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By Jonathan Cook

24 May 2019 – By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province – their final holdout in Syria – should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism.

That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.

Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given that the Syrian government was already poised to defeat these al-Qaeda groups without resort to chemical weapons – and without provoking the predictable ire (yet again) of the west.

But most of all scepticism was required because these latest claims arrive just as we have learnt that the last supposed major chemical attack – which took place in April 2018 and was, as ever, blamed by all western sources on Syria’s president, Bashar Assad – was very possibly staged, a false-flag operation by those very al-Qaeda groups now claiming the Syrian government has attacked them once again.

Addicted to incompetence

Most astounding in this week’s coverage of the claims made by al-Qaeda groups is the fact that the western media continues to refuse to learn any lessons, develop any critical distance from the sources it relies on, even as those sources are shown to have repeatedly deceived it.

This was true after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, and it is now even more true after the the international community’s monitoring body on chemical weapons, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was exposed this month as deeply dishonest.

It is bad enough that our governments and our expert institutions deceive and lie to us. But it is even worse that we have a corporate media addicted – at the most charitable interpretation – to its own incompetence. The evidence demonstrating that grows stronger by the day.

Unprovoked attack

In March the OPCW produced a report into a chemical weapons attack the Syrian government allegedly carried out in Douma in April last year. Several dozen civilians, many of them children, died apparently as a result of that attack.

The OPCW report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” for believing a toxic form of chlorine had been used as a chemical weapon in Douma, and that the most likely method of delivery were two cylinders dropped from the air.

This as good as confirmed claims made by al-Qaeda groups, backed by western states, that the cylinders had been dropped by the Syrian military. Using dry technical language, the OPCW joined the US and Europe in pointing the finger squarely at Assad.

It was vitally important that the OPCW reached that conclusion not only because of the west’s overarching regime-change ambitions in Syria.

In response to the alleged Douma attack a year ago, the US fired a volley of Cruise missiles at Syrian army and government positions before there had been any investigation of who was responsible.

Those missiles were already a war crime – an unprovoked attack on another sovereign country. But without the OPCW’s implicit blessing, the US would have been deprived of even its flimsy, humanitarian pretext for launching the missiles.

Leaked document

Undoubtedly the OPCW was under huge political pressure to arrive at the “right” conclusion. But as a scientific body carrying out a forensic investigation surely it would not simply doctor the data.

Nonetheless, it seems that may well be precisely what it did. This month the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media – a group of academics who have grown increasingly sceptical of the western narratives told about Syria – published an internal, leaked OPCW document.

A few fays later the OPCW reluctantly confirmed that the document was genuine, and that it would identify and deal with those responsible for the leak.

The document was an assessment overseen by Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW expert, of the engineering data gathered by the OPCW’s fact-finding mission that attended the scene of the Douma attack. Its findings fly in the face of the OPCW’s published report.

Erased from the record

The leaked document is deeply troubling for two reasons.

First, the assessment, based on the available technical data, contradicts the conclusion of the final OPCW report that the two chemical cylinders were dropped from the air and crashed through building roofs. It argues instead that the cylinders were more likely placed at the locations they were found.

If that is right, the most probable explanation is that the cylinders were put there by al-Qaeda groups – presumably in a last desperate effort to persuade the west to intervene and to prevent the jihadists being driven out of Douma.

But even more shocking is the fact that the expert assessment based on the data collected by the OPCW team is entirely unaddressed in the OPCW’s final report.

It is not that the final report discounts or rebuts the findings of its own experts. It simply ignores those findings; it pretends they don’t exist. The report blacks them out, erases them from the official record. In short, it perpetrates a massive deception.

Experts ignored

All of this would be headline news if we had a responsible media that cared about the truth and about keeping its readers informed.

We now know both that the US attacked Syria on entirely bogus grounds, and that the OPCW – one of the international community’s most respected and authoritative bodies – has been caught redhanded in an outrageous deception with grave geopolitical implications. (In fact, it is not the first time the OPCW has been caught doing this, as I have previously explained here.)

The fact that the OPCW ignored its own expert and its own team’s technical findings when they proved politically indigestible casts a dark shadow over all the OPCW’s work in Syria, and beyond. If it was prepared to perpetrate a deception on this occasion, why should we assume it did not do so on other occasions when it proved politically expedient?

Active combatants

The OPCW’s reports into other possible chemical attacks – assisting western efforts to implicate Assad – are now equally tainted. That is especially so given that in those other cases the OPCW violated its own procedures by drawing prejudicial conclusions without its experts being on the ground, at the site of the alleged attacks. Instead it received samples and photos via al-Qaeda groups, who could easily have tampered with the evidence.

And yet there has been not a peep from the corporate media about this exposure of the OPCW’s dishonesty, apart from commentary pieces from the only two maverick mainstream journalists in the UK – Peter Hitchens, a conservative but independent-minded columnist for the Mail on Sunday, and veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk, of the little-read Independent newspaper (more on his special involvement in Douma in a moment).

Just as the OPCW blanked the findings of its technical experts to avoid political discomfort, the media have chosen to stay silent on this new, politically sensitive information.

They have preferred to prop up the discredited narrative that our governments have been acting to protect the human rights of ordinary Syrians rather than the reality that they have been active combatants in the war, helping to destabilise a country in ways that have caused huge suffering and death in Syria.

Systematic failure

This isn’t a one-off failure. It’s part of a series of failures by the corporate media in its coverage of Douma.

They ignored very obvious grounds for caution at the time of the alleged attack. Award-winning reporter Robert Fisk was among the first journalists to enter Douma shortly after those events. He and a few independent reporters communicated eye-witness testimony that flatly contradicted the joint narrative promoted by al-Qaeda groups and western governments that Assad had bombed Douma with chemical weapons.

The corporate media also mocked a subsequent press conference at which many of the supposed victims of that alleged chemical attack made appearances to show that they were unharmed and spoke of how they had been coerced into play-acting their roles.

And now the western media has compounded that failure – revealing its systematic nature – by ignoring the leaked OPCW document too.

But it gets worse, far worse.

Al-Qaeda propaganda

This week the same al-Qaeda groups that were present in Douma – and may have staged that lethal attack – claimed that the Syrian government had again launched chemical weapons against them, this time on their final holdout in Idlib.

A responsible media, a media interested in the facts, in evidence, in truth-telling, in holding the powerful to account, would be dutybound to frame this latest, unsubstantiated claim in the context of the new doubts raised about the OPCW report into last year’s chemical attack blamed on Assad.

Given that the technical data suggest that al-Qaeda groups, and the White Helmets who work closely with them, were responsible for staging the attack – even possibly of murdering civilians to make the attack look more persuasive – the corporate media had a professional and moral obligation to raise the matter of the leaked document.

It is vital context as anyone tries to weigh up whether the latest al-Qaeda claims are likely to be true. To deprive readers of this information, this essential context would be to take a side, to propagandise on behalf not only of western governments but of al-Qaeda too.

And that is exactly what the corporate media have just done. All of them.

Media worthy of Stalin

It is clear how grave their dereliction of the most basic journalistic duty is if we consider the Guardian’s uncritical coverage of jihadist claims about the latest alleged chemical attack.

Like most other media, the Guardian article included two strange allusions – one by France, the other by the US – to the deception perpetrated by the OPCW in its recent Douma report. The Guardian reported these allusions even though it has never before uttered a word anywhere in its pages about that deception.

In other words, the corporate media are so committed to propagandising on behalf of the western powers that they have reported the denials of official wrongdoing even though they have never reported the actual wrongdoing. It is hard to imagine the Soviet media under Stalin behaving in such a craven and dishonest fashion.

The corporate media have given France and the US a platform to reject accusations against the OPCW that the media themselves have never publicly raised.

Doubts about OPCW

The following is a brief statement (unintelligible without the forgoing context) from France, reported by the Guardian in relation to the latest claim that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons this week: “We have full confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”

But no one, except bloggers and academics ignored by the media and state authorities, has ever raised doubts about the OPCW. Why would the Guardian think these French comments worthy of reporting unless there were reasons to doubt the OPCW? And if there are such reasons for doubt, why has the Guardian not thought to make them public, to report them to its readers?

The US state department similarly came to the aid of the OPCW. In the same Guardian report, a US official was quoted saying that the OPCW was facing “a continuing disinformation campaign” from Syria and Russia, and that the campaign was designed “to create the false narrative that others [rather than Assad] are to blame for chemical weapons attacks”.

So Washington too was rejecting accusations against the OPCW that have never been reported by the state-corporate media.

Interestingly, in the case of US officials, they claim that Syria and Russia are behind the “disinformation campaign” against the OPCW, even though the OPCW has admitted that the leaked document discrediting its work is genuine and written by one of its experts.

The OPCW is discredited, of course, only because it sought to conceal evidence contained in the leaked document that might have exonerated Assad of last year’s chemical attack. It is hard to see how Syria or Russia can be blamed for this.

Colluding in deception

But more astounding still, while US and French officials have at least acknowledged that there are doubts about the OPCW’s role in Syria, even if they unjustifiably reject such doubts, the corporate media have simply ignored those doubts as though they don’t exist.

The continuing media blackout on the leaked OPCW document cannot be viewed as accidental. It has been systematic across the media.

That blackout has remained resolutely in place even after the OPCW admitted the leaked document discrediting it was genuine and even after western countries began alluding to the leaked document themselves.

The corporate media is actively colluding both in the original deception perpetrated by al-Qaeda groups and the western powers, and in the subsequent dishonesty of the OPCW. They have worked together to deceive western publics.

The question is, why are the media so obviously incompetent? Why are they so eager to keep themselves and their readers in the dark? Why are they so willing to advance credulous narratives on behalf of western governments that have been repeatedly shown to have lied to them?

Iran the real target

The reason is that the corporate media are not what they claim. They are not a watchdog on power, or a fourth estate.

The media are actually the public relations wing of a handful of giant corporations – and states – that are pursuing two key goals in the Middle East.

First, they want to control its oil. Helping al-Qaeda in Syria – including in its propaganda war – against the Assad government serves a broader western agenda. The US and NATO bloc are ultimately gunning for the leadership of Iran, the one major oil producer in the region not under the US imperial thumb.

Powerful Shia groups in the region – Assad in Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Iraqi leaders elevated by our invasion of that country in 2003 – are allies or potential allies of Iran. If they are in play, the US empire’s room for manoeuvre in taking on Iran is limited. Remove these smaller players and Iran stands isolated and vulnerable.

That is why Russia stepped in several years ago to save Assad, in a bid to stop the dominoes falling and the US engineering a third world war centred on the Middle East.

Second, with the Middle East awash with oil money, western corporations have a chance to sell more of the lucrative weapons that get used in overt and covert wars like the one raging in Syria for the past eight years.

What better profit-generator for these corporations than wasteful and pointless wars against manufactured bogeymen like Assad?

Like a death cult

From the outside, this looks and sounds like a conspiracy. But actually it is something worse – and far more difficult to overcome.

The corporations that run our media and our governments have simply conflated in their own minds – and ours – the idea that their narrow corporate interests are synonymous with “western interests”.

The false narratives they generate are there to serve a system of power, as I have explained in previous blogs. That system’s worldview and values are enforced by a charmed circle that includes politicians, military generals, scientists, journalists and others operating as if brainwashed by some kind of death cult. They see the world through a single prism: the system’s need to hold on to power. Everything else – truth, evidence, justice, human rights, love, compassion – must take a back seat.

It is this same system that paradoxically is determined to preserve itself even if it means destroying the planet, ravaging our economies, and starting and maintaining endlessly destructive wars. It is system that will drag us all into the abyss, unless we stop it.

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Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

27 May 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By Institute for Public Accuracy

21 May 2019 – The British-based Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media recently revealed an internal engineering assessment by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that undermines claims justifying U.S. attacks on Syria.

Last year, many claimed that the Syrian government had launched a chemical weapons attack on Douma on April 7. This was used to justify strikes on Syrian government targets on April 14. The British Guardian claimed: “Syria: U.S., U.K. and France launch strikes in response to chemical attack.” NPR headlined a story: “U.S., Allies Hit 3 Syrian Sites Linked To Chemical Weapons Program.”

Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provided the Institute for Public Accuracy with his initial assessment of the newly revealed OPCW document:

“The OPCW engineering assessment unambiguously describes evidence collected by the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) that indicates two analyzed chlorine cylinder attacks were staged in April 2018 in Douma. The holes in the reinforced concrete roofs that were supposedly produced by high-speed impacts (impact at speeds of perhaps 100 m/s or more, 250 mph) of industrial chlorine canisters dropped from helicopters were instead created by earlier explosions of either artillery rockets or mortar shells. In one event a chlorine canister that was damaged on another occasion was placed on the roof with its head inserted into an existing crater hole, and in the other case a damaged chlorine cylinder was placed on a bed supposedly after it penetrated the building roof and bounced from its original trajectory into a bed. In both cases the damage to the chlorine cylinders was incompatible with the damage to the surroundings that was allegedly caused by the cylinder impacts.

“As such, 35 deaths that were originally attributed to these staged chlorine events cannot be explained and it cannot be ruled out that these people were murdered as part of the staging effort.

“The evidence provided in the OPCW report is quite clear. For example, rebar in the cement roof slabs was splayed out from the forces of an intense supersonic shockwave that produced the holes. The only source of such a violently impulsive force in this environment would be that of the shockwave from the forward end of an explosive warhead that impacted and detonated on the roof. The forward end of the explosive charge in the warhead would have been touching or nearly-touching the roof surface when it detonated. Under these conditions the near-in shockwave generated from the forward end of the cylinder shaped explosive produces a shockwave that is traveling at a very high Mach number. Such a shockwave creates a reflected shock that is tremendously hotter and more intense than the incident shock due to the extreme compression of the supersonic incident shock as it violently decelerates during its encounter with a rigid surface.

“The net result of the shock interactions is that the incident and tremendously amplified reflected shocks coalesce together to produce an extremely intense impulse at the surface of the concrete slab. This impulse is so intense that it might well cut through rebar and readily splay the rebar in the forward direction in a geometry like that of the petals of a flower pointing downward.

“This is what is described in the report.

“I will have a much more detailed summary of the engineering report later this week. For now, it suffices to say that the UN OPCW engineering report is completely different from the UN OPCW report on Khan Sheikhoun, which is distinguished by numerous claims about explosive effects that could only have been made by technically illiterate individuals. In very sharp contrast, the voices that come through the engineering report are those of highly knowledgeable and sophisticated experts.

“A second issue that is raised by the character of the OPCW engineering report on Douma is that it is entirely unmentioned in the report that went to the UN Security Council. This omission is very serious, as the findings of that report are critical to the process of determining attribution. There is absolutely no reason to justify the omission of the engineering report in the OPCW account to the UN Security Council as its policy implications are of extreme importance.”

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The Institute for Public Accuracy was founded by Norman Solomon and opened its national office in San Francisco in October 1997.

27 May 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By teleSUR

23 May 2019 – The U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) praised Bolivia’s newly implemented universal health care system, known in the country as the Single Health System (SUS). The WHO pointed out that Bolivia’s leftist government has given generous funding and resources to health, ensuring free treatment for all.

Alfonso Tenorio, a representative of the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization, spoke Wednesday in Geneva, in praise of Bolivia’s health system and the country’s health minister Gabriela Montaño.

Tenorio spoke afterwards with state radio company Red Patria Nueva, saying: “Bolivia has become an important model for the world … the minister is always taking advantage of the strength of others and the exchange of knowledge to strengthen the SUS.”

The day before, Carina Vance, UNASUR representative, also praised Bolivia’s leftist government, saying that they have “deepened the right to healthcare.”

The SUS was officially formed on March 1, 2019, ensuring that millions of previously uninsured Bolivians now have access to free treatment. In the first 20 days of the system being launched, it was announced that over 30,000 had already received free treatment. The SUS has also initiated vaccination campaigns across the country, in one such campaign, over 80,000 were inoculated in just one week, in the department of Cochabamba. Experts have argued that such social programs are possible thanks to the nationalization of much of the country’s natural resources in 2006.

Other leftist governments in the region have also achieved significant results in health. On Tuesday, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua announced a 40% drop in infant mortality in the first few months of 2019.

Go to Original – telesurenglish.net

27 May 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By Glenn Greenwald

22 May 2019 – Among the planet’s significant political figures, no one is quite like Lula. Born into extreme poverty, illiterate until the age of 10, forced to quit school at the age of 12 to work as a shoe shiner, losing a finger at his factory job at 19, and then becoming a labor activist, union leader, and founder of a political party devoted to a defense of laborers (the Workers’ Party, or PT), Lula has always been, in all respects, the exact opposite of the rich, dynastic, oligarch-loyal, aristocratic prototype that has traditionally wielded power in Brazil.

That’s precisely what makes Lula’s rise to power, and his incomparable success once he obtained it, so extraordinary. And that’s what, to this very day, makes him so worth listening to regarding the world’s most complex and pressing political questions: As the ascension of right-wing nationalism and populism at times seems unstoppable, Lula is one of the world’s very few political figures of the last several decades able to figure out how to win national elections in a large country based on left-wing populism in the best sense of that term.

So unlikely was Lula’s rise to power that he ran for president, and lost, three times before finally being elected by an overwhelming margin in 2002 and then reelected by an even larger margin in 2006. His eight-year presidency, despite being marred by corruption scandals long endemic to Brazilian politics, was a stunning testament to the power of politics to improve the lives of people and transform a country: implementation of innovative social programs that lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty and created opportunities and hope for a huge segment of the population which, for generations, had none.

So bold and charismatic was Lula’s leadership that it not only transformed the lives of millions but also the perception of Brazil itself: both domestically and globally. Brazil was awarded the World Cup and then became the first South American country to host the Olympics. Tens of millions of Brazilians who resigned themselves to eternal, inescapable deprivation began to believe for the first time that a brighter future was possible. When Obama saw him at the G-20 summit in 2008, he anointed Lula “my man,” adding: “He’s the most popular politician on Earth.”

Obama was right: By the time he left office in 2010, Lula had an approval rating of 86 percent. And in a highly patriarchal country, he chose as his successor a little-known PT minister, Dilma Rousseff, who in 2010 was, with Lula’s vehement support, comfortably elected as the country’s first female president and then reelected in 2014. Somehow, a pro-worker leftist party founded by an impoverished labor leader became the dominant political force — winning four consecutive national elections and restoring Brazil’s belief in itself — in an oil-rich country long notorious for its extreme inequality of all types.

But then, just as quickly and dramatically as Lula built these successes, everything fell apart: for Lula, for Dilma, for PT and, most tragically, for Brazil. During Dilma’s presidency, the economy collapsed, millions returned to unemployment and poverty, an epidemic of street violence emerged, Dilma’s approval ratings dropped to near single-digits, she was impeached during her second term under highly dubious circumstances, and a routine investigation of money laundering through a car wash in the mid-sized Brazilian town of Curitiba quickly exploded into a massive corruption scandal. Aptly referred to as Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato, it implicated and sent to prison Brazil’s richest and most powerful figures, including the billionaire funders of multiple parties, PT’s leaders, and, finally in March 2018, Lula himself.

Lula’s criminal conviction on corruption charges last year came under highly suspicious circumstances. All year long, polls showed him as the clear front-runner for the 2018 presidential race. After anti-PT forces finally succeeded with Dilma’s impeachment in doing what they spent 16 years trying with futility to accomplish at the ballot box — removing PT from power — it seemed that Lula’s 2018 return to presidency was virtually inevitable and that only one instrument existed for preventing it: quickly convicting him of a felony which, under Brazilian law, would render him ineligible to run as a candidate.

And that’s precisely what happened. While Lula faced a variety of allegations of large-scale, complex corruption schemes, Lava Jato prosecutors instead selected one of the smallest and simplest cases against him that had long been regarded as trivial but which enabled a conviction to be quickly obtained: accusations that he received a modest-sized “triplex” in exchange for helping a construction company secure contracts. The judge who presided over the Lava Jato investigations and became heralded as an anti-corruption icon around the world, Sérgio Moro, quickly convicted Lula and sentenced him to almost 10 years in prison, a conviction upheld in early 2018 by an appeals court that mildly increased Lula’s prison term.

Ever since, Lula has been held in a makeshift prison cell inside a Federal Police building in Curitiba, thanks to a 6-5 Supreme Court ruling that he could be imprisoned pending his final appeal. An electoral court then barred Lula’s candidacy for president. Barring Lula from running as a candidate paved the way for the election of the far-right extremist Jair Bolsonaro, who defeated Lula’s handpicked replacement from PT, the little-known and charisma-challenged former mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, by a wide margin.

In a transaction that even anti-Lula crusaders found highly distasteful, the judge who found Lula guilty and cleared the path for Bolsonaro’s ascension to the presidency — Judge Moro — thereafter accepted a position in Bolsonaro’s government that has been described as a “Super Justice Minister”: a newly designed position consolidating powers under Moro that had previously been dispersed among various agencies. It rendered Judge Moro — less than a year after putting Lula in prison and thus removing Bolsonaro’s key obstacle — one of the most powerful men in Brazil.

Beyond his imprisonment, Lula has recently suffered a series of deep personal and political tragedies. In 2017, his wife of 43 years, Marisa, suddenly died of a stroke at the age of 66. In January, his brother died of cancer, but judicial permission to attend his funeral arrived too late. In March of this year, Lula’s 7-year-old grandson died of meningitis. All the while, Lula has had to watch the growth and progress of Brazil to which he has devoted his entire life being reversed, unraveled, and trampled upon by a far-right extremist spouting hatred for an endless number of marginalized groups, while Bolsonaro’s Chicago-trained, Pinochet-admiring economics minister prepares to sell off and privatize national resources, including those in the Amazon, to the highest bidder.

Throughout the election of 2018, the Intercept Brazil, and me personally, relentlessly sought judicial permission to interview Lula from prison, as did several other outlets. Even as the country’s most violent and dangerous criminals were permitted to be interviewed in prison, our requests to interview Lula were systematically denied by a judiciary clearly petrified of Lula’s singular ability to persuade the electorate. Only after the election was complete and Bolsonaro’s victory secure did the Brazilian judiciary suddenly begin granting authorizations for him to be interviewed. We were granted one hour with him alone, and I traveled to Curitiba last week to conduct the interview.

Despite the intense personal tragedies and harsh political defeats he has suffered, I encountered a Lula who was remarkably similar to the one I interviewed in 2016: intense, energetic, charismatic, combative, and highly insightful. I confronted him with numerous criticisms about his own conduct and that of his party — including policies many believed helped lead the way to Bolsonaro’s victory — but also used the opportunity to ask one of the only world leaders with a proven track record of winning with real leftist politics what the international left must do if it has any chance of stopping the inexorably growing nationalistic right-wing movement sweeping the democratic world.

We present the entire one-hour interview with very few edits so that the full vibrancy of our exchange can be seen. It was a sweeping discussion with one of the world’s most incisive political minds, involving a wide range of issues, some of which were about Bolsonaro and Brazil, but most of which were about the dangers the planet faces from collective threats and global political changes around the world. The complete transcript is below.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93MgeyNqc_k]

Read the full interview:

Glenn Greenwald: Good morning, Mr. President. It’s good to see you again, and thank you for the interview. This interview is for a Brazilian audience as well as for an international audience. Everyone outside Brazil already knows that you think you’ve been unjustly sentenced, a point we’ll get back to in a moment. But many people have also been asking me how you’ve been treated in prison, and you’ve said many times that the authorities here are humane and professional. Is this still the case?

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: I don’t know what humanitarian treatment in a prison means. I’m locked up, and I’m in solitary confinement — and it really is solitary, because most of the time I’m completely alone. I meet with my lawyers, and that’s it. And with my family once a week. I don’t know whether to consider this decent. What allows me to endure all of this without loathing it, and with a brighter outlook, is knowing that there are millions and millions of Brazilians living in freedom who, even so, are in worse conditions than I am. At least I have the opportunity to have lunch, to have dinner, you know?

But Brazil is the country you ran for eight years, and there are plenty of people in jail. How do you compare your treatment here to the treatment common prisoners receive in common prisons?

Take the Brazilians who have to live in stilt houses above swamps: They’re living as second-class citizens. A citizen who has to live in a single 9-square-meter room, who has to have lunch, dinner, has to cook, make love, go to the bathroom, and do everything within those 9 square meters — they’re not living any better than I am here. That’s why I’m less concerned about my own situation and more concerned with that of millions of people …

I get it, but are you being abused or tortured? That’s what people want to know.

No, listen: We’ve been fighting for many years to end torture. These days, torture has more sophisticated forms. It’s based on plea bargaining, on the thousands of lies told simultaneously over and over, and people imprisoned for two or three years until they say what the prosecutor or police commissioner wants to hear. I could cite the example of [Antonio] Palocci’s plea bargain, where he’s lying in the most unbelievable manner. Or take Leo [Pinheiro], for example, who’s in prison and lying through his teeth to get out. The secret is to talk about Lula. This has been going on for five years. You know that I’m here even though neither the judge, the prosecutor, or the Federal Police commissioner who launched the investigation have any proof against me. They know that the apartment isn’t mine, they know that the ranch isn’t mine, but they keep up these lies …

So are they mistreating people in order to elicit accusations against others?

Yes, and it continues to this day. I joke with my lawyers that I’d like to plea bargain and denounce Sérgio Moro, denounce the TRF4 [the 4th Regional Federal Court], to be a whistleblower against the commissioner that launched that deceitful investigation, I’d like to denounce [Deltan] Dallagnol. I’d love to, you know, but nobody would accept my plea bargain. Let’s see if you arrange for my whistleblowing to see the light of day, Glenn, because I need to make something clear. There’s this phrase by an English philosopher, that the curse of the first lie you tell is that you spend the rest of your life telling more lies to justify the first one. Do you remember when I went for my first deposition with Moro? I said to his face, “You’re condemned to condemn me,” given the huge amount of lies they’ve told, you know, in this agreement between Operation Car Wash and the Brazilian press. Because Operation Car Wash would be nothing without press coverage. But it’s a collusion between media, television, radio, and newspapers, where the press editors get the material before even the lawyers do. Before the defense lawyers received any news, the press already had. Thanks to this collusion, you’ve woven a gigantic lie. Every day, every hour I keep wondering, will GloboNews ever use the Jornal Nacional to say, “We made a mistake with Lula’s case”?

In the interview that we did in 2016, you harshly criticized Operation Car Wash, insisting that it was selective and an operation dedicated to destroying PT — as you said just now. But Operation Car Wash went on to imprison Eduardo Cunha, who led the impeachment process against Dilma, and also Michel Temer, who became president after Dilma’s impeachment (though he’s been released, he then went back, was released again, but at least he’s on trial), and also Sérgio Cabral, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. And now they’re aggressively going after Aécio Neves, Dilma’s center-right opponent in 2014. After all this, can you really say that Operation Car Wash was launched to destroy PT?

Glenn, let me tell you something: Operation Car Wash has been selective most of the time it’s been running. You’re a foreign journalist, so you can investigate impartially. Check out who made donations to PSDB [the Brazilian Social Democracy Party], and who made donations to PT. How much did PSDB receive, and how much did PT receive? And what about other parties? Conduct a thorough study, an impartial one, and figure out why only [João] Vaccari of PT was sentenced for campaign finances. What about the other treasurers from the other parties??

But isn’t Aécio on trial?

But Aécio isn’t a campaign treasurer. I’m talking about campaign finances to show you that there’s been a focus on going after PT from the outset. Why? Because they needed to take out PT from the government, and since they didn’t manage to do so over the course of nearly four elections, they needed to create clear ways to stir up hatred of PT. Historically in Brazil, and I think the whole world over, this kind of loathing increases once you accuse someone of corruption.

Listen, let me be crystal clear: I think if someone steals, they should go to jail, whether they’re PT or not, whether they’re Catholic or evangelical, you know? You steal, you go to jail. If the sentence has been pronounced, if the facts have been established, and if it’s been proven that you stole, you must go to jail. This is the kind of lawful state we want to establish. Now, I want to challenge the people who imprisioned me to show the world a single shred of evidence against me. I’m not asking for anything else.

But do you agree that Operation Car Wash is going after other politicians, including your opponents from the center-right?

Glenn, Operation Car Wash has been gradually changing into a political operation that benefits whoever participates in it. I’ll give you a tip-off here, a bit of whistleblowing that you can help investigate: Not long ago, we found out that there was an agreement made by the U.S. Department of Justice with what Dallagnol was handling for the Federal Public Ministry, for Operation Car Wash, to the tune of $600 million.

From the U.S.?

From the U.S. And afterwards, it surfaced that Sérgio Moro had authorized another agreement to the tune of $1.6 billion from Odebrecht, here in Brazil. We also know that there are other monetary agreements funding Operation Car Wash, but right now we don’t have access to the figures. In fact, PT is demanding that the leader of the House of Representatives get the Federal Savings Bank involved to help us find out who’s made agreements with Operation Car Wash. Because in fact, any time someone makes an agreement like this involving hundreds of millions of dollars, they’re trying to build a political machine, they’re setting up a racket..

All right, well, I promise you that we’re working on these issues, and investigating these …

Just let me finish, Glenn, I don’t want to stop in the middle of saying …

Go ahead.

The only thing I really want, the only thing, is that my case be judged objectively. I don’t want anything else. I want the judges at some point to care about having hard evidence, either from the side of the prosecution or from the defendants. Did you know I had 73 witnesses but that Dallagnol didn’t even show up to the hearings? He made up that deceitful PowerPoint presentation and then vanished. The only person he talks to is Miriam Leitão from Rede Globo news, and once in a while, he grants an interview. He’s probably going around now on lecture tours to make money. Anyway, I don’t want his beliefs to be the last word. I want evidence to be the last word. If he can prove that I own what he says I own, that shouldn’t cost him anything. In the meantime, I’ve been completely demoralized in the face of public opinion.

We won’t be able to settle this right now. You’ve got your accusations, but it’s a question of evidence …

Listen: When PT denounced the foundation that was set up with these funds, Dallagnol went to Caixa Economica [federal bank] to try sign a document and take over the foundation. Let’s put it this way: I’m being convicted without any foundation, without any dollars behind me, without any funds, and he’s walking free, trying to seize $2.5 billion. We denounced him to the National Justice Council. But who’s going to judge the case? The Council, which consists of, you know who? 8 members of the Federal Public Ministry. So what do you think the result will be? Is there any doubt?

During the 2018 elections, we spent a year trying to get an interview with you, like other journalists, but nobody was authorized to interview you, even though some of the most violent people behind bars in the country, including Nem, the head drug trafficker in Rio de Janeiro, were interviewed in prison. But now that the elections are over and Bolsonaro has won, all of a sudden the courts are allowing some journalists, like Folha de São Paulo, El País, and Kennedy Alencar for the BBC to interview you. How would you explain this?

I have no doubt, Glenn, that everything that’s happened in connection with Operation Car Wash has been to prevent Lula from running for president. Nowadays I’m certain of this, the same way that I’m certain that the U.S. Department of Justice is behind this, and the same way that I’m certain …

Is there evidence of that?

Sorry?

Is there evidence? Is there proof?

I can only have strong beliefs, you know, about everything. The same way that I’m absolutely certain that it’s interest in the petroleum resources of Brazil’s pre-salt layer that’s behind everything that’s happened to me and Dilma. Namely, the coup against Dilma, my imprisonment, the accusations. You see, Operation Car Wash could have had an important role in punishing the businessmen — if they’re guilty — and allowing the businesses to keep on creating jobs, paying salaries. They could have kept Petrobras from going broke, from being sold, from being divvied up as it is. Anyway, I’m very glad that today they’ve allowed this interview, and I’m grateful to you all for demanding this in the courts. I should have been allowed to have interviews before the elections.

Well, we requested the interview a long time ago, before the elections.

I know. And I’m grateful that you requested one. But it was denied. First, Minister of the Supreme Court [Ricardo] Lewandowski allowed it, but then it was vetoed by [Dias] Toffoli, I think, as president of the Supreme Court. I knew that it was a game they were playing, and that the game was: Let’s prevent Lula from competing in the elections. Why? Because the worst nightmare of the Brazilian elite is Lula returning to the presidency. But why exactly, if they made so much money during my presidency?

Yes, and isn’t it true, for example, that bank profits went through the roof during your presidency?

I don’t know if they went through the roof, but they grew significantly.

They did, didn’t they?

But the truth is that the poor ascended a whole rung on the economic ladder. And as the lower classes began to go to university, to go out to the theater, to go out to eat at restaurants, to travel more by airplane, this began to bother part of the elite.

But the upper classes also saw great improvements during your presidency. So why would this upper class, who profited so much while you were president, be so against your return to office?

It’s because this isn’t just an economic question; it’s a cultural issue. One has to remember that it was only a little over a hundred years ago that slavery was legally abolished, and that it continues in the minds of many. That’s why the greatest victims of police violence are black, that’s why those who are black earn 50 percent less than those who are white, and that’s why black women earn less than white women. That’s why those who are black have a lower average level of schooling than those who are white. Why? Because slavery is still prevalent deep within people’s consciousness. It’s a harsh thing to say, but it’s true. And this doesn’t change overnight. If we think about civil rights in the U.S., things began to change in the 1960s, but how many people had to die, including Martin Luther King Jr., in order to guarantee that black people would be treated with dignity? Really, I think deep down, it’s not an economic question. It’s set of a cultural, political, and sociological issues.

Well, let’s talk about some cultural issues. Your government was responsible, for example, for approving the changes in drug laws in 2006, which were a great advance in differentiating between drug users and drug traffickers. But as a result of these laws, the number of incarcerations rose, specifically of black people and of women. Looking back, how would you judge the policies of your government, given that it led to increase incarcerations during your presidency and Dilma’s too?

Let me tell you something. Between 2003 and 2014, we rolled out a range of strategies and approved as many laws as possible to improve the system of policing in this country, to reduce the rate of corruption, and to put more criminals behind bars. If you look at anything that’s functioning well in the Ministry of Justice, you’ll realize that these advances were put in place specifically during PT’s government. Exactly then. Now listen, we didn’t manage to solve the problems of public safety in Brazil, but we did create the mechanisms, including more civil ones, for the police to act more professionally, and we equipped the Federal Police, we set up the National Police, all with the objective of getting things done. And all of this is going down the drain now. I remember when Minister of Justice Tarso Genro approved PRONASCI, the National Program for Public Safety, which was a great initative for reducing crime and helping out young adults. It no longer exists. I think what’s really needed is a series of public policies to help resolve the overall situation. What are two extremely important components?

First, take PAC, the Growth Acceleration Program. You mentioned Nem earlier, and I remember in one of his interviews with a magazine, I think it was Istoé, he said that the president who got the most criminals off the streets was Lula, because during PAC, they lost 20 percent of their crooks who instead went to go work in PAC programs. In other words, if you want to reduce violence, you shouldn’t hand out weapons; you should hand out education, jobs, salaries, opportunities, and hope.

But did this actually work during your presidency? Because for many people, the problem was that violence and crime increased during the PT government. These problems were exactly what Bolsonaro exploited in his rhetoric. Isn’t it true that the problems of …

It did not increase during the PT government. During the PT government, we enacted the greatest policies of social mobility in 500 years of Brazilian history.

But did crime increase or decrease?

It decreased, definitely. It decreased. And there’s something one has to take into account when discussing this in the context of Brazil. One thing is being serious and keeping records of every case that happens, and another thing is just making the crime rate look lower by hiding the crimes. What we emphasized was greater transparency, with the goal of avoiding the same old trend of poor people being the victims. When you can guarantee that a young person will have a job, you know, then he won’t have to steal someone’s cellphone or tennis shoes. He won’t have to kill someone to steal their jacket. This is a no-brainer. When you give a young person the opportunity to dream, to dream “I can have a job, I can go to a technical school, I can go to university,” then this young person will grab and hold on to such opportunities..

I see what you mean.

What kinds of dreams do they have today?

I’d like to turn to discussing the political situation here in Brazil and its relation to international politics, because the whole world is interested in understanding Brazil after Bolsonaro took power. In 2015 in the U.S., it was unthinkable that Trump would win the elections, and nobody believed it would happen, but he’s now president. The same thing in the U.K. with Brexit. The same thing in Europe with nationalist and far-right parties. A year ago in Brazil, nobody believed that Bolsonaro would be elected. It was unthinkable, but he won. Now I know that you believe that Bolsonaro’s victory was due to causes and factors unique to Brazil, like the media’s attack on PT, but right now, can we see Bolsonaro’s victory as part of a larger global pattern in the democratic world of far-right parties overturning center-left parties?

Well, as part of the democratic process in the whole word, shifts and alternations in power are a normal pattern. This holds in the U.S., it holds in Germany, and it holds in Brazil. In one election, the right wins, in the next one the left wins, and in the next one …

But the right-wing is gaining ground in many countries.

Now, look: We had a very extraordinary period in Latin America. The period with the most growth, the greatest distribution of wealth, and of the most social inclusion in Latin America happened between 2000 and 2014 with the elections of [Cristina] Kirchner, [Ricardo] Lagos, Lula, Evo Morales, [Hugo] Chavez, Rafael Correa — it was a golden age for Latin America. We’re now in a far-right phase that’s failing in absurd ways. Macri is a disaster for Argentina, and he was supposed to be the answer. There’s this book …

Why is this happening?

Well, there’s this book by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, with the following phrase: “In times of terror, we choose monsters to protect us.” Now, when you create hatred within a society, when you create anti-political sentiment, when you take away any kind of hope in people or in existing institutions, then, well, anything goes. I know that Americans thought Trump had no chance. So why did he end up winning the elections? It wasn’t with Putin’s help, as everyone’s saying. It was because of the lies of fake news, just like here in Brazil.

Was that the only reason?

That’s not the only reason, it was because of unemployment, because of despair, and because of this discourse of the shrinking the government, which is always a concern in the air. You know what I mean? When Reagan and Thatcher created so-called globalization, the fad in the 1980s was to say that being modern was being globalized, and opening the economy up to the whole world and letting capital transit freely — even though people could not freely transit. Now that globalization has caused problems for developed countries, above all for the U.S., Trump found an easy line of discourse: “The U.S. is for Americans, and jobs are for Americans.”

Well, it’s not very well known that many people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 then went on to vote for Trump in 2016. In Brazil, the same thing happened: Many people who voted for you and then for Dilma went on to vote for Bolsonaro. How do you explain this?

Glenn, let me share something with you: I know Hillary Clinton pretty well. It would have been very easy to find someone more popular than her. She’s not an appealing personality. Trump’s victory was due to him having the right kind of discourse for the white blue-collar workers, you know, from the automobile industry, who were unemployed. He promised the obvious: more jobs for Americans. He promised to fight the Chinese to create more jobs, and this won him the elections. Now it’s obviously possible that many people who voted for Obama voted for Trump, just like many people who voted for Lula voted for Bolsonaro, especially since Lula wasn’t running for office. If Obama was running, I don’t know if Trump would have won. Concretely, I don’t know if, even in spite of the extraordinary performance by [Fernando] Haddad — if I were to have run, would the people have voted, would PT voters have elected Bolsonaro? Concretely …

I know people who voted for you, and then for Dilma, and then for Bolsonaro.

Well, maybe if I’d been a candidate, these people wouldn’t have voted for Bolsonaro. Glenn, since you’re a journalist, you know what’s happened in Brazil. First of all, Brazil has always had politics based on a monolithic “conventional wisdom.” Fernando Henrique Cardoso had eight years of conventional wisdown that was favorable to him, I had eight years of conventional wisdom that was against me, and Dilma had favorable conventional wisdom when the press tried to create a rift between Dilma and Lula, but then that didn’t work out, so they were against her. And as soon as the idea of impeachment came about, they were 100 percent against her.

There was this climate of hatred running throughout society, trying to blame PT for all of the misfortunes of Brazil, but when the elections were on the horizon, there wasn’t a single viable right-wing candidate. (I mean, normal right-wing, because as for Bolsonaro, he’s comparable to Nero standing by while Rome burned down to the ground.) And in fact, Bolsonaro’s been in office for five months and we’ve never heard the words “growth,” “development,” “investment,” “job creation,” “distribution of wealth” — these words have simply vanished from the dictionary. The only thing you see is everyone making this gun gesture with their fingers all the time, and this is actually the same shape they used before to make an “L” for Lula. I guess Bolsonaro borrowed this gesture from when it was used in my presidential campaigns. The point is, our country is abandoned, everyone only speaks of budget cuts and welfare reform, and promising the society …

Abandoned by who? I mean, during your interview with El País, you chalked up the rise of the global right to the failures of neoliberalism. I’d like to know more about this issue of neoliberalism failing here in Brazil and internationally as well. What’s the relation between the population suffering and their sudden embrace of far-right leaders like Bolsonaro and others throughout the democratic world?

Neoliberalism, as it arose during the era of globalization, is losing ground everywhere. It’s not just losing ground to the left, but also to the right, as it lost to Hitler and to Mussolini. At the same time, we’ve had two recent examples, in Spain and Portugal, of the left coming back during the elections. And even in Germany, where Angela Merkel is a very strong politician, if she hadn’t formed coalitions with the Social Democrats, she wouldn’t be in power.

But even there, the far-right is growing.

I know, it’s growing the whole world over, and I think it’s a warning call for the left, yes. But the right-wing won’t … you can be sure that after Bolsonaro and Macri, Cristina [Fernández de Kirchner] will win the next elections. You can be certain that if Evo Morales runs for president, he’ll win in Bolivia, and that the same will happen in many countries.

I hope that Americans will have the good sense to prevent another term of Trump as president, because he’s not just a problem for the U.S., he’s a problem for the whole world. He has to learn that given the importance of the U.S. on the international stage, he can’t make impulsive decisions without reflecting on their global consequences. He can’t threaten to wage war on everyone, threatening to attack all the time. Enough is enough! We’ve had enough lies, like in Vietnam, like the lies about Iraq, like the lies about Libya.

It’s time to stop this, you know, the world needs peace, the world needs schools, the world needs more books, and not more weapons, the world needs jobs. Sometimes I get really upset thinking about the G20 meeting we had in London, the first one that Obama went to, where we reached important decisions to deal with the 2008 financial crisis, and one of the suggestions was that richer nations, in accord with the reduction in their internal consumption, could enable financial means for poorer countries to develop and to modernize, to buy newer machines, to have greater access to technology and science. But this didn’t happen, and protectionism is back.

But Mr. President, it’s a common criticism, for PT as well, that while you and Dilma have a reputation and a political past as left-wing, your form of government was neoliberal, and there are a number of examples which we’ve already discussed, like the increase in bank profits during your presidency. The same way that the Democratic Party in the U.S. is financed by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, PT was financed by the richest corporations in Brazil, such as Odebrecht, OAS, JBS, and lots of banks. You implemented a welfare reform in 2004, and Dilma implemented austerity in 2014 and went ahead with the hydroelectric dam in Belo Monte that environmental and indigenous activists were against, and you implemented tax cuts for the rich. If you think that Bolsonaro’s victory was due to the failures caused by neoliberalism, don’t you think that PT built it up?

Oh, no, no. No, Glenn, I won’t answer your question before responding to all of these things you’ve just said about PT and my government.

I don’t want you to respond to those …

It’s important to keep in mind that …

It’s a common criticism, that’s why I’m asking.

During my presidency, I never said that my government was socialist. First of all, when you win an election, you have to figure out the relations between the forces that you’ll have on your side in order to implement political decisions. It’s important to remember, Glenn, that when I was elected president of the republic with a parliament of 513 representatives, I had 91 representatives from my party. Collor and Bolsonaro, they had 50. He’s going to need, much more than I did, to construct allegiances with forces who will be amenable to approving what he wants. There’s no point in his talking of “old politics” when he’s the old politician himself! He’s been in office for 28 years. He’s the old politician, and I’m the new one. I had only been a representative for four years, and I didn’t want to be a representative anymore, and he was one for 28 years. So enough of this “old politics” nonsense. And if you want to run a country, you have to work with what you have!

I ran the country that I happened to be in. I wasn’t running France, or Germany or the U.S., I was running Brazil. And when I arrived in office, there were 54 million people dying of hunger, who couldn’t afford to eat breakfast, and I pledged that by the end of my term, every person in Brazilian would have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I didn’t get the chance to go to college, but I made it my duty to see to it that, since I didn’t have the chance go to college, the workers would. For all these reasons, even though I’m the only president without a college degree, I wouldn’t switch places with many people who have one, you know? I’m the president who sent the highest number of students to university, who opened the most public universities, who launched the most technical schools in the history of the country, who had the largest policies of distribution of wealth, who raised the minimum wage the most, and who helped the most in settling the landless.

So how do you explain the suffering that people felt that brought Bolsonaro to office, after 14 years of PT in power?

Why did I do all those things that I just mentioned? Because I understand that if one wants to solve the problems of Brazil, we have to use the word “people.” We have to look at people and see human beings instead of just seeing numbers or debt figures. Do you want to reduce the government debt in Brazil? Grow the economy. Do you want to reduce the welfare debt? Create jobs. Why was the welfare at a surplus in 2014? Because we created 20 million jobs with regularized work contracts, and because we legally approved six million individual microenterprises. We got the economy functioning. Just talking about cuts, cuts, cuts won’t hack it; one needs to speak of growth, development, and look toward people, not toward the banks. Come on, what kind of growth can our country expect with a president who goes around saluting the American flag?

No, what I’m trying to ask is why you blame the rise of Bolsonaro and other extremists on neoliberalist ideologies. I’m trying to understand the difference in how you ran the country, how Dilma ran the country, and those ideologies. What differences do you see?

Glenn, when we started this interview, I said clearly that PT’s biggest problems come not from its errors, but its successes. Every time that a president tries to enact socially-minded policies in Latin America, they’re eventually ousted. The elite in Brazil and in other countries don’t accept economic development policies that contain social inclusion. PT managed to enact — and this is according to the U.N., not me — the greatest changes in social inclusion in the history of this country. It’s important to remember that during our mandate, it was the only time in history that the poor had a higher rate of economic upturn than the rich. The rich made gains too, but the poor at an even greater percentage. It was the only time in history, and this bothered people. You should have heard it in the Rio de Janeiro airport, in the São Paulo airport, when people said, “This airport is beginning to look like a bus station, with these poor people all around, people who have never taken a plane in their life.”

Yeah, so why is there so much anger in this country, leading to Bolsonaro’s election?

Well now, you’re giving me the opportunity to explain to the Brazilian people what happened. Let’s take the case of Bolsonaro. He had 39 percent of the total votes, not of those who went to the polls, but 39 percent of the total.

In the first round?

No, in the second round runoff. If you do the math, he had 57 percent of the votes of people who picked a candidate, but only 39 percent of the total number of voters.

But he won by a large margin.

It was a third, but yes, he won. He won the elections, but the majority of the people did not vote for him. But why did anyone vote for him? They voted for him because of that phrase I said earlier: “In times of terror, many people choose a monster to protect them.” So there were people who preferred to believe in a lie called Bolsonaro, in a man who preached hate, who preached violence, in a man who hates black people, who hates gay people, who hates poor people, in a man who said that killing was the answer, yes, they voted for him. Why? Because the opposition was PT, and PT had been demonized.

Who knows, Glenn, you know that when they ask me, I say that maybe God didn’t want me to win the elections back in 1989. Why? I lost in 1989, I lost in 1994, I lost in 1998, and I never got angry, nobody ever saw me infuriated about losing. I went back home and got ready for the next election. The hatred all started with Dilma’s victory in 2014 — no, actually with the demonstrations in 2013, and came to a head when Aécio lost, and then rants against Dilma began, and the hatred, the hatred …

They couldn’t accept this loss. But I want to ask you something important, because you just said that PT was demonized and talked about the hatred of PT. And there’s a common criticism that I often hear about your strategy in 2018, which is that you did everything possible to weaken the candidacy of Ciro Gomes of the center-left, who many think had a better chance of beating Bolsonaro than the candidate who you chose from your party, Fernando Haddad.

Because of the hate and loathing of PT in Brazil, because Haddad was unknown outside of São Paulo. And now this is for the international audience: In the first runoff, Haddad ended up in second place, while in the second runoff, Bolsonaro defeated your PT candidate by a huge margin. The critics say that you preferred to lose to Bolsonaro and maintain control over the left with PT, than to have a better chance of beating Bolsonaro if it meant letting another party, namely Ciro’s, represent the left. Is this a valid criticism?

Do you believe this?

Well, I’m asking what you think.

I’m asking if you believe this, you know why?

I’ll tell you what I know. I know that the candidate who you endorsed so that he could make it to the second round ended up losing by a large margin to Bolsonaro, and I’m asking whether this was the right strategy.

I’ll try to explain. My main strategy, my most basic strategy, goes back to 1989. In 1989, [Leonel] Brizola, who I remember fondly, thought he would win the elections. Brizola came back from exile ready to be president, but I was the one who went to the second round runoff. Did you know Brizola asked me to give up, so that he and I could support Mario Covas instead? So I said, “Brizola, if the people wanted to elect Mario Covas, they would have voted for him, so why didn’t they? How would I look for the voters who wanted me in office? Should I give up to support Mario Covas who is way behind?” Really, if the people wanted Ciro to win the second round runoff, why didn’t they vote for him in the first round?

Because you endorsed Haddad and not Ciro, and because your party also blocked his alliance with the PSB [the Brazilian Socialist Party], and gave up a possible candidacy for the governor of Pernambuco all to help the PT candidate. You’ve heard all these criticisms.

Come on, does Ciro really complain because PT had the political means to bring in PCdoB [the Communist Party of Brazil] and PSB [the Brazilian Socialist Party]? What did he want PT to do? Nothing? He wanted PT to talk to PSB, because …

You were the one who said that PT was demonized, was always under attack …

Listen, let me tell you something. Ciro’s gotten learn something, this is important in politics, and if you ever want to go into politics, then learn this: If you want someone to like you, then you’ve gotta learn to like them back. If you want someone to respect you, then you’ve got to respect people. So if Ciro really wanted PT’s support, he could have come and discussed things with PT. I’m gonna tell you a story that you might not know, that nobody’s ever told, and that Ciro never told anyone. There was a time that Mangabeira Unger came to my office and said, “Me, Haddad, and Ciro had a meeting, and we agreed that Haddad would be Ciro’s vice president.” And I said, “Mangabeira, don’t you think you should’ve discussed this with PT first?” What do you think? Mangabeira, and now this is back in 1994, I was at a dinner at his house in Boston with him, with the beloved Marco Aurelio Garcia, with his beloved wife, and he says to me, “Brizola’s gonna win the election.” I had over 20 percent of the votes, and Brizola had none, and he says, “Brizola’s gonna win.” So I said, “Why do you think so, Mangabeira?” And he says, “Because as soon as Leonel Brizola gets in front of the cameras, all of the workers will vote for him!” And I said, “Mangabeira, you must be out of it, this isn’t gonna happen.” Well, the elections came, and I don’t know if you remember what happened that year. They banned the use of outside images, and only allowed candidates to speak directly in front of the camera. So how many votes did Brizola get? He lost to Enéas Carneiro. I ran again in 1994 and had 27 percent of the votes, but there was no second round. Ciro went to the elections, and didn’t run — no, he did, and he got 11 percent of the votes. He then ran again in 2002, and got 11 percent or 12 percent, and last year he ran again. So I lost four times before winning, and Ciro has already lost three times, maybe he’ll have to lose once more. If Ciro wants to make alliances, he has to learn to have conversations, he has to learn how to convince people, and he has to assume certain programmatic commitments.

Well, Ciro will definitely hear this interview.

I think Ciro knows what kind of relationship I have with him. I’ve always had a great deal of respect for him, and I thank Ciro for working with me in my government, and I’ll tell you something else: I thought Ciro shouldn’t have even run for the House of Representatives, because I invited him instead to be the president of BNDES [the Brazilian Development Bank].

Well, this is exactly the reason that he thought he had a better chance than the candidate that you endorsed in the second round runoff. But anyway, I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the challenges that the left faces internationally, because it’s really important, and you are one of the few great leaders of the left in the past twenty years, who managed to win national elections in a huge nation and to reach out to the most destitute and marginalized.

I think it’s really important to hear what you think of the problems that the left is facing worldwide, because in the majority of countries in the democratic world, including Brazil, the left is facing great difficulties in attracting support from lower socioeconomic classes, but at the same time is seeing increased support for higher classes, people with higher education, and university degrees. So I want to ask, what’s needed in order for the Brazilian left and the left worldwide to be able to reconnect with the people, as you were able to do?

Listen, during the economic crisis in 2008, I discovered that the world was lacking leadership. I went to meetings with the 20 main leaders of the world, and I realized that nobody knew what to do. I was worried, for example, about the EU, because the EU had become very bureaucratic, and it was no longer the politicians who spoke, it was the bureacrats, it was this committe and that commission, and everything was a committee or commission without the politicians deciding anything. I thought this was pretty bad, you know.

And in the U.S., Obama also had no way out. I remember calling up Obama during the automobile industry crisis and telling him my plans with the BNDES, with the Bank of Brazil, with the Caixa Economica — with three public banks that enabled us to kickstart economic growth in Brazil and prevent the crisis from strangling us. Obama regretted that in the U.S. there was no way to have such bank involvement, but there were ways to create development banks. Anyway, here’s what I think the left has to do: First, the left needs, you know … there are left-wing parties with 100 years of experience, with 150 years of experience, with 80 years, and PT has 40 years of experience, and I think PT has had a very successful experience.

Now, some folks have said that PT has gotten too far removed from the people. Listen, I would say that PT needs to take a step back but not to its origins — because you don’t govern for the sake of a party, you govern for the sake of the whole society. When you win an election, you have to govern for the sake of everyone, and of course you can choose who you want to focus on serving more or less, but you have to govern for the sake of everyone, you have to respect everyone, you have to like everyone, you have to serve everyone, and this was how I did things. I doubt, Glenn, that you’ll find any other country, during my presidency, I doubt you’ll find a mayor, a governor, or a representative from an opposition party who had anything bad to say about my government, because we treated everyone with decency.

I agree, and you left office with an 86 percent approval rate, and one of the most important aspects, in my opinion, of your political appeal was your childhood and background: that you came from poverty, that you only learned to read at age 10, and that you were a laborer at age 16, like millions of other Brazilians. I want to know whether you think it’s important for left-wing parties to be represented by people who learned about poverty not only in theory while in college, but who grew up in poverty themselves and, therefore, have that experience in their bones and can speak with credibility to the people about poverty and about their experience. Do you think that the Brazilian left, or the left internationally, can manage to do this the way you did?

Well, I think the left has many people who have studied very hard and who are serious intellectuals who can achieve this. What we need is …

But is that the same has having experienced it?

What’s really needed is to be committed to these causes. There’s no way to govern a country if … Do you remember my attitude when I won the election? Do you remember that I put every minister on a plane and took them all to the four most destitute places in Brazil? Why did I do that, anyway? I wanted [Henrique] Meirelles, a banker, and [Antonio] Palocci, a doctor, and [Luiz] Furlan, a businessman — I wanted them to see a stilt house above a swamp up close, I wanted them to see a man and woman having to defecate in the same room they eat in, I wanted them to see the vast number of young girls with two or three kids and no dad around, I wanted them to see the poverty of Jequitinhonha Valley, I wanted them to see the real world as it is, not just the world as it is in Brasilia. What the left needs is this kind of commitment.

You’re not going to manage to govern if you can’t define which part of the population it’s your priority to serve. So I might like everyone, I might like Glenn, I might like Lula, I might like anyone, but I have to choose. Does Glenn manage to eat three meals a day? Does Glenn have access to education? Does Glenn own a car? Well, then Glenn isn’t my priority. The priority are those who are downtrodden, who don’t have what Glenn has, but who need to.

But to make this happen, do you think it’s important to have candidates coming from these neighborhoods that have real poverty and that don’t seem overly academic?

No, what we have to do is prepare ourselves. I prefer that we find candidates who come from backgrounds with popular struggles in their blood, in their veins, but obviously there are many good people out there, not necessarily from poor backgrounds, who are committed to the cause of the poor.

But most important is having the candidates. Do you think this is what’s missing in Brazil?

Definitely. This is why the party … I think what’s missing is more people being involved, more women, more black people, more Indigenous people.

I’ve only got 5 minutes left, and I need to ask you …

I want to know whether you’re going to ask me about Venezuela?

Sure, but I have to ask you about something else too, or everyone will kill me, because it’s one of the greatest concerns internationally about the situation in Brazil: the Amazon — given its importance and what it represents in terms of the capacity of human beings to protect the planet, against catastrophic climate disasters. Do you think that the Amazon is under threat because of the Bolsonaro government?

I do think so, because really they have no limits. The only thing they know how to do is destroy, and they don’t give a damn about the biodiversity and ecosystems in Brazil. They just want to destroy it, and I’m concerned about this, because sustainability and the defense of the Amazon are part of the policy of national sovereignty. Brazil has nearly 16,000 kilometers of borders with 10 countries and nearly 8,000 kilometers of ocean borders. The pre-salt layer is 200 miles away from our coastline, and thus right on the limits of our territorial waters and in need of protection, and Brazil has 12 percent of the fresh water on the planet. Brazil needs to treat our borders, our people, our flora and fauna, and our biodiversity as part of the heritage of all humanity, but administered by Brazil according to our interests. We need to put science and technology at the forefront, along with pharmaceutical advances that the Amazon might contain, as a source of solutions to dozens of diseases around the world. Really, Brazil really needs to take care of all of this. I’m proud of the fact that I participated in COP 15 [2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference] in Copenhagen, when we made a commitment, and Dilma’s commitment to the agreement in Paris. In other words …

But you were also criticized by Marina Silva, who fought for environmental causes, and by now we are all more aware of the dangers that our planet faces. So with this in mind, are there things that you would have done differently?

Listen, Glenn, do you know what I figured out? I came to appreciate some of my mother’s principles only after she died. I didn’t realize how much I appreciated her. Now as for Marina having criticisms, well, Marina was the minister of the environment. She was minister for five years. She has no right to complain, she was minister! I didn’t tell her what to do; she told me which environmental policies to implement. In other words, we obviously couldn’t do everything, but I doubt that anyone else achieved as much as we did.

OK. Well, according to my interview permit, I have a little more than one minute left, so I have one question.

Aren’t you gonna cut me some slack and ask me about Venezuela? Come on.

No, I guess not, because you already discussed this with Kennedy [Alencar and the BBC], so today I really want to ask about Moro, because he’s the judge that condemned you and put you in this prison, and the one who got you disqualified for running for president. And after all that, he was appointed by Bolsonaro as his minister of justice, a choice that many people consider downright suspect, if not corrupt, while Moro’s conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. And this week it was revealed that Bolsonaro apparently promised Moro the next seat on the Supreme Court. How do you view this new development in relation to the role Moro had in your criminal case and to the fact that you’re here in prison?

There was another disclosure yesterday, which you might not know about: The minister who convicted me during the second trial revealed yesterday night at a debate in Curitiba that she just cut-and-paste the same pronouncement from the first trial with Moro. Basically now, let me look you in the eyes with the utmost seriousness and responsibility and tell you something: Moro is a liar. Moro is a byproduct of Rede Globo news television and the media. Worse than anyone, he planned things out with the Estado de São Paulo newspaper, he visited all the communication media outlets before launching Operation Car Wash, and he wrote an article admitting that the success of any of their operations depended on the press.

A judge who depends on the media in order to make convictions is not a real judge. A judge who is making a conviction needs to go carefully through the records of the proceedings, needs to look through all the evidence, both for and against. So I’ll tell you loud and clear: He’s a liar, the commissioner who led the investigation about the apartment is a liar, and the TRF4 lied about me as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy saying any of this, and I know what the consequences are. What I actually want is for Moro to have to make speeches every day, because the more he talks, the more he exposes who he really is. He was not born to anything but read the penal code. As for me, I have a lifelong commitment to prove that these people are lying about me.

I’ve been locked up here for a year and two months. I’m really, you know … every day I do exercise to keep myself under control, to avoid seething with rage while watching Brazil being destroyed, while watching our national sovereignty and military officers selling out, while witnessing these nonsensical attacks — this is all a state of affairs that I can’t imagine how we arrived at. Brazil in 2008 was poised to become the fifth-largest economy in the world. Now we’ve turned into the scourge of the earth. Brazil was the country who helped strengthen Mercosul, who helped create UNASUL, helped create CELAC, helped create BRICS, helped create IBAS, established meetings between South America and the Arab world, established meetings between African countries and Latin America …

Our time is almost up …

Let me tell you something: This country is throwing away everything that’s been built up, and now is throwing away a dream with these budget cuts at universities. It’s beyond belief that they can be so ignorant. Some of them even have university degrees, so don’t they know that there is no better way to invest in the future than education? This was exactly what we built up, and this is what they’re destroying. There’s only one thing for the people to do, and that’s to react. He wasn’t elected to destroy Brazil. He wasn’t elected for this. He didn’t even participate in debates, he has no plan, he has nothing.

We need to wrap up. I want to thank you …

[As the police officer approaches Lula] I want you to know the following, I want to end with a question that you didn’t ask and that I’m gonna answer. I think it’s not right, it’s just not right, the way that Venezuela is being treated. Venezuela deserves its own sovereignty, they have the right to self-determination, and Venezuela’s problems are Venezuelans’ problem, they’re not the USA’s problems. Trump should take care of the U.S. and stop sticking his nose where he’s not wanted.

Mr. President, again, thank you so much for the interview.

Thank you.

____________________________________________________

Glenn Greenwald – glenn.greenwald@​theintercept.com

27 May 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By Celina della Croce

22 May 2019 – Every year, the vast majority of Ghana’s natural wealth is stolen. The country is among the largest exporters of gold in the world, yet—according to a study by the Bank of Ghana—less than 1.7 percent of global returns from its gold make their way back to the Ghanaian government. This means that the remaining 98.3 percent is managed by outside entities—mainly multinational corporations, who keep the lion’s share of the profits. In other words, of the $5.2 billion of gold produced from 1990 to 2002, the government received only $87.3 million in corporate income taxes and royalty payments.

Even in cases where the corruption of local governments does exist, the amount of money pilfered pales in comparison to the wealth extracted by transnational corporations.

The dominant discourse propagated by institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that control the levers of global finance blames the bad governance of local officials for the consequences of this plunder, citing corruption scandals as the main reason for a lack of resources. However, the discourse around bad governance—the idea that corrupt local officials are to blame for endemic poverty, low health indicators, education, and other measures of national well-being—focuses on what happens with the 1.7 percent of the returns that Ghana receives. Sarah Bracking points out that “the company would argue that the market value of output is not synonymous with their surplus, or profits, as working capital, wages, depreciation of machines and so forth must be paid from this. However, the figures do act as a good illustration of the low returns to the sovereign owners of sub-soil resources, as a proportion of their final market value, which, in Africa, can be estimated as typically in the region of between three and five percent, but which in this case is lower (about 1.7 percent).” Holding officials accountable for their use of public funds should be a given, but what about the remaining 98.3 percent of the returns generated by Ghana’s gold exports?

Individuals are blamed, fingers angrily pointed at corrupt governments, while the nations they govern are robbed blind by transnational corporations. It is these corporations, working with institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, that define the terms of this conversation. These international lenders bury borrowing countries with steep interest rates and terms that grant lending institutions the power to determine and approve national policies.

National leaders of countries that fall into the debt trap are forced to forfeit the right to create their own policies for access to loans. These leaders are then blamed for the consequences of policies and terms crafted by lending institutions (a key form of neocolonialism). They are also blamed for the vestiges of hundreds of years of colonialism that came before.

In some cases, it is true that national leaders are involved in corruption scandals. In others, corruption scandals are fabricated, relying on a deeply embedded narrative and lack of faith in national leadership in the Global South, despite a lack of evidence (seen recently in Brazil with the imprisonment of leading presidential candidate Lula da Silva).

Even in cases where the corruption of local governments does exist, the amount of money pilfered pales in comparison to the wealth extracted by transnational corporations. In other words, robber barons are blaming petty thieves for the consequences of their large-scale robbery schemes. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), multinational corporations’ offshore tax hubs result in an estimated $100 billion in annual tax revenue losses for developing countries. Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research calls this phenomenon “tax strikes,” or the idea that “those who hold capital, who are the masters of property, have been—essentially—on strike against regimes of taxation. They use their vast wealth to either hide their money or change tax laws to offer them increasing protections.” Rather than using this money for the social good—to invest in public services, infrastructure, health, or education—they use it to increase their own wealth, often by “inflat[ing] the stock market and various asset bubbles.”

Comparatively, during a 2013 keynote address, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim cited that corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials costs developing countries between $20 billion and $40 billion each year. In other words, by a rough calculation, the amount that corrupt government officials cost developing countries is anywhere from 40 to 80 percent less than half of the amount that these nations lose in offshore tax havens.

The real power, then, remains in the hands of multinational corporations, which not only make off with vast sums of wealth belonging to the “darker nations,” but also continue to exercise control over nations in the Global South, where they use access to finance as a lever to impose policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the people who live there.

When local leaders are deemed too much of a threat to multinational corporations’ interests, they are quickly deposed through coups, as we saw in Haiti (2004) and Honduras (2009), or destabilization campaigns, as we see in Venezuela today.

When local leaders are deemed too much of a threat to multinational corporations’ interests, they are quickly deposed through coups, as we saw in Haiti (2004) and Honduras (2009), or destabilization campaigns, as we see in Venezuela today. Kwame Nkrumah, a leader in Ghana’s independence struggle and the country’s first president, referred to this process as neocolonialism. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside,” Nkrumah wrote in his book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. Through organizations like the IMF and World Bank, former colonialists would strive for “the general objective … to achieve colonialism in fact while preaching independence.”

Fifty-four years after Nkrumah wrote Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) and 62 years after Ghana’s independence from Great Britain (1957), Nkrumah’s assessment remains as clear and relevant as ever. The preferred words of imperialism have shifted, but the underlying structure remains the same: a system where an illusion of freedom obscures the power relations and where monopoly capital, in the form of transnational corporations and lending institutions, exercises control over the country’s economic and political reality.

The narrative of today’s neocolonialists blames “bad governance” as the obstacle to a better future in which Ghanaians benefit from their vast mineral wealth, as Gyekye Tanoh of the Third World Network (Africa) points out in his recent interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. According to this trope, the corruption of local governments is to blame. However, this narrative leaves out of the picture the pillage of natural resources and exploitation of labor by colonizers (Great Britain, in the case of Ghana).

Not only were the systems to process crude forms of minerals such as oil and gold not developed by colonizers, but the country’s reliance on foreign capital to buy and process these resources has kept the country in a position similar to its colonial status pre-1957, as Nkrumah predicted, where transnational corporations, rather than the state of Great Britain, keep the vast majority of revenues produced from Ghanaian gold and other resources. Tanoh explains: “[t]he entire system that was set in place since the 1980s to force countries to rely upon raw material exports and to become dependent on foreign buyers is what leaves countries like Ghana with such a minuscule amount of the wealth taken from Ghana’s land. ‘Good governance’ is not going to solve this, unless ‘good governance’ refers as well to the deep structural dynamics.”

Pointing a proverbial finger at those responsible for the distribution of 1.7 percent of wealth generated and framing them as the main culprits of corruption, poverty, and underdevelopment, is not just reckless and irresponsible; it is part of a systemic narrative that deflects attention away from the real thieves.

Pointing a proverbial finger at those responsible for the distribution of 1.7 percent of wealth generated and framing them as the main culprits of corruption, poverty, and underdevelopment, is not just reckless and irresponsible; it is part of a systemic narrative that deflects attention away from the real thieves: the multinational corporations that preside over the 98.3 percent of the remaining wealth. It is intellectually dishonest to ignore the broader historical context that is responsible for the low returns of Ghanaian gold to Ghanaian citizens. True bad governance is the appropriation of 98.3 percent of wealth produced by Ghanaian resources that lines the coffers of transnational corporations instead of being returned to benefit the Ghanaian people.

Of the 10 top multinational firms that operate on the African continent, only one (Vale, of Brazil) is located in the Global South. Of the remaining nine, three are United States corporations, three are Canadian, two are Australian, and one is British. All are private transnational corporations. In other words, the gold that is extracted from Ghanaian soil (like the natural wealth extracted from across the African continent and Global South) is immediately handed over to multinational corporations—almost entirely based in and controlled by the Global North (or, at best, by the national elite)—to be processed, refined, and distributed. Death, rape, and preventable illnesses that plague those who work in or live near the mines are rampant in the area where these companies operate (as illustrated by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s latest briefing).

Though Ghana won its independence in 1957, the vestiges of colonialism and underdevelopment did not magically leave with it. Under colonialist rule, resources were extracted from former colonies—like Ghana—to sustain the wealth of their colonizers. Wealth produced from gold (further enhanced by enslaved or bonded labor) quickly left the country, promoting development in England while leaving Ghana void of the infrastructure to develop or refine its own resources, and leaving its people without access to basic services.

To accept the narrative on bad governance is to forfeit what Fidel Castro called the Battle of Ideas. It is to let the powerful—transnational corporations, and the web of institutions that protects their interests, from the IMF to corporatized non-profits and mainstream media—define the terms of the conversation on development, sovereignty, and the lives of the people who inhabit the resource-rich land. It is to forfeit the control of Ghanaian resources to transnational corporations, the very thieves of the majority of the country’s wealth, under the false pretext that they are incapable of managing it themselves. To quote Gyekye, “the language of ‘good governance’… implies that it is only the aberrant behaviors of the public officials that should be seen as corruption. Yet of course the lack of resources available to accountable public institutions makes it impossible to create or sustain meaningful domestic anti-corruption mechanisms.”

It is intellectually dishonest to blame local leaders as the main culprits for bad governance, conveniently leaving multinational corporations out of the picture. It is the vestiges of colonialism, and its continued neocolonialist forms, that deprive the Ghanaian people of the right to process, develop, and manage their natural wealth and to be the drivers of their own policies—in other words, their right to national sovereignty. It is transnational corporations, the stand-ins of yesterday’s British empire—often aided by an enthusiastic national bourgeoisie—that have robbed the Ghanaian people of sovereignty over their resources, their wealth, and their future.

____________________________________________________

Celina della Croce is a coordinator at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research as well as an organizer, activist, and advocate for social justice.

27 May 2019

Source: www.transcend.org

By M J Aslam

History is recorded in writing for enabling people know their past & the events that took place in the past. Sometimes, however, need is felt to rewrite it, also, but strictly subject to revelation of new “evidence” about the recorded events coming to the knowledge of a rewriter during his “objective investigation” of the historical events. “Genuine” revisionist, as he is called, re-interprets, thus, the given historical facts when there is “strong evidence” against them. But the relativism, subjective perspectives, long cherished beliefs and “subjective investigation” dictated by lusty goals of “palengenetic nationalism” & “cultural myths” render revisionism mere attempting at concocting & fabricating the already received & admitted authentic historical facts. Politically motivated revisionist, if at all, every Tom, Dick and Harry, like BJP-RSS ideologues, could be paraphased, is accorded with the “epithet” of historian, will, obviously, be interpreting it according to his own ulterior purposes that cause more potential threat to the well recorded accounts of history, then. George Orwell in 1949, in his masterpiece novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, saw this “insidious danger” of destroying recorded historical facts by inventing & spreading lies about them that ultimately obliterate people’s understanding of their own history by the totalitarian and repressive regimes.

History, rewritten with political motives, just serves the desires of a politically controlled centralized party. It is incitement to ignorance. It is indoctrination of children when history text books are sanitized & a highly communal view of history is implanted there in place of recorded historical truths, whether bitter or sweet, to the taste of the reader. This is done by “deleting chapters or passages from public school textbooks that contradicted their ideology, while adding their own make-believe versions of the past”. I In the present day ever-changing world, such incitement & indoctrination should not be allowed to the detriment of a nation itself. II

The people & parties in power can re-name places, markets & roads to re-write history to their personal-gratification. Allahabad to Prayagraj, Gurgaon to Gurugram, Bangalore to Bengaluru, Madras to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkotta, Aurangzeb Road to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road are few examples III & there was also a proposal initiated by the ring-wing organisations of India and vociferously supported by a BJP Parlimentarian & ex-Army Chief of India, Gen Rtd VK Singh, to change famous Akbar Road of Delhi to the name of “great son of India”, Maharana Pratap, IV who had purportedly defeated in the battle of Haldighati (Mewar) , the Muslim Mughal Emperor , Akbar the great, a title conferred upon him by all historians of India & beyond. The authentic history, nevertheless, is that in 1568 Akbar had conquered entire Rajasthan, present day Pakistan, Punjab, Haryana, HP, Bihar, UP upto Bengal. Some Rajputs in Mewar area had not accepted suzerainty of Akbar & preferred putting resistance to his rule. But Mewar , Haldighati was ultimately lost by Maharana Pratap after some days war-tricks & camouflages . He didn’t surrender to the Mughal Army is equally a historical fact & but why is altogether a different question. It is an unequivocal fact that the Maharana Pratap lost the battle of Haldighati to Mughal Army hat was led by another Rajput Man Singh. And, to suggest otherwise is sheer revisionism. V A BJP leader also wanted Modi government to change the name of one of the oldest markets of Delhi, Khan Market, to Valmikhi Market. VI

A step further towards revisionism, Yogi Aditiyanath, a “well known” extremist Hindu Sadhu who is presently CM of UP, has been openly denigrating all 900 years old Muslim symbols of India & damning Muslim Rulers as simply “invaders & foreigners”. Then, by the same logic, one is within one’s rights to ask, what Indian-rulers are to JK Muslims? 70 years “rule” by India over JK is comparatively nothing before 900 years rule of India by Muslims. In pre-Medieval times, people without strict demarcations of geographical boundaries or territories used to travel from one place to another & most of the times settle in the “foreign” lands where they found chances of their habitation & survival much better. The Aryans who were Central Asians had migrated from Central Asian States & settled in Indian subcontinent on banks of Indus River wherefrom spread Indus Valley Civilization which is present day entire North & West of India, Pakistan & Afghanistan. The Aryans invaded Dravidian parts of (South) India & settled there. These migrations, wars, invasions & above all settlements in different lands were not confined to India alone. It happened everywhere in the world. But no one after thousands of years is chest beating like pan-Hindu ideologues. “The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home”. VII

This was also case with kings in the past. Wars were fought across geographical territories & the kingdoms established in so called foreign lands. And, over centuries, those kings & their successors became part of the soil they had conquered. They resided and lived there till their death.

Right-wing-hate does not end here. World famous Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan on a Shiva Temple, Aditiyatanath-RSS claim, has been rebuffed by Archeological Survey of India by deposing before Agra Court recently in August 2017 that there is no proof to prove right wing claim. VIII

It is a reality that the men in political power can demolish old statutes & monuments to pave a way for their own political ideologies. This has happened during former USSR rule when the Communist Rulers endeavoured hard to twist & turn the history of hundreds of years of provinces to suit their Marxist political theory. The official version of history was to be accepted as authentic one & any deviation from it was harshly punishable under Communist Laws of the country. The antebellum slavery & war against it are undeniable facts of the American history. There are statues, monuments & flags of Confederate in seven American States that held African-American-slaves & that, however, represent the American national leaders & constitution-givers who themselves owned slaves including George Washington. Some left-parties are attempting now to demolish those statues, monuments & flags of Confederacy to get rid of American Slave-history which is simply impossible to obliterate from the recorded annals of the American history. And, there is a generally accepted notion in American society that history is recorded version of facts, so, by demolishing or rewriting it, the underlying reality never gets displaced nor changed.

The people in power can demean the historical contributions of leaders & rulers of the past. They can re-write text books of children to disconnect them to real & connect them to an artificial past. BJP-RSS ruled States of India like Rajasthan, MP, Maharashtra & Gujarat in recent past are instances at hand where references to Muslim rulers who ruled India for 900 years & who were invariably born, lived & buried sons of Indian soil, in school text books are scantly, one or two lines, negligible while Hindu Kings like Maharana Pratap are shown as heroes in chapters merely because they were Hindus. IX Indeed, all this is climax of religious bigotry & just desperate attempts of the rewriters of Indian history that debunk the very reality of their religious-political thought since in modern era of technology & science people cannot be disconnected with their past by ill-intent of politically & religiously controlled & motivated groups like Sangh Parivar . After all, it is not Joseph Goebbels time to hold and say that a lie repeatedly spoken becomes truth. It could be reversed by saying that if a lie is repeated million times, still it is a lie.

The right-wing groups that presently & overwhelmingly rule & control Indian political landscape forget certain facts: First, nationalism is a newest concept in the history of mankind that came in prominence post-colonial rules of many parts of the world during twentieth century just to maintain hegemony of more powerful nations or countries on small provinces & communities of the world. India was no exception to this world scene. At the time of partition, India including Pakistan & Bangladesh was divided into hundreds of small entities or provinces. No particular nationalism, nothing like that, was followed by those erstwhile provinces of undivided India. Each province had a ruler or a king who was named differently & many among them were interlocked into mutual battles & infighting since years. Each province had different traditions, customs, values, religious practices, ethnicity & language. Second, during & before Muslim rule of India, nothing like Indian Nationalism existed. Thirdly, it was during early part of twentieth century when some Hindu ultra- nationalists like V D Savarkar in 1923 tried to find “revival” of so called lost-Hindu Nationalism which they termed Hindutva —-lost to foreign rule not of the British but Muslims. British were not bad people like Muslims and it was for this reason that RSS did not choose to fight them. According to this RSS ideology, Hitler too was not a bad guy as he simply wanted to preserve his culture & race from the influence of other-bad Semitic races like Jews. “Admiration for Nazism—– often reframed with a genocidal hatred for Muslims—- is rampant in the Hindu nationalist camp, which has never been as mainstream as it is now”. X M S Golwalkar in his book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, gives a vent to this racist ideology in these recorded words: “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by”. ” XI He then vents his spleen to Muslims in these harshest words: “Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening. The lion was not dead, only sleeping. He is rousing himself up again and the world has to see the might of the regenerated Hindu Nation strike down the enemy’s hosts with its mighty arm’. XII

This Hindutva ideology has been adopted by BJP in 1989 as its official political ideology & other Ultra Hindu Nationalist parties VHP, HMS, SS, etc. It has to be noted here that expression “Hindutva “ was first time in 1925 coined & propagated by three-times-banned right-wing-Hindu Organisation called RSS. Though it had very little role in Indian Freedom Struggle for its open “communal” policies, since demolition of 464- years old Babri Masjid on 6th December, 1992, its rise with gloomy forebodings for future of India’s secular democracy became clearly noticeable. XIII Landslide win in Parliamentary elections of 2019 for BJP which is undoubtedly political face of all right wing Hindu organisations of India has emboldened the right wing groups to openly intimidate, threaten & even physically assault & sometimes kill or lynch minority members especially Indian Muslims, though governments in power “disown their actions” but without bringing culprits to book. The Parliamentary election sweep of BJP-RSS has been viewed by world media as “bad for India & world”, XIV India’s soul “lost to dark politics” XV and as re-election won on “tide of violence, fake news & resentment”. XVI

As its avowed policy is to “officially” declare India a Hindu Rashtra, BJP-RSS ruling elite are also investing on re-writing Indian history, as mentioned above, as it believes that by re-writing history of India by saffron pen & ink, it can pursue its political agenda of Hindu Rashtra conveniently. Hundreds of years recorded history cannot be replaced by blizzard of lies & concoctions. Fabricating history saffron-way is bound to boomerang because Indian history is not recorded in India only. All historical facts of Indian subcontinent are preserved in history books of the world. And, so, re-writing Indian history to simply hindunise or saffronise it, to augment political agenda of Sangh Parivar, is not-so-easy as it is erroneously presumed to be. The difference between history & myth is & shall always be there. Muslims including now those living in Pakistan & Bangladesh, 600 million odd, their rule, their contribution to Indian culture, art & its development cannot be lost sight of while reading & writing history of India. For conventional & convincing defeats of Hindu Rajas by Mughals & other Muslim Rulers of the past, the present day Muslims of India cannot be put to collective punishment, socially, psychologically, politically & financially. Present scenario of India adequately highlights the agonies the Indian Muslims are facing at the hands of right wing Hindu organisations of India continuously.

References:

I. The New York Times dated 17-05-2019 , They Peddle Myths & Call it History by Historian Romila Thapar;

II. Website thehill.com: blog “Rewriting history & the pursuit of ignorance” dated 26-02-2015 by Michael Rosenbaum;

III. See Indian Express dated 16-10-2018 : 20 Cities that changed their names;

IV. The Indian Express dated 09-05-2018 & 10-05-2018;

V. daily O dated 28-07-2017: Akbar v/s Maharana Pratap by Sudharshan R Garg;

VI. India Today Megazine, online, dated 27-05-2019[No proposal received from Delhi Government to change name];

VII. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind (Pocket Books, New York, 1954), page 20;

VIII. Hindustan Times dated 25-08-2017 [Taj Mahal is a tomb , not a temple]; see also Financial Times dated27-03-2015; India Today dated 20-04-2018 [Agra Court imposes fine] ; the Times of India dated 10-07-2018 [Only local Muslims & not non-local Muslims of Agra can offer Nimaz in Taj Mahal Masjid, SC];

IX. The New York Times dated 17-05-2019, They Peddle Myths & Call it History by Historian Romila Thapar;

X. Haaretz ( Israeli Newspaper) dated 14-12-2017 [Hitler’s Hindus , article by Shrenik Rao];

XI. M S Golwalkar, WE or Our Nationhood Defined (Bharat Publications Nagpur, 1939, pdf) pages 87-88;

XII. Ibid at pages 51-52; see also The Hindu, Business Line, dated 27-11-2015 [Golwalkar drew lessons from history]; The Dawn dated 02-08-2016[From Golwalkar to Trump];

XIII. India After Gandhi, Ramchandra Guha, (Picador India, 2008) page 658; Sayed Naqvi, Being the other: Muslim in India (Aleph Book Company, Daryagunj, New Delhi 2016) pages 116[Babri Masjid demolition left a permanent scar on Indian Muslim’s psyche destroying their confidence in the Indian political system].

XIV. The Guardian editorial dated 23-05-2019[Guardian view on Narendra Modi’s landslide];

XV. Scroll.in dated 24-05-2019 [Modi’s win will see];

XVI. The New York Times dated 23-05-2019 [How Narendra Modi seduced India, opinion by Pankaj Mishra].

M J Aslam is Author, academic, story-teller & freelance columnist.

1 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Vltchek

Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault.

North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris.In these nations, there is suddenly no appetite for sacrificing their own people on the altar of well-being of Western citizens. Several countries, including Venezuela and Syria, are even willing to fight for their independence.

Despite insane and sadistic embargos and sanctions imposed on them by the West; China, Russia and Iran are now flourishing, in many fields doing much better than Europe and North America.

If they are really pushed any further, China, Russia and their allies combined, could easily collapse the economy of the United States; an economy which is built on clay and unserviceable debt. It is also becoming clear that militarily, the Pentagon could never defeat Beijing, Moscow, even Teheran.

After terrorizing the world for ages, the West is now almost finished: morally, economically, socially, and even militarily. It still plunders, but it has no plan to improve the state of the world. It cannot even think in such terms.

It hates China, and every other country that does have progressive, internationalist plans. It smears President Xi Jinping and his brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but there is nothing new and exciting that the West is able to offer to the world. Yes, of course, those regime changes, coups, military interventions and theft of natural resources,but anything else? No, silence!

*

During my two weeks long working visit to Europe, in the Czech Republic (now renamed to Czechia), a country that enjoys a higher HDI (Human Development Index defined by UNDP) than Italy or Spain, I saw several young, decently dressed men, picking through garbage bins, right in front of my hotel, looking for food.

I saw young Europeans kneeling and begging in Stuttgart, the second richest city in Germany (where both Mercedes and Porsche car are produced).

What I observed in all seven countries of the EU that I visited, was confusion, but also indifference, extreme selfishness and almost grotesque idleness. In great contrast to Asia, everybody in Europe was obsessed with their ‘rights’ and privileges, while no one gave a slightest damn about responsibilities.

When my plane from Copenhagen landed in Stuttgart, it began to rain. It was not heavy rain; just rain. The Canad air jet operated by SAS is a small aircraft, and it did not get a gate. It parked a few meters from the terminal and the captain announced that ground staff refused to bring a bus, due to lightning and the downpour. And so, we stayed inside the plane, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. The lightning ended. The drizzle continued. 40 minutes, no bus. One hour later, a bus appeared. A man from the ground staff emerged leisurely, totally wrapped in plastic, protected hermetically from rain. Passengers, on the other hand, were not even offered umbrellas.

“I love myself”, I later read graffiti in the center of the city.

The graffiti was not far from the central train station, which is being refurbished at the cost of several billion euros, and against the will of the citizens. The monstrous project is marching on at an insanely lazy pace, with only 5-6 construction workers detectable at a time, down in the tremendous excavations.

Stuttgart is unbelievably filthy. Escalators often do not work, drunkards are all over, and so are beggars. It is as if for decades, no one did any face-lift to the city. Once free museums are charging hefty entrance fees, and most of the public benches have disappeared from parks and avenues.

The decay is omnipresent. The German rail system (DB) has virtually collapsed. Almost all trains are late, from the ‘regional’; to the once glorified ICE (these German ‘bullet trains’ are actually moving slower, on average, even in comparison to some Indonesian inter-city expresses).

The services provided everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Italy, are grotesquely bad. Convenience stores, cafes, hotels – all are understaffed, badly run and mostly arrogant. Humans are often replaced by dysfunctional machines. Tension is everywhere,the bad mood omnipresent. Demanding anything is unthinkable; one risks being snapped at, insulted, sent to hell.

I still remember how Western propaganda used to glorify services in the capitalist countries, when we were growing up in the Communist East: “The customer is always treated like a god”. Yes, right! How laughable.

For centuries, “European workers” were ‘subsidized’ by colonialist and neo-colonialist plunder, perpetrated in all non-white corners of the world. They ended up being spoiled, showered with benefits, and unproductive. That was fine for the elites: as long as the masses kept voting for the imperialist regime of the West.

“The Proletariat” eventually became right-wing, imperialist, even hedonistic.

I saw a lot this time, and soon I will write much more about it.

What I did not witness, was hope,or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela,just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere.

And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm.

*

Italy felt slightly different. Again, I met great left-wing thinkers there; philosophers, professors, filmmakers, journalists. I spoke at Sapienza University, the biggest university in Europe.I lectured about Venezuela and Western imperialism. I worked with the Venezuelan embassy in Rome. All of that was fantastic and enlightening, but was this really Italy?

A day after I left Rome for Beirut, Italians went to the polls. And they withdrew their supports from my friends of the 5-Star-Movement, leaving them with just over 17%, while doubling the backing for the extreme right-wing Northern League.

This virtually happened all over Europe. UK Labor lost, while right-wing Brexit forces gained significantly. Extreme right-wing, even near-fascist parties, reached unexpected heights.

It was all “me, me, me” politics. An orgy of “political selfies”. Me had enough of immigrants. Me wants better benefits. Me wants better medical care, shorter working hours. And so on.

Who pays for it, no one in Europe seems to care. Not once did I hear any European politicians lamenting about the plundering of West Papua or Borneo, about Amazonia or the Middle East, let alone Africa.

And immigration? Did we hear anything about that nuisance of European refugees, millions of them, many illegal, that have descended in the last decades on Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, and even Sub Continent? They are escaping, in hordes, from meaninglessness, depressions, existential emptiness. In the process, they are stripping the locals of land, real estate, beaches, everything.

“Immigrants out”? Fine; then European immigrants out from the rest of the world, too! Enough of the one-sidedness!

The recent EU elections clearly showed that Europe has not evolved. For countless dark centuries, it used to live only for its pleasure, murdering millions in order to support its high life.

Right now, it is trying to reshuffle its political and administrative system, so it can continue doing the same.More efficiently!

On top of it, absurdly, the world is expected to pity that overpaid and badly performing, mainly right-wing and lethargic European proletariat, and sacrifice further tens of millions of people, just in order to further increase its standard of living.

All this should not be allowed to happen. Never again! It has to be stopped.

What Europe has achieved so far, at the expense of billions of lives of “the others”, is definitely not worthy of dying for.

Beware of Europe and its people! Study its history. Study imperialism, colonialism and the genocides it has been spreading all over the world.

Let them vote in their fascists. But keep them away. Prevent them from spreading their poison all over the world.

They want to put the interests of their countries first? Wonderful! Let us do exactly the same: The people of Russia first, too! China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

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

1 June 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jafar M Ramini

This is the Arabic name for the holiest of cities, the most sacred of cities, the most beautiful yet tragic of cities in the world. Jerusalem.

I have known Jerusalem all my life. I travelled to Jerusalem most weekends when I was young and walked through the cobbled streets and the alleyways of the ancient city. I ventured into each and every church and mosque and stood in awe within the Church of The Holy Sepulchre and in the great piazza of Al Haram Al Sharif. Al Aqsa Mosque, The Dome of the Rock, these magnificent edifices dating back hundreds of years have an aura all of their own that can’t be replicated or replaced. I remember climbing the Mount of Olives and the surrounding hills and filling my lungs with the mingled aromas of the olive trees, the jasmine and the almonds along with the thyme growing beneath my feet.

Now at this ripe age, when I look at this unique city I wonder what has befallen my beloved Jerusalem and what woes do the Zionist settlers have in mind for the future of Al Quds?

These are not rhetorical questions. What I am doing is airing my fears and my sense foreboding when I see or read what the Israeli occupation is doing to our beloved city and our brothers and sisters living there, the Jerusalemites. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been going on for the last 71 years. The ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem has intensified since Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. More Israelis are moving into East Jerusalem, more property has been confiscated or bought by deceitful proxies and Jerusalem has been defaced beyond recognition. The assault on our ancient city does not stop at the harassment of the Jerusalemites and the revoking of their residency permits. It does not stop at a few deceitful Palestinians and Arabs and others selling Jerusalem by the square metre to the feral Israeli settlers. The assault continues and it culminated a year ago when Mr Trump, declaring Jerusalem, a city he does not own nor have any connection or title to, as the United Capital of Israel. As I am writing these words a further tender has been issued for the construction of over four hundred housing units for Israelis in Arab East Jerusalem. In the meantime, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Mr Trump and his special Middle East envoy is touring the area, twisting the arm of King Abdullah II of Jordan to accept ‘the deal of the century’ and to attend the ‘forthcoming workshop’ in Manama, Bahrain to complete the total abrogation of Palestinian rights and aspirations and the end of Jerusalem as a Palestinian city.

What is Palestine without Jerusalem at its heart?

Today is the final Friday of the holy month of Ramadan. A day that was designated internationally “Al Quds” Day. Jerusalem Day. It was started by Iran forty years ago and I have just seen live footage of hundreds of thousands of Iranians commemorating the day by marching through the streets of Teheran and other Iranian cities waving banners saying “ No to the Deal Of The Century”.

With all that is going on in the Middle East, the amassing of American fire power, the ratcheting up of the rhetoric, propaganda and lies against Iran will we live to see another Al Quds Day?

Will the international community take note of what is happening to the city that is holy to all the people of the book, Jews, Christians and Muslims or will the world continue to look the other way and allow Israel to continue the Judaisation of the Holy City?

Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer and political analyst, based in London, presently in Perth, Western Australia.

31 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sandeep Banerjee

Dr Kamel Eddine Fekhar was arrested on March 31 by the authority in the de facto military rule that is continuing in Algeria. He started hunger strike and became very weak. His health was already fragile and he undertook several hunger strikes in the past when he was arrested protesting government injustices. Rightly he was honoured there not only as a practising doctor but also, or more, as a human right activist. Sadly, he when his health was much deteriorated the military jail sent him to hospital and he died on May 28 at an age of 55 only; and what an irony, the hospital where he died is named after that great Dr (Psychiatrist) and Algerian Revolutionary Franz Fanon.

Louisa Hanoune, the Secretary General of Workers Party (PT, Parti des travailleurs, a party known to be Trotskyite communist) is also under military custody since May 9. And she is not alone. Nobody knows exactly how many or how many hundreds of activists and protestors are under arrest. But arresting Madame Hanoune is a signifier, it shows that the authority is not ready to spare anyone. Louisa Hanoune is the first woman in the Arab world to contest in a presidential election, that was in 2004, and in 2009 presidential election she got 4.22% vote to be the runners up, where Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika won for his third term with 90.24% votes, an election which many called fraudulent. PT is one of the major parties in Algeria. She is now under arrest, the military court accused her for plotting conspiracy against the military and the state. Many political parties together demanded immediate release of Louisa Hanoune.

Protests in Algeria started in second half of February this year when the president Saïd Bouteflika announced that he would run again for presidency for his fifth term in the ensuing vote. He is already 82, he suffered serious heart disease and spent several times in hospital, lost ability of speech at least for some time and etc. – people believe he cannot manage affairs. Moreover, people are disgruntled with clientele-nepotism, coteries and corruption. And the big wasteful spending he made – to build the largest mosque of Africa (or the world?) spending allegedly $4 billion (a French doctor satirically said that the president could have built 200 hospitals with this money)! With protests exacerbating Bouteflika purportedly retreated. Practically the Army generalissimo and bureaucrats are running the country as a country under military rule.

Every time such a protest happens the media talks about ‘youth protest’, ‘leaderless protest’, and so on, like “Youth lead the movement for change” reported BBC News in mid-April. The same way they did not highlight the Egyptian and Tunisian workers’ movement during 2011 like those in Gazl Al Mahalah and Alexandria in Egypt or Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. We shall look into some news here. But before that a general picture: Each Friday hundreds of thousands protested. Last Friday, May 24, was the fourteenth Friday of protests, and police and military were over working to diffuse perhaps the largest protest yet happened. Police even was not allowing people to have their Iftar that evening in the GPO stairs, a very usual place for many people for their fast breaking in this month of Ramjan. Hundreds of thousands are protesting, Fridays being the biggest protest days. People are chanting angry slogans against army general Ahmed Gaid Salah. Army is keen for an early president election possibly on July first week. But main political forces and people too want an interim process and interim civilian government that will also review the constitution and look after the election.

UGTA (Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens) is the biggest Trade Union in Algeria. It is informally controlled by the ruling party FLN, that is the party of Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika. This party is in the continuity of the force that once took a big role in the Algerian revolution. And also it was one of the forces (and the other main force was the military loyal to it) that fought against Islamist forces when the later tried to capture state after almost poised to winning ‘democratically’ a national election – the elections were not held after the first phase in fear that the very popular FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) would win the elections. (FIS won 54% votes in local body elections in 1990.) A hard-core Islamist armed group emerged in reaction to banning FIS. And civil war followed for years after years. Ultimately FLN and army became victorious and when Bouteflika assumed presidency in 1999 after president post was managed by pro-army persons, the civil war almost stopped.

UGTA is ‘under’ FLN control. But UGTA is composed of ‘people’, in this case ordinary workers, and they were also full of dissent like their fellow toiling countrymen. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France released a material, “Algérie: de la contestation dans l’UGTA et les grèves” on April 17, 2019 written by Hocine Guernane. There were general strikes in between march 10 and 14, there were marches. There were calls included ‘the departure of the system’, ‘reorganisation of UGTA’. This was started by the provincial union of Bejaia. Provincial UGTA bodies of Bejaïa, Tizi-Ouzou, Saïda, Tlemcen met in Algiers and signed a communiqué through which they reaffirmed their involvement in the popular movement “to the satisfaction of its demands” and “the building of a new republic” and they demanded the departure of UGTA chief Sidi Said and his national secretariat. In response Sidi Said and the leadership ordered expulsion of these local leaders. This only fuelled the movement. On April 10, members of the CEN (Central Executive Committee), supreme body between two congresses, the Provinces of Algiers, Blida, Tipaza, Médéa, Brouira, Tizi-Ouzou, total 32 out of 47 members, wrote a statement in which they declared to support the popular movement and denounce secretary general Sidi Said. Afterwards Federation of Metallurgy and Federation of Electronics formally joined the workers’ protests. On April 11 at Bejaia, under a heavy rain, thousands of workers assembled and shouted slogans – Sidi Said get Out – UGTA is not your property it is ours. Later UGTA local bodies decided to make a show in front of the UGTA headquarters.

It remains to be seen what happens in Algeria in near future, and how toiling people protest in the coming Fridays. Recently in the NPA website we saw a FB post of Mahmoud Rechidi which tells (in easy translation) ‘In Algeria 70% of the working population earns less than 100 € a month. Minimum wage at Algeria is lowest in the region. But there are mad people who say this is not the time to talk social issues’. Hundreds of migrants fleeing to Europe die of boat capsize. Algeria cannot continue like this. [First edition of this was written on 29th May and was published in Frontier Weekly online on 30-5-2019; this updated version, with photographs and their twitter sources, is dated 31-5-2019.]

The author is an activist who writes on political and socioeconomic issues and also on environmental issues. Some of his articles are published in Frontier Weekly. He lives in West Bengal, India. Presently he is a research worker. He can be reached at sandeepbanerjee00@gmail.com

31 May 2019

Soure: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now imprisoned in the UK, has been moved to the hospital wing of the Belmarsh prison in the UK, prompting concerns about his health pending the hearing on his extradition to the US.

“The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself,” said WikiLeaks.

It said Assange has lost a lot of weight and was barely able to speak to his Swedish lawyer last week.

Media reports said:

Assange’s health had already “significantly deteriorated” during the nearly seven years he spent inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and has continued to get worse over the seven weeks he has spent in Belmarsh, WikiLeaks said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him,” his lawyer Per Samuelson told reporters after visiting Belmarsh, but the quote was barely reported in Sweden, let alone elsewhere.

WikiLeaks statement said:

WikiLeaks has grave concerns about the state of health of our publisher, Julian Assange, who has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison. Mr Assange´s health had already significantly deteriorated after seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy, under conditions that were incompatible with basic human rights. The United Nations twice found him to have been arbitrarily detained and called on the United Kingdom to honor its commitments under international law and free him. The UK’s refusal to abide by UN rulings, and its subsequent treatment of Mr. Assange since his arrest, presents serious questions about the UK’s standing as a human rights-abiding nation.

In his last year in the embassy, as the US finalized its extraditions plans, Julian Assange was, at the bequest of US authourities, totally isolated and gagged – a situation designed to make his life as hard as possible.

During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight. The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself.

We strongly condemn the refusal by the Swedish court to postpone a hearing on 3rd June on the basis of Mr Assange’s health condition. Defense lawyer for Assange, Per Samuelson said that Julian Assange’s health state last Friday was such “that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him”.

Tomorrow, May 30, there is a formal hearing in Westminster Court on the Extradition request by the Trump administration. The initial U.S. warrant has been expanded to include a life sentence or potential death penalty under the Espionage Act, announced last week in the the superseding indictment which disclosed 17 additional charges, bringing the potential sentence to 175 years in prison. The indictments have been widely condemned by free press organizations as the most serious attack against publishing activities in modern times — the Trump administration in essence criminalizes the very act of journalism. The indictment utilises the archaic Espionage Act of 1917 to indict a publisher for the first time in history–in an unprecedented escalation of the Trump administration’s war on the free press.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief:

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our lifetime. The People need to voice their condemnation; it is their politicians, their courts, their police and their prisons that are being abused in order to leave this black stain on history. Please act now to avert this shame”.

Sweden has rejected Samuelson’s motion to delay Assange’s extradition hearing, though he was never charged with anything.

Swedish investigators never interviewed Assange about claims of “sexual assault” that seem to have been trumped-up as a pretext to extradite him to the US in 2012, and prompted him to seek asylum in Ecuador.

The preliminary hearing on Washington’s extradition request is still scheduled for today, May 30.

The US has charged Assange with 18 counts under the Espionage Act, which carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our time,” said Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief.

Kristinn Hrafnsson urged people everywhere to oppose their politicians, courts, police and prisons from being abused to “leave this black stain on history.”

The Wikileaks statement also called attention to pressure by the United States on the Ecuadorean government to deny Assange during his last year in the embassy any communication rights in a bid to have the asylum seeker “isolated and gagged.

Belmarsh prison is a high-security prison located in Thamesmead southeast London and holds hardened murders, rapists and other violent offenders.

Everyone else must take my place: Assange in letter from British prison

An earlier report datelined May 24, 2019 said:

In a handwritten letter from Belmarsh prison, Julian Assange says he is being denied a chance to defend himself and that elements in the US that “hate truth, liberty and justice” want him extradited and dead.

The letter was sent to independent British journalist Gordon Dimmack. It was dated May 13 – ten days before the US announced 17 additional charges under the Espionage Act against the jailed whistleblower.

In light of the new indictment, Dimmack read out the letter in a YouTube video. A photo of the handwritten note was soon posted online as well.

“I have been isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself: no laptop, no internet, ever, no computer, no library, so far, but even if I get access it will just be for a half an hour, with everyone else, once a week,” Assange wrote.

He wrote: “The other side? A superpower that has been preparing for 9 years, with hundreds of people and untold millions spent on the case.”

I am defenseless, he wrote.

“I am unbroken, albeit literally surrounded by murderers, but, the days where I could read and speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals, and my people are over until I am free! Everyone else must take my place,” Assange wrote in the letter.

“The US government, or rather, those regrettable elements in it that hate truth, liberty and justice, want to cheat their way into my extradition and death, rather than letting the public hear the truth, for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated 7 times for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Assange wrote.

Truth, ultimately, is all we have, Assange said in the letter.

The new charges against Assange have alarmed even the mainstream media outlets that have spent years pouring vitriol on WikiLeaks, as they began to realize his prosecution along those lines would essentially criminalize all journalism.

30 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org