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By Countercurrents

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are the highest in 3 million years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged more than 400 parts per million throughout April, the first time the planet’s monthly average has surpassed that threshold.

The data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California , San Diego , shows how world leaders are failing to rein in greenhouse gases that climate scientists say are warming the planet.

“We’re running out of time, but not solutions,” Ed Chen, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an e-mail. “The next big step is to limit, for the first time, carbon pollution being spewed by our power plants.”

The average value for April was measured at 401.33 ppm at the Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaii , according to an announcement on Twitter disclosing the finding by the institution’s Keeling Curve program. It was named for the scientist who began the measurements in 1958 and shows that temperatures are rising more quickly.

The finding adds to concerns that a buildup of carbon dioxide is damaging the atmosphere, making storms more intense, melting glaciers and putting at risk the future of seaside cities such as Miami .

The level of CO2 broke 400, as a daily average, for the first time last May. Less than a year later, the average for a month has exceeded a threshold not seen in the measured record dating back 3 million years.

Concentrations of CO2 are rising at about 2 to 3 ppm a year. The United Nations has said that in order to maximize our chances of limiting the global temperature rise since 1750 to the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the concentration of all greenhouse gases should peak at no higher than 450 ppm this century.

That includes methane and nitrous oxide, gases not included in the Scripps measurement.

The atmospheric concentration of all greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide, was equivalent to a CO2 level of 430 ppm in 2011, according to the UN intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The annual average concentration of CO2 that year was about 391 ppm, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Association.

03 May, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Mike Head

In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.

According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.

The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centered in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.

As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Western media attempts to cover up what happened in Odessa—with multiple reports stating that “the exact sequence of events is still unclear”—there is no doubt that the killings in the southern port city were instigated by thugs wearing the insignia of the Right Sector, which holds positions in the Kiev regime, along with the like-minded Svoboda party.

The Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev elements after they surrounded and set fire to a tent camp of anti-government activists that had stood for several weeks in front of the building on Odessa’s Kulikovo Field Square. The building itself was torched after some of the anti-government protesters barricaded themselves inside it.

As the building was engulfed in flames, photos posted on Twitter showed people hanging out of windows and sitting on windowsills of several floors, possibly preparing to jump. Other images showed pro-regime elements celebrating the inferno. Some jeered on Twitter that “Colorado beetles are being roasted up in Odessa,” using a derogatory term for pro-Russian activists wearing St. George’s ribbons.

Thirty of the victims were found on the floors of the building, having apparently suffocated from smoke inhalation. Eight more died after jumping out of windows to escape the blaze, according to local police. Ukraine authorities said a total of 43 people died in Odessa Friday and 174 others sustained injuries, with 25 still in a critical condition.

The violence started as around 1,500 supporters of the Kiev authorities, who recently arrived in the city, gathered at Sobornaya Square in central Odessa. Armed with chains and bats and carrying shields, they marched through the city, chanting “Glory to Ukraine,” “Death to enemies” and “Knife the Moskals [derogatory for Russians].”

Odessa has been among the southeast Ukrainian cities swept by protests since the February coup. At the end of March, thousands rallied in the city, challenging the legitimacy of the coup-imposed government and demanding an autonomy referendum.

The Odessa massacre is the largest death toll so far since the Ukrainian regime, at the urging of the Obama administration, renewed its full-scale military assault on anti-government protests and occupations.

Earlier Friday, interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said many separatists had been killed in a government offensive in Slavyansk. Kiev officials said troops overran rebel checkpoints surrounding the city of 130,000 people in an operation launched before dawn, adding that the city was now “tightly encircled.”

Despite the use of helicopter gunships, the assault stalled, however, because of local resistance. By early afternoon, the Ukrainian troops were halted in the villages of Bylbasovka and Andreyevka, where residents flocked to their lines to argue with them and urge them not to fight.

In Andreyevka, about 200 people formed a human chain to stop armoured personnel carriers and trucks. In Bylbasovka, residents chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” In the nearby town of Kramatorsk, people blocked roads with trolley cars and buses in an attempt to prevent the army from entering.

At his press conference with Merkel, Obama seized on reports that two Ukrainian helicopters had been struck by ground fire. He cited unconfirmed allegations by the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU that one was hit by a heat-seeking missile as proof that Russian forces were involved. By the evening, however, even the New York Times admitted that no evidence had been produced of heat-seeking missiles.

Along with Obama’s incendiary claim, his backing for Kiev’s military onslaught points to a drive by the US and its European partners to create civil war conditions and goad Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration into intervening, in order to provide the pretext for crippling economic sanctions and a NATO confrontation with Russia.

Washington pushed for the renewed offensive just days after the Kiev regime appeared to back away from an all-out military assault, saying it was “helpless” to stop the occupations of buildings, which have spread to at least 17 cities and towns.

Putin sought to forestall the US-led push by signing a so-called peace agreement with the US, the European Union and Ukraine two weeks ago, which provided for ending the building occupations and halting plans for a military crackdown. This pact has been swept aside by Kiev and its backers. Putin’s spokesman yesterday said the “punitive operation” mounted by Ukraine had destroyed the agreement.

Russia called another emergency UN Security Council meeting Friday to denounce Ukraine’s actions. Moscow’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, warned of “catastrophic consequences” if the military operation continued, only to be denounced by his US counterpart, Samantha Power, who called the attack “proportionate and reasonable.”

Power, who made a name for herself by championing US military interventions in Libya and elsewhere in the name of “human rights” and the “protection of civilians,” declared that Russia’s concern about escalating instability was “cynical and disingenuous.” In keeping with US government propaganda since the beginning of the crisis, she baldly asserted that Russia was the cause of the instability.

It was Washington and its allies, particularly the German government that orchestrated the ultra-nationalist February putsch in Kiev and then exploited the reaction of Moscow, and Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, to accuse Russia of threatening Ukraine.

Having poured some $5 billion into the country to install the Kiev regime via violent paramilitary operations, it is now accusing Russia, without producing any serious evidence, of doing the very same thing.

Ukraine’s initial military assault last month began after CIA Director James Brennan surreptitiously visited Kiev. A second push followed a visit by US Vice President Joseph Biden.

There is evidence of ongoing US involvement. The Russian Foreign Ministry said English-speaking foreigners had been seen among the Ukrainian forces mounting the assault on Slavyansk on Friday, echoing its previous charges that Greystone, a US military contractor, is working alongside the Ukrainian military.

In part, the US operation seems directed at preventing an autonomy referendum planned by anti-Kiev opponents on May 11. In addition, a Ukrainian presidential election, scheduled for May 25, is seen by the Western powers as a means of lending legitimacy to the coup government in Kiev. The most widely-promoted presidential candidate, billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko, advocates NATO membership for Ukraine and the subordination of the country to the dictates of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

But with the Kiev regime failing to suppress the opposition, Washington appears intent on provoking a confrontation and then accusing Russia of preventing the presidential poll from proceeding. Meanwhile, on the pretext of training exercises, US troops are being deployed in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Poland, bringing NATO forces right up to Russia’s borders.

03 May, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Gaither Stewart

Rome: On the heels of the disasters left behind by the USA-led wars in the small countries of Iraq, Libya and Syria, among others, the reasons for America’s blatant and barely disguised aggression against Ukraine might seem at first puzzling. If America’s armed forces and its proxies left such socio-economic messes in such smaller and weaker countries, why the sudden all-out attack on Ukraine that translates into an attack on the powerful nuclear power Russia? If US forces could not defeat the Shia in Iraq, nor suppress the tribal society in Libya, nor break the Assad government in Syria, how could Washington’s power-mad neocons even dream of planting missile bases in Ukraine and of subduing an unbeatable Russia as both Napoleon and Hitler experienced?

It is difficult to distinguish Ukraine from Russia. Ukraine is as much Russia as Texas is the USA. Russian-Ukrainians in the traditional Russian city of Kiev, today claimed by bands of Fascists and neo-Nazis of the so-called Right Sector and the Svoboda political party, write daily in pure Russian on their Facebook pages of their disgust with the whole artificially mounted process. Though the majority in Kiev are Ukrainians, or Little Russians, Ukraine is still Russia. The attempt to separate them is pure folly.

The awkward and mad US attempt to simply skip over Ukraine, as if it didn’t count, is the acme of hubris, just as would a Russian-backed Mexican attempt to occupy Texas and California.

However, there is a secondary aspect of the US-NATO-EU aggression against Ukraine: the enduring American fear of the endemic germ-disease of Socialism/Communism in Russia that is very much alive today, and spreading in Russia and East Europe. The independent Socialist magazine, Monthly Review, recently quoted the Secretary of the Russian Communist, Gennady Zygunov, at the 14th plenum of the Party Central Committee on the 95th anniversary of the Russian Revolution that today’s Russian CP, together with the other main Socialist Party, regularly poll about 40% of the vote which some observers claim would be more than 50% if elections were a little more transparent.

The American fear of Russia is an old story. In November, 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia based on the slogan of “peace, bread and land.” Within five weeks, France, Britain and the USA decided to intervene against the antiwar Russian Bolsheviks, claiming it was necessary to keep Russia in the war against Germany.

Today we know that was not the real reason. The real reason was to stamp out the spreading contagion of Socialism. The Allied intervention nearly a century ago marked the real beginning of the Cold War against Russia. Today’s US/NATO/EU support for neo-Nazis and Fascists in Ukraine against Russia is the continuation of that same anti-Socialist crusade.

As Phil Braithwaite underlines in his book To Begin at the Beginning, the same “Allied intervention was responsible for Bolshevik terror (against real internal threats)—which was then used as the basic public pretext for continued intervention after November 1918.”

The English scholar, Braithwaite goes on the say that “the motivation and character of Allied intervention in Russia between 1917 and 1920 … were primarily ideological.”
“The purpose of the Allied intervention,” Churchill stated, “was to strangle the baby in its crib.” And thus, ultimately, one may safely add, the intervention was a primary cause of WWII. This same Allied anti-Socialist crusade motivated the non-intervention in Spain on the side of the Republic, the sell-out to Hitler in Munich and the subsequent policy of appeasement of the Nazi regime in the hope the Wehrmacht of the Third Reich would succeed in smashing Socialist Russia where the Allied intervention failed. Consequently, even the post-WWII arms race has its origins in the hostility to Socialism and the Soviet Union

The Russian has often been labeled the most religious person in Europe. One can argue that though Russian Communism was executed by Lenin or Stalin, they did not invent it. The Russian form of Socialism/Communism is closely linked to the Russian’s sense of Communitarianism. In ancient times, “the Russian village community, called in Russian the mir, was based on neighbourhood and property, with however the warmth and the patriarchal character of life.” (G.P. Fedotov in The Russian Religious Mind.) Even the word mir has messianic connotations inherent in Socialism; mir means also world and peace.

Moreover, according to Russian historiography, ancient Russian peoples and kingdoms sought to avoid wars and bloodshed. Only extreme historical and geographical circumstances have precipitated Russia into war, for example its drive for a maritime exit from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Here is the issue today: Russia has not sought conflict in Ukraine. During Russia’s period of weakness after the disintegration of the former USSR, it had to accept US/NATO encroachments and military a/o missile bases in neighbouring nations like Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland and even in former Soviet republics like the Baltic States and Georgia. Russia even bore up under US-sponsored interference in Chechnya in the Caucasus.

However, today, an again strong Russia, pushed to the limit by American hubris, has said a loud No! to aggression against Ukraine, Russia’s spiritual Slavic brother. A powerful No! to the US strategy of placing missile sites in territory considered the cradle, the very soul of Russia. It has said No! to this new “Allied” intervention. Loud and clear. This intervention, as was the Napoleonic invasion, as was the Allied intervention in 1917, as was the Hitlerite invasion in WWII, is an attack on Holy Russia. Those previous interventions have much in common: they all ended in disastrous failures.

No one should be deceived by a puppet Fascist-Nazi regime in Kiev, one of Russia’s holy cities. People of Kiev are not deceived. People of the West Ukraine with its history of collaboration with Hitler’s legions invading Holy Russia in WWII are not deceived. Russia will never be content with re-claiming what is “hers”, the south-eastern, pro-Russian provinces of Ukraine. Russia will eventually re-absorb what is as much a part of Russia as is Texas of the USA. Without Russia, Ukraine is hardly a nation that could not even organize properly world soccer championship games. As a people they are called in those parts “Little Russians”. A people-nation which cannot exist economically independent from Russia. Today, Ukraine’s puppet leaders are begging Europe and the USA to pay its debts to Russia for its indispensable gas supplies, while they pathetically decide to cut off water supplies to the Crimea already re-annexed to Russia. And dare to send troops eastwards toward Eastern cities whose Russian ethnic majorities have revolted against the US supported Fascist regime in their holy Kiev, many of which troops anyway defect to the Russian side.

The aspect of Russia’s historical preference for peace (which is not as esoteric a discourse as it might seem to more hardened readers) as compared to America’s marked preference for war reflect the extreme difference between two types of society. (As according to Emil Cioran, the difference between the very basic moral values of the two cultures: one for peace, the other for war.)

I don’t believe that Putin’s long silences are signs of a tolerance born from weakness —neither his own nor of the people he leads. Washington should be extremely careful not to overstep here the limits as it does regularly. As Cioran writes in Histoire et Utopie, “Ambition is a drug which makes of the addicted a madman in power.”

Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture.

02 May, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Alex Lantier

NATO officials escalated their military build-up against Russia yesterday, as the pro-Western puppet regime in Kiev reinstated conscription in order to boost its crackdown on spreading pro-Russian protests in eastern Ukraine.

The news came as the position of the far-right regime in Kiev weakened, with more cities and government buildings in east Ukraine held by protesters and militias opposed to it. Protesters stormed the prosecutor’s office, disarming police, in the city of Donetsk, one of many cities in the region, including Luhansk, Slavyansk, and Kramatorsk, now outside of Kiev’s control.

A statement issued by the Kiev regime’s acting president Oleksandr Turchynov confirmed that the aim of the conscription order, for all able-bodied males between 18 and 25, was to boost the crackdown in predominately Russian-speaking areas. The order was issued “given the deteriorating situation in the east and the south [and] the rising force of armed pro-Russian units and the taking of public administration buildings,” the statement declared. It added that the protests “threaten the territorial integrity” of Ukraine.

Turchynov’s justification for the conscription order is a political fraud. His regime, the product of a Western-backed putsch, does not stand for Ukraine’s independence or its territorial integrity. The regime has launched crackdowns planned in discussions with top US officials such as CIA Director John Brennan and Vice President Joe Biden, who visited Kiev as successive waves of repression began.

The contempt of the Kiev regime and its imperialist backers for the Ukrainian population was further underscored by their agreement to a $17 billion bailout package dictated by the International Monetary Fund. It is conditioned on unpopular fuel price increases and mass layoffs in the public sector that have already provoked protests in several cities.

Turchynov has admitted that his regime’s security forces are “helpless” to stop the spread of pro-Russian seizures of cities and government buildings across east Ukraine. Some army and police units have refused orders to shoot protesters. The Kiev regime has turned to setting up private militias led by business oligarchs or fascist paramilitaries from the Right Sector to attack the protesters.

This crackdown has placed the world on the verge of war. Moscow has stated that it will use “all means” to protect ethnic Russians from Ukrainian forces, should the Kiev regime’s crackdown escalate into a large-scale massacre of the population of east Ukraine. In a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that all Ukrainian troops be withdrawn from eastern Ukraine.

The conscription order is a desperate attempt to bolster the tottering Kiev regime amid deepening political crisis and rising popular opposition. If obeyed in parts of the country still under Kiev’s control, it would provide back-up to the fascist forces spearheading the repression of the protests.

It would also place an army of over a million men, supported and equipped by NATO, directly on Russia’s southwestern border. In this, the Kiev regime is doing the bidding of its Western imperialist masters, who are recklessly denouncing Russia and mounting a military build-up across Eastern Europe laying the basis for a major war with Russia.

Yesterday, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow branded Russia an enemy. “Clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner, but as more of an adversary than a partner,” he said.

Vershbow said NATO could repudiate its 1997 pledge not to station nuclear weapons or large numbers of troops in Eastern Europe. Given Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the east Ukraine protests, he said, “we would be within our rights” to scrap the deal and permanently station “significant” numbers of troops in Eastern Europe.

The Western powers are seizing upon the Ukraine crisis to try to carry out a major restructuring of European and world politics. Like the September 11, 2001 attacks, which US imperialism exploited to launch a series of unpopular Middle East wars, the Ukraine crisis is to provide the Western imperialist powers with a justification for a massive military escalation and the preparation of large-scale wars.

Such topics will doubtless be at the heart of discussions today between US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is visiting Washington, DC.

Claims that NATO’s reckless escalation is simply a response to Russian military aggression are lies. Protests in eastern Ukraine—previously the power base of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed by the February putsch—are not the product of Russian aggression, but of broad opposition to the oligarchs and fascists who lead the Kiev regime. They are a consequence of the reckless decision of the NATO powers, led by Washington and Berlin, to back the putsch and then stoke tensions with Moscow.

Since the Kiev putsch, Washington and its NATO allies have stationed fighter jets and ground forces in Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania. They have also stepped up naval deployments to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, while hypocritically denouncing Russia for stationing troops along its western border with Ukraine.

Vershbow said that NATO will deploy more forces, to be able to intervene rapidly in the Baltic states. “We want to be sure that we can come to the aid of these countries if there were any, even indirect, threat very quickly before any facts on the ground can be established,” he said.

Such a deployment would be wildly provocative. Were NATO forces to be stationed in the northernmost Baltic country, Estonia, they would be less than 100 miles from Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

NATO officials also announced yesterday that they were examining ways to grant NATO membership status to the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus.

Such a move also directly raises the risk of war between Russia and NATO. Russia and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008, after Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers stationed in ethnic minority regions of Georgia along its border with Russia. Had Georgia been a NATO member state at the time, the other NATO powers could have invoked the Clause 5 mutual self-defense guarantee between NATO member states to justify intervening in the war on Georgia’s side.

NATO Special Representative for the Caucasus James Appathurai pledged that the organization would ignore Russian objections to Georgian membership in NATO.

“What Russia says or does will not influence our decision,” he said. “We will judge Georgia on Georgia’s merits and regardless of what’s happening elsewhere and regardless of comments from the Kremlin or elsewhere … We are now looking, of course, at next steps, at bringing Georgia even closer to NATO and to meeting its goals.”

02 May, 2014

WSWS.org

 

 

By Anuradha Sharma And Vishal Arora

BANGKOK — To many Americans, Buddhism is about attaining enlightenment, maybe even nirvana, through such peaceful methods as meditation and yoga.

But in some parts of Asia, a more assertive, strident and militant Buddhism is emerging. In three countries where Buddhism is the majority faith, a form of religious nationalism has taken hold:
* In Sri Lanka, where about 70 percent of the population is Theravada Buddhist, a group of monks formed the Bodu Bala Sena or the Buddhist Power Force in 2012 to “protect” the country’s Buddhist culture. The force, nicknamed BBS, carried out at least 241 attacks against Muslims and 61 attacks against Christians in 2013, according to the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress.

* In Myanmar, at least 300 Rohingya Muslims, whose ancestors were migrants from Bangladesh, have been killed and up to 300,000 displaced, according to Genocide Watch. Ashin Wirathu, a monk who describes himself as the Burmese “bin Laden,” is encouraging the violence by viewing the Rohingya presence as a Muslim “invasion.”

* And in Buddhist-majority Thailand, at least 5,000 people have died in Muslim-Buddhist violence in the country’s South. The country’s Knowing Buddha Foundation is not a violent group, but it advocates for a blashemy law to punish anyone who offends the faith. It wants Buddhism declared the state religion and portrays popular culture as a threat to believers.

Though fundamentalism is a term that has thus far been used mostly in relation to Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, some are beginning to use it to describe Buddhists as well.

Maung Zarni, an exiled Burmese who has written extensively on the ongoing violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, argues that there is no room for fundamentalism in Buddhism.

“No Buddhist can be nationalistic,” said Zarni, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. “There is no country for Buddhists. I mean, no such thing as ‘me,’ ‘my’ community, ‘my’ country, ‘my’ race or even ‘my’ faith.”

He views the demand for an anti-blasphemy law in Thailand also as a distortion of Buddhism, which doesn’t allow any “organization that polices or regulates the faithful’s behavior or inner thoughts.”

But Acharawadee Wongsakon, the Buddhist teacher who founded the Knowing Buddha Foundation, insists Buddhism needs legal protections and society must follow certain prescribed do’s and don’ts.

She and others see the new movements as providing “true knowledge on Buddhism.”

Thailand’s conflict between Muslim insurgents and local Buddhists, which reignited along the Malaysian border in 2004, is part of a long-standing feud pitting Buddhist monks and Muslim insurgents.

“For sure, Thailand has its own brand of ‘Buddhist’ racism towards non-Buddhists,” said Zarni. “But, I am not sure the Thai society will go the way of those two genocidal Theravada Buddhist societies (Sri Lanka and Myanmar) — where racism of genocidal nature has enveloped the mainstream ‘Buddhist’ society.”

Buddhist monk Phramaha Boonchuay Doojai, a senior lecturer at Chiang Mai Buddhist College in Thailand, said there are reasons why Theravada Buddhists see Islam as a threat. Among them, he cited the destruction of Nalanda University in India by Turkic military general Bakhtiyar Khilji in the early 13th century and attacks on Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, around the seventh century and more recently by the Taliban in 2001.

“Thousands of monks were burned alive and thousands beheaded as Khilji tried his best to uproot Buddhism,” he said.

Zarni agrees there are links “among what I really call anti-Dharma ‘Buddhist’ networks” in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, which are “toxic, cancerous and deeply harmful to all humans anywhere.”

Wirathu was recently labeled on the cover of Time magazine as “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” The Myanmar government banned the edition. But Wirathu was quoted telling a reporter, “I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist.”

YS/MG END ANURADHA-ARORA

2 May 2014

Religion News Service

By BBC
A Dutch Catholic priest was shot dead in the Syrian city of Homs earlier this month, but who was he, and what was he doing there? Bethlehem-based writer Daniel Silas Adamson pays tribute to a Jesuit who practised yoga, ran a farm and welcomed people of all faiths on mountain hikes.

No-one who knew Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch Jesuit priest murdered in Syria, was surprised by his refusal to leave the besieged city of Homs. He had spent almost 50 years in Syria and had been in Homs since the siege began more than two years ago.

The last European left inside the Old City, he was sought out by journalists and became a spokesman for the trapped and starving civilian population. “I have learned about the generosity of the Syrian people,” he told a reporter earlier this year. “If these people are suffering now I want to be in solidarity with them. As I was with these people in their good times, I am with them in their pain.”

A few years ago, I met Frans at the residence in Homs where, on 7 April, he was taken into the garden by a masked gunman and shot in the head. We were introduced by Paolo dall Oglio, an Italian priest who also spent his life in Syria and has not been seen or heard of since he was kidnapped by Islamist rebels in Raqqa in July 2013.

In many ways the two men were similar. Both were Jesuits. Both spoke fluent Arabic and considered Syria home. Both had been shaped by the ideals of internationalism and social justice that influenced the Catholic Church in the 1960s. In Syria, far from the rigid hierarchies of the Vatican, Frans and Paolo each found the freedom to pursue an unorthodox vision of what it meant to be a Catholic priest.

But they responded in radically different ways to the challenge of serving a dwindling Christian community in a predominantly Muslim country.
Paolo built on the bedrock of Syrian Christianity – desert monasticism. In the 1980s he found a ruined Byzantine monastery in the mountains some 80km (50 miles) north of Damascus and slowly restored it to life. Deir Mar Musa, as the monastery was called in Arabic, had been founded before Islam and only abandoned in the mid-19th Century.

For Paolo, it was witness to centuries of coexistence between Christians and Muslims and was, for that reason, an ideal place from which to promote friendship across lines of religious difference. He received thousands of Muslim guests at Deir Mar Musa, always making clear that they were welcome to eat, to sleep, and to pray at the monastery. Often he would show them the frescoes in the church, pointing out the 12th Century painting of Abraham (for Muslims, the Prophet Ibrahim) that covered the west wall.

“I believe in traditions, and the oriental tradition is rich and full of value,” Paolo told me as we drove from Deir Mar Musa to meet Frans in Homs. “Fourteen centuries of common life between Christians and Muslims is not something to be cast aside lightly.”
In the early 1990s, while Paolo was rebuilding his monastery in the desert, Frans was given a few acres of flat agricultural land about 15km south-west of Homs. He called it al-Ard – the earth – and he used it to create a spiritual centre that had no precedent in Syria.

“It’s simple, like the earth,” Frans said. “That’s all.”

The dirt track that led from the main road to al-Ard ran between olive groves and vineyards. Frans didn’t use weed-killers or pesticides and there were wild flowers everywhere. In the centre of the land was a vegetable garden where perhaps a dozen people, many of them children or teenagers with disabilities, were weeding and watering the red earth.

Each morning Frans made a circuit of the nearby villages in his old VW van, collecting these young people from their families and bringing them to the farm. In a culture where people with disabilities are often hidden away in shame, Frans was creating a space where they could work together as part of “a community that values everybody”.
Some of these people needed patient, full-time support. Others, with less severe disabilities or mental health problems, were employed in the vineyards that made al-Ard economically sustainable.

The work was shared by the volunteers who lived on the farm and by those – of all faiths – who visited for spiritual retreats led by Frans.

Sceptical about initiatives that emphasised theological common ground, Frans rarely mentioned the Abrahamic roots shared by Syria’s Christians and Muslims. If anything, he looked beyond monotheism entirely. He was a serious student of Zen Buddhism and sat in silent meditation every morning. He also taught meditation and yoga in a quiet, light-filled space, neither church nor mosque, that he built at the heart of al-Ard. “For me,” he said, “it is important to start from the human meeting. Not to start with religion.”

The hike in the Jebal Ansariya mountains
That lack of dogmatism may have been one of the things that drew young people to Frans. In 1980 he began walking through the Jebal Ansariya, the mountains that rise from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, with students from his parish. Almost 30 years later, already in his 70s, Frans was still leading an annual eight-day hike across the country, followed by as many as 200 or 300 young Syrians – Christian and Muslim, Druze and Alawite. Though he was reluctant to ascribe any particular purpose to the walks, Frans acknowledged that they had become something special.

“The hike brings people together. They share the common experience of fatigue, of sleeping and eating together, and this builds a link between people. After the hike it is not important that you are Christian or Muslim, it is important that you are present.”

Working on the land, sitting in silence, walking across the countryside. For Frans, these basic human experiences were the most reliable way to create “a kind of unity, a human complicity, a human comprehension”. In the search for what he called “the common place of being” he had come to distrust the certainties that often accompany religious identity. Unless he was leading a service, Frans wore no outward signs of the priesthood to which he belonged and there was nothing at Al Ard that marked it out as a Christian space.

As he drove me back to Homs, Frans said: “You know, I don’t really like religions. I believe in the spiritual experience that is the source, the initial inspiration of faith. Religions are always losing that inspiration, that direct experience; then they are not in the true way. I mean, they are in the hypocrisy of speaking for the spirit with which they have lost touch.”
Frans, though, stayed true to his life’s work. Through the appalling siege of Homs, his devotion to the Syrian people never faltered. To the end he spoke not of Christians or Muslims but of fellow human beings struggling to survive.

“There is nothing more painful than watching mothers searching for food for their children in the streets,” he said in a video clip released in February. “We love life, we want to live. And we do not want to sink in a sea of pain and suffering.”

 

26 April 2014
www.bbc.com

The attempt to lever Kiev into the western camp by ousting an elected leader made conflict certain. It could be a threat to us all

By Seumas Milne

The threat of war in Ukraine is growing. As the unelected government in Kiev declares itself unable to control the rebellion in the country’s east, John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a “pariah state”.

That might be more explicable if what is going on in eastern Ukraine now were not the mirror image of what took place in Kiev a couple of months ago. Then, it was armed protesters in Maidan Square seizing government buildings and demanding a change of government and constitution. US and European leaders championed the “masked militants” and denounced the elected government for its crackdown, just as they now back the unelected government’s use of force against rebels occupying police stations and town halls in cities such as Slavyansk and Donetsk.

“America is with you,” Senator John McCain told demonstrators then, standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the far-right Svoboda party as the US ambassador haggled with the state department over who would make up the new Ukrainian government.

When the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia’s most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.

Putin bit back, taking a leaf out of the US street-protest playbook – even though, as in Kiev, the protests that spread from Crimea to eastern Ukraine evidently have mass support. But what had been a glorious cry for freedom in Kiev became infiltration and insatiable aggression in Sevastopol and Luhansk.

After Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage. So Putin is now routinely compared to Hitler, while the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda.

So you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down, and false identifications of Russian special forces are relayed as fact.

The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.

No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

But the dangers are also multiplying. Ukraine has shown itself to be barely a functioning state: the former government was unable to clear Maidan, and the western-backed regime is “helpless” against the protests in the Soviet-nostalgic industrial east. For all the talk about the paramilitary “green men” (who turn out to be overwhelmingly Ukrainian), the rebellion also has strong social and democratic demands: who would argue against a referendum on autonomy and elected governors?

Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan. But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality? It has none, of course – which is why the Ukraine crisis is seen in such a different light across most of the world. There may be few global takers for Putin’s oligarchic conservatism and nationalism, but Russia’s counterweight to US imperial expansion is welcomed, from China to Brazil.

In fact, one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese “pivot” to Asia. And despite growing violence, the cost in lives of Russia’s arms-length involvement in Ukraine has so far been minimal compared with any significant western intervention you care to think of for decades.

The risk of civil war is nevertheless growing, and with it the chances of outside powers being drawn into the conflict. Barack Obama has already sent token forces to eastern Europe and is under pressure, both from Republicans and Nato hawks such as Poland, to send many more. Both US and British troops are due to take part in Nato military exercises in Ukraine this summer.

The US and EU have already overplayed their hand in Ukraine. Neither Russia nor the western powers may want to intervene directly, and the Ukrainian prime minister’s conjuring up of a third world war presumably isn’t authorised by his Washington sponsors. But a century after 1914, the risk of unintended consequences should be obvious enough – as the threat of a return of big-power conflict grows. Pressure for a negotiated end to the crisis is essential.

Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He was the Guardian’s comment editor from 2001 to 2007 after working for the paper as a general reporter and labour editor.

30 April 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/

By Nile Bowie

As Washington pursues its rebalancing strategy, Obama’s historic four-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific has subtly altered the region’s security dynamics.

“The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,” declared President Obama during his speech to the Australian parliament in 2011, following his announcement to deploy 2,500 marines to northern Australia to help protect American interests across Asia.

As Washington remains embroiled in domestic economic issues and conflicts throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, the Obama administration has come under great scrutiny for not living up to the promise of rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific, the world’s most economically-dynamic region. The US president’s recent trip to the region was the most significant and tangible development to occur since the rebalancing policy was unveiled.

Obama’s trip had two primary dimensions: deepening the role of the US military throughout the Asia-Pacific, and shoring up support for the faltering Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, an all-encompassing trade deal led by Washington that would embolden transnational corporate power at great public expense.

As the Obama administration moves ahead on plans to relocate some 60 percent of its navy into the region, Washington’s current Asia doctrine is grounded in the notion that no other power can be allowed to reach parity with the United States. Washington’s strategy to pivot toward the Asia-Pacific is adorned with the language of pragmatism and neutrality, and despite repeated denials, the Obama administration’s actions are quite transparently aimed at capping the influence of a rapidly developing China.

Washington has inserted itself into complicated, long-standing historical and territorial disputes under the guise of neutrality, which risks potentially setting the stage for an irreparable strategic blunder: antagonizing two major world powers simultaneously at a time when relations between the US and Russia are already deteriorating over the crisis in Ukraine.

President Obama’s milestone four-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific may have laid the foundations for the region’s local territorial disputes to grow into an increasing tense superpower stand-off.

Japan refuses to yield on trade
The US president’s visit to Japan comes at a time when the right-leaning administration of Shinzo Abe has taken controversial positions on historical and territorial issues that have inflamed relations with China and South Korea, which view the incumbent Japanese government as being openly unrepentant for past atrocities.

The White House previously expressed reservations toward Abe’s calls to consider revising official apologies over Japan’s wartime conduct, and his controversial visit to the Yasukuni shrine that honors Japan’s WWII war dead, including over a dozen convicted Class-A war criminals. Abe made a ritual offering to the Yasukuni Shrine shortly before Obama’s arrival in Tokyo, followed by 146 Japanese lawmakers who visited the shrine en masse one day later, putting the US president in an awkward situation.

These provocative gestures did little to derail Obama’s support for Japan’s position in its tense territorial dispute with China over a chain of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. In an interview with Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Obama affirmed that the disputed islands fell within the scope of Article 5 of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, meaning that Washington would be obliged to back Japan in the event of a military confrontation over the islands with Beijing, which views the islands as an integral part of its territory.

Obama also enthusiastically pledged support for Abe’s moves to amend Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution, which has traditionally limited Japan’s armed forces from going beyond a self-defense role.

In the interest of expanding the US-Japan alliance to counter the growing clout of China, the US president has given Japanese rightists a green light to pursue militarization policies that will undoubtedly fuel regional antagonism. Rather than taking a neutral position and steering Tokyo toward a de-escalation with Beijing, Obama has effectively sent Abe the message that he can challenge China’s bottom line without serious repercussions, encouraging Japan to continue its inflexible position. Obama may have hoped that in exchange for backing Japan’s stance on territorial disputes and constitutional reform, Abe would have reciprocated by yielding on thorny trade issues, but he was wrong.

Obama allegedly put his chopsticks down halfway through his informal sushi dinner with Abe and jumped straight into discussions about trade. The White House is anxious to seal the TPP trade deal, but is unwilling to give significant concessions, forcing all countries to meet rigid criteria. Abe risks losing support from his conservative voter base by reducing tariffs on areas such as rice, sugar, beef, pork and dairy that would adversely affect Japanese farmers. Obama was expecting to come to a final agreement with Abe, but trade negotiators claim that there is still “considerable distance” between the US and Japan on key issues in the deal.

Trade talks are not expected to recommence anytime soon, and Obama was forced to reject suggestions that the deal is in danger over his failure to persuade Abe into making painful concessions.

Dialogue with Pyongyang ruled out?
Obama’s trip to South Korea came as the country was still reeling from the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry, which killed scores of youngsters. Security topped the agenda as reports of increased activity at North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site wrought condemnation from Seoul. President Park Geun-hye adopted a hardline stance, calling for the rejection of dialogue with Pyongyang over the nuclear issue if the North conducts a fourth nuclear test as expected.

Pyongyang proposed a framework for better relations with the South at the start of this year and urged its willingness to meet for negotiations on the nuclear issue without any preconditions. The attempted thaw in relations culminated in reunions of separated families in February, amid Pyongyang’s calls for Seoul to cancel its planned joint military drills with the US.

Given the circumstances, South Korean authorities could have toned down this year’s drills as a gesture of reciprocity following Pyongyang’s moves to host family reunions. Seoul’s response was to hold the largest amphibian landing exercise with the US in over two decades, followed by large-scale war exercises. The lack of sincere measures to cool ties with Pyongyang is evident in the actions of Seoul and Washington, who are quick to accuse the North of provocations while flexing military muscles on its doorstep, ratcheting up anxiety and insecurity.

Park and the Obama administration refuse to open dialogue with Pyongyang unless it agrees to denuclearization as a precondition, despite pressure from China that preconditions be relaxed to allow the recommencement of the Six-Party talks.

During a joint press conference, Park announced that plans to transfer operational command of South Korea’s military in time of war, or OPCON, from the US to South Korea would be further delayed, giving the Pentagon de-facto control over South Korea’s military forces beyond December 2015.

Washington has also encouraged Seoul to strengthen missile defense cooperation – which Park agreed to do – while deepening trilateral cooperation between the US, Japan, and South Korea. During his trip, Obama called for more sanctions against North Korea and spoke of America’s capacity for military might, creating every indication that Washington’s antagonistic ‘strategic patience’ policy against Pyongyang will remain unchanged.

Malaysia’s delicate balancing act
Western media have billed Obama’s trip to Malaysia – the first visit by a US president in nearly five decades – as being quite successful. Malaysia was the only Muslim-majority country on the president’s four-nation tour, and the only country not to have an existing security treaty with the United States.
Washington and Kuala Lumpur have always enjoyed strong trade relations, but political relations were known to be tense during the 22-year tenure of former PM Mahathir Mohamad, who took strong positions against US foreign policy. Prime Minister Najib Razak, a British-educated economist who assumed office in 2009 as a reformer, has been much friendlier to the US.

The New York Times described Malaysian leadership’s change of attitude as an evolution from “deep suspicion, verging on contempt, to a cautious desire for cooperation.” Suspicious attitudes toward the US are still commonplace among certain factions within the ruling party and the conservative religious establishment. Several far-right Malay rights groups share the same misgivings, lashing out at Obama following statements he made on racial equality in the country.

Trade and security topped the agenda during Obama’s visit, and although progress was made in both areas, it’s likely that the US delegation was hoping for a firmer stance on issues such as territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Malaysia is China’s largest trading partner within the ASEAN bloc, and of all the countries in the region who have territorial disputes with Beijing, the approach taken by Kuala Lumpur has been the most low-key and non-adversarial.

ino-Malaysian ties were upgraded to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ level during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Kuala Lumpur in October 2013, while Najib and Obama agreed to upgrade ties to a ‘comprehensive partnership’ at a joint news conference following their talks on Sunday.

In the joint statement prepared by the two sides, Najib called for the full implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties regarding the South China Sea disputes, which Chinese state-media welcomed, saying that Malaysia showed a balanced attitude to avoid confrontation with China.

In an interview with Malaysian newspaper The Star, Obama alluded to his administration’s commitment to ensuring the “freedom of navigation in critical waterways,” which can be understood as a euphemism for policing the Straits of Malacca, one of China’s most critical supply routes responsible for transporting much of the oil and raw materials needed by Beijing to maintain high economic growth. Malaysia allows American warships to dock at ports throughout the country, but does not host any US military bases, and does not seek a hostile relationship with Beijing.

It is unclear how deep Malaysia’s commitment to security cooperation with the US will go, although the Obama administration has pledged to assist in the development of Malaysia’s maritime enforcement capacity, setting the stage for deeper military-to-military cooperation. In the economic sphere, there were no breakthroughs on the TPP trade deal, with both sides admitting that significant differences still remain.

Najib, however, made clear that the overall benefits of the TPP would far outweigh the disadvantages of the pact; he mentioned his commitment to getting acceptance from Malaysian people, but offered no specifics on how public acceptance of the trade deal would be measured. Mahathir, who still exerts a degree of influence on traditionalists within the ruling party, commented that Malaysia should not be pressured to agree to the terms stipulated by the TPP. The former PM has routinely called for the trade deal to be dropped, and a large segment of Malaysian civil society and activists are also opposed to the deal.

As a country that has put much emphasis on a non-confrontational foreign policy, Malaysia is well suited to leverage its good ties with Washington and Beijing to promote a conciliatory solution to territorial issues. Malaysia finds itself somewhere between being a warm friend to the Obama administration but not yet a staunch US ally with deep security ties.

Philippines signs 10-year defense agreement
To coincide with the last stop of his four-nation tour, Washington and Manila inked a controversial defense agreement to allow greater numbers of US soldiers to remain in the country on a rotational basis.

The reopening of foreign bases is prohibited by the 1987 Constitution, but the latest defense pact – negotiated largely in secret, and fast-tracked into law under the auspices of an executive agreement without ratification by the Philippine Congress – gives the US government de facto basing access in the country.

The US maintained large military bases in northern regions of the Philippines until the Philippines congress voted to close them down in 1991, but American forces were allowed to return in 1999 under a temporary stay agreement that saw US troops conduct joint training with the Philippines military. The new agreement is far broader, allowing the US military to establish permanent facilities within Philippine military facilities, also paving the way for American military technology to be sold to the Philippines.

Philippines President Benigno Aquino’s rationale for expanding the US presence in his country is to provide the Philippines with a powerful deterrent in the midst of Manila’s bitter territorial row with Beijing, as both countries lay claim to the Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea. The Philippines and its neighbors undoubtedly have firm and legitimate grievances in the interest of protecting their sovereignty and territorial integrity.

It should be recognized that the disputed features falls within the Philippine’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone as recognized by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; China has resisted applying the procedures stipulated by the law to the many reefs and islands that lie much closer to the Philippines than to China. Manila has argued that Beijing has an obligation to respect the Philippines’ rights to exercise control over areas that fall within its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone.

China claims that its sovereignty over the disputed areas can be supported by abundant historical and legal evidence, which also support Beijing’s maritime rights over three-quarters of the South China Sea. Beijing has consistently called for settling territorial issues through direct bilateral negotiations. Earlier this year, it offered the Philippines mutual disengagement from the contested area, trade and investment benefits, and postponement of the plans to declare an air defense identification zone over the South China Sea. The Philippines leadership rejected the proposal, and unilaterally filed a case with the tribunal that arbitrates maritime disputes under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

China has resolved territorial disputes with 12 of the 14 countries with which it shares land borders, and the immense complexities of these maritime territorial disputes require levelheaded dialogue and a commitment from negotiations by both sides.

The Philippines leadership may have legitimate grievances, but is clearly not committed to seeking a resolution through dialogue, resorting to hyperbolic name-calling. In an interview with the New York Times, Aquino compared China to Nazi Germany, causing immense harm to bilateral relations with Beijing.
Much like the Obama administration’s position on Japan’s territorial disputes, there is now a concern that backing by the US military can encourage Manila to take a provocative and reckless stance.

Washington has entered the regional fold claiming to be a neutral party and mediating force, yet it supports the territorial claims of its allies and uses them as a justification to maximize its own interests, transforming a regional dispute into a potential super-power conflict, reducing the possibility for any peaceful settlement.

The recent security developments will deepen Manila’s historic dependency on the United States, reinforcing its colonial subordination to the strategic, military and regional priorities of American hegemony.

Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is also a Just member.

 

29 April 2014

RT.com

 

By Paul Craig Roberts
The Obama regime, wallowing in hubris and arrogance, has recklessly escalated the Ukrainian crisis into a crisis with Russia. Whether intentionally or stupidly, Washington’s propagandistic lies are driving the crisis to war. Unwilling to listen to any more of Washington’s senseless threats, Moscow no longer accepts telephone calls from Obama and US top officials.

The crisis in Ukraine originated with Washington’s overthrow of the elected democratic government and its replacement with Washington’s hand-chosen stooges. The stooges proceeded to act in word and deed against the populations in the former Russian territories that Soviet Communist Party leaders had attached to Ukraine. The consequence of this foolish policy is agitation on the part of the Russian speaking populations to return to Russia. Crimea has already rejoined Russia, and eastern Ukraine and other parts of southern Ukraine are likely to follow.

Instead of realizing its mistake, the Obama regime has encouraged the stooges Washington installed in Kiev to use violence against those in the Russian-speaking areas who are agitating for referendums so that they can vote their return to Russia. The Obama regime has encouraged violence despite President Putin’s clear statement that the Russian military will not occupy Ukraine unless violence is used against the protesters.

We can safely conclude that Washington either does not listen when spoken to or Washington desires violence.

As Washington and NATO are not positioned at this time to move significant military forces into Ukraine with which to confront the Russian military, why is the Obama regime trying to provoke action by the Russian military? A possible answer is that Washington’s plan to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base having gone awry, Washington’s fallback plan is to sacrifice Ukraine to a Russian invasion so that Washington can demonize Russia and force a large increase in NATO military spending and deployments.

In other words, the fallback prize is a new cold war and trillions of dollars more in profits for Washington’s military/security complex.

The handful of troops and aircraft that Washington has sent to “reassure” the incompetent regimes in those perennial trouble spots for the West–Poland and the Baltics–and the several missile ships sent to the Black Sea amount to nothing but symbolic provocations.

Economic sanctions applied to individual Russian officials signal nothing but Washington’s impotence. Real sanctions would harm Washington’s NATO puppet states far more than the sanctions would hurt Russia.

It is clear that Washington has no intention of working anything out with the Russian government. Washington’s demands make this conclusion unavoidable. Washington is demanding that the Russian government pull the rug out from under the protesting populations in eastern and southern Ukraine and force the Russian populations in Ukraine to submit to Washington’s stooges in Kiev. Washington also demands that Russia renege on the reunification with Crimea and hand Crimea over to Washington so that the original plan of evicting Russia from its Black Sea
naval base can go forward.

In other words, Washington’s demand is that Russia put Humpty Dumpty back together again and hand him over to Washington.

This demand is so unrealistic that it surpasses the meaning of arrogance. The White House Fool is telling Putin: “I screwed up my takeover of your backyard. I want you to fix the situation for me and to ensure the success of the strategic threat I intended to bring to your backyard.”

The presstitute Western media and Washington’s European puppet states are supporting this unrealistic demand. Consequently, Russian leaders have lost all confidence in the word and intentions of the West, and this is how wars start.

European politicians are putting their countries at great peril and for what gain? Are Europe’s politicians blackmailed, threatened, paid off with bags of money, or are they so accustomed to following Washington’s lead that they are unable to do anything else? How do Germany, UK, and France benefit from being forced into a confrontation with Russia by Washington?

Washington’s arrogance is unprecedented and is capable of driving the world to destruction. Where is Europe’s sense of self-preservation? Why hasn’t Europe issued arrest warrants for every member of the Obama regime? Without the cover provided by Europe and the presstitute media, Washington would not be able to drive the world to war.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

27 April, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

 

By Countercurrents

“Brazil believes that the governing of the internet should be multi-sector, democratic and transparent. We consider the multilateral model to be the best way to govern it,” said Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president.

Dilma Rousseff was speaking at the beginning of a global conference in Sao Paulo on governing a safer, less US centered internet.

She convened the two day meeting following revelations that she and other world leaders were spied on by the US National Security Agency.

Rousseff set the tone of the conference by signing a new bill into law safeguarding the rights of Internet users.

Government officials, industry executives, academics as well as the founder of Thought Works and promoter of the software of open code, Roy Singham, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells and Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the web attended the conference.

In the conference, the inventor of the World Wide Web said: “Net neutrality means keeping the net free from discrimination, be it commercial or political. The innovative explosion, which happened across the net over the last 25 years has happened only because the net has been neutral.”

It should be mentioned that the US president Barack Obama has decided to take control away from ICANN, a California-based non-profit organization that has until now coordinated internet domains or addresses.

A new international body that has yet to be decided on will now carry out this role as of September 2015.

The two-day meeting to establish a global internet governance agreement, Net-Mundial, has concluded on April 24, 2014 in Brazil.

The meeting was initiated in the backdrop of NSA, an intelligence and surveillance organization of the US, leaks made by Edward Snowden. The leaked NSA documents show massive surveillance of the world population including heads of states and governments. Rousseff was one of the world leaders under the surveillance years of NSA.

The meeting was called as a result of a speech by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff at the UN General Assembly, in which she denounced US cyber espionage and demanded the creation of an Internet regulatory framework.

Called by the Brazilian government last year, Gilberto Carvalho, secretary general of the presidency, invited interested parties to discuss the direction of internet in Brazil and the world in this new democratic digital era.

The goal of the meeting was to develop ideas and generate discussion on the importance of internet rights, as well as seeking agreement on rules for the use of cyberspace, said Carvalho.

The agenda for the two day exchange included the development of a document to describe principles for governance and use of internet in Brazil, said the president of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee Demi Getschko.

The meeting condemned espionage on the worldwide web.

The delegates worked toward advancing multi-sector internet governance, and its development without hegemonic control.

The essential goal was agreement on a resolution to limit United States dominance in the administration of cyberspace.

According to Getschko, the idea was to promote a Universal Declaration on Internet Human Rights, which should include principles including freedom of expression, privacy, transparency and collective governance.

Internet Constitution

Ahead of the Net Mundial conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s Senate has unanimously adopted a bill which guarantees online privacy of Brazilian users and enshrines equal access to the global network.

The bill known as the “Internet constitution” or Marco Civil was first introduced in the wake of the NSA spying scandal and has now been signed into law by Dilma Rousseff.
Rousseff presented the law at the Net Mundial Internet.

The bill promotes freedom of information, making service providers not liable for content published by their users, but instead forcing the companies to obey court orders to remove any offensive material.

The principle of neutrality, calling on providers to grant equal access to service without charging higher rates for greater bandwidth use is also promoted. The legislation also limits the gathering and use of metadata on Internet users in Brazil.

Approval of the Senate was assured after the government dropped a provision in the legislature requiring Internet companies such as Twitter and Facebook to store data on Brazilian users at home.

The final version bill states that companies collecting data on Brazilian accounts must obey Brazilian data protection laws even if the data is collected and stored on servers abroad.

NSA was also involved on spying on Brazil’s strategic business sector, particularly on a state-run oil company Petrobras. In response to US spying, Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington in October and called on UN, together with Germany, to adopt a UN resolution guaranteeing internet freedoms.

The event is not expected to result in any binding policy decisions, but Almeida said it will facilitate a debate that will “sow the seeds” for future reforms of internet governance.

27 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org