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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

By Hamid Dabashi

If Hollywood wants to turn to Rumi, may Rumi’s blessings be on Hollywood.

Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio, say as Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Now imagine him as Rumi. Yes, Rumi: the Muslim mystic poet of the 13th century.

Now imagine Robert Downey Jr, say as Tony Stark/Iron Man in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008). Now imagine him as Shams-e Tabrizi. That’s right: the mysterious mystic centre of Rumi’s deepest and most moving affections, the very inspiration behind his monumental collection of lyrical poetry.

Believe it or not, this is not a mere flight of fantasy but the combined intention of a major Hollywood scriptwriter and a producer who have evidently come together to make a biopic on the Muslim mystic, scholar, thinker, and poet Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi: the author of two monumental masterpieces of Persian poetry, the Mathnavi and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, the founder of the Mevlevi Order, whose Mausoleum in Konya is the pilgrimage destination of millions of his devotees from around the globe.

“An Oscar-winning screenwriter,” we read in the news, “has agreed to work on a biopic about the 13th-century poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi. David Franzoni, who wrote the script for the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, and Stephen Joel Brown, a producer on the Rumi film, said they wanted to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of Muslim characters in western cinema by charting the life of the great Sufi scholar.”
From Muslim mystic to New Age guru

Why not, was my first reaction to the news. Rumi is so big, so magnificent, so majestic a river that anyone can come closer and fill a bucketful with his grace and go about his business.

Rumi is, of course, no stranger to New Age mysticism and has been quite successfully made available in English by such cavalier “translators” as Coleman Barks and Deepak Chopra.

Though quite distant from their original Persians, these English translations indeed read very well, create an engaging emotive universe, and successfully draw global attention to a poet otherwise entirely alien to them.

When there is no rose, to borrow a metaphor from Rumi himself, what choices do people have but to remember it from a drop of rosewater!

If you read the original Persian or are otherwise familiar with Rumi through the scholarship of the hard-working but quiet Orientalists such as R A Nicholson and A J Arberry, you may roll your eyes at some of these translations.

But given Rumi’s own predilection towards a playful soul he might have smilingly approved of his poetry being taken for a ride into English with such lovely disloyalty.

You cannot really be stubbornly dogmatic about the persona and the poetry of a man who danced with words as he took all dogmas for a lovely bathing under a cascade of forgiving love. Can you?

Imagining Rumi

Be that as it may, the new biopic this report promises is going to venture into a whole different domain: how to imagine and visualise Rumi, the world he lived, the divinity he experienced, the focal points of his love and affection, the universe that he thought engulfed his life and afterlife?

Muslims who know and love Rumi, especially those who are born and raised in his original Persian poetry, will and could never be satisfied with any rendition of him – Hollywood or otherwise.

The reason for that is very simple. They have been imagining him in their own mind for generations and lifetimes, and the slightest variation from that imagining will lead them the wrong way.

The incurable banality of Hollywood for casting famous actors of European descent in leading roles of non-European characters did not of course begin with the idea of having Leonardo DiCaprio play Rumi or Robert Downey Jr Shams-e Tabrizi.

Just take a look at a picture of a blackface Laurence Olivier as Othello or Mahdi of Khartoum, or even more recently of Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott’s Exodus!

The challenge that Hollywood and its scriptwriters and producers face, however, is much more serious than who will portray Rumi.

As a titanic figure in Muslim moral and intellectual history, Rumi was the product of a moment when the Mongol invasion was bringing the Abbasid and Seljuqid empires to a crushing end to build an even more enormous and opulent empire on their ruins.

Rumi was the single most towering moral intellect at the crosscurrent of that world-historic moment. His universe of imagination, the God he praised, the heavens he fathomed, the Persian poetry he perfected to the pitch of that divine presence are all at fundamental odds with the fragmentary attention span of a world in which Hollywood has turned its attention to Rumi.

As a poet, a mystic, and a prophetic soul, Rumi does not belong to anyone, and anyone can enter his presence and hope to receive the gift of his grace.

If Hollywood wants to turn to Rumi, may Rumi’s blessings be on Hollywood. But before Leonardo DiCaprio of Hollywood or Salman Khan of Bollywood is invited to play Rumi, the scriptwriter and producer are well advised quietly to whisper this piece of a ghazal that I as a mere pilgrim to Rumi’s grace translate for them from the original. I promise it will do them good:

Oh Muslims what am I to do

For I no longer know myself?

I am neither a Christian nor a Jew,

Neither a Zoroastrian, nor indeed a Muslim!

I am neither from the East nor from the West,

Neither from the sea nor from the land …

Neither from the dust nor from the wind,

Neither from water nor from fire …

Neither from this nor from the world to come,

Neither from Paradise nor from Hell,

Neither from Adam nor from Eve,

Nor indeed from the Garden of Eden –

I dwell in Noplace, my sign is Signless.

I have neither a soul nor a body,

For I come from the very Soul of all souls.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York

 

By Andre Vltchek

These days you may get hugs from many common people in the Middle East or Latin America when you say that you are Russian, but such emotional outbursts are mainly intuitive. After being bombarded by extremely effective and negative Western propaganda for years and decades, people of the world still know very little, if anything, about two enormous countries that have been proudly resisting the Western imperialism – Russia and China.

I recently spent five weeks in Latin America, where the West openly supports the entire wide spectrum of counter-revolutionary movements, literally overthrowing one progressive government after another. I worked alongside the left-wing intellectuals there, helping to define the way forward, to rescue the Process.

But I was shocked by how little is known there about both Russia and China – for decades two natural allies of the patriotic Latin American Left.

“Are you for Putin or against?” And: “Is China really as capitalist now as we read?”

These were two most commonly asked questions.

Not in Cuba, of course. Cuba, almost free of most of propaganda media outlets of the Empire is actually one of the best-educated and informed societies on Earth. There, people know all about those long decades and centuries of the epic struggle of the Russian people against Western imperialism. There, it is very well known that China is essentially and once again increasingly a Communist (and successful) nation with clear central planning, which uses some controlled capitalist practicesin order tobuilda prosperous society for its people.

But even in such educated countries like Argentina and Chile, even in those centers of progress and revolution like Ecuador and Venezuela, the two world giants are often misunderstood. The majority of people in Latin America may feel sympathy for both Russia and China,but there is no deep knowledge of the realities there.

It is truly discouraging, because the Latin American Left is one of the essential components of the front against Western imperialism, standing shoulder to shoulder with Russia and China, but also South Africa, Iran and other proud nations.

It is easy to understand the reasons behind all this. Even in some of the most revolutionary nations of Latin America, the Western mass media outlets have been managing to retain their presence, often through the right-wing big business cable TV and satellite distributors. Most of the biggest newspapers are still in the hands of local business interests.

And so the negative and misleading messages about Russia and China are spread constantly. People are bombarded with them from the television screens, from the pages of mass-circulation newspapers, and from the imported (Western) films.

Many are resisting. They instinctively want to cling to both Russia and China. But they don’t have enough “ammunition”; not enough positive and inspiring information is available to them. In the meantime the critics are armed tothe teeth with toxic propaganda that is mass-produced in New York, Los Angeles, London and Madrid.

And the situation is much worse in Asia.

There, the Empire has truly and fully mobilized allavailable resources, in order to discredit its two main adversaries.

Speaking to my friends and colleagues in such places like Indonesia and Philippines, I was told that most of the people there know little, even close to nothing about Russia. It is still perceived through the Cold War and post-Cold-War stereotypes. The Western propaganda apparatus has been portraying Russians as cold, aggressive, brainwashed and dangerous.

Great Russian culture, Russian arts and the exceptional warmth of the Russian people, are something almost totally unknown in most of the Asian nations.

Great foreign policy successes of Russia, like those in Syria, are twisted and turned into the crimes, even in Muslim countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where “people should definitely know better”.

In India, which had been for decades very close to the Soviet Union, the situation is somehow brighter, but only among the extremely small and educated group of its citizens. There, like in many other parts of the world, pro-business and pro-Western mass media is skillfully defending the interests of the West, demonizing all that is standing in the way of the Empire.

China is being targeted with an even greater and more malicious force than Russia. Successful and Communist China is the worst nightmare for the West and for the local, Asian ‘elites’.

The entire propaganda apparatus is now in overdrive, spreading ideological attacks and negative messages. The most peaceful major country on Earth is being portrayed as an aggressor and threat to regional and world peace. In the Philippines and elsewhere, the global Western regime is arousing the cheapest and extremely dangerous bellicose forms of nationalism.

The local Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia that consists mainly of the anti-Communist elements, descendants of the people who left China after the revolution, are playing an extremely important and destructive role.

Nobody seems to notice that the United States/NATO is encircling both Russia and China with its military bases, while deploying new offensive missile systems. Nobody talks about those tens of millions of people who were massacred during the Western invasions of Asia during the 20th century.

And the situation is not much different in Africa and elsewhere.

*

True, both Russia and China have invested some substantial resources in order to counter the Western propaganda. The RT, Sputnik and NEO (New Eastern Outlook), have all become extremely effective global information and intellectual detoxification outlets.

But the West is still investing more. The ideological war is even something that is lately being discussed openly in Washington. The more Russia and China resist andthe more they defend themselves; the more Western propaganda steps up its indoctrination campaigns.

Clearly, both Russia and China have to do more, not only for their own interests, but also for the good of the world.

The great achievements of China and Russia have to be explained in detail. Such information should be spread to all corners of the planet.

In this field, China should learn from Russia, as the Chinese media outlets now available abroad are still too ‘timid’ and too reconciliatory. It requires real strength and determination to counter the mighty and centuries-old Western propaganda and brainwashing schemes.It also requires large financial budgets.

But the intellectual ‘resistance’ and the ideological wars should not be fought only in the fields of the politics, news and analyses. The tremendous cultural and intellectual achievements of both China and Russia should be made available to the populations on all continents. China has done so already a lot, mainly through its Confucius Institutes. It should be doing more, and so should Russia.

Both countries are in possession of marvelous cultural wealth, overflowing with wisdom and arts. Their humanism is much deeper than that of the West -the West that has been mainly building its wealth, for centuries, by plundering thePlanet.

For as long as one can remember, both Europe and North America had been committing genocides, while enslaving entire continents. At the same time, they have been engaging in self-glorification, promoting their political, economic and cultural concepts. They claimed cultural superiority. And they have been doing it with such force, such ruthlessness and in the end with such success, that they have managed to fully indoctrinate most of the world into accepting that there is really no alternative, no other way (except the Western way) forward.

There are naturally other ways, and needless to say, much better ones!

In fact, before European colonialism began ruining and enslaving the planet, almost all parts of the world were living in much more developed and gentler societies than those of the West.

Now very little is known about this fact. Alternatives are not discussed in the mainstream, anymore. The search for a better world, for more humanistic concepts, is almost totally abandoned; at least in the West and in its colonies and ‘client” states.

It as if this horrid nightmare, into which the world had been forcedinto by the global Western dictatorship, is the only imaginable future for our human race.

It is not. And there are two great countries on this planet, Russia and China, which can offer many alternatives. They are strong enough to withstand all the pressure from the West. They have hearts, brains; they have the know-how and resources to offer alternatives and to re-start millennia old, essential discussions about the future of our humanity.

But in order for this to happen, the world has to first know about both Russia and China. It has to understand their cultures.

The war against imperialism should be fought not only on the battlefields; it shouldbe fought on the airwaves, at the printing presses, in the concert halls and theatres. Kindness, humanism, internationalism and knowledge can often serve as weapons much more powerful than missiles, strategic bombers and submarines.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.Discussion with Noam Chomsky:On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or hisTwitter.

First published by NEO (New Eastern Outlook)

 

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Jack A. Smith

From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, October 2011 as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to be ending:

“There are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition [to Asia], but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward — we cannot afford not to…. Rather than pull back from the world, we need to press forward and renew our leadership. The Asia-Pacific represents such a real 21st-century opportunity for usto secure and sustain our leadership abroad.”

President Obama’s recent journey to Japan and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, beyond visiting Hiroshima and being welcomed by crowds in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, was primarily aimed at strengthening his administration’s most important foreign policy objective — the political, commercial and military encirclement of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Now that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Obama may rest assured that if she defeats Republican Donald Trump in November, as expected, his “rebalance” to Asia will continue apace. Indeed, a Clinton administration may move faster and more decisively.

Clinton was a strong advocate of the rebalance and thoroughly agrees with Obama that Beijing must never be allowed to diminish Washington’s global hegemony, even within China’s ownSouth Asian region, and, like Obama, she always uses the code words “American leadership” in place of “American domination.”

Obama announced what he first termed a “pivot” to Asia in the fall of 2011 just after a 5,500-word article by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton titled “America’s Pacific Century” appeared in Foreign Policy magazine. It began:

“As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region.” The “otherwise” meant military.

While in Japan, Obama told the newspaper Asahi Shimbun May 26:

“Renewing American leadership in the Asia Pacific has been one of my top policy priorities as President, and I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made. The cornerstone of our rebalance strategy has been bolstering our treaty alliances—including with Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines and Australia—and today each of these alliances is stronger than when I came into office. We’ve forged new partnerships with countries like Vietnam, which I just visited, and with regional institutions like ASEAN and the East Asia Summit. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the highest-standard trade agreement in history, we have the opportunity to write the rules for regional and global trade for decades to come. I believe that America’s position in the region has never been stronger, and I’m confident that the next U.S. President will continue to build on our progress.”

A week later in San Diego Clinton delivered a foreign policy speech. Its purpose was to show that she would be much better than Republican Donald Trump in furthering America’s global interests. Accusing Trump of not understanding that Russia and China “work against us,” she declared:

“If America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum — and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety — and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit. Now Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them. They’d love for us to elect a president who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”

Instead of defining the November election as a contest between the right/far right Republicans and the center right Democrats, Clinton depicted it as a choice between “a fearful America that’s less secure and less engaged in the world [under Trump], and a strong, confident America that leads to keep our country safe and our economy growing.”

Clinton has thus committed herself to a continuation of Washington’s decades-longimperial foreign/military policies, replete with cold war rhetoric, the notion of an indispensible America, the commitment to “lead” the world, and targeting China and Russia as virtual enemies. There was no hint of making any efforts to reduce world tensions peacefully. As a result of Obama-Clinton policies the relationship between Beijing and Moscow has become considerably closer in recent years.

Meanwhile the Bush-Obama Middle East wars are expected to continue indefinitely, at least throughout the next administration and maybe much longer. If Clinton gains the White House she is expected to intensify U.S. involvement in these conflicts, particularly in Syria and Libya. Her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is significantly to Clinton’s left in domestic politics but only moderately less hawkish in foreign affairs. Trump is a dangerous enigma, correctly identified by Clinton as “temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.”

U.S. arms for Vietnam

President Obama was warmly received by the Vietnamese Communist Party, the government and it seems by the people as well during his three-day visit starting May 22. A number of U.S. news articles marveled at the fact that Washington appeared to be totally excused for its brutal two-decade intervention to prevent the unification of temporarily divided North and South Vietnam. After all, some to 3.8 million Vietnamese people died from the American air and ground war, as did nearly two million in Cambodia and Laos combined due to U.S. led attacks on suspected North Vietnamese trails and hideouts in these neighboring countries. U.S. war deaths were 58,193 between 1955-1975.

Part of the reason Vietnam doesn’t hate the U.S. is that it won the long war against the world’s most powerful military state following Hanoi’s victory against French colonialism and the earlier Japanese invasion and occupation. Vietnam was exhausted and in economic difficulty after 30 years of continual conflict when the Americans finally fled South Vietnam in April 1975.

Another reason for cautiously partnering with the U.S. is the existence of China on Vietnam’s northern border. Chinese dynasties dominated Vietnam for over 900 years between 111 BCE and 1427 CE. Both Russia and China supported Vietnam in the fight against U.S. aggression but grave tensions and even the possibility of an armed conflict between the two giant nations was an additional worry for Hanoi, which needed their material support to pursue the war. On Dec. 25, 1978,Vietnam invaded and occupied adjacent Cambodia in order to drive out the ultra-left Khmer Rouge government after a number of border clashes between them. In February 1979, China — which had supported the Khmer Rouge — invaded northern Vietnam in a brief but bloody one-month war, with both sides claiming victory. Several short skirmishes took place until 1989 when Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. Since then relations between the two neighboring countries with governments that seem to share the same socialist ideology have been peaceful but distant.

During his stay in Vietnam, Obama was publicly critical of what he considered Vietnam’s human rights shortcomings, as though killing five million people in Indochina, millions in the contemporary Middle East, and uncritically supporting dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia gave Washington the international standing to wag its finger in Hanoi’s face.

But Obama’scriticisms of the country wereprimarily for show, paving the way for him to announce the ending of he 41-year ban on lethal arms sales to Vietnam. In Hanoi, Obama told a press conference that “we already have U.S. vessels that have come here to port [at Cam Ranh Bay and] we expect that there will be deepening cooperation between our militaries.”

According to The Diplomat May 31: “Uncorroborated Vietnamese sources in Hanoi [state that] prior to Obama’s visit, U.S. officials proposed to their hosts the possibility of raising their comprehensive partnership to a strategic partnership [an important upgrading]. Vietnamese officials reportedly got cold feet at the last minute and politely left this proposal for future consideration.At the same time, although U.S. officials, including the president, described bilateral relations as entering a new phase, no new adjective was placed in front of comprehensive partnership in the official joint statement issued by the two presidents to indicate that relations had advanced significantly since 2013.”

China’s Global Times, a party daily tabloid that tends to speak directly, argued May 26 in reference to the U.S. decision to sell arms to Vietnam: “This is a new move by the U.S. to advance its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, displaying Washington’s desire to reinforce military cooperation with China’s neighboring countries…. Now, Washington is ironically trying to manipulate Vietnam’s nationalism to counter China. U.S. Senator John McCain, a prisoner in the Vietnam War and now Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, plays a key role in rescinding the ban on the sale of lethal arms to Vietnam, believing it will rope in Hanoi to counter China’s rise.”

In the same issue of Global Times, Nguyen Vu Tung, acting president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam in Hanoi, wrote an op-ed that expressed his “personal” views, stating: “In July 2013, Vietnam and the U.S. agreed to elevate their relationship to a ‘comprehensive partnership’ designed to further promote bilateral ties in all fields. 

It is noteworthy that the enhancement of Vietnam-U.S. relations ran parallel with Vietnam’s forging its relations with China, a big neighbor that is of increasing importance to Vietnam’s peace, stability and prosperity…. Vietnam-U.S. relations are not developing at the expense of the links between Vietnam and China. Instead of choosing sides, Hanoi tries its best to promote relations with both China and the U.S. and sees its relations with them in positive-sum terms…..

“The independent posture of Vietnam’s foreign policy applies especially to Vietnam’s defense policy where Vietnam strictly follows a ‘three-no principle.’ Vietnam will not enter any military pact and become a military ally of any country, will not allow any country to set up a military base on its soil, and will not rely on any country to oppose any other country. Recently, Hanoi has been under some domestic pressure to review this principle. Yet, adhering to it is still the policy mainstream.”

With the arms sales Vietnam is now considered an allied member of the informal U.S. coterie of East Asian and Southeast Asian nations, six of which are contending with China’s claims to most of the South China Sea, with Washington’s backing. Beijing says it is willing to negotiate with the six on a one to one basis but the U.S insists on multilateral talks. In addition to Vietnam the countries involved in the claims include Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Japan.

China’s claim is based on two points: 1. Implicitly, its long history — about 4,000 years, nearly all of it under Chinese dynastic imperial rule until 104 years ago. 2. Explicitly, the 1947 “nine dash line” map produced by the Chinese Nationalist government in 1947, two years before the success of the Chinese communist revolution replaced the semi-capitalist/semi-feudal Nationalist enterprise called the Republic of China with the People’s Republic of China. The Nationalist government, army and many civilians fled to Taiwan, an offshore province of China that still maintains that the nine dash line is absolutely legitimate, as does the PRC. The U.S. — which supported the Nationalists to the extent of keeping Taiwan in China’s permanent Security Council seat until 1971 — did not question China’s claims until fairly recent years. U.S. support for the six claimants is an important political part of the containment of China by increasing the number of regional allies and dependencies that will support Washington’s political goals.

There are military and commercial aspects of the rebalance to Asia in addition to using allies to strengthen opposition to China.

The U.S. has militarily dominated the East Asia region since the end of World War II in 1945 but it has been significantly increasing its military might since launching the pivot to Asia. More Army and Air force units have been ordered to existing bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and other nearby locations, as well as a new base in Australia. Up to 90,000 U.S. military personnel are in the vicinity. Navy aircraft carriers, other warships and submarines have been shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. An aircraft carrier battle group is patrolling the East China Sea. Some U.S. ships navigate extremely close to small Chinese islets that are being upgraded — a practice that could inadvertently spark an armed confrontation.

The principle commercial element of the effort to contain China is the corporation-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — Washington’s neoliberal free-trade proposal for 12 Pacific Rim countries that is intended to enlarge U.S. economic influence in the region at the expense of China, which has not been invited to join. The 12 signatories to the TPP agreement in 2010 included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam.

Ratification of the trade pact the may not happen, not least because recent political developments in the U.S. may bury this major Bush-Obama initiative. Hillary Clinton, once a strong advocate as secretary of state, turned against the TPP during the Democratic primary in order to opportunistically convey the impression she was as radical as Sanders in order to attract his constituency. She also wanted to retain the support of the AFL-CIO, which strongly opposes the pact. Trump rejects the TPP because many working class supporters believe that such trade deals take away American jobs, which they do. Some commentators suggest Obama may be able to get it passed after the elections and before the new president assumes office, but it’s a long shot.

Vietnam supports the TTP because its economy stands to gain from increased trade.It is of interest that China is Vietnam’s biggest trading partner and will remain so, as is true of most regional nations aligning with the U.S. superpower. Beijing’s rise over the last 20 years has benefitted all these states, not to mention the transfer of reasonably priced reliable goods throughout area.

U.S. President visits Hiroshima

Obama arrived in Japan May 25 to attend a Group of Seven meeting and to further strengthen Japan’s commitment to help in the effort to surround China, but the international media focused entirely on the first American presidential visit to Hiroshima in the 71 years since the United States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.

He didn’t apologize to Japan because that would be unpopular with many Americans and alsowith Korea and China, countries that suffered woefully from the vicious and racist Japanese invasion and occupation. They believe Japan hasn’t sufficiently atoned for its numerous wartime atrocities.

Instead Obama delivered a quite moving speech: “We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are….”

His address was hypocritical, particularly when he declared: “We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil. So nations and the alliances that we formed must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics. And yet, that is not enough, for we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset about war itself.”

In reality Obama is not only slower than his three predecessors in reducing nuclear weapons but he has initiated a trillion dollar effort to upgrade America’s entire nuclear arsenal and delivery systems.

In his Asahi Shimbun interview Obama also said: “I believe that we’ve substantially enhanced America’s credibility in the Asia Pacific, which is rooted in our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies. We continue to modernize our defense posture in the region, including positioning more of our most advanced military capabilities in Japan. As I’ve said before, our treaty commitment to Japan’s security is absolute. With our new defense guidelines, American and Japanese forces will become more flexible and better prepared to cooperate on a range of challenges, from maritime security to disaster response, and our forces will be able to plan, train and operate even more closely. I’m very grateful for Prime Minister Abe’s strong support of our alliance.”

Abe is a hawk about China. “No one country is more enthusiastic than Japan to advocate containing China,” according to a May 19 commentary by Zhang Zhixin, the head of American Political Studies at China’s Institute of American Studies. He continued:

“The strategic competition between the [U.S. and China] is becoming more apparent. In economic and trade areas, the EU and U.S. denied granting market economy status to China. In the South China Sea, where China is trying to secure its maritime sovereignty and rights, the U.S. believes China is challenging its regional hegemony and military dominance in the area. As deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, the U.S. is intensely focused on China’s ‘assertive and provocative behavior.’ Therefore, the U.S. Navy is pushing for a more aggressive policy of patrolling close to Chinese-fortified islands and caused more dangerous encounters between the U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and Chinese jet planes.

“What makes the situation more complicated is that Japan, as an outsider in the South China Sea issue, is trying to insert itself into the conflict. At the end of last year, the Japanese Foreign Minister talked about the possibility of joint patrol with the U.S. Navy in the [South China Sea] area. This year, Japan is becoming increasingly aggressive in charging that China’s a threat in the Asia Pacific region. It is understandable for the Prime Minister Abe to do so to the domestic audience to sell his proposal of revising the pacifist Constitution, but when he was selling his viewpoint to the EU countries, that’s too much. Japan is allied with the U.S., but the latter never restrained Japan’s anti-China rhetoric. Furthermore, Japan actively sold advanced weapons to countries around the South China Sea, participated in more multilateral military exercises, and conducted more port calls in the area, which just made the regional situation more tense.”

Another area of sharp Chinese-Japanese contention is in the East China Sea. Both countries claim rocky, uninhabited protuberances known as Senkaku by Tokyo and Diaoyu by Beijing. China scrambled jets to meet Japanese military aircraft in disputed airspace May 21. Japanese officials said it was the closest Chinese jets had flown to their planes. It came as China was holding air-sea naval exercises with Russia in the region. Tokyo officially protested to Chinese ambassador Cheng Yonghua June 9 about a “Chinese and three Russian warships” that entered what Japan called the “contiguous zones” near the disputed Islands. The Chinese Defense ministry responded June 9 calling the navigation legal and reasonable, insisting “China’s naval ships have every right to navigate in waters under its jurisdiction.” The reply came a day a before the beginning of a large-scale eight-day joint military drill in the western Pacific involving the U.S., Japan and India.

According to Stratfor in a June 10 analysis: “Japan under Abe has upset Beijing by broadening the geographic and functional scope of the operations of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, which Japan’s postwar pacifism long limited. Perceptions of Chinese expansionism have prompted Japan to prioritize responding in the South China Sea. In 2015, Japan announced the start of talks with the Philippines on a Visiting Forces Agreement that would permit Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel to rotate through Philippine bases. Later that year, Japan secured an agreement with Vietnam to allow Japanese warships to make port calls at Cam Ranh Bay, which they did in April of this year. Even more ambitiously, Japan has responded that it might be amenable to U.S. calls for regional powers to join freedom of navigation operations in waters far beyond the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s traditional domain in Japan’s near seas. Though these steps are incremental, they represent slow and steady progress toward a clear endpoint most unwelcome in Beijing —the routine presence of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operations in the South China Sea.”

The 42ndG7 summit meeting in Japan May 26–27 accomplished little. It was “an opportunity lost” according to Montreal Star columnist Thomas Walkom, who wrote June 1: The leaders of seven important countries had a chance to do something that would rekindle the sputtering global economy.Some, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Canada’s Justin Trudeauurged their fellow leaders to foreswear austerity and, among other growth-inducing measures, spend money to stimulate the world economy.

“They failed. Italy’s Matteo Renzi was on side with Canada and Japan, as were France’s François Hollande and U.S. President Barack Obama. But Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron insisted that debt and deficit control were more important than fiscal stimulus.The final communiqué from the session said essentially that each nation would continue to do what it thought best.So what do we make of the G7? In some ways, its time has passed. It no longer represents the world’s major economies. China is conspicuously absent. Russia, briefly a member of what was then called the G8, was summarily expelled in 2014 for annexing Crimea.”

The importance of India

As soon as President Obama returned home he put aside time to work out plans for ensnaring rising India more deeply into Washington’s informal anti-China coalition. He met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the White House June 7. This was their seventh meeting in the two years since the Indian leader was elected in May 2014, which must be some kind of record. Modi addressed Congress the next day and his speech was received with great applause. Earlier Indian governments, while friendly to the U.S. were closer to Russia (and the USSR in earlier days) and nonaligned countries than to America. Modi is campaigning for a much closer relationship with Washington, which is exactly what the Obama administration wants.

The Economist noted June 11: “China worries about signs that Western countries are cozying up to its giant neighbor. It fears that Modi will exploit better ties with America as a source of advantage. For years the Pentagon has pursued India as part of an effort to counterbalance growing Chinese strength, but only in recent months have Indian military officials begun to show eagerness for co-operation. This month the two countries will hold their annual naval exercises not in Indian waters, but in the Sea of Japan, with the Japanese navy, near islands claimed by both Japan and China. In a wide-ranging speech before a joint session of Congress on June 8 Modi said that America was India’s “indispensable partner.” An outright military alliance between India and America remains unlikely, but even the remote prospect of one will concentrate Chinese minds.

In her pivot to Asia article referred to earlier, Clinton foresaw intense U.S. involvement in the region “stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas…. Among key emerging powers with which we will work closely are India and Indonesia, two of the most dynamic and significant democratic powers of Asia, and both countries with which the Obama administration has pursued broader, deeper, and more purposeful relationships.” India and Indonesia are second and fourth ranking countries in population. (China is first, U.S. third.)

According to the Center for International Studies “Washington has made it clear that Jakarta is central to the U.S. rebalance, toward the Asia Pacific, both in its own right and as a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN.)”It is also the largest Muslim country by far.

India, however, is the big prize.As a result of U.S.-Indian talks after the Modi government took power India has been designated a “Major Defense Partner” by Washington, although it is not entirely understood what this unusual title obligates India to do. For its part the U.S. is supplying India with technology, loans,equipment,and other means of enhancing India’s economy and military.

Commenting on the Obama-Modi meeting June 7 the Associated Press reported “The two governments said they had finalized the text of a defense logistics agreement to make it easier for their militaries to operate together. The U.S. and India share concern about the rise of China, although New Delhi steers clear of a formal alliance with Washington.

In an article published by the Cato Institute April 29 and titled Persistent Suitor: Washington Wants India as an Ally to Contain China, Ted Galen Carpenter wrote:

“A growing number of policymakers and pundits see India not only as an increasingly important economic and military player generally, but as a crucial potential strategic counterweight to a rising China…. Strategic ties have gradually and substantially deepened. President Barack Obama has characterized the relationship between the United States and India as ‘a defining partnership of the 21st century,’ and Indian Prime Minister Modi has termed it ‘a natural alliance.’” Perhaps more significant, India has contracted to receive some $14 billion in supposedly defensive military items from the United States in less than a decade. Washington has now edged out Moscow as India’s principal arms supplier.

“Bilateral strategic ties received an additional boost in mid-April 2016 with the visit of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to Delhi. That trip generated considerable uneasiness in China, where opinion leaders noted not only was it Carter’s second trip to India during his relatively brief tenure as Pentagon chief, but that he cancelled a previously scheduled trip to Beijing so that he could make this latest journey. That move, they feared, suggested a rather unsubtle tilt against China in favor of one of its potential regional geostrategic competitors. The agreement that came from Carter’s visit would do nothing to reassure the Chinese….

“Moreover, India maintains an important economic relationship of its own with China. Indeed, according to most calculations, China has now emerged as India’s largest trading partner. Trade between the two Asian giants topped $80 billion in 2015. In addition to the economic stakes, there are bilateral security issues, primarily unresolved border disputes, as well as security issues throughout Central Asia of concern to Delhi that could be exacerbated if relations with Beijing deteriorated.Shrewd Indian policymakers may well conclude that the best position for their country is one of prudent neutrality (perhaps with a slight pro-American tilt) in the growing tensions between the United States and China.”

U.S.-China Relations

The contradiction between Washington’s words and deeds is no better exemplified than in its relations with China. U.S. rhetoric rarely includes threats, except occasionally regarding the South China Sea. Most though not all its multitude of discussions with Chinese leaders are soft spoken and civil. From time to time the U.S. speaks of China as a “partner.” Never stated openly is the fact that Washington will continue pressuring Beijing until it learns how to behave in a fashion acceptable to the world’s only military and economic superpower. Part of that pressure consists of continual exaggerations of China’s military power, which is far behind that U.S.

The Beijing government never threatens the U.S. It is well aware of the meaning behind Washington’s friendly words because it is surrounded by U.S. military power and Washington’s obedient allies in the region, by exclusionary trade deals, the rejection of its claims in the South China Sea and innumerable efforts by the White House to undermine China in all the political and economic associations and coalitions in the East Asia region.

Beijing rarely mentions this publicly and works to develop a cooperative “win-win” relationship with Washington. China clearly recognizes the U.S. as the world’s great power and occasionally appears slightly deferential.

The following June 6 report from Xinhua news agency about the annual China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing that day is typical example of the Chinese approach:

“President Xi Jinping urged China and the United States to properly manage differences and sensitive issues and deepen strategic mutual trust and cooperation at a high-level bilateral dialogue. The differences between China and the United States are normal, Xi said.

“As long as the two sides tackle differences and sensitive issues in the principle of mutual respect and equality, major disturbances in bilateral relations can be avoided, Xi said, adding that China and the United States should strengthen communication and cooperation on Asia-Pacific affairs.

“The broad Pacific Ocean, Xi said, ‘should not become an arena for rivalry, but a big platform for inclusive cooperation. China and the United States have extensive common interests in the region and should maintain frequent dialogues, cooperate more, tackle challenges, jointly maintain prosperity and stability in the region, and “cultivate common circles of friends’ rather than ‘cultivate exclusive circles of friends.’

“The Chinese president also called on the two sides to expand mutually beneficial cooperation, uphold the win-win principle, and raise the level of bilateral cooperation…. [He] stressed that China will unswervingly pursue the path of peaceful development and promote the building of a new model of international relations with win-win cooperation at its core.”

At the same time, as we have written at length [1], China openly rejects in principle the existence of a unilateral global hegemon — a position the U.S. has occupied for the last quarter century since the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beijing advocates a form of shared global leadership. Washington is convinced that it deserves the right to in effect rule the world and has no intention of dismantling its shadow empire. This is the principal contradiction between the U.S. and China.

Beijing is doing what it can to avoid a major clash with the United States, short of appearing to kowtow to Washington. The U.S. does not want a clash as well. Both sides fear the possibility of war and each is aware that one may eventually take place. That is certainly one of the reasons the Obama administration has launched its decades-long program costing a trillion dollars to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal.

China, for all its progress since the 1980s, is still a developing country and behind the U.S. in many ways, but is destined to become a major power in a few decades at most. The U.S. cannot but accept China’s inevitable growth. At issue is whether Beijing will eventually subordinate itself to the U.S. as have other powers, such as Germany, UK, France and Japan, have done, or in any other acceptable fashion.

There are current and historical reasons why China will not do so. At this point the U.S. is drawing upon all its resources to contain and surround the growing giant. This can only lead to big trouble in time, for both countries and the world.

Unfortunately, both U.S. neoliberal capitalist political parties are absolutely dedicated to world domination and ultimately to the use of terrible violence to defend American “leadership.” Unless this changes substantially imperialism eventually will lead to global calamity. This is a matter that goes far beyond the Hillary, Donald, and Bernie political preoccupation of the moment. None of them would substantially transform the existing foreign/military policy. Only a genuinely left wing mass movement in the U.S. has a chance of changing direction.

— [1] For article “The Hegemony Games — USA v. PRC,” click on 5-31-15 Newsletter Hegemony Games

Jack A. Smith, editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter at http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/, who may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net.
14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dan Glazebrook

Over the past three weeks, it has emerged that British special forces are now in direct combat roles in Libya and Syria. Ostensibly there to fight ISIS, the real goal is to prevent the Syrian and Libyan armies defeating ISIS themselves.

The Normandy landings, launched 72 years ago this week, saw the opening of a second front against the Nazis in Europe by the US and the UK after years of procrastination. Despite the signing of a ‘mutual assistance’ agreement with Britain in 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet alliance in 1942, for years very little was done by the US or Britain to actually fight the Nazi menace. In a joint communique issued in 1942, they agreed to open a second front in Europe that same year, an agreement they broke and then postponed repeatedly, leaving the Soviets to fight the strongest industrial power in Western Europe alone for three years – at an eventual cost of 27 million lives. The US and Britain, it seemed, were following what International Relations theorist John Mearsheimer has termed a ‘bait and bleed’ policy, allowing Germany and the Soviet Union to “bleed each other white” whilst they themselves stood on the sidelines. “If we see Germany winning, we ought to help Russia,” declared US Senator (and later President) Harry Truman in June 1941, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” The British Minister for Aircraft Production Colonel Moore-Brabazon echoed his views the following month, telling a lunch party of government officials that the best outcome on the Eastern front would have been the mutual exhaustion of Germany and the USSR in order that Britain could then move in to dominate Europe. He was eventually forced to resign following uproar from a public determined to see their government do more to help the embattled Soviets.

In the end, it was not until well after the Nazis’ fortunes had been decisively reversed at Stalingrad that the long promised ‘second front’ actually materialized. Indeed, by this point the outcome of the war had effectively already been determined. D Day, then, was waged not to defeat the Nazis but to ensure the Soviet Union, who had borne almost all of the sacrifice, would not reap the fruits of their victory. As Soviet Admiral Kharlamov, head of the Soviet Military Mission in Britain during the Second World War, wrote, “Certain circles, both in the United States and Britain, feared that should the Red Army defeat Germany single-handed, the Soviet Union would have enormous influence on the post-war development of and social progress in the European countries. The Allies could not allow that to happen. This is why they considered the opening of a second front in Europe not so much a military action but as a political measure aimed at preventing the progressive political forces from coming to power in European countries.” Documents declassified in 1998 revealed that Churchill had even ordered the drawing up of a plan that would see British and US troops push on beyond Berlin alongside a rearmed German army in a nuclear war against the Soviets.

History is now repeating itself, this time as farce. From 2014 until September 2015, ISIS appeared to sweep all before them, achieving hugely symbolic victories in Iraq’s Mosul and Fallujah, Syria’s Raqqa and Palmyra, and Libya’s Derna and Sirte. At the same time, under Saudi and Turkish tutelage, Al Qaeda’s ‘Al Nusra front’ was making gains in Syria, and the Ansar Sharia faction in Libya took Benghazi, paving the way for a major ISIS infiltration. The West did little to help. In Syria, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) had been left to fight such groups not only bereft of support from the West, but facing a West apparently determined to destroy them. Similarly, the Libyan National Army – representing the elected Libyan parliament – was hamstrung by an arms embargo scrupulously observed in relation to them, but regularly violated by the West’s gulf allies when it came to the ‘Libya Dawn’ sectarian militias who were attacking them. And even the US’ supposedly closest allies in the Iraqi army, the elite ‘Golden Division’, had trouble getting effective US support when they needed it.

Despite this, starting with last September’s Russian intervention in Syria, the tide has begun to turn against ISIS and Al Qaeda, paving the way for a string of victories by the Syrian Arab Army and the Libyan National Army in particular, and pointing, potentially, towards the full restoration of governmental authority in both countries.

In Libya, the key moment was in February 2016, when the Libyan National Army finally regained control of Benghazi from ISIS and Ansar Sharia after 18 months of intense fighting. Both the ISIS presence in Benghazi and the city’s liberation were predictably downplayed in Western media, despite the city’s fate having been apparently so important to British and US leaders back in 2011. On May 3rd, the Libyan National Army began its march West from Benghazi towards ISIS’ last Libyan holdout in Sirte.

In February, too, a massive Syrian army offensive towards Aleppo began to make serious gains, taking territory from Al Qaeda, ISIS and Ahrar Al Sham. On February 3rd, the supply route to Aleppo was severed, breaking a rebel siege of two government-held towns south of Azaz. Mass surrenders to the SAA followed, including 1200 in Hama. Then, exactly one month later, the world-historic city of Palmyra was liberated from ISIS by Syrian government forces backed with Russian air support. In what was presumably an attempt to appear relevant, the US had also launched two token airstrikes on the city, illustrating, said journalist Robert Fisk, that the US “want to destroy iSIS – but not that much”.

Today, ISIS’ original stronghold, the capital of its self-declared caliphate, is itself under threat. The Times reported earlier this week that a massively re-moralised Syrian army, is “storming towards the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa” and that “the Syrian regime’s elite Desert Hawks unit, backed by the Russian airstrikes, crossed the southern border of Raqqa province at the weekend – the first time that any of Assad’s forces have set foot there since being driven out by isis nearly two years ago.” They have been making swift advances.

Throughout 2016, then, the national armed forces of Libya and Syria, representing the elected governments of both countries, have been on a roll; and the days of ISIS and their sectarian bedfellows may well be numbered. So it is interesting that it is precisely this moment – not when ISIS were making gains, but now that they are facing defeat – that British troops have deigned to openly enter the fray.

The same edition of the Times that reported that the SAA were “storming towards …Raqqa” also carried, as its front page story, the news that “British special forces are on the frontline in Syria defending a rebel unit”, noting that “the operation marks the first evidence of the troops’ direct involvement in the war-torn country rather than just training rebels in Jordan.” And the same newspaper had reported the previous week that British special forces undertook their first known combat mission in Libya on May 12th, in support of the ‘Libya Dawn’ faction of the Libyan civil war. Libya Dawn is an umbrella group of mainly Misrata-based militias that emerged following the elections of June 2014 under Qatari patronage to fight against the newly elected secular parliament, and its armed forces, the Libyan National Army (LNA). The Times tacitly acknowledged that, up until now, the LNA has been fighting ISIS alone, noting that “MIsrata had largely ignored the metastasis of ISIS in Sirte, 170 miles away, since the first terrorist cells embedded themselves there in 2013”. Now, however, alongside the British ‘boots on the ground’ that Cameron vowed would never step foot in Libya, they have suddenly found themselves the ‘chosen force’ to liberate the country.

As in 1945, having sat back whilst a vicious and genocidal group laid waste to thousands upon thousands of soldiers fighting alone against them, the Cameron regime now wants to deny those armies the fruits of their heroic sacrifices. Cameron would rather see Raqqa and Sirte liberated by a ragtag of militias with little to unite them other than their sectarianism, than to see the authority of the elected governments restored. With British troops now in combat roles alongside the insurgents in Syria, however, this raises the prospect of a direct confrontation with Russian forces. Just like Churchill in 1945, it appears he is quite prepared to risk this. Back then, saner heads prevailed. The question is – where are those heads now?

Dan Glazebrook is author of Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis

This article originally appeared at: Rt.com

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Vacy Vlazna

In April, President Abbas, true to form, buckled under international pressure to sacrifice the integrity of the land of Palestine on the altar of another bogus ‘peace’ initiative by friends of Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) had been circulating to UN Security Council members a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements when the French government effortlessly convinced Abbas to cease and desist the demand to protect diminishing Palestinian land being razed for settlement expansion until after France held its Paris talkfest.

Well, the Paris shindig, attended by foreign ministers from Europe, Arab States and the US has come and gone with notable diplomatic irrelevance. It ended, heedless of the French request for urgent deadlines, with no set timetable for yet another pointless peace stunt later in the year.

Inevitably, Paris impotently administered CPR to the dead two state solution, tokenly stated that the status quo is not sustainable while maintaining the status quo, purposely minimised criticism of Israel, mouthed empty alarm at the violence on the ground, dodged the Right of Return, fantasised about a mythical peace à la Arab Peace Initiative. A further dead giveaway of the inanity of the Paris pretence. was its acknowledgement of the key role of the failed quisling Quartet.

And Paree was flush with anti-Palestine quislings. Of the 26 countries represented, 11* have not recognised the State of Palestine. The host, yes, was the very same France that has no diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine, and is tied with Germany as ‘Europe’s largest exporter of arms to Israel’ (Halper). Not one French bullet nor air-to-ground missile, not one Rafaele fighter jet, nor Mistral helicopter carrier was sold to Palestine. In 2014, during Israel’s monstrous assault on Gaza, France was the first in the world to ban pro-Palestine rallies, even posting details of rallies could incur a year’s imprisonment or a 15,000 Euro fine. France has criminalised BDS under the Lellouche law as an incitement to hatred and anti-semitism which violates the right to freedom of expression once defended popularly and hypocritically by the Charlie Hebdo issue.

Seemingly unfazed by Israel’s destruction (this year alone) of 150 European funded projects at a loss of a mere $74 million, EU foreign policy head, Federica Mogherini, ‘stressed that the aim of the summit was not to impose terms’. This fits snugly with the EU’s overlooking the terms of the settlement funding ban in the Horizon 2020 agreement with Israel involving, according to Halper, ‘the biggest single R&D budget in the world, which will make €80 billion of funding available over seven years (2014–20)’

The Arab turncoat delegation included the Arab League, Saudi Arabia (of killing Yemeni children and bombing MSF hospital fame), Egypt, Jordan, Morocco all of which are US pawns thereby no friends of the Palestinian people. The Saudis are France’s top arms client and Jordan, UAE and Egypt (plus Israeli defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman) are manoeuvring for Death-Squad-Dahlan to succeed Abbas ignoring that prison not presidency is Dahlan’s rightful fate.

Double-dealer Ban Ki Moon jibber-jabbered about the need for courageous leadership- a concept that is beyond his ken. UN leadership should have booted out Israel from the UN decades ago for violating international law and ignoring dozens of UN resolutions particularly UNSC Resolution 242 calling for the withdrawal of Israel armed forced from territories in the 1967 war and 446 that “Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

The cherry on the top of the quisling pie, was the absent PA (Palestinian and Israeli officials were not invited – go figure!) carrying on the Arafat tradition of fiddling perks while Palestine dwindles. In the mere 6 weeks from the PA suspension of its anti-settlement initiative to the end of the French sham, the Zionists pushed on airbrushing, dunum by dunum, Palestine from the face of the world;

Early April Plan No. 901/20 ‘which states the construction of a new bypass road on lands of Beit Ummer, Halhul and Al Arroub’ was begun.

23-4-16 ‘The Israeli authorities delivered notices to the Palestinian village of Jalud in the northern occupied West Bank, alerting residents that 5,000 dunams (1,250 acres) of private land were slated for confiscation in what appeared to be the retroactive legalization of illegal outposts in the area.’

26-4-16 ‘The committee of sit-inners in Occupied Jerusalem warned on Monday of the seriousness of the Israeli settlement project to build 1,690 new housing units over Qalandya town’s confiscated lands in Occupied Jerusalem.’

1-5-16 ‘Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s plan to apply Israeli laws to Jews living in West Bank settlements,opens way to annex the settlements.’

9-5-16 ‘Israeli ministry of security decided to establish a new settlement close to Shilo settlement for those settlers who will be evacuated from Amona outpost.’

23-5-16 ‘Israeli bulldozers from Bado’il settlement on Sunday leveled Palestinian plots of land belonging to Deir Ballut town, west of Salfit province. ‘

24-5-16 ‘Israeli Meyashvei Zion association revealed that a new settlement project is scheduled to be built at the expense of the public park in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Occupied Jerusalem.’

26-5-16 Extremist settler, Yehuda Glick who aims to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque enters the Knesset.

26-5-16 ‘Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said that her government will continue settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank and that more settlers will reside there.’

31-5-16 ‘The Israeli Civil Administration re-mapped over 15,000 acres in the occupied West Bank in an attempt at justifying illegal settlement expansion inside the re-designated areas.’

31-5-16 ‘President Reuven Rivlin ..vowed the West Bank settlement of Ariel would forever remain under Israeli control, despite its location deep inside the West Bank.’

6-3-16 ‘Israeli government endorsed, in a session held in Occupied Jerusalem, the investment of 220 million dollars in settlement projects in Jerusalem over five years under the pretext of “city development”.’

Don’t fool yourself that the Abbas gang are naive or victims of a Zionist-international conspiracy to obliterate Palestine. Victims they are not. They are co-conspirators since signing the Oslo Accords and Paris Protocols in the early nineties.

The PA, intimately familiar with Western and Arab quislings, knew the French farce was doomed to fail the Palestinian people, though cynically on cue Mansour, Erekat, Ashrawi, al Maliki moaned and shed crocodile tears. Yet, a few days before Paris, on 28 May, at the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Abbas agreed in principle to land swaps which he knows are illegal even though there’s precious little left of Palestine to swap thanks to years of two-state negotiations that Abbas and Netanyahu are keen to resume.

Abbas knows that for 100 years to this very day (and beyond ) the Zionist goal, which has never been compromised, is a Zionist state on the whole of Palestine. It is this goal that drives the settlement facts on the ground rendering the two state solution an illusion, a deception.

And Abbas and Co hang in there by directing their vicious security militia to protect Zionist interests and expansion by crushing Palestinian resistance and fending off the main threat to Israel, and to fat-cat-PA self-interests— reconciliation i.e. Palestinian unity.

You may wonder why Palestinians in the West Bank don’t stage a coup against the the corrupt PA/PLO and bring them to trial for treason under the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code 1979 that still applies:

Article 144: Any person who provides the enemy with documents, or is considered to have harmed military actions, or the security of military sites and centres, or any other military institutions shall be punished by death,

Article 148: Any person who leads the enemy to the sites of the revolutionary forces, or the allied forces, or misleads these forces shall be punished by death.

Well, you can ask Hamas affiliated prisoners in Zionist gaols due to PA intelligence sharing with Israel. Or ask the grieving parents of Adel Jaradat, 19 who was killed on 7th June during a PA raid in Silat Harithya near Jenin. PA security forces, trained by the US, conduct raids identical to Zionist Occupation Forces- and kill identically. Or ask the widow of Omar al-Nayef conveniently assassinated in the Palestinian embassy in Bulgaria. Or ask Kefah Quzmar tortured and held in solitary confinement without legal representation by the PA for daring to dissent on Facebook, “Do you know why the mukhabarat [intelligence service] is a rotten agency? Because the entire PA is rotten. Seif al-Idrissi is under arrest! #FreedomforSeif”

Nevertheless, the 6.2 million Palestinians isolated and trapped in the Zionist and PA pincers of brutal oppression have friends. The Palestinian civil society call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel which champions Palestinian rights and freedoms is activated by international grass roots activism that has rapidly evolved into a powerful resistance structure that Israel is desperate to destroy.

A pan-Palestine BDS joining Palestinians inside historic Palestine with the 6.2 million free diasporan Palestinians, in the spirit of the Palestinian ‘rejectfenchinitiative’ , could achieve what the PA/PLO has abrogated.

*France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, UK, USA, Canada

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

In the winter of 1941, a Jewish gravedigger from Chelmo, the western province of Poland, appeared in Warsaw and desperately sought a meeting with Jewish leaders.

He told them the Nazis were rounding up Jews, including the old, women and children, and forcing them into what looked like tightly sealed buses. The buses had the exhaust pipes redirected into the cabins. The Jews were killed with carbon monoxide. He had helped dig the mass graves for thousands of corpses until he escaped.

On the way to Warsaw, he had gone from village to village, frantically warning the Jews. Scores of Jews, in the villages and ultimately in Warsaw, heard his testimony of horror and dismissed it.

A handful of listeners, however, including Zivia Lubetkin, who two years later would help lead the uprising by 500 armed Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, instantly understood the ultimate aims of the Nazi state.

“I don’t know how we intuitively shared the same horrible conviction that the total annihilation of all the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe was at hand,” she wrote in her memoir, “In the Days of Destruction and Revolt.”

She and a handful of young activists started planning a revolt. From that moment forward, they existed in a parallel reality.

“We walked along the overcrowded streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, hundreds of thousands of people pushing and rushing about in fright, antagonistic and tense, living the illusion that they were fighting for their lives, their meager livelihood, but, in reality, when you closed your eyes you could see that they were all dead …”

The established Jewish leadership warned the resistance fighters to desist, telling them to work within the parameters set by the Nazi occupiers. The faces of the established Jewish leaders, when they were informed of the plans to fight back, she wrote, “grew pale, either from sudden fear or from anger at our audacity. They were furious. They reproached us for irresponsibly sowing the seeds of despair and confusion among the people, for our impertinence in even thinking of armed resistance.”

The greatest problem the underground movement faced, she wrote, was “the false hope, the great illusion.” The movement’s primary task was to destroy these illusions. Only when the truth was known would widespread resistance be possible.

The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.

Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.

The promises made by the corporate state and its political leaders—we will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children—are the opposite of reality.

The loss of privacy, the constant monitoring of the citizenry, the use of militarized police to carry out indiscriminate acts of lethal violence—a daily reality in marginal communities—and the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.

There is no more will to reform, or to accommodate the needs and rights of the citizens by the corporate state, than there was to accommodate the needs and rights of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. But until the last moment, this reality will be hidden behind the empty rhetoric of democracy and reform. Repressive regimes gradually institute harsher and harsher forms of control while denying their intentions. By the time a captive population grasps what is happening, it is too late.

The elaborate ruses set up by the Nazis that kept Jews and others slated for extermination passive until they reached the doors of the gas chambers, usually decorated with a large Star of David, were legend. Those taken to death camps were told they were going to work. Unloading ramps at Treblinka were made to look like a train station, with fabricated train schedules posted on the walls and a fake train clock and ticket window. Camp musicians played. The elderly and infirm were escorted from the cattle cars to a building called the infirmary, with the Red Cross symbol on it, before being shot in the back of the head. Men, women and children, who would die in the gas chambers within an hour, were given tickets for their clothes and valuables.

“The Germans were quite courteous when they led people to be slaughtered,” Lubetkin noted acidly.

Jews in ghettos, awaiting deportation to the death camps, were divided by those who worked for the Nazis and therefore had certain privileges, and those who did not. This division effectively pitted the two groups against each other until the final deportations. And collaborating with the killers, in the vain hope that they would be spared, were Jews themselves, organized into Jewish Councils, or Judenrat, and formed into units of the Jewish police, along with what Lubetkin called “their cronies, the spectators and profiteers, the smugglers.”

In the death camps, Jews, to stay alive a little longer, worked in the crematoriums as sonderkommandos. There are always those among the oppressed willing to sell out their neighbor for a few more crusts of bread. As life becomes desperate, the choice is often between collaboration and death.

Our corporate masters know what is coming. They know that as the ecosystem breaks down, as financial dislocations create new global financial meltdowns, as natural resources are poisoned or exhausted, despair will give way to panic and rage.

They know coastal cities will be covered by rising sea levels, crop yields will plummet, soaring temperatures will make whole parts of the globe uninhabitable, the oceans will become dead zones, hundreds of millions of refugees will flee in desperation, and complex structures of governance and organization will break down.

They know that the legitimacy of corporate power and neoliberalism—as potent and utopian an ideology as fascism or communism—will crumble. The goal is to keep us fooled and demobilized as long as possible.

The corporate state, operating a system Sheldon Wolin referred to as “inverted totalitarianism,” invests tremendous sums—$5 billion in this presidential election alone—to ensure that we do not see its intentions or our ultimate predicament.

These systems of propaganda play on our emotions and desires. They make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. They get us to identify with the manufactured personality of a political candidate. Millions wept at the death of Josef Stalin, including many who had been imprisoned in his gulags. There is a powerful yearning to believe in the paternal nature of despotic power.

There are cracks in the edifice. The loss of faith in neoliberalism has been a driving force in the insurgencies in the Republican and Democratic parties. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, of course, will do nothing to halt the corporate assault. There will be no reform. Totalitarian systems are not rational. There will only be harsher forms of repression and more pervasive systems of indoctrination and propaganda. The voices of dissenters, now marginalized, will be silenced.

It is time to step outside of the establishment. This means organizing groups, including political parties, that are independent of the corporate political machines that control the Republicans and Democrats.

It means carrying out acts of sustained civil disobedience. It means disruption.

Our resistance must be nonviolent. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, condemned to imminent death and alienated from a Polish population steeped in anti-Semitism, had no hope of appealing to the Nazi state or most of the Poles.

But we still have options. Many who work within ruling class structures understand the corruption and dishonesty of corporate power. We must appeal to their conscience. We must disseminate the truth.

We have little time left. Climate change, even if we halt all carbon emissions today, will still bring rising temperatures, havoc, instability and systems collapse to much of the planet.

Let us hope we never have to make the stark choice, as most of the ghetto fighters did, about how we will die. If we fail to act, however, this choice will one day define our future, as it defined theirs.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
© 2016 TruthDig

14 June, 2016
Truthdig.com

The air strikes also destroyed public and residential areas, historical and religious monuments, schools, hospitals, and many economic infrastructures. Even the food consignments have been attacked by Saudi fighters. As you are already aware, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has added the Saudi-led coalition to an annual blacklist of countries and armed groups that have violated children’s rights in conflict for “killing and maiming” children in Yemen. According to a UN report, the Saudi-led military coalition is responsible for 60 percent of the total number of children killed or wounded in Yemen during the current year. During the attacks of the coalition forces 510 children have been killed and 67 maimed. According to the same report, the Saudi-led coalition is responsible for half of the attacks on schools and hospitals in Yemen.

The Islamic World Peace Forum (IWPF) has always endeavored to preserve human values, peace and justice in the region and the world. , Dr. Davoud Ameri, the Secretary General of the IWPF All global humanitarian organizations are earnestly asked to collectively support the rights of the people of Yemen against the Saudi Arabia’s aggressions and war crimes to really safeguard world peace and security.

The Islamic World Peace Forum (IWPF) takes an exclusive interview with Professor Richard Falk of International Law at Princeton University and the UN Human Rights Council Special Reporter on the situation of human rights in Palestine in 2008 and 2014 and Professor Chandra Muzaffar Head of the International Movement for a Just Peace and Dr. May El Khansa PHD in International Law, human rights activist the Islamic world.

Flowing is the text of this interview:

IWPF: Why the United Nations, despite slamming Saudi Arabia for its war crimes, does not take a serious action to prevent their war crimes?

Richard A Falk: The UN can pass judgment on a powerful member such as Saudi Arabia, but it lacks the geopolitical capability to impose its will on the behavior of such a state, which is an important Western ally, protected by the United States and influential as a source of UN funding and a leading energy producer and supplier. Except for the Secretary General the UN has not condemned the Saudi intervention in Yemen or the crimes against humanity committed during these military operations.
In essence, the UN is important for purposes of symbolic approval or disapproval, but not to reshape the behavior of a resisting state. The pattern with respect to Israel is very much the same. Condemnation of policies and practices, but no capacity or political will to challenge behavior in accordance with UN consensus. Here the people of Yemen suffer while the UN is silent on the abuses being endured.

Chandra Muzaffar: The UN seldom acts even on the issues raised by its own agencies and outfits. This is mainly because it cannot ignore the interests of the nation-states that comprise the UN. The more powerful a state, the greater its ability to thwart a report that may go against its interests. This is why the UN often appears to be impotent.

May El Khansa: It must be reminded that the beginning of the UN headquarters is inside the United States and is considered a hostage or less modified under house arrest and is therefore subject to the policy of the United States.
As for the great crime that the United Nations committed against human rights, and led to the write-off (Saudi Arabia’s )name from the black list for states committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is not the first crime committed by UN under its blue flag, through staying silent about the massacres committed against humanity, such as crimes against Palestinian people, and the crimes that occur in African countries, Syria and Iraq … and even un is blind sometimes so it does not see the great countries who participates in the crimes, but major powers sometimes be the decision maker.

IWPF: Isn’t it time for the UN Security Council to send the Saudi Arabian case to the International Criminal Court?

Richard A Falk: It is time from the perspective of a well functioning legal order committed to promoting justice. The UN Security Council, subject to the veto by any one of the P-5, is a geopolitical actor that can only reach a decision if these states support such a referral to the International Criminal Court. Up to this point, the United States, in particular, has ‘a special relationship’ with Saudi Arabia that protects it against adverse action in the UN, and especially in the Security Council. As a practical matter, it would require a state that is a member of the ICC to submit evidence to the Office of the Prosecutor that Saudi Arabia’s alleged criminal conduct should be investigated with an eye toward prosecution.
To overlook the Saudi crimes in Yemen, especially toward children, civilians, medical facilities, is to weaken the authority of international criminal law.

Chandra Muzaffar: I agree that there must be bold action against nations and institutions that oppress the people, especially if they are children. One cannot expect the UN Security Council to act in the case of Saudi Arabia because veto wielding members of the Council such as the US and Britain, who are ‘protectors’ of Saudi Arabia will kill any such move. What this means is that there is no chance of Saudi Arabia being hauled up to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

May El Khansa: The UN scandal was a loud this time, and this thing came clear from the Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, who stressed that the international organization had bowed to pressure and financial threats that dangled by Saudi Arabia, which led to write-off ( Saudi Arabia )from the list of committed countries to crimes against humanity, especially in the Yemen, the killing of children.
Thus, because Saudi Arabia has the money, it was able to impose a “veto” or the right of veto against all who dared demanded he held them accountable. And that we are already at a sensitive and critical situation because how can any longer resort to the United Nations to protect innocent people, especially children, and we know that money is the master of the decision and not the law or international agreements, and of course UN under the pressure of money will not send Saudi Arabian to ICC COURT.

IWPF: Why are the Western countries, particularly the United States, silent vis-à-vis the Saudi crimes and even support this country by sending weapons to them?

Richard AFalk: As indicated, the West, and especially the United States, has developed a multi-dimensional special relationship with Saudi Arabia that accords the Kingdom impunity for its criminal practices and policies. Part of this relationship is based on arms sales, which bring both profits and dependency, and Saudi Arabia has long been a valued customer. For this reason and others the West turns a blind eye toward both violation of fundamental human rights in Saudi Arabia, and even more surprisingly, major Saudi financial and diplomatic support for extremist versions of Islam that produce political violence in Western countries.
It should be appreciated that in the sectarian struggles in the Middle East, the West has sided with the Saudis, and this alignment applies to Yemen. It is regarded geopolitically in the Middle East as a war justified for the purpose of containing the spread of Iranian influence. Thus, the West supports the political goals of the Saudi intervention, and supplying weapons and engaging in arms sales is consistent with both the political and economic interests of the West.

Chandra Muzaffar: Saudi leaders are allied and aligned to Washington DC. This is why Western leaders as a whole are silent when it comes to Saudi crimes. For protecting the Saudi elite, the rulers of the US, Britain and other such countries are guaranteed control over Saudi oil. They are also in control of the strategic sea- routes in the vicinity of Saudi Arabia and some of the other states in that region. Besides, the Saudi and some of the other elites in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) also purchase a lot of sophisticated weapons from the US, Britain and other Western states. How can we expect Western leaders to speak up against Saudi crimes when there is such an incestuous relationship between the Saudi elite and some Western leaders?

May El Khansa: The reasons is Saudi is paying money so that the US arms aids the Saudi-led coalition, against Yemen, also a coalition of Western allies and traditional imperial powers — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, armed by the US and UK — is carrying out a brutal war on the poorest country in the Middle East.

IWPF: How can the Islamic Cooperation Organization (OIC) and other Islamic organizations help the settlement of this crisis?

Richard AFalk: The OIC can give greater weight to Saudi wrongdoing, both from perspective of law and morality and from the viewpoint of upholding the reality of Islam as a foundation of peace and tolerance. The OIC has the authority and stature to establish for world public opinion the contrast between Islamic values and Saudi behavior, which suggests that condemnation by the UN should be reinforced by effective actions. Whether the impact on world public opinion is sufficient to alter the approach taken by the West is uncertain, but it is worth the effort.
The OIC could produce an influential report on the Saudi intervention in Yemen giving specific information on the means of warfare that violate international criminal law.

Chandra Muzaffar: The OIC as an organization will not take action against Saudi Arabia since the OIC is actually under the sway of the Saudi elite. Other Islamic organizations have neither the clout nor the resources to help settle the crisis.

May El Khansa: The OIC can do a lot if it was united, but as some Islamic countries are funding this organization it will not be able to be effective and helpful.

IWPF: Why the United Nations Saudi Arabia to immediately be removed from the black list?

Richard A Falk: “I was not familiar with this development, but it is consistent with earlier answer. The UN to survive must accommodate member states that possess relevant geopolitical leverage. Saudi Arabia is one of those states, and although it has lost some of its influence due to the falling price of oil, it is still important to the West as an ally, as a purchaser of arms, and in relation to the regional balance of forces.” Ban Kimonos shocking admission that Saudi Arabia was removed from the blacklist after it threatened to deprive the UN of funding for emergency humanitarian assistance to Palestinians trapped in Gaza tells the world both that he is unfit to serve as Secretary General, and quite literally that Saudi Arabia getsa way with murder at the UN. For the world and its peoples it is sad to realize that the UN to survive must accommodate member states that possess relevant geopolitical leverage no matter how far their behavior falls beneath thresholds of minimal decency. Saudi Arabia is one of those states, and although it has recently lost some of its influence due to the falling price of oil, it is still accorded impunity by the West and even much of Islamic world because of its status as an ally, as a purchaser of arms, and in relation to the regional balance of forces in the Middle East.”

Chandra Muzaffar: It is alleged by diplomats in New York that “Muslim allies of Saudi Arabia piled pressure on UN chief Ban Ki-Moon over the black-listing of a Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen , with Riyadh threatening to cut Palestinian aid and funds to other UN programs.” This is why the UN Secretary-General removed the coalition from the black-list “pending a joint review by the world body and the coalition of cases of child deaths and injuries during the war in Yemen.”
Apart from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Bangladesh also complained to Ban, according to various sources. They threatened the UN Secretary-General that if the Saudi-led coalition was not removed from the black-list, aid from Saudi Arabia and its allies for Palestinian refugees channeled through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) would cease. Saudi Arabia is a big donor to UNWRA, providing it with almost 100 million US dollars in 2015. Kuwait and UAE together supplied 50 million to UNWRA last year.
By threatening the UN in this manner, Saudi Arabia and its allies were actually blackmailing the UN. This is despicable. It is immoral to force the UN to alter its well-researched report on the killing of Yemeni children by exploiting the vulnerable position of Palestinian refugees. It is a travesty of justice.
It is worth recalling that the UN decided not to blacklist Israel in 2015 over the massacre of children in Gaza largely because of pressure from Israel and the United States. Now a number of Arab and Muslim states have also joined them in the “Hall of Shame.”The least the world can do is to condemn Saudi Arabia and its allies for attempting to erase the truth about an immoral act through blackmail. At the same time, global citizens should express deep disappointment over Ban’s succumbing to such blackmail.

May El Khansa: The international organization had bowed to pressure and financial threats that dangled by Saudi Arabia, which led to write-off (Saudi Arabia) from the list of committed countries to crimes against humanity, especially in the Yemen, the killing of children.

IWPF: What role should the Muslim elites and ulama (scholars) play regarding this crisis?

Richard A Falk: I would suppose that Muslim elites and ulama have a strong interest in setting the record straight as to the nature of and limits on acceptable behavior from an Islamic point of view, and questioning Saudi Arabia on the basis of such an assessment.

Chandra Muzaffar: Muslim elites and ulama should raise the awareness of Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere about what is happening in Yemen and other countries The UN’s report on children could serve as a trigger for organized, systematic awareness raising, networking and campaigning. Awareness raising and campaigning will be effective only if those who are leading the process are perceived as women and men of integrity. They should not be biased against one side or the other. Unfortunately, there are very few such individuals in the Muslim world today.

May El Khansa: True hope to solve the problems is the Muslim Elites, by union of Muslims (Sunni and Shia) they must work in earnest to fight fanaticism and terrorism and to stop corruption and waste of money the Islamic countries, and put an end to the rulers of the Muslims who use the money for sectarian incitement and terrorism feed.

14 June 2016

By David Brunnstrom

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tension between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counselor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.

“She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should … make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington.

“I actually told her she should speak more openly.”

Violence between Buddhists and Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticized Suu Kyi’s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya’s plight.

The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated”.

“So I don’t know,” he said.

There is widespread hostility towards Rohingya Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country, including among some within Suu Kyi’s party and its supporters.

More than 100 people were killed in violence in western Rakhine state in 2012, and some 125,000 Rohingya Muslims, who are stateless, took refuge in camps where their movements are severely restricted.

The Dalai Lama said some Buddhist monks in Myanmar “seem to have some kind of negative attitude to Muslims” and Buddhists who harbored such thoughts “should remember Buddha’s face.”

“If Buddha happened, he certainly would protect those Muslim brothers and sisters,” he said.

Suu Kyi said during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry last month that the country needed “enough space” to deal with the Rohingya issue and cautioned against the use of “emotive terms”, that she said were making the situation more difficult.

“It’s very important for the international community to realize the sensitive situation of Rakhine State, and avoid doing anything that would make matters worse and more difficult for the new government to handle it,” Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Suu Kyi’s office, said when asked about Dalai Lama’s comments.

Zaw Htay said Suu Kyi had been trying to “sort out this problem to the best of her ability”, referring to a newly formed committee led by Suu Kyi to bring peace and development to Rakhine State.

The government offered no details on how the new committee would address Rakhine State’s problems.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom, additonal reporting by Aung Hla Tun in YANGON; Editing by David Gregorio, Robert Birsel)

14 June 2016