Archives: Articles

By Jean Bricmont

European construction began as the dream of European elites and has become the nightmare of European peoples. For a number of European intellectuals and politicians, the dream was to transform Europe into a sort of Superstate, capable of rivaling the United States. For others, the idea was to get rid of the Nation-State once and for all, since it was considered chiefly to blame for the woes of the 20th century.

However, aside from the fact that this dream always enjoyed strong United States support, which casts doubts on its claim to constitute an alternative to American domination, it suffers from a fatal flaw: the nonexistence of a European people. That is, an overwhelming majority of European citizens feel part of their respective Nation-States, or of even smaller entities (Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders, etc.), much more than they feel “European”.

Advocates of European construction have two answers to that objection: either that the feeling of belonging is an historic construction (in the case of modern Nation-States) and is being changed into a “European” sense of belonging, or else that the sense of belonging does not really matter, inasmuch as political decisions must be taken on the basis of economic rationality (the liberal view) or class interests (the Marxist view), rather than on the basis of sentiments.

As for a sense of being European, it is perfectly possible that it may develop over the course of coming centuries, just as the various national sentiments did in the past. But one should not have illusions concerning the time scale. Such processes take centuries, and the Scottish example shows that even within a democratic State such as Great Britain, with equal rights for all and sharing the same language, centuries may not be enough to eradicate national feeling.

It is enough to watch sports events, such as the current European Cup, to see that national feelings are far from disappearing. They are not even disappearing among the “elites”: in Brussels, with rare exceptions, the representatives of the various Member States defend what they consider to be their national interest rather than the “European” interest.

As for the notion that national feeling does not matter, compare the national currencies that existed before the euro and the euro itself. Before the euro, changes in currency parities took place among Member States to make up for differences in economic strength between, say, Germany and France or Italy. But within each State, the unity of the national currency was maintained between rich and poor regions by a whole series of redistribution measures: identical pensions and social allocations, public investments and so on. These measures were politically possible because the citizens of these States “felt” that they were all French, or all Italians, or all Germans.

With the euro, there can be no adjustment in currency parity between weak and strong economies. Moreover, the eurozone lacks the redistribution mechanisms that existed between rich and poor regions of a single State. It is clear from following the Greek tragedy that the Germans do not feel sufficiently Greek – or even sufficiently European – to accept the transfers of wealth needed to “save Greece”. In short, national feelings have a huge economic importance, contrary to the views of the liberals and Marxists who both ignore or play down the importance of “irrational” feelings in social reality.

Or compare Europe with Latin America. In the latter continent, all the countries except Brazil have their origin in the same colonial empire, speak the same language, practice the same religion, even have more or less a common enemy (the United States) and have not massacred each other in recent major wars.

In Europe, it’s the other way around. The “memories” of the various peoples are very different, even contradictory, some having lived through communism, others through fascism, not to mention all the various wars among themselves. Their various legends and even languages preserve these diversities.

And yet, the integration of the Latin American continent is advancing in full respect of the sovereignty of each State. Nobody insists that Chile and Bolivia adopt the same currency, nor that all their four-year university programs be changed to five years, to “harmonize” studies, as with the Bologna process in Europe. If Bolivia or Ecuador decide to control their own natural resources, they don’t have do ask “Brussels” for authorization.

Such integration respecting national sovereignties could have been undertaken in Europe. That was the idea of a “Europe of peoples” proposed by Charles de Gaulle, ruled out by the existing European construction.

The left condemns the policy of the European Union because it is “neoliberal”, but the problem goes much deeper. The fatal flaw is that, in the absence of a European people, European construction can only be undemocratic and bureaucratic. A bureaucratic or autocratic power inevitably arouses hostility and ends up producing political effects contrary to those sought. If EU policies were “socialist”, they would arouse similar hostility.

From the point of view of the liberal right, depriving European peoples of their sovereignty and thus of democracy was natural because those peoples, left to themselves, would vote for too many redistributive measures.

On the left, European construction was promoted because those same peoples were supposedly chauvinist, nationalist, racist, and if left to themselves would surely end up at war with each other. This negative attitude toward their own population has been suicidal for the left, whose only base has to be the “people”.

The Europist left has made a mistake similar to that of the Communists in the past; they too thought that they were acting in the interests of the people, but the latter, being incapable of understanding, had to be led by an unelected elite.

This is particularly flagrant and tragic regarding immigration and refugees. The left Europists want to impose a policy of “opening” without ever asking their own people what they think, since some of them are sure to be against it. But they fail to understand that imposing an unpopular policy can only make it still more unpopular and that nobody likes being forced by others to be altruistic.

The Communists had their People’s Democracies, with democracy as only a façade.

The Europists have their Parliament which is another: it has no real power, and if it did, it would not be able to exercise such power because of the multiplicity of languages and national origins.

The Communists believed that national sentiments would disappear thanks to economic progress. The Europists bet on the same thing, but both have to acknowledge that “irrational” national sentiments have not disappeared, least of all when there is no sign of the promised progress.

For a long time the Communist used the accusation of antifascism to silence their opposition. The left Europists do exactly the same. The moment European peoples balk at the policies being imposed on them, they are ignored and accused of being populists and racists.

In both cases, that sort of intimidation works for a while but finally boomerangs. And when that happens, those who benefit from the popular revolt are those who never gave in to the intimidation, whether Communist or Europeist, that is, the nationalist or religious right.

No doubt, all that foreshadows “dark times” for our continent, as the Europists lament. But who is to blame? Not the Cassandras who try to warn of what is happening, but those who have “constructed Europe” on the shaky foundations of intellectual arrogance, contempt for the people and illusions concerning human nature.

JEAN BRICMONT teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is author of Humanitarian Imperialism. He can be reached at Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be

21 June 2016

 

By Eric Zuesse

When the democratically elected President of Ukraine was violently overthrown in February 2014 and replaced by a rabidly anti-Russian regime, not only the residents in the areas of Ukraine that had voted heavily for him (Crimea having voted 75% for him, and Donbass having voted 90% for him) were terrified by what they viewed to be a bloodthirsty new regime, but Russians were, too, because the dictators who were installed made clear their hatred of Russians and even of speakers of the Russian language — one of their first legislative initiatives was to outlaw the Russian language, but the blatant hatred there made the proposal die in Ukraine’s parliament because this new regime needed outside support, and outlawing a language spoken by around half of the nation’s population would have sparked international condemnation.

Shortly after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly on 16 March 2014 to separate from Ukraine and to rejoin Russia, of which Crimea had been a part until the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, the top military commander at NATO, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, said that because Russia had protected Crimeans from invasion by the newly installed Ukrainian regime, which was threatening Crimeans if they were to hold a referendum to separate from Ukraine, “now it is very clear that Russia is acting much more like an adversary than a partner”, and he speculated sarcastically about the “next place where Russian-speaking people may need to be incorporated” into Russia — as if the people of Crimea didn’t have good reason to fear the new regime, and as if speakers of the Russian language in all countries were in the same situation and needed the same protection; and as if NATO itself had any right to comment about this matter at all, since Ukraine isn’t even a member-nation of NATO anyway. Ukraine is a nation that shares a long border with Russia, but does this give NATO a right to ‘defend’ Ukraine from ‘Russian aggression’? Is NATO trying to provoke a Russian invasion in order for NATO to have a pretext to launch a full-scale nuclear war?

Why was the top military commander of NATO commenting on this at all? He was representing the U.S. President, not the people of Ukraine, and certainly not the people of Crimea. The people of Crimea had good reason to be terrified by the new regime, but Obama’s general who was running NATO’s military operations, didn’t care about that at all.

And the threat that the United States and its allies were posing to Russian-speaking populations in other countries that border Russia was also being ignored by the U.S. and its allies.

Alexander Lukin wrote about this matter in Foreign Affairs on 17 June 2014:

Today, the West’s continued advance is tearing apart the countries on Russia’s borders. It has already led to territorial splits in Moldova and Georgia, and Ukraine is now splintering before our very eyes. Divisive cultural boundaries cut through the hearts of these countries, such that their leaders can maintain unity only by accommodating the interests of both those citizens attracted to Europe and those wanting to maintain their traditional ties to Russia. The West’s lopsided support for pro-Western nationalists in the former Soviet republics has encouraged these states to oppress their Russian-speaking populations – a problem to which Russia could not remain indifferent. Even now, more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than six percent of the population in Estonia and more than 12 percent of the population in Latvia, most of them ethnic Russians, do not have the full rights and privileges of citizenship. They cannot vote in national elections, enroll in Russian schools, or, for the most part, access Russian media. The EU, despite its emphasis on human rights outside its borders, has turned a blind eye to this clear violation of basic rights within them.

Why does the U.S. government not care about the rights of ethnic Russians in countries which border on Russia, and which treat like dirt, people whose families had moved there from Russia? Is the U.S. government trying to goad Russia into protecting those people, too?

Why was General Breedlove (who hardly breeds love for oppressed people of Russian descent) mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin about the “next place where Russian-speaking people may need to be incorporated”?

Is Obama trying to force Putin to either lose face at home, or else to force Putin to ‘provoke’ a NATO invasion, in order to provide NATO an ‘excuse’ to attack?

On 4 May 2016, Breedlove’s successor, U.S. General Curtis M. Scaparrotti, took over from Breedlove, and he condemned “an aggressive Russia … a resurgent Russia trying to project itself as a world power.” If the U.S. government has a right to “project itself as a world power,” then why doesn’t the Russian government possess the same right — especially in order to defend itself? The headline of that news report from the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ was “‘Resurgent Russia’ Poses Threat to NATO, New Commander Says”, but precisely what ‘threat’ Russia poses to NATO wasn’t even suggested there, other than the vague charge of a “resurgent Russia striving to project itself as a world power.”

Is General Scaparrotti trying to goad Putin to either lose face at home, or else ‘provoke’ a NATO invasion?

But now NATO is staging Operation Atlantic Resolve, their biggest-ever military maneuvers on Russia’s borders. This includes nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev tried to plant Soviet missiles 90 miles from the U.S. in 1962, the American President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was ready to go to a nuclear attack against the Soviet dictatorship; this was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin soon be ready to go to a nuclear attack against the new American dictatorship, which is moving much farther against Russia’s democracy now, than the Soviet dictatorship ever did against America’s democracy then?

Does Obama think he’s playing some kind of game here? Khrushchev didn’t think it was any game; nor did Kennedy. Khrushchev backed down, in a deal in which the previous U.S. President’s, Dwight Eisenhower’s, initiation of installation of U.S. missiles in Turkey against the Soviet Union were also removed. Kennedy negotiated an elimination of both Eisenhower’s and Khrushchev’s provocative and dangerous acts, in a nuclear-armed world. Putin has been careful not to do anything that threatens the U.S., except to protect Russia from what by now is clearly U.S. aggression. But the fact that a democratic Russia has not violated a now dictatorial U.S., constitutes no excuse for U.S. Presidents continuing the aggression that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush started against democratic Russia.

Meanwhile, we have blatant NATO propaganda spread on German public television, asking “Is NATO expansion to blame for Crimean crisis?” and answering: not only no, but “just change NATO’s name” and we all should ignore Russia’s worries about the hostile U.S. military alliance that has spread right up to Russia’s borders and that’s intent upon posting nuclear missiles minutes from Moscow.

Do Western leaders really think that Western publics are stupid and callous enough to believe that? Is the leaders’ presumption, about this, correct? Is this the reason why nuclear war is getting perilously close while Western publics are worried about it little if at all?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

18 June, 2016
Strategic-culture.org

By John Scales Avery

NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance, whose purpose is to “protect Europe from aggression”; but today it is aggressive tool of the United States. Today NATO is threatening to drive Europe into an all-destroying thermonuclear war with Russia.

In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.

Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include the whole world”

At present the United States government has forced the European members of NATO to participate in aggressive operations in connection with the coup which it carried out against the elected government of Ukraine. The hubris, and reckless irresponsibility of the US government in risking a catastrophic war with Russia is almost beyond belief.

According to The Guardian, June 16, 2016, “The largest war game in eastern Europe since the end of the cold war has started in Poland, as Nato and partner countries seek to mount a display of strength as a response to concerns about Russia’s assertiveness and actions.”

“The 10-day military exercise, involving 31,000 troops and thousands of vehicles from 24 countries, has been welcomed among Nato’s allies in the region, though defence experts warn that any mishap could prompt an offensive reaction from Moscow.”

“A defence attache at a European embassy in Warsaw said the “nightmare scenario” of the exercise, named Anaconda-2016, would be ‘a mishap, a miscalculation which the Russians construe, or choose to construe, as an offensive action’ ”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/nato-launches-largest-war-game-in-eastern-europe-since-cold-war-anaconda-2016

Do the people of Europe really want to participate in the madness of aggression against Russia? Of course not! What about European leaders? Why don’t they follow the will of the people and free Europe from bondage to the United States? Have our leaders been bribed? Or have they been blackmailed through personal secrets, discovered by the long arm of NSA spying?

To save itself from the danger of nuclear annihilation, Europe must declare its independence from America, just as the United States once declared its independence from Britain.

Some suggestions for further reading

http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky130616.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44891.htm
https://www.sott.net/article/319923-War-is-a-racket-US-terrorizes-and-scams-Europe-through-NATO
http://www.makewarshistory.co.uk/?p=2415

http://www.cctv-america.com/2016/06/15/the-heat-nato-war-games#utm_sguid=155260,43357f6d-09a8-927c-abd1-8d4fdafed861
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/06/16/pentagons-real-trategy-keeping-money-flowing
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/05/americas-natos-outrageous-behavior-greatest-threat-exists.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44883.htm
http://www.countercurrents.org/gaist150616.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44852.htm
http://www.countercurrents.org/avery090414.htm

The Illegality of NATO

Europe Must Not Be Forced Into a Nuclear War with Russia

http://www.countercurrents.org/avery240615.htm

John Avery received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago.

18 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rupert Read & Thomas Wallgren

Trade treaties were a hot button issue during the recent US presidential primary campaigns. This represents an important victory for the people – for the grassroots – whose voice is finally being heard. While it’s hard to know what really lies behind Donald Trump’s opposition to the trade agreements, it’s very significant that Bernie Sanders put Hillary Clinton on the defensive about NAFTA and led her to take a stand against the TransPacific Partnership (TPP). In rejecting these trade deals, political leaders are going against the top-down pressure from global corporations and banks. We must of course be alert to the fact that politicians pander to voters while seeking election, but once in power they only seem to hear the voice of big money. Nevertheless, the fact that awareness about the trade treaties has become so widespread is itself a huge victory. Now that these corporate-friendly deals are seeing the light of day, it is unlikely that future trade agreements will be easy, automatic victories for global capital.

In the UK, meanwhile, another fierce debate is underway: voters in Britain will soon decide whether or not to remain in the European Union. Although this issue parallels – and is in fact linked to – the debate around trade treaties, most voices in favor of Brexit seem to offer little more than narrow nationalism, xenophobia and racism. Such associations make it feel impossible for most Greens and progressive thinkers on the left to vote ‘Leave’ in the upcoming UK referendum.

And that settles it in the minds of some: one ‘has’ to vote ‘Remain’. Anything else feels ‘unprogressive’, reactionary, even downright dangerous.

However, there are powerful arguments against the European Economic Union. In all five Nordic countries – Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark – there has been a very powerful critique of the EU from an ecological, cultural, global solidarity and democratic perspective. A large proportion of the population in those countries realized that the impetus to link countries together was primarily based on a misguided notion of economic growth. However, these arguments didn’t reach the English-speaking world, and today on both sides of the debate in Britain this misguided notion continues to prevail.

In order to make sense of misleading pro and con arguments in the media, we need to go behind the scenes to examine the issues holistically. We need to look carefully at the process of economic ‘integration’ that has been going on for several generations now around the world.

At the regional, national and global level, societies and ecosystems have been transformed in order to accelerate economic growth. The emphasis has been on increasing international trade and benefits to international traders, at great cost to ecosystems, livelihoods, and democracy. It is important to understand the formation of the EU in this context, but by no means do the points we make here apply to the EU alone.

The EU is dedicated to corporate interests and economic globalization

The European Union is an extension of the Bretton Woods institutions – The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

It is widely assumed that the European Union was formed in order to prevent conflict and in order to avoid another depression. In the aftermath of the Second World War, political elites and business leaders promoted the notion that economic integration was a path to peace and harmony.

But the result was a form of economic development – based on debt, global trade and consumerism – that systematically undermined democracy and favored corporate interests while hollowing out local economies worldwide. In country after country, transnational corporations (TNCs) have been able to evade taxes by ‘offshoring’ their activities, and to bargain for lower tax rates and higher subsidies by threatening to move where even less in taxes will be demanded, and more in subsidies provided.

Today, interlinked multinational banks and corporations constitute a de facto European government, determining economic activity through the ‘European market’. Their vast lobbying power has an overwhelming influence on the EU Commission and the secretive Council. In other words, corporations run Europe.

Economic integration imposes human and ecological monoculture

Europe is home to a great variety of cultures, languages and customs. The economic union is based on an economic model that is eroding this diversity, which was born of human adaptation to different climates and ecological realities. A fabric consisting of mutually enriching and different cultural traditions is being replaced by the uniform culture of consumerist ‘individualism’.

Previously, the many borders, currencies, and differing regulations made trade difficult for big business, while the diversity of languages and traditions put limits on mass marketing. None of these were obstacles to businesses operating within their own countries – in fact, the borders and cultural diversity helped protect the markets of domestic producers from the predations of mobile capital, helping to ensure their survival.

But for big corporations and financial institutions, diversity is an impediment, whereas monoculture – in all aspects of life, from seeds, fast food and clothing, to architecture – is ‘efficient’. For them, a single Europe-wide market of 500 million people was an essential step to further growth: their growth.

Meeting that goal required a single currency, ‘harmonized’ regulations, the elimination of borders, and centralized management of the European economy.

The EU economy increases pollution and CO2 emissions

The global economic model promoted in the EU increases pollution and fossil fuel use in a multitude of ways.

First of all, economic policies are responsible for a concentration of jobs in ever-larger high-rise urban centers. When people move into urban areas, net resource and energy consumption tends to rise, massively increasing CO2 emissions and toxic pollution.

Secondly, the EU subsidies system not only wipes out family farms but paves the way for agribusinesses that destroy soils and ecosystems, or employ cruel factory farming methods.

Thirdly, investments in infrastructure and fossil fuel subsidies help to prop up the energy-intensive system of mass production for mass consumption. Moreover, most energy subsidies tend to support highly centralized power systems, rather than more decentralized renewable energy.

Even worse is ‘redundant trade’: in a typical year, Britain exports millions of liters of milk and thousand of tonnes of wheat and lamb, while importing nearly identical amounts. The cod caught off the coast of Scotland is shipped 5,000 miles to be turned into fillets in China, then shipped back again.

This kind of wasteful trade – which greatly overshadows the efforts of well-meaning individuals to reduce their personal carbon footprints – actually benefits no one but massive corporations. And it is not efficiency but a wide range of subsidies and ignored costs that make it all possible.

National governments stripped of political power

At the same time as governments subsidise big business, they must pay from their depleted treasuries to retrain displaced workers, to mend the unraveling social fabric, and to clean up the despoiled environments left behind by deregulated, mobile corporations.

Forced to go hat-in-hand to banks, countries can easily find themselves on a downward spiral, with interest payments consuming an increasing proportion of national output. It’s no wonder that so many governments today are struggling to stay afloat, while global corporations and banks are flush with cash.

This has left nation-states increasingly powerless to deliver what people need. They have lost the power to protect their citizens from the impacts of international capital and financial speculation. As a result, many people have lost confidence in governments and democracy itself. They feel disenfranchised and angered by the escalation of inequality-driven by international market forces and rootless, profit-hungry corporations, with the full complicity of the EU.

This is a dangerous situation, ripe for exploitation by extremist forces, including those of atavism and of outright fascism.

European government is not the answer

Many idealists see the EU as a political bloc that has raised environmental and human rights standards continentally and globally, and acted as a buffer to the United States. There is much truth in this. And to greatly strengthen pan-European collaboration with the aim of solving our global ecological and human rights problems is clearly highly desirable.

However, this type of collaboration does not need to – ought not to be allowed to – erode the rights of smaller nation states to run their own affairs under clearly negotiated agreements of environmental protection. We hold that the relatively high standards in the EU have been a consequence of the integrity of the democracies in many of the constituent countries, not a consequence of creating a single market that benefits big business.

We would also argue that to assess the overall contribution by the EU to global environment and human rights affairs we must not look exclusively at the relatively benign EU policies in these areas themselves but also at the consequences for ecological justice of EU policies in trade and military policy.

In fact, the main impetus behind the European Economic Union was the desire of big business to compete with the US. And to a great extent, what we have today is a nascent United States of Europe, competing with the US about market shares but also working closely together with the US in preserving the hegemony of the global North over the global South.

European democracy? If only …

Meanwhile, within the EU, the public has very little power and ability to affect decisions. There is no common public sphere where European citizens can get together to muster democratic control of the European economy and the administrative power concentrated in Brussels.

The European Parliament is weak, and, more importantly, elections to it work mostly on a national-level basis. There are no real European political parties and movements. Thus the situation is even worse than it is at the national level: for at least at the national level there is a public, a citizenry, a demos, a press, a political debate.

It might appear that the solution is to remove power from national governments and give it to a democratically-controlled European government. There is something completely understandable about this impulse. After all, there is a real need for international co-operation around the political and ecological crises gripping our planet.

But scaling up government means increasing the distance between civic society and their representatives. It would be a step backward to create a federal superstate of Europe. Such a government would be virtually incapable of responding to the diverse needs of half a billion people.

Democratic institutions need to operate at a level that is comprehensible and accessible to people: at a human scale. We must take seriously the possibility that global democracy – people’s urge to care for the globe and for all its citizens – can only be real if most functions are local and people’s dependence on global trade and institutions is limited.

When presented by continent- and global-level problems caused by businesses and untrammeled markets, let’s increase international collaboration with the goal of scaling down businesses and markets. This form of collaboration is fundamentally different from scaling up government. It points in the opposite direction!

The following point is then at the heart of the very challenging position we find ourselves in: there is a profound mismatch between politics at the national level, and economics at the international level. Many well-intentioned ‘progressive’ / green / ‘Left’ people and organizations across the continent believe the best response to this problem is to create a true (rather than a merely de facto) European government. Yet this is likely to merely amplify the control already exerted by corporations over the European economy.

The answer, instead, is to decentralize the European economy. This will enable us to shape economic activity to reduce waste and resource consumption while providing meaningful livelihoods and restoring the environment. Through decentralization and relocalization we also reassert democratic control over our own destinies.

The way forward: localization

There is an alternative to undermining our own people in order to enrich foreign corporations and banks. It’s called ‘localization’ and it involves moving away from ever more specialized production for export, towards prioritizing diversified production to meet people’s genuine needs; away from centralized, corporate control, towards more decentralized, local and national economies.

This means encouraging greater regional self-reliance, and using our taxes, subsidies and regulations to support enterprises embedded in society, rather than transnational monopolies.

A shift away from the global towards the local is the most strategic way to tackle our escalating social and ecological crises. Localization shortens the distance between producers and consumers by encouraging diversified production for domestic needs, instead of specialized production for export.

Localization does not mean eliminating international trade, or reducing all economic activity to a village level. It’s about shifting the power from transnational corporations to democratically accountable entities, including nation states. At the same time we need to build up regional and local self-reliance. It’s about reclaiming power over our lives while simultaneously shrinking our ecological footprint.

Localization – the benefits

In contrast with the make-believe of derivatives and debt-based money, localization is founded in real productivity for genuine human needs, with respect for the rich diversity of cultures and ecosystems worldwide.

By shortening the distance between production and consumption, localization minimizes transport, packaging, and processing – thereby cutting down on waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. This simultaneously increases resilience, which will be needed to cope with the inevitable crises coming our way.

Localized economies rely more on human labor and creativity and less on energy-intensive technological systems. This increases the number of jobs while reducing the use of natural resources.

By spreading economic and political power among millions of individuals and small businesses rather than a handful of corporate monopolies, localization provides the potential for revitalizing the democratic process. Political power is no longer some distant impersonal force, but is instead rooted in community.

As the scale and pace of economic activity are reduced, anonymity gives way to face-to-face relationships, and to a closer connection to Nature. This in turn leads to a more secure sense of personal and cultural identity.

Localization is a remarkable solution-multiplier, but it should not be mistaken for a complete panacea. It offers no guarantee for peace and ecological wellbeing. Going local needs to be pursued in full awareness of the need for environmental and human rights protection that goes beyond local, regional and national borders. It’s a prerequisite, a necessity in order to build the accountable structures we need that respect and renew diversity.

Localization, or decentralization, was central to the thinking of the people’s movements in the Nordic countries that have resisted full integration into the EU. In Norway, the economic and political elites twice tried to achieve EU-membership and were defeated, thanks to the campaigns for democracy and global responsibility for environment and justice.

In Denmark and Sweden, membership in the Eurozone has been rejected in several referenda after historic grassroots campaigns. In Iceland, the popular support for EU membership has always been weak. The first application for membership in the EU was submitted in 2009 but suspended in 2013 when the pro-membership government lost elections.

UK voters: think before you vote!

We are facing huge crises: the frightening specter of climate change; the threat of nuclear annihilation; the enormous problems of hypermobility and large-scale migration …

These are all consequences of a fixation on growth and technological ‘progress’. The leadership in both Brexit and Remain are committed to promising more ‘economic growth’ to the millions of people who are struggling to hold on to a job, struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

The ‘growth’ that is being discussed is actually supporting excessive global trade and global businesses and banks. The very same process is handing over more wealth and power to the 1%, to the detriment of the 99%. And this type of growth demands ever-more energy for global infrastructures, including bigger airports, ports and super-highways.

So we have a system that destroys livelihoods while driving up CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution. More and more people, including Nobel laureate economists, are questioning this path.

There are some who would believe that collaboration at the pan-European level could facilitate a path to genuine economic decentralization. Others are convinced that those steps to localize can best be taken by first leaving the EU. Still others don’t favor either of these paths. We are not trying to tell UK readers how (or even whether) to vote; we are asking you to help us shed light on and bring sanity to this volatile situation.

Whichever way you vote, please reject the glaringly stupid rhetoric in the media. Speak out, let your voice be heard for ecological and economic sanity, for a fundamental turnaround.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is founder and director of Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). A pioneer of the “new economy” movement, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than thirty years. She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness, and is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. She was honored with the Right Livelihood Award for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh, and received the 2012 Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.”

Rupert Read was a Green Party councillor in Norwich and a candidate in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. He is Chair of the Green House thinktank.

Thomas Wallgren founded the campaign Yes to the World – No the the EU before the Finnish referendum on EU-membership in 1994. He is a member of the advisory board of Corporate Europe Observatory and of the city council in Helsinki for the Social Democrats.

16 June, 2016
CommonDreams.org

By Afro-Middle East Centre

The Iraqi army’s assault on the city of Fallujah held by the Islamic State group (IS) has ground to a halt in light of fierce house-to-house fighting with IS fighters. The city has been under IS control since January 2014, with 90 000 civilians trapped inside. Some 20 000 civilians fled during the first few weeks of the fighting, which began on 25 May, through IS lines, dodging Iraqi army fire, and even swimming the Euphrates river. In the initial push towards Fallujah, the Popular Mobilisation Forces (Hashd al-Sha’bi) were at the forefront of the battle. These Shi’a militias have been accused of numerous human rights violations against Sunni communities, since their cooption by Baghdad in the fight against IS.

Merely fifty kilometres north of Baghdad, Fallujah is strategically important to the Iraqi capital. IS has used it as a staging ground for infiltrating the capital, and executing attacks that have sapped confidence in the government’s ability to provide security. The manner in which Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi retakes Fallujah and returns it to Baghdad’s authority will serve as the template for the Iraqi army’s impending assault on Mosul, which will be conducted in coordination with Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The battle of Fallujah also represents an internal political issue for Iraq’s Shi’a political class. The successes of the Badr Brigade, a Shi’a militia with strong links to Tehran, in securing Baghdad and beating back IS from Diyala province has provided Badr leader Hadi al-Ameri with significant political capital. Meanwhile the protest movement in Baghdad against corruption and poor service delivery threatens to de-legitimise Abadi’s fledgling government.

The inability of Iraqi forces to coordinate with Sunni tribal leaders – who the government had alienated through heavily sectarian security measures – granted IS the ability to consolidate its control over Fallujah in 2014. In light of the failures leading up to the fall of Fallujah, the government has recently worked to increase coordination with Sunni tribes and militias in battles to retake territory seized by IS since mid-2014. This coordination is a conscious attempt by Abadi to provide a united national front against IS, exemplified through the increasing purchase Sunni tribes and militias have over Baghdad’s approach to retaking Sunni areas. Sunni tribes have called on the government to reign in Popular Mobilisation Forces in the Fallujah assault. Abadi had attempted to hold them on the outskirts of the city. In the days leading up to the current assault, reports of abuses by these forces against Sunni civilians in the liberated areas south of Fallujah prompted Anbar’s Provincial Council to call on ‘sectarian factions [to keep] away from the battle of Fallujah’. In light of these abuses, Abadi also ordered the government to prosecute fighters accused of committing violations.

Within the Shi’a political class, Abadi is on the back foot. The Badr Brigade has become a prominent force within Iraqi politics through its successes against IS. Badr’s political front, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, is poised to become kingmaker in Iraqi elections. This party receives much financial support from Tehran, and uses its control of Diyala province to exhibit its potential as a ruling partner. Meanwhile, the Sadrist camp, led by influential Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, seized upon the May protests in Baghdad’s Green Zone to demand the prime minister changes his cabinet to a technocratic one, eradicates corruption, and enhances service delivery. Sadr and Abadi support the incorporation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces into the Iraqi army, a move opposed by Badr head Ameri. Other militia leaders echo this.

The battle for Fallujah will be a protracted engagement for Iraqi national forces, is becoming increasingly bloody as Iraqi forces get closer to the centre where IS militants are holed up, allegedly using civilians as human shields. Abadi knows that using the militias will grant political points to his rivals. However, these forces have proved effective at clearing and occupying rural zones around contested cities. Abadi thus devised a formula in which Popular Mobilisation Forces are held at the outskirts to prevent IS reinforcements entering the cities, but play no visible role in the liberation of the city. This is a positive development in the battle against IS. The perception of the Iraqi army as liberators in Sunni Fallujah will assist in the pursuit of national unity. Success could guarantee Abadi’s administration the popular support it drastically needs.

16 June 2016

By Thomas Gaist

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is sending 4,000 additional troops to Eastern Europe in the name of reassuring Poland and the Baltic states, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed on Monday. “We will agree to deploy by rotation four robust multi-national battalions in the Baltic states and Poland,” Stoltenberg told NATO officials.

The US, Germany and Britain will each contribute 1,000 soldiers, with Canada expected to confirm its own contingent of 1,000. The deployments are among the most provocative actions taken by the NATO high command in the course of its anti-Russian buildup, now well into its second year. With ever greater recklessness, the US and European ruling elites are sowing the seeds of war across the width and breadth of the Eurasian landmass.

The announcement of new troop deployments comes in the midst of Operation Anaconda 2016, involving more than 30,000 NATO forces in the biggest war drill held in Poland since the end of the Second World War. Some 12,500 of the 30,000 soldiers are American.

In Eastern Europe, under the guise of “rotational deployments,” NATO has established a permanent military force. Put forth for public consumption as a response to Russian “meddling” in Ukraine and alleged provocations by Russia’s military along the frontiers of NATO’s eastern member states, the real purpose of NATO’s spearhead force is to prepare for a ground invasion across Russia’s western border.

Beginning with the February 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, the US-dominated imperialist alliance has relentlessly stoked confrontation with Moscow and laid the foundations for a continental-scale war aimed at breaking up and conquering the Russian Federation.

The continued massing of Western troops along Russia’s border makes good on US President Barack Obama’s September 2014 promise that the US and NATO powers would provide “eternal” military assistance to the Baltic states. In effect, Obama committed the most powerful military alliance in the world to waging all-out war against Russia should one of the tiny Baltic states claim to be under attack from Moscow.

Such a war, which would immediately raise the prospect of a showdown between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, would ostensibly be launched to defend some of the smallest and least populated countries in Europe, which are ruled by far-right and rabidly anti-Russian regimes.

The Baltic governments are actively encouraging the deployments and calling for still more NATO military hardware over and above the vast stocks of tanks, artillery and heavy weapons pre-positioned throughout Eastern Europe by NATO since 2014. Backed by the Western alliance, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are placing their societies on a war footing. They are putting their armed forces on high alert and awaiting the call for mobilization against Russia.

On Monday, Lithuanian defense official Juozas Olekas told the UK’s Daily Express that Russia “might exercise on the borders and then switch to invasion in hours.” At stake in Lithuania is “the credibility of the whole alliance,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius.

NATO defense of Estonia’s air space must be “first and foremost” on the alliance’s agenda, Estonia’s military chief said, before demanding a permanent presence of NATO troops in Estonia. “These forces are in Estonia to send a clear and unequivocal message to the adversary: do not quarrel with NATO,” he said.

The charge of “Russian aggression” against Europe is among the central lies employed by present-day imperialism. Seizing on the secession of Crimea from post-coup Ukraine and the enclave’s integration into the Russian Federation, the NATO establishment has sought to justify its war preparations as a defensive precaution in the face of a Putin government supposedly primed to invade Central Europe.

While Russia’s military saber-rattling, which alternates with attempts at compromise with the West, only adds to the war danger, it is essentially of a defensive character.

On Monday, citing unnamed NATO sources, British media accused Russia of “circumventing the Vienna accord and building up troop numbers in sensitive locations on Europe’s doorstep.” Announcing plans to boost military expenditures by $3 billion annually, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg declared: “This will send a clear signal that NATO stands ready to defend any ally.”

US and European imperialism are committed to defend the Baltics because it supplies them with a pretext and a staging area for covert and military operations along Russia’s flanks.

In Washington and some European capitals, powerful elements within the imperialist bourgeoisie are actively conspiring to engineer further provocations and destabilization operations against Russia.

The integration of former Soviet republic Georgia into NATO is slated to be a core issue at next month’s NATO summit in Warsaw. Russia and the pro-Western government of Georgia fought a brief war in 2008, and Moscow has vociferously opposed the country’s joining the US-dominated military alliance.

The integration of Georgia would greatly facilitate the projection of US and NATO power against Russia’s southern flank in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea Basin. Last week’s announcement of intensified US military operations in Afghanistan is bound up with preparations to use that country as well to strike against Russia’s “soft underbelly” in Central Asia, in particular against Russian interests in Kazakhstan.

The NATO buildup in Eastern Europe is producing levels of militarist frenzy not seen in Europe since the 1930s. During war drills in Lithuania this week, as the German and Danish militaries rehearsed marching on the Russian border, Danish Colonel Jakob Larsen told the media, “You see it differently when you live here. We need to learn to fight total war again.”

14 June, 2016
WSWS.org

How do we even talk about the horrific killings in Orlando, which left at least 50 LGBTQ revelers dead and more than 50 more injured in the middle of pride month? First we mourn. Then we rage. Then we hug our loved ones, especially our LGBTQ friends, comrades, and family members.

Then we look again, and we see the horror — that this murderer was licensed to carry guns and had no trouble buying incredibly powerful military-style weapons. So casually. So legally. So common, across our country. That’s when we start to rage again.

More troubling still, Omar Mateen worked for a company that was perpetrating systemic violence against vulnerable people long before he took up arms against his LGBTQ neighbors. For nine years Mateen worked for G4S Security, a British-based corporation that contracts with the U.S. and Israeli governments for work that often violates human rights on a massive scale.

G4S, which brags about having 600 staffers on the southern border, has contracts with U.S. immigration authorities to detain and deport people back to Mexico, as well as to run private juvenile detention facilities. In Israel, meanwhile, G4S profits from providing equipment and services in Israeli prisons and interrogation centers where Palestinians are routinely tortured. It’s also involved in running Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Incidentally, G4S is the company that trained Mateen to work as an armed security guard, which licensed him to carry and use weapons. And although his coworkers told supervisors that Mateen “frequently made homophobic and racial comments,” the company did nothing. It kept him on board — and kept him armed.

Should this company continue to profit from multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. government?

Since 2012, there’s been a major campaign against G4S, resulting in decisions by major mainstream institutions — like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Methodist Church, numerous European universities, important charities in South Africa and the Netherlands, UN agencies in the Middle East, and more — to divest from G4S holdings, or to cancel or not renew service contracts. G4S is profiting from exactly the kind of anti-Arab and anti-Latino racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that are all on the rise in the U.S. right now.

If the early reports are accurate, G4S’s long-serving employee is responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

And here let’s continue to be careful with our numbers. As my IPS colleague Karen Dolan and others have been pointing out, our nation’s origins are grounded in genocide and slavery. Earlier history has to take into account things like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when between 150 and 300 children, women, and men were gunned down. That mass shooting is part of our history, too.

But our nation’s history also includes the great movements that have risen against war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. The party at Orlando’s Pulse club was part of a month-long Gay Pride celebration rooted in the extraordinary movement that grew out of the 1969 Stonewall revolt, when bar patrons fought back against police brutality toward gay men and lesbians. June 12 was a special Latino Night at Pulse. And Reverend William Barber, a leader of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, reminded me that June 12, now seared in our memories as the day of the Orlando massacre, is also the anniversary of the 1963 Mississippi assassination of the great civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

One more link between our movements — from Stonewall to Orlando, from Mississippi to Palestine.

Muhammad Ali

And with all the discussion and debate these days about intersectionality and the need to link our movements against racism and against war, the name of Muhammad Ali belongs right up in our pantheon with Dr. King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Howard Zinn, and so many other women and men who fought and continue to fight those linked battles together.

In the history of our movements for peace and for justice, the most strategic activists, analysts, leaders and cultural workers were always those who understood the centrality of racism at the core of U.S. wars, and who grasped the ways in which U.S. militarism relied on racism at home to recruit its cannon-fodder and build public support for wars against “the other” – be they Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Yemenis or …

It was Muhammad Ali who first described the Vietnam-era draft as “White people sending Black people to fight Yellow people to protect the country they stole from the Red people.” He said no to the draft and refused to step forward to accept the legitimacy of the coerced registration. Ali was convicted of felony draft resistance, facing years in prison, while remarking “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong [sic].”

What is perhaps less well known, but absolutely consistent with this man of extraordinary principle, is his 1974 statement in Beirut. After visiting refugee camps filled with Palestinians dispossessed of their homes in the 1947-48 Nakba, or catastrophe, Ali said, “I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland.”

All of those statements were massively controversial at the time. Ali’s initial resistance to the draft led to his being excluded from professional boxing for years. Yet Ali and the anti-war and anti-racism movements that Ali was part of continued their work. And Ali’s own presence, his principles, his influence was such that in later years the tributes poured in, including his memorable lighting of the Olympic flame at the otherwise corporate-controlled, ultra-establishment 1996 Atlanta games.

Wracked with the tremors of advanced Parkinson’s disease, he held the torch high and stood tall somehow with more grace, dignity, and power than any of that year’s athletes. His incandescent presence that night made undeniably clear, once again, that the movements against war and racism that Ali so eloquently spoke for and that he remained such an elemental and principled part of, had already succeeded in transforming public discourse, if not yet public policy, across the United States.

15 June 2016

EIR’s Jeff Steinberg interviews Virginia State Senator Richard Black on his recent trip to Syria and Lebanon. The two discuss the resilience of the Syrian people, the impact of U.S. sanctions on Syria, and the overall U.S. and Western strategy of “regime change.”

TRANSCRIPT

The following is a transcript of the LaRouche PAC video interview, conducted by EIR Counterintelligence Editor Jeffrey Steinberg with Virginia State Senator Richard Black.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Senator Black it’s a pleasure to be here. And you’ve just returned from a trip to the Middle East, to Syria and Lebanon, and why don’t you just start by telling us what you saw and your assessments of the situation there?

SEN. RICHARD BLACK: What we did, we spent the better part of a week; we spent our time in Lebanon initially; we met with General [michel] Aoun, who is sort of the presumptive next President of Lebanon. We met with Foreign Minister [gebran] Bassil who is the head of the Christian bloc of the parliament there. And also with the Syrian ambassador to Lebanon; which is a new thing. You know the Syrians have not had an ambassador there until just recently.

From there we flew to Damascus and were then taken out and we visited Palmyra, where the Syrian army conducted an enormously heroic fight to drive out ISIS and assisted by the Russians who did a very good job there. And then we drove from Palmyra to Homs. Homs is the largest province, it’s the size of an American state, but it’s also a very large city.

It was an incredible visit, because, like you, I have studied the Syrian war, the origins of the war for years, since 2011. I know you go back before that, but this is when I got so focused on it. And the best way to explain it, is that through intensive study and what we would call “open source intelligence,” you begin to get a very clear concept of what the war is all about, and the origins of the war. But when you go there and you actually walk the grounds and you shake hands with the soldiers and meet with the refugees and people like that, it turns black and white into Technicolor. And I’m going to tell you: Syria is one of the most incredibly wonderful nations on Earth. And the fact that America set out to topple the government and destroy it, long before there was the faintest hint of civil unrest, it’s really one of the great stains on American honor.

So when I went there, one the one thing that stands out so vividly is this incredible religious tapestry of religious harmony, between the Christians, the Alawites, the Sunnis, the Shi’ites, everyone; and there is such freedom of religion in Syria, and it’s stunning. You know, as an American, here we have the Federal courts being partially repressive to Christianity in particular, and you go over there and I went to the Syrian broadcast system SANA, did an interview. And I came out and in the press room here is the plywood cutout of the Christmas tree and the ornaments are journalists who were martyred covering the war. And you think, “My gosh, if you did this in the United States, the ACLU would be all over you! You’d be in Federal court, and they’d rip down the tree.”

And we went to the theater in Homs province, in Homs city; it’s a large, modern theater, probably seated a thousand people. And they introduced me and they were very polite and receptive. And I sat next to the governor and his wife, and they’re Muslim, and so I’m watching: Here’s this choral presentation, very beautiful, everyone in tuxedos and the orchestra and a very lovely woman, and naturally, the woman very charismatic, you’re focused on her; and then gradually your eyes start to shift gaze. And then, suddenly, I look and I realize that behind them is a theater screen with a projection of Jesus Christ, bloodied, crown of thorns, staggering under the weight of the cross. And I looked at it — and I didn’t even know what they were singing, because they were singing in Arabic, right? And I realized later that they were singing Christian religious songs. And I turned to the wife of the governor, and I said, “Is this a religious theater, a Christian theater?” She said, “No, no, no, this is just a regular theater for entertainment. We put on shows, we put on concerts, everything.” But it happened that on the Julian calendar, we were there for Palm Sunday and we left just prior to Easter.

And so, she said, many of the people here for the presentation are Muslim. She said, the choral group, many of them are Muslim also. And here, they’re participating in the praise of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ! Not that they are not serious Muslims, but it’s also indescribable without seeing it in person. I had heard about it, and from hundreds of Syrians, but to see it and just to encounter it at random, you suddenly were able to “breathe” religious freedom there!

STEINBERG: I think I told you, when I was in Damascus in March of 2010, some of the things that were completely stunning to me, were the Grand Mosque right off of this great market area. You walk in there; it’s a gigantic, beautiful mosque, and right in the middle of it is the tomb of John the Baptist.

BLACK: Yes.

STEINBERG: And we went to parts of the old city, and we visited one of the earliest, the very first of the Christian churches anywhere in the world, and it’s just really stunning. The first event that we went to, was an ecumenical conference. It was at a Sunni religious school; there were Shi’ite, Alawite, Sunni; there were Christians, there were Franciscan monks attending; people from Scandinavian churches. And that night there was a celebration in the old city, and they had these Sunni dervishes.

So it’s what you’re describing: If you’re not there and you don’t see it, it’s almost hard to concede that this is such a natural phenomenon in this country, and you see what the Saudis and the Turks and others are trying to establish, which this hard, sectarian fight within Islam , that has no bearing on the traditional culture of Syria as a country!

BLACK: Yes, and you know, I spoke with Lebanon very senior officials, and of course, discussed this with President Assad and with the top leadership of the Syrian parliament. And one of my questions, is why is there war in Syria? We know, this was not a popular uprising. This was a calculated decision by the CIA, MI6, French intelligence, working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Turks, Saudis — an organized plan to topple the government. And of course we were familiar that there competing plans for oil and gas pipelines. And I come up a divided mind on exactly what’s going on: It is true that the oil and gas pipelines are a major, major incentive for this war.

But the other thing, that both Lebanese and the Syrians were quite insistent on, is that it is Saudi Arabia’s desire to impose Wahhabism. They’re not content that the vast majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims; now, if you listen to the press, they say, “oh, you know, we need a Sunni government.” Well, there are umpteen million Sunnis who are in the government and in high positions, and in the army and everywhere else. What they really mean is that we want Wahhabism, the type of Wahhabism that says that you impose severe, brutal Sharia law, and you begin beheading people, you force conversions and you take the wives of the Christians that you’ve murdered and you sell them at slave markets, which is happening right now in Iraq, perhaps in some parts of Syria also; but their feeling is that the true zeal behind this is this desire to impose the harshest, most extreme and violent, brutal form of Islamic rule.

STEINBERG: What you’re describing is the ISIS and the al-Nusra Front which is simply al-Qaeda, and the Saudis carry out beheadings, cutting off limbs, as their brand of Sharia law justice, exactly as ISIS and Nusra do in the areas they control.

BLACK: That’s exactly correct. And this has gone on through history. When I visited the Church of the Patriarch of Syria and the East, we went to a little adjacent, Christian school, and they had paintings of martyrs, and just as a reminder, that the history of Turkey, the Turks and the Saudis share the same history of violence towards those who do not share this most extreme view. And there was a painting that just stood out in my mind of a martyr, a woman during the Armenian genocide, a Christian, and the extremists had come in and they had amputated her feet and her hands. And she had an infant, and she cradled the infant and breast-fed the infant for the next couple days until she finally died of the torture they’d imposed on her.

So you know, they had suppressed this in Turkey under Ataturk, starting 1925. I read the Turkish Constitution; it’s admirable, it’s a very fine Constitution. But now you have President Erdogan who has said…

STEINBERG: He’s ripping it up.

BLACK: He’s tearing it to shreds, and he says “I want the powers of Adolf Hitler.”

STEINBERG: That’s right.

BLACK: Our ally. Our ally says, “I want the powers of Adolf Hitler!” Imagine that!

STEINBERG: Mm-hmm. And it was brushed off and explained away in the American media as a misquote or something like that, as if he hadn’t said it, and didn’t mean it.

BLACK: And he never retracted a word of it! But a spokesman said, “well, you know, it’s sort of out of context.” Well — gimme a break. How do you put “the powers of Adolf Hitler” out of context! You know?

STEINBERG: Right, exactly.

I wanted to ask you, because I think you made a very important point about the Saudis and what they want, the Turks and what they want, but if the United States and Western European were not in on this for their own reasons, from the very outset, I doubt that the Saudis or the Turks would have been able to create the mess. And I’m reminded that way back in 1991, right at the point that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were disintegrating, according to Gen. Wesley Clark, he met with Paul Wolfowitz in Dick Cheney’s office — Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.—and Wolfowitz went through a list of governments targeted for regime change because they had at various points, allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And Syria was right near the top of that list; Syria, Iraq, Libya, others.

And so, I wanted to get your assessment, given the way the situation has played out, the tragedy of the last five years, do you think that this could have actually occurred were it not for the full, witting complicity of the United States, both under President George W. Bush and now, for the last seven years, under President Barack Obama?

BLACK: That’s an excellent question. If one of our assistants could hand me the black and white poster over there, I think this could help to explain it somewhat. [Placard reading “Syrian War Countdown” 16:10]

Let me just run you through this, because the timeline is extremely important: In 2001, Gen. Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe has told us, that the Pentagon was ordered by the Secretary of Defense to make plans to topple seven different countries, neutral, non-belligerent countries, in what was an act of aggression under the law of war, which is a war crime. And so, the Pentagon began war-planning 2001.

Now, President Bashar al-Assad did not take office until I think it was 2000; so he was brand new. He’d come in as a reformer. But reform, good or bad, didn’t matter; we were going to topple seven countries, all of them also enemies of the Saudi Arabians. The United States is pulled around by the nose by Saudi Arabia, and for our senior leaders in this country, they all have a meeting with Mr. Green. And Mr. Green persuades them to do whatever the Saudis tell them.

So, OK, you start with 2001, the Pentagon starts planning. In 2006, WikiLeaks has released a document that came from the Chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy; at the time, we didn’t not have an ambassador, so the Chargé d’affaires was the senior person. That document outlined, in detail, plans to overthrow the government of Syria. And the two things that stand out in my mind is, we have a problem because President Assad came in as a reformer, he’s doing a lot of positive things, and so it is drawing an enormous amount of foreign direct investment and we’ve got to smear the image of Syria so that it will begin cutting off this flow of funds, and will adversely impact the Syrian economy. This is the United States, your country and my country, saying “we’re going to destroy another country by smearing their reputation.

The other thing which I think was equally sinister, is in this country that has this beautiful religious harmony, we said have got to create religious division, religious frictions and hatred among religions, so that we can disassemble this country.

But there were six very specific things outlined. And keep in mind, in 2006, there were no demonstrations, there was no political opposition, there were no uprisings, people were prosperous, they were happy.

So here you go from 2005, we start planning the war; 2006, we come up with explicit plans. You go to 2011 and the CIA works to gain the release of the most deadly al-Qaeda operatives in Libyan prisons and uses those people to spark an uprising in Benghazi, the purpose of which — and I wish, you know, Congress, while they’re always talking about Benghazi, they never talk about before Benghazi. What was the reason we were there in the first place! Why did we attack our
ally, Colonel Qaddafi — now we have had problems with Qaddafi but we had resolved them …

STEINBERG: In 2003, he dismantled his WMD program and became — even John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham, in early 2009, were in Tripoli and said “this guy’s our best friend in our war against — ” it wasn’t ISIS yet, but “the war against al-Qaeda and the other jihadists.”

BLACK: Yes, yes. So, absolutely, he was our best ally. And however, his big mistake was he had a huge arsenal of modern weapons, that we needed, to overthrow Syria. The reason that we went into Libya was, to capture their weapons to feed and fuel the war against Syria. Because we knew, Syria was a powerfully united, cohesive nation of people who — you know, every country has people who are unhappy or who are dissidents; we have ’em in this country — but we knew that we had a tough nut to crack here, because this was a very cohesive country. So we needed a huge amount of armaments. The reason we went into Libya was to capture these. And this is all laid out by Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersh in his article, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” something that was censored; almost everything he’s done has been widely printed by major media, and they censored it. But the London Review of Books has it published, and he explains why we went in, how we captured the weapons, and how we started the rat line, flying arms in.

Because the CIA could not go before Congress and say, “Look, we intend to attack a neutral, non-belligerent country, where the people are happy, prosperous, and enjoy greater women’s rights and religious freedom than any other Arab nation; we’re going to rip it to shreds, we’re going to open up a torrent of bloodshed: Please give us an appropriation so we can purchase weapons to do it.”

STEINBERG: Right.

BLACK: That would not have gone over well. So, we went around it, and we captured the weapons in Libya, sent ’em to Syria. Three months after the war in Libya, even before Colonel Qaddafi had fallen, we started the war in Syria. And the technique that we used, — now just watch the timeline: We go from 2001, we decided to bring ’em down then, it was 10 years! An entire decade of planning and plotting and preparing.

STEINBERG: Exactly, exactly.

BLACK: So, you look at this timeline, and then, of course, we’ve employed massive, unrelenting propaganda against President Assad and his government. We call him a “regime,” the “Assad regime.”

STEINBERG: Right, as opposed to “an elected, sovereign government.”

BLACK: Yes. Now, of course, we always ignore the fact that he was popularly elected, in fair and open elections in 2014. Now, on the other hand, we sit at Geneva III at the peace talks, and on one side we have Saudi Arabia, where if you were to suggest the election of the King or dictator of Saudi Arabia, your head would be a spike the next day; and then, on the other hand, you have President Erdogan, the man who would be Adolf Hitler! [laughter]

STEINBERG: Right!

BLACK: It is so bizarre. And the method that we use, the specific method when we triggered this is interesting. The Arab Spring started with a single suicide, and it is very difficult to conceive that it did not spread without very active covert action. Nothing ever happens in politics, nothing just happens without a push.

So there actually began to be legitimate demonstrations in Syria as well as across the Middle East. What I found interesting, I talked to several people — I just bumped into them on my trip, and they said, “Oh, I was anti-Assad then.” Well, one of them turns out to be my interpreter; he’d been with me for the better part of a week! And one day we’re talking, and he said, “You know,” he said, “I was a demonstrator against President Assad.” And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me about it?”

He said, “Well, we just started. It was during the Arab Spring, and we started holding demonstrations.” Much like, you and I have both probably been involved in demonstrations! But he said, “first, people started showing up with al-Qaeda flags.”

STEINBERG: Yeah. The black flags.

BLACK: “Then,” he said, “people started showing up with military weapons.” Now, there is no Second Amendment in Syria, so you don’t just grab a Kalashnikov at the corner drug store.

STEINBERG: Right. You don’t go to a gun show on Sunday afternoon.

BLACK: That’s right, you don’t do that. And he said, “The third thing, is they began to preach religious hatred!” And all along the demonstrators would say, “You guys, get out of here, get out of here! This is not what we’re about. We’re just here asking the government for some changes.” And the friction became tougher and tougher, and he said, “My uncle was the head of all the demonstrators” in this large city, and he said, in the seventh month of back and forth with the al-Qaeda people, they murdered him; they killed him.

And so I asked the same question of the several people I encountered, who had been anti-Assad. Well, they weren’t anti-Assad, they were demonstrators; they weren’t demonstrating against him.

STEINBERG: Sure. They wanted reforms.

BLACK: They wanted reforms. You know, I’ve been in demonstrations; I wasn’t demonstrating to bring down the government, I was there for reform.

And this was news to me, because I knew about this transition, but what was stunning that consistently, — two out of the three said that this transition took place over the span of a single month; the second one said it took place over the span of two months. So within one to two months, what started as demonstrations became an al-Qaeda-led violent, jihadist uprising. And of course, you still had demonstrators struggling to make it a demonstration. But that was how it developed.

STEINBERG: You know, it coincided with the period in 2010 going into 2011, when back here in Washington, there was a study ordered by President Obama, of how to relate to the anticipated insurgencies that were going to sweep across the Muslim world, particularly North Africa and the Middle East. The conclusion that was arrived at by people like Dennis Ross, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, was that the horse the United States should ride in on was the Muslim Brotherhood.

BLACK: Yeah.

STEINBERG: And these are still classified, National Security Study and Decision Directives, that are the cornerstone of the U.S. strategy, which was to basically play into the jihadist insurgencies.

BLACK: Yes, and you know, that brings us to a good point: You then come to the point of the uprising itself, how was this carried out? Just prior to the uprisings, Ambassador Ford was sent to Damascus; we had not had an ambassador there for some time. He was put in place by Hillary Clinton. Around that time, of course, you have all of these covert agencies; Western agencies, plus the Saudis and the Turks. And their mechanism was the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood had created a violent uprising under the father, Hafez Assad, and it’s often portrayed some put-down of these poor people. It was not at all that: It was a violent uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood copied, almost with precision, the approach that the Nazis took during Kristallnacht, which triggered the anti-Jewish backlash by the Nazi Party. The Nazis during Kristallnacht and they painted the Jewish star on all Jewish buildings and residences, and then on signal they surged through and they smashed and they beat, they killed 92 people. With identical procedures, the Muslim Brotherhood, first they hired people to stand on the street corners with placards that said, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” Which meant, we’re going to kick out 10% of our population, another 10% we’re going to murder them. In short order, it changed to “Christians to the grave, Alawites to the grave,” which meant, we’re going to kill 1 out of every 5 Syrians.

So they had these people carrying these placards, and then, at a certain point, the Muslim Brotherhood sent people out at night; they marked the residences, and the businesses, with the Nazarene symbol; and then right after mosque, with the most extremist mosques, they surged out and began beating and roughing up and murdering Christians. Within three days from the city of Hama, 70,000 Christians streamed into Damascus; why Damascus? Because they knew that President Assad would protect the Christians. He would protect anyone who was under attack by the Muslim Brotherhood.

And interestingly, then, Ambassador Ford and the French ambassador, get in a car; and the city of Hama had been ringed with security forces so that they could restore order to the town. And violating diplomatic protocol, they bypassed security, they met with the demonstrators, and they promised total American support. And by that action, they converted demonstrations into an armed revolution. And this was done intentionally.

STEINBERG: Right. I was at an event in Washington, in June of 2011, and there was still a Syrian ambassador in Washington at the time. It was Dr. Imad Mustafa. And this was really even before the major eruptions of violence that came a bit later in the year. And he presented a series of videos of sermons that were given by these Wahhabi and other radicalized clerics in these small, rural areas; and it was an absolute call to arms! And this was early on in the process. He said, “this is what we’re dealing with. This is a problem that has existed for a long time, but now, suddenly this problem has mushroomed tremendously, because there’s all of this outside support and encouragement coming from Washington and coming from all of these other places.”

This is what has been described as “regime change.” Using quote “civil society,” as a kind of a human shield, for organized, well-armed, violent elements, that make the claim that they’re part of a public outcry, upsurge; but in fact, it’s an organized, financed, and armed operation.

You mentioned the Sy Hersh article: the United Nations as part of the enforcement of the arms embargo had been monitoring all of those weapons going from Libya into Syria, into the hands of the jihadists. And there were a series of UN reports that tracked out, from Benghazi ships and planes from Qatar and from Turkey, that were overseen by American and British officials on the ground, loading the weapons up; and this is all in official United Nations reports, indicating exactly what you described: the flow of weapons through these channels into the rebels in Syria. Yet, you won’t read a word about that in the American and European media, which is completely on board with this regime change strategy.

BLACK: Well, you know, I’ll tell you what is amazing, Jeff, is that when we started the war on terror, after 9/11, it was essentially a war against al-Qaeda and similar organizations. We have gone full circle from opposing al-Qaeda, which sent 3,000 Americans to a flaming death on 9/11, complete circle to where we now supply them; we arm them; we finance them; and it’s all coming with the approval of the highest authorities in the United States government.

And you know, if you want to consider whether the people of Syria are for or against their government and their President, just consider this: Syria has a population of 23 million people. It is in the sixth year of a war in which it has been opposed by the United States, Great Britain, France, NATO, the European Union, …

STEINBERG: Right. The GCC.

BLACK: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the GCC — this massive force! I mean, basically, all of the great nations of the world, — almost all, not China and Russia, of course — but almost all of the great nations have descended on little Syria, and it’s like “The Little Train That Could,” they just keep chuggin’ and chuggin’ and chuggin’.

And I spoke with the First Lady, who is just utterly charming. She is not — unlike the First Ladies we’re accustomed to who are ostentatious, and pompous and arrogant — she is very down to earth, a very nice person; and she said, “One of the things I’ve done,” she said, unlike worrying about hamburgers and billboards and things like that, she goes out and she meets the families that have lost sons in battle, and she says, “I’ve now met with over 1,000 personally.” She said, “when I first did it, I was naturally apprehensive, and I knew that I would go to some homes and the people would be just so distraught that they’d burst out in anger at anybody who came, and was like me.” But she said, “I was so surprised. I had never encountered that. Every home I go to, they tell me, we are so deeply sad for the loss of our son, but we cannot think of anything for which we would rather have sacrificed our son than for the defense of Syria, for the unity of this nation.”

And I saw that over and over: I went to a hospital for amputees, and I discovered, — just to my personal disgrace as an American — that the sanctions we have imposed on Syria prevent them from receiving prosthetic devices, amputees. They said, not long ago, they had 600 cancer patients, and they said, “look can you make an exception to the exchange provisions,” where we’d blocked all foreign exchange, “so we can get medication for these cancer patients?” And the Treasury Department said, “No. You don’t get prosthetic devices for people who are missing legs and arms; you don’t medication for cancer patients…” There’s such utter cruelty in our government! I mean — our Federal government!

When I was a young Marine, we used to — at the end of the day we’d stand there, the drill instructor would march back and forth, and we’d scream the Marine Corps hymn, and we’d say the words, “we will fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean, we’re proud to claim the title of United States Marine.” If ever our honor has been disgraced, here we are cutting off access to prosthetic limbs for people! Where have we come?! What has come of this country?!

STEINBERG: Exactly. And these are really violations of the Geneva Conventions. There are rules of war, and rules for the kind of medical care that all parties deserve in wartime. And it’s violated.

I wanted to ask you before we finish up: Within the bounds of what you’re comfortable discussing, your impressions and things that came from both your discussion with President Assad and maybe some of the other officials; and similarly, when you were Lebanon, I’m wondering what General Aoun might of shared with you, in terms of his view of what has happened in the region; because is one of the countries that has been greatly affected, and badly, badly damaged by this phenomenon. The Saudis have basically vetoed a President being selected by the parliament because they don’t want anything that would stand in the way of their — as you say — their drive to spread Wahhabism everywhere.

BLACK: Yes. Well, you know, Lebanon has a unique structure, where the President is always a Christian, the Prime Minister is always Sunni, and the Speaker of the Parliament is Shi’a. It’s their way. They don’t quite achieve religious harmony quite as smoothly as Syria does. But interestingly, General Aoun spent a good part of his life fighting against Syria, because Syria occupied a portion of Lebanon; and Syria withdrew under President Assad. When he took over he began the withdrawal and completed the withdrawal of Syrian troops. General Aoun always took the position, he said, “when you’re in my country you are my enemy,” he said, “when you’re out, you are my friend.” And he has been true to that. He’s a delightful man.

And he clearly is supportive of the government of Syria, and I think is very respectful of the President of Syria. And I think he realizes something that I was quoted by ISIS as saying. You know, there were three Americans chosen as enemies as ISIS, but they quoted me, in a way that said, “this man is telling the truth, and listen,” because they said, “in the words of the enemy.” They called me the “American Crusader” — “in the words of the enemy,” and they quoted me accurately and I had said something to the effect that, if Assad falls, then the dread black and white flag of al-Qaeda will fly over Damascus; and within months, Lebanon will fall, and Jordan will fall. And with the consolidation of this very large area under the control of al-Qaeda, we will then face this tremendous extremism that will percolate over into Turkey where it already is taking hold, very rapidly. And that that will begin a drive on Europe, and I believe that this time, Europe will fall.”

And I think that from General Aoun’s perspective, from President Assad’s perspective, from the various officials that I spoke with, I think they share this belief; I think they believe that this is the objective of al-Qaeda.

And you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became so distraught, so very concerned about the eventual outcome of events in Syria, that they tasked the Defense Intelligence Agency in the summer of 2013 to do complete study and to render findings of fact. The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is not political like the CIA, came up with three findings: They said 1) President Assad must not leave office because if he does, Syria will fall into chaos, just as Libya has done. 2) Turkey is a major problem, because they are the supplier of ISIS, they give them arms, ammunition, everything that ISIS gets comes out of Turkey. And 3) which is the very thing that President Assad has said from the beginning, they said, there are no moderate rebels. The notion is a fantasy, they do not exist! And yet, I think yesterday, Secretary Kerry was out there saying, we’ve got to help the moderate rebels. The “moderate rebels” are al-Qaeda, who flew the jets into the Twin Towers and today these are the “moderates”!

So this is where we have come….

STEINBERG: Right, right. And “Saudi Arabia is our greatest ally in the region.”

BLACK: Yeah. Saudi Arabia, there is increasing evidence pointing to Saudi Arabia as the prime actor in the attacks on 9/11; more and more people are beginning to conclude that as evidence starts emerging.

And so here we are: We are allied with the country most complicit in the 9/11 attacks on us, and we have gone full circle and we are now supplying al-Qaeda with TOW antitank missiles and we’re preparing to give them even more advanced weapons such as antiaircraft missiles; they can be used to shoot down Boeing 747 jets at Dulles Airport, and Heathrow and LaGuardia and across the world.

Extremely reckless, nearly an insane American policy, driven by Saudi wealth that lines the pockets of top people in this country. It’s sad.

STEINBERG: I want to thank you very much. This was really an important visit that you made, a courageous visit. And I think sharing these insights and getting them out as widely as possible is one of the critical steps in getting the United States back on its traditional track which we have veered off of so dangerously that we might not make it as a nation, if we don’t make the corrections in time.

BLACK: We are on a suicidal course, and I really appreciate you, helping to get the word out. We’ve got to change course, or it’s coming here, and it’s coming fast.

STEINBERG: That’s right. Thank you again.

BLACK: Thank you very much.

larouchepac.com

By Laura Vozzella

RICHMOND — After Virginia state Sen. Richard H. Black popped up in Damascus this spring, shaking hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the reaction was swift and cutting.

“Dangerously clueless,” Democrats said. “Ignorant” of Assad’s brutality, said the White House. Even fellow Republicans cracked jokes.

In the month since, the Northern Virginia legislator, who regards Assad as a protector of Syrian Christians and a buffer against Islamic extremism, has been on the receiving end of something else: invitations.

Black (R-Loudoun) has been asked to speak, alongside congressmen and a senior State Department official, at a Washington forum on energy and foreign policy. To attend a reception, as the guest of a Jewish constituent, at the Israeli Embassy. To hold Skype sessions with Middle East interest groups. To address a couple of hundred Syrian expats in Boston.

“There’s definitely a lot of interest in hearing what I have to say about Syria,” Black said. “I think it’s pretty clear to people that they’re not getting the straight scoop from their government, and they’re interested in hearing factual information about what’s actually going on.”

Black’s late-April meeting with Assad continues to reverberate, raising and expanding the profile of a man who for years had been known for a single anti-abortion stunt: He was the guy who once mailed tiny plastic fetuses to fellow legislators. Now, he’s the local legislator who had a two-hour sit-down with Assad, a dictator the Obama administration says unleashed chemical weapons on his own people.

Democrats see his trip as a tin-eared political caper, one that reinforces the notion that Black is not just outside the mainstream but also a little nutty.

“If I got on a plane and said to Assad, ‘Attaboy,’ you would absolutely think, ‘Saslaw has lost it,’ ” said state Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax). “And by God, you would be right. . . . I like Dick, but we’re moving into weird.”

Black’s support for Assad has earned him other foes; he now has a spot on the Islamic State’s enemies list. But Black, 72, has also drawn praise from left- and right-leaning skeptics of U.S. foreign policy. The decorated Vietnam veteran figures that about half the people who have phoned to express approval are Democrats from the party’s Bernie Sanders wing.

A global viewpoint
To critics who say Black had no business lending legitimacy to Assad, the senator replies in a way familiar to anyone who has seen him operate in Richmond: with passion and a visceral reference to war. “Show me somebody on the [U.S. Senate] Foreign Relations Committee who has shed more blood for this country, and maybe they can tell me I have no business speaking out,” said Black, who received a Purple Heart for his military service.
Black fought in the jungles of Vietnam, flying helicopters for the Marines, directing the dropping of more than 1,000 bombs and engaging in close ground combat.

A onetime Baptist who converted to Catholicism as an adult, Black feels deeply about war, suffering and life. That drives him whether he is battling abortion or conducting an unlikely tete-a-tete with Assad in the Syrian palace, where the discussion ranged from international politics to chit-chat about family.

Even before Vietnam, Black was drawn to global affairs. He grew up with a father who traveled across Latin America for the IRS and a nanny with a backstory out of an international thriller. After the war, he was stationed in Germany as an Army lawyer. So Black thinks — and acts — globally, sometimes in ways that seem jarring for a state legislator with no role in setting foreign policy.

[Va. senator travels to Syria to shake hands with Bashar al-Assad]

His April visit with Assad was particularly surprising because Black, one of Virginia’s strongest voices for protecting life at every stage, embraced a man the White House blames for a 2013 sarin gas attack that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Black feels certain that Turkey and al-Qaeda engineered the attack in hopes of triggering a U.S. strike on Syria. The senator says he believes that by drawing attention to the issue with his visit, he can help set U.S. foreign policy straight.

But Black’s intensity and tactics — whether he’s praising Assad or blasting Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” as “moral sewage” — can make him an easy target, even among kindred spirits.

[Why a Va. senator told a teacher, ‘You do not know better than the parents’]

“I can’t comment on this. But I want to. So much,” Del. C. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) tweeted in April along with a photo of Black shaking hands with Assad.

Black drew similar reactions in 2014 when he wrote a letter of praise to Assad. The Syrian president posted it on Facebook, prompting the Islamic State to put Black on its enemies list.

“What’s the matter, Dick?” state Sen. William M. Stanley Jr. (R-Franklin) joked at the time. “Kim Jong Un not returning your text messages?”

‘Would you kill this child?’
Black is used to the jabs. He is still mocked — 13 years later — for enclosing tiny pink, plastic fetuses in letters he sent to senators ahead of an abortion vote. And yet, Black’s bill became law.

As a state delegate in 2003, Black wrote a bill requiring minors to get parental consent for abortions. The measure cleared the House but seemed doomed in a Senate committee controlled by moderates. On the eve of the committee vote, Black’s letter landed.

“You can see that by the 11th week of gestation, a child is well-developed and unmistakably human,” it said. “Would you kill this child?”

The little fetus dolls, bought for 17 cents a pop from an anti-abortion group, caused an uproar.

“People were really appalled by this and talked about nothing else for days afterwards,” said Sen. Janet D. Howell (D-Fairfax). “My receptionist was sobbing. . . . She had had many miscarriages, and she and her husband so much wanted a baby. And here she comes to work, opens my mail — which is her job — and out came a fetus. It just devastated her. And I have never forgiven him for it.”

Black said the outcry helped his cause, drawing attention to the bill and preventing moderates from quashing it in committee. Yet even some pro-life Republicans questioned his strategy.

“You need to shock the conscience, not [cause] the visceral, physical revulsion,” said one Richmond Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending Black.

Bucking conventional political wisdom has often worked for Black, who has beaten better-funded challengers backed by Emily’s List and other abortion rights groups. Black led a revolt against GOP leaders in 2014, when he warned that Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) had a secret plan to circumvent the legislature to pull off his marquee campaign promise: expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
Pure conspiracy theory, GOP leaders said at first. But Black dug in and eventually got changes made to obscure budget language that he said could pave the way for an expansion via executive order.

The McAuliffe administration, which declined to comment for this article, later conceded that the governor was, in fact, pursuing a secret expansion plan — one thwarted by Black.

[Puckett’s Senate exit undid McAuliffe’s secret plan to expand Medicaid]

‘Unnaturally stubborn’
When he was young and his mother ill, Black had a nanny who told stories of international intrigue and injustice. Born in Germany, she was an acrobatic dancer who, while entertaining troops during World War II, was caught behind enemy lines in Poland and gang-raped.

She resumed dancing after the war and was on tour when her troupe went belly-up, stranding her, penniless, in Havana. There she met Black’s father, an IRS agent dispatched to audit island hotels owned by American mobsters. She moved to Miami to care for Black and a younger sister.

As a painfully shy, pimply teenager in Miami, Black was drawn to nerdy-but-daring pursuits. He hunted poisonous snakes. He nearly blew himself up in a home chemistry lab. He was “unnaturally stubborn” by his own account and refused — even as his nanny beat him with a ruler — to put down his chemistry book and go to bed. That was the last straw for the nanny, who quit.

But her stories of brutality, combined with his tour in Vietnam, formed a potent foundation for his later career as a Pentagon lawyer prosecuting rape cases and as a legislator in the General Assembly.

“When I think about abortion,” Black said in the Senate one day in 2013, on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, “my mind returns to battlefields in Vietnam.”

He went on to describe, in cinematic detail, the death of an enemy soldier who had lobbed a grenade at the Americans and got a bayonet slashing in return.

“I remember this enemy soldier, this Viet Cong soldier, screaming, screaming with desperation, screaming like an animal,” said Black, who wanted his enemy’s suffering to end. “And all that I could do as the enemy were surging around us was to yell across the field and say: ‘Shoot him! For God’s sake, just shoot him!’ And they did.”
“As we ran by, I recall looking at him, and he was clearly dead,” he said. “No one would doubt that he was dead. And yet his body shook with the adrenaline that had surged from the horror and the terror that he had gone through. Ladies and gentlemen, the children who die in the womb don’t die easily. People do not die easily. People die in a desperate struggle for life.”

Stanley, the Republican who later teased Black about his fan letter to Assad, took in that speech from a corner of the Senate reserved for GOP cut-ups. All opposed to abortion yet inclined to crack wise, they rolled their eyes as Black launched his Vietnam analogy.

“We’re like, ‘What is he talking about?’ ” Stanley said. “And by the end . . . we were all so moved by it that we were in tears.”

But Democrats were outraged that Black had also invoked the Holocaust, as he suggested that people might look back on abortion someday and wonder why ordinary citizens did not do more to stop it.

For such a polarizing figure, Black has forged some unlikely alliances. He has won praise from some women’s groups for separate laws he wrote that made the state address its backlog of untested rape kits and allowed minors to consent to rape exams, even when their parents object.

“He picked up the torch,” said Kristine Hall, policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance.

Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington), a vocal abortion rights advocate, worked closely with Black last year to address concerns that colleges were playing down sexual assault. She did not find it easy. Black wanted all campus rapes reported to police. Favola feared that would deter some victims from seeking help. Only after weeks of wrangling did they reach a compromise.

“He’s very well intentioned,” she said. But “he does not see any gray in things.”

Some of Black’s harshest critics suggest something darker. They point to comments he made in 2002, while debating a bill to change Virginia’s definition of spousal rape, which then applied only to cases involving physical injury or couples living apart.

“I do not know how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape where they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie and so forth, there is no injury, there’s no separation or anything,” he said.

The remark resurfaces every time he runs for office.

“GOP Congressional Candidate: Spousal Rape Shouldn’t Be a Crime,” read a Mother Jones headline in 2014, when Black briefly ran for Congress.

Black said he never doubted the notion of spousal rape; in the 1980s, he prosecuted an Army doctor for raping his estranged wife. He said he only questioned how prosecutors could win convictions without injury or separation. And ultimately, he voted for the bill, which became law.

But to Black’s detractors, such as Progress VA Executive Director Anna Scholl, the “nightie” comment suggested that he blames victims for inviting sexual assault.

“It speaks,” she said, “to a deeper sentiment that men just sometimes can’t help themselves.”

Library board to legislature
His first stint in politics came after Vietnam, when he was back at the University of Miami and elected to the student senate. Black was in his late 20s, married, with two children. In the Age of Aquarius, his idea of a toe-tapper was “Born Free.” He was the odd man out.

“The antiwar movement was roaring, so the senate spent most of its time — when they weren’t talking about rock concerts — talking about the war and trying to pass antiwar resolutions,” he said.

Decades passed before he joined another deliberative body. In 1997, soon after retiring and moving to Loudoun County with his wife, Barbara, to be near their first grandchild, Black was put on the local library board. He greeted the gig like a jury summons.

“I told myself, ‘Boy, this really sounds boring,’ ” he said.

At his first meeting, Black learned of plans to provide Internet access — something he feared could expose young library patrons to pornography. He persuaded the board to require filters, triggering a civil liberties lawsuit and making national news.

“Maybe if I had done this in Nebraska it would have been one thing, but to do it in Loudoun County, home of AOL, was hugely contentious,” Black said.

In the Virginia House and later the Senate, Black continued to champion social issues, along with bills related to autism, Lyme disease and many other topics. He also spent the better part of a decade seeking clemency for a black woman who, under the state’s three-strikes law, got a much harsher sentence for robbing banks with a fake grenade than a more affluent white woman who had robbed a string of pharmacies with a toy gun.

That bit of Black’s biography is all but forgotten in Richmond, though his pro bono effort was the subject of a Washington Post article in 2003. The story made note of something else about Black.

“He’s the guy,” it said, “who sent miniature plastic fetuses to his fellow legislators during a debate over an abortion bill this year.”

Laura Vozzella covers Virginia politics for The Washington Post.

3 June 2016

 

by Shireen T. Hunter

The question of how to help promote human rights globally has always had a political dimension. States often press these issues in the case of those
countries of which they disapprove and ignore or downplay transgressions by friendly countries. In the last decade or so, the use of human rights as a
policy tool, and hence the politicization of the human rights issue, has attained new heights, particularly at the United Nations and its Human
Rights Commission.

Consider, for instance, the cases of Iran and Saudi Arabia. For years, Iran has been under economic sanctions for disregarding human rights. The United
Nations has appointed several special rapporteurs to report on Iran’s transgressions, which in turn has justified the imposition and continuation
of sanctions. Certainly Iran, like any other country that does not respect human rights, should be held accountable, and pressure should be brought to
bear on it. At the same time, incentives should be provided for good behavior.

However, for such measures to be effective, they must apply to all countries in an equal fashion. Yet this has never been the case. Several countries in
the Middle East have contravened international standards of human rights, and yet they have received very different treatment.

A good case is Saudi Arabia. Its human rights record has been dismal. For example, the Saudi government actively discriminates against its large Shia
minority. This discrimination has been repeatedly noted both by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and by many scholars. Typical
of Saudi policies has been the treatment of Shia cleric, Sheik Nimr Al Nimr. The Saudi government accused him of fomenting disorder, rebellion, and acts
of terror, and executed him at the beginning of 2016. These accusations are the stock-in-trade of nearly all Middle East countries, which interpret any
dissent or even mild criticism as acts of rebellion.

But when these countries violate human rights, the worst they suffer at the hands of outside actors is a slap on the wrist. Iran has been sanctioned
because of its transgressions. But not Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia also has one of worst records regarding women’s rights. And although the United States, other Western countries, and the United Nations
stress the importance of women’s rights, somehow Saudi Arabia pays no price for disregarding them.

The special treatment of Saudi Arabia reached new heights when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was forced to remove Saudi Arabia from a register of
violators of children’s rights, despite the killing of children by the Saudi-sponsored coalition fighting in Yemen. The secretary general said that
the main reason was that Saudi Arabia and a number of its Arab and African allies threatened to cut their financial contributions to the UN, including
its humanitarian activities. He added that, if realized, such cuts would have seriously imperiled UN programs in Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. In
other words, the UN secretary general was blackmailed into removing Saudi Arabia’s name from the register.

That Saudi Arabia would do so is no surprise. What is surprising and depressing is that the secretary general also noted that, in the face of
Saudi threats, he could not expect the support of the permanent members of the Security Council.

Human rights is not the only area where Saudi Arabia gets a free pass for its misdeeds. Support for terrorism is another notable area where different
standards are applied to its actions. The State Department’s report on terrorism cited Iran as the biggest state supporter of terrorism and only
mentioned Saudi Arabia in passing. Would the State Department, by that logic, also consider the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, and various Sunni
terrorist groups in Iraq benefitting from Saudi help not to be terrorist organizations? The answer is obvious.

This special treatment or Saudi Arabia has served neither that country nor the international community well. It has emboldened Saudi Arabia to continue
its disregard for human rights and support for terrorist groups without fear of any retaliation. Worse, it has given Saudi Arabia license to intervene
militarily in neighboring countries such as Bahrain, undermine the government in Iraq, and engage in the full- scale invasion of Yemen.

These acts have had severely negative consequences for the entire Persian Gulf, much of the rest of the Middle East, and even for Saudi Arabia itself,
as its current domestic troubles indicate. Most regrettably, however, the special treatment of Saudi Arabia has undermined the cause of human rights
throughout the region and has led to growing cynicism regarding the international community’s commitment to upholding human rights. Like peace
and security, human rights are indivisible. Either the same standards and principles are applied to all and transgressors are punished equally or the
defense of human rights will be reduced to mere rhetoric that convinces no one.
Lobelog, June 13, 2016