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By Niles Niemuth

An Apache gunship opened fire on a boat carrying Somali refugees off the coast of Yemen early Friday morning killing at least 42 people and wounding dozens of others.

The boat, which came under attack 30 miles off the Yemeni coast, was reportedly ferrying more than 100 men, women and children from Sudan.

Bullets from the attack helicopter riddled the boat ripping through the passengers, many of them women and children. Pictures posted online show the bloodied bodies of the victims being brought ashore. A number of the wounded taken to hospital were missing arms and legs.

Al-Hassan Ghaleb Mohammed, the boat’s pilot, told the Associated Press that the panicked passengers scrambled to hold up flashlights in order indicate that they were migrants and stop the surprise attack. All of those on the boat had official documentation from the UN Refugee Agency certifying that they were refugees.

As of this writing, no government has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it was most likely carried out by the Saudi-led coalition which has been waging a brutal war against Yemen for the last two years. Saudi Arabia and the United Araba Emirates are currently the only militaries flying Apache helicopters in the region, and there were reports of intensified airstrikes in Hodeida Thursday night.

Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, with direct military support from the United States, have been waging a brutal war against Houthi rebels who seized control of much of western Yemen in 2015 and ousted the US and Saudi-backed president Abd Rabbu Hadi.

The Saudi-led offensive has so far killed more than 10,000 civilians, targeting hospitals, schools, factories, market places, farm fields and social infrastructure with airstrikes in an effort to break the Houthi’s resistance. A naval blockade of Yemen by the coalition, enforced with the support of the US Navy, has pushed the country, which imported 90 percent of its food stock prior to the war, to the brink of famine.

The US has been waging its own war in southeastern Yemen since 2009, launching drone strikes against targets and individuals purportedly affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Trump administration has ramped up the offensive begun by Barack Obama which has already killed hundreds of people, including women and children.

Friday’s attack highlights the historic humanitarian crisis which is engulfing a significant portion of the African continent and Middle East, stretching from the Lake Chad region in West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. The UN warned earlier this week of the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II as 20 million people in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria face imminent starvation.

Civil wars stoked by the US government and its European allies combined with historic drought conditions are pushing millions across the Africa continent to flee their homes. It is estimated that at least 5.5 million African are refugees in other countries, and another 11 million are displaced within their own countries.

Even with the ongoing war, which has pushed the country to the brink of a famine, Yemen remains one of the most popular destinations for refugees fleeing war and famine in Somalia. At the end of February there were nearly 256,000 UN recognized refugees from Somali living in Yemen; this was second only to the more than 317,000 in Kenya.

Tens of thousands of people from across the Horn of Africa transit the Bab el Mandeb strait every year in order to reach the poorest country in the Middle East. Many of those who flee to Yemen end up in the Khazar refugee camp, a former military barracks located in a hot, desolate desert region two hours north of the southern port city of Aden.

While most intend for Yemen to be a temporary transit point, many thousands have been stuck at the Khazar camp for years on end. The camp currently holds 16,000 people, mostly from Somalia and Ethiopia.

With few employment opportunities for African refugees in Yemen, those who are physically able make the increasingly treacherous trek onwards to Europe. Hundreds of Somali refugees drowned in the Mediterranean in 2016 desperately trying to reach Italy.

18 March 2017

www.wsws.org

By Afro-Middle East Cantre

On 5 March, the upper house of the Bahraini parliament passed a constitutional amendment which, critics say, will result in the country living under undeclared martial law. The amendment allows for civilians to be tried by military courts when the case involves the military. This was followed the next day by the justice ministry filing a lawsuit to ban the Wa’ad party, the second biggest opposition party after the now-banned Al-Wefaq party. The repression of dissent in Bahrain is clearly increasing.

The suspension of civil liberties implicit in this amendment as well as the removal of limitations in the constitution on who may be tried by a military court are both characteristics of martial law. When this amendment was initially passed by the lower house of parliament Sayed Alwadaei, the director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (based in London) accused Bahrain’s king of ‘effectively creating a police state’and of implementing ‘de facto martial law’. Bahrain is following in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia which has also redefined its anti-terror laws to increase the power of security forces in the face of political dissent. The government is using counter-terrorism measures to clamp down on political opposition, and cases of opposition leaders will be passed on to military courts to adjudicate as per the instruction of the Minister of Justice, Islamic Affairs and Endowments, Shaikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, who stated that judges of military courts should adjudicate cases concerning terror activities.

Anti-regime and pro-democracy protests have been occurring frequently in Bahrain since the 2011 uprisings. These have been led by members of the Shi’a majority against the ruling al-Khalifa monarchy, which is Sunni. High unemployment, systematic discrimination against Shi’as, a deteriorating human rights record and the increasing executive power of the Emir are grievances repeated by the opposition. Apart from Bahrain’s Bloody Thursday on 17 February 2011, where police raided sleeping protestors camping at Pearl Roundabout in Manama killing four and injuring about 300; protests have been largely peaceful but generally accompanied by a police response using excessive force.

On 14 March 2011 troops from both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia entered Bahrain at the request of the al-Khalifa regime, and crushed the rebellion. Three months of martial law followed, and hundreds of civilians were tried in military courts; tortured prisoners were given lengthy jail terms on little to no evidence. Peaceful protestors and even medics who had treated injured protesters were jailed. Both an independent inquiry commissioned by Bahrain’s rulers and international human rights’ organisations condemned the military courts. After martial law was lifted on 1 June 2011, the main opposition party, Al-Wefaq, led weekly demonstrations until protests were banned in October 2012. Despite the ban, protests have continued. The reintroduction of military courts to try civilians now is a disturbing development in the erosion of rights within Bahrain.

Government repression has included the stripping of citizenship from top cleric Shaykh Isa Qassim in June 2016, the banning of Al-Wefaq in July, and the execution of three men in January 2017. In contrast to the religious-based Al-Wefaq, Wa’ad (the National Democratic Action Society) – which has just been banned – is a leftist political party whose stated mission is to: ‘To strive towards achieving equal citizenship, safeguarding people’s sovereignty, protecting their rights and public freedoms, achieving equality and social justice for all and rejecting all forms of discrimination and sectarianism.’ As a secular bloc it has attempted to reach out to both Shi’a and Sunni opposition figures.

Wa’ad was previously banned in April 2011, but reinstated two months later. Its former secretary-general, Ibrahim Sharif, served four years in jail for his role in the 2011 protests, after being convicted by a military-led tribunal for plotting to overthrow the government. He was arrested again in July 2015 for a speech allegedly inciting hatred and spent a year in prison, and was again arrested and charged in November 2016 for ‘inciting hatred against the regime’ after an interview he gave to the Associated Press where he argued that a forthcoming visit by Britain’s Prince Charles would ‘whitewash’ human rights abuses. Wa’ad has been an unusual target for the government since the uprisings due to its moderate stance; this suggests that the government is unwilling to tolerate even mild dissent.

The international response to Bahrain’s increasing repression has been contradictory, with calls for condemnation ignored by both the USA and the UK. Various human rights NGOs, Amnesty International in particular, have been vocal in their concern for the deterioration of human rights. Amnesty claims that Bahrain is at ‘a tipping point’, and that the first weeks of 2017 saw ‘an alarming upsurge in arbitrary and abusive force by security forces’. The USA has announced its intention to approve an arms deal with Bahrain that was halted under the Obama administration. This would see the transfer of nineteen F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain. In December 2016 British Prime Minister Theresa May visited Bahrain and addressed the Gulf Co-operation Council, emphasising the fostering of stronger economic ties with Gulf countries on the eve of Brexit. There was no mention of human rights abuses.

14 March 2017

By Bill Van Auken

The Trump White House has secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to resume drone assassination strikes that in the latter years of the Obama administration had been largely reserved for the US military, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The Journal cited unnamed US officials revealing that the authorization was granted shortly after Trump visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia on January 21, the day after his inauguration. No announcement has been made as to the change in policy, and the White House as well as the CIA and the Pentagon have declined to comment on the matter.

According to the report, the authorization initially provided to the CIA was in relation to drone strikes in Syria, where the agency killed Egyptian Al Qaeda leader Abu al Khayr al Masri in an airstrike late last month.

It appears, however, that the policy has already been expanded globally, with an apparent CIA drone strike in Pakistan that killed two men, and a wave of strikes in Yemen—more in a single week this month than in any single year under the Obama administration—for which the Pentagon failed to take responsibility.

The return to drone assassinations by the US intelligence agency is part of a broader turn by the Trump administration toward jettisoning cosmetic restrictions imposed by Obama during his second term. These measures were aimed at providing a veneer of legality for the drone murder program, which had been greatly expanded by the CIA and the Pentagon under Obama, while firmly institutionalizing it as an instrument of the US state.

During the final years of the Obama administration, the CIA and the Pentagon worked in tandem in the drone killing program, with the intelligence agency providing surveillance and location of targets and the military sending in killer drones to fire the missiles.

The Obama White House presented this arrangement as a bid to lend the drone program a pretense of “transparency,” as the Pentagon would issue reports on its strikes, while the CIA routinely refuses to confirm or deny actions by its own operatives.

In reality, the Pentagon routinely ignores or grossly underestimates its own slaughter of civilians in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And the Obama administration issued a secret order allowing the CIA to continue its covert drone war in northwestern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas near the Afghan border, as part of the attempt to quell the Taliban and other insurgents challenging the US puppet regime in Kabul.

In July 2016, when the Obama administration issued its executive order purporting to sanitize the drone assassination program, the Director of National Intelligence provided an accompanying estimate of the number of civilians killed in drone strikes since Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. The figure given—between 64 and 116—was less than a tenth of the deaths conservatively estimated by independent monitoring groups.

The other consideration in shifting the responsibility from the CIA to the Pentagon was the blatant illegality of intelligence agents—who are not considered legitimate combatants under international law—carrying out lethal operations abroad. By 2013, court cases had been initiated in Pakistan charging CIA personnel with murder and terrorism, while a class action lawsuit by relatives of drone strike victims was also brought against the US government and the CIA. The change in policy was also initiated with an eye toward the threat of possible war crimes prosecutions.

In May of 2013, Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University vowing that drone strikes would be launched only against “terrorists” who posed “a continuing and imminent threat to the American people,” and only under conditions of “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” The pretense of concern for civilians being blown to pieces as “collateral damage” inflicted by drone strikes was meant merely to provide a “humanitarian” cover for cold-blooded assassinations and massacres.

The executive order issued by Obama in July 2016 repeated this language, while institutionalizing the drone assassination program and reaffirming the supposedly inalienable right of the US president to order state murder by means of Hellfire missiles of anyone in any part of the world, including US citizens.

This is the criminal political legacy that Obama has handed off to the Trump administration. Trump is now dispensing with the pretense of humanitarian concern, while also satisfying the demands of the Pentagon and the CIA to streamline the killing process to allow commanders and operatives on the ground to order drone strikes without having them vetted through Washington.

This shift may signal a departure from the Obama administration’s signature “terror Tuesdays,” in which the Oval Office was turned into a headquarters for approving “kill lists” and organizing “targeted killings,” with the responsibility instead being delegated to US military commanders and CIA agents.

Citing senior US officials, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, “The Trump administration is close to finishing a review that would make it easier for the Pentagon to launch counterterrorism strikes anywhere in the world by lowering the threshold on acceptable civilian casualties and scaling back other constraints imposed by the Obama administration.”

The changes, the Post reported, “would empower the Pentagon to make decisions on targets without approval from the White House and potentially scrap the ‘near-certainty’ standard of no civilian deaths for strikes outside war zones.”

As part of the move to waive such restrictions, Trump has signed off on a request to designate three provinces of Yemen as “areas of active hostilities,” i.e., free-fire zones, where the rules on civilian deaths do not apply. His administration is reportedly about to grant similar approval in relation to Somalia.

Again, this is not an innovation on the part of the Trump administration, but follows similar dispensation granted by Obama in Libya during the bombardment of the coastal city of Sirt last summer.

Whatever the tactical differences between the Democrats and the Republicans over US foreign policy, both defend Washington’s right to murder people indiscriminately in every corner of the planet.

15 March 2017

By Nauman Sadiq

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide training and arms to the Syrian militants in order to battle the Syrian regime with the support of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria, the bulk of the so-called “moderate rebels” is comprised of Islamic jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, al-Tawhid Brigade, al-Nusra Front and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army (FSA).

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, the various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in their character than secular or nationalist, as such.

Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, had been allied with the Shi’a regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014.

At the behest of the American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.

Notwithstanding, George Santayana presciently said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s, that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan Mujahideen to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore, this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels,” with secular and nationalist ambitions, to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore, the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in those countries: such as, the red militants of the Islamic State, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

Regardless, back in the ‘80s, the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” did not spring up spontaneously out of nowhere, some powers funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized those militants; how else could such ragtag militants had beaten back the super power of its time?

Then in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, those same powers once again financed, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Libyan militants by calling them pro-democracy, “armed” activists against the supposedly “brutal and tyrannical” rule of the Gaddafi regime.

Similarly, in Syria, those very same powers once again had the audacity to provide money, training and weapons to the Syrian militants; how else could such peaceful and democratic protests had mutated into a full-blown armed insurrection?

And even if those protests did mutate into an armed rebellion, left to their own resources, the best such civilian protestors could have mustered was to get a few pistols, shotguns and rifles; where did they get all those machine gun-mounted pick-up trucks, rocket-propelled grenades and the US-made TOW antitank missiles?

You don’t have to be a military strategist to understand a simple fact that unarmed civilian population, and even ragtag militant outfits, lack the wherewithal to fight against organized and professional armed forces of a country that are equipped with artillery, tanks, air force and navy.

Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of the insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media, that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments, has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling Satans as saviors.

Notwithstanding, for the whole of the last five years of the Syrian proxy war, the focal point of the Western policy has been that “Assad must go!” But what difference would it make to the lives of the ordinary Syrians even if the regime is replaced now when the civil war has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, created millions of refugees, displaced half of the population and reduced the whole country of 22 million people to rubble? I do concede that Libya and Syria were not democratic states under Gaddafi and Assad, respectively; however, both of those countries were at least functioning states.

Gaddafi was ousted from power in September 2011; five years later, Tripoli is ruled by the Misrata militia, Benghazi is under the control of Khalifa Haftar, who is nothing more than the stooge of Egypt and UAE, and the heavily armed militants are having a field day all over Libya. It will now take decades, not years, to restore even a semblance of stability in Libya and Syria; remember that the proxy war in Afghanistan was originally fought in the ‘80s and today, 35 years later, Afghanistan is still in the midst of perpetual anarchy, lawlessness and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

It’s very unfortunate that haughty and myopic politicians and diplomats do not learn any lessons from history, otherwise all the telltale signs are there that Syria has become the Afghanistan of the Middle East and its repercussions on the stability of the energy-rich region and the security threat that the Syrian militants pose to the rest of the world will have far reaching consequences for many decades to come.

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, neocolonialism and Petroimperialism.

14 March 2017

By Chris Hedges

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

“The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence.”

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohn wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohn wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

13 March 2017

By Patrick Martin

More than 20 million people face imminent starvation in four countries, United Nations officials warned over the weekend, the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. All four countries—Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Nigeria—are wracked by civil wars in which the US government is implicated in funding and arming one of the contending sides.

UN emergency relief coordinator Stephen O’Brien gave a report to the UN Security Council Friday detailing the conditions in the four countries, and the UN issued published further materials on the crisis Saturday, seeking to raise $4.4 billion in contributions for emergency relief before the end of March. So far, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, only $90 million has been pledged, barely two percent of the total needed.

As outlined by UN officials, the populations most immediately at risk number 7.3 million in Yemen, 2.9 million in Somalia, 5 million in South Sudan, and 5.1 million in Nigeria, for a total of 20.3 million. The number of children suffering symptoms of acute malnutrition is estimated at 462,000 in Yemen, 185,000 in Somalia, 270,000 in South Sudan, and 450,000 in Nigeria, for a total of nearly 1.4 million.

While adverse weather conditions, particularly drought, are a contributing factor in the humanitarian disasters, the primary cause is civil war, in which each side is using food supplies as a weapon, deliberately starving the population of the “enemy.”

US-backed forces are guilty of such war crimes in all four countries, and it is American imperialism, the principal backer of the Saudi intervention in Yemen and the government forces in Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria, which is principally responsible for the danger of famine and the growing danger of a colossal humanitarian disaster.

The worst-hit country is Yemen, where US-armed and directed military units from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies are at war with Houthi rebels who overthrew the US-installed president two years ago. Some 19 million people, two-thirds of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The Saudi forces, which fight alongside Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, control the country’s major ports, including Aden and Hodeida, and are backed by US Navy units in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in imposing a blockade on the region controlled by the Houthis in the west and north of the country.

US forces operations range throughout the country, with drone missile strikes and occasional raids, like the disastrous attack on a village at the end of January in which at least 30 Yemeni civilians were killed, many of them small children, and one US Special Forces soldier was shot to death.

In Somalia, the protracted civil war between the US-backed government in Mogadishu and Al Shabab militias, who control most of the country’s south, has laid waste to a country which already suffered a devastating famine in 2011, and has been ravaged by civil war for most the past quarter-century.

At least half the country’s population, more than six million people, is in need of humanitarian aid, according to UN estimates. Drought conditions have killed off much of the country’s animal population. In Somalia, too, US military units continue to operate, carrying out Special Forces raids and drone missile strikes. There is also an extensive spillover of Somali refugees into neighboring Kenya, where another 2.7 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.

The civil war in South Sudan is a conflict between rival tribal factions of a US-backed regime that was created through Washington’s intervention into a long-running civil war in Sudan. After a US-brokered treaty and a referendum approving separation, South Sudan was established as a newly independent state in 2011.

Tribal conflicts within the new state have been exacerbated by drought, extreme poverty, and the struggle to control the country’s oil reserves, its one significant natural resource, which is largely exported through neighboring Sudan to China. The country is landlocked, making transport of emergency food supplies more difficult.

The crisis in South Sudan was said to be the most acute of the four countries where famine alerts were being sounded, with some 40 percent of the population facing starvation. Last month, UN officials declared a full-scale famine alert for 100,000 people in South Sudan. A cholera epidemic has also been reported.

The famine crisis in Nigeria is likewise the byproduct of warfare, this time between the Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram and the government of Nigeria, which has military support from the US and Britain. The focal point of this conflict has been the Lake Chad region, where Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger share borders. This is the most densely populated and fertile of the four areas threatened with famine.

A recent offensive by Nigerian government forces pushed backed Boko Haram and uncovered the extent of the suffering among the local population in the region, where food supplies were cut off as part of the US-backed military campaign.

US military forces range throughout the Sahel region, the vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert which encompasses much of western Africa. The armed forces of French and German imperialism are also active in former French colonies like Mali and Burkina Faso, as well as further south, in the Central African Republic.

According to the UN reports, the humanitarian disaster in Yemen has accelerated in recent months. The number of Yemenis in immediate danger of starvation jumped from four million to seven million in the past month. One child dies every 10 minutes in Yemen from a preventable disease.

When the UN humanitarian chief’s mission was in Yemen last week, it was able to secure safe passage for the first truckload of humanitarian supplies to the besieged city of Taiz, the country’s third largest, which has been blockaded for the past seven months.

The debate on O’Brien’s report to the UN Security Council featured one hypocritical statement after another by imperialist powers like the US, Britain, France, Japan and Italy, as well as by China and Russia, all bemoaning the suffering, but all concealing the real cause of the deepening crisis.

Typical were the remarks of the US representative, Michele Sison, who declared, “Every member of the Security Council should be outraged that the world was confronting famine in the year 2017. Famine is a man-made problem with a man-made solution.”

She called on the parties engaged in fighting in the four countries to “prioritize access to civilians” and “not obstruct aid”—although that is exactly what the US-backed forces are doing, particularly in Yemen, and to a lesser extent in the other three countries.

The UN report does not cover other humanitarian crises also classified by the World Food Program as “level three,” the most serious, including Iraq, Syria, Central African Republic and the Philippines (the first three due to civil war, the last due to the impact of several Pacific typhoons). Nor does it cover the devastating civil conflict in Libya or Afghanistan, ravaged by nearly 40 years of continuous warfare.

Nor does it review the worldwide total of people in acute need of food assistance, estimated at 70 million in 45 countries, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. This figure is up 40 percent since 2015, as a result of escalating civil wars, drought and other climate-driven events, and rising food prices.

The World Food Program experienced a shortfall in contributions of nearly one-third in 2016, receiving only $5.9 billion from donors towards a total outlay of $8.6 billion, forcing the agency to cut rations for refugees in Kenya and Uganda. Total unfunded humanitarian aid appeals came to $10.7 billion in 2016, larger than the combined total of such appeals in 2012.

While these sums are gargantuan in terms of the need, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the resources squandered by the major powers on war and militarism. The total deficit in humanitarian aid amounts to less than three days’ worth of global military spending. The $4.4 billion in aid sought for the famine crisis is half of what the US Pentagon spends in a typical week.

13 March 2017

By David Korten

The plight of immigrant families in the United States facing threat of deportation has provoked a massive compassionate response, with cities, churches, and colleges offering sanctuary and legal assistance to those under threat. It is an inspiring expression of our human response to others in need that evokes hope for the human future. At the same time, we need to take a deeper look at the source of the growing refugee crisis.

There is nothing new or exceptional about human migration. The earliest humans ventured out from Africa to populate the Earth. Jews migrated out of Egypt to escape oppression. The Irish migrated to the United States to escape the potato famine. Migrants in our time range from university graduates looking for career advancement in wealthy global corporations to those fleeing for their lives from armed conflicts in the Middle East or drug wars in Mexico and Central America. It is a complex and confusing picture.

There is one piece that stands out: A growing number of desperate people are fleeing violence and starvation.

I recall an apocryphal story of a man standing beside a river. Suddenly he notices a baby struggling in the downstream current. He immediately jumps into the river to rescue it. No sooner has he deposited the baby on the shore, than he sees another. The babies come faster and faster. He is so busy rescuing them that he fails to look upstream to see who is throwing them in.

According to a 2015 UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) report, 65.3 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution in 2015, the most since the aftermath of World War II. It is the highest percentage of the total world population since UNHCR began collecting data on displaced persons in 1951.

Of those currently displaced outside their countries of origin, Syrians make up the largest number, at 4.9 million. According to observers, this results from a combination of war funded by foreign governments and drought brought on by human-induced climate change. The relative importance of conflict and drought is unknown, because there is no official international category for environmental refugees.

The world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees.

Without a category for environmental refugees, we have no official estimate of their numbers, but leading scientists tell us the numbers are large and expected to grow rapidly in coming years. Senior military officers warn that food and water scarcity and extreme weather are accelerating instability in the Middle East and Africa and “could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.” Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, former military advisor to the president of Bangladesh and now chair of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change, notes that a one-meter sea level rise would flood 20 percent of his country and displace more than 30 million people.

Already, the warming of coastal waters due to accelerating climate change is driving a massive die-off of the world’s coral reefs, a major source of the world’s food supply. The World Wildlife Federation estimates the die-off threatens the livelihoods of a billion people who depend on fish for food and income. These same reefs protect coastal areas from storms and flooding. Their loss will add to the devastation of sea level rise.

All of these trends point to the tragic reality that the world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees that we must look upstream to resolve.

This all relates back to another ominous statistic. As a species, humans consume at a rate of 1.6 Earths. Yet we have only one Earth. As we poison our water supplies and render our lands infertile, ever larger areas of Earth’s surface become uninhabitable. And as people compete for the remaining resources, the social fabric disintegrates, and people turn against one another in violence.

The basic rules of nature present us with an epic species choice. We can learn to heal our Earth and shift the structures of society to assure that Earth remains healthy and everyone has access to a decent livelihood. Or we can watch the intensifying competition for Earth’s shrinking habitable spaces play out in a paroxysm of violence and suffering.

David Korten wrote this opinion piece for YES! Magazine as part of his series of biweekly columns on “A Living Earth Economy.” David is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including When Corporations Rule the World and Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty. Follow him on Twitter @dkorten and on Facebook. As do all YES! columnists, he writes here in his personal voice.

9 March 2017

By Thomas Gaist

Large numbers of persons fleeing war and famine in sub-Saharan Africa are transiting through Libya in a desperate effort to reach Europe, UNICEF reported last week.

An estimated 80,000 refugees, including 25,000 children, left Libyan ports in an effort to cross the Mediterranean Sea and enter southern Europe last year, with 4,000 of them dying during the crossing.

Another 320 refugees died attempting the crossing during the first two months of 2017 alone, a 300 percent increase from the same period in 2016. Some 16,000 African refugees have crossed from Libya to Italy so far this year, nearly double last year’s figure for the same period. Twenty-two refugees from sub-Saharan Africa were killed and 100 wounded during clashes between smugglers along Libya’s Mediterranean coastline on Tuesday.

There are 5.5 million Africans currently refugees in other countries, while 11 million Africans are displaced within their home countries, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) reported in January. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says 18 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa are at risk of becoming refugees in the coming year.

The tide of refugees comes predominantly from countries where the United States and its European allies have intervened most heavily. In Africa, just as in the Middle East, decades of imperialist warfare have shattered entire societies and turned large sections of the population into refugees. This is the most important factor underlying the huge exodus of dispossessed people now struggling to reach European shores.

Libya, which was destroyed and plunged into chaos by the 2011 US-NATO war, has become the epicenter of Africa’s refugee crisis. Refugee smuggling routes from across sub-Saharan Africa converge on the country, which has a long Mediterranean coastline and virtually no functionary authorities. A growing number of criminal networks and extremist militias specialize in transporting, and extracting money from, the refugees. While most of Libyan society remains in chaos, a system of detention centers, including for-profit camps run by militia groups, has managed to take hold.

“There are dozens of illegal prisons over which we have no control. There are at least thirteen in Tripoli. They are handled by the powerful armed militias,” a Libyan police official told UNICEF, quoted in the organization’s report, “A Deadly Journey for Children: The Central Mediterranean Migration Route.”

In Uganda, 120,000 South Sudanese refugees have crossed the border fleeing war in the past two months alone. Thousands of South Sudanese are fleeing the country every day, the United Nations refugee agency reported this week.

The South Sudanese civil war (2013-present), fought out between factions of a regime installed by Washington in 2011, is causing an unprecedented social collapse. The violence is fatally disrupting economic life, causing widespread famine and has forced 1.5 million to flee the country.

The South Sudanese war is producing “the destruction of all the social fabric in all parts of the country,” according to a secret report by the United Nations secretary-general, leaked to the Washington Post Monday. The South Sudanese government in Juba is blocking humanitarian aid from reaching areas in need, according to UN humanitarian secretary Stephen O’Brien.

January saw preparations for airstrikes by US F-16 warplanes based in Djibouti, with speculation they could be directed against targets in South Sudan.

The war in northern Nigeria is producing another humanitarian catastrophe that is among the worst in Africa. Five million northern Nigerians are in need of food in the northern provinces of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, and two million Nigerians may starve in the coming year, UN officials reported Monday.

The Nigerian war has involved a steadily growing US role. The Obama administration steadily expanded the US troop presence in neighboring countries. In May 2014, the Obama administration sent 80 US Air Force soldiers to Chad, under the pretext of searching for Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram. In March 2015, a US-backed Chadian army invaded northern Nigeria and seized several towns.

In May 2015, the White House authorized direct US military operations in Nigeria. In October 2015, the US Defense Department sent 300 soldiers to Cameroon, along Nigeria’s eastern border.

Last November, US AFRICOM General Donald Bolduc told the New York Times that the Lake Chad Basin, where Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon share borders, is becoming “ground zero for the fight against militant Islam in Africa.” Of the 30 million residents of the Lake Chad Basin, 2.6 million are already displaced as a result of military violence, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Although presented as the fault of “radical Islam,” Africa’s refugee crisis has, in reality, developed out of the crisis of world capitalism and the worldwide eruption of US militarism. The transformation of millions of Africans into homeless refugees, fleeing for their lives, is above all the responsibility of the American ruling class, and the criminal strategic aggressions it has pursued during the past two and a half decades.

Prior to the 1990s, the existence of the Soviet Union imposed constraints on US imperialism’s efforts to dominate Africa. The end of the USSR removed a political obstacle inhibiting the imperialist powers from pursuing the military conquest of their former colonies. It marked the beginning of a new scramble to redivide and enslave the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

For 25 years, Washington has sought to violently reorder African society and politics in accordance with the interests of American capitalism. Africa’s national elites eagerly adapted to the new situation, and have grown rich amidst the spread of war and famine. They have welcomed ever more US and NATO soldiers into Africa and have thrown open their economies for unrestrained exploitation by foreign capital.

Today, decades after Africa’s “independence” and decolonization, thousands of American troops are permanently stationed in Africa. The United States maintains an elaborate military infrastructure across large areas of the continent, including “forward bases” and “security locations” in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces,” Oxford Research Group security director Richard Reeve said. “There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases … so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.”

This week, joint US-African war exercises are taking place along the Nigerian border, involving thousands of US and Africa soldiers, including forces from Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco and Chad.

9 March 2017

By rt.com

Britain suffers from “historical amnesia” over the atrocities and plunder of its former empire, Indian MP and author Dr Shashi Tharoor told RT.

In his new book ‘Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India,’ Tharoor argues the real story of the empire was one of theft, murder, and expropriation of wealth. He says the modernizing developments cited by “empire apologists” were built for the primary benefit of British occupiers.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCmhk_9hqbU)

Speaking to RT’s Going Underground, Tharoor said: “India was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. In 1700, it was the richest country in the world – with 27 percent of global GDP when Britain had 1.8 percent.

“In 200 years of British rule, plunder… it was reduced to one of the poorest countries in the world.”

Tharoor, added: “When English people cynically say ‘it’s not our fault that you missed the bus for the industrial revolution’ my answer is ‘we missed the bus because you threw us under its wheels.’

“The British came in and destroyed the thriving textile industry, destroyed the thriving ship-building industry, destroyed the thriving steel industry… and substituted their products into what had become a captive market held down by force of arms.”

Britain’s education system fails to tell the real story of the British empire, Tharoor said.

“Why this historical amnesia? Why the desire to brush these things under the carpet? It’s often more convenient not to remember atrocities.

“The Germans went through a similar period of trying to brush everything under the carpet immediately after the Second World War.”

The Foreign Office responded to Tharoor’s comments, saying: “As two modern democracies, UK and India have a long standing friendship and work very closely together to promote our shared prosperity and global security.

“Our friendship is characterized by extensive political engagement and deep economic co-operation.”

8 March 2017

By Paul Craig Roberts

“The U.S. intelligence community’s extraordinary campaign of leaks claiming improper ties between President Trump’s team and Russia seeks to ensure a lucrative New Cold War by blocking detente.”
— Gareth Porter

27 Feb 2017 – It only required 24 days for the Deep State to castrate President Donald Trump and terminate the promise that the high tensions with Russia created during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes would be terminated by Trump’s presidency.

As Gareth Porter shows conclusively (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46546.htm), the case against General Flynn, Trump’s 24-day National Security Adviser, and by implication against Trump himself, is a fake news creation.

Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, planted fake reports, none of which contained any evidence whatsoever, on the CIA-compliant media whores known as “presstitutes.” The CIA’s media whores knew that the reports were a CIA response to the threat to the $1,000 billion annual budget of the military/security complex that desperately needs “the Russian threat” for its justification. But the media whores—-principally the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC—-and all the rest as well are more dedicated to serving their CIA master than they are to serving peace between nuclear powers. Interesting, isn’t it, that the US and Western media are more committed to conflict with Russia than they are to peace, despite the brutal fact that 10 percent of the nuclear arsenal of either the US or Russia is sufficient to terminate all life on earth.

As Patrick Lawrence says: “The lights upon us are dimming. We have been more or less abandoned by a press that proves incapable of informing us in anything approaching a disinterested fashion. As suggested, either the media are Clintonian liberals before they are newspapers and broadcasters, or they are servants of power before they serve us.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46532.htm

All we have left, says Lawrence, is the alternative media. “To put this simply and briefly, they and we must learn that they are not ‘alternative’ to anything. In the end there is no such thing as ‘alternative media,’ as I often argue. There are only media, and most of ours have turned irretrievably bad.”

The alternative media is the Internet media, websites such as this one, RT, the Intercept, USAWatchdog, Alex Jones, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Unz Review, etc. These independent news sites are under attack. Remember the list of 200 “Russian agents/dupes”? Every source of information that does not subscribe to the Deep States’ Matrix creation of “the Russian Threat,” which is the Deep State’s replacement for the orchestrated “Soviet Threat,” has been selected for shutdown. Apparently, Alex Jones is already having problems with Google. Several websites managed to get off the 200 List, and those that have seem to have collapsed as members of the opposition.

As the Nazis said, all it takes is fear, and the people collapse.

Trump’s presidency is effectively over. Even if he is permitted to remain in office,
he will be a figurehead for the Deep State’s presidency. President Trump has already fallen into line with the military/security complex. He has said Russia has to return Crimea to Ukraine, whereas in fact Crimea returned itself to Russia. He has rejected a new strategic arms limitations treaty (START) with Russia, stating that he wants supremacy in nuclear armaments, not equality. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/02/27/president-trump-decries-new-start-treaty.html Obama’s one trillion dollar upgrade of the US nuclear arsenal is likely to get a boost from Trump.

After one month in office the goal has changed from reduced tensions with Russia to greater tensions. Greater tensions might soon be upon us. There are plans to occupy part of Syria with US troops in order to prevent Syria with Russia’s help from reuniting the country. http://www.globalresearch.ca/rand-corporations-plan-for-dicing-up-syria/5577009 Part of Syria is to go to Turkey, part to the Kurds, and Washington will keep a chunk. This way Washington can keep the turmoil going forever. The Russians brought this problem on themselves. Ever hopeful for Washington’s cooperation against ISIS, Russia dallied in cleaning out ISIS. The prospect that Trump would work with Russia as part of better relations assumed that Trump would actually be in charge, which has turned out to be delusional.

It is difficult to know if the new Trump regime is more Iranophobic than Russophobic. The Trump regime’s inclination to jettison the Iran agreement and reopen the conflict means more conflict with Russia. Washington’s continued provocations of both Russia and China will dispel any lingering Russian expectations of better relations with Washington.

It is bizarre to see the liberal-progressive-left allied with the warmongers against Trump. As the neoconservatives pull nuclear Armageddon out of the grave that Reagan and Gorbachev put it in, the American left demands the impeachment of the president whose goal was better relations with Russia. Once the champion of the working class, the left now champions Identity Politics. Trump’s goal of jobs for the working class leaves the leftwing cold. The left wants to destroy the “Trump deplorables,” which the left describes as “racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun nuts.” In Identity Politics, every identity is a victim except the oppressor identity—white heterosexual males.

Where then is the opposition to the neoconservative ideology that is driving US foreign policy toward world hegemony? There are a few of us, but we are being cast as “Putin agents.” In other words, those who have sufficient intelligence to understand that Washington is not going to achieve hegemony over Russia and China or even Iran, but is likely to provoke nuclear war by trying, are relegated to the traitor class.

The reason that there is still life on earth after more than a half century of nuclear weapons is that American presidents and Soviet leaders worked together to reduce tensions. During these decades, there were numerous false alarms of incoming ICBMs. However, because the leadership of both countries were working together to avoid nuclear conflict, the warnings were disbelieved both by the Soviets and Americans.

Today the situation is vastly different. The last three US presidents, and now apparently Trump also, worked overtime to increase tensions between the two nuclear powers. Moreover, it was done in ways that convinced the Russian government that Washington is completely untrustworthy. The ongoing vicious lies about the Russian connections of Trump and his associates are so obviously false as to be laughable, but the Russians are seeing that the falsity of the charges notwithstanding, Trump’s National Security Adviser has fallen and Trump himself might be next.

In other words, the Russians are observing that in America facts are not relevant to outcomes. The Russians have already experienced this with regard to themselves with the lies about Putin, the Ukraine, Georgia, and Russian intentions toward Europe. Putin is routinely called a “thug,” “murderer,” “the new Hitler” by US politicians, presstitutes, and the Democratic Party’s candidate in the recent presidential election. Ranking US generals describe Russia as the “principal threat to the US.” NATO commanders assert that the Russian Army could occupy the Baltics and/or Poland at any moment. These nonsensical accusations and predictions suggest to the Russians that the West is preparing its populations for an attack on Russia.

In such a tense state of affairs, how will false alarms be interpreted? Will Americans convinced that Putin and Russia are evil incarnate believe the false alarms this time? Will Russians convinced that they have been set up for attack believe them this time?

This is the extreme risk to which the insane neoconservatives, the idiot liberal-progressive-left, the greedy military/security complex, and the aggressive generals have exposed life on earth.

And the few voices warning of the risk are dismissed as “Russian agents.”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate.

6 March 2017