions, having interpreted the destruction as being an explosion-based event, or having been informed by government officials about the possible use of explosives).

In terms of the percentage of explosion and non-explosion reporters, 21 of the 25 reporters who directly witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers, or 84%, either perceived an explosion or explosions or they perceived the Twin Towers as exploding, blowing up, blowing, or erupting. In comparison, four of the 25 reporters who directly witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers, or 16%, did not report explosions in any way.

The tables below list each reporter and each instance of reporting according to the time at which each report was made.

Table 2A: Eyewitness Reporting by Explosion Reporters

Reporter  Channel  Times of Reports

Ashleigh  Banfield   MSNBC 9:59 AM
Aaron Brown CNN  9:59 AM, 10:02 AM
N.J. Burkett   WABC   9:59 AM
Walter Perez WNBC 9:59 AM, 10:00 AM, 10:27 AM
Kristen Shaughnessy NY1 9:59 AM
David Lee Miller Fox News 10:01 AM, 10:32 AM
Harold Dow CBS 10:05 AM
Rick Leventhal Fox News 10:05 AM, 10:06 AM, 10:12 AM
Michelle Charlesworth WABC 10:10 AM
Andrew Siff NY1 10:12 AM
Nina Pineda WABC 10:17 AM
Rose Arce CNN 10:29 AM, 10:43 PM
Cheryl Fiandaca WABC 10:38 AM, unknown time shortly after 10:38 AM
Patty Sabga CNN 10:57 AM
Tom Flynn CBS 11:03 AM
Mika Brzezinski CBS 11:15 AM
John Bussey CNBC 11:52 AM
Ron Insana CNBC 12:41 PM, 1:08 PM
Anne Thompson NBC 12:43 PM
Joe Torres WABC Unknown time
Marcella Palmer WCBS Unknown time

Table 2B: Narrative Reporting by Explosion Reporters

Reporter Channel Times of Reports

Michelle Charlesworth* WABC 10:10 AM
Nina Pineda* WABC 10:18 AM, 10:19 AM, unknown times
John Schiumo NY1 10:18 AM
Cheryl Fiandaca* WABC Unknown time shortly after 10:38 AM
Kristen Shaughnessy* NY1 10:42 AM, 10:43 AM, 10:45 AM
Rose Arce* CNN 10:50 AM, 12:26 PM
Rick Sanchez MSNBC 10:52 AM, 11:26 AM, 12:09 PM
Ashleigh Banfield* MSNBC 10:54 AM, 10:55 AM, 1:35 PM, 1:36 PM, 1:37 PM
Carol Marin (CBS reporter) WCBS 10:59 AM
Patty Sabga* CNN 10:59 AM
Alan Dodds Frank CNN 11:07 AM
Andrew Kirtzman NY1 11:11 AM, 11:12 AM
John Slattery WCBS 11:44 AM
John Bussey* CNBC 11:55 AM
George Stephanopoulos ABC 12:27 PM
Bob Pisani CNBC 2:42 PM
1st Unidentified Reporter All channels 2:43 PM (Giuliani and Pataki press conference)
Marcia Kramer All channels 2:44 PM (Giuliani and Pataki press conference)
2nd Unidentified Reporter All channels 2:54 PM (Giuliani and Pataki press conference)
Pat Dawson NBC 3:02 PM
Vince DeMentri WCBS Unknown time around 5:00 PM
Cynthia McFadden ABC 5:56 PM

*These reporters also engaged in eyewitness reporting.

Table 2C: Source-based Reporting by Explosion Reporters

Reporter Channel Times of Reports

Pat Dawson*  NBC 11:55 AM
Rick Sanchez*  MSNBC 12:07 PM
Jack Kelley  USA Today Around 5:30 PM

*These reporters also engaged in narrative reporting.

Table 2D: Non-Explosion Reporters

Reporter Network Times of Reports

Don Dahler  ABC 10:00 AM
Bob Bazell   NBC 10:08 AM
John Zito  MSNBC 10:36 AM
Drew Millhon  ABC 11:09 AM

How Reporters Reported the Twin Towers’ Destruction

The picture that unmistakably emerges is that the great majority of reporters who witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers either perceived an explosion or perceived the towers as exploding. This hypothesis of the Twin Towers’ destruction then continued to be prevalent among reporters covering the event, who essentially viewed the destruction of the towers as an explosion-based attack subsequent to the airplane strikes. We learn from the source-based reporting that the same hypothesis was also held by officials in the FDNY, the New York Police Department (NYPD), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — three of the most important agencies involved in the response to the attacks. In particular, with regard to the FBI, we are told the explosion hypothesis was the agency’s “working theory” as of late in the afternoon on 9/11.

Unlike members of the FDNY, most of whom provided their accounts during interviews conducted weeks or months after the event, it was the job of reporters to spontaneously communicate their perception and interpretation of events. Thus, when their reporting is compiled into one record, we are left with a rich and largely unfiltered collective account of what took place. Considered alongside the FDNY oral histories, these reporters’ statements, in our view, constitute strong corroborating evidence that explosives were used to destroy the Twin Towers.

Regarding the four non-explosion reporters, in addition to the fact that there are so few of them, we find that their individual accounts add little support to the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.

Two of the reporters were quite far away from the Twin Towers at the time of their destruction relative to most of the explosion reporters: Drew Millhon was “about 10 to 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center,” at the intersection of Varick Street and Canal Street, while Bob Bazell was at St. Vincent’s hospital on West 12th Street, approximately two miles from the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, Don Dahler, the only reporter who explicitly articulated the fire-induced collapse hypothesis, nonetheless likened the South Tower’s destruction to a controlled demolition, saying: “The entire building has just collapsed as if a demolition team set off — when you see the old demolitions of these old buildings.” The fourth non-explosion reporter, John Zito, was quite close to the South Tower when it came down. He did not describe an explosion, but he also did not attribute the destruction to a fire-induced collapse. It is worth noting that Ron Insana, whom Zito was with, vividly described seeing the building “exploding” and “blowing” and hearing a “noise associated with an implosion.”

Conclusion

Returning to the first question posed at the top of this article, we conclude that the hypothesis of explosions bringing down the Twin Towers was not only prevalent among reporters but was, in fact, the dominant hypothesis.

Furthermore, the 21 instances of eyewitness reporting, all of which contain spontaneous descriptions of the phenomena the reporters witnessed, strongly corroborate the overwhelming scientific evidence that explosives were used to destroy the Twin Towers.

In a subsequent article, we will examine how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis.

***

Appendix A: Statements by 36 Explosion Reporters

These statements are organized by channel in the same order as presented in Table 1. Within each channel, they are organized chronologically based on the time of the first noted statement by each reporter.

TO VIEW ALL 36 VIDEO CLIPS Go to Original – ae911truth.org

_______________________________________________________________________

Prof. Graeme MacQueen is co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies and co-author, with Johan Galtung, of Globalizing God-Religion, Spirituality and Peace, TRANSCEND University Press, 2008.

Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for AE911Truth.

27 July 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

 

By Andre Vltchek

Recently, when a retired Chilean U.N. employee tried to enter ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Santiago de Chile) to claim her pension in a bank inside the compound, her car was stopped by a U.N. security officer. She was asked to complete formalities. To her taste, the process was taking too much time, and she began honking. The head of security approached her, trying to explain the procedure, which had recently toughened up, due to the outbreak of COVID-19. The security head happened to be an African-Brazilian.

She clearly did not like this fact, and she exploded:

“That spicy nigger (‘el negro picante’) is the security head? I’m going to send him to the United States so that they could kill him there! I’m going to write to ‘El Mercurio’ newspaper! Who would think that this nigger could be a boss?”

Her horrid outburst was reported, and it quickly reached the ECLAC head who happens to be a progressive Mexican scientist – Alicia Bárcena – who is a vocal admirer of AMLO, Hugo Chávez, Correa, and Lula. Indignant, she took immediate action, barring the former employee’s entry to the compound and reporting the incident to the U.N. headquarters in New York.

This story could be dismissed as an ugly anecdote, as something sick and unusual. Except, it is not unusual at all. Chile is a dreadfully racist place, although, as many countries where racism thrives, it does not openly admit that it is.

Gone are the internationalist ideals of Allende’s era, gone is solidarity with other Latin American nations. It appears that only the Chilean Communist Party has at least some sympathy with the plight of Venezuelan people. And no one here is demanding the return of the access to the sea to Bolivia: access which was literally stolen during the shameful “War of the Pacific,” during which Chile disgracefully joined forces with Great Britain against Bolivia and Peru.

*

“We are English of Latin America.” This is how Chileans like to view themselves.

And they openly despise those who are not as white as they are: Peruvians, Bolivians, Haitians.

Throughout the 20th Century, Chilean immigration policy was based on a determined effort to attract the whitest of whites, from Germans to Czechs, Croats, Swiss. Even the Italians were not good enough for them. A new wave of European migrants was mainly settling in the south, pushing indigenous, native Mapuche people to the margins, and into misery.

Chilean Left has very little to do with the indigenous struggle. It is a Western-style left, much closer to defunct “anarcho-syndicalism” in the United States, then to Cuban, Venezuelan, or Bolivian pan-Latin American struggle. The majority of Chilean ‘revolutionaries’ feel much more at home in Miami, Paris, or Rome than with their own oppressed people in such places as Puerto Saavedra or Temuco.

In Chile, race plays an extremely important role. It opens and closes doors. It determines who gets what jobs, and who ends up living in inescapable misery.

*

Under the cover of “fight against COVID-19”, Chilean extreme right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera unleashed a new stage of the war against Mapuche people, a war that even some foreign mass media outlets could not ignore, anymore.

According to Thomas Reuters Foundation News report from 17 June 2020:

“The Mapuche, which means “Earth People” in the Mapudungun tongue, make up about 10% of Chile’s population of 19 million and mainly work as subsistence farmers in the Araucania region – one the poorest areas of the country.

Mapuche activists have gone on hunger strike, occupied and burned forestry and farming lands, and cut off highways to demand territories they say were stolen from them.

Mapuche leaders say that, like black Americans, they have lost a disproportionate number of their own young men to police violence.

One such case was Camilo Catrillanca, who was shot dead in 2018 during a police operation that sparked widespread fury among Chileans.

The 24-year-old became a symbol of police brutality, and his death triggered the resignation of the country’s police chief.”

However, while there is now even the “Papuan Lives Matter” movement, in far-away Indonesia, until this very moment, there is nothing resembling like “Mapuche Lives Matter” movement in Chile.

The Reuters report continues:

“Still, the struggles of indigenous people remain unknown to many, according to Karina Riquelme, a Chilean lawyer.

“Every day they (the Mapuche) live in fear that one of their members could end up dead,” said Riquelme, who works with indigenous groups.

“I don’t think people can imagine, but there are tanks, helicopters, and police installations in their communities.”

Holding those responsible to account and getting justice is rare, said opposition lawmaker Emilia Nuyado, Chile’s first Mapuche congresswoman elected in 2018.”

*

The plight of non-white migrants in Chile is horrific, particularly of those with non-white skin.

Haitians are taking the worst part.

Even Venezuelans, those who were leaving their country mainly because of the economic difficulties which have risen due to illegal U.S. sanctions against their country, have to face discrimination and often even open hostility.

When the Chilean neoliberal economy began collapsing as a result of the 2019 popular uprising, as well as mismanaged COVID-19 crisis, most of the Venezuelan migrants lost their jobs. They ended up literally on the street, facing insults, ridicule, even attacks. Hundreds gathered in front of their Embassy in Santiago, hoping to return home, but there were no flights. The temperature was dropping as winter had arrived. The Chilean state did nothing to help. In the end, it was the Communist mayor of Recoletta, who took decisive action and housed all Venezuelan people in need in his neighborhood.

The Chilean government began preparing what is termed as ‘voluntary repatriation’ of both Haitian and Venezuelan citizens, demanding that they sign an affidavit with a clause that they cannot re-enter the country for at least nine years. Thoroughly unlawful and unconstitutional move, but here nobody cares.

*

In Chile, racism has many diverse forms, and some of them are truly monstrous.

Right after the Pinochet dictatorship officially ended, I went to Chile, to write about, and to expose “Colonia Dignidad,” an evil German enclave, run by extreme right-wing (some of them Nazis) child molesters (listen to my interview here). This huge compound, in remote Maule Region, spreading towards the Andes and the border with Argentina, was, particularly during the dictatorship, notorious for torturing, raping, and disappearing people. Its name was changed in 1991 to Villa Baviera, but even after that, for years it continued to function as a state inside the state, equipped with barbed wire at its perimeter, as well as searchlights, German shepherds, two airstrips, power plant, and the arsenal of weapons stored in the underground tunnels.

After returning to Chile, several months ago, I discovered that all major Chilean supermarket chains are stuffed with the Villa Baviera products, from German bread to sausages of all kinds.

This pinnacle of racism, bigotry, sexual abuse (mainly pedophilia), and torture, the colony is now operating as some sort of “tourist resort.” This is clearly a spit in the face to its countless victims, many of them kidnapped and ‘adopted’ Mapuche children, and to the Chilean democracy, which was broken to shards on 11 September 1973, during the fascist, US-backed military coup. Democracy, which was never restored, until this very moment.

*

Even in the United States, one statue after another is getting desecrated, painted with graffiti, or simply destroyed. Crimes against humanity are being exposed. With each of the statues, respect to US racist past has been vanishing.

In Chile, racist, white pro-imperialist figures have always been admired and revered. During the last year’s uprising, however, several monuments were attacked, including those to the conqueror Pedro de Valdivia, in the cities of Concepcion, Valdivia, and Temuco.

History of the country has been closely tied to various brutal conquerors, butchers of the native population, and to the collaborators with the European and lately North American interests: Pedro de Valdivia, General Baquedano, and others.

In Santiago de Chile, a huge statue of General Baquedano was painted over with graffiti. It served as a gathering place for the anti-government demonstrations at the end of 2019.

However, under cover of the four months long COVID-19 lockdown, the government of Sebastian Piñera managed to stop most of the protests, and consequently repaint the Baquedano’s statue. At one point, the president himself stopped his motorcade and took his own selfie in front of the monument to the butcher of Bolivia and Peru.

*

In Chile, there is no love for the Chinese or other Asians. The country fell under the total influence of the U.S./European political and cultural propaganda.

I knew several Asian women who used to face intimidation and harassment in Santiago.

Here, to be white, to be of European stock, is worn like a coat of honor. The highest honor.

Twenty years ago, when I lived here for over two years, Chileans were obsessed with different cultures. People appeared to be thirsty for everything coming from Asia or the Middle East. Now, it is back to the mainstream Western offerings: from U.S. pop music to Hollywood junk. The number of art cinemas shrank dramatically. Santiago reduced itself to a provincial, culturally dull capital. Unless one is interested in the second-rate Western offering, there is very little of interest here, now.

Little wonder. Under the neo-liberal model, Chile’s upper and upper-middle classes adopted the Western/white complex of superiority fully.

Obviously, individuals who spit at black people will not be seeking African art.

In a report published by Palabra Publica, some facts and analyses appear to be shocking:

The report ‘Manifestations of Racial Discrimination in Chile: A Study of Perception’s, published by the National Institute for Human rights (NIHR) in February of this year, indicates that 68.2% of surveyed individuals declare that they agree with measures to limit the entrance of migrants into Chile. In turn, a third of them consider themselves “whiter than other people from Latin American countries” and almost 25% in the Metropolitan Region see immigrants as “dirtier” than Chileans. Additionally, the National Institute for Human rights indicates in their report that “the fact that skin color and indigenous features are indicated as reasons for rejection denotes their use as indicators of social exclusion and, therefore, as an implicit expression of racism (…) the indicators of the responses show that over 30% of the participants do not clearly reject the idea of stigmatizing them”.

Black lives do matter, increasingly, even among the many progressive groups of people in the United States. But not in Chile. Despite gross discrimination, assaults and even killing of the people with a different color of skin, (one of the most ‘famous’ cases was that of a 27-year-old Haitian immigrant, Joanne Florvil, who got, in 2017, arbitrarily detained, denied an interpreter and killed), there seems to be no organized, powerful movement in Chile, which would stand determinately against racism and continuous theft of what is left of the Mapuche lands, or for the return of access to the sea to Bolivia.

Now, during the draconical COVID-19 lockdown (Chilean neoliberal government absolutely failed in its ‘battle’ with the novel coronavirus – Chile presently having the highest number of infections in Latin America, per 1 million people), Haitian immigrants are abused more and more, openly and brutally. Bizarrely, many Chileans believe that Haitians are ‘dirty’ and that they are responsible for spreading the virus. Horrid conditions in which they have to live, as well as abuses they have to face, were recently depicted even by Al-Jazeera and otherwise staunch neo-liberal reporter Lucia Newman.

*

In a way, Chilean racism and racial divisions are an extreme version of what is happening in several countries of South America. Here, the European descendants became what is called ‘elites.’ They control political, cultural, and economic life, and they control land, despising other ethnic groups.

Politically, they are controlling not only the right-wing, but also in some cases (like Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), a substantial part of the Left. Here, much of the Left now has nothing to do with the Latin American Left, which is governing in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. As described above, in Chile, it is a defunct pseudo-left similar to the Western anarcho-syndicalism, which is alien to the mentality of the native, non-Western cultures. It is all about ‘rights’ and individualism, and very little or none, about internationalism. In Chile, during the big uprising which took place at the end of 2019 – an uprising which I photographed, filmed and covered – there were almost no voices supporting Venezuela or denouncing US-backed coup in Bolivia. However, there were many demands for free abortion.

*

Chilean racism is deadly. Here, European migrants ruined great native cultures, both in the south and north. Alliance of Chile and the U.K. robbed Bolivia of its access to the sea and damaged Peru. Chile spied on Argentina, on behalf of the U.K., during the War of Malvinas. The country was the essential participant in Operation Condor, with Colonia Dignidad being one of the main torture centers on the continent. Until now, Santiago plays a crucial role in isolating and intimidating Venezuela and other left-wing countries in Latin America.

All this, because of desperate desire to be accepted, to be part of the Western club of predominately white nations.

“The English of Latin America,” Chile does not want to be a victim. It prefers to be a victimizer. And in many ways, it is. Domestically and internationally.

But the word is quickly changing, and Chile may find itself on the very wrong side of history. The Western regime, the Western empire, is rapidly collapsing. And the white color could and should, very soon, become just that and nothing more – a color.

While the great original cultures of Latin America will, no doubt, return to both prominence and former glory.

*

[Written for and first published by Orinoco Tribune in Venezuela]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker, and investigative journalist.

24 July 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Co-Written by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies

In an article in Foreign Affairs in March titled, “Why America Must Lead Again,” Joe Biden claimed that “the world doesn’t organize itself,” and promised to “put the U.S. back at the head of the table” among the nations of the world. But the premise that the world can only organize itself under the direction of the United States and Biden’s ambition to restore the U.S. to such a dominant position at this moment in history are out of touch with global reality.

This view is already being challenged by governments and social movements around the world, and Americans should also challenge it if we mean to avoid endless war and a debilitating new arms race. As if to underline precisely these dangers, the “Back at the head of the table” sub-heading in Biden’s Foreign Affairs article appeared just above a huge photo of U.S. troops firing heavy artillery into a town in Afghanistan at the height of Obama’s escalation of that war in June 2011 (above).

Biden’s Record

An in-depth report in Defense One on June 30th, based on interviews with dozens of Biden insiders, explained how his article and his foreign policy views have reassured military-industrial interests that were worried by the impact of the growing progressive movement on the Democratic Party. Defense One concluded, “Biden may not radically change the nation’s military, deviate from the era’s so-called great power competition, or even slash the bottom line of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.”

These conclusions are consistent with Joe Biden’s record as a senator and vice president. On the most consequential, life-or-death decisions that members of Congress must make, votes for war or peace, Biden only once voted against a U.S.-led war, the First Gulf War in 1991. That was largely a party line vote, in which 45 out of 55 Democratic senators voted against the use of military force to recover Kuwait from Iraq for its royal family.

But Biden seems to have learned a perverse lesson from that war, since he later expressed regret for his vote and never voted against a war again. The next time Congress voted on a bill to authorize the use of military force, over Kosovo in 1999, Biden wrote the bill himself. His war bill failed in the House in a rare 213-213 tie, but the U.S. and NATO attacked Yugoslavia anyway, in a war that was therefore illegal under both U.S. and international law.

As the bombing campaign escalated, killing thousands of civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure from Kosovo to Belgrade, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned that the U.S. and NATO’s decision to go to war without UN Security Council approval had set the world “on a dangerous path to anarchy.” Joe Biden responded, “Nobody in the Senate agrees with that. There is nothing to debate. He is dead, flat, unequivocally wrong.”

Biden then played a key role in the propaganda blitz for war on Iraq. As John Feffer and Stephen Zunes wrote later, “In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.”

During his final 12 years in the Senate, Joe Biden never once voted against a military spending bill. Then, as vice president, despite the illusion of Obama as a “peace president,” which even fooled the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Biden was a senior member of an administration that set a post-World War II record for military spending and dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush and Cheney did.

To Biden’s credit though, he did oppose the 2011 regime change operation that plunged Libya into endless chaos. Biden also argued against sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but what he supported instead was a policy shift from large-scale U.S. occupations to a greater reliance on bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy war, which Obama adopted and Trump has continued.

The continuing chaos caused by the U.S.’s wars in the Greater Middle East, the guerrilla wars now raging across much of Africa, and the rubble and unmarked graves of Ramadi, Kobane, Mosul, Raqqa and other cities in Iraq and Syria are a damning testimony to the cynicism of the Obama and Trump administrations’ war policies. They have succeeded in reducing U.S. casualties and shifting America’s wars off our TV and computer screens, but only at the cost of hundreds of thousands of largely uncounted civilian deaths.

The U.S. Can’t Organize Itself, Much Less the World

People around the world must be scratching their heads over Biden’s claim that “the world doesn’t organize itself” and that it needs the U.S. to do it. The more pressing question right now is whether the U.S. can organize itself to deal with a pandemic that China, New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, Cuba and other better-organized societies have already contained and nearly defeated, simply by prioritizing the health of their people over other interests for a relatively short period of time.

In the U.S., on the other hand, the pandemic was instantly politicized, and exploited as a new opportunity for corporate bailouts. U.S. leaders cavalierly treated the health of the public as a secondary concern to be weighed against the impact on the “economy,” mainly a euphemism for corporate profits and stock prices, and their own political interests.

In June, months into the pandemic, the U.S. still had only 37,000 contact tracers, barely a third of the 100,000 minimum that public health experts said were needed. Former CDC director Tom Frieden pointed out in April that the U.S. would need 300,000 contact tracers if it was to match the scale of China’s successful program in Wuhan. Now a surge in new cases in the U.S. in June has inevitably led to a tragic ever-rising death toll in July, with no end in sight.

In reality, the main obstacle to the world organizing itself in recent years has been the very country that Joe Biden promotes as its savior: the United States. Wikipedia lists 47 multilateral treaties that the U.S. has either not signed, signed but not ratified or withdrawn from. They range from the Convention on the Rights of the Child to the Convention on Cluster Munitions to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Wikipedia’s list does not even include Trump’s disastrous decision to pull out of the Nuclear Agreement with Iran or his withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic.

U.S. leaders blame their abysmal record of international obstruction on U.S. partisan politics, but other countries also have contentious domestic politics and yet somehow manage to ratify treaties, cooperate with the UN and play their part in international affairs. Only the U.S. acts like a spoiled child, demanding a seat at the head of the table before it will cooperate on anything – and then still refuses to cooperate.

On climate change, the Obama administration wrecked the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which would have imposed binding limits on carbon emissions, refusing to sign on unless it was dropped in favor of a system in which each country would set its own voluntary, non-binding targets for emissions cuts. That was the basis for the much-hailed but ineffective agreements in Copenhagen and Paris that have allowed the U.S. to boost its oil and gas production to their highest levels ever.

On questions of war and peace, the UN Charter unequivocally prohibits the threat or use of force by any country, as Kofi Annan pointed out in the cases of Kosovo and Iraq. The basis of current U.S. war policy, as Biden implied in dismissing Annan’s statement on Kosovo, is that the U.S. will not be bound by the UN Charter when its “vital interests” are at stake or it can find any political justification for war that is persuasive to U.S. leaders.

In effect, the U.S. claims to be exempt from the rule of international law, which is why it vigorously rejects the jurisdiction of impartial international courts that could never uphold such a claim. In the case of Nicaragua v the United States in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the U.S. guilty of aggression against Nicaragua and ordered the U.S. to cease its aggression and pay war reparations – which it has still not paid.

In economic terms, no single country dominates today’s world economy or international trade as the U.S. did after the Second World War. The United States, China and the European Union are roughly equal in the size of their economies and their international trade, but even the combined GDP and external trade figures for all three only account for about 45% of the world’s trade and economic activity. The world we live in today is a diverse, multipolar world of 196 countries, where billions of people live, work and interact with each other, and all deserve a voice in our common future.

The notion that the United States deserves a special seat at the head of the international table is therefore a dangerous anachronism. It is not based on the U.S’s economic role in today’s world but on weaponizing the residual power of the U.S. Treasury and the dollar with murderous sanctions, and on a military imbalance that has given its leaders the erroneous idea that they can ignore the laws the world has agreed to live by and instead adhere to a doctrine of “might makes right” or the “law of the jungle.”

Far from earning the U.S. a position of privilege and authority among nations, the U.S.’s illegal military and economic warfare is a serious problem that the American people and the world must address and peacefully resolve before it does even greater harm.

How About a Round Table?

Amid all the rancor of U.S. politics, many of the older Americans who are Joe Biden’s base in the Democratic Party wistfully remember President Kennedy and the much mythologized “brief shining moment” when a young, glamorous president turned the White House into a vision of Camelot, and all things seemed possible. The most powerful symbol of the original Camelot was King Arthur’s Round Table, at which he and all his knights and guests sat as equals, and the identification of Kennedy with King Arthur was a symbol of his popular image as a man of the people – despite his privileged background.

So, here’s an idea for Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers. Stop pretending that all America’s problems began with Trump, and that our failed bid for global military dominance has somehow earned our next president a “seat at the head of the table” when he sits down with his counterparts from China, Germany, Russia and the rest of the world. How about instead sitting down with them at a Round Table—real, virtual or just symbolic—on a basis of mutual respect and sovereign equality, to solve the urgent problems we all face in this century?

The American people are ready to turn the page on 20 years of war, undying hostility to our old Cold War enemies and massive military budgets that leave us trailing our more peaceful neighbors in education, healthcare, public transport, housing and social programs. Instead of trying to match Trump’s hostility to China, which will only encourage him to double down on his brinkmanship, Biden should firmly close the book on Trump’s New Cold War before it gets even more perilous.

Unfortunately, Biden’s past loyalty to military-industrial interests does not bode well for the kind of leadership we need, and which we have not seen from any U.S. president of this generation. So if Biden is elected, it will be up to peace-loving Americans to demand a foreign policy that takes illegal military “options,” brutal sanctions and a new arms race off the table and replaces them with a new commitment to the rule of law and “Round Table” diplomacy.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

22 July 2020

Source: countercurrents.org