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By Kim Scipes

As protests have been taking place in Venezuela the last couple of weeks, it is always good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer. What has the NED been up to in Venezuela?

Before going into details, it is important to note what NED is and is not. First of all, it has NOTHING to do with the democracy we are taught in civics classes, concerning one person-one vote, with everyone affected having a say in the decision, etc. (This is commonly known as “popular” or grassroots democracy.) The NED opposes this kind of democracy.

The NED promotes top-down, elite, constrained (or “polyarchal”) democracy. This is the democracy where the elites get to decide the candidates or questions suitable to go before the people—and always limiting the choices to what the elites are comfortable with. Then, once the elites have made their decision, THEN the people are presented with the “choice” that the elites approve. And then NED prattles on with its nonsense about how it is “promoting democracy around the world.”

This is one of the most cynical uses of democracy there is. It’s notable even in what my friend Dave Lippmann calls “Washington Deceit.”

The other thing to note about NED is that it is NOT independent as it claims, ad nauseum. It was created by the US Congress, signed into US law by President Ronald Reagan (that staunch defender of democracy), and it operates from funds provided annually by the US Government.

However, its Board of Directors is drawn from among the elites in the US Government’s foreign policy making realm. Past Board members have included Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, General Wesley K. Clark, and Paul Wolfowitz. Today’s board can be found at http://www.ned.org/about/board; most notable is Elliot Abrams of Reagan Administration fame.

In reality, NED is part of the US Empire’s tools, and “independent” only in the sense that no elected presidential administration can directly alter its composition or activities, even if it wanted to. It’s initial project director, Professor Allen Weinstein of Georgetown University, admitted in the Washington Post of September 22, 1991, that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In other words, according to Professor William Robinson in his 1996 book, Promoting Polyarchy, NED is a product of US Government foreign policy shift from “earlier strategies to contain social and political mobilization through a focus on control of the state and governmental apparatus” to a process of “democracy promotion,” whereby “the United States and local elites thoroughly penetrate civil society, and from therein, assure control over popular mobilization and mass movements.” What this means, as I note in my 2010 book, AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, “is that instead of waiting for a client government to be threatened by its people and then responding, US foreign policy shifted to intervening in the civil society of a country ‘of interest’ (as defined by US foreign policy goals) before popular mobilization could become significant, and by supporting certain groups and certain politicians, then channel any potential mobilization in the direction desired by the US Government.”

Obviously, this also means that these “civil society” organizations can be used offensively as well, against any government the US opposes. NED funding, for example, was used in all of the “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and, I expect, currently in the Ukraine as well as elsewhere.

How do they operate? They have four “institutes” through which they work: the International Republican Institute (currently headed by US Senator John McCain), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (currently headed by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), the Center for International Private Enterprise (the international wing of the US Chamber of Commerce), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), the foreign policy operation of the AFL-CIO, with Richard Trumka the head of its Board of Directors.

As I documented in my book, ACILS had been indirectly involved in the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela by participating in meetings with leaders later involved in the coup beforehand, and then denying afterwards the involvement of the leaders of the right-wing labor organization (CTV) in the coup, leaders of an organization long affiliated with the AFL-CIO. We also know NED overall had been active in Venezuela since 1997.

The NED and its institutes continue to actively fund projects in Venezuela today. From the 2012 NED Annual Report (the latest available), we see they have provided $1,338,331 to organizations and projects in Venezuela that year alone: $120,125 for projects for “accountability”; $470,870 for “civic education”; $96,400 for “democratic ideas and values”; $105,000 for “freedom of information”; $92,265 for “human rights”; $216,063 for “political processes”; $34,962 for “rule of law”; $45,000 for “strengthening political institutions”; and $153,646 for Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE).

Additionally, however, as found on the NED “Latin American and Caribbean” regional page, NED has granted $465,000 to ACILS to advance NED objectives of “freedom of association” in the region, with another $380,000 to take place in Venezuela and Colombia. This is in addition to another $645,000 to the International Republican Institute, and $750,000 to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

The irony of these pious claims for “freedom of association,” etc., is that Venezuela is has developed public participation to one of the highest levels in the world, and has one of the most free media in the world. Even with massive private TV media involvement in the 2002 coup, the government did not take away their right to broadcast afterward.

In other words, NED and its institutes are not active in Venezuela to help promote democracy, as they claim, but in fact, to act against popular democracy in an effort to restore the rule of the elite, top-down democracy. They want to take popular democracy away from those nasty Chavistas, and show who is boss in the US Empire. This author bets they fail.

Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in Westville, IN, and is author of AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, and KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994. He can be reached through his web site at http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes.

26 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Alois Philby

In the events that have unfolded in Ukraine during the past weeks, the role of Israel is by far the most interesting. As far as the Americans and the European Union are concerned, it is a question of pursuing old-fashioned power politics vis-à-vis Russia with a view to minimising the latter’s influence in Europe. The role of Israel, on the other hand, can be adequately appraised only by taking into account the financial interests of the following individuals, whose plight was reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 2 July 2013:

“In the past decade, wealthy businessmen from the former Soviet Union have flocked to Israel in private planes via the Moscow-Tel Aviv route. Once here, they buy mansions in wealthy communities and get around in luxury cars. Most of them have come to Israel to escape the grasp of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They live below the radar, zealously guarding their privacy and hiding their assets and Israeli citizenship. […] Many of them fear that if their Israeli assets and citizenships were revealed, it would complicate their relations with Russian authorities or hurt their business interests.”

Gone are the days of cowboy liberalism when Western tycoons and businessmen would treat Russia with the condescension of a colonial lord towards his African subject. The economic system currently in force in Russia is corporative in nature: the state works with the businessmen, and those amongst these businessmen, Khodorkovsky being a case in point, who object to the interference of the state into their financial dealings can count on heavy reprisals.

The oligarchs of Russia are left with no choice but to cooperate with Putin, lest they suffer the same fate as Khodorkovsky. Some of these oligarchs prostrate themselves with great gusto at the feet of the ruler in Kreml, but the modus vivendi that they have found with Putin is an uneasy one. After all, these oligarchs are in possession of state assets of the Soviet Union purchased at a fraction of their actual value. At some point in time these assets will have to be returned to their rightful owners: The Russian People.

The long term aim of these these oligarchs is to determine the political culture as well as the legislative framework of Russia in such a way that their property is shielded from being expropriated by the state. The procession from liberalism towards corporatism, which in the future could lead to further centralisation, is a process that these oligarchs are at pains to reverse. The first step towards such a reversal is to prevent Putin from extending his sphere of influence into their safe havens in the former Soviet Union, of which Ukraine is the most important.

Press TV was one of the few news outlets to report on the Israeli involvement in the riots in Ukraine:

“A former Israeli army officer is playing a leading role in the anti-government protests in Ukraine […]. [This] unnamed Israeli was commanding a group of 20 Ukrainian militants while four other Israelis, who had also previously served in the army, were said to have taken part in opposition rallies in Ukraine’s capital of Kiev. They were born in Ukraine but migrated to Israel and joined its armed forces before returning [to Ukraine] for the demonstrations […]”

 

The Press TV report went on to state

“that an Israeli tycoon provided financial support to the opposition in Ukraine […]”

On 16 December 2013 Jerusalem Post reported that

“some young Jews working for international organizations such as JDC, Hillel and Limmud have taken to the barricades [in Ukraine, and they were] ‘really active’ in offering support as well as ‘organizing the barricades’.”

One may well be tempted to view these young Jews as useful idiots, but it is far more plausible that they were in fact provocateurs with a political agenda of their own. Ukraine is not just a safe haven for oligarchs on the run from Putin; it is also a country in which Israel exerts a high degree of political influence.

What should be troubling to Russia is the extent of the cooperation between Ukraine and Israel in the fields of military and intelligence. During the European Championship in football in 2012, which was held in Poland and Ukraine, Mossad was partly in charge of security. And the cooperation went much farther than the overseeing of sports events:

(i) Exchange of security information between the two countries; such an exchange is most likely skewed in Israel’s favour.

(ii) Cooperation in the field of counter-terrorism.

(iii) Israel is granted wellnigh unlimited access to Ukrainian databases; this facilitates the halting of the influx of undesired elements into Israel as well as the apprehension of potential or imagined terrorists.

Indeed, the cooperation between Israel and Ukraine in the field of intelligence is so extensive that Israel saw it fit to appoint Reuven Dinel, a former Mossad agent, as ambassador to Ukraine. It is worth noting that Dinel was caught spying in Russia during the 90s and was subsequently declared persona non grata. So tarnished was Dinel’s reputation that Turkmenistan refused to grant diplomatic status to this enemy of Russia. Ukraine had no such qualms.

Ukraine is today a veritable den of russophobic Israelis. On the one hand, Israel’s interests coincide with those of the West in the sense that they both wish to limit the Russian sphere influence, whereas on the other Israel is advocating the agenda of oligarchs with dual or multiple citizenships jealously clinging on to assets stolen from the people of Russia.

Russia has no choice but to treat Israel as an enemy state.

Alois Philby is a blogger. He blogs at http://aloisphilby.blogspot.com

26 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Alex Lantier

Attempts to set up a government by the Western-backed Ukrainian opposition forces that seized power in Saturday’s fascist putsch have collapsed amid rising demands for social attacks on the working class from Washington and the European Union (EU), and military tensions with Russia.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton left Kiev yesterday after two days of fruitless talks attempting to bring the different opposition parties together in a government. The putsch, cynically hailed by the Western media as a struggle for democracy, is proving to be an operation to forcibly install a filthy dictatorship of imperialist finance capital. Opposition officials estimated this week that Ukraine needs up to $35 billion to refinance its debts. However, the major international banks have effectively cut off credit to Ukraine, charging ruinously high interest rates that it cannot afford. Meanwhile, Russia has withdrawn its offer of $15 billion in aid after the putsch toppled Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.

EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials are demanding austerity measures, such as deep cuts to state subsidies for consumer energy prices, in exchange for a $1or 2 billion payment to stave off immediate bankruptcy. Yanukovych rejected a planned association agreement with the EU entailing such cuts last autumn—the decision which led to the opposition protests against him—fearing that the cuts might lead to social upheavals that would bring down his regime.

Now, the pro-Western opposition, supported by gangs of fascist thugs from the Svoboda party and the neo-Nazi Right Sector group, is trying to push this reactionary, anti-democratic agenda through. Arseniy Yatsenyuk of billionaire oligarch Yulya Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party, whom Washington has identified as its preferred right-wing figurehead in Ukraine, called on the opposition to join government and do the banks’ bidding despite popular opposition. “This is about political responsibility. You know to be in this government is to commit political suicide, and we need to be very frank and open,” Yatsenyuk told reporters outside Parliament.

Such remarks underscore that the opposition aims to run roughshod over the Ukrainian people, trying to use violently anti-working class forces like Svoboda or Right Sector, which openly glorify Nazism and the Holocaust, to crush whatever popular opposition emerges.

Reports of broader public opinion in Ukraine indicate popular hostility not only to Yanukovych, but also to the leading opposition oligarch, Tymoshenko. One woman told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “They are all crooks, the ones like the other, and Yulya [Tymoshenko] is no better.”

Tensions are escalating with Russia over the Western powers’ move to snatch Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry attacked US and EU policy in Ukraine as driven “not by a concern for the fate of Ukraine, but by unilateral geopolitical calculations … A course has been set to use dictatorial and sometimes terrorist methods to suppress dissenters in various regions.”

Speaking to Interfax on Monday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev denounced the putsch in Kiev. He said, “Strictly speaking, there is no one to talk to there. The legitimacy of a whole host of government bodies raises huge doubts … If people crossing Kiev in black masks and Kalashnikov rifles are considered a government, it will be difficult for us to work with such a government.”

Medvedev added, however, that Russia would honor legally-binding energy contracts to provide Ukraine with natural gas. “Those agreements which are legally binding must be honored. We are not cooperating with personalities or isolated individuals. These are inter-state relations. We are neighbors, close nations, and we cannot run away from one another. Whatever has been signed must be honored. For us, Ukraine remains a serious and important partner.”

The opposition has abolished the status of Russian—which is widely spoken, particularly in the east of Ukraine—as an official language. There is widespread fear of possible fighting, including Russian intervention, if opposition forces in Kiev attempt to conquer the east or take over Russian military installations in the Crimea.

NATO commander in Europe General Philip Breedlove spoke with Russian Chief of General Staff General Valery Gerasimov in a tense exchange on Monday, in which both “expressed concern over the situation in Ukraine.”

Such remarks highlight the bankruptcy of the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin, and the disastrous geo-strategic implications of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the USSR, 23 years ago. Dependent on Ukrainian pipelines to transport its natural gas to European markets, the Kremlin oligarchy has no more popular base than the corrupt Yanukovych regime. It is vulnerable to similar right-wing provocations by middle class opposition forces or internal ethnic conflicts, such as the one in Chechnya, fueled by the United States and its allies. To the extent that it tries to use its military machine to block the offensive of imperialism’s far-right proxies, Moscow only runs the risk of triggering all-out war with NATO.

The only way forward is to mobilize the working class in Ukraine and internationally against the imperialist powers’ drive to impose far-right, neo-colonial regimes throughout the former USSR. In the absence of this, the imperialist powers will simply press ahead with mobilizing right-wing, middle class forces to destabilize the entire region, ultimately aiming to dismember Russia. The ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, whose US-backed government fought a brief war with Russia in 2008 after attacking Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, is now applying for a EU association agreement like that turned down in Ukraine by Yanukovych.

In yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank in Moscow indicated that pro-Western opposition forces are preparing for operations like the Ukrainian putsch throughout the territories of the former USSR, including in Russia itself.

Praising the fascist-led putsch in Kiev in Orwellian fashion as “a new form of national self-realization, with its own leaders and heroes,” and calling for Ukraine to join NATO, she wrote: “Ukraine proved to be the weakest link in the post-Soviet chain. One must keep in mind that similar uprisings are also possible in other countries.”

Pointing to the foreign policy of German President Joachim Gauck, who has called for Germany to abandon restraints on its foreign and military policies observed since the fall of the Nazi regime, Shevtsova raised the possibility that Berlin might support similar operations against Russia.

She wrote, “One can therefore hope that the Ukrainians will not be disappointed in Europe again, and also that the democratic forces in Russia will be able to overcome their current disappointment with Europe.”

26 February, 2014

WSWS.org

By Chris Marsden

The intervention of the United States, Germany, France and other European powers in Ukraine led to a putsch by far-right forces on Saturday. The negotiated settlement that Foreign Ministers Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, Laurent Fabius of France, and Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland imposed in Kiev, aiming to provide a semi-legal façade for the opposition’s power grab, did not survive for a single day.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych agreed to form a national unity government within ten days that included opposition representatives and to reinstate the 2004 constitution passed after the US-backed Orange Revolution, depriving him of control over the heads of the security services. Presidential and parliamentary elections were to be held by December, during which time Yanukovych was to remain president, though only as a powerless figurehead.

The agreement signed was worthless.

France, Germany and Poland, with the United States operating in the background, had worked hand-in-glove with opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko of the Udar party, Arseniy Yatsenyuk of oligarch Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party, and Oleh Tyahnybok of the fascistic Svoboda. As the opposition had relied on fascist thugs to provide the muscle for its street protests, a negotiated settlement with them was impossible.

After signing the deal Friday night, Yanukovych fled the capital Kiev, clearly fearing that if he stayed he would meet the same fate as Muammar Gaddafi, who was murdered at the end of the NATO war in Libya.

Opposition protesters, numbering around 25,000, are led by far right groups including the overtly fascist Right Sector, led by Dmitry Yarosh. They had formed militias who had taken control of the capital, surrounding the president’s administration and parliament.

Parliament—dominated by the opposition parties and supported by the former ruling Party of Regions, which disowned Yanukovych—voted to free Tymoshenko, who became prime minister in the Orange Revolution. It annulled her seven-year prison sentence for embezzlement. She flew from the eastern city of Kharkiv to Kiev to address protesters.

Legislators ousted Yanukovych in extra-legal fashion. Parliament voted 328-0 to impeach him, which was treated as an accomplished fact even though it requires approval by the Constitutional Court. Parliament then appointed Arsen Avakov as Interior Minister and Oleksandr Turchynov as speaker of the parliament, both from Fatherland. Turchynov was given temporary presidential powers. He told MPs they have until Tuesday to form a government.

An order has been given to arrest former ministers and for state security and the prosecutor’s office to investigate “grave crimes against the Ukrainian people, including those by former state leaders.”

In a further indication of the rightist character of the regime that has been installed, parliament voted that Ukrainian is the only official language, disenfranchising around one fifth of its population, which mainly speaks Russian.

The atmosphere is so poisonous that Ukrainian Chabad Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman has called on Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country if possible. He cited “constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions.”

Yanukovych reportedly flew to Kharkov, near the border with Russia late Friday, when his private plane was reportedly stopped by security forces. The president’s own spokesman said Sunday that he does not know where Yanukovych is.

He released a pre-recorded television address, describing events in the Ukraine as a coup and a “repeat of the 1930s, when Nazis came to power in Germany and Austria.” MPs had been “beaten, pelted with stones and intimidated,” he added, and the parliamentary speaker, Volodymyr Rybak, forced to resign because he had been physically beaten.

The European powers and Washington were the driving forces behind this putsch, aiming to break Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. They have gone very far towards fulfilling longstanding geostrategic ambitions—firstly those of Germany, which has repeatedly sought to bring Ukraine under its control, and then of the US, which has sought to weaken and isolate Russia ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Ukraine’s central government has now been seized by fascistic elements in alliance with various sections of the oligarchy, including some of those who were loyal to Yanukovych until last week.

It was possible to successfully organise such a putsch, utilising a few thousand fascist thugs and an “opposition” united by little more than a common desire for money and power, because Yanukovych’s regime proved corrupt and devoid of any popular support. It represented no one save that wing of the oligarchy that considered an alliance with Russia to be more conducive to its own self-enrichment than membership in the EU.

Yanukovych’s reliance on Russia to fend off the hostile moves of Washington, Berlin and Paris failed miserably. Last November, Russia agreed to buy $15 billion worth of Ukrainian bonds signed after Yanukovych cancelled the signing of an association agreement with the EU. Russian negotiator Vladimir Lukin refused to sign the agreement drawn up by Germany, France and Poland, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calling on the EU powers to “rein in the opposition” that has “following the lead of armed extremists and pogromists who pose a direct threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty and constitutional order.”

However, Moscow has been almost permanently on a back foot since the onset of the Ukraine crisis. Its various manoeuvres are dictated by the fact that the regime headed by Vladimir Putin articulates nothing other than the interests of Russia’s own oligarchs, who are richer, but just as rotten as their Ukrainian counterparts.

Ukraine’s eastern districts, including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk, the Crimea and Sevastopol have threatened to seek autonomy, if not outright independence. They have been in meetings with the Russian Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee Chief, Alexei Pushkov.

These are the most economically vital industrial areas in the country. The Crimea is particularly sensitive for Russian national security and is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, in Sevastopol.

The crisis in Ukraine testifies to two historically determined and essential political issues that must now be resolved.

Firstly, at no point in the unfolding crisis has the Ukrainian working class had the chance to take an independent stand in defence of its own interests. This has left events to be dominated by competing oligarchs and the imperialist powers, who are now threatening to divide the country, which could end in civil war and even a great-power war for control of Ukraine.

The only social force capable of halting the intrigues of the imperialist powers and defeating their fascist hirelings is the international working class.

Secondly, the absence of a fight-back in the working class is bound up with the decades-long attack on its political consciousness by Stalinism. The ability of the US and its European allies to dictate events is the direct outcome of the dissolution of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

This laid the basis for the rule of Russia’s mafia cliques under Putin and opened up the former Soviet republics to the predatory ambitions of the imperialist powers.

24 February, 2014

WSWS.org

 

By Farooque Chowdhury

Violence has again placed Venezuela on news headlines. And, it has exposed the source of the violence: vested interests, the rich with imperialist connections. Propaganda based on lies is also being exposed. Politics in Venezuela is polarized by class interests.

To many, the situation in Venezuela appears confusing. Reports of protests by “millions” and “violence” by authorities cloud perceptions of a part of Venezuela news-audience.

But a careful look takes away confusion created by a part of mainstream media.

In today’s Venezuela, it’s not possible to perceive incidents without considering a major line of contradiction moving through the society: politics of the poor and of the rich. Political divide in Venezuela is now based on poor-rich interests. Incidents and interpretations, actors and their role are now being governed by the conflicting interests.

The two – the poor and the rich – stand opposed to each other. Societies going through transition process can’t escape the reality of the contradictions related to this divide, which is fundamental. Failure to identify the contradictions complicates interpretation of incidents.

Venezuelan media network controlled by the native rich has an edge: propagate whatever they like, manipulate in whatever way they like. Then, they have their external class-allies. Their money power, experience and efficiency turn stronger with their connections. “As the US political scientists Ronald Sylvia and Constantine Danopoulos explain, the availability of such cultural capital is restricted: ‘Weekend shopping trips to Miami were the order of the day for the bourgeois classes.” (Lee Salter “What’s going on in Venezuela?”, February 21, 2014)

It’s an economic connection, a financial connection, a cultural connection, a political connection of the few native rich with their global masters. Propaganda appears “factual” with images and news reports craftily concocted by this connection.

Dr. Salter, an academic from the UK, describes an incident experienced personally: “So, when a story needs to get out about the dramatic abuse of journalists (in one occasion I noted a human rights group release a story about such an abuse, which I investigated to find the original footage of a camera operator being jostled on a picket line), the lines of communication are open, and a primed international media is ready to accept anything that conforms to expectations.”

Dr. Salter cites two more experiences. The first one is with now world-“famous” Venezuelan “darkness”:

“It is thus that I heard from an ‘exile’, a really cool, funky hippie-type whose plight had caught the sympathy of everyone in her wide network of English friends: (paraphrased) ‘Chavez hates the people, he hates anyone with money. He is trying to stop the dams from producing electricity so that rich people can’t have televisions and things. In Caracas they only have 4 hours of electricity per day’. My response: I’ve just come back from ten days in Venezuela, and there was one power cut of about 20 minutes.”

And, the other one is:

 

“Another time I was stuck with rather scary English-speaking Venezuelan in a cable car in Caracas. She and her partner began talking to me and my friend about lightbulbs: ‘you know anything about Venezuela, about Chavez? He’s a communist you know? He’s trying to destroy the country. He’s trying to force everybody to have energy saving lightbulbs…but this isn’t Cuba’. After 5 minutes of ranting, my friend in his inimitable Irish accent gently explained that they have energy saving lightbulbs in Ireland and he doesn’t feel particularly oppressed by them.”

A long drought, as Salter describes the background of energy saving lightbulbs, reduced water levels in hydropower dams in Venezuela that, in turn, reduced power generation. There were no required number of engineers with the expertise of working with the dams and rivers. At the same time, there was the increase in the sales of consumer electrical good including refrigerators, which was encouraged by the government to improve the quality of life. “So, drought + lack of care for hydroelectric plants + increase demand on electricity = power cuts. The short-term solution: energy saving items.” This was a Chavez-“sin” in the world of the rich.

The current of propaganda turns a laughingstock as is exposed by a researcher:

“When quizzing Thomas Muhr, a researcher on Venezuela at the University of Bristol, about the mania over lightbulbs, he told me that it was all led by a rumor that Chavez was placing video cameras in them so he could spy on them in their homes. Quite.”

Salter, an expert on media coverage of Venezuela, makes a comparison:

“It is worth reflecting how other states of emergency are mediated. After the 2011 riots in the UK, 3000 young people were swept up in a dragnet and sent to kangaroo courts for what would no doubt be called in Venezuela, a protest against an out of touch and corrupt government. The repressive clampdown was cheered on by the British media.”

Then a hard fact is told by him:

“Yet if the current President Maduro or Chavez before him had received as small a proportion of the vote as Cameron, Venezuela would probably have been invaded by now.”

Doesn’t a perspective, of biasness of mainstream propaganda, emerge? It’s a perspective of, broadly, interest of hegemony, and, actually, a class interest. The view based on class interest is described by Salter:

“The most recent protests are indeed about a lot of things, and no doubt reflect a plethora of voices …. Indeed, Venezuela still has … a lot of problems. Yet the ‘opposition’ is as concerned with poverty as its leaders were when they presided over massive levels of poverty. They are as concerned with human rights as they were during the Caracazo Massacre. They are as concerned with democracy as they were when there was de facto exclusion of most of the population from political life. The big fear is the change in this latter. And it is this fear of the ‘plebs’ that drives the ‘opposition’.”

The opposition is not only driven by the fear of the plebs struggling to take control of their own lives to improve their life, whose 67% had to live on less than $2 a day in 1997. The super-rich like to regain their lost hegemony.

To counter the plebs, a part of mainstream media plays its role as it’s owned by the ‘opposition’, the super-propertied absolute minority of the population. They have backing of the external masters. The minority of the population was skimming oil profit to fuel their wasteful ultra-luxury in Miami and New York, in London, Paris and Geneva, was engaged with land-hoarding, keeping idle thousands of hectares of land in the hope of pocketing a huge profit in future, while the country could not produce enough to feed its population. The majority, the poor, challenged this “democratic” land hoarding practice of the minority. The mode of challenge was closer to the mode of Lincoln.

The mainstream media stories ridicule their creators as it’s exposed as cooked.

So, stories about and photographs of “brutality unleashed” by Chavez followers are circulated on Twitter and picked up by a part of mainstream media.

So, one finds photographs of protest and oppression from “Venezuela”, as Dr. Dawg has presented in a blog on February 17, 2014: “Some brutal cops, with nice woolly caps and fur collars … guard against the 24°C Caracas weather, [they are] visiting police officers from Bulgaria”, “a re-purposed photo taken in Argentina”, “a photo from Chile”, “an unfortunate fellow, shot in April and then again in the exact-same way during the current protests”, “a iconic photo, which CNN had to admit that the graphic photo was actually taken in Singapore”, “one from Greece”, “an absolutely shameless steal from Egypt: this photo became known world-wide during the Arab Spring”, “a heart-wrenching picture of babies in laundry-baskets, with the question, What kind of revolution is this? A photo from Honduras”, “a religious procession, reincarnated as an anti-government protest”. (“Constructing ‘Venezuela’ Protests: a Photo Gallery (fixed)”, February 17, 2014)

These photographs from other countries have been spread as photographs of violence unleashed by the Venezuelan authorities. There are also similar photographs from Brazil, Catalonia and Syria.

This “objectivity” in news and photographs as tools of mainstream politics is not only a Venezuela case. This is an old practice mainstream politics resorts to in other countries and societies. History is replete with this type of examples. A very recent example is Syria. Prior to Syria, there was Iraq: Saddam’s WMD, actually a long tube. There are countries in South Asia that also bear stark example of this practice.

This practice finds sudden emergence of writers preferring alternate media. They capitalize credibility of alternate media, sell biased political stories by blurring major questions in concerned society, and wage, as part of a long-term intervention plan, media and psychological war against the society. A part of alternate media “wisely” lends its space to these newly emergent writers. And, attempts to befool audience move on. And, plans are being implemented to manufacture heroes with long and “valuable” experience as Leopoldo Lopez in Venezuela is being made although Wikileaks cables don’t portray him favorably.

It’ll be befooling none but self to assume that the doctoring or “mistaken” use of photographs and distortion of facts are work of a few young boys and students. These can’t be done without expert service and resource. A very few in this world has that resource and capacity.

Dr. Dawg writes: The present “manufactured crisis is a re-run. Anyone remember the massive demo/counter-demo at the Miraflores palace in 2002, the lead-up to a short-lived coup against Hugo Chavez.”

“There is no flabby pretense of ‘objectivity’ on the part of the international media when it comes to Venezuela. That country poses a stark threat to the hegemonic order … Having enough oil wealth to say No to all that, Venezuela created its own counter-hegemonic partnership … And domestically, while all we hear about is toilet-paper shortages and inflation, there has been substantial progress on a number of fronts for years now – a sharp reduction of dire poverty, major advances in education, reduced child mortality, and rapid steps taken towards gender equality, maternal health, and environmental protection.”

Jack Johnston, a science teacher from England, recently experienced a situation in San Cristobal, Venezuela, first hand as he was spending nine days there. A group of students, according to Johnston, was complaining about insecurity, but was demanding the fall of the government. When asked about the response he had observed from the authorities to the situation, he replied, “Inexplicably non-existent. It’s far from a repressive crackdown, the exact opposite. They’ve allowed a small number of students to occupy a main crossroads and dozens of blocs without any opposition…I explained to them [opposition activists] that there’s no way this would be allowed to continue for more than one day in my country”. (Ewan Robertson, “Venezuelan Government Sends Army to Combat ‘Grave’ Opposition Disorder near Colombian Border”, February 22, 2014)

This type of “objective” news reporting happens and political “protests” are organized when one tries to move outside of the Empire’s hegemony. Decades ago, Tehran experienced engaging of hired hoodlums to overthrow Mosaddegh.

Plans are drawn for destabilization and intervention. It’s part of regular work by the world capital. Today’s Venezuela-violence reiterates this part of politics by forces of hegemony.

Farooque Chowdhury is Dhaka-based freelancer.

25 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Alan MacLeod

In recent days, angry anti-government protests have erupted in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. If we are to believe some influential Venezuelan bloggers, the government is sending teams of motorbike-riding death-squads roaming around rich neighbourhoods looking for people to kill. Social media is awash with pictures of children, apparently having been beaten to within an inch of their life by government thugs. All this, the New York Times eagerly reports, is making Secretary of State John Kerry “increasingly concerned.” Surely this must be the beginning of a democratic uprising against an authoritarian dictator?

All this does not sit easily with the reaction elsewhere, however. President Morales of Bolivia alleged that, far from being a spontaneous democratic uprising, this was a US-financed coup d’etat which was trying to destroy Hugo Chavez’s humanist legacy. Morales went on to say that “on behalf of the Bolivian people, we send our energy and support to the courageous Venezuelan people and president Nicolás Maduro. ” President Fernandez de Kirchner sent her solidarity to the President and people of Venezuela in the face of violent attacks on its sovereignty. Similar statements have been made by the Presidents of Ecuador and Nicaragua and even from political parties in Europe. Indeed, Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, has stood firmly behind President Maduro, while even the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs praised the government for its moderation in dealing with violent protesters and castigated the White House for its “misguided policy toward South America.”

But what on Earth has the White House got to do with all this? And why are so many respected international bodies talking about imperialism? You would be forgiven for not knowing, as no New York Times or Washington Post article has revealed the fact that Washington has been funding and training the heads of these protests for at least 12 years. Indeed, the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to overthrow the Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorean governments. Those leading the protests, Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado, are not students, but two of the wealthiest people in South America; Machado is a personal friend of George W. Bush. She was also involved in the last three opposition attempts to overthrow the government: in 2002, 2002-2003 and 2004. In 2002, with the financial, technical and political help of the US government, she and her co-conspirators kidnapped President Hugo Chavez and installed Pedro Carmona as President. He immediately suspended the constitution, sacked all politicians, sacked all judges in the country, suspended human rights, gave himself power to rule by decree, and even changed the name of the country . They were only stopped by a massive revolt, some 25-50 times the size of the current protests, of ordinary, poor Venezuelan citizens.

Prominent among the current protesters are students from Caracas’ elite, fee-paying universities, who wish for change in the country. And yet Venezuela has changed enormously since Hugo Chavez’s election in 1998. Poverty was reduced by 50%, extreme poverty by 72% . The bottom 40% of Venezuela’s population have seen their slice of the economic pie expand by nearly half and those in the economic percentile 40-70 have also seen their incomes rise. How did the government manage this? By destroying the middle class? In fact, those in percentiles between 70-90 have seen their comparative income stay virtually the same. It is only the top 10% of Venezuelan society, and in particular, the top 1% who have seen their incomes fall. It is from these groups that these young Venezuelans disproportionately come from. In 1998, Venezuela was the most unequal country in the most unequal region in the world, with some of the highest proportions of private jet ownership and child malnutrition in the world. Thanks to massive social programs, a national health service was created and UNESCO hailed Venezuela’s achievements in reducing illiteracy. Very little of this has ever been reported by the media.

But the government was far from winning universal support. Chief among their adversaries were the Venezuelan middle and upper classes, who use their power in business, finance and the media to put pressure on the government. Venezuela still faces a host of pressing social and economic problems, some of which have been highlighted by protesters as key issues. But to characterize these protests as democratic movements against an illegitimate government is altogether misleading. Let us not forget that Maduro’s party has won 18 elections since 1998, elections which have drawn near-universal praise for their fairness, with Jimmy Carter stating that Venezuelan elections are “the best in the world. ”This latest attempt at revolution can only be seen as an attempt by the upper-classes to regain their power lost under the Chavez government.

It turns out those death squads and the pictures of tortured children were manipulated , as were our emotions. But triflings such as this matter little to the media, who will continue to bang the drum for regime change. They are unlikely to get their wish. For all its faults, and there are many, the majority are standing behind the government, with only  23% of Venezuelans supporting the protests (not that one would guess this given the media coverage) .Tread carefully through the minefield of Venezuelan politics.

Alan MacLeod is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, studying the media’s portrayal of Bolivia and Venezuela.

25 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

 

By Reuters

According to UN special rapporteur, Israel violates Palestinians’ rights in West Bank, Gaza through occupation, confiscation of land, ‘ethnic cleansing’ of East Jerusalem.

Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appear to amount to apartheid due to its systematic oppression of the Palestinian people and de facto expropriation of their land, a United Nations investigator said in a report.

Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said that Palestinian rights are being violated by Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory and “ethnic cleansing” of East Jerusalem.

Gaza, despite the disengagement of Israel in 2005, remains “occupied” under an unlawful Israeli blockade that controls borders, airspace and coastal waters, and especially hurts farmers and fishermen, he said. The humanitarian situation in the Hamas-ruled enclave is dire amid fuel shortages, he added.

UN member states should consider imposing a ban on imports of produce from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Falk said in his final report to the UN Human Rights Council after serving six years in the independent post.

In a section entitled “acts potentially amounting to segregation and apartheid”, he analyzed Israeli policies, including “continuing excessive use of force by Israeli security forces” and unlawful killings that he said are “part of acts carried out in order to maintain dominance over Palestinians”.

Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military laws, while Jewish settlers face a civil law system, he said. Israel also violates their rights to work and education, freedoms of movement and residence, and of expression and assembly, he said.

Ten years ago the UN’s International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s separation wall inside the West Bank is illegal, he noted. Israel says it is a security barrier.

“It seems incontestable that Israeli measures do divide the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory along racial lines, create separate reserves for Palestinians and expropriate their land,” Falk wrote in his 22-page report.

“The combined effect of the measures designed to ensure security for Israeli citizens, to facilitate and expand settlements, and, it would appear, to annex land is hafrada (the Hebrew word for separation), discrimination and systematic oppression of, and domination over, the Palestinian people.”

There was no immediate reaction from Israel, which boycotted the council it accuses of bias for 19 months, returning in October 2013. The Jewish state left after accusing the forum of bias when it set up a fact-finding mission on the settlements.

Controversy

Falk, an American law professor who is Jewish, has long been a controversial figure. After taking up the post in May 2008, he compared Israeli forces’ actions in the Gaza Strip to those of the Nazis in wartime Europe.

Months later, he was detained at Ben Gurion airport and deported by Israeli authorities after being barred from crossing into Palestinian areas to carry out his investigation.

Last June he said he would not resign and accused critics of calling him anti-Semitic to divert attention from his scrutiny of Israeli policies. UN Watch, an activist group that Falk labels as a ‘pro-Israel lobbying organization’, and the United States had called for him to quit.

Falk said in his latest report that businesses and countries should examine who profits from the “settlements of Israel and other unlawful Israeli activities” and take appropriate steps.

“Considering the fact that the European Union remains one of the most important trading partners for the settlements, with annual exports worth $300 million, a ban on settlement produce would have a significant impact,” he said.

His previous appeals for divestment have brought results and have encouraged governments to be more vigilant, he said.

Royal HaskoningDHV, a Dutch company, ended a contract with Jerusalem’s municipality to build a wastewater treatment plant in East Jerusalem and a Swedish-Norwegian bank Nordea excluded Cemex from its investment portfolio due to its extraction of non-renewable natural resources from Palestine, according to Falk.

 

24 February 2014

 

By Asa Winstanley

A campaigning research group says Israeli companies are making healthy profits from the siege their government has imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006.

In a new briefing document published last week, Corporate Watch details its conclusions based on a recent research trip to Gaza. The Electronic Intifada published an interview with the team while they were there.

Gaza is a “captive market” for Israeli pharmaceutical companies, the report says, based on interviews with Palestinian health professionals there.

Palestinians are effectively forced to buy Israeli products, since Israel dictates almost all the products that enter.

In addition, the terms of the Paris protocol of 1994 opened the floodgates for Israeli products – tax free. In practice, Palestinian exports are heavily curtailed, as well as imports from other countries.

Israel bans many medicines from entering Gaza, and shortages abound. “We have a shortage of drugs, especially for chronic illness,” one doctor from the Union of Health Work Committees told Corporate Watch. A Ministry of Health spokesperson told the researchers that 141 out of a list of 470 essential drugs cannot be found in Gaza.

A complex system of Israeli “coordination” and hurdles means that basic medicines and medical equipment can be delayed for months. For example:

When health services in Gaza purchase drugs from the international market they come into Israel through the port of Ashdod but are not permitted to travel the 35 km to Karam Abu Salem [crossing, in the south] directly. Instead they are transported [80 km] to the Bitunia checkpoint into the West Bank and stored in Ramallah, where a permit is applied for to transport them to Gaza, significantly increasing the length and expense of the journey.

In addition, transport and storage costs with Israeli companies also have to be paid for – increasing the profits to Israeli companies.

Egypt’s military regime has been a junior partner in the siege, intensifying its involvement since the military coup of July 2013. Not long after, it destroyed many tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border, which had been a vital lifeline.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza told Corporate Watch that 30 percent of its medicines used to be brought in via the tunnels.

Boycotting where possible

Despite all this, Palestinian health workers in Gaza told Corporate Watch they “were uniformly enthusiastic about the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel … All of the health workers that we spoke to told us that their organizations had a policy of boycotting Israeli medicines except where they needed that medicine in order to protect life and were not able to procure it from another source.”

The Palestinian heath workers suggested action that could feasibly be taken by those outside Palestine. These ideas included boycotting the Israeli Medical Association. “If they see that there is a growing campaign in Europe maybe they will think twice about launching new military operations in Gaza,” explained Dr. Bassem Zaqout of the Palestine Medical Relief Service.

Another idea was for Europeans in general, and British citizens in particular to work on a boycott of Teva, a giant Israeli drug corporation – the largest company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Corporate Watch says Teva is the world’s largest supplier of generic drugs. As such, it would be safe to ethically advocate a boycott of Teva, since its products can easily be replaced, the group argues. Palestinian professionals they interviewed were in favor of a boycott of Teva.

Asa Winstanley is an associate editor with The Electronic Intifada. He is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

http://electronicintifada.net/

24 February, 2014

By Franklin Lamb

Damascus: Since around Valentine Day and aided by truly magnificent warm weather for this time of year, the dozens of parks in Damascus have been receiving unusually large numbers of visitors, not least of whom are Syrian soldiers on leave, enjoying the green space with girlfriends, families and friends. At the large garden with dozen of benches and sculptures, called Al-Manshia (Presidents Bridge) public park, and located between two five-star hotels, the Dama Rose and the 4-Seasons, some soldiers, presumably from out of town and with many appearing utterly exhausted, can be seen simply laying on the grass fast asleep under the warm healing sunshine.

Soldiers joke, laugh and seem pleased when citizens approach them to offer their thanks for the army’s service to the Syrian Arab Republic and to inquire about how things are going personally and if there is some help the citizen might offer the soldier. Such is the nature of Syrian nationalism and connection with Mother Syria that this observer has remarked about before and is strikingly rare from his experience. I love my country but frankly do not feel the pride and deep connection that Syrians appear to exhibit about their country’s 10,000 year history as the cradle of civilization. I would defend my country and fight for it if there were to be a legitimate war which frankly has not been the case in my lifetime.

Over the past 30 months of frequent visits to Damascus, the city has never appeared more ‘normal’ Last night this observers was up all night reading and there was not one bombing run or mortar or artillery fire to he heard, a first for more than two years. For many months, I used to avoid the historic Al-Hamidiyah Souk, the largest and the central souk in Syria located inside the old walled city of Damascus next to the Umayyad Mosque, despite its hundreds of interesting shops. The reason I tended to stay away was because I was one of very few people meandering among the warren of stalls and felt self-conscious when shopkeepers would plead with me to buy something-anything to help feed their families many of whom lived near the labyrinth warren.

Today, Al-Hamidiyah Souk, if not frequented with the numbers of shoppers and visitors as it was before March 2011, it is nonetheless very crowded such that foreigners can pass unnoticed…well, sometimes for at least the first hundred yards or so. In Damascene neighborhoods, no longer do citizens quickly disappear into their homes at the first sign of dusk but the streets and cafes are these days and many crowded well past 9 p.m.

“Quo Vadis Syrie”, (‘where is Syria heading’) one Damascus University student asked this visitor as we both sat on the steps of the Law Faculty while enjoying a bit of sun yesterday afternoon. “Is our crisis nearly over so we can start re-building Mother Syria or do our enemies have other plans to destroy us? I worry that today’s calm will soon disappear with an arriving hurricane.” His comment was perhaps triggered by a certain sense here and widely elsewhere that a forming “coalition of the willing” are pressing for a ‘humanitarian’ No Fly Zone. Some American allies envisage and are making plans to implement a no-fly zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to Congressional sources.

Any NFZ would be very different from what is currently being promoted and advertised by certain war-mongers in Washington, Tel Aviv and several European capitals as well as among elements of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the League of Arab States. Post Round Two of Geneva II, the White House and the usual group of war mongers in Congress and among the US Zionist lobby, are said to be re-thinking the idea of a No Fly Zone (NFZ) for Syria. It would be planned and executed with US and a yet to be specified, “Coalition of the willing” using aircraft positioned at bases in Jordan and Turkey to begin with.

Ranking with the fake “non-lethal aid” concept, in terms of cynical deception (virtually all “non-lethal” aid is indeed lethal for its facilitates certain forces killing others including night goggles, telecommunication equipment, GPS equipment, salaries, fake IDs and much else), a limited, ‘humanitarian’ NFZ would almost certainly became a bomb anything/person that moves ‘turkey shoot’ as was the case in Libya in 2011 as was studied and witnessed first-hand by this an many other observers. What we observed in the then, but no more, Al Jamahiriya (state of the masses), was that the misnomer ‘limited humanitarian Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) promoted by Obama Administration UN Ambassador Susan Rice for Libya and now by her predecessor Samatha Power for Syria was that a NFZ means essentially an all-out war for regime change at all costs in terms of expendable lives and treasury.

The Libya experience, conceding many differences between the two countries and their governments and quality of each country’s military, may be prologue for Syria. Backed by a U.N. Security Council mandate, NATO charged into Libya citing its urgent “responsibility to protect” civilians threatened by claimed bloody rampages occurring across the country. Within days, we witnessed the ‘limited carefully vetted’ targets bank turn from a promoted ‘several dozen purely military targets” into more than 10,000 bomb runs using over 7,700 ‘precision guided bombs” and from the ground and what we saw during weeks in Libya by victims and eye-witnesses it seemed at times that the targets were basically anything that moved or looked like it might have a conceivable military purpose of some sort.

Human Rights Watch documented nearly 100 cases of civilians being bombed and killed as part of the R2P campaign. Other estimates are several times the HRW published figures. To this day Libyan civilians and demanding to know from NATO, Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” No answer were even provided to the Libyan victims’ families despite investigations that some showed NATO pilots disregarded instructions and “we essentially bombed at if we were playing video games” according to post-conflict contrite airman.

Susan Rice, now Obama’s national security adviser, met with Saudi officials last week to discuss a NFZ and related strategy despite White House claims that it is still skeptical. Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last month that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are working together again on Syria policy after a year of occasional bitter disagreement.

Among those currently petitioning the Obama Administration for a NFZ, which would quickly devolve into thousands of bomb runs across Syria that would likely decimate its air force and tank corps are the so-called rebels. They tend to agree with France that problems lay ahead for them given April’s fast approaching Presidential election, in which the incumbent President, Bashar Assad, is likely to seek and win re-election.

In addition, Israel, according to a Congressional source, has offered to help ‘behind the scenes” with airbases if needed and certain activities along the southern Syrian border with still occupied Palestine. A majority of Arab League countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plus Turkey, France, the UK and some members of the EU also support the NFZ idea. Saudi Arabia has already approved large quantities of Chinese man-portable air defense systems or Manpads as well as antitank guided missiles from Russia and more cash to help rebels oust the Assad regime, according to an Arab diplomat. Meanwhile, the US has upped its contribution to pay the salaries of preferred rebel fighters.

Ominously, the U.S. has already moved Patriot air defense batteries and F-16 fighter planes to Jordan, which could be integral to any no-fly zone. U.S. planes have air-to-air missiles that could destroy Syrian planes from long ranges. But officials have advised Congress that aircraft may be required to enter Syrian air space if threatened by advancing Syrian planes. This could easily lead to all-out war with Syria and if Russia decides to provide advanced, long-range S-300 air defense weapons to Syria, it would make such a limited no-fly zone far more risky for U.S. pilots and it’s anyone’s guess what would happen next.

President Obama so far is keeping his own counsel as his Secretaries of Defense and State, current and former, and many other officials and politicians offer their advice for the White House ordering a NFZ. Hilary Clinton and General David Petraeus reportedly both favor a NFZ to ‘end this mess” in the words of the retired CIA Director.

To his great credit, Barack Obama appears to many on Capitol Hill reluctant to give formal approval to another NFZ as he was last summer when he resisted calls to launch a war against Syria as well as Congressional war-monger demands to go to war with Iran on behalf of the Netanyahu government. This week Mr. Obama acknowledged that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict are far from achieving their goals. “But the situation is fluid and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue including diplomacy.”

If President Obama extends his record of putting American interests first to three key decisions over the past six months, and if he sticks with diplomacy rather than launch all-out war with Syria, and potentially the allies of Damascus, via a NFZ, he just may be on his way to earning his per-maturely awarded Nobel Prize.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

22 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

Interview With Prof Francis Boyle

It is a fact that since 9-11-2001, the US Government has been in the business of destroying countries and using NATO as it principle instrument. That was stated more than a decade ago by then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later by General Wesley Clark. The Pentagon drew up a list of 7 states that were to be destroyed: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria and they have systematically proceeded to destroy all of the Countries on the list. The strategy in Ukraine is the same, US/NATO/EU are promoting the destabilization and the breakup of Ukraine in order to achieve the NATO goal of moving into Ukrainian territory closer to Russia. Harvard Professor Francis Boyle, a US based Russian expert who was invited to the Soviet Union to lecture spoke on these issues and more in an interview with the Voice of Russia. While Russia was distracted into believing that the US wanted a reset US foreign policy was being planned and dictated by rabid Russia haters like Zbignew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes. Brzezinski wants to breakup Russia into approximately 68 parts and has placed his protégés in key US foreign policy posts. According to Mr. Boyle, Brezezinski has staffed the Obama administration with his acolytes and protégées, including the US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a specialist in color revolutions. At the end of the day the US plan is to see the breakup of the Russian Federation, that is the goal.

This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with Professor Francis Boyle. He is a Professor in International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, Illinois. This is part 1 of a longer interview. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com

Robles: Hello Sir! How are you this evening?

Boyle: Very fine. Thanks for having me on, John, and my best to your listening audience.

Robles: Thank you Sir! And thanks for agreeing to speak with us. News of the day is Ukraine. Now you’ve recently made some statements and done some work regarding Syria. I’d like to ask for your correlations between what is going on right now in Syria and what is going on right now in Ukraine. Do you see a connection? Some people are saying that Ukraine, the push there was because the US was not allowed to carry out military operations against Syria. Do you see a relationship between them?

Boyle: Well I wouldn’t say that is “necessarily” the reason. As we know, Ukraine has for a long time been a strategic objective of the United States and trying to get Ukraine into NATO. And this EU plan was simply a first step in that direction. The EU wasn’t really offering anything to Ukraine. But it was very clear, if they could move Ukraine closer to the EU, that would be a step closer to NATO. In fact, I regret to say over the years, even though I have EU citizenship and carry an EU passport, the EU now has become nothing but an anteroom to NATO.

So, I think this really has to be understood in terms of the gradual movement of NATO further to the east in violation of the pledge that George Bush Senior and Jim Baker gave to then President Gorbachev that if he agreed to the reunification of Germany, NATO would move no farther east, towards Russia’s boundaries.

Robles: Well, we’ve seen those promises, similar promises were made to President Gorbachev – the first and last President of the Soviet Union – those were also ignored. And regarding …

Boyle: The problem was – he never got them in writing.

Robles: That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Boyle: That is incredibly naive on his part not to get them in writing. And I would point out, right now the United States is trying to do the exact same thing on the deployment of BMDs (ballistic missile defense) into Europe and around the borders of Russia saying “you have to accept our assurances, but we are not going to give you anything in writing.”

You know, it is preposterous. In fact, we had something in writing and that was the Anti-ballistic Missile System Treaty of 1972 that prevented all of this. And then Bush Junior pulled out of that treaty. So, as it stands now, really anything goes, these verbal assurances mean nothing.

Robles: Getting away a little bit from the ABM system now, you mentioned NATO and Ukraine; there is a military objective, if you could tell us about that? And is there a similar military objective for Syria? Or what is the objective of the US Government in Syria?

Boyle: Since 9/11 2001, as publicly admitted by then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the United States Government would be getting into the business of destroying states. And that was later confirmed by General Wesley Clark, as you know in his memoirs, his meeting there at the Pentagon where they had the list of seven states they were going to proceed to take over.

Afghanistan was first, Iraq was second, Sudan was on the list, Libya was on the list and Syria was on the list, Iran was on the list. So, they are proceeding systematically down that list of destroying states. Syria is now near the top, Iran might be next. And it also appears now the same strategy is being applied to Ukraine to promote the crackup of Ukraine between east and west and, I would hate to say it, the dissolution of Ukraine as a state.

Robles: Can you repeat that quote again? He said…

Boyle: Yes Wolfowitz said… I have the citation in my book “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence”, where Wolfowitz said: “We are going to get into the business of destroying states”. And then, soon thereafter General Wesley Clark (head of NATO) was in the Pentagon and can confirm they drew up a list of seven states that they were systematically going to go after.

So, that’s really, the objective here of Syria, against Syria, is as they did to Libya: to crackup Syria as a state into its constituent, religious and ethnic units not only for the United States but also for the benefit of Israel.

As you know, Israel has been a long time opponent to Syria. They headed a plan there, the Yi Nolan Plan to crackup surrounding states in order to better manage them and keep them under control. So, here you see a congruence of interests certainly between the United States and Israel.

And I regret to say it, but pretty much they have cracked up Syria in its constituent units, as they had done to Iraq. We now have basically three mini states in Iraq. The same has been done to Afghanistan and also Libya, where you have, you know it is hard to say there is a meaningful state there anymore. I have a new book out called “Destroying Libya and World Order” where I have all these citations in there and an analysis. And then, I tried to extend this to Syria near the end of the book.

And it does appear we are seeing a similar pattern of behavior here on Ukraine: to destabilize Ukraine, promote a crack up, some type of civil war or who knows what. And I guess the theory is, well if NATO-EU can get western Ukraine – fine! – they can extend the borders of NATO, the EU that far.

So, it is a very dangerous situation, because, as you know, Ukraine is of utmost strategic significance to Russia. And second, Russia believes that Ukraine is the cradle of its civilization.

Robles: Well it is, that’s not a belief. Ukraine is the mother of Rus.

Boyle: I’ve been to Ukraine and I’ve been to where Nestor wrote his chronicles, and I have studied Russian and Ukrainian history, sure, at Harvard. And I went through the same PhD program at Harvard that produced Zbigniew Brzezinski before me and Richard Pipes, both of whom were, are ardent Russia haters, there is no question at all about it. And that is really part of the problem here in the United States, when it comes to Russian studies, that so much of it is biased against Russia inherently.

Robles: Why is that, please, if you could? You’ve been through the system, you know the system. Why does the US hate Russia so much? Why?

Boyle: Well I spent ten years at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School studying Russian history, Russian literature, Soviet politics, Russian politics. Indeed I even offered Soviet politics and Russian history on my PhD General Exams at Harvard, which qualified me to teach both those subjects to undergraduates at Harvard. But I never learned the language because that was not what I was intending to do.

And all those years, ten years of studying, I only had two professors who I thought were fair, reasonable and balanced when it came to Russia and the Soviet Union. And understand Harvard and Chicago are two of the leading centers in the United States for training Russian experts. They train professors and experts, government officials and things of that nature.

Robles : Diplomats…

Boyle: So, and again, you had Brzezinski, I went through the same PhD program that produced Brzezinski and Kissinger. You know Brzezinski is an expatriate Pole who hates the Russians with a passion.

Robles : Oh God yes, yeah…

Boyle: Indeed Brzezinski wants to crackup Russia into its constituent units.

Robles : Right, I think it was 68 autonomous regions, if that’s what it was.

Boyle: It’s more dangerous than that! In that Obama’s mentor at Columbia was Brzezinski. And Brzezinski ran the foreign affairs apparatus for Obama’s campaign and he has staffed the Obama administration with his acolytes and protégés, like McFaul – the recently resigning ambassador.

Robles: I’m sorry, can you expand a little bit on McFaul? You said he is one of Brzezinski’s protégé .

Boyle: Yes, he is from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which is a neo-conservative operation out there, and Brzezinski is one of these people.

Robles : Was McFaul chosen by Brzezinski?

Boyle: I think all the high-level appointments in the Obama administration in foreign affairs have been run by Brzezinski. That is my personal feeling looking at it. Yes, Brzezinski decided not to take a position himself, but all these people that have surrounded Obama, not just on Russia, but other areas, are Brzezinski protégés and indeed that goes back in the Democratic Party I think since Carter came to power and Brzezinski was his National Security Advisor. You know, he was the one who started the Afghan Mujahidin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and bragged about it.

So, within the Democratic Party Brzezinski is considered to be their foreign affairs guru and he was Obama’s mentor at Columbia, and it is a matter of public record that Brzezinski was running the foreign affairs apparatus for the Obama campaign.

Robles: Wow!

Boyle: So, I certainly believe he helped staff this administration on foreign affairs matters.

Robles: People are thinking about a reset and trying to improve relations. And I don’t think anyone knew that it was all Brzezinski, because people knew who Brzezinski was a long time ago.

Boyle: Right. Well, this I think is part of their plan to see the crackup of the Russian Federation, at the end of the day. Sure, that’s I think what his objective is.

You know, if you want to get credentialed as an expert on Russia, you have to go to somewhere like Columbia or Harvard, or Chicago and get your Master’s degree or PhD from people like that. At Harvard they also had Richard Pipes, he was the Reagan’s top guru on the Soviet Union, The Committee on the Present Danger.

I had Pipes for imperial Russian history, again, another expatriate Pole who hates the Russians with passion. Pipes was so bad in his course on Imperial Russian history, he used to break into sweat when he was lecturing on Peter the Great or Catherine the Great and had to take a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his brow. So, he is another fanatic against the Russians, only prominent in the Republican Party.

So, we don’t really have … you know Professor Cohen at NYU I think is fair, balanced and reasonable when it comes to Russia. He just wrote something in The Nation on Ukraine. And I think he wrote a very good book on Russia. But you know, he is really the exception to a pretty abysmal rule here in the United States when it comes to training and credentialing what were Soviet and now Russian experts.

Robles : So, why are you fair-minded Sir?

Boyle: I try to come at Russia and the Soviet Union with an open mind. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis and I concluded that probably the most important issue of my time would be to learn to understand Russia across the board and the Soviet Union. So, that’s why I spent the ten years studying at the University of Chicago and Harvard and getting formally credentialed in these areas.

And I have to say I was pretty appalled. I did have Professor Edward Keenan at Harvard who was my teacher, mentor and friend. And he was Director of the Russian Research Center. And he is very fair, balanced and reasonable, and Professor Harold Berman at Harvard Law School, again, very fair, balanced and reasonable. But that was pretty much about it.

I was invited over twice by the Soviet Government to lecture, once around the country in 1986 and then in 1989. And I guess they just figured I was a reasonable American to talk to. And I was open, I met with people and lectured and I seemed to get along with everyone. We didn’t necessarily agree about everything, but at least we could try to talk it out.

But that’s not what we are seeing now. That’s for sure! As we know from the Nuland tape here with the Ambassador in Kiev, she admits they had spent at least $5 million right away now trying to promote opposition to the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Whatever you think of Yanukovych, he is democratically elected and so far I think he’s shown a remarkable restraint.

You were listening to an interview with Professor Francis Boyle. He is a Professor in International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. That was part 1 of a longer interview. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com

22 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org