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By Jay Janson

The sixty or seventy million men, women and children didn’t die because of Adolph Hitler, they perished because the wealthy in the US and Western Europe empowered Adolph Hitler to make war.

IF there were public awareness of this incontrovertible truth, how would activists within he hundreds of millions of good people who lost loved ones during the Second World War and the Holocaust react?

The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War forced reduction of the strength of the German army from 4,500,000 in 1918 to 100,000. Its navy was not to exceed 15,000 men, including manning for the fleet, coast defenses, signal stations, administration, and other land services. Heavy weapons armored vehicles, submarines and capital ships were forbidden, as were aircraft of any kind. Compliance with these restrictions was monitored until 1927 by the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control.

1918 to 1929 was a already a time of low economic growth and mass unemployment. The Wall Street Crash during the autumn of 1929 had grave consequences for Germany. German unemployment brought suffering to 20 million people. All over Germany there were people desperate for money needed to feed, clothe and house their families. Many of the homeless were camping out in the parks of Berlin.

There is simply no way an impoverished and utterly demilitarized Nazi Germany, with no air force, a tiny navy, no armored vehicles, no heavy weapons and a small army, could have on its own, built its armed forces up to the most powerful military in the world during the first six years of Hitler’s rule without the colossal and crucial investments in, and joint venturing by, top US corporations in low wage Nazi Germany – in outright evasion of the Versailles Treaty prohibition of German rearmament. There is no way Hitler could have begun a world war and a multi-nation Holocaust when he did without the mega enormous financial and technical help he received from the United States of America. England and France also cooperated, especially in agreeing to allow the abandonment of the prohibitions on German rearmament. Western media defended the building up of Nazi Germany’s military as only a ‘bulwark’ against the Soviet Union.

Regarding a depression so great that it threatened the status quo and required fascism and war, one need not read Marx to understand private capital will withdraw when profitability is too low to sustain the privileges and power of the ruling upper class. America’s great independent economist Thorstein Veblen assumed depression to be “the normal condition in a business-enterprise economy, to be relieved in periods of excitation caused by stimuli not intrinsic to the system, for example, war, expansion abroad, etc.”[from The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen]

Hitler had emphasized Germany’s need for ‘Lebensraum’ (‘living space’), insisting Germany’s 19th century motto ‘Drang Nach Osten’ (‘push to the East,’ a slogan designating German expansion into Slavic lands), must become a reality. All this was strikingly proclaimed by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, [1] which by 1939 had sold 5.2 million copies in eleven languages. [Britannica]

Hitler’s uncompromising lethal condemnation of communism and the very existence of Wall Street’s archenemy, the socialist Soviet Union, would have to have impressed the US and European wealthy, whose ‘rule by the rich’ was threatened by socialist fervor and riots at home for their failure to have prevented the ongoing Great Depression with tens of millions suffering even from lack of food. Newsreels of massive and violent riots in many US cities, newsreels can be seen on YouTube at ‘Riots Across America – The Great Depression.’

Below are excepts from British American scholar Anthony B. Sutton’s ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,’ Chapter One – ‘Wall Street Paves the Way for Hitler.’ ( Anthony Sutton was research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973.)

“The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities. For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline; Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I. G. Farben, Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil — of which 85 percent was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process.

Germans were brought to Detroit to learn the techniques of specialized production of components, and of straight-line assembly. The techniques learned in Detroit were eventually used to construct the dive-bombing Stukas …. I. G. Farben representatives in this country enabled a stream of German engineers to visit not only plane plants but others of military importance. Contemporary American business press confirm that business journals and newspapers were fully aware of the Nazi threat and its nature.

The evidence presented suggests that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) –with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.

Synthetic gasoline and explosives (two of the very basic elements of modern warfare), the control of German World War II output was in the hands of two German combines created by Wall Street loans under the Dawes Plan.

The two largest tank producers in Hitler’s Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A. G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry.

General Motors supplied Siemens & Halske A. G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. As late as 1940, Bendix Aviation supplied complete technical data to Robert Bosch for aircraft and diesel engine starters and received royalty payments in return.

In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note ” that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were — except for the Ford Motor Company — controlled by the Wall Street elite — the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan Bank.”

No one will regret the time spent in reading Anthony Sutton’s ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,’ 1976, available gratis on the Internet (PDF). Sutton was economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute from 1968 to 1973

Given the general public ignorance regarding Wall Street responsibility for WW II, Sutton’s book invites our flabbergasted attention:

1. Wall Street-Nazi Collaboration in World War II; American I.G. in World War II; Were American Industrialists and Financiers Guilty of War Crimes?

2. Conclusions: The Pervasive Influence of International Bankers; Is the United States Ruled by a Dictatorial Elite? The New York Elite as a Subversive Force; The Slowly Emerging Revisionist Truth.

Beginning in 1935, GM built a factory in Berlin for the purpose of manufacturing “Blitz” trucks for the Wehrmacht. Ford began building similar trucks around the same time, but GM was the number one producer of the vehicles that were vital for the quick conquests of Poland, France, and much of the Soviet Union. Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production, claimed that the rubber GM supplied was the key to the ability of the Germans to wage war the way they did. [2]

In July 1938, before the outbreak of war, the German consul at Cleveland gave Ford, on his 75th birthday, the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. General Motors and Ford controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army. American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.[2] In 1998, it came out that the Third Reich was providing Ford’s factory in Cologne with 1,200 Russian slaves.[3]

Your author would never buy a Ford or General Motors built automobile.

In 1941, Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum in addition to owning a massive amount of America’s electricity production and other minerals. It sent so much of its aluminum product over to Germany that when the US involvement in the war began, there was a massive aluminum production shortage in America. Alcoa essentially sold the Axis powers much of the material to build their war machines. [The Nazi Hydra in America. Suppressed History of a Century – Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich, Glen Yeadon with John Hawkins, Progressive Press, 2008]

During the early 1930s, Fritz Thyssen ran a business that he used to help finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Brown Brothers Harriman was a subsidiary company that he used as a base of American operations. Prescott Bush, father of Ex-President George Bush and of course grandfather of Ex-President George W. Bush, was on the board of directors for BBH and his business dealings continued until his company’s assets were seized by the federal government in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. [Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust Paperback – February 16, 2009, by Edwin Black

Dow Chemical was one of the companies that provided an insane amount materials for the Nazis, including not only raw materials but also American technological innovations in regards to oil refinery.

The Chase Manhattan Bank’s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly heinous. It functions as the bank for foreign transactions for fascist Vichy France, and because Carlos Niedermann, Chase’s representative in Paris, had very good personal relations with the Nazis, he agreed to their requests that the bank seize the assets of at least one hundred Parisian Jews that were considered especially worth pursuing by the Reich. This doubtless helped the Gestapo capture those people. Chase Manhattan was hardly alone in this, though. In 1998, the company was part of a suit demanding reparations from J.P. Morgan and Citibank for the millions of dollars stolen during the war.

Yours truly would not have the stomach to open an account in a Chase Manhattan bank.

How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany even throughout World War II is detailed in “Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949″ by Charles Higham; Hale , London, 1983. Charles Higham is the son of a former UK MP and Cabinet member.

“Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other, war means business as usual for international capital. Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland – a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.”

Standard Oil shipped enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France. On September 22,1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, ”Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben-after the United States and Germany had become active enemies.” The appeal was denied. [The Treason Of Rockefeller Standard Oil During World War II By The American Chronicle, February 4, 2012]

I.T.T. helped supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London; and I.T.T. build the Focke-Wulfs that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war. After the war, I.T.T. and General Motors both received tax deductions for the damage to their factories in Germany from Allied bombing.

The bottom line is that, while British and US soldiers were dying at the hands of thee Nazi war machine, and Jews sere being exterminated in their thousands, British and US companies which had invested in post-WW I Germany continued to sympathize and trade with the Nazi regime. The bombs that leveled so many British cities and killed so many women and children, may well have been manufactured in Germany, but it was largely British and US money that provided Hitler with the parts, and the fuel to dispatch them to allied targets.[5] Both at the Normandy landing and in Russia many Nazi tanks had GM motors and downed German planes were found to have GE engines.

Britain was America’s closest ally. During the year 1936, the King of England and the British Empire was for certain a greater follower of Hitler than most Germans. During the occupation of France, the then Duke of Windsor, asked the German forces to place guards at his Paris and Riviera homes – and they did. His pro-Hitler statements, while Governor of the Bahamas during the war had to be hushed up. Even as late as 1970 he spoke affectionately of Hitler.[6]

That the Second World War was a ‘good war,’ a clear fight against what a madman had brought about, has been a major and fundamental deception solidified in Wall Street owned media and movies. So pervasively universal is the deception that even the outcry of the German Counsel for the Defense in his summation at the major Nuremberg trial, heard in the block buster American movie Judgement at Nuremberg, (with Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Marlena Dietrich) made little impression, “Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty? shouts actor Maximilian Schell in defense of the Nazis on trial.

Seven years before the outbreak of WWII, during this rearming of Germany, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last wealthy aristocratic insider US President, wrote to his confidant Colonel House “as you and I know, this government has been owned by a financial element in the centers of power since the days of Andrew Jackson.” (Jackson was US president a hundred years earlier). While Roosevelt was permitted to tax the wealthy in order to enact Social Security, Unemployment Compensation and have the government put the unemployed to work in CCC Camps and the Works Projects Administration, Roosevelt at the same time had to have been aware all his cronies among the wealthy owners of America’s top corporations were investing and joint venturing head over heels in Nazi Germany.

The Nazi’s frightening early on murderous, violence against Germany’s Jewish population did not deter the titans of US industry from empowering Hitler militarily for war against Russia. In any case, the upper echelon of American high society in general was clearly anti-Jewish. From the roll modeling elite, strong anti-Jewish sentiment was reflected down and throughout the country. It was usually more viciously and outspokenly demonstrated among the working classes. As a seven year old, your author upon missing a shot playing marbles in the schoolyard remembers cursing the wayward marble with “Jew bastard!” without knowing the meaning of either word. Though these wealthiest of investors and bankers on Wall Street and eminent CEOs of America’s major corporations could not have foreseen that their empowering Nazi Germany militarily would bring about Hitler’s 1941 orders to kill all Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, they knew of the inhuman persecution of Jews in Germany that began immediately upon Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.

Edwin Black, in his ‘IBM and the Holocaust’ raises the important question of whether Hitler’s destruction of the Jews would have happened as rapidly as it did and claimed as many victims without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards. IBM/Dehomag employees worked for the Nazi death bureaucracy. In 1933, International Business Machines began providing Germany with punchcard machines that functioned as precursors to modern computers and databases. Documents have since been uncovered that show that as late as 1941, IBM was working in tandem with the Reich to liquidate Jews from Holland. IBM employees were training SS personnel how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass execution of large numbers of undesirables, at times right in the headquarters of death camps.[Hitler’s Willing Business Partners, by Jack Beatty, April, 2001, Atlantic Monthly]

Similar to IBM and GM’s automotive rivals, General Motors was sued by Holocaust survivors for assisting the Nazi war machine.

During the trials at Nuremberg after the war it came out in testimony that the German translation of Henry Ford’s ‘The International Jew’ was required reading for the Hitler Youth.

(Not that it means anything, your author would never buy a Ford or General Motors built automobile.)

The Chase Manhattan Bank’s form of colluding with the Reich was particularly heinous. It functioned as the bank for foreign transactions for fascist Vichy France, and because Carlos Niedermann, Chase’s representative in Paris, had very good personal relations with the Nazis, he agreed to their requests that the bank seize the assets of at least one hundred Parisian Jews that were considered especially worth pursuing by the Reich. This doubtless helped the Gestapo capture those people. Chase Manhattan was hardly alone in this. In 1998, Chase was part of a suit demanding reparations from J.P. Morgan and Citibank for the millions of dollars stolen.

(Yours truly would not have the stomach to open an account in a Chase Manhattan bank.)

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, describes the reaction to Kristallnacht in the US: Kristallnacht, (German: “Crystal Night”), the night of November 9–10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and property. The name Kristallnacht refers ironically to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms.

“President Franklin Roosevelt condemned the pogrom, recalled the U.S. ambassador from Germany for ‘consultations,’ and extended the visitors’ visas of the approximately 12,000 German Jewish refugees who were then in the United States. But at the same time, FDR announced that liberalization of America’s tight immigration quotas was ‘not in contemplation.’ The Christian Science Monitor echoed Roosevelt’s position, telling its readers that prayer, not more immigration, was the best response to the persecution of German Jewry.

– In the wake of Kristallnacht, humanitarian-minded members of Congress introduced legislation to aid German Jewry. A bill sponsored by Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass) proposed the admission of 20,000 German refugee children outside the quotas. Nativist and isolationist groups vociferously opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill. Typical of their perspective was a remark by FDR’s cousin, Laura Delano Houghteling, who was the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration: she warned that ‘20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.’ February, 1939, the Wagner-Rogers bill died in Congress. Roosevelt refused to take a position on it.

– On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, with 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. 743 had been waiting to receive US visas. The Cuban government refused to admit them. Some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded.’ 254 of the passengers returned to Europe would perish in the Holocaust.

– Four months before Kristallnacht, the Roosevelt administration had organized a conference in Evian, France, and invited delegates from 32 countries to discuss the Jewish refugee problem. But the delegates reaffirmed their unwillingness to liberalize their immigration quotas, and the British refused to even discuss Palestine as a possible haven. One German newspaper’s comment on Evian stands out: ‘We can see that one likes to pity the Jews…but no state is prepared to … accept a few thousand Jews. Thus, the conference serves to justify Germany’s policy against Jewry.’”

On May 18, 1942, The New York Times reported, but on an inside page, that Nazis had machine-gunned over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia. By this date, millions had been gassed.

In the June 10,1944 issue of Nation Magazine, Editor I. F. Stone wrote “For the Jews – Life or Death? – regarding a weak proposal to make so called ‘free ports’ of army camps in the US for refugee Jews.

The longer we delay the fewer Jews there will be left to rescue, the slimmer the chances to get them out. Between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 European Jews have been killed since August, 1942, when the Nazi extermination campaign began.”

The most violent persecution, brutal arrests and internment had been done openly in a world basically owned and run by the ‘democratically’ elected legislatures of white industrialized nations, nations that had earlier used their edge in arms manufacture to conquer, colonize and exploit the whole non white population of the world. When the difficult to believe newsreels and newspaper photos of the indescribably inhuman conditions inside the camps, of heaps of hundreds of naked bodies and of the cremation ovens were seen, they did not awaken a change in the of the long standing fierce antipathy and prejudice toward Jews which sustained an attitude of opposition to the entry of Jews, even as survivors of the Holocaust, into the USA, in spite of the wide open spaces it contained.

The rearming of Germany made possible Hitler’s invasions of twenty-two countries and brought world war to Asia, for Japan would not have dared to attack and declare war on the United States of America without it being able to count on an alliance with an awesomely powerful rearmed Nazi Germany, plus Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania, which all declared war on the USA immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Second World War and the Holocaust, which made the rich speculators of Wall Street owning America the sole world superpower, is estimated to have taken the lives of 60 to 70 million men, women and children. As already mentioned, within this total were the 28 million citizens, men, women and children, of the Soviet Union, which had been the target goal for the rearming of Germany by a consensus of the wealthiest American and European capitalists. A further plus for Wall Street was that half the cities of Wall Street’s designated archenemy, socialist model USSR, lay in ruins.

We are fortunate to have Finian Cunningham’s excellently written description of the mega great deception that underlies most subsequent deceptions in our post-WW II world. A world of deceit by media managed public ignorance and dis and mis information.

“The Western public, inculcated with decades of brainwashing versions of history, have a particular disadvantage in coming to a proper understanding of the world wars…

A very different ‘version’ of history has been concealed, a ‘version’ that puts the Western rulers in an altogether more pernicious category from their ordinary citizens.

European fascism headed up by Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, was not some aberrant force that sprang from nowhere during the 1920s-1930s. The movement was a deliberate cultivation by the rulers of Anglo-American capitalism. European fascism may have been labeled “national socialism” but its root ideology was very much one opposed to overturning the fundamental capitalist order. It was an authoritarian drive to safeguard the capitalist order, which viewed genuine worker-based socialism as an enemy to be ruthlessly crushed.

This is what made European fascism so appealing to the Western capitalist ruling class in those times. In particular, Nazi Germany was viewed by the Western elite as a bulwark against possible socialist revolution inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917.

It is no coincidence that American capital investment in Nazi Germany between 1929-1940 far outpaced that in any other European country, … The industrial rearmament of Germany (despite the strictures of the Versailles Treaty signed at the end of World War One, which were ignored) was indeed facilitated by the American and British capitalist ruling classes. When Hitler annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, it was ignored. This was not out of complacent appeasement, as widely believed, but rather out of a far more active, albeit secretive, policy of collusion. British Conservative leader Neville Chamberlain and his ruling cohort were intent on giving Nazi Germany a “free hand” for eastward expansionism.

The real target for the Western sponsors of the Nazi war machine was an attack on the Soviet Union in order to destroy, in their view, the source of international revolutionary socialism. In the 1930s, the very existence of capitalism was teetering on the edge amid the Great Depression, massive poverty and seething popular discontent in the US, Britain and other Western countries. The entire Western capitalist order was under imminent threat from its own masses. This is the historical context for the Western-backed rise of European fascism.

Look at some of the undisputed figures from the Second World War… Some 14 million Red Army soldiers died in the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, compared with less than 400,000 military each from the US and Britain. These figures tell us where the Nazi German war effort was primarily directed towards – the Soviet Union, as the Western imperialist rulers had hoped in their initial sponsoring of Nazi and other European fascist regimes during the 1930s. [Quoted from Finian Cunningham’s article ‘World War II Continues… Against Russia,’ PressTV, 5/10/2014]

Why had Soviet leaders and writers, even during the onslaught of lies in anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, never held the West responsible for WW II in having rearmed Germany, intending (as Hitler’s threatened) the destruction of the USSR? This has been a mystery to this archival research peoples historian. All the investments and joint venturing of US (and European) corporations building up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to the world’s number one military in only six years are documented in both business records and the tax records of US, German and other nations and are in great part located on the Internet with quite comprehensive statistics, a modest amount of which are presented in this tract.

The only plausible answer as to why Russians haven’t openly and logically held the United States responsible for the second world war and the genocidal Nazi invasion of their country is the shame for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. However, given the obviousness of the colonial powers heavily arming Nazi Germany under such a pathetic excuse as to make Nazi Germany only a “bulwark against communist Soviet Union,” and then refusing all entreaties of the Soviets to form a protective alliance in the face of Hitler’s ever increasing power and belligerence, Stalin’s surprise signing a non-aggression pact seems to have been a last resort defense of Russia.

Were the Soviets to wait for Hitler’s attack, openly prepared by US, UK and France’s rearming of Germany against the terms of the Versailles Treaty and refusing to unite with the Soviet Union in opposing Hitler?

In his book, Mission to Moscow, (later a film as well with Walter Huston), US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, Joseph Davies, chronicles the desperation of the Russians in 1937, unable to get a defensive alliance with England and France, and fully aware that the rearming of Germany was directed at the Soviet Union most obviously not meant to be only a ‘bulwark.’ By the surprise non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin derailed for the moment the West’s plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. This gained the Soviet Union the time to build the tanks in the East that would later defeat the Nazi invasion. What Hitler called “a war of extermination” in Western Poland began only one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Hitler would again call for “a war of extermination” with the German invasion of the USSR, June 22, 1941, at the same time calling for the eradication of Jews. Russian President Vladimir Putin in his most recent comment on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 2014[8] shifts the blame for the Nazi-USSR pact away from the Soviets and on to the West’s emboldenment of Hitler with the Munich Agreement.

The arming of Nazi Germany for an attack on the Soviet Union was a continuance of the colonial powers policy of total destruction of Soviet Russia since it’s inception. In 1917, after suffering more dead than the other empires in a colonial powered First World War, Russians had overthrown their Tsar and their capitalists, and had declared a socialist government. Russians established a revolutionary government as a consequence of intolerably horrendous suffering during the First World War. Almost immediately, fourteen armies of twelve capitalist nations, former WW I allies of Russia, invaded in support of a desperate regime change civil war that failed but took the lives of millions, three million from typhus alone. The US sent two armies, one to Murmansk, the other to Vladivostok. There are official US Army photos of Americans standing over dead Bolsheviks* posted in the margins of Wikipedia’s articles, Polar Bear Expedition and the American Expeditionary Force Siberia. *’Bolshevik’ in Russian means ‘majority’ referring to past voting results during a Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party Congress) Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.” [Cover Story: Churchill’s Greatness,. Jeffrey Wallin 2006-10-04 at the Churchill Center]

The capitalist arming of Hitler, seems to have been sign of a desperate, to the point of illegality, continuance of the mortally destructive intentions of the US and other colonial powers since 1919.

The Cold War after the Second World War saw the colonial powers invading and bombing most of their colonies or ex-colonies, or fostering proxy wars between forces backed by the colonial capitalist powers against revolutionary independence movements backed by the Soviets and the socialist block.

That the Second World War Was A ‘Good War,’ ‘Good’ Triumphing Over ‘Evil,’ has been a Gargantuan Deception, Ominously Conditioning All of Humanity to Tolerate Profitable Genocide Ad Infinitum!

REAFFIRMING THE BARE TRUTH:

If no rearming of a Nazi Germany led by Hitler,

then no Second World War

If no Second World War,

then no multination Holocaust of six million Jews among a Holocaust total of eighteen million Europeans:

If no multination genocide of Jews,

then no 250,000 displaced Jewish survivors refused refuge.

All the German crimes, the crimes that were committed by Stalin and those committed by the US and Britain in fire bombing entire German and Japanese cities, happened during the world war that was made possible by the enthusiastic rearming of Germany for a singular purpose.

The Second World War, Wall Street made possible, ended with the Wall Street owned United States of America having become the mega wealthy first ever world’s single super power, while its socialist nemesis, the Soviet Union lay devastated, its major cities half destroyed and 28 million of its citizens dead.

What might have been different all these subsequent years? if the world had been aware that investments and joint venturing by America’s large corporations had made the Second World War and the Holocaust possible?

END NOTES

1. 1. In Mein Kampf, Hitler unequivocally stated a German necessity to invade Eastward, and several passages in Mein Kampf regarding Germany’s Jewish citizens are undeniably of a genocidal nature. Mein Kampf was published in July of 1926 and sold a quarter million copies before Hitler came to power. In it, Hitler announced his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils:Communism and Judaism.

2. Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration, By Michael Dobbs Washington Post, November 30, 1998

3 [Ford ‘used slave labour’ in Nazi German plants, By Simon English, The Telegraph, 11/3/2019 1,200 Russian slaves.

4. The Coca-cola Company Under the Nazis, University of Virginia xroads.virginia.edu

5. “But it was largely British and US money that provided Hitler with the parts. … General Motors’ collaboration with both the Nazi-controlled chemicals giant“, … As author Rodney Atkinson points out in his book, Europe’s Full Circle

6. 1997 titled The Windsor File, Written by Paul Sweet, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and historian involved in the eventual publication of the papers, details the duke’s Nazi associations and the long, ultimately unsuccessful effort at suppression.

7. Hitler’s Willing Business Partners, 4/2001, Jack Beatty, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Thomas C Mountain

Dr. Mirandi, Professor Extraordinaire of Iran, said it best when asked on Al Jazeera if the USA was going to attack Iran. He stated something so obvious that you would think western journalists would have already come to this realization, that “as long as the USA is sending its military to the Persian Gulf they are not about to attack Iran. It is when the USA starts to pull it forces out is when we should start to be worried”.

Why does this make so much old fashioned common sense? Because the US military based in the Persian Gulf is so incredibly vulnerable to Iranian short and medium range missiles. These missiles have been hidden deep in hardened silos that are pretty much invulnerable to US preemptive strikes and when wheeled out can quickly leave the Persian Gulf in a smoking ruin

Lets face it, US warship are still basically 19th century technology, slow, vulnerable to supersonic anti-ship missles and will quickly be headed to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in event of a war breaking out. US airbases are stationary and no matter the number of the infamously unreliable Patriot missiles defenses impossible to protect.

Iran has tens of thousands of homemade missiles, well tested, and quite close geographically to the US and Arab governments militaries in the Persian Gulf. As the esteemed Professor put it when it comes to missiles in Iran “think Hezbollah in Lebanon times 100”.

So as long as the USA military is sending more cannon fodder to the Persian Gulf you can count on one thing, that a war is not about to break out. When the Pax Americana starts to withdraw is troops and warships is when the situation is getting serious.

Thomas C. Mountain is an historian and educator reporting from Eritrea since 2006 who first became involved in matters “Middle Eastern” in 1982.

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Vltchek

Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected:

I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete wallsintended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets. I see monstrous environmental devastation in places such as Indonesian Borneo, Peruvian gold mining towns, or the by now almost uninhabitable atoll island-nations of Oceania: Tuvalu, Kiribati or Marshall Islands.

I see slums, a lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, where the boots of Western empires have been smashing local cultures, enslaving people and looting natural resources.

I work on all the continents. I never stop, even when exhaustion tries to smash me against the wall, even when there are hardly any reserves left. I cannot stop; I have no right to stop, because I can finally see the pattern; the way this world operates, the way the West has been managing to usurp it, indoctrinate, and enslave most of the countries of the world. I combine my knowledge, and publish it as a ‘warning to the world’.

I write books about this ‘pattern’. My most complete, so far, being the 1,000 pages long “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.

Then, I see the West itself.

I come to ‘speak’, to Canada and the United States, as well as Europe. Once in a while I am invited to address Australian audiences, too.

The West is so outrageously rich, compared to the ruined and plundered continents, that it often appears that it does not belong to the Planet Earth.

A lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in Villa Borghese in Rome, and a horror walk through Mathare slum in Nairobi could easily exist in two distinct realities, or in twodifferent galaxies.

Even now, after I slightly misspelled “Villa Borghese”, my Mac immediately offereda correction. It is because Villa Borghese does exist. On the other hand, “Mathare”, which I spelled correctly, was underlined red. Mathare ‘is an error’. Because it does not exist. It does not exist, despite the fact that around one million men, women and children lives there. It is not recognized by my MacBook Pro, nor by the great majority of my relatively well-educated readers in the West.

In fact, almostentire world appears to be one big error, non-entity, if observed from New York, Berlin or Paris.

*

I come and speak in front of the Western public. Yes, I do it from time to time, although with decreasing frequency.

Frankly, to face European or North American crowds feels depressing, even humiliating.

It goes like this: you are invited to ‘tell the truth’; to present what you are witnessing all over the world.

You stand there, facing men and women who have just arrived in their comfortable cars, after having good dinners in their well-heated or air-conditioned homes. You may be a famous writer and a filmmaker, but somehow, they make you feel like a beggar. Because you came to speak on behalf of “beggars”.

Everything is well-polished, and choreographed. It is expected that you do not show any ‘gore’. That you do not call your public ‘names’. That you do not swear, do not get drunk on the stage, do not start insulting everyone in sight.

What you usually face is quite a hard, or at least ‘hardened’, crowd.

Recently, in Southern California, when I was asked, by a fellow philosopher and a friend of mine, to address a small gathering of his colleagues, some people were banging on their mobile phones, as I was describing the situation at the Syrian frontline, near Idlib.I felt that my account was nothing more than a ‘background, an elevator music’ to most of them. At least when I am addressing millions through my television interviews, I do not have to see the public.

When you ‘speak’ in the West, you are actually addressing men and women who are responsible, at least partially, for the mass murders and genocides that are being committed by their countries. Men and women whose standards of living are outrageously high, because The Others are being robbed, humiliated, and often raped. But their eyes are not humble; they are drilling them into you, waiting for some mistake that you might make, so they can conclude: “He is fake news”. For them, you are not a bridge between those who ‘exist’ and those who don’t. For them, you are an entertainer, a showman, or more often than not: a nuisance.

To learn about war, about the terror that the West is spreading, is, for many in my audience yet another type of luxury, high-level entertainment, not unlike an opera performance or a symphony concert. If necessary, they can even pay, although mostly they’d rather not. After a titillating experience, it is back to the routine, back to a sheltered, elegant life. While you, the next day, are often catching a plane back to the reality of the others; to the frontline, to dust and misery.

They, your public (but face it, also most of your readers) came to show how ‘open-minded’ they are. They came ‘to learn’ from you, ‘to get educated’, while keeping their lifestyles intact.Most of them think that they know it all, even without your first-hand experience, they are benevolently doing you a favor by inviting you, and by dragging themselves all the way to some university or a theatre or wherever the hell you are standing in front of them. They did not come to offer any support to your struggle. They are not part of any struggle. They are good, peace-loving, hardworking people; that’s all.

You know, like those Germans, in the late 1930’s; self-righteous, hard-working folks. Most of them love their pets, and recycle their garbage. And clean after themselves at Starbucks.

*

A few days ago, we stopped the coup in Venezuela. I say we, because, although deep in devastated Borneo Island, I had been giving interviews to RT, Press TV, addressing millions. Even here, I never stopped writing, tweeting, always ready to drop everything just fly to Caracas, if I were to be needed there.

To defend Venezuela, to defend the Revolution there, is essential. As it is essential to defend Syria, Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Bolivia, South Africa and other revolutionary and brave nations that are refusing to surrender to the Western diktat.

While the ideological battle for Caracas was raging, I was thinking: is there anything that could still move the Western public into action?

Have they – Europeans and North Americans – become totally indifferent to their own crimes? Have they developed some sort of emotional immunity? Is their condition ideological, or simply clinical?

Here we were, in the middle of a totally open coup; an attempt by the West to overthrow one of the most democratic countries on our planet. And they did almost nothing to stop the terrorism performed by their regimes in Washington or Madrid! At least in Indonesia in 1965 or in Chile in 1973, the Western regime tried to hide behind thin fig leaves.At least, while destroying socialist Afghanistan and the Communist Soviet Union by creating the Mujahedin, the West used Pakistan as a proxy, trying to conceal, at least partially,its true role. At least, while killing more than 1 million people in Iraq, there was this charade and bunch of lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. At least, at least…

Now, it is all transparent. In Syria, Venezuela; and against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia.

As if propaganda was not even needed, anymore,it as if the Western public has become totally obedient, posing no threat to the plans of the Western regime.

Or more precisely, the once elaborate Western propaganda has become extremely simple: it now repeats lies, and the great majority of Western citizens do not even bother to question what their governments are doing to the world. The only thing that matters are ‘domestic issues’; meaning – the wages and benefits for the Westerners.

There are no riots like during the Vietnam War. Now riots are only for the better welfare of European workers. No one in the West is fighting in order to stop the plunder abroad, or the terrorist attacks unleashed by NATO against non-Western countries, or against those countless NATO military bases, against the invasions and orchestrated coups.

*

How much more can the Western public really stomach?

Or can it stomach absolutely everything?

Would it accept the direct invasion of Venezuela or Cuba or both? It has already accepted the direct intervention and destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to name just a few terrorist actions committed by the West in recent history.

So, how much more? Would an attack against Iran be acceptable? Let’s say, 2-3 million deaths?

North Korea, perhaps? A few more millions, a new mountain of corpses?

I am asking; it is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. I believe that the world has to know.

Has the Western public reached the level of the ISIS (or call them IS or Deash)? Is it so self-righteous, so fanatic, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, that it cannot think, clearly, analyze and judge, anymore?

Would provoking Russia or China or both into WWIII be acceptable to people living in Bavaria or South Carolina, or Ontario?

And if yes, are they all really out of their minds?

And if they are, should the world try to stop them, and how?

*

I want to know the boundaries of the Western madness.

That there is madness is indisputable, but how massive is it?

I understand, I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on Israel which its West’s outpost in the Middle East, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder.

But what about the survival of our planet, and the survival of humankind?

I imagine the eyes of those people who come to my ‘combat presentations’. I tell them the truth. I say it all. I am never holding back; never compromise. I show them images of the wars they have unleashed. Yes, they; because the citizens are responsible for their own governments, and because there is, clearly, something called collective guilt and collective responsibility!

Those eyes, faces… I will tell you what I read in them: they will never act. They will never try to overthrow their regime. As long as they live their privileged lives. As long as they think that the system in which they are the elites, at least has some chance of surviving in its present form. They play it both ways, some of them do: verbally, they are outraged by NATO, by Western imperialism and savage capitalism. Practically, they do nothing tangible to fight the system.

What is the conclusion then? If they do not act, then others have to. And I am convinced: they will.

For more than 500 years the entire world has been in flames, plundered and murdered by a small group of extremely aggressive Western nations. This has been going on virtually uninterruptedly.

Nobody finds it amusing, anymore. Where I work, in places that I care about, nobody wants this kind of world.

Look at those countries that are now trying to destroy Venezuela. Look closely! They consist of the United States, Canada, majority of Europe, and mostly those South American states where the descendants of European colonialists are forming majority!

Do we want another 500 years of this?

North Americans and Europeans have to wake up, soon. Even in Nazi Germany, there were soldiers who were so disgusted with Hitler, that they wanted to send him to the dogs. Today, in the West, there is not one powerful political party which believes that 500 years of Western colonialist plunder is more than enough; that torturing the world should stop, and stop immediately.

If Western imperialism, which is the greatest and perhaps the only major threat our planet is now facing, is not decisively and soon dismantled by its own citizens, it will have to be fought and deterred by external forces.That is: by its former and present victims.

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

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

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

When the President of Israel and the Jewish son-in-law of the President of the United States make surprisingly thoughtless statements about Palestine, they show us just how deliberately ignorant of history they are — and how uncaring they are for Palestinian suffering at a deeply subconscious level.

Hatim Kanaaneh, Palestinian doctor and author of A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel and a collection of short stories entitled Chief Complaint , doesn’t know what to make of Reuven Rivlin’s slip of the tongue in addressing his guest Mohammad Kiwan, the chairman of the Council of Muslim Leaders in Israel, at an iftar (breaking the fast) meal the Israeli president hosted at his home in celebration of Ramadan. Rivlin says to the Palestinian (with a straight face, apparently), “Your Home Is My Home.”

Kanaaneh imagines Sheikh Kiwan responding: “Had you left it standing in Damoun (Kiwan’s village), you would be welcome to enter it.” Kanaanah goes on to “try to exonerate [Rivlin] of any conscious malicious intent.”

I wish I could do the same for Jared Kushner’s calculated, ignorant and orientalist comment in an interview about the deal to liquidate Palestinian claim to their homeland: “Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said in an interview that the Palestinians aren’t yet able to govern themselves and declined to promise them an independent state in the White House’s long-awaited Mideast peace plan.”

Malicious intent is all over that statement. He goes on to add condescendingly, “The hope is that they over time will become capable of governing.”

When Kushner says Palestinians are not ready “to govern themselves”, he is really calling upon their hasbara carefully-manufactured image as terrorists. Given Palestinian history of denial and desperation, they are not to be trusted, he is saying. They have yet to accept “civilized” behavior — i.e., mask their rage and pain — and reject “uncivilized behavior.”

Kushner’s statements are so outrageous, I hardly know where to begin to address them. Let me start almost exactly a hundred years ago when the Turks lost Palestine in 1918 and their rule was replaced by a “British Mandate”, an agreement between the Allied Powers in 1923, which also incorporated the ambiguous terms of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Ever since then, Palestinian Arabs understood that the phrase “Jewish national home” with its religious connotations in the Declaration was merely a euphemism for a Jewish settler-colonial state and that ‘article 2’ of the Mandate, with its reference to “self-governing institutions”, was a fraud.

Similarly, today Kushner’s phrase implying that self-government would come later when the Palestinians were “ready” to govern is meant as a fraudulent “safeguard”. The British Mandate over Palestine of 96 years ago has simply evolved into an “Israeli Mandate”. It is blessed, not by the United Nations, but by an arm-twisting imperial power.

The deal of the 20th century (the Balfour Declaration) triggered the Great Palestinian Arab Rebellion, “probably the boldest challenge to Britain in her colonial half of the twentieth century”, according to Walid Khalidi. The deal of the 21st century will also inevitably inflame Palestinian rebellion — and for exactly the same reasons.

In the 20th century, the Arabs of all the Middle East States expected independence in return for their help to Britain during WWI. They fought against their co-religionists, the Turks, putting their faith in the principle of self-determination as enshrined then in the League of Nations. Eventually, when they were deemed “ready” for self-governance, all the Arab states eventually achieved independence, despite the negative colonialist imagery imposed on them — except for Palestine.

In the 20th century, as in the 21st, Palestine was excluded from the doctrine of self-determination in a clear strategy of dispossession. Balfour had explained to President Wilson in a memorandum: “we are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to reconstitute a new community and definitely building for a Jewish numerical majority in the future.” [At the commencement of the Mandate, there were approximately 486,000 Muslims in Palestine, 84,000 Jews and 71,000 Christians.]

In today’s lingo “Jewish majority” also translates as “Jewish self-determination”, leaving the self-determination of Palestinian Arabs who were there and had always been there, nowhere. Pre-Zionist Palestine as well as the remnant pockets of Palestine today called the “occupied territories” have been portrayed as backward and unproductive awaiting “Western penetration and fecundation”, to use Ella Shoat’s disturbingly apt phrase, which is also morally superior to the Arab masses.

And underpinning the entire Zionist venture in Palestine, as Walid Khalidi explains, is a myth, that when “stripped down to its barest essentials may be presented as two sides of a coin. The obverse carries the Right of Return deriving from Divine Promise. The reverse carries explicitly, the dismissal of the millennia-old ‘Arab’ presence in Palestine.”

This myth played and it still does today a key role, beclouding the strategy of dispossession and tapping a huge reservoir of emotions in the West. Is Jared Kushner a White supremacist who just happens to be Jewish, or is he a Jewish supremacist as in a Jewish nationalist? Today the Jewish State which has sovereignty over all of Mandate Palestine minus Jordan has a Western ideological and political orientation despite the fact that 70% of its population is “Third-World derived” (Palestinians and Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews). Its character is anomalous, as Edward Said so often described it.

What are Trump’s motives and that of countless other American politicians for sponsoring Israel? The answers are deliberately beclouded with the myth, causing Western “purblindness” to use Walid Khalidi’s expressive word.

In Palestine under the Mandate, British policy, similar to U.S. policy today, was never to accept the principle of one-man-one-vote in Palestine, and no self-governing institutions were ever developed for the country at large. It was not possible to question the provisions of the Mandate then, just as it is impossible for Palestinian “negotiators” to question the Jewish national provisions of the Israeli government today.

During the failed Oslo process, money was poured into the occupied territories for “development” and “capacity building”. Numerous reports were and are still being written, with each one beginning, as a matter of framing, with a long list of the obstacles facing both economic development as well as capacity building in the occupied territories, and affirming that only final status negotiations could achieve an enduring development — both political and economic.

It turns out the long-awaited final status is … the status quo!

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

The all-powerful U.S. Dollar is not that lovely thing now-a-days. Significant moves are on to dump the U.S. Dollar.

Media reports said:

Russia and China took another step away from the U.S. Dollar after the two countries agreed to develop bilateral trade using the Ruble and the Yuan.

It was one of the major deals reached after Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the presidents of the two countries, held talks in Moscow on Wednesday.

“Russia and China intend to develop the practice of settlements in national currencies,” Putin told journalists at the news conference following the talks.

Putin added that the states have signed intergovernmental agreements on expanding the use of the Yuan and the ruble in bilateral financial operations.

A draft government decree on the national currencies trade was released earlier during the day.

The document stipulates that the two countries will cooperate on development of national payment systems, and facilitate cross-border payments in national and other currencies.

In another major deal, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), China’s Alibaba, and Russia’s Mail.Ru Group agreed to invest $382 million into an e-commerce joint venture. Alibaba Group is to provide some $100 million while the Russian side will fund the rest.

Strategic stability

China and Russia vowed to strengthen contemporary global strategic stability in a joint statement signed by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

China and Russia intend to deepen strategic mutual trust and strengthen strategic coordination to firmly safeguard global and regional strategic stability, according to the joint statement.

China and Russia note with alarm the extremely dangerous actions of certain states that, out of their own geopolitical and even commercial benefits, destroy or adapt the existing system of arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to their needs, the statement said.

Three pillars

Both sides urged actively promoting the three pillars – nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and peaceful use of nuclear energy, it said.

The two sides reaffirmed their unwavering commitment to the unconditional implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iran nuclear issue and declared their rejection of unilateral sanctions by the United States against Iran, according to the statement.

China and Russia also pledged to promote multilateralism and expressed commitment to working together to preserve the system of international mechanisms on non-proliferation and arms control.

Changes unseen in a century

Bottom of Form

Acknowledging the world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, Xi said China and Russia shoulder an even greater expectation from the peoples of the two countries and the international community.

Noting that the world today is becoming increasingly uncertain and unstable, Xi said enhancing the China-Russia relationship is the call of history, and a firm strategic choice by both sides.

BRI and EEU

The two sides, according to Xi, should actively push forward their cooperation to dock the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) to promote regional economic integration.

He said China and Russia, both permanent members of the UN Security Council, are going to continue working with the international community to safeguard the international order that is based on the international law with the UN at the core, maintain multilateral trading system and make new contributions to the building of a community with a shared future for humankind.

Putin called on the two countries not to be complacent about what they have achieved, but be dedicated to bettering their bilateral relations.

Putin said Russia is ready to provide China with sufficient oil and gas, and export more soybeans and other farm produce to China, and expects a faster alignment between the Eurasian Economic Union and the BRI.

Xi and Putin exchanged views on the Korean Peninsula situation, the Iran nuclear issue and the Venezuela issue, among others.

Safeguard multilateralism

The two heads of state agreed to step up communication and coordination in the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS, the APEC, and the G20 to jointly safeguard multilateralism and the norms of international relations.

Chinese businesses consider moving production to Russia as trade war with US escalates

Small and medium-sized enterprises in China, under pressure from Washington’s trade war, are studying the possibility of moving production to Russia.

That’s according to the secretary general of the China Overseas Development Association (CODA), He Zhenwei, who talked to RIA Novosti ahead of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

Trade between China and the US mainly relies on small and medium-sized enterprises, while China’s bilateral trade with Russia accounts for large state-owned enterprises, He said.

“However, many Chinese export-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises are now facing difficulties. The US has already raised its duties on Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent, which is tantamount to closing its doors. In case American consumers agree to pay more out of their pockets, these companies will be able to raise prices on products by 25 percent, which is hardly probable,” He said.

In such harsh conditions, Chinese companies are now struggling to maintain their existence. “They should think about moving production to Russia,” he said.

He added, “Chinese goods produced in Russia could be further sold in the United States and even in Europe.”

Trade between Russia and China saw historic growth last year of around 25 percent to US$108 billion, beating all forecasts.

According to Putin, China is and will continue to be Russia’s number one foreign trade partner.

Putin recently said that the two countries are enjoying their best trade and economic ties ever.

Russia buys quarter of World Yuan reserves in shift from Dollar

A January 9, 2019 Bloomberg report said:

Russia’s central bank dumped $101 billion in U.S. holdings from its huge reserves, shifting into Euros and Yuan last spring amid a new round of U.S. sanctions.

The central bank moved the equivalent of $44 billion each into the European and Chinese currencies in the second quarter, according to a report published on late Wednesday by the Bank of Russia, which discloses the data with a six-month lag. Another $21 billion was invested in the Japanese yen.

“Russia is making a strategic shift in its reserves towards holding fewer dollars and more assets in other currencies,” said Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The data reveal a dramatic acceleration in a policy Russia has been pursuing for several years of reducing exposure to assets that could be affected by U.S. restrictions.

Russian holdings of U.S. Treasuries dropped by about $81 billion in May and June of 2018, according to U.S. data.

Russia is not alone

Russia isn’t alone in its bid to reduce reliance on the world’s reserve currency amid increasing attempts by Washington to use economic leverage for geopolitical ends.

In a deepening trade war with America, China sold a large portion of its U.S. Treasury holdings last year and officials in Europe put forward proposals to increase the use of the euro in regional transactions.

“We aren’t ditching the dollar, the dollar is ditching us,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in November. “The instability of dollar payments is creating a desire for many global economies to find alternative reserve currencies and create settlement systems independent of the dollar. We’re not the only ones doing it, believe me.”

Russia’s reserves are among the 10 largest in the world, totaling $458 billion at the end of June 2018. The data suggest Russia accounted for 90 percent of the inflows into the Chinese bond market in the first half of 2018, analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a research note published Thursday.

India and UAE agree to trade in local currencies

Citing the Indian Embassy in Abu Dhabi, an earlier report said:

India and UAE have inked a currency swap agreement to boost trade and investment without involvement of a third currency like the US dollar.

The swap is for an amount of two billion UAE dirham or 35 billion Indian rupees (US$495 million)

“The bilateral currency swap agreement between India and UAE is expected to reduce the dependency on hard currencies like the US dollar,” the embassy said.

“It is also expected to give a push for the local currencies of the two nations and may reduce the impact of volatility in exchange rate arising from the dependency on a third currency. It is also expected to reduce the transmission costs arising from exchange rate risk,” the embassy added.

With more than $50 billion in bilateral trade, the two countries are each other’s largest trade partners.

India’s foreign direct investment into the UAE was $6.6 billion in 2017 while the UAE’s investment in India stood at $5.8 billion

UAE is the sixth-largest oil exporter for India, with non-oil trade between them accounting for $34 billion.

Dollar-free monetary union: Russia-led free trade zone may adopt single currency

Another media report said:

The members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) may abandon border procedures and adopt a common currency in the future by analogy with the European Union (EU), according to the President of Kyrgyzstan Sooronbay Jeenbekov.

Jeenbekov noted, “Like in the European Union we have no borders, no border guards. All our nationals are freely traveling across the Union and are entitled to same services, no matter which – medical, educational.”

According to him, the EAEU member countries should work towards boosting competition with third countries.

Jeenbekov said, “I believe that in 2040, the economy of our countries will be the same as in the European Union, the US, Japan and in other leading nations.”

The EEU, which is based on the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, was established in 2015. Armenia and Kyrgyzstan later joined it. In 2016, Vietnam officially became the first non-regional country to join the bloc. The union is designed to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital and workers between member countries.

More than 40 countries and international organizations including China, Indonesia, and Israel, as well as some South American countries, have expressed interest in a free-trade deal with the EEU. The trade bloc is also negotiating with South Korea, Egypt, and India.

In 2017, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) proposed to create a joint digital currency for BRICS countries and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). It could replace the US dollar and other currencies used in settlements among the member states, CBR said.

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

In a June 1 interview with ABC Radio Adelaide, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer warned that Julian Assange could die in prison if his persecution is not stopped immediately.

Last week, Melzer issued a scathing denunciation of Assange’s persecution, calling it “psychological torture.”

Reporter Philip Williams asked Melzer, “If your calls are ignored, do you fear that he could actually die in prison?” Melzer replied, “Absolutely, yes. That’s a fear that I think is very real … the cumulative effects of that constant pressure, it will become unpredictable how this will end. What we see is that his health condition is currently deteriorating to the point that he cannot even appear at a court hearing. This is not prosecution; this is persecution and it has to stop here and it has to stop now.”

The full radio interview with Melzer can heard here. WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail on May 1 by a British court in a vindictive show trial on fabricated charges of “skipping bail.” Following his eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy on April 11, where Assange had sought asylum and was effectively detained for seven years, he was arrested by British authorities and is now held in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in southeast London.

Melzer’s comment about Assange’s dire condition follows a statement he issued on May 31 demanding an immediate end to the “collective persecution” by the United States and its allies.

The UN torture expert visited Assange in Belmarsh on May 9 along with a medical doctor and psychologist in order to evaluate the condition of the heroic journalist. Melzer issued his statement just one week after the US Justice Department announced 17 counts on charges of violating the Espionage Act—which carry up to 170 years in prison if convicted—and renewed the demand that the WikiLeaks publisher be extradited to the US for prosecution.

Melzer warned that the nine-year “persistent and progressively severe abuse” of Assange by US, British and Ecuadorian authorities and the threat of his being extradited to the US would pose “a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Speaking from Geneva during his interview with ABC Radio Adelaide, Melzer reiterated his warning that Assange cannot get a fair trial in the US “in light of the prevalent prejudice against him and the image of the public enemy that has been portrayed over there.”

In answering a question from Williams about the role of the Australian government in the unfolding attacks on Assange, Melzer said, “The Australian government has been the glaring absentee in this case from my perspective. I would have expected Australia to take steps to protect their national … to protect him from this excessive persecution that he is experiencing currently.”

Assange is the target of an international campaign of vilification, persecution and silencing due to WikiLeaks’ exposure to the people of the world both the war crimes American imperialism and its allies.

Melzer’s warning points to the urgent need to organize a struggle to defend Assange. We urge all of our readers to take up this fight .

Originally published by WSWS.org

6 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Binu Mathew

Eid Mubarak!

I’m writing this article on the eve of Eid. Two weeks after the Modi 2.0 government was installed in India.

When the election results came out on May 23 I was baffled. How come a government which put India through enormous pain through its anti-people policies like Demonetisation which killed over 200 people and destroying small scale industries with job loss for millions, ignoring of farmer’s distress which killed over 300,000 farmers through suicide, divisive policies which divided India on religious, ethnic and linguistic lines, painful Good and Services Tax (GST) which put small traders under severe stress, can come back to power?

Several theories were floated. Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) tampering, the willful support of Election Commission of India for the ruling regime, money power, mass media support, fake news….All these must have played a part. However, none of these arguments are convincing.

Then why? How?

I believe the RSS project of Hindu Rashtra is reaping rich dividends for their loyal work for over nine decades. RSS or Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh has about 60,000 branches across India and its ideology is to make India into a Hindu Rashtra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of RSS.

RSS openly challenges the constitution of India and wants to make Manusmriti (Manu’s code) as the constitution of India. Manusmriti dehumanizes everyone except the upper castes, including women of all castes.

RSS ideologue Golwalkar wrote in his book “Bunch of Thoughts”

“The most important and effective step will be to bury deep for good all talk of a federal structure of our country’s Constitution, to sweep away the existence of all ‘autonomous’ or semi-autonomous ‘states’ within the one state viz., Bharat and proclaim ‘One Country, One State, One Legislature, One Executive’ with no trace of fragmentational, regional, sectarian, linguistic or other types of pride being given a scope for playing havoc with our integrated harmony. Let the Constitution be re-examined and re-drafted, so as to establish this Unitary form of Government and thus effectively disprove the mischievous propaganda indulged in by the British and so unwittingly imbibed by the present leaders, about our being just a juxtaposition of so many distinct ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘nationalities’ happening to live side by side and grouped together by the accident of geographical contiguity and one uniform supreme foreign domination.”

Golwalker also wrote in his book “We or our nationhood defined”,

“From the standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of Hindu nation i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, for less any preferential treatment, not even the citizen’s rights.”

This is actually happening NOW. A de facto HINDU RASHTRA is here. Whether it will stay or not is OUR choice.

By the way who are the Indians? The name India is derived from Indus river, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindush. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi which translates as “The people of the Indus”. Actually it was the colonial westerners gave the name “India” to the subcontinent. There is no historical evidence that India belongs to Hindus.

Tony Joseph in his path breaking book “Early Indians” proved that India is a land of migrants. All Indians are migrants. The earliest civilization, “The Indus Valley civilization” was kick started by West Asian migrants. All others, including the Aryan Hindus are migrants. India in its millennia old history has accepted migrants from all parts of the world and absorbed religion, culture and languages. This is this history that RSS and BJP want to rub aside.

India is a land of varied cultures. Originator of great religions like Budhism and Jainism and Sikhism. A great number of Indians adopted Islam, making it the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. Indian constitution has recognized 22 official languages. Thousands of other languages are being spoken by, from a few thousand to many millions. RSS and BJP want to rub it all away. Their motto is ‘’HINDU, HINDI, HINDUSTAN’’.

This kind of monolithic culture is the foundation of the Hindu Rashtra envisioned by the RSS ideologues. It seems like decades long hard work by RSS is coming to fruition. Unless we step up!

Only way to keep India as we know it is to celebrate the cultural, linguistic, religious diversity of India. That’s the only way we can undermine the Hindu Rashtra project by the RSS. If we cannot do it we can say good bye to India and welcome HINDUSTAN.

So, once again I say Eid Mubarak. Let’s celebrate each other’s festivals more than ours. That’s the only way we can save India from falling into a fascist, Hindu theocratic, failed state.

Binu Mathew is the Editor of www.countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org

4 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The 14th Islamic Summit Conference ended Friday Night (May 31) in Mecca. A final statement accused Iran of supporting Yemen’s Houthi rebel group; illegally occupying three islands in the Persian Gulf; and “interfering” in the domestic affairs of both Syria and Bahrain.

Not surprisingly, the Mecca summit reiterated support for Saudi/western-backed Yemeni government of President Abdu Rabuh Mansour Hadi which is fighting the Houthi rebels.

The OIC summit condemned a “terrorist attack” on Saudi Arabia’s oil pumping stations which targeted global oil supplies. The summit statement also condemned “sabotage operations” against four vessels near the territorial waters of the United Arab Emirates, which it said threatened international maritime traffic safety.

Tehran rejects OIC statement

Iran on Friday rejected a final communique issued following a Mecca-hosted summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), saying it did not reflect the views of all OIC member-states, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi accused summit host Saudi Arabia of “exploiting the holy month of Ramadan, and the holy city of Mecca, to level allegations against Iran.”

Mousavi also reportedly accused Riyadh of “missing the opportunity provided by International Quds Day and the OIC summit to press for the rights of the Palestinian people… and choosing instead to sow discord among Muslim and regional countries”.

Saudi Arabia’s behavior at Thursday’s summit, he added, “are in line with the futile efforts of the U.S. and the Zionist regime against… Iran”.

Mousavi went on to voice hope that leaders of OIC member-states “will not allow the Palestinian issue to be overshadowed by divisive policies”.

Syria also rejects OIC statement

Syria is rejecting the final statement of the Arab emergency summit held in Saudi Arabia, which criticizes what it calls Iranian intervention into Syrian affairs.

Syria says the statement is an unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Syria.

A Syrian Foreign Ministry statement said the Iranian presence is “legitimate because it came at the request of the Syrian government and contributed to support Syria’s efforts in combating terrorism supported by some of the participants in this summit.”

The Syrian statement said the summit should instead condemn the involvement of other countries in Syrian affairs, “which lacked legitimacy and legality” and provided “unlimited support in various forms to terrorist groups and prolonging the crisis in Syria.”

The leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group told supporters in Lebanon on Friday the Mecca summits are a Saudi call for help from Arab countries after Saudi Arabia failed to win in Yemen, where the kingdom and its allies have been at war since 2015 against Iranian-allied Yemeni rebels.

“It is a sign of failure,” Hassan Nasrallah said. “These summits are calls for help …that express the failure and the inabilities in confronting the Yemeni army, popular resistance and people.”

OIC summit condemns any decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital

The OIC summit condemned any position adopted by an international body that supports prolonging occupation, including a U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it said on Saturday.

The Mecca summit also refused all illegal Israeli measures aimed at changing facts in occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem, and undermining the two-state solution, it said in a statement.

The summit urged member countries to take “appropriate measures” against countries that move their embassies to Jerusalem, it added.

The summit refused any proposal for peaceful settlement that did not accord with Palestinians’ legitimate inalienable rights, the statement said.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani had his own message for OIC leaders ahead of the summit, urging them to stay focused on the rights of Palestinians.

In a letter published online Friday, Rouhani said Muslim leaders should not let the importance of Palestinian statehood be “marginalized” in the face of the Trump administration’s forthcoming Israeli-Palestinian plan.

Rouhani also noted in the letter he was not invited to the Islamic summit, but expressed Iran’s readiness to work with all Muslim leaders to confront the White House’s so-called “Deal of the Century.”

Syrian Golan Heights

The Islamic summit condemned President Trump’s decision to annex the occupied Syrian Golan Heights into Israeli territory. Paragraph 17 of the joint communiqué said:

“The conference called for Israel’s full withdrawal from the Occupied Syrian Golan to the borders of 4 June 1967, in accordance with Security Council Resolutions Nos. 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), the principle of ‘land for peace, the terms of reference of the Madrid Peace Conference and the Arab Peace Initiative adopted by the Arab Summit in Beirut in 2002. It also affirmed non-recognition of any decision or action aiming to change the legal and demographic status of the Golan. The Conference specifically rejected and condemned the American President’s decision to annex the Golan into Israeli territory, dismissing it as null and void and of no legal effect.”

Tellingly, the US State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus confirmed Thursday that the State Department has changed its maps to show the disputed Golan Heights as Israeli territory. Ortugas statement came after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had received one of the updated versions.

“I know we have for sure we updated the maps,” Ortagus said when asked whether the State Department had taken such steps after President Donald Trump in March officially recognised the Golan Heights as part of Israel.

Fifty years on

The Islamic summit convenes every three years to make decisions about how to confront and contain conflicts and crises in Muslim-majority countries. This year it coincides with two emergency summits – The Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council summits- called for by Saudi King Salman Ben Abdulaziz amid heightened tensions with Iran.

On September 25, 1969, representatives from 24 Muslim-majority countries held a summit in Rabat, Morocco, in response to the burning of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Fifty years later, the summit still regularly convenes, with the latest set to take place in Mecca on May 31, 2019.

The historic Rabat meeting resulted in a decision to establish the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which was designated to handle the Islamic Summit, turning it into a permanent and fundamental executive body.

At the 13th Summit, held in Istanbul in 2016, a statement was issued stressing the need for “cooperative relations” between Iran and Islamic countries, including “abstaining from the use or threat of force.”

The OIC is the second largest intergovernmental institution, just after the UN, with 57 member states from four continents. It is the voice of 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.

OIC members represent 22 per cent of the world population, have 2 per cent of the world’s GDP, 1.3 per cent of the world trade and only 1.5 per cent of the investments. Twenty five per cent of OIC population does not have access to medical facilities or safe drinking water.

Half of the population lives below the poverty line classified as the most poor. No Muslim country is in the top list of the Human Development Index or in any other global economic indicators.

This depressing picture of the Islamic countries is not limited to the economic and social spheres, in the realm of education and technology the facts are equally disappointing.

The OIC member countries possess 70 per cent of the world’s energy resources and 40 per cent of available raw material but their GDP is only 5 per cent of the world GDP. Muslim countries miserably lag behind in education and technology.

They produce only 500 PhDs each year as compared to 3,000 in India and 5,000 in the United Kingdom. None of their educational or research institutions or centres of excellence find place in the top 100 in the world.

The OIC today has 57 Muslim member-states and has held 14 summits in response to the challenges confronting the Muslim world. Since its establishment, the Islamic world has suffered several major catastrophes which have reduced it to almost a non-factor in international politics.

The breakup of Pakistan through armed intervention by India in 1971, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), the US invasion of Iraq 2003, recent US attempts for regimes change in Iran and Syria have dealt a mortal blow to the unity, dignity and sovereignty of the Muslim world.

The OIC has failed to respond meaningfully to any of these crises or demonstrate any unity of thought and action apart from issuing high-sounding declarations at the end of each summit. Nothing was done to contain the crises or avert the tragedies. The OIC remained merely a silent spectator.

Limited influence

While the OIC has been known for its cultural and social projects, its political influence has been relatively limited.

“Typically, in the past, the OIC has been effective in promoting cultural and educational projects across the Muslim world,” Sami Hamdi, a Middle East expert, told Al Jazeera. “However, its political capabilities remain severely limited.”

According to Mamoon Alabbasi, a political analyst focusing on the Middle East and North Africa region, while the OIC has relative political weight, its rhetoric does not always translate into action on the ground.

“With 57 member states… the OIC carries a [relatively] heavy political weight… [and] impact. But how much change that makes on the ground is not always clear,” said Alabbasi.

Adding to its political limitations is its inability to unify its stance on issues, say experts.

“Like other international organizations, such as the UN General Assembly, the OIC is supposed to have a unified voice but it does not because policies of the individual countries greatly differ,” said Alabbasi.

“Most importantly, the OIC doesn’t have a unified voice because most of its member countries are not democracies. So, while their populations may be in agreement [over an issue] they do not always represent the views of their populations.”

Hamdi agrees: “The OIC has a broad spectrum of different cultures. This means that on the political front, even if there is a united stance, it means very little, practically.”

Final Analysis

The Palestinian cause and support for Somalia, Djibouti, poor Islamic countries, and oppressed minorities have been permanent points in the Islamic Summit’s resolutions during its 50 years history. The 14th Islamic summit issued three documents: A joint communiqué of 18 pages with 102 paragraph, a special resolution on the Cause of Palestine and Al-Quds and a three page Mecca Declaration.

Among other issues, the Mecca Declaration stressed “the importance of standing by those Muslims in non-Islamic countries who suffer persecution, injustice, coercion and aggression; extending full support to them and adopting their causes in international forums to ensure the realization of their political and social rights in their countries and develop programs and mechanisms that would guarantee their integration in their societies without any discrimination.”

Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar

The Conference condemned the inhumane situation in which the Rohingya Muslim community lives and called for urgent action to end acts of violence and all brutal practices targeting this minority and give it all its rights without any discrimination or racial profiling. It emphasized that the Government of Myanmar is fully responsible for the protection of its citizens and underscored the need to stop the use of military power in Rakhine State immediately.

The Conference urged the Government of Myanmar to take practical, time bound and concrete steps to restore the citizenship of Rohingya IDPs and forcibly displaced Rohingya Muslim Minority Community who were deprived of their nationality, with all associated rights, especially the right to full citizenship, and to allow and facilitate the return in safely, security and dignity of all Rohingyas internally and externally displaced, including those forced into taking shelter in Bangladesh.

The Conference condemned the inhumane situation in which the Rohingya Muslim community lives and called for urgent action to end acts of violence and all brutal practices targeting this minority and give it all its rights without any discrimination or racial profiling. It emphasized that the Government of Myanmar is fully responsible for the protection of its citizens and underscored the need to stop the use of military power in Rakhine State immediately.

The Conference urged the Government of Myanmar to take practical, time bound and concrete steps to restore the citizenship of Rohingya IDPs and forcibly displaced Rohingya Muslim Minority Community who were deprived of their nationality, with all associated rights, especially the right to full citizenship, and to allow and facilitate the return in safely, security and dignity of all Rohingyas internally and externally displaced, including those forced into taking shelter in Bangladesh.

The Conference insisted on the importance of conducting international, independent and transparent investigations into the human rights violations in Myanmar, including sexual violence and aggression against children, and to hold accountable all those responsible for these brutal acts in order to make justice to the victims. The Conference affirmed its support for the ad hoc ministerial committee on human rights violations against the Rohingyas in Myanmar, using all international legal instruments to hold accountable the perpetrators of crimes against the Rohingya. In this connection, the Conference urged upon the ad hoc Ministerial Committee led by the Gambia to take immediate measures to launch the case at the International Court of Justice on behalf of the OIC. It further called for ensuring free and unrestricted access to humanitarian assistance by affected persons and communities.

Sri Lanka

The Conference expressed deep concern and strong condemnation of the recent acts of violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka and urged the Government of this country to hold accountable to perpetrators of these acts, bring them to justice and counter firmly the spread of rhetoric of hatred and intolerance, while ensuring the security and safety of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka.

Jammu and Kashmir

The Conference reaffirmed its principled support for the people of Jammu and Kashmir for the realization of their legitimate right to self-determination, in accordance with relevant UN resolutions. It condemned the recent outbreaks of violence in the region and invited India to implement the relevant Security Council resolutions to settle its protracted conflict with its neighbor. It further welcomed the recommendations included in the UN report on Kashmir issued in June 2018; called for the expedited establishment of a UN commission of inquiry to investigate into the grave human rights violations in Kashmir, and called on India to allow this proposed commission and international human rights organizations to access Indian-administered Kashmir.

Islamophobia is a form of racism

The Conference noted with concern that Islamophobia, as a form of racism and religious discrimination today, has spread across the world, as evidenced by the increase in religious intolerance, negative stereotyping, hatred and violence against Muslims. In this connection, the Conference encouraged the United Nations and other regional and international organizations to declare 15 March an international day to combat Islamophobia.

It condemned roundly the horribly appalling terrorist attack, perpetrated out of hatred for Islam, against innocent worshipers at Al-Noor and Linwood mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on 15 March 2019. In the meantime, it expressed appreciation to the Government of New Zealand for its unequivocal condemnation of the terrorist attacks, hailing the firm and clear position of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who displayed compassion toward and sympathy with the Muslim community in their bereavement. The Conference equally paid tribute to the wider New Zealand society for showing such a deep empathy with the families of the victims and the Muslim community.

The Conference urged all countries with Muslim minorities, communities and migrants to refrain from all policies, statements and practices associating Islam with terrorism, extremism or dangers posing a threat to society.

The Conference called upon all Member States, in coordination with the General Secretariat, to adopt a comprehensive OIC Strategy on Combating Islamophobia, in order to establish a legally binding international instrument to prevent the growing trend of intolerance, discrimination and hatred on the grounds of religion and faith.

The Conference welcomed the establishment of the OIC Contact Group on Peace and Dialogue and called on the Contact Group to develop a Plan of Action on Combating Islamophobia in preparation to the Contact Group meeting at the ministerial level at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2019.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

3 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jeffrey Sachs

公众号【侃英语】整理（id：KanEnglish）

(CNN) China is not an enemy. It is a nation trying to raise its living standards through education, international trade, infrastructure investment, and improved technologies. In short, it is doing what any country should do when confronted with the historical reality of being poor and far behind more powerful countries. Yet the Trump administration is now aiming to stop China’s development, which could prove to be disastrous for both the United States and the entire world.

China is being made a scapegoat for rising inequality in the United States. While US trade relations with China have been mutually beneficial over the years, some US workers have been left behind, notably Midwestern factory workers facing competition due to rising productivity and comparatively low (though rising) labor costs in China. Instead of blaming China for this normal phenomenon of market competition, we should be taxing the soaring corporate profits of our own multinational corporations and using the revenues to help working-class households, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, promote new job skills and invest in cutting-edge science and technology.

We should understand that China is merely trying to make up for lost time after a very long period of geopolitical setbacks and related economic failures. Here is important historical background that is useful to understand China’s economic development in the past 40 years.

In 1839, Britain attacked China because it refused to allow British traders to continue providing Chinese people with addictive opium. Britain prevailed, and the humiliation of China’s defeat in the First Opium War, ending in 1842, contributed in part to a mass uprising against the Qing Dynasty called the Taiping Rebellion that ended up causing more than 20 million deaths. A Second Opium War against Britain and France ultimately led to the continued erosion of China’s power and internal stability.

Toward the end of the 19th century, China lost a war to the newly industrializing Japan, and was subjected to yet more one-sided demands by Europe and the United States for trade. These humiliations led to another rebellion, followed by yet another defeat, at the hands of foreign powers.

China’s Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, after which China quickly succumbed to warlords, internal strife and Japan’s invasion of China beginning in 1931. The end of World War II was followed by civil war, the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and then the upheavals of Maoism, including millions of deaths from famine in the Great Leap Forward, which ended in the early 1960s, and the mass destabilization of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath until 1977.

China’s rapid development on a market basis therefore started only in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping came to power and launched sweeping economic reforms. While China has seen incredible growth in the past four decades, the legacy of more than a century of poverty, instability, invasion and foreign threats still looms large. Chinese leaders would like to get things right this time, and that means they are unwilling to bow to the United States or other Western powers again.

China is now the second-largest economy in the world, when GDP is measured at market prices. Yet it is a country still in the process of catching up from poverty. In 1980, according to IMF data, China’s GDP per capita was a mere 2.5% of the United States, and by 2018 had reached only 15.3% of the US level. When GDP is measured in purchasing-power-parity terms, by using a common set of “international prices” to value GDP in all countries, China’s income per capita in 2018 was a bit higher at 28.9% of the United States.

China has roughly followed the same development strategy as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore before it. From an economic standpoint, it is not doing anything particularly unusual for a country that is playing catch up.The constant US refrain that China “steals” technologies is highly simplistic.

Countries that are lagging behind upgrade their technologies in many ways, through study, imitation, purchases, mergers, foreign investments, extensive use of off-patent knowledge and, yes, copying. And with any fast-changing technologies, there are always running battles over intellectual property. That’s true even among US companies today — this kind of competition is simply a part of the global economic system. Technology leaders know they shouldn’t count on keeping their lead through protection, but through continued innovation.

The United States relentlessly adopted British technologies in the early 19th century. And when any country wants to close a technology gap, it recruits know-how from abroad. The US ballistic missile program, as it is well known, was built with the help of former Nazi rocket scientists recruited to the United States after World War II.

If China were a less populous Asian country, say like South Korea, with a little more than 50 million people, it would simply be hailed by the United States as a great development success story — which it is. But because it is so big, China refutes America’s pretensions to run the world. The United States, after all, is a mere 4.2% of the world’s population, less than a fourth of China’s. The truth is that neither country is in a position to dominate the world today, as technologies and know-how are spreading more quickly across the globe than ever before.

Trade with China provides the United States with low-cost consumer goods and increasingly high-quality products. It also causes job losses in sectors such as manufacturing that compete directly with China. That is how trade works. To accuse China of unfairness in this is wrong — plenty of American companies have reaped the benefits of manufacturing in China or exporting goods there. And US consumers enjoy higher living standards as a result of China’s low-cost goods. The US and China should continue to negotiate and develop improved rules for bilateral and multilateral trade instead of stoking a trade war with one-sided threats and over-the-top accusations.

The most basic lesson of trade theory, practice and policy is not to stop trade — which would lead to falling living standards, economic crisis and conflict. Instead, we should share the benefits of economic growth so that the winners who benefit compensate the losers.

Yet under American capitalism, which has long strayed from the cooperative spirit of the New Deal era, today’s winners flat-out reject sharing their winnings. As a result of this lack of sharing, American politics are fraught with conflicts over trade. Greed comprehensively dominates Washington policies.

The real battle is not with China but with America’s own giant companies, many of which are raking in fortunes while failing to pay their own workers decent wages. America’s business leaders and the mega-rich push for tax cuts, more monopoly power and offshoring — anything to make a bigger profit — while rejecting any policies to make American society fairer.

Trump is lashing out against China, ostensibly believing that it will once again bow to a Western power. It is willfully trying to crush successful companies like Huawei by changing the rules of international trade abruptly and unilaterally. China has been playing by Western rules for the past 40 years, gradually catching up the way that America’s Asian allies did in the past. Now the United States is trying to pull the rug out from under China by launching a new Cold War.

Unless some greater wisdom prevails, we could spin toward conflict with China, first economically, then geopolitically and militarily, with utter disaster for all. There will be no winners in such a conflict. Yet such is the profound shallowness and corruption of US politics today that we are on such a path.

A trade war with China won’t solve our economic problems. Instead we need homegrown solutions: affordable health care, better schools, modernized infrastructure, higher minimum wages and a crackdown on corporate greed. In the process, we would also learn that we have far more to gain through cooperation with China rather than reckless and unfair provocation.

27 May 2019

Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist, public policy analyst and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor, the highest rank Columbia bestows on its faculty.

By Peter Koenig

The 67th Bilderberg Meeting is taking place in Montreux, Switzerland from 30 May – 2 June 2019, where the about 130 invitees – so far confirmed – from 23 countries, are staying at one of Switzerland’s most luxurious venues, the Montreux Palace hotel. About a quarter of the attendees are women.

The Bilderberg meetings started at the onset of the Cold War, as a discussion club of American and European leaders, a fortification against communism, in clear text, against the Soviet Union. The first event took place in 1954 at the Bilderberg hotel in the Dutch town of Oosterbeek. Ever since, meetings of the Bilderberg Group were held annually, in different locations in the western world, most of them, though, in North America.

It’s not a coincidence that the Bilderbergers meet in Switzerland. Switzerland is one of the Group’s favored host country outside the US. Switzerland hosted their gatherings at least five times before this upcoming Montreux event (1960 – Palace Hotel, Bürgenstock; 1970 – Grand Hotel Quellenhof, Bad Ragaz, St. Gallen; 1981 – Palace Hotel, Bürgenstock; 1995 – Palace Hotel, Bürgenstock; 2011 – Suvretta House, St. Moritz).

The conferences of the Bilderbergers are the most secretive events, managed by those who pull the strings behind world leaders – politicians, corporate CEOs, big finance, and other business execs – artists, and the who-is-who of the world elite. And we are talking of the western world. Other than about ten attendees from Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and Estonia, participants are North Americans or Europeans. The rest of the world doesn’t count.

The Bilderbergers are strictly a western dominion. The farthest east they go is Turkey. It’s like the carrot to Erdogan, hoping to draw NATO Turkey back into the camp of the west. But how much longer? – Turkey, forever wavering between east and west, has more than one leg already in the east – eyeing entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – not exactly the eastern version of the Bilderbergers, because the SCO is an open forum for economic development policies and defense strategies, no secrets, no manipulation western style.

This year’s Bilderberg meeting will be chaired by Henri Castries, France,Chairman of the Paris-based Institut Montaigne, a non-profit thinktank working on public policy and social cohesion. Other prominent attendees include Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State, and the driving force of these events and protégé of Rockefeller’s, former US Secretary of State (and war criminal), Henry Kissinger; France’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire; Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister, from the far-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy; Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s Defense Minister from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU); – and, perhaps most noteworthy, Jared Kushner, personal advisor and son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, and intimate friend of Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

This means that Israel will be represented at the highest level. From Switzerland attending will be – among others – the current President, Ueli Maurer, who, it is rumored, will hold behind closed-doors talks with Mike Pompeo about Iran whom Switzerland is representing vis-à-vis Washington. The Presence of Kushner, Pompeo, secretive Iran talks – smells a rat.

The Bilderbergers are associated and its members are overlapping with those of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission and the London-based Chatham House which makes the rules for the meetings – and let’s not forget, the World Economic Forum, the infamous WEF that takes place every January in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF represents a relatively transparent window to the world, with, of course, also its secret, behind closed doors meetings, whereas the Bilderbergers are an all-round secret organization. The Bilderberg meetings – so they say – are informal talks, allowing the participants to freely use the information they receive. But they are not allowed to reveal the identity or the affiliation of the speakers, nor of any participant in the particular talks.

Switzerland, one of the most secretive countries in the world – the world of banking, the world of big finance, safe haven for international corporations which not only get away with low taxes, but also escape standards of ethics they otherwise may have to apply doing business, exploiting natural resources, in developing countries. They are privileged, just by being domiciled in Switzerland. The Helvetic Confederacy is a country run by the fiefs of western money, of the western FED-directed and debt-based pyramid monetary system, a Ponzi scheme that has survived for the last hundred years – led by the Rothschild banking clan an Co.

They are closely associated and control the western banking system’s gold bunker, the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) in Basle, also called the central bank of central banks. The BIS is intimately linked to Swiss finance. The BIS, located conveniently close to the German border, has also served as intermediary for the FED to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union.

What better place for the Bilderbergers to concoct – not to say conspire – their vision of the world’s future?

It is no coincidence that Switzerland was spared from the destruction of both WWs. It’s the only OECD country, where laws are made directly by big-finance and big-business, i.e. where parliamentarians are sitting on the Boards of Directors of corporations and financial institutions, while making the laws for the people, a country where basic business and corporate ethics get short-shrifted and are overruled by flagrant conflicts of interest, a country where a white collar interest group makes the laws that suit big capital. Again, what better place for the Bilderbergers to meet?

Switzerland has become the epicenter of neoliberalism over the past 30 years or so – and is ideal for the behind the scene discussions and agreements, visions of New World Order strategies. The first item in this year’s Bilderberg meeting’s agenda is “A Stable Strategic Order”, a euphemism for One World Order or New World Order.

Other official agenda items include “The Future of Capitalism”, “Russia”, “China”, “Weaponizing Social Media”, “BREXIT”, “What’s Next for Europe”; “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” – and of course, not to be missed in conferences of such importance, “Climate Change”. – Imagine, with such a benign agenda, what will take place behind closed doors?

One of the permanent agenda items which is close to Rockefeller’s heart, the current thriving force behind the Bilderbergers, and is being propagated, by his disciple, Henry Kissinger, is the reduction of world population – so that the few on top may live better and longer with the world’s rapidly diminishing resources.

So – what are not agenda items, but might certainly enter the realm of population reduction, are, permanent “wars on terror” – that justify mass killings and the related horrendous, never-spoken about quantities CO2 and other greenhouse gases they emit; 5G (the 5th Generation of deadly radiation) to facilitate our communication, meaning more effective surveillance, imposed artificial intelligence (AI), more efficient digitalization of money – and likely though delayed, but exponentially increasing cancer rates; Bayer-Monsanto’s poisonous GMOs and glyphosate products; artificially planted deadly epidemics, like Ebola; the US Air Force’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program(HAARP) for weaponizing climate change, bringing about famine and misery by droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other climatic calamities – and probably much more.

This is of course, only speculation, being deducted from the Master Goal of the Bilderbergers, i.e. population reduction.

But perhaps I’m totally wrong.

As everything is secret and most likely nothing of the behind the scene talks and decisions will penetrate into the media, only hear-say and, of course, conspiracy theories, it is well possible that the Bilderbergers are what they propagate to be – a peaceful, dialogue seeking group of people, who is committed to the values of democracy and freedom – and entrepreneurship.

And – hear-hear! – “Talking about the future of capitalism does not mean that we consider it to be the only possible system,” as organizer André Kudelski told the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures.

In that he is right. Capitalism is not the only viable system. In fact, it is THE system that is NOT viable, as it spreads injustice, inequality, crime and misery around the globe and, therefore, is certainly not sustainable. Yes, Bilderbergers, start thinking of an alternative, one that brings social justice, inclusion, equal opportunities and spreads wealth more evenly around the globe – one that brings PEACE, so that we all may live well, not wealthy, but well.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

30 May 2019

Source: www.globalresearch.ca