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By Peter Singer

A Saudi prince has been revealed to be the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” for which he spent $450.3 million. Had he given the money to the poor, as the subject of the painting instructed another rich man, he could have restored eyesight to nine million people, or enabled 13 million families to grow 50% more food.

PRINCETON – Last month, “Salvator Mundi,” Leonardo da Vinci’s portrayal of Jesus as Savior of the World, sold at auction for $400 million, more than twice the previous record for a work of art sold at auction. The buyer also had to pay an additional $50.3 million in commissions and fees.

The painting has been heavily retouched, and some experts have even questioned whether it really is by Leonardo. Jason Farago, a New York Times art critic, described it as “a proficient but not especially distinguished religious picture from turn-of-the-16th-century Lombardy, put through a wringer of restorations.”

The buyer – who many believe to be the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, acting through a distant cousin – has paid a very high price for a painting of a man who is said to have told another rich person: “Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” That makes it relevant to ask: what could someone with a spare $450 million do for the poor?

The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit organization that I founded a few years ago, has a Charity Impact Calculator that enables you to see what can be achieved by donations to charities with a proven record of effective aid for the world’s poorest people. It shows that, for $450 million, you could restore sight to nine million people with curable blindness, or provide 13 million families with the tools and techniques to grow 50% more food.

If you want to follow Jesus’s command in a more literal manner, you could simply give the money to the world’s poorest families to use as they wish. A nonprofit called Give Directly will locate the neediest families and transfer your money to them, deducting only 10% for its administrative costs.

In case you think that people receiving such a windfall will spend it on alcohol, gambling, or prostitution, an independent evaluation has shown that they don’t. Give Directly’s cash transfers increase recipients’ food security, mental health, and assets. For $450 million, you could also buy 180 million bed nets, enough to protect 271 million people from malaria. (For all these interventions, the numbers are likely to be somewhat smaller, because the Charity Impact Calculator is not designed for such large sums, and so does not take into account that costs will rise once the needs of those who are easiest to reach have been met.)

When a person chooses to buy “Salvator Mundi”rather than restore sight to nine million people, what does that say about their values? One thing is clear: they cannot care very much about other people. Whatever pleasure they, their family, and friends will get from viewing the painting, it can hardly compare with the benefit that restoring sight provides to one person, let alone many millions.

Rightly or wrongly, most of us do give much more weight to our own interests, and those of our children and other close relatives and friends, than we do to the interests of others. The more distant, and the more different from us, those others are, the higher the rate of discount that we apply in practice.

Yet there is a line at which the discount rate becomes so great, and the interests of others are treated with such indifference, that we must say no, that is going too far. We could argue that most affluent people are on the wrong side of that line. What seems to me unarguable is that to care more about owning a painting than about whether several million people can see is a long way beyond it.

In 2006, the legendary investor Warren Buffett pledged to give most of his wealth – around $30 billion – to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help people in extreme poverty. That gift – the single biggest gift anyone has ever given to anyone for anything – doubled the resources of the foundation. To mark the tenth anniversary of Buffett’s pledge, Bill and Melinda Gates recently reported to him on what the foundation, together with other organizations, achieved to improve global health over that decade.

The figure that Bill and Melinda Gates highlight is 122 million. That’s the number of children’s lives saved since 1990 by progressive reductions in the rate of child mortality. In other words, if the rate of child mortality had remained constant between 1990 and today, 122 million more children would have died than did in fact die over that period.

Perhaps the biggest contribution that the Gates Foundation made to that decline was pledging $750 million to establish the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (now known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance), a public-private initiative that works with governments and United Nations agencies to improve the rate of vaccination in poor countries and foster the development of new vaccines. Now 86% of the world’s children receive basic vaccines – the highest rate ever.

The Gateses claim that every dollar spent on childhood immunization yields $44 in economic benefits, including the money that families otherwise lose when a child gets sick and a parent cannot work. Warren Buffett’s contribution to immunizations may be the best investment he has ever made.

What do you think would make a person happier? Owning a painting – even if it were the most marvelous painting in the world – or knowing that you had kept millions of children healthy, saving lives and benefiting families economically at the same time? Both common sense and psychological research suggest that it isn’t owning the painting.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.

12 December 2017

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/salvator-mundi-purchase-price-world-s-poor-by-peter-singer-2017-12?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9279d87ece-sunday_newsletter_17_12_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-9279d87ece-104996581

By Nouriel Roubini

In the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently sold out the blue-collar, socially conservative whites who brought him to power, while pursuing policies to enrich his fellow plutocrats. Sooner or later, Trump’s core supporters will wake up to this fact, so it is worth asking how far he might go to keep them on his side.

NEW YORK – Donald Trump won the US presidency with the backing of working-class and socially conservative white voters on a populist platform of economic nationalism. Trump rejected the Republican Party’s traditional pro-business, pro-trade agenda, and, like Bernie Sanders on the left, appealed to Americans who have been harmed by disruptive technologies and “globalist” policies promoting free trade and migration.

But while Trump ran as a populist, he has governed as a plutocrat, most recently by endorsing the discredited supply-side theory of taxation that most Republicans still cling to. Trump also ran as someone who would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street. Yet he has stacked his administration with billionaires (not just millionaires) and Goldman Sachs alumni, while letting the swamp of business lobbyists rise higher than ever.

Trump and the Republicans’ plan to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would have left 24 million Americans – mostly poor or middle class, many of whom voted for him – without health care. His deregulatory policies are blatantly biased against workers and unions. And the Republican tax-reform plan that he has endorsed would overwhelmingly favor multinational corporations and the top 1% of households, many of which stand to benefit especially from the repeal of the estate tax.

Trump has also abandoned his base in the area of trade, where he has offered rhetoric but not concrete action. Yes, he scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but Hillary Clinton would have done the same. He has mused about abandoning the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), but that may be just a negotiating tactic. He has threatened to impose a 50% tariff on goods from China, Mexico, and other US trade partners, but no such measures have materialized. And proposals for a border adjustment tax have been all but forgotten.

Trump’s bullying tweets against US firms that move production offshore or undertake tax inversions have been no more than cheap talk, and business leaders know it. Manufacturers who fooled Trump into thinking they would keep production in the US have continued to transfer operations quietly to Mexico, China, and elsewhere. Moreover, international provisions in the pending tax legislation will give US multinationals an even greater incentive to invest, hire, and produce abroad, while using transfer pricing and other schemes to salt away profits in low-tax jurisdictions.

Likewise, despite Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on immigration, his policies have been relatively moderate, perhaps because many of the businesspeople who supported his campaign actually favor a milder approach. The “Muslim ban” doesn’t affect the supply of labor in the US. Although deportations have accelerated under Trump, it’s worth remembering that millions of undocumented immigrants were deported under Barack Obama, too. The border wall that Trump was going to force Mexico to pay for remains an unfunded dream. And even the administration’s plan to favor skilled over unskilled workers will not necessarily reduce the number of legal migrants in the country.

All told, Trump has governed like a plutocrat in populist clothes – that is, a pluto-populist. But why has his base let him get away with pursuing policies that mostly hurt them? According to one view, he is betting that social conservatives and white blue-collar supporters in rural areas will vote on the basis of nationalist and religious sentiment and antipathy toward secular coastal elites, rather than for their own financial interests.

But how long can anyone be expected to support “God and guns” at the expense of “bread and butter”? The pluto-populists who presided over the Roman Empire knew that keeping the populist mob at bay required substance as well as diversion: panem et circenses – “bread and circuses.” Raging tweets are meaningless to people who can scarcely afford a dignified living, let alone tickets to the modern-day Colosseum to watch football.

The tax legislation that Republicans have rushed through Congress could prove especially dangerous, given that millions of middle-class and low-income households will not only get little out of it, but will actually pay more when income-tax cuts are phased out over time. Moreover, the Republican plan would repeal the Obamacare individual mandate. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, this will cause 13 million people to lose health insurance, and insurance premiums to rise by 10%, over the next decade. Not surprisingly, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that a mere 29% of Americans support the Republican plan.

Nevertheless, Trump and the Republicans seem willing to risk it. After all, by pushing the middle-class tax hikes to a later date, they have designed their plan to get them through the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 general election. Between now and the midterms, they can brag about cutting taxes on most households. And they can expect to see the economic-stimulus effects of tax cuts peak in 2019, just before the next presidential election – and long before the bill comes due.

Moreover, the final legislation will likely lower the federal deduction for mortgage interest and eliminate deductibility for state and local taxes. This will hit households in Democratic-leaning states such as New York, New Jersey, and California much harder than households in Republican-leaning states.

Another part of the Republican strategy (known as “starve the beast”) will be to use the higher deficits from tax cuts to argue for cuts in so-called entitlement spending, such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security. Again, this is a risky proposition, given that elderly, middle-class, and low-income Americans rely heavily on these programs. Yes, the working and non-working poor who receive welfare payments or food stamps include minorities who tend to vote for Democrats. But millions of the blue-collar, socially conservative whites who voted for Trump also rely on these and similar programs.

With the global economy expanding, Trump is probably hoping that tax cuts and deregulation will spur enough growth and create enough jobs that he will have something to brag about. A potential growth rate of 2% won’t necessarily do much to help his blue-collar base, but at least it could push the stock market up to its highest point ever. And, of course, Trump will still claim that the US economy can grow at a rate of 4%, even though all mainstream economists, including Republicans, agree that the potential growth rate will remain around 2%, regardless of his policies.

Whatever happens, Trump will continue to tweet maniacally, promote fake-news stories, and boast about the “biggest and best” economy ever. In doing so, he may even create a circus worthy of a Roman emperor. But if gassy rhetoric alone does not suffice, he may decide to go on the offensive, particularly in the international sphere. That could mean truly withdrawing from NAFTA, taking trade action against China and other trading partners, or doubling down on harsh immigration policies.

And if these measures do not satisfy his base, Trump will still have one last option, long used by Roman emperors and other assorted dictators during times of domestic difficulty. Namely, he can try to “wag the dog,” by fabricating an external threat or embarking on foreign military adventures to distract his supporters from what he and congressional Republicans have been doing.

For example, following the “madman” approach to foreign policy, Trump could start a war with North Korea or Iran. Or he could post further inflammatory tweets about the evils of Islam, thereby driving disturbed and marginalized individuals into the arms of the Islamic State (ISIS) or other extremist groups. That would increase the likelihood of ISIS-inspired attacks – for example, “lone wolves” blowing themselves up or driving trucks through crowded pedestrian areas – within the US. With dozens, if not hundreds, slain, Trump could then wrap himself in the flag and say, “I told you so.” And if things got bad enough, Trump and his generals could declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties, and transform America into a true pluto-populist authoritarian state.

You know it’s time to worry when the conservative Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Bob Corker, warns openly that Trump could start World War III. And if you’re not convinced, consider the recent history of Russia or Turkey; or the history of the Roman Empire under Caligula or Nero. Pluto-populists have been turning democracies into autocracies with the same playbook for thousands of years. There’s no reason to think they would stop now. The reign of Emperor Trump could be just around the corner.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates.

11 December 2017

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-populist-plutocracy-by-nouriel-roubini-2017-12?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9279d87ece-sunday_newsletter_17_12_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-9279d87ece-104996581

By Ishaan Tharoor

“You will not replace us!” went the guttural cry from a small, torch-wielding crowd of American white nationalists and neo-Nazis. They marched in August through a leafy Virginia town in defense of monuments to Confederate leaders, figures from the past who had waged a war to preserve slavery. In the uproar surrounding the rally, an anti-fascist activist was killed when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The far right spilled blood on American soil.

Despite national outrage over the episode, President Trump struck an awkward pose, infamously remarking that there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis. Trump’s attempts at condemnation rang hollow. The young, mostly white men who marched in Charlottesville, Va., may be reprehensible adherents of a fringe ideology, but they had been galvanized by the president, who, throughout both his election campaign and subsequent year in power, constantly pulled from a dark seam of ethno-nationalism underlying American politics.

A year ago, in the wake of Trump’s stunning election victory, it was in vogue to talk about the “populist” moment upending the West. Elections on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated how a wide segment of the electorate was fed up with the status quo, skeptical of elites ensconced in their country’s financial and political capitals, and eager to throw up walls around their nations in the face of the forces of globalization. Looking back at this year’s events, it is clear that their anxieties were more cultural than economic.

The politics of many Trump voters, and their counterparts overseas, were less truly “populist” — anchored in some moral vision of a united people — than “nativist,” animated by divisive, ethnic tribalism.

It may thus be unsurprising that Trump’s first legislative victory of his presidency is a deeply unpopular tax overhaul. In the long run, the reforms will likely provide the greatest benefits to corporations and the mega-rich, possibly to the detriment of virtually everyone else. “Trump has governed like a plutocrat in populist clothes,” wrote Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University. “He is betting that social conservatives and white blue-collar supporters in rural areas will vote on the basis of nationalist and religious sentiment and antipathy toward secular coastal elites, rather than for their own financial interests.”

So the cry of “you will not replace us” can be heard in Trump’s hectoring over “rapist” immigrants and bans on Muslim-majority nations. And like a lot about current far-right American politics, it’s imported from Europe. The right-wing, xenophobic French polemicist Renaud Camus popularized the idea of the “great replacement:” That somehow trends of immigration in the West would lead to a kind of demographic extinction event. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people,” he said.

Stephen Bannon, the ultra-nationalist ideologue who entered the White House with Trump and whose rhetoric fueled Trump’s demagoguery over immigrants and Muslims, feeds off these narratives. He cites approvingly the garish visions of Jean Raspail, another French anti-immigration writer, whose apocalyptic, racist work prefigured far-right opposition to refugees and asylum seekers.

“We are a country, a civilization, a language, a way of life,” Raspail told journalist Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of a new book featured by Today’s WorldView. “If we blend it with something that does not correspond at all to who we are, it won’t work, and we’ll be lost.”

This once-fringe racial paranoia, combined with a resentment of the “establishment,” has found a home in the White House. “There is, and there are, people at the highest levels of government that don’t want to let America be America,” declared Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., at a rally on Wednesday.

In Europe, this discourse found its way to the heart of political campaigns. “The radical right has by and large defined the discussion around the refugee crisis and the project of European integration,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, told Today’s WorldView.

In 2017, far-right parties — including factions linked to a past of fascism and Nazi apologia — did not “win” elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands, but they performed better than ever before. And in countries like the Netherlands and Austria, nativist platforms have shifted policy to the right or even been brought into power. That we even considered the thwarted election challenges of far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders “defeats,” argued Mudde, “says such much about the normalization of their politics.”

And what are those politics? Post columnist Anne Applebaum offered a searing encapsulation in a lengthy essay earlier this year: “They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts,” she wrote. “They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use ‘Christianity’ as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are ‘Christians’ fighting against ‘Muslims’ — or against ‘liberals’ if there are no ‘Muslims’ available.”

Applebaum was writing on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and was struck by the extent to which the Europe’s far right operates in a neo-Bolshevik mold. “To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise,” she wrote, referring to both entrenched illiberal regimes in Poland and Hungary, as well as the right-wing populists farther west.

“I think Lenin would have recognized 2017 as a revolutionary moment as was 1917,” Victor Sebestyen, author of a new biography of the Soviet leader, told Today’s WorldView. “The neo-Bolsheviks are using a similar game, intolerant rhetoric and similar tactics, creating scapegoats who are later identified as ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘saboteurs.’ It is happening in Eastern Europe, certainly in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Bannon, significantly, has styled himself in the past as a “Leninist,” eager to “destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” White House intrigues forced him away from the Oval Office, but his fingerprints remain all over Trump’s rage, from the president’s war on the media, to his denunciations of judges that get in his way, to his sweeping contempt for his opponents and perpetual appeals to a thinly veiled white nationalism.

“What we learned in 2017 is that institutions by themselves cannot defend liberal democracy,” Mudde said, “and mainstream politicians won’t either.”

And so as polarization deepens, and bad blood builds up, the question begs: Can they replace us?

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Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

21 December 2017

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/21/in-2017-nativism-went-mainstream-in-the-west/?utm_term=.f2a663b9305d

By Mohammad Ashraf

(As always, people from every side are trying to “manage” the problem in Kashmir rather than resolve it once for and all!)

The authorities in Delhi and Kashmir are these days announcing a number of measures to somehow engage the “rebellious” youth all over Kashmir. Firstly, harsh measures are being taken to trace and liquidate militants. In fact, the Army Chief has declared that these operations will continue as long as militants are around. From his point of view, it is a war which has to be fought till the end. However, the moot point is why these militants have taken up arms? Why even after liquidating some, others are ready to replace them. It is here that the real political aspect of the problems comes to the fore!

The basic political problem of Kashmir has now been there for almost 70 years and it continues to be on the agenda of the UN Security Council. It has been there since India approached the UN in late forties regarding Pakistan’s aggression to grab Kashmir which had, as claimed by India, duly acceded to the Indian Union under the instrument of accession signed between the then Maharaja of Kashmir Hari Singh and the Governor General of India Lord Mountbatten. As a result of the signing of the instrument of accession, the Indian Army had been air-lifted to Kashmir to halt the Tribal Raid supposedly engineered by Pakistan to forcibly annex Kashmir to Pakistan. India had claimed that the people of Kashmir had supported the accession through their leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. The story after that is well known and documented event wise in dozens of books. The two parts of the former state of Jammu & Kashmir remain under the administrative control of the two neighboring countries. Although both countries claim these to be their parts yet the UN does not recognize the arrangement as the final settlement of the dispute regarding the owner ship of the State. A UN military Observer Group tasked with keeping an eye on the status of the ceasefire line now called the line of actual control is a living proof of the existence of the basic political dispute recognized by the world body.

On the Pakistani side, the administration has been virtually run from Islamabad by their Minister for Kashmir Affairs and the most powerful person in that part of the state has always been the Chief Secretary, a senior Civil Service of Pakistan officer. In the case of Gilgit-Baltistan, formerly known as the Northern Areas, it used to be the Commissioner for Northern Areas. In the recent past, they have got their own elected Executive Council which has given them some semblance of autonomy. On this side the system has been better with an elected government notwithstanding allegedly the fact of the disputed fairness of the elections. The State did enjoy some sort of autonomy till Sheikh Abdullah was dethroned and imprisoned in 1953. Since that time there has been gradual erosion of autonomy and at present only the hollow shell is left!

Unfortunately, some over eager members of the present ruling set up are bent upon removing this empty shell of so called autonomy.  They want to demolish the special status of the state by totally merging the Indian part of the state into the Union of India. They have declared that they are determined to remove all special privileges including the state subject law which guarantees Kashmiris’ individuality in the vast ocean of the Union of India! The two initiatives cannot go together. You cannot claim to be embracing the youth of Kashmir on one hand and then on the other take measures to destroy his individuality. The right approach would be to accept the existence of the basic problem and take measures in earnest to resolve it by approaching all the stakeholders.

The present unrest which the government has totally failed to curb has actually originated in the election debacle of 1987 when people were denied the right to choose their own representatives under the Indian Constitution. That story too is well documented. The result of that denial was the outbreak of militancy in 1990. According to government figures more than 50,000 people died in that uprising over a period of few years. Unofficial figures put the casualties much higher. About 10,000 people are supposed to have disappeared without a trace. Some of the relatives of the disappeared are still waiting for their return! After those events of the nineties the real peace has never returned to Kashmir in the true sense. A fall out of the uprising of the nineties has been the continuous harassment of the youth by the security forces and the Police. The Burhan Tsunami which was generated by the killing of this popular militant leader was the bursting out of that pent up anger which is still simmering among the youth of the valley. Now, instead of facing the reality, the authorities are once again trying to manage the situation by using the proverbial stick andcarrot! It is a crude attempt at firefighting without bothering about the cause of the fire. Well, they may be able to subdue the youth temporarily by using the stick of the security forces and at the same time by dangling the carrot of jobs and so on but the embers of the fire will continue to simmer for another flare up sooner than later! The alienation of the youth is now at the extreme.

Incidentally, during the rule of Congress which lasted almost 70 years since independence, there was always an excuse given by them that they will not be able to take a decisive stand on Kashmir because of the fear of the Hindu backlash. It was opined by many that only a strong Government supported by the major Hindutva parties would alone be able to take a final decisive step in resolving Kashmir as they will not have any fear of the backlash! It is true that with such a decisive majority and the support of the Hindu masses they could easily take a decision to sort out Kashmir once and for all as they would be able to sell any solution to the bulk of the Indian masses without any backlash. Unfortunately, they seem to be more concerned with their vote banks rather than ridding the whole sub-continent of this festering problem. It is a pity that the people do not realize that all efforts to develop the sub-continent in every way will go up in smoke if the spark of Kashmir lights the nuclear fuse!

There is still time to revive a real peace process by active and unconditional dialogue not only with the people of all the regions and with all alienated parties including the youth but even across the border. The only catch is for the process to be for a real and practical resolution of the basic problem and not for its temporary management! Can the present government in Delhi rise to the occasion? If not, the alternative is unthinkable as it would be a disaster not only for Kashmir but for the whole sub-continent as well as South Asia.

Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir

28 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/28/kashmir-needs-resolution-not-management/

By Andre Vltchek

It has been all very ugly, aggressive and often distinctly vulgar: the way the British Foreign Secretary has behaved before and during his official visit to Moscow.

Mr. Johnson described Russia as “closed, nasty, militaristic and anti-democratic” concluding that it could not be “business as usual”.

He did not define what the UK has become, and the Russian hosts were too polite to explain.

The “business as usual” it was not.

During the last few weeks, the behavior patterns of both the UK and US have began increasingly to resemble those of the badly brought up leadership of the provincial Italian mafia: “You do as we tell you, or we’ll poke out your eyes… or break your leg… or perhaps we’ll kidnap your daughter”.

It appears that there is absolutely no shame left in Washington, in London, and in several other ‘provincial capitals’ of the Empire. Insults are piling on insults and then shot to all corners of the globe. Lies are being spread barefacedly, and bizarre deceptions and fabrications have been manufactured with impressive speed.

It is clear that the Empire is now missing its composure, its nerve; that it is scared of losing its control over the world and its monopoly on deciding what should be universally accepted as the truth.

The more the world realizes that it has been controlled and brutalized by shameless neo-colonialist gangsters, the more the Empire says, indirectly but sometimes even straight into the faces of the international community: “Our interests are what really matter! You will behave and obey, or we will smash you to pieces, starve you to death, invade you and bathe yourland in blood”.

It is nothing new, of course: the West has been doing all this for many decades and centuries. Hundreds of millions of Asians, Africans, South Americans, Middle Easterners and Russians lost their lives in the process. All non-white continents were occupied, plundered and enslaved; all, without a single exception. But it was always done “for the good of the victims”, or “in order to protect them” (most likely from themselves).

The Brits were at the forefront of the art of manipulating the brains of their ‘subjects’. Their propaganda used to be refined, effective, some would even say ‘brilliant’. For decades after the end of the Second World War, they used to teach its offspring in North America and Australia, how to lie elegantly and how to convince even those nations that were being barbarically raped, that they were actually being rescued, pampered and made love to, gently and respectfully.

Now the masks have fallen off, and the ugly, gangrenous face of imperialism has been clearly exposed. Britain is simply not in the mood for refinements. It is brutal. It was always brutal. Now it is also, finally, honest.

It is all absolutely frightening, but it is also good, truly significant, that the West is suddenly behaving with such clarity.

What is it that Mr. Johnson is accusing Russia of? Of liberating Syria from those Western, Saudi, and Qatari backed terrorist groups? What else could be expected from the Foreign Secretary of the country that had been, for long centuries, the mightiest, ruthless and the most deceptive colonialist empire in the history of the mankind?Mr. Johnson is definitely not going to thank the liberator of the oppressed people, is it?

In his open letter to Boris Johnson, the British writer and journalist Neil Clark wrote:

“In April you canceled your planned visit to Moscow and traveled to the G7 talks instead, where you urged other countries to consider fresh sanctions against Russia (and Syria), saying that Vladimir Putin was “toxifying his image” by backing Assad.

But if Russia hadn’t supported the Syrian government, ISIS/Al-Qaeda affiliates would probably have taken control of the whole country. Is that what you wanted?”

Of course it was! More chaos, the better!

The UK has been playing appalling, truly Machiavellian games all over the Middle East, and it has been doing it for centuries – in Palestine, in what is now Iraq and Kuwait, and in many other areas. To borrow from the colorful lexicon of thePrime Minister Lloyd George, it was reserving rights “to bomb those niggers”, to bomb them and to fry them alive, to rob them of everything, even of the land itself. The UK, together with their close friends and allies such asMuhammad ibnAbd al-Wahhab, managed to manufacture the most conservative branch of Islam, just in order to keep the local population in fear and submission to its commercial and colonialist interests.

The country responsible for hundreds of millions of dead, for tens of millions of human beings who have been hunted down like animals and shipped to America as slaves, has been reserving the right to judge the world, to decide what is ‘free’ and what is not, what is ‘democratic’ and what is dictatorial, what is true and what is false or even ‘fake’.

‘Fake news’ – the latest invention of the crumbling, paranoid Western regime!

Now the Empire is hunting down almost all ‘alternative media’ outlets, including the highly successful and informative RT (Russia Today) international television channel. It is important to remember and to understand: only the official Western channels and press agencies are allowed to spread indoctrinationall over the world. To broadcast or to print ‘counter-propaganda’ (or call it an intellectual detox) is considered an arch crime, and punished as such.The RT is now portrayed as a hive of ‘agents’, at least in both Washington and London.

As the Syrian city of Aleppo was celebrating its first anniversary of liberation, grateful citizens were carrying, in reverent silence, portraits of Russian soldiers who spilled their blood for the liberation of their nation.

The Syrian people know, they clearly understand, who ignited the war, and who came to their rescue.

Boris Johnson can insult Russia as much as he desires,but one thing he cannot deny: there are no men, women and children carrying portraits of British soldiers, be it in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Syria, Libya or Yemen.

In Yemen, the UK talks peace but manufactures bombs that are enriching the already deadly Saudi arsenal of weapons, used to terrorize, and to murder thousands of defenseless Yemeni civilians.

Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov said nothing about the crimes against humanity that are being committed by British troops in several parts of the world.I believe that he should have said something, that he should have said a lot, but Mr. Lavrov is a seasoned diplomat, and he knows perfectly well what is appropriate, what is effective and what is counter-productive.

Yes, the Empire is evidently in panic.

It is scared of everything: of public opinion all over the world, of the great Chinese new Silk Road initiative which is gaining great popularity all over the Asian continent, of the Sino-Russian alliance, of the silent rebellion in the ranks of its former allies, particularly in Asia, of the undeniably increasing economic might of its adversaries, of the new ‘alternative media’, and even of its own tail lost somewhere in the darkness.

For many years, one effective way for the Empire to control the world was to spread dark cynicism and nihilism, in order to ‘pacify’, to immobilize its colonies and even its own people living in Europe and North America. Now this strategy is backfiring: British and North American citizens are not only passive and unwilling to fight for the internationalist and left wing ideals, they are also unimpressed, even disgusted with their own rulers and regime. Yes, most of them are cynical about such countries like Russia, China or Venezuela, but they are also cynical about the corporatism, capitalism, as well as Western domestic and foreign policy. They are not willing to commit to anything. They trust nothing. They believe in very few things.

For the Empire, people like Boris Johnson are extremely useful buffoons: they offer cheap entertainment to the masses, and they deliver it with impeccable upper-class English accents (the BBC-style). They play it dirty, trying to smear, to humiliate their opponents. They try to bring back pride to their imperialist and white supremacist regime, by humiliating the victims, who are now finally standing on their feet and ready to fight forthe right to be different.

People like Mr. Johnson turn reality upside down, and it is all done ‘spontaneously’, with a boyish, almost innocent grin. Except that there is actually absolutely nothing innocent in this entire charade. It is all perfectly choreographed, all extremely professional.

The Empire is rotting and it is in agony. It panics. It fights for its life.

Peace is dangerous. If the world is at peace, it is indisputable that the Western Empire would lose, in no time. It would be defeated on social, moral, creative and even economic fronts.

That is why the Empire is spreading chaos, fear, war, perpetual conflicts and antagonism everywhere, all over the world: in Syria and Afghanistan, Libya, in all corners of Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, in Iran, Central and South America, even in the tiniest countries of Oceania.

It is challenging, provoking North Korea, it is insulting countries that have already suffered more than enough from Western terror and barbarism; countries like Russia, China and Iran.

It threatens those nations (and even some international organizations like UNESCO) that are supporting Palestine.

It essentially bullies all those who want to live their own lives, their own cultures, and their own economic and social systems. It punishes those countries that are refusing to plunder their own people and resources in order to support the high-life of the Western nations. It overthrows governments, and murders individuals.

In Moscow, the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson made a fool of himself. He did! With his unmistakable spineless jellyfish style, he tried but failed to humiliate the nation, which, for several centuries fought determinedly against Western imperialism and colonialism, and, on numerous occasions has already managed to save the world.

Mr. Johnson applied an old and rather disgusting approach: he came to Russia with spite and superiority complex, ready to preach, to insult, to scold those white-looking but essentially Asian people – to ‘show them their place’.

But this is 2017 now, not 1990. London is not the center of the universe, anymore, just the capital of a confused and rather aggressive and increasingly badly behaved nation.

The British bulldog came to Moscow. Frankly, it did not even look like a bulldog, anymore – it looked totally… weird: stoned and mentally unbalanced. It barked and barked, while the Russian bear was calm, maintaining its composure. It was clear who of the two has the upper hand, and who is provoking and who is refusing to fight. It was also obvious who of the two is really scared.

And, it was so apparent to whom belongs the past and to whom belongs the future!

*[First published by New Eastern Outlook (NEO)]

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

27 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/27/panic-boris-johnson-moscow-agony-rotting-empire/

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

2017 will be remembered as the year that the so-called ‘peace process’, at least in its American formulation, has ended. And with its demise, a political framework that has served as the foundation for US foreign policy in the Middle East has also collapsed.

The Palestinian leadership and its Arab and international allies will now embark on a new year with the difficult task of drumming up a whole new political formula that does not include the United States.

The Palestinian Authority entered 2017 with the slight hope that the US was in the process of moving away, however slightly, from its hardline pro-Israel attitude. This hope was the result of a decision made by the Barack Obama Administration in December 2016 not to veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 that declared the status of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories null and void.

But the new Donald Trump Administration suffocated all optimism as soon as it took over the White House, with a promise to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing, in defiance of international law, the Holy City as Israel’s capital.

Mixed messages from President Trump made it unclear whether he would go through with his campaign and early presidency promises, or remain committed to traditional US foreign policy. The appointment of extremist politicians, the likes of David Friedman as US Ambassador to Israel was juxtaposed with constant references to an ‘ultimate deal’ that would involve Palestinians, Israel and Arab countries.

The American ‘regional peace’, however, amounted to nothing, and Trump eventually fulfilled his promise to Israel and its allies by signing the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995.

By doing so, he has ended his country’s once-leading role in the US-espoused ‘peace process’ which advocated a ‘two-state solution’ based on a ‘land for peace formula.’

European countries had anticipated the American retreat from peace-making efforts as early as January 2017, yet it still pushed for the Paris Peace Conference on January 15. The conference brought nearly 70 countries together but, without US support and amid Israel’s rejection, it was merely a platform for rehashed language about peace, co-existence and so on.

Now that Trump has downgraded his country’s role, European powers, especially France, are likely to attempt to salvage peace talks. Such a possibility, however, is likely to prove equally fruitless since the rightwing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that neither freezing illegal settlements, a shared Jerusalem nor a Palestinian state are on the Israeli agenda. Without the enforcement of international law, Israel will not willingly change its position.

In fact, 2017 has been a year of unbridled Jewish settlement expansion with thousands of new housing units having been built – or are in the process of being completed – while brand new settlements are also in the offing.

Israel’s intransigence and the end of the US peace gambit has renewed interest in the Palestinian struggle, which has been cast aside for years due to regional conflicts and the Syria war. This has resulted in greater support for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Modeled after the South African anti-Apartheid boycott movement, BDS calls for direct action by global civil society to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

However, the rise of BDS has also meant a strong Israeli-US push back to outlaw the Movement and to punish its supporters. Nearly two dozen US states have passed laws to criminalize BDS, while the US Congress is finalizing its own law that makes boycotting Israel an act punishable by a hefty fine and a prison term.

Challenging both the Israeli Occupation and the PA, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continued with their Intifada, although one that lacked the mass mobilization of previous uprisings.

Hundreds of Palestinians were killed and wounded, including many children, in Israel’s efforts to suffocate any protest against its military rule.

The siege on Gaza also remained in place despite Hamas’ efforts to end it through the rewriting of its constitution and the various overtures towards Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, which dominates the PA government in Ramallah.

A unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah was signed in Cairo in October. It set an election date, and allowed for thousands of PA officials to return to Gaza to man border crossings and populate various ministries and government offices.

The nearly 2 million Palestinians in the besieged Strip, however, are yet to savor the fruit of that unity in their everyday life.

Although the reconciliation agreement was motivated by political expediency for both factions, the need for real unity among Palestinians is more urgent now than ever before, and not only because of Trump’s decision regarding Jerusalem.

The Israeli Knesset has passed, or is in the process of passing, various bills that seal the fate of Palestinians, regardless of their geographical location or political affiliation. One is the Jewish Nation-State Bill which defines Israel as the “nation home of the Jewish people” thus rendering millions of indigenous Palestinian Arabs as outcasts in their own homeland.

The ‘Greater Jerusalem Bill” was only shelved temporarily, despite the fact that it has the support of a majority in the Knesset. The Bill calls for the expansion of Jerusalem’s boundaries to include major illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, thus illegally annexing massive swathes of Palestinian land and reducing the Palestinian population in Jerusalem into an even smaller minority.

The Palestinian leadership must understand that the challenges at hand are far greater than its selfish need for political validation and monetary support. There is an urgent need for the revitalizing of all institutions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).  The new strategy should place Palestinians first, and must harness the energies of the Palestinian people at home or in ‘shatat’ – diaspora.

2018 promises to be a decisive year for the future of all Palestinians and it will be a difficult one. Not only did the US pull out of the ‘peace process’, it is expected to do its utmost to jeopardize any Palestinian initiative aimed at holding Israel accountable for its 50-year-old illegal military occupation.

If the Palestinian leadership fails to transition itself into a new role, it is likely to find itself in direct confrontation with the Palestinian people, who are ready to move on into a whole new type of struggle; one that is not beholden to the farce of a ‘two-state solution’, which was never truly on the agenda to begin with.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

27 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/27/year-review-will-2018-usher-new-palestinian-strategy/

By Dr Elias Akleh

During his national security speech last Monday, December 18th Trump introduced his administration’s new “America First” national security strategy in a surprisingly unaccustomed calm and calculated mannerism that is uncharacteristic of him. Although it seemed that he was well coached, yet, he couldn’t escape his narcissistic tendency and kept denunciating previous administrations while praising his own.

Trump accused the previous administrations of failing the American people by building the economy of foreign countries rather than the American economy. He accused the Trans Pacific Partnership as a “job killing deal” and the Paris Climate Accord of being expensive and unfair. Trump promised to withdraw America from both.

He accused Obama’s administration of creating ISIS and setting it upon Libya and Syria; an accusation that he emphatically asserted during his presidential campaign when he accused Obama and Hillary of creating ISIS. On the other hand, he praised his efforts, during his first trip abroad to the Middle East, to convince the Gulf States (the real supporters of ISIS) and other Muslim majority states to join together to fight radical Islamic ideology and terrorism. He took the credit that “we have dealt ISIS devastating defeats one after another” falsely claiming that the American coalition had recaptured almost 100% of the land that was held by the terrorists in Iraq and in Syria. Facts reveal that ISIS was defeated not by the American coalition rather by Syrian/Hezbollah/Russian coalition.

He blamed Obama’s administration for signing nuclear agreement with Iran calling it a bad deal. Then accuses Iran of terrorism throughout the Middle East when Iran has been fighting the American created and armed ISIS terrorist groups for the last seven years.  He boasted that he imposed an ineffective and meaningless sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, and of declining to certify Iran deal to Congress. Trump ignores the fact that his administration is arming and supporting Saudi Arabia’s aggression against Yemen creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the recent history.

Trump accused previous administrations of tolerating North Korean regime allowing it to develop its missile system. He accused North Korea of threatening the US and the world, coerced its neighboring countries to join him in imposing economic sanctions, and sent carrier ships to threaten North Korea of nuclear attack and utter destruction. He in fact used North Korea’s deterrent missile system to spread fear in the hearts of the neighboring countries in order to sell them more American weapons.

After tooting his first year achievements, Trump focused on his national security strategy stating that it advances four national interests; at times called them pillars. The first is the protection of the American people, the homeland and the American way of life. He talked about the need to secure American borders in order to secure the American nation. So, he again called for the construction of a wall on the southern border, many parts of which had been built by previous administrations. This is an Israeli concept to separate “them” from “us”. He explained that this strategy is to enhance ICE (Immigration and Custom Enhancement) officers and homeland security personnel to stop Latinos, whom he previously called criminals, drug dealers, rapists and thieves.

This step also calls for confronting, discrediting and defeating what he called radical Islamic terrorism and ideology and preventing it from spreading into the US. Trump is spreading Islamophobia and is banning Muslims from five countries in this regard. A new vetting procedure has been implemented to keep Muslims out, and the vetting is getting tougher every month.

The strategy also calls for developing new ways to counter the use of cyber and social media to attack and threaten Americans. This is meant to destroy net neutrality, to enhance surveillance, to target internet users with brainwashing fake news, and to perpetrate more cyber attacks  as was done against Iranian nuclear centrifuges (Stuxnet virus).

This interest (pillar) aims at building a police state, divide the people, spread Islamophobia and hatred, increase surveillance, and killing net neutrality. By protecting the people and the American way of life Trump means protecting the richest 1% and their exploiting ways of life and separating them from the poor working class.

Trump’s second strategic pillar is the promotion of American economic prosperity that he recognizes as national security. Trump sees home economic growth as an absolute necessity for American power and influence abroad. “Any nation that trades away prosperity for security ends up losing both” Trump explained. So, his strategy calls for cutting taxes, rolling back unnecessary regulations against corporations, renegotiate/cancel trade agreements, and use firm actions against “unfair practice and intellectual property theft.” The strategy proposes a complete rebuilding of American infrastructure, and embraces a future American energy dominance and self-sufficiency.

The strategy, here, serves only the rich and the corporations, including, of course, Trump’s corporations, by cutting their taxes and rolling back regulations that were previously enforced to serve and to protect the consumers and the environment. Trump has already signed a tax bill reducing the corporate tax from 35% to 21% while the working class gets only crumbs. With the complete rebuilding of the infrastructure and huge military expenditure Trump is proposing there will be a definite huge budget deficit, that would require cuts in the infrastructure building (Puerto Rico Island in mind), reduction in social security benefits, and reduction in medicare and social services.

When talking about trade fairness and reciprocity Trump is alluding to renegotiating more aggressive trade agreements and imposing economic boycott or aggressive measures against those countries, who don’t play according to his rules.  Deregulations would allow the opening of federal land for mining and oil excavations.  The future American energy dominance and self-sufficiency are hints to allowing more oil fracking and running more oil pipe lines.

The third pillar of Trump’s strategy recognizes that “weakness is the surest path to conflict and our rivaled power is the surest mean of defense”, and “a nation that is not prepared to win a war is a nation not capable of preventing a war.”  Trump calls for “peace through strength”. He calls for the reversal of what he accuses previous administrations’ decisions to shrink the armed forces even as threats to national security grew. His strategy calls for massive building up of the military by breaking from what he called the damaging defense sequester, and calls for streamlining acquisition to eliminate bloated bureaucracy. Trump proposed the investment of $700 billion in defense next year praising, here, the “fundamental side benefit of creating millions and millions of jobs”, yet neglecting the side-harm of war, killings and destruction. Trump’s strategy recognizes space as a “competitive domain” and calls for multi-layered missile defense; a very dangerous call that will initiate space arms race and eventual star wars.

Trump’s strategy recognizes “a new era of competition … in vigorous military and economic and political contest” and his administration is in this competition to win the contest. His peace through strength is actually the process of bullying, intimidating, coercing, and subjugating other nations to the whims of the American president (dictator) under the threats of military destruction and annihilation. Let us not ignore Nikki Haley’s threat to North Korea in the United Nation: “if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.” I don’t know what peace Trump was talking about when the US had destroyed in whole or part many countries around the world and had overthrown democratic governments and supported dictatorial regimes.

Previous administrations never had a defense sequester. On the contrary, the military budget grew immensely a year after year until it exceeded the military budgets of the next eight countries combined. Trump wants to eliminate any control or restrictions over military budget by streamlining military acquisitions. Under the justification of building a credible military deterrence Trump called for significant investment to maintain American nuclear arsenal and infrastructure capable of being deployed abroad. He is not satisfied with the almost 200 nuclear bombs stationed in different European countries. He does not see these as threat to world peace while considering North Korean missile and the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons as the real threat to world peace. What a myopic vision!

Trump’s fourth strategic pillar is advancing American influence in the world by building partnerships based on cooperation and reciprocity with those who share American goals. Trump claimed that the US does not seek to impose the American ways of life on any one, but will champion these values without apology. Although his strategy will pursue a vision of strong, sovereign and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their neighbors, it will not allow inflexible ideology to become an obsolete and obstacle to peace.

Trump seems to have forgotten that the US had destroyed many independent sovereign countries in order to spread its version of democracy. Last week his ambassador to the UN; Nikki Haley, had threatened member countries, virtually the whole world, not to vote for Jerusalem proposal, warning them that their vote will be remembered, their names will be taken and handed to Trump, who will consider this as a personal matter, and will cut US financial aid to these members. If this is not imposing one’s opinion, then what is?

“America first” and “peace through strength” are means for Trump’s administration to control and suppress American people through police state under the guise of national security, and to control foreign countries through nuclear military intimidation and bullying. It is the US that is threatening world peace not Iran or North Korea.

Trump had ridiculously attempted to conclude his speech by portraying an optimistic future vision of Americans returning to the wisdom of their founders forgetting that the founders’ so-called wisdom was based on genocide of indigenous people, on slavery and on racism. I could not stop myself from laughing when he concluded with “In America the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign.” He must have been talking about the 1% elite.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab American from a Palestinian descent. His family was evicted from Haifa, Palestine, after the 1948 Nakba when the Zionists stole his family’s property. Then the family was evicted again from the West Bank during the 1967 Naksah, after the Zionist, again, occupied the rest of Palestine.

26 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/26/trumps-national-security-strategy-strategy-thuggery-intimidation/

By Dan Glazebrook

Presenting themselves as shocked bystanders to the growing famine in Yemen, the US and UK are in fact prime movers in a new strategy that will massively escalate it.

The protagonists of the war on Yemen – the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have been beset by problems ever since they launched the operation in March 2015. But these problems seem to have reached breaking point in recent months.

First and foremost, is the total lack of military progress in the war. Originally conceived as a kind of blitzkrieg – or “decisive storm” as the initial bombing campaign was named – that would put a rapid end to the Houthi-led Ansarallah movement’s rebellion, almost three years later it has done nothing of the sort. The only significant territory recaptured has been the port city of Aden, and this was only by reliance on a secessionist movement largely hostile to ‘President’ Hadi, whose rule the war is supposedly being fought to restore. All attempts to recapture the capital Sanaa, meanwhile, have been exposed as futile pipe dreams.

Secondly, the belligerents have been increasingly at war with themselves. In February of this year, a fierce battle broke out between the Emiratis and Saudi-backed forces for control of Aden’s airport. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the struggle  “prevented an Emirati plan to move north to Taiz,” adding that “the risk of such confrontations remains…Lacking ground forces anywhere in Yemen, the Saudis worry that the UAE could be carving out strategic footholds for itself, undermining Saudi influence in the kingdom’s traditional backyard.” Notes intelligence analysts the Jamestown Foundation, “The fight over Aden’s airport is being played out against a much larger and far more complex fight for Aden and southern Yemen. The fighting between rival factions backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE clearly shows that Yemen’s already complicated civil war is being made more so by what is essentially a war within a war: the fight between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their proxies.” This tension flared up again in October, with Emirati troops arresting 10 members of the Saudi-aligned Islah movement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Yemeni faction.

And finally, the war is undergoing a serious crisis of legitimacy. Aid agencies are usually doggedly silent on the political causes of the disasters they are supposed to ameliorate. Yet on the issue of the blockade – and especially since it was made total on November 6th this year – they have been uncharacteristically vocal, placing the blame for the country’s famine – in which more than a quarter of the population are now starving – squarely on the blockade and its supporters. Jamie McGoldrick, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, put it starkly: “150,000 will die before the end of the year because of the impact of this blockade” he told ABC news last month. Save the Children had already stated back in March 2017 that “food and aid are being used as a weapon of war”, and called for an end to UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, whilst in November 2017, Oxfam’s Shane Stevenson said: “All those with influence over the Saudi-led coalition are complicit in Yemen’s suffering unless they do all they can to push them to lift the blockade.” Paolo Cernuschi, of the International Rescue Committee, added that: “We are far beyond the need to raise an alarm. What is happening now is a complete disgrace.” The governments of Donald Trump and Theresa May were being painted – by the most establishment-aligned of charities – as essentially mass murderers, accomplices to what Alex de Waal has called “the worst famine crime of this decade”. Even the Financial Times carried a headline that Britain “risks complicity in the use of starvation as a weapon of war”. “Is complicit” would be more accurate than “risks complicity”, but nevertheless: still a pretty damning indictment.

To confront these problems, a new strategy has clearly emerged. It appears to have been inaugurated by Theresa May and Boris Johnson on November 29th.  On that date, whilst the British Prime Minister met with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Riyadh, the Foreign Secretary was hosting a London meeting of the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE and the US under-secretary of state, representing all four of the belligerent powers in Yemen.

The first element of this strategy was for Britain and the US to pacify the NGO fraternity by distancing themselves from the blockade, as if it were somehow separate from the war in which they were so deeply involved. This actually came about in the days preceding those meetings, when Theresa May told the press she would “demand” the “immediate” lifting of the blockade during her forthcoming visit to the king. That was disingenuous; after all, had she really wanted the blockade ended, she could have achieved this immediately simply by threatening to cut military support for the Saudis until they ended it. According to War Child UK, arms sales to Saudi Arabia have now topped £6billion, and Britain runs a major training programme for the Saudi military, with 166 personnel deployed within the Saudi military structure. Former US presidential advisor Bruce Riedel is entirely correct when he states that “the Royal Saudi Air Force cannot operate without American and  British support. If the United States and the United Kingdom, tonight, told King Salman [of Saudi Arabia] ‘this war has to end,’ it would end tomorrow.”

In fact, the meeting seems to have been more about reassuring the Saudis that her words were but rhetoric for domestic consumption, and not meant to be taken seriously. In the event, far from an “immediate” end, the UK government website reported that May and Salman merely “agreed that steps needed to be taken” and that “they would take forward more detailed discussions on how this could be achieved”. Just to make it absolutely clear that the UK’s support for the war was not in question in any way, the very next line of the statement was “They agreed the relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia was strong and would endure”. A deeply complicit press ensured that the actual contents of this meeting was barely reported; the last word on the matter, as far as they were concerned, was May’s pledge to “demand” an end to the blockade. Donald Trump followed suit last week, likewise calling on the Saudis to “completely allow food, fuel, water and medicine to reach the Yemeni people” whilst doing nothing to bring this about. Thus have the UK and US governments attempted to manipulate the media narrative such that the blockade they continue to facilitate no longer reflects badly on them.

The next aspect of the strategy became obvious before the Johnson and May meetings had even finished, as fighting broke out between the Houthis and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh the same day. Saleh had made an alliance with his erstwhile enemies the Houthis in 2015 in a presumed attempt to seize back power from his former deputy Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to whom he was forced to abdicate power in 2012. But he had never been fully trusted by the Houthis, and their suspicions were to be fully confirmed when on Saturday 2nd December he formally turned on them and offered himself up to the Saudis. Saleh had always been close to the Saudis whilst in power, positioning himself largely as a conduit for their influence; now he was returning to his traditional role. The swiftness and intensity of the Saudi airstrikes supporting his forces against the Houthis following his announcement suggests some degree of foreknowledge and collaboration had preceded it, as does the Saudi’s reported house arrest of their previous favourite Hadi the previous month. This restoration of the Saleh-Saudi alliance represents a victory for the UAE, who had been pushing the Saudis to rebuild its bridges with him for some time. Analyst Neil Partrick, for example, had written just weeks before the move that “The Emiratis are advising the Saudis to go back to the former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, believing his growing disputes with the Houthis, his tactical allies, can be encouraged to become a permanent breach.” Thus was the problem of the military stalemate supposed to be solved by splitting the Houthis alliance with Saleh, paving the way for a dramatic rebalancing of forces in favour of the belligerents. The execution of Saleh two days later has only partially scuppered this plan, with many of his forces either openly siding with the invaders or putting up no resistance to them.

At the same time as the Saudis have finally been brought round to the UAE’s preference for a reconciliation with Saleh’s forces, the UAE have now, it seems, accepted an alliance with the Saudi-backed Islah party. Despite the Saudi’s usual antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood, it has backed their Yemeni offshoot in this war, a move hitherto firmly opposed by the Emirates. Yet, following earlier meetings between Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and Islah leader Abdullah al-Yidoumi, the two men met last Wednesday (13th December) with Emirati crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Maged Al Da’arri, editor of Yemen’s Hadramout newspaper, explained to The National that “the Gulf leaders are trying to combine the different sides in Yemen to work collaboratively in order to be able to liberate the provinces that are still held by the Houthis.”

It seems likely that Emirati support for Islah was a quid-pro-quo for Saudi support for Saleh, both moves suggesting perhaps that the two powers’ divisions were to some extent being overcome. But this rapprochement was formalised with the formal announcement of a new military alliance between them on December 5th, the day after Saleh’s death.

Thus, within a week of the London and Riyadh meetings, the coalition’s three seemingly intractable problems – the paralysing divisions between UAE and Saudi Arabia, the military stalemate, and the West’s legitimacy crisis over the blockade – had all apparently been turned around. This readjustment was and is intended to pave the way for a decisive new page in the war: an all-out attack on Hodeidah, as a prelude to the recapture of Sanaa itself.

This new strategy is now well under way. On December 6th – four days after Saleh switched sides, and one day after the new UAE-Saudi alliance was announced – the invaders’ Yemeni assets mounted “a major push…to purge Al Houthis from major coastal posts on the Red Sea including the strategic city of Hodeida.” The Emiratis had been advocating an attack on Hodeidah for at least a year, but, according to the Emirati newspaper The National, President Obama had vetoed it in 2016, whilst in March 2017, the Saudis got cold feet due to fears that the plan was “an indication of [the Emirates’] attempt to carve out strategic footholds in Yemen”. Now, it seems, it is finally under way.

The following day, the red sea town of Khokha, in Hodeidah province, was captured by Emirati forces and their Yemeni assets, backed by Saudi airstrikes. Gulf News reported that “Colonel Abdu Basit Al Baher, the deputy spokesperson of the Military Council in Taiz, told Gulf News that the liberation of Khokha would enable government forces and the Saudi-led coalition to circle Hodeida from land and sea”. The day after that, Houthi positions in Al Boqaa, between Khokha and Hodeidah, were taken by Emirati-backed forces.

The following Sunday, 10th December, Boris Johnson met with the Emirati crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi, where he “underlined the depth of strategic relations between the two countries and his country’s keenness on enhancing bilateral cooperation”, before attending another “Quartet committee” meeting with his Emirati and Saudi counterparts and the US acting secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. The four of them “agreed to hold their meetings periodically, with the next meeting scheduled for the first quarter of 2018.”

This intensive activity in the space of just two weeks, bookended by high-level meetings of the ‘quartet’ on either side, is clearly coordinated. But what it heralds is truly horrifying. Presenting themselves as shocked bystanders to the growing famine in Yemen, the US and UK are in fact prime movers in a new strategy that will massively escalate it.

When an attack on Hodeidah was being contemplated back in March 2017, aid agencies and security analysts alike were crystal clear about its impact. A press release from Oxfam read: “Reacting to concern that Hodeidah port in Yemen is about to be attacked by the Saudi-led coalition, international aid agency Oxfam warns that this is likely to be the final straw that pushes the country into near certain famine…Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB Chief Executive said: “If this attack goes ahead, a country that is already on the brink of famine will be starved further as yet another food route is destroyed…An estimated 70 percent of Yemen’s food comes into Hodeidah port. If it is attacked, this will be a deliberate act that will disrupt vital supplies – the Saudi-led coalition will not only breach International Humanitarian Law, they will be complicit in near certain famine.” The point was reiterated by the UN’s World Food Programme, whilst the UN International Organisation for Migration warned that 400,000 people would be displaced were Hodeidah to be attacked.

“The potential humanitarian impact of a battle at Hodeidah feels unthinkable,” Suze Vanmeegen, protection and advocacy advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council, told IRIN recently. “We are already using words like ‘catastrophic’ and ‘horrendous’ to describe the crisis in Yemen, but any attack on Hodeidah has the potential to blast an already alarming crisis into a complete horror show – and I’m not using hyperbole.”

In the Independent, Peter Salisbury  noted that “it is by no means certain that taking Hodeidah will be easy” as the (then) “Houthi-Saleh alliance is well aware of the plan” and preparing accordingly. He added that “While the Saudi-led coalition claims that taking the port would help alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the medium term, aid agencies fret that the short-term effect of cutting off access to a major port could be a killing blow to some of Yemen’s starving millions.” The Jamestown foundation were even more wary, writing that the city’s capture would be impossible without major US involvement and that  “Even with U.S. assistance, the invasion will be costly and ineffective. The terrain to the east of Hodeidah is comprised of some of the most forbidding mountainous terrain in the world. The mountains, caves, and deep canyons are ideal for guerrilla warfare that would wear down even the finest and best disciplined military.” Yet the US’s current efforts to argue that Houthis are being supplied with Iranian missiles via Hodeidah may well be aimed at legitimising just such direct US involvement in an attack on the port. After all, continues Jamestown, “the Saudi effort in Yemen hinges on the invasion of Hodeidah. The reasoning behind the invasion is that without Hodeidah and its port — where supplies trickle through — the Houthis and their allies, along with millions of civilians, can be starved into submission.”

This, then – the ramping up of the ‘weapon of starvation’ – is the ultimate end of this new phase in the war. Basic humanity demands it be vigorously opposed.

This article was originally published in Middle East Eye.

Dan Glazebrook is a political writer and editor of stopstarvingyemen.org. He is author of Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis and blogs at danglazebrook.com.

21 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/21/a-total-horror-show-the-new-plan-for-yemen/

By Nick Buxton

The bad news streaming through our media in 2017 has been relentless. However it doesn’t tell the full story. Beyond the headlines, there have countless amazing social movement struggles in different regions of the world that deserve to be celebrated. Here are ten stories showing that people power works:

1. El Salvador bans mining

In a classic David and Goliath tale, this small Central American state took on a vast Canadian transnational corporation to become the first country in the world to ban metals mining. Farmer communities led the struggle when they came together in 2004 to save the Lempa River watershed. They built a national coalition in the face of massive repression (including the assassination of several activists), formed alliances internationally, took on the Canadian corporation OceanaGold and finally secured a mining ban in March 2017.

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2. #Metoo campaign challenges impunity for sexual harrassment

Sexual harassment has been a constant reality for women everywhere for generations, but in 2017 the wall of impunity was suddenly breached.   Revelations of Hollywood mogul Weinstein’s repeated sexual abuses prompted 1.7 million #metoo tweets in 85 countries, prompting many women in every walk of life to come forward publicly to denounce sexual harassment. Many men have been forced to resign and there seems to be finally a consensus that sexual harassment must stop. This shift is not an accident or down to the work of a few journalists, it was the result of decades of tireless campaigning by women’s organizations worldwide fighting for equality.

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3. French law on multinationals

At a time when corporate power has become seemingly impregnable, French campaigners have shown that transnational corporations can be defeated. In a four year campaign, they mobilized for a new law approved in March 2017, which recognizes the responsibility of parent companies for human rights violations committed by subsidiaries, subcontractors and providers. The law was passed in the face of considerable corporate opposition and is a major step forward in the fight against impunity of transnational corporations (TNCs), addressing the legal complexity of their supply chains that has made it so difficult for affected communities to get justice. The law has also given a boost to ongoing efforts to create an international binding treaty on TNCs at the United Nations.

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4. Privatization is being rolled back, community by community

After many years  where privatization of services was the dominant trend, a wave of communities worldwide is successfully fighting off privatization and bringing formerly privatized services back under control. In 2017 in Cali, Colombia, for example, a  public sector workers union succeeded in defeating the proposed privatization of the municipal owned telecommunications company and then set up a public-public partnership (PuP) with a Uruguayan national public enterprise to improve the public service. In another case, Indonesia’s Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that privatization of water is a violation of human rights and annulled an agreement between Jakarta’s city-owned water operator PAM Jaya and two private companies. More than 835 communities worldwide have brought their public services back under public control in recent years.

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5. Trump’s agenda faces massive popular resistance

Trump’s election in 2017 was one of the most disturbing days in 2016, but it hasn’t gone so well for him since. From the very first day of office, Trump’s presidency has faced unprecedented popular resistance. In the first week, his blanket ban on Muslims from six nations was met with spontaneous protests at more than 20 major international airports across the USA – and has been blocked repeatedly by courts ever since and is now only temporarily enacted. Popular movements involved in fighting the white supremacy, corporate greed, and militarism that the Trump regime represents have reported a massive surge in engagement and support.

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6. Gambia autocrat overthrown

Military ruler, Yahya Jammeh, who ruled Gambia with an iron fist for 22 years was forced to step down at the beginning of 2017 after he lost the 2016 election. Jammeh predicted he would rule for a billion years, but young Gambians came out in large numbers and used social media to mobilize votes for his opponent, Adama Barrow. Jammeh tried to overrule the election results, but fierce opposition from trade unions, professional associations and pressure from outside states forced Jammeh to relinquish power.

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7. Almost two-thirds of Australian voters say yes to marriage equality

Australia became the 25th country to legally embrace marriage equality in 2017 after voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of changing the definition of marriage to include same sex relationships in an advisory referendum. Australia’s parliament then approved a bill almost unanimously. Popular and legal support for gay rights may seem unsurprising now, but it is worth remembering that just 20 years ago there was not one nation that treated same sex relationships as legally equal to heterosexual ones.

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8. Farmer rebellion in India

In November, tens of thousands of peasants and rural laborers from 20 states representing more than 180 peasant organizations gathered in Delhi for an unprecedented show of strength against the reactionary Modi Government. Facing rising production costs, increased droughts and falling incomes, the farmers demanded debt relief, better prices and effective crop insurance schemes. While the government did not immediately respond to their key demands, the united platform is likely to have an impact as it takes its campaign across the country in 2018 and 2019.

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9. Guatemala rises up against institutionalized corruption

Since 2015, a series of mass protests against corruption have rocked Guatemala. These came to a head in September when President Jimmy Morales attempted to expel a Colombian investigator of the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Indigenous communities have played a leading role in the protests and are also in a fight with Congress to approve a constitution that would recognize greater indigenous autonomy. In October, a national strike led by a coalition of social movements in twenty cities demanded the resignation of Morales in addition to calling for land reform and nationalisation of the energy sector.

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10. Rise of Momentum and transformation of UK Labour Party

In 2017, Momentum, a grassroots movement in the UK, defied the odds and brought a left candidate Jeremy Corbyn close to government. Focusing on door-to-door conversations and a sophisticated social media campaign, they substantially increased Labour’s vote in the General Elections and almost ended the ruling Conservative party’s majority. The movement, Momentum, made up of 30,000 active members showed how a mobilized grassroots operation could defy massive media hostility and win seats.  The movement has made the Labour Party the biggest membership party in Europe with a platform committed to bringing privatized services back under public ownership, abolishing university tuition fees and ending fracking. Momentum is now widely recognised as the most vibrant part of the party and is advocating greater participation in the party’s decision-making.

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These stories and others are taken from a recap of the year by Transnational Institute, a progressive research institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable world. Read the full rundown of social movement victories here.

Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working as a publications editor and supporting  online learning and support of activist scholar communities for TNI.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

21 December 2017

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/12/21/10-amazing-social-movement-struggles-in-2017-that-give-us-reason-to-hope/

By Maung Zarni

Truths and totalitarianism are irreconcilable.  They have never co-existed, they do not coexist, and they never will.

Whatever the exterior – fascist, corporatocracy (government of, for and by corporations), military, communist, or theocratic – the regimes of un-truths share a common hallmark, namely, their marked disdain for empirical facts that undermine their legitimacy.  Through manufactured falsehoods, they all try relentlessly to establish and maintain a monopoly grip on power and control the population, both bodies and minds.

The arrest of two Burmese Reuters journalists who were sniffing the military’s dark “top secrets” in Rakhine is just one evidential incident in a long series of frontal assaults on truths which Myanmar’s NLD-military hybrid regime seeks to conceal.  Myanmar government uses anachronistic colonial-era ‘security and anti-sedition’ laws to put in interrogation cells journalists or activists who attempt to uncover and expose them at great personal risk, while it labels some of us outside Myanmar as ‘national traitors’ and ‘enemies of the state’.  As a recipient of such high national honour, I speak from my own experience.

This is not news, however.   Astute students of politics know very well the hand-in-glove nature of falsehoods (official propaganda) and political repression, in all senses of the word.

But what is new, and deeply troubling, is the “Free World” of the West (that is, USA, Canada, EU, Japan and Australia, as well as certain UN agencies) are resorting to exactly the same type of totalitarian methodology insofar as their justifications offered in defence of their business-as-usual Myanmar policies are concerned.  That is, London, Washington, Brussels and other western regimes are crafting, promoting and defending a single lie, just as they put out ‘statements of grave concerns’ directed at their increasingly repressive Myanmar business partner.

This foundational lie of today’s western policies towards Myanmar goes something like this:

The country is in a fragile democratic transition under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, who represents ‘the best hope’ for the people.  Accordingly, the West’s Myanmar policy delusion demands that we suspend our common sense and swallow its self-serving discourse of ‘balancing’ the need to address the country’s genocide of Rohingyas and stand with the Great Democratizer, that is, Aung San Suu Kyi.

These prevailing Myanmar policy discourses are self-serving at best and sinister at worst.  As a Burmese activist who has worked on Myanmar political and policy affairs for nearly 30 years, having lived in Washington and London, I smell a rat.

These discourses under their liberal veneer are self-serving because they enable Western commercial and strategic interests, however defined and whatever they are, to stay put in Myanmar despite the genocide.   And they are sinister because western policy-makers know that the road to democracy and human rights has never run through any totalitarian ideology or system.  Nazi Germany, fascist Japan, communist dictatorships of former USSR and the now deceased Eastern Bloc spring to mind.

And my country of birth today, both the ruling hybrid regime and the society at large, is progressively moving not towards any form of pro-human rights democracy, but towards what I call Buddhist Fascism.

In this sordid political climate in Myanmar, the formerly pro-human rights public, peaceful Buddhist Order and pro-human rights dissidents, from Aung San Suu Kyi and former student leaders of the Great Uprising of 8.8.88, have closed ranks with their former military jailors and torturers.  Their new-found mission is nothing short of building a Myanmar majoritarian ethnocracy where Buddhism is systematically misused as the state’s political ideology.  The Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly declared ‘defence of Buddhism’ as an additional duty of the armed forces, in addition to serving as the self-style institutional shepherd of what the generals call ‘Discipline Flourishing Democracy’.   His former titular boss, ex-general and President Thein Sein, enacted the Four Race and Faith Defence Laws, persecutorial and discriminatory towards millions of non-Buddhist citizens.

In addition, Myanmar military has accomplished its long-standing, if unwritten, objective of cleansing the armed forces of any officer who is not Buddhist. While the country’s most powerful institution is well-known for its Islamophobia, what is less known is that Christianity is widely mocked, being called “Virus C”, sufficient ground for discharging military officers from strategic positions.

To the dismay of many of its Muslim supporters, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party, with the parliamentary majority has followed suit:  it has not a single Muslim representative, thanks to the autocratic Suu Kyi’s single-minded strategy of pandering to the racist Buddhist majority.

Consequently, for the first time in the country’s 1,000-years of recorded history, Myanmar now has Muslim-free armed forces, a Muslim-free parliament and a Muslim-free executive branch.  (The judiciary doesn’t count as its decisions are dictated by those in the executive branch and ultimately by the military).

Religion isn’t the only issue that drives both the NLD and the military’s policies and political moves. The Burmese majoritarian ethnic identity is inseparable from this institutionalisation of Buddhism as the country’s ruling political ethos, displacing, in effect, any secularist values such as respect for non-Buddhist and non-Burmese ethnic and religious minorities, multiculturalist pluralism, fundamental human rights, civil liberties and intellectual and press freedoms.

In response to a strong criticism by the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights situation in Myanmar Professor Yangee Lee directed at the country’s state actors, the NLD-controlled national parliament passed unanimously the NLD’s motion, specifically designed to condemn Ms Lee and her mission to investigate and highlight human rights violations.  Only in a totalitarian system of governance is such unanimity of views and votes conceivable and possible.

Indeed, Myanmar today is, in essence, more akin to Germany in the 1930’s where a single ethnic community, namely German Jews, were singled out and made scapegoats for all the fears and ills that the majoritarian public was reeling from.

It defies intelligence to paint, as western governments and regional blocs such as EU are doing now with a collective straight face, Myanmar’s emerging populist politics with its fascist characteristics as a ‘fragile democratic transition’.  This is against the backdrop of Rohingyas being singled out as ‘illegal Bengali migrants’, for extermination the way European Jewry were in the Nazi-occupied Europe.

What of Myanmar’s “best hope”, namely Aung San Suu Kyi, who had until recently been viewed worldwide as ‘Asia’s Mandela’ or an iconic leader in the mould of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.?

Suu Kyi’s abysmal record on human rights promotion since her release from house arrest in November 2010 speaks volumes. Dismissing any association of human rights with her leadership – “I am not a human rights defender, but have always been leader of the political opposition” –  the NLD leader has chosen not to stand up for the displaced Burmese farmers, the non-Bama ethnic minorities, for instance, Christian Kachins in the war zones of Eastern Myanmar, student dissidents who demanded democratic educational reforms, and even her own rank and file members who attempted to challenge the military-backed racial and religious discrimination.

And worse still, Suu Kyi has on more than one public occasion, expressed her ever-lasting ‘affection’ – which she qualifies as ‘genuine’ – for what she calls ‘my father’s army’, even when her former captors in general’s uniform have long been accused of commissioning all crimes in the international law book including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

On Ms Suu Kyi’s role in these governmental crimes since she entered into a partnership with the military, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein recently told the BBC that “…there’s the crime of omission. That if it came to your knowledge that this was being committed, and you did nothing to stop it, then you could be culpable as well for that.”

One year ago, in the Foreign Policy article entitled ‘A Genocide in the Making’, Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, wrote these prophetic words: “Today we know enough about the conditions that give rise to genocide that no one in power can justifiably claim ignorance…. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral, legal, and even criminal responsibility.”

Five years ago the world welcomed and held up the ‘Burmese Spring’ as a model democratic transition.  Now the only transition that my old society is undergoing is a transition to Buddhist fascism.

In today’s Myanmar former dissidents speak of ‘national security’ against Muslims – and particularly against vulnerable Rohingyas – and most local journalists use their hard-earned press freedom to promote the military’s brand of hatred.

It is well past time that the Western governments and international institutions stop peddling their twin delusions about my country’s ‘fragile democratic transition’ and its Nobel ‘woman of destiny’.

*Maung Zarni is a Burmese human rights activist, an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism based in Cambridge, UK and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia.  He blogs at maungzarni.net

22 December 2017

Source: http://en.prothom-alo.com/opinion/news/168319/Suu-Kyi-for-democracy-or-Buddhist-fascism