Just International

Warning To The World: Washington And Its NATO And EU Vassals Are Insane

By Paul Craig Roberts

Herbert E. Meyer, a nutcase who was a special assistant to the CIA director for a period during the Reagan administration, has penned an article calling for Russian President Putin’s assassination. If we have “ to get him out of the Kremlin feet-first with a bullet hole in the back of his head, that would be okay with us.” http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/how_to_solve_the_putin_problem.html

As the crazed Meyer illiustrates, the insanity that Washington has released upon the world knows no restraint. Jose Manual Barroso, installed as Washington’s puppet as European Commission President, misrepresented his recent confidential telephone conversation with Russia’s President Putin by telling the media that Putin issued a threat: “If I want to, I can take Kiev in two weeks.”

Clearly, Putin did not issue a threat. A threat would be inconsistent with Putin’s entire unprovocative approach to the strategic threat that Washington and its NATO puppets have brought to Russia in Ukraine. Russia’s permanent representative to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, said that if Barroso’s lie stands, Russia will make public the full recording of the conversation

Anyone familiar with the disparity between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries knows full well that it would take the Russian military 14 hours, not 14 days, to take all of Ukraine. Just remember what happened to the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian Army when Washington set its stupid Georgian puppets on South Ossetia. The American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian army collapsed under Russian counterattack in 5 hours.

The lie that Washington’s puppet Barroso told was not worthy of a serious person. But where in Europe is there a serious person in power? Nowhere. The few serious people are all out of power. Consider the NATO Secretary General, Anders Rasmussen. He was a prime minister of Denmark who saw he could rise beyond Denmark by serving as Washington’s puppet. As prime minister he strongly supported Washington’s illegal invasion of Iraq, declaring that “we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Of course, the fool didn’t know any such thing, and why would it matter if Iraq did have such weapons. Many countries have weapons of mass destruction.

According to the rule that anyone who serves Washington is elevated, the cipher Rasmussen was elevated.

The problem with elevating unprincipled fools is that they risk the world for their career. Rasmussen has now put the entirety of Eastern and Western Europe at risk of annihilation. Rasmussen has announced the creation of a blitzkrieg spearhead force capable of blitzkrieg attack on Russia. What Washington’s puppet calls “the Readiness Action Plan” is justified as a response to “Russia’s aggressive behavior in Ukraine.”

Rasmussen’s “lightening spearhead force” would be instantly wiped out along with every European capital. What kind of idiot provokes a nuclear superpower in this way?

Rasmussen asserts “Russia’s aggressive behavior” but has no evidence of it. Russia has stood on the sidelines while Washington’s puppet government in Kiev has shelled and bombed civilian housing, hospitals, schools and issued a constant stream of lies against Russia. Russia denied the requests of the now independent eastern and southern provinces of Ukraine, former Russian territories, to be reunited with Russia. As readers know, I regard Putin’s decision as a mistake, but events might prove me wrong and that is OK with me. For now, the fact is that every act of aggressive behavior is the result of the US and EU support of the Kiev nazis. It is the Ukrainian nazi militias that are attacking civilians in the former Russian territories of eastern and southern Ukraine. A number of regular Ukrainian military units have defected to the independent republics.

Yes, nazis. Western Ukraine is the home of the Ukrainian SS divisions that fought for Hitler. Today the militias organized by the Right Sector and other right-wing political organizations wear the nazi insignia of the Ukrainian SS divisions. These are the people that Washington and the EU support. If the Ukrainian nazis could win against Russia, which they cannot, they would turn on the stupid West, just as has the Washington-funded ISIS that the dumbshits in Washington unleashed on Libya and Syria. Now ISIS is remaking the Middle East, and Washington appears helpless.

William Binney, a former high level official in the US National Security Agency, along with colleagues from the CIA and military intelligence services, have written to German chancellor Merkel advising her to beware of Obama’s lies at the upcoming NATO summit in Wales. The US intelligence officials advise Merkel to remember Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and don’t again be deceived, this time into conflict with Russia. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-01/ex-nsa-director-us-intelligence-veterans-write-open-letter-merkel-avoid-all-out-ukra

The question is: who does Merkel represent? Washington or Germany? So far Merkel has represented Washington, not German business interests, not the German people, and not Germany’s interests as a country. Here is a protest in Dresden where a crowd prevents Merkel’s speech with shouts of “kriegstreiber” (warmonger), “liar, liar,” and “no war with Russia.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wSMhGE_Mpk

My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: “Money, we give them money.” “Foreign aid?” I asked. “No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale, We bought them. They report to us.” Perhaps this explains Tony Blair’s $50 million fortune one year out of office.

The Western media, the largest whorehouse on earth, is desperate for war. The editorial board of the Washington Post, now a trophy newspaper in the hands of Amazon.com’s billionaire owner, ran an editorial on August 31 that projected all of Washington’s (and the Post’s) lies upon Putin.

Amazon.com’s owner might know how to market products on the Internet, but he is hopeless when it comes to running a newspaper. His editors at the Washington Post have made his trophy a worldwide laughing stock.

Here are the mindless accusations against Putin from the idiots that the billionaire put in charge of his trophy newspaper:

Putin, bitterly resentful at the loss of power from the Soviet collapse, has “resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie” in order to reconstitute the Russian Empire.

“Russian sponsored militias in Ukraine” are responsible for the “shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner in July.” The “Russian state-controlled media” lied and misrepresented to the Russian people the party responsible for downing the airliner.

“In the absence of independent and free reporting, few Russians realize that Russian soldiers and armaments are in action in eastern Ukraine, albeit (as in Crimea) in uniforms and vehicles stripped of their identifying insignia and license plates. With no free media, Russians are left to fend for themselves against a firestorm of falsehoods.”

“Mr. Putin’s Big Lie shows why it is important to support a free press where it still exists and outlets like Radio Free Europe that bring the truth to people who need it.”

As a former Wall Street Journal editor, I can say with complete confidence that such extraordinary propaganda posing as an editorial would have resulted in the immediate firing of all concerned. In my days on the Congressional staff, the Washington Post was regarded as a CIA asset. Today the Post has sunk far below this status.

I have seen much media propaganda in my day, but this Washington Post editorial takes the cake. The editorial shows that either the editorial writers are completely ignorant or they are completely corrupt and also assume that their readers are completely ignorant. If Russian military units were in action in eastern Ukraine, the situation would be precisely as Alexander Zakharchenko http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/08/30/west-greatest-cause-war-human-history-stands-stripped-legitimacy-paul-craig-roberts/ and Dmitry Orlov describe. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/01/can-tell-whether-russia-invaded-ukraine/ Ukraine would no longer exist. Ukraine would again be part of Russia where it was for centuries prior to Washington taking advantage of the Soviet collapse to tear Ukraine away from Russia.

The question before us is: how long will Russia’s patience last with the West’s enormous lies and provocations? No matter how restrained Russia is, Russia is accused of the worst. Therefore, Russia might as well inflict the worst.

At what point will the Russian government decide that Washington’s mendacity, and that of its European puppets and corrupt Western media, render hopeless Russia’s efforts to resolve the situation with diplomacy and unprovocative behavior? As Russia is constantly accused falsely of invading Ukraine, when will the Russian government decide that as Western propaganda has established that Russia has invaded Ukraine and has imposed sanctions and new military bases on Russia’s borders because of the alleged invasion, Russia might as well go ahead and rid themselves of the problem Washington has brought to Russia and invade Ukraine?

There is nothing that NATO could do about it if Russia decides that Ukraine in Washington’s hands is too much of a strategic threat to Russia and reincorporates Ukraine again into Russia where it has resided for centuries. Any NATO force sent would be instantly wiped out. The German population, remembering the consequences of war with Russia, would overthrow Washington’s puppet government. NATO and the EU would collapse as Germany departed the absurd construct that serves Washington’s interest at the expense of Europe.

Once this happens, the world will have peace. But not until.

For those who care to understand how the land of lies works, Washington’s puppet government in Kiev attributes the defeat of its military forces by the Donetsk Republic to the presence in the Donetsk army of Russian military units. This is the propaganda that has gone out to western Ukraine and to the presstitute western media, a collection of whores that echo the propaganda without any investigation whatsoever. However, Kiev has a different story for the IMF. Kiev cannot receive IMF money with which to pay off its Western creditors if Ukraine is at war. Therefore, Ukraine tells the IMF the opposite story: Russia has not attacked Ukraine. http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/08/ukie-doubleplusgooddoublethink.html

The Western media remains uninterested in any facts. Just the lies. Only the lies.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, Fox “news,” Die Welt, the French press, the British press all plead: “please Washington give us more sensational lies that we can trumpet. Our circulation needs it. Who cares about war and the human race if only we can regain financial stability.”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

03 September, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

US And NATO Step Up Military Preparations Against Russia

By Niles Williamson

At their meeting this week in Wales, government heads of NATO member countries are expected to approve the creation of a special rapid response force of as many as 4,000 soldiers that could be deployed to any member state within two days. They are also expected to sanction the establishment of an ongoing troop presence in Poland and the Baltic states, as well as the buildup of equipment and arms stockpiles in Eastern Europe.

The NATO summit, to which Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been invited, will focus on the Western diplomatic, economic and military offensive against Russia that has been continually escalated since the US and Germany triggered the crisis in Ukraine last February by organizing a fascist-led putsch that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

Russia announced Wednesday that it will alter its military policy in response to the aggressive expansion of NATO forces into Eastern Europe as well moves by the Kiev regime to integrate Ukraine into the US-dominated Western military alliance.

Mikahil Popov, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said in an interview with RIA Novosti that “the issue of drawing of military infrastructure of NATO member-countries to the borders of our country, including via enlargement, will remain one of the external military threats for the Russian Federation.”

Incoming European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Federica Mogheirini announced Tuesday that a new round of sanctions against Russia would be decided on by the end of the week.

According to the Wall Street Journal, among the new measures being considered are restrictions on the ability of Russian state-owned companies to raise money on capital markets, the extension of restrictions on Russian state-owned banks and other firms from receiving new syndicated loans, and wider limits on the export of dual-use goods.

US President Barack Obama was in Tallinn, Estonia on the eve of the NATO summit to meet with the leaders of the three Baltic states—Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, and Latvian President Andris Berzins. Grybauskaite recently declared that “practically Russia is in a state of war against Europe.”

The main purpose of Obama’s trip to Estonia is to reaffirm the Baltic states’ status under Article Five of the NATO Charter, which triggers collective defense when a member state is attacked by another country.

The right-wing leaders of the Baltic states have called for an increased US and NATO military presence in their countries, all of which share a border with Russia and have significant Russian minority populations. The Baltic states were incorporated into NATO and the European Union in 2004 and are the only former Soviet territories to have attained membership in both organizations.

The Italian newspaper La Republica leaked details from a closed session of Saturday’s EU summit that have been seized upon by the media to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin and condition public opinion for war with Russia.

In the session, European Council President Jose Manuel Barroso detailed a telephone conversation he had with Putin on Friday. According to La Republica, Putin responded to Barroso’s accusations of Russia troops in Ukraine by saying, “The problem is not this, but that if I want I’ll take Kiev in two weeks.

Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy adviser, denounced the leak of selected details from Putin and Barroso’s conversation. “Whether these words were said or not, in my viewpoint, the quote given is taken out of context, and it had an absolutely different meaning,” he stated.

In the face of NATO’s aggressive posture, Russian Foreign Minister Segei Lavrov appealed for the US and its European allies to support a compromise in Ukraine between Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. He called on the US to use its influence to rein in Kiev and encourage the regime to resolve the crisis through a political process rather than military operations.

Lavrov suggested that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s scheduled visit to the White House on September 18 would be “a good opportunity to dot the i’s and cross the t’s concerning US interest or non-interest” regarding political developments in the country.

Talks in Minsk between representatives from Moscow, Kiev and the separatist groups ended without any progress Monday and will resume on Friday. The Obama administration did not send a representative to the talks and is working to prevent any sort of political settlement between Kiev and the pro-Russian separatists.

In the last two weeks, the separatists have made significant gains against Kiev’s armed forces. As many as 680 Ukrainian soldiers have been captured by the separatists in recent fighting, with many being taken around the city of Ilovaisk, where rebels were able to surround hundreds of Ukrainian troops.

Ukrainian armed forces withdrew from the Luhansk airport on Tuesday after a night of intense fighting with rebels. Clashes were reported to be taking place around the Donetsk airport as well.

The rebels were also reported to be continuing their advance on the strategic port city of Mariupol. The separatists captured Olenivka, a key city on the road to Mariupol, opening a possible route from the north. They had already opened a route from the east when they captured the coastal city of Novoazovsk last week.

The ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced as many as a million people. Hundreds of civilians have been killed as a result of indiscriminate artillery shelling of residential areas in the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk by Ukrainian armed forces.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, more than 300 civilians have been killed by explosive weapons since May in the city of Luhansk. On August 18, shells struck the city’s central market, killing four civilians and setting off a fire that burnt down several shops. Shells were then fired at fire brigades as they sought to respond, keeping them from putting out the blaze.

The UN estimates that 260,000 people have been displaced inside Ukraine, more than doubling through the month of August. According to Russian authorities, more than 800,000 Ukrainians have entered Russia seeking either refugee/temporary asylum or other residence options.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres expressed his concern over the rapid rise in Ukrainian refugees. “If this crisis is not quickly stopped,” he said, “it will have not only devastating humanitarian consequences, but it also has the potential to destabilize the whole region. After the lessons of the Balkans, it is hard to believe a conflict of these proportions could unfold in the European continent.”

03 September, 2014
WSWS.org

 

How America Made ISIS

By Tom Engelhardt
Their Videos and Ours, Their “Caliphate” and Ours

Whatever your politics, you’re not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there’s Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from Libya and Ukraine to Iraq and the South China Sea, nothing has been coming up roses for the U.S. Polls reflect a general American gloom, with 71% of the public claiming the country is “on the wrong track.” We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.

What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.

In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It’s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it’s brought back crucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it’s ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it’s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you’ve got a label that’s really, really bad like genocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS’s actions.

It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least four million people, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their revenues as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be expanding and claims it has established a caliphate.

A Force So Evil You’ve Got to Do Something

Facing such pure evil, you may feel a chill of fear, even if you’re a top military or national security official, but in a way you’ve gotta feel good, too. It’s not everyday that you have an enemy your president can term a “cancer”; that your secretary of state can call the “face” of “ugly, savage, inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless evil” which “must be destroyed”; that your secretary of defense can denounce as “barbaric” and lacking a “standard of decency, of responsible human behavior… an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else”; that your chairman of the joint chiefs of staff can describe as “an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated”; and that a retired general and former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan can brand a “scourge… beyond the pale of humanity [that]… must be eradicated.”

Talk about a feel-good feel-bad situation for the leadership of a superpower that’s seen better days! Such threatening evil calls for only one thing, of course: for the United States to step in. It calls for the Obama administration to dispatch the bombers and drones in a slowly expanding air war in Iraq and, sooner or later, possibly Syria. It falls on Washington’s shoulders to organize a new “coalition of the willing” from among various backers and opponents of the Assad regime in Syria, from among those who have armed and funded the extremist rebels in that country, from the ethnic/religious factions in the former Iraq, and from various NATO countries. It calls for Washington to transform Iraq’s leadership (a process no longer termed “regime change”) and elevate a new man capable of reuniting the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, now at each other’s throats, into one nation capable of turning back the extremist tide. If not American “boots on the ground,” it calls for proxy ones of various sorts that the U.S. military will naturally have a hand in training, arming, funding, and advising. Facing such evil, what other options could there be?

If all of this sounds strangely familiar, it should. Minus a couple of invasions, the steps being considered or already in effect to deal with “the threat of ISIS” are a reasonable summary of the last 13 years of what was once called the Global War on Terror and now has no name at all. New as ISIS may be, a little history is in order, since that group is, at least in part, America’s legacy in the Middle East.

Give Osama bin Laden some credit. After all, he helped set us on the path to ISIS. He and his ragged band had no way of creating the caliphate they dreamed of or much of anything else. But he did grasp that goading Washington into something that looked like a crusader’s war with the Muslim world might be an effective way of heading in that direction.

In other words, before Washington brings its military power fully to bear on the new “caliphate,” a modest review of the post-9/11 years might be appropriate. Let’s start at the moment when those towers in New York had just come down, thanks to a small group of mostly Saudi hijackers, and almost 3,000 people were dead in the rubble. At that time, it wasn’t hard to convince Americans that there could be nothing worse, in terms of pure evil, than Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Establishing an American Caliphate

Facing such unmatchable evil, the United States officially went to war as it might have against an enemy military power. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, the Bush administration launched the unmatchable power of the U.S. military and its paramilitarized intelligence agencies against… well, what? Despite those dramatic videos of al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, that organization had no military force worth the name, and despite what you’ve seen on “Homeland,” no sleeper cells in the U.S. either; nor did it have the ability to mount follow-up operations any time soon.

In other words, while the Bush administration talked about “draining the swamp” of terror groups in up to 60 countries, the U.S. military was dispatched against what were essentially will-o’-the-wisps, largely representing Washington’s own conjured fears and fantasies. It was, that is, initially sent against bands of largely inconsequential Islamic extremists, scattered in tiny numbers in the tribal backlands of Afghanistan or Pakistan and, of course, the rudimentary armies of the Taliban.

It was, to use a word that George W. Bush let slip only once, something like a “crusade,” something close to a religious war, if not against Islam itself — American officials piously and repeatedly made that clear — then against the idea of a Muslim enemy, as well as against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and later Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. In each case, Washington mustered a coalition of the willing, ranging from Arab and South or Central Asian states to European ones, sent in air power followed twice by full-scale invasions and occupations, mustered local politicians of our choice in major “nation-building” operations amid much self-promotional talk about democracy, and built up vast new military and security apparatuses, supplying them with billions of dollars in training and arms.

Looking back, it’s hard not to think of all of this as a kind of American jihadism, as well as an attempt to establish what might have been considered an American caliphate in the region (though Washington had far kinder descriptive terms for it). In the process, the U.S. effectively dismantled and destroyed state power in each of the three main countries in which it intervened, while ensuring the destabilization of neighboring countries and finally the region itself.

In that largely Muslim part of the world, the U.S. left a grim record that we in this country generally tend to discount or forget when we decry the barbarism of others. We are now focused in horror on ISIS’s video of the murder of journalist James Foley, a propaganda document clearly designed to drive Washington over the edge and into more active opposition to that group.

We, however, ignore the virtual library of videos and other imagery the U.S. generated, images widely viewed (or heard about and discussed) with no less horror in the Muslim world than ISIS’s imagery is in ours. As a start, there were the infamous “screen saver” images straight out of the Marquis de Sade from Abu Ghraib prison. There, Americans tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, while creating their own iconic version of crucifixion imagery. Then there were the videos that no one (other than insiders) saw, but that everyone heard about. These, the CIA took of the repeated torture and abuse of al-Qaeda suspects in its “black sites.” In 2005, they were destroyed by an official of that agency, lest they be screened in an American court someday. There was also the Apache helicopter video released by WikiLeaks in which American pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians on the streets of Baghdad (including two Reuters correspondents), while on the sound track the crew are heard wisecracking. There was the video of U.S. troops urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. There were the trophy photos of body parts brought home by U.S. soldiers. There were the snuff films of the victims of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns in the tribal backlands of the planet (or “bug splat,” as the drone pilots came to call the dead from those attacks) and similar footage from helicopter gunships. There was the bin Laden snuff film video from the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, of which President Obama reportedly watched a live feed. And that’s only to begin to account for some of the imagery produced by the U.S. since September 2001 from its various adventures in the Greater Middle East.

All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of trillions of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape. They would prove jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.

When the U.S. was done, when it had set off the process that led to insurgencies, civil wars, the growth of extremist militias, and the collapse of state structures, it had also guaranteed the rise of something new on Planet Earth: ISIS — as well as of other extremist outfits ranging from the Pakistani Taliban, now challenging the state in certain areas of that country, to Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy — and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing U.S. counterterror operations in the “surge” years of the occupation. In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS’s fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington’s weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.

The Escalation Follies

When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single U.S. military intervention has had anything like its intended effect. Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits — and ISIS knows it.

Don’t consider its taunting video of James Foley’s execution the irrational act of madmen blindly calling down the destructive force of the planet’s last superpower on themselves. Quite the opposite. Behind it lay rational calculation. ISIS’s leaders surely understood that American air power would hurt them, but they knew as well that, as in an Asian martial art in which the force of an assailant is used against him, Washington’s full-scale involvement would also infuse their movement with greater power. (This was Osama bin Laden’s most original insight.)

It would give ISIS the ultimate enemy, which means the ultimate street cred in its world. It would bring with it the memories of all those past interventions, all those snuff videos and horrifying images. It would help inflame and so attract more members and fighters. It would give the ultimate raison d’être to a minority religious movement that might otherwise prove less than cohesive and, in the long run, quite vulnerable. It would give that movement global bragging rights into the distant future.

ISIS’s urge was undoubtedly to bait the Obama administration into a significant intervention. And in that, it may prove successful. We are now, after all, watching a familiar version of the escalation follies at work in Washington. Obama and his top officials are clearly on the up escalator. In the Oval Office is a visibly reluctant president, who undoubtedly desires neither to intervene in a major way in Iraq (from which he proudly withdrew American troops in 2011 with their “heads held high”), nor in Syria (a place where he avoided sending in the bombers and missiles back in 2013).

Unlike the previous president and his top officials, who were all confidence and overarching plans for creating a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, this one and his foreign policy team came into office intent on managing an inherited global situation. President Obama’s only plan, such as it was, was to get out of the Iraq War (along lines already established by the Bush administration). It was perhaps a telltale sign then that, in order to do so, he felt he had to “surge” American troops into Afghanistan. Five and a half years later, he and his key officials still seem essentially plan-less, a set of now-desperate managers engaged in a seat-of-the-pants struggle over a destabilizing Greater Middle East (and increasingly Africa and the borderlands of Europe as well).

Five and a half years later, the president is once again under pressure and being criticized by assorted neocons, McCainites, and this time, it seems, the military high command evidently eager to be set loose yet one more time to take out barbarism globally — that is, to up the ante on a losing hand. As in 2009, so today, he’s slowly but surely giving ground. By now, the process of “mission creep” — a term strongly rejected by the Obama administration — is well underway.

It started slowly with the collapse of the U.S.-trained and U.S.-supplied Iraqi army in Mosul and other northern Iraqi cities in the face of attacks by ISIS. In mid-June, the aircraft carrier USS H.W. Bush with more than 100 planes was dispatched to the Persian Gulf and the president sent in hundreds of troops, including Special Forces advisers (though officially no “boots” were to be “on the ground”). He also agreed to drone and other air surveillance of the regions ISIS had taken, clearly preparation for future bombing campaigns. All of this was happening before the fate of the Yazidis — a small religious sect whose communities in northern Iraq were brutally destroyed by ISIS fighters — officially triggered the commencement of a limited bombing campaign suitable to a “humanitarian crisis.”

When ISIS, bolstered by U.S. heavy weaponry captured from the Iraqi military, began to crush the Kurdish pesh merga militia, threatening the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and taking the enormous Mosul Dam, the bombing widened. More troops and advisers were sent in, and weaponry began to flow to the Kurds, with promises of all of the above further south once a new unity government was formed in Baghdad. The president explained this bombing expansion by citing the threat of ISIS blowing up the Mosul Dam and flooding downriver communities, thus supposedly endangering the U.S. Embassy in distant Baghdad. (This was a lame cover story because ISIS would have had to flood parts of its own “caliphate” in the process.)

The beheading video then provided the pretext for the possible bombing of Syria to be put on the agenda. And once again a reluctant president, slowly giving way, has authorized drone surveillance flights over parts of Syria in preparation for possible bombing strikes that may not be long in coming.

The Incrementalism of the Reluctant

Consider this the incrementalism of the reluctant under the usual pressures of a militarized Washington eager to let loose the dogs of war. One place all of this is heading is into a morass of bizarre contradictions involving Syrian politics. Any bombing of that country will necessarily involve implicit, if not explicit, support for the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, as well as for the barely existing “moderate” rebels who oppose his regime and to whom Washington may now ship more arms. This, in turn, could mean indirectly delivering yet more weaponry to ISIS. Add everything up and at the moment Washington seems to be on the path that ISIS has laid out for it.

Americans prefer to believe that all problems have solutions. There may, however, be no obvious or at least immediate solution when it comes to ISIS, an organization based on exclusivity and divisiveness in a region that couldn’t be more divided. On the other hand, as a minority movement that has already alienated so many in the region, left to itself it might with time simply burn out or implode. We don’t know. We can’t know. But we do have reasonable evidence from the past 13 years of what an escalating American military intervention is likely to do: not whatever it is that Washington wants it to do.

And keep one thing in mind: if the U.S. were truly capable of destroying or crushing ISIS, as our secretary of state and others are urging, that might prove to be anything but a boon. After all, it was easy enough to think, as Americans did after 9/11, that al-Qaeda was the worst the world of Islamic extremism had to offer. Osama bin Laden’s killing was presented to us as an ultimate triumph over Islamic terror. But ISIS lives and breathes and grows, and across the Greater Middle East Islamic extremist organizations are gaining membership and traction in ways that should illuminate just what the war on terror has really delivered. The fact that we can’t now imagine what might be worse than ISIS means nothing, given that no one in our world could imagine ISIS before it sprang into being.

The American record in these last 13 years is a shameful one. Do it again should not be an option.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.

02 September, 2014
TomDispatch.com

 

30% of Small Island States Population Threatened By Sea Level Rise

By Marianne de Nazareth

The horror hit like a jack hammer, while we sat through a UNFCC Congress of the Parties event in Copenhagen a few years ago. Dwarfed by the massive stage she was standing on, a little girl brought the crisis being faced by her country to the world stage. ” Why must my country, The Solomon Islands be submerged and swallowed up by the sea? ” she asked, ” just because you richer nations do not want to cut back on your carbon emissions? What have we done to lose our country? I want my own country, I do not want to have to run away from it, incase it is swallowed up by the rising seas.” He voice rang out clear and true, and I am sure many in the audience squirmed at her questions. Images of her drowning country flashed behind her and it is only then we, who do not face her problem got shaken out of our complacency.

The new Global Environment Outlook report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)says, Governments and the world at large are being confronted by accelerating climate change and environmental challenges to their economies and society. For many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), the experience is even more dramatic and is felt more rapidly because of their small physical scale, geographic isolation, unique biodiversity, exposure to natural hazards and disasters, high population growth coupled with outmigration and significant seasonal in-migration from tourism, limited resource base, remoteness from global markets and small economies of scale.

There are multiple drivers and pressures, beyond global economic stagnation and population growth, affecting the outlooks for SIDS. These include vulnerability to climate change, local access to water, nutrition and food security, energy and transport demand, exploitation of natural resources, local sectoral development, poor management of waste and pollution, coastal squeeze and loss of ecological resilience. SIDS are also threatened by a range of emerging issues, such as social disintegration, and in some instances the disappearance of their national territory.

SIDS in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and South China Sea region, range from the volcanic archipelago of Cape Verde with a semi-desert climate, the savannah and mangrove swamps of Guinea Bissau and the rugged volcanic rocks of São Tomé and Principe located off the west coast of Africa, to the coral islands of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, to the urbanized-tropical rainforest mix of Singapore. All face significant threats from climate change, sea level rise and natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, heavy rains, floods and drought. Many have globally high endemism, and are home to important marine resources including sea turtles and dugongs. With the exception of the wealthy Singapore, these are among the poorest countries in the world.

Invasive species

Marine invasive species have become a focus of concern in many SIDS. In less than a decade, the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans) has become widely established in the southeast United States and throughout the Caribbean. This highly predatory fish is spreading rapidly and reducing the abundance of key herbivores, thus altering fish communities in reefs. Lionfish occupy the same trophic position as economically important species (e.g. snapper and grouper) and may hamper stock rebuilding efforts and coral reef conservation measures. Longer-term impacts of lionfish abundance could be growth rate reduction of the wave breaking reef crests, which help to protect coastlines from erosion. Across the Caribbean, people are being encouraged to consume lionfish as a means to lower their numbers.

The blue-green economy

Small Island Developing States Need ‘Blue-Green Economy’ Innovations to Adapt to Climate Change Island Nations at a Crucial Turning Point, says the new Global Environment Outlook report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). SIDS have in short to learn to help themselves and the report brings out various measures which are critical to SIDS self sufficiency.

According to the report, a blue-green economic strategy, that targets resource efficiency and clean technology, is carbon neutral and socially inclusive, will stimulate economic stability, facilitate job creation, provide a clean and healthy environment and help conserve resources. By focussing on balanced development and the linkages between small-scale fisheries and aquaculture, water, tourism, renewable energy and waste, some of the most critical challenges facing SIDS, such as land and water scarcity, dependence on imported energy, high costs of waste management and the vulnerability of the key sectors, can be addressed.

Cultured pearl farming

Today, cultured pearl farming in the Pacific offers an economic activity in which sound environmental management and conservation are prerequisites to economic success. Pearl oysters are remarkably sensitive organisms and environmental deterioration or sudden ecological changes affect the oyster and hamper its potential for producing a high-quality pearl.

Estimates suggest that 95% of a pearl farm’s income comes from only 2% of its pearls. The more pristine an environment, the healthier the oysters are and the higher the likelihood of harvesting valuable, high-quality pearls.

Pearl farming can be carried out in isolated islands where there are otherwise very limited economic opportunities. Cultured pearls have become important economic pillars in French Polynesia and the Cook Islands as a major source of export revenue. In French Polynesia, pearl farming has reduced pressure on fish stocks, stemmed outer-island emigration, and provided economic alternatives for an economy otherwise heavily reliant on French financial assistance and tourism. At its peak in 2000, the pearl sector provided employment to 7,000 people in French Polynesia. In the Cook Islands, black pearl production is carried out within existing forms of indigenous socio-economic organization.

Small-scale pearl farming contributes so effectively to ecosystem health that it has been sanctioned inside of marine protected areas, such as off Pakin in the Federated States of Micronesia. Now a new integrated marine plan is being implemented in which pearl farming is compensating for the lost income that artisanal reef fishing communities have incurred due to the introduction of no-fishing zones and marine protected areas. This new source of income has created an incentive for conservation by reducing pressure on reef fish stocks, and is increasing the resilience of these communities in the face of climate change.

“Small Island Developing States presently face a number of major challenges and hardships,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “Many suffer from isolation and high costs associated with long distances from global markets, and lag behind in the adoption of new technologies and innovation. Growing populations concentrated in urban areas are putting stress on island resources and the health effects of unsafe water, poor sanitation and increasingly unhealthy diets. Meanwhile, climate change threatens biodiversity, livelihoods and even the very existence of some island nations.”

“As the world enters the post-2015 era, significant changes both in global policy and on islands themselves were identified by the GEO expert teams from SIDS. Improvements in line with the blue-green economy would include, among other things, economic diversification, economic approaches to improve the management of biodiversity, resource efficiency, and sustainable consumption and production,” he added.

Along with the blue-green economy outlook, the report recommends an ensemble of three other island-centric elements: “technology leapfrogging”, priority to island community and culture and reconnecting with nature.

A blue-green economy outlook requires the development of economic tools to improve the management of biodiversity, using indigenous and local knowledge in decision-making and monitoring. Such tools as the UN System of Environmental and Economic Accounting, natural capital accounting, payment for ecosystem services and carbon trading schemes would contribute to establishing the “right” market prices for natural resources.

information and communication technologies

The report also suggests that SIDS should envisage rapid technological innovation, especially in information and communication technologies, that will help overcome island isolation, create new ways of maintaining social and cultural ties across the island diaspora and help evolve new economic activities.

Some of the hallmarks of technological leapfrogging in the context of SIDS include Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enablement for the benefit of society, phasing out of inefficient technologies and increasing the penetration of renewable sources of energy and materials, as well as the use of traditional knowledge to create scale-appropriate technologies.

Digital technologies have enormous potential to benefit everyday life in SIDS and to tackle disaster risk management and a variety of social challenges. A digital agenda, focused on ICT capabilities to support social cohesion and connectivity, will help improve access to information, reduce energy consumption, support citizen’s lives, revolutionize health services and deliver better public services.

Brain circulation

SIDS will continue to face many challenges when dealing with climate change. For example, in the western Pacific –where the rates of sea level rise on islands such as Tuvalu and Funafuti have been recorded up to 3 times the global average of 2.8-3.6 mm/year – islands are susceptible to extreme sea level events such as storm surges and tidal waves.

In order to deal with such challenges, a very high level of skill and education will be required. Therefore, policies should encouraging “brain circulation”, or the return of skilled people who have emigrated away from the island. In addition, traditional knowledge and activities such as fishing can be combined with other sectors to create new business opportunities.

Healthy traditional and modern elements

There is great potential among SIDS to encourage a healthy island culture combining traditional and modern elements, evolving with the times while maintaining roots in island heritage. Each island community and culture should select what it wants from globalization within island limits, without being passive consumers.

Giving priority to island community and culture involves the promotion of participatory community and indigenous conservation and management; communities that are resilient; widespread collective action and partnership and the development of an island-centric demand side in the global marketplace; and education that has sustainability at its core.

Among participatory and community approaches described in the report is that of building community resilience as a key element in successful climate change adaptation and risk management.

This involves four critical strategies: building coping capacities to withstand and counteract shocks; strengthening existing and developing new early warning systems; strengthening disaster risk reduction capacity in SIDS, for example, through ecosystem-based adaptation such as restoring beaches and mangroves; and actively engaging the international community in reducing the anthropogenic causes of the increased frequency of extreme events, including global warming and environmental degradation.

Reconnecting with nature

Connections with nature have long been important to island peoples. In a blue-green economy outlook scenario, traditional knowledge of the environment would be combined with modern science to increase the integration and harvestable capacity of island ecosystems to restore biodiversity. Coral reef growth could be maintained by careful management and supported by citizen science and monitoring.

A number of SIDS have emphasized improving management and expansion of protected areas (PAs) as a strategy for dealing with biodiversity loss. Between 1990 and 2009, however, only a handful of SIDS showed an increase of over 4 per cent in protected areas. A related strategy is the promotion and implementation of community or indigenous conservation and management areas, which respect and incorporate local and indigenous knowledge.

Similarly, empowering local communities and devolving power to them for managing and restoring forested areas has proven effective in places like Palau and Vanuatu.

The report recommends investments in organic agricultural policies and agritourism – which connects sustainable agriculture with tourism – as ways to increase food self-sufficiency, and notes that many SIDS are already successfully investing money in improving and developing water and wastewater treatment infrastructure. It also stresses that, as part of a blue-green economy outlook, SIDS should place themselves at the forefront of sound coastal zone management policies.

Hopefully all this does help SIDS recover and not just slip under the sea and be a lost home to that little girl forever.

( Marianne de Nazareth is a Freelance science and environment journalist, registered PHD scholar and adjunct faculty, St Joseph’s College of Media studies, Bangalore. )

02 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

Putin’s Restraint

By Gaither Stewart & Paul Carline

Putin’s matter-of-fact statement over last weekend that “If I wanted to I could take Kiev in two weeks”, following his mid-week reminder of Russia’s sometimes forgotten nuclear capacity, was most certainly startling to European Union leaders gathered in Bruxelles to shuffle around EU functions in such way that the bureaucrats—who have made non-elected careers in Bruxelles running as much as possible the lives of Europeans—can keep their jobs.

Putin’s softly spoken words plastered across newspaper headlines shook them out of their reveries. They had hoped the Ukrainian problem would just go away. Now they don’t know what to do. Several countries-members—Slovakia, Hungary and Cyprus oppose sending arms to the Chocolate King Poroshenko’s forces getting whipped by the separatists-terrorists in the Southeast Donbass and losing huge quantities of military hardware and yesterday losing also the Luhansk airport. No one in fact is really sincere about the whole US idea of sanctions. Europe, afflicted by uncertainty about its own identity and the centrifugal forces at work to tear it apart (anti-Europeanists, the secession referendum in Scotland this month, similar movements in Cataluna and the Basques country) has the nerve to give Russia seven days to withdraw its troops from inside Ukraine (which Russia denies) to which Putin responds laconically that “it’s impossible to foresee when the crisis will end.” Putin has repeated a paraphrased version of US East European policymaker Nuland’s words to the EU: “Fuck off!” Merkel is meanwhile really pissed with the Kremlin but can’t do much about it, and probably would not even if she could: half of Russia’s foreign trade is with her Germany.

Restraint? I firmly believe Russia could take back Kiev in much less than two weeks. Maybe overnight. The Ukrainian army might even join in with Russian forces. And the Nazi-Fascist militias? What would they do? Oh, they would fight a bit, but would be overwhelmed by events and quickly melt away. The US/NATO would face exactly the same situation as when Russia quietly took back the Crimea.

But, as Putin intimates in the conditional tense, “ … if he wanted to,” why should he? That is what he is saying. Why should he? He knows. Russians will drink Russian beer instead of Heinekens and wait. Let Poroshenko’s ragged army and any Westerners who join in walk straight into Russia’s arms. The US/NATO has already suffered defeat after defeat in Ukraine: Crimea, the Donbass, Novorossiya, the ignominy of a banana republic political clique trying to manage to stay afloat in Kiev and ridiculously requesting admission into the European Union and NATO. In whose name, anyway, one wonders? The Bandera-Nazi militia whom every Russian and most Ukrainians detest?

While Putin waits patiently, right on Ukraine’s eastern borders, if one even exists, which I doubt. Let NATO or their proxies walk into another Stalingrad.

In this chiefly verbal conflict for everyone except those doing the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, Europe plays the roll of patsy for both the US and Russia. Obama in Washington can incite Europe to violent words and sanctions and expressions of solidarity for which it then must pay the bill. Russia can direct its political maneuvering, its solidarity with the Ukrainian people, its opposition to the US-backed puppet government in Kiev, and direct its counter-sanctions against a vulnerable Europe still in the throes of economic crisis.

Putin’s restraint. Russian patience. America’s unknowing.

Gaither Stewart serves as a Senior Editor and European correspondent at The Greanville Post and Cyrano’s Journal Today. A retired journalist, his latest novel is The Fifth Sun (Punto Press). He’s also the author of several other books, including the Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Malena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com

Paul Carline – writer, critic, democracy activist, and regular contributor to New Review and Senior Contributing Editor of The Greanville Post

02 September, 2014
Cjournal.info

 

The terrorists fighting us now? We just finished training them.

By Souad Mekhennet

No, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.

In recent years, President Obama, his European friends, and even some Middle Eastern allies, have supported “rebel groups” in Libya and Syria. Some received training, financial and military support to overthrow Muammar Gadhafi and battle Bashar al Assad. It’s a strategy that follows the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has been the American and allied approach for decades in deciding whether to support opposition groups and movements.

The problem is that it is completely unreliable — and often far worse than other strategies. Every year there are more cases in which this approach backfires. The most glaring and famous failure was in Afghanistan, where some of the groups taught (and supplied) to fight the Soviet Army later became stridently anti-Western. In that environment, Al Qaeda flourished and established the camps where perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were trained. Yet instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States keeps making them.

Washington and its allies empowered groups whose members had either begun with anti-American or anti-Western views or found themselves lured to those ideas in the process of fighting. According to interviews with members of militant groups, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Al Nusra Front (which is aligned with al Qaeda), that is exactly what happened with some of the fighters in Libya and even with factions of the Free Syrian Army.

“In the East of Syria, there is no Free Syrian Army any longer. All Free Syrian Army people [there] have joined the Islamic State,” says Abu Yusaf, a high-level security commander of the Islamic State, whom The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola wrote about last week.

The Islamic State is the most successful group for now, controlling the main areas of Syrian oil and gas fields. It has also acquired large amounts of cash, gold (from banks in the areas they control) and weapons in its fight against the armies in Syria and Iraq. “When the Iraqi Army fled from Mosul and the other areas, they left behind all the good equipment the Americans had given them,” Abu Yusaf says.

“From IS to the Mahdi army you see groups that basically are not our friends but who became more powerful because we have handled the situations wrong,” says a senior U.S. security official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

Some European and Arab intelligence officials also voiced their worries and frustration about what they call the mistakes the United States has made in handling the uprisings in Arab states. “We had, in the early stages, information that radical groups had used the vacuum of the Arab Spring, and that some of the people the U.S. and their allies had trained to fight for ‘democracy’ in Libya and Syria had a jihadist agenda — already or later, [when they] joined al Nusra or the Islamic State,” a senior Arab intelligence official said in a recent interview. He said that often his U.S. counterparts would say things like, “We know you are right, but our president in Washington and his advisers don’t believe that.” Those groups, say Western security officials, are threats not only in the Middle East, but also in the United States and Europe, where they have members and sympathizers.

The official’s account has been corroborated by members of the Islamic State in and outside the Middle East, including Abu Yusaf, the military commander. In several interviews conducted in the last two months, they described how the collapse of security during Arab Spring uprisings helped them recruit, regroup and use the Western strategy – to support and train groups that fight dictators — for their own benefits. “There had [also] been … some British and Americans who had trained us during the Arab Spring times in Libya,” said a man who calls himself Abu Saleh and who only agreed to be interviewed if his real identity remained secret.

Abu Saleh, who is originally from a town close to Benghazi, said he and a group of other Libyans received training and support in their country from French, British, and American military and intelligence personnel — before they joined the Al Nusra Front or the Islamic State. Western and Arab military sources interviewed for this article, confirmed Abu Saleh’s account that “training” and “equipment” were given to rebels in Libya during the fight against the Gadhafi regime.

Abu Saleh left Libya in 2012 for Turkey and then crossed into Syria. “First I fought under what people call the ‘Free Syrian Army’ but then switched to Al Nusra. And I have already decided I will join the Islamic State when my wounds are healed,” the 28-year-old said from a hospital in Turkey, where he is receiving medical treatment. He had been injured during a battle with the Syrian Army, he said, and was brought to Turkey with false documents. “Some of the Syrian people who they trained have joined the Islamic State and others jabhat al Nusra,” he said, smiling. He added, “Sometimes I joke around and say that I am a fighter made by America.”

For a long time, Western and Arab states supported the Free Syrian Army not only with training but also with weapons and other materiel. The Islamic State commander, Abu Yusaf, added that members of the Free Syrian Army who had received training — from the United States, Turkey and Arab military officers at an American base in Southern Turkey — have now joined the Islamic State. “Now many of the FSA people who the West has trained are actually joining us,” he said, smiling.

These militants are preparing for the day that Western governments catch on. “We do know the U.S. will go after the Islamic State at some stage, and we are ready for it. But they should not underestimate the answer they will get,” said an IS sympathizer in Europe who goes by the name Abu Farouk. He added that the “unconditional support” of the United States toward the government of outgoing premier Nuri al-Maliki, which he says has oppressed Iraqi Sunnis, and America’s “pampering Iran,” which is mainly Shia, made the Islamic State a more attractive alternative for some Sunnis who felt angry about double standards.

“Thanks to the Arab spring and the West fighting all these rulers for us, we had enough time to grow and recruit in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S,” Abu Farouk said. Then he paused for some seconds and smiled. “Actually, we should say, thank you, Mr. President.”

Souad Mekhennet, co-author of “The Eternal Nazi,” is a visiting fellow at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the Geneva Centre for Security policy.

18 August 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Continuing Media Silence On The Fate Of Flight MH17

By Stefan Steinberg

With a handful of exceptions, a shroud of silence has been drawn by the international media regarding the fate of Malaysian Airlines MH17, which crashed over Ukraine nearly six weeks ago.

Immediately after the plane crash on July 17, leading US officials, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the fore along with sections of the US and European media, alleged, without a shred of evidence, that the passenger jet had been shot down by a Russian missile fired by pro-Russian separatists operating in eastern Ukraine. The completely unfounded allegations were then used to create a frenzied political climate to justify the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions by the US and the European Union against Russia.

Since the crash there has been deliberate stalling on the part of Western authorities in releasing relevant information. At the start of this month Dutch investigators leading the inquiries announced they would release a preliminary report “in a few weeks.” Now, with only days before the end of the month, no such report has been issued. This is despite the fact that the Dutch co-ordinator for the struggle against terrorism admitted in parliament that the Dutch authorities already have extensive data from the black boxes and other sources in their possession.

One article which has raised questions regarding the silence surrounding the crash appeared recently in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The magazine has played a particularly vile role in the US-led propaganda campaign to blame Russia for the crash. On the cover of its July 28 edition Der Spiegel featured photos of MH17 victims with the prominent red lettered text “Stop Putin Now!”. In its latest edition, the magazine again raises the banner of German militarism in a lead article deploring the state of the German army and arguing for a massive increase in military sending.

However, in one article on the crash, headlined “The strange silence of the investigators”, the magazine attempts to backtrack somewhat and at least intimate there are good reasons to doubt the official line put out by Washington and Brussels. The article refers to a letter sent to Barack Obama at the end of July by a group of former US intelligence officers. In their letter the group, known as VIPS, accused Secretary of State Kerry of attempting to use the crash to blacken Russia, recalling other blatant provocations by the Obama administration, such as the claim that Syria was responsible for chemical weapon attacks. The Obama administration has never responded to the allegations made in the VIPS letter.

The Spiegel article then goes on to quote reports in the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times, which charge Ukraine with responsibility for the crash, citing one journalist who writes: “It is farcical that the country known for overseeing the world’s most sophisticated and far-reaching surveillance capabilities has sunk to citing grainy YouTube videos to justify its policy decisions.”

Noting that Dutch authorities already have considerable information about the details of the crash which they have undoubtedly shared with their German counterparts, the Spiegel article warns that it is unlikely that the black box recordings will ever be released in full. The Dutch investigation team recently announced that there were alleged legal grounds for withholding evidence from the boxes.

The failure of the media to raise the issue of the fate of MH17 prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to query on Monday why the plane’s black box recordings had not been released publicly. It appears, Lavrov said, that apart from Russia, “everyone else has lost interest in the investigation.”

Lavrov also asked why Ukraine had not yet provided recordings of conversations between air traffic controllers in the nearby airport of Dnepropetrovsk. Kiev has up until now persistently refused to publish the recordings of the conversations between the MH17 pilot and Ukrainian air traffic controllers.

Lavrov noted that Russia had contacted the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations aviation agency, and offered to provide its own information on the crash, but noted that “so far there is nothing transparent to be seen there either.”

Lavrov concluded: “We must not allow the investigation of the MH17 crash to be manipulated into oblivion as already happened to investigations of many Ukrainian tragedies, including the sniper assault against civilians in Kiev in February, massacres in Odessa and Mariupol in May, and others.”

Bearing in mind the leading role played by the US in utilizing the crash of MH17 to create the conditions for a confrontation with Russia, there can be no doubt that the administration in Washington and US intelligence services are in close contact with the Dutch authorities and are complicit in the efforts to bury the truth about what really took place on July 17.

29 August, 2014
WSWS.org

 

White House Threatens Russia Over Alleged Incursion Into Eastern Ukraine

By Niles Williamson

The Obama administration and NATO officials on Thursday escalated threats against Russia over the alleged incursion of two columns of Russian tanks and troops into eastern Ukraine. Moscow has denied accusations that its troops are actively involved in the country.

In an afternoon press conference, US President Barack Obama declared that Russian actions were further confirmation that Moscow was fomenting the unrest and has “routinely violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” While he refrained from characterizing Russia’s actions as an invasion, he said that it was a “continuation” of the sort of Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine that has been occurring for the last several weeks.

“These separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama declared. “Throughout this process we’ve seen deep Russian involvement in everything that they’ve done.” The US president pledged “additional steps” to punish Moscow for supporting the separatists, including new economic sanctions coordinated with Europe.

In fact, it was not Russia that stoked the conflict in Ukraine but rather the United States, along with Germany, which funneled billions of dollars to opposition groups, backing a right-wing coup in February with the support of fascist forces. The White House is strongly backing the Ukrainian government of President Petro Poroshenko as it carries out a brutal war against predominantly Russian-speaking cities in the east.

More than 2,249 people have been killed and more than 6,000 injured in military operations in the Donbass region of Ukraine. The American government has supported the military siege of two major European cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, cutting off electricity and running water to hundreds of thousands of civilians. Residential neighborhoods and hospitals have been subjected to artillery fire from Ukrainian armed forces.

The shelling of the eastern cities of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces continued on Thursday, injuring 15 people and destroying several homes and businesses. Over the course of the previous day, 16 civilians were killed and a further 22 injured by continued shelling.

The latest developments in eastern Ukraine have opened up a new front in the conflict in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian armed forces and further raised the possibility of war between the United States and Russia.

While stating that “we are not taking military action to solve the Ukrainian problem,” Obama provocatively declared that “a number of those states who are close” to Ukraine and Russia are members of NATO, “and we take our Article Five commitments to defend each other very seriously—and that includes the smallest NATO members as well as the largest.”

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO, including Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since the coup in February, the US and NATO have moved to increase their military presence in all these countries. Article Five of the treaty states that an armed attack on any NATO country is considered an attack on all members.

As a means of justifying a further military buildup of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the imposition of ever more harsh economic sanctions, the United States and its European allies have very consciously sought, at every point, to force Russia to respond.

The United States is seeking to turn Ukraine into a NATO outpost for threatening Russia. This is highlighted by the fact that Poroshenko will be the only non-NATO head of state attending the NATO summit in Wales next week. Proshenko is also scheduled to meet with President Obama at the White House next month.

These military moves have been coupled with the implementation of harsh austerity measures in Ukraine itself, targeting the entire working class.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Thursday for pro-Russian separatists to open up a corridor to allow Ukrainian troops to flee into Russia. Putin called on the rebels to, “avoid meaningless victims and provide them with the opportunity to freely withdraw from the battlefield area.” At least five Ukrainian National Guard battalions were reported to have been surrounded since Tuesday, when pro-Russian separatists engaged in a fierce battle to retake the town of Ilovaisk.

NATO released satellite images that it claims shows Russian artillery and other equipment well inside Ukrainian territory. A senior NATO officer, Brigadier General Nico Tak, stated that the images, “provide additional evidence that Russian combat soldiers, equipped with heavy weapons, are operating inside Ukraine’s sovereign territory.”

One image purportedly shows Russian self-propelled artillery moving on a road near Krasnodon, Ukraine on August 21 just across the border from the Russian city of Donetsk. Another image shows the same artillery set up in firing positions outside of Krasnodon, while the several other images released by NATO show artillery and military units deployed on the Russian side of the border.

Tak also said that NATO had evidence that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers were fighting with the rebels in Ukraine. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Thursday that between three and four thousand Russian volunteers are fighting alongside the Ukrainian separatists, and that many of these were military men on leave. He stated, “There is no secret that among the volunteers from Russia there are many military men. They are fighting together with us because they understand that it’s their duty.”

Poroshenko responded to the developments in the east by canceling a scheduled trip to Turkey. “The situation is certainly extremely difficult and nobody is going to simplify it. Still, it is controlled enough for us to refrain from panic,” Poroshenko said.

Ukrainian security council spokesman Andriy Lysenko accused Moscow of sending troops and tanks across the border in a bid to create a land bridge to the territory of Crimea, which Russia annexed in March. Lysenko also announced that the security council had made a decision to reintroduce compulsory military service starting in the fall.

29 August, 2014
WSWS.org

 

The New Silk Road Leads to the Future of Mankind!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Coming Helium-3-Based Fusion Power Economy

August 2014—When the authors of this study decided last year to set out a new concept for peace in the 21st Century, by producing a revised version of the World Land-Bridge program—23 years after the first proposal for the Eurasian Land-Bridge—it was their intention not only to provide a concept for reconstruction of the world economy, but to present a war-avoidance strategy in the context of an acute strategic crisis at the same time. For in the intervening years, the danger of an intentional—or even an accidental—thermonuclear world war has grown dramatically. The attempt, fed by geopolitical motives, to associate Ukraine with the EU, and thus bring it, de facto, into the NATO sphere of influence, has triggered a series of escalating confrontations, which, in the worst case, could end in the extinction of the human race.

But in addition, nearly the entire Near and Middle East is burning; set off by wars built on lies, against so-called rogue states, the seeds of violence were sown which have called to life a million-headed hydra, which has not only leveled the Cradle of Civilization to the ground, and created there a Hell on Earth, but has also become an existential threat to the West.

The consequences of this policy of “regime change” have long thrown large parts of Africa into chaos, and overrun the continent with wars of terror and civil wars. But there are also geostrategic conflicts breeding in the Pacific, which have the potential to set loose regional wars and beyond. And since absolutely nothing has been done to remedy the causes for the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the TBTF (too-big-to-fail) banks are, on average, 30-40% bigger today than they were then, the indebtedness still more massive, and the derivatives bubble grown to nearly $2 quadrillion; so that a new systemic crisis could result at any moment, this time, given the strategic situation we have sketched here, with the danger that chaos will be triggered, making a strategic catastrophe unavoidable.

The entire world thus finds itself in such an alarming condition that one can only wonder how those responsible for the so-called Western community of values could have let things get to this point.

Pope Francis, who has characterized the global financial and economic system as “intolerable,” recently put it this way, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia: “In order for the system to continue, wars must be waged, as great empires have always done. But mankind cannot bear a third world war, and so it seizes on regional wars.”

Though one could not put it better than the Pope has done, in this case, he underestimates the satanic energy of the system of globalization, which is ready to defend its privileges with all weapons available. One hundred years after the First World War, we find ourselves in a very similar geopolitical situation, except that this time there are thermonuclear weapons whose use would wipe out the human race.

There Is an Alternative
Meanwhile, an alternative to the collapsing trans-Atlantic system has been created; the attempts of that system to use supranational institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, TTP, TTIP, and similar monetarist instruments of globalization, to extend a worldwide imperium, have produced an opposition which might not have been expected to manifest itself as it has.

In less than one year, an alliance of nations has been created, which has built a parallel economic order with giant steps, one which is dedicated exclusively to the building of the real economy, in opposition to the maximization of speculative monetary profit, and which now includes more than half of mankind. This new community of nations represents a power center based on economic growth, and above all, on leading-edge technology, one which belongs to the future, as shown above all by the success of the Chinese lunar exploration program, focused on the idea of bringing large quantities of helium-3 from the Moon back to Earth, for the future economy of thermonuclear fusion power. It points the way to a scientific and technological revolution which will increase, by orders of magnitude, the energy-flux density, both in production processes on Earth, and in fuels for space travel, and thereby introduce a completely new phase in the evolution of the human species.

The first step in the direction of a new economic world order was the announcement by Chinese President Xi Jinping at a conference in Kazakstan in July of last year, that China would build a new Silk Road Economic Belt, through Central Asia to Europe, in the tradition of the ancient Silk Road. Then, in October, in a trip to Indonesia and Malaysia, Xi took the initiative to involve all of Southeast Asia in the construction of the Maritime Silk Road.

At the summit meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi, on May 20 in Shanghai, and Putin’s state visit to China on the occasion of the 4th Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Shanghai on May 21, extensive plans for collaboration of the two great powers were signed, including a 30-year natural gas agreement, and 46 additional bilateral accords. At the end of the summit, the two heads of state published a common declaration of intent, stating that both countries wished to create a new economic architecture in the Asia-Pacific region, oppose interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and intend to coordinate, as much as possible, their responses to important foreign policy questions on which they agree.

They named, among others, one goal of this collaboration as follows: “Increasing the effectiveness of collaboration in high-technology areas, priority projects in the international use of nuclear energy, civil aviation, and a program of cooperation in basic research on space flight, satellite observation of the Earth, satellite navigation, and research into deep space and manned space travel.” A further militarization of space should, on the contrary, be prevented, and the unilateral stationing of missile defense installations was judged to be a “destabilizing factor for the world.” Other goals include innovative research, improvement of agricultural techniques, and increasing agricultural production. They also expressed the intention to reform the international financial architecture.

The 30-year Russia-China natural gas treaty, with a total value of $400 billion, can be called historic. The two countries’ cooperation in the petroleum field is also to be deepened; coal mines in Russia will be jointly developed; additional power plants will be built in Russia to supply electricity to China; and there will be collaboration on many other projects in infrastructure, transportation, water, and nature conservation.

Of still greater importance is President Putin’s support for President Xi’s strategic initiative to expand the New Silk Road. Their common statement says:

“Russia recognizes the enormous significance of the Chinese initiative for the building of the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt,’ and particularly appreciates the readiness of the Chinese side to take Russian interests into account in its development and realization. Both sides will seek further opportunities to combine the perspective of the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ with the conception of the ‘Eurasian Economic Union.’ Toward this purpose, they intend to deepen the cooperation of the relevant agencies in the realization of both projects, especially in the development of transportation routes and infrastructure.”

The BRICS Summit
Other nations were then drawn into this collaboration at the May 20-21 4th Summit Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia in Shanghai. On July 16, the 6th BRICS Summit was held in Fortaleza, Brazil; on the following day, the Latin American heads of state and government joined the conference, and thus, 48% of humanity was represented at this meeting.

At the BRICS Summit itself, and in a series of multilateral and bilateral discussions within and around this summit, the heads of state agreed on the creation of an entirely new economic and financial system, representing a fundamental alternative to the casino economy of the present system of globalization, which is based on maximized profit of the few, and impoverishment of billions of people. Included in the 72 points of the “Declaration of Fortaleza” is the real thunderbolt: the announcement of the creation of a new financial architecture. The new architecture was launched with the formation of a New Development Bank with an initial capitalization of $50 billion, and a Currency Reserve Agreement (CRA) with an initial capacity of $100 billion to help participating nations defend themselves against capital flight and other forms of financial warfare.

China had already previously decided to found an “Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,” the AIIB, to have an initial capitalization of $100 billion, with the invited participation from the start of more than 30 countries. Xinhua quoted Jin Liqun, under whose direction the Chinese Finance Ministry placed the founding of the Bank:

“The means of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank fall far short of satisfying the hunger for more infrastructure…. The Bank will open a new financing channel for developing countries, especially for those with low income…. In October 2013, during a visit to Indonesia, China’s President Xi Jinping proposed an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to support economic integration.”

The general secretary of the Chinese Center for International Economic Exchanges emphasized that the AIIB is to be an open and freely accessible platform, welcoming not only nations in Asia, but also others, such as the United States and the European countries. Up to this point, the nations of ASEAN, at a summit in Myanmar, on Aug. 9, agreed to deepen their cooperation with China on “New Silk Road” development projects, while Thailand and Singapore agreed to join the AIIB as charter members, as has Bangladesh. South Korea, despite direct U.S. pressure not to join, is considering charter membership, and requested that Seoul be considered as a possible location for the Bank.

In the course of this series of summits, collaboration was decided upon, among the various states, in a large number of projects, above all, the development of nuclear energy in Russia, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa, and also, such groundbreaking projects as a second Panama Canal to be built by China through Nicaragua, and a transcontinental high-speed rail connection from Brazil to Peru.

The multiplicity of projects decided on among this community of nations in the areas of infrastructure, energy, industry, agriculture, research, and education, has reached a dimension which dwarfs the investments made by the U.S.A. and Europe in the same spheres over the past 30 years. The claims that Russia is only a “regional power,” and China only a “cheap-production country,” as was said at hastily arranged seminars at various thinktanks on the theme of the allegedly minor significance of the BRICS nations, have rather the character of whistling past the graveyard.

For in reality, there are now two economic and financial systems built on completely different principles. One, the trans-Atlantic system, as an imperial structure, seeks constantly to extend the boundaries of its sphere of power through supranational structures which threaten the sovereignty of other nations. It forces regime change against governments it disapproves of, insists on submission to a “consensus,” and in the process, uses methods which do indeed produce an aura of domination for a while, and the feeling of powerlessness among the populations dominated in this way, but it ultimately goes the way of all empires. The moment this aura of power fades, whether because the imperial financial system is bankrupt, or because the people realize the hollowness of the values handed down, then the capability for intimidation disappears.

The newly arising system of the BRICS nations and the countries associated with them, bases itself on entirely different principles. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi formulated it most expressively at the plenary session of the summit: “BRICS is unique as an international institution. In the first instance, it unifies a group of nations, not on the basis of their existing prosperity or common identities, but rather their future potentials. The idea of the BRICS itself is thus already aligned with the future.”

Modi stressed that the high percentage of young people, in India for example, represents an enormous potential for the future, and proposed forming a BRICS forum for young scientists, and a school of languages “offering language training in all of our languages.” Modi made an appeal: “Excellencies, we have an opportunity to define the future—not only for our countries, but for the entire world…. I conceive that as a great challenge.”

The Future Lies in Outer Space
Nicholas of Cusa, the founder of modern natural science and a revolutionary scientific method, came to the conclusion, in the 15th Century, that every human being who strives to do so must be capable of reproducing virtually the entire evolution of the universe in its essential qualitative levels of development, and that this standpoint makes it possible to determine the necessary next step in scientific progress.

Today, this necessary next discovery, which defines the future for the entire world, is the conquest of the energy source that will bestow energy and raw materials security on mankind for thousands of years into the future: the utilization of thermonuclear fusion power on the basis of helium-3.

Therefore, the success of the Chinese Chang’e-3 mission this past December, in achieving a soft landing of the “Jade Rabbit” rover on the Moon, was a milestone in achieving this goal. The Chang’e-4 mission will follow immediately this year, in preparation for Chang’e-5 in 2017, which can start the phase of flight back and forth between the Earth and the Moon, in preparation for the future industrial exploitation of the Moon. This will bring within reach, the separation of the helium-3 found on the Moon in great quantities, for the nuclear fusion economy on Earth.

In the scientific collaboration among the BRICS nations, but above all, among Russia, China, and India, helium-3 plays a prominent role, because as a fuel for fusion, in contradistinction to deuterium-tritium, it does not produce energetic neutrons, which are very problematic for the reactor materials, but instead produces positively charged protons, which makes possible a revolution in energy generation. Instead of producing energy through the customary method via steam and turbines, in which there is a great energy loss, it will become possible to convert the energy of fusion reactions directly into electricity, at much higher efficiencies.

But Russia, too, according to the Russian space agency Roskosmos, plans a mission between 2016 and 2025, which is intended to create the basis for the industrial exploitation of the Moon. In the first phase, this involves robotic infrastructure for work on the Moon, thus, among other things mobile cranes, dredges, and cable-laying machines. After the landing probe “Luna Globe 1” in 2015, and the orbital module “Luna Globe 2” in 2016, then in 2017 the hard-landing apparatus “Luna Resource,” developed together with the Indian Space Research Agency, will reach the lunar surface and, among other tasks, convey the Indian lunar vehicle onto the Moon.

The collaboration among China, Russia, and India is paradigmatic for the new area of mankind, in which we—instead of plunging ourselves into geopolitical wars—will concentrate on the common aims of mankind. With the attainment of energy security for at least 10,000 years on the basis of helium-3-fed thermonuclear fusion power, and with the technologies associated with this, such as the fusion torch technique which will enable raw materials security by reducing waste and all types of materials into isotopes which can be recomposed as needed, mankind will reach a completely new economic platform on the basis of a very high energy-flux density. This new economic platform begins a new age of mankind. The utilization of helium-3 sources for the fusion economy will be the game-changer which will revolutionize all relationships in science, economy, and politics on the Earth and in the Solar System.

It is obvious that a continuation of the geopolitical thinking which already led to two world wars in the 20th Century, into a third, and this time, a thermonuclear world war, will cause the extinction of mankind. Instead of seeing the rise of China as a threat to the West’s supposed geopolitical interests—and thus, as the American Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has repeatedly warned, groping around in a new “Thucydides Trap”—we need a new conception, a new paradigm which considers the development perspective of mankind as a whole.

A New Economic Order
The late German-American space pioneer Krafft Ehricke described the long arc of evolution as an upward development, in which, at first, life spread from the sea to the continents by means of photosynthesis in plant world, and then led gradually to the rise of biological species of high complexity and metabolism with higher energy-flux density. He described how the human species, as the highest expression of this evolution up to now, initially settled on the coasts and the shores of rivers, and then along roads and canals, and finally along railroads and modern infrastructure, making the landlocked regions of the continents more and more accessible.

This process is still not completed—and exactly this is the goal of the World Land-Bridge presented in this study, to achieve the infrastructural development of the continents of the Earth. krafft Ehricke saw, in space travel and the colonization of the universe, the natural next phase of the evolution of mankind, and saw in the industrialization of the Moon, in particular, the springboard for excursions of human beings into the Solar System and potentially beyond. He was convinced that the evolution of the human species would only effectively reach adulthood with manned space travel; that only the “great challenge of the extraterrestrial imperative,” as Krafft Ehricke called it, will raise mankind to its true purpose and destiny: namely, representing through its power of reason, the only creative species (known up to now), to act on verifiable universal principles, and not on the illusory world of sense-perceptions

By doing so, the human species will achieve a considerable advance in bringing its relationships to this planet and to near-Earth space, into harmony with the cosmic order. Perhaps the most important contribution of Lyndon LaRouche consists in that by the further development of the Leibnizian term “physical economy,” he has created a theory of scientific economy which corresponds to the real laws of development of the physical universe.

One of its basic concepts is that it is indispensable for the continuously sustained existence of the human race that its relative potential population density should increase on the basis of rising energy-flux densities in the production process, because at any arbitrary stage of economic development, there is a relative exhaustion of resources. The entire history of human development, particularly the most recent 10,000 years, in which the population potential has risen from a few millions to presently over 7 billion, demonstrates the correlation of the anti-entropic character of human creativity with the knowable universal principles of the physical universe.

The use of the helium-3 resources on the Moon for the fusion economy on the Earth also recalls in an interesting way the controversy between Plato and Nicholas of Cusa, over whether ideas possess an existence already effectively present in the objective universe, independent of mankind, or whether it is only with human creativity that these ideas are created. Helium-3 supplies on the Moon are, in the first instance, only deposits in the upper layer of the regolith. Only human creativity, in mastering thermonuclear fusion power, makes these isotopes into the fuel which can even exceed the power of nuclear fusion in the Sun!

But mankind has reached a phase-change not only from the scientific standpoint, but also from that of universal history; that is, the end of geopolitics is necessary for the survival of the species. Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, LaRouche proposed the “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna” infrastructure program, and thereby, the plan to make this triangle the scientific motor and starting point for development corridors for the transformation of the Comecon states (the then-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe).

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and thus the Iron Curtain disappeared, Schiller Institute teams further elaborated this program into the conception of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. Thus the idea was developed of linking the population and industrial centers of Europe with Asia by so-called development corridors, and thus providing the landlocked regions of Eurasia with the same site-characteristics which the regions with ocean or river access already had.

In the 23 years which have passed since then, this idea has not only been presented in innumerable conferences and seminars in cities around the world, but also further filled out into the idea of the World Land-Bridge. The linking of peoples through this World Land-Bridge is now the realistic perspective emerging from the collaboration of the BRICS nations, Latin America, and the ASEAN nations, and in which the U.S.A., Europe, and Africa must urgently participate.

A new strategy for mankind means the ability, from now on, to see the human species as a unity, and to see that unity in the process of mutual development. Thus, along with Friedrich Schiller, we see no contradiction whatsoever between the inviolability of national sovereignty, which is guaranteed by the law of nations and by the United Nations Charter, and the rationality of the world citizen who has in view the interests of mankind as a whole. For this unity lies in the higher development of all; the concordance of the macrocosm requires the maximal development of all microcosms to their reciprocal benefit, as Nicholas of Cusa said.

This also signifies a new model of cooperation among the nations of the world. It means that all potential treaty organizations and alliances must be inclusive, that they cannot be for the security and economic interests of some nations, while excluding others. While the support of mutual development is the premise, they must nonetheless respect the different levels of development, history, culture, and social systems, and above all, respect national sovereignty. That is Cusa’s idea of unity in multiplicity, and it must be inspired by a tender love for the idea of the community of nations, for the idea of mankind as the creative species.

We must learn to view this mankind from the same perspective as the astronauts, cosmonauts, and Taikonauts have seen it, as so wonderfully expressed by one of the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon:

“The fact is that evolution is now taking place in space, as much as on Earth. Man has shown that as a species mankind was willing to commit itself to living in environments that were completely different than those in which the species evolved—with a shield of life around ourselves in order to protect the life within. But the willingness to go out there, is there. We’ve shown that. The curve of human evolution has been bent.”[1]

Translated from German by Paul Gallagher

 

Political Europe Suppressed Under Washington´s Thumb Is Waking Up

By Roman Baudzus

In the aftermath of the downing of the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine, the Western media followed Washington’s lead and manipulated reports in order to make Europeans believe that Russia and Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine were responsible for downing the airliner. In Germany, the press was an extension of Washington’s propaganda machine despite the lack of evidence from both Washington and Kiev to support their irresponsible claims.

It was not long, however, before the public mood in Europe began to turn. A pivotal factor was openly voiced U.S. threats in a law that had been passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the U.S. Congress that could eventually result in an invasion of the Netherlands by United States army forces. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/internationales-strafgericht-us-kongress-droht-niederlanden-mit-invasion-a-200430.html

When this was learned outrage was expressed not only within the Dutch government, but also among the population of the country. According to the law, if it should ever happen that American citizens are brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and accused at The Hague, Washington would exercise the preemptive right to invade the country in order to prevent prosecution.

Remember that Malaysia’s government had permitted a tribunal in 2011, whose judges in the tradition of British court proceedings condemned both George W. Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html Some Europeans are asking if there could be a connection between the ruling of this tribunal and the loss of two Malaysian airliners.

In addition, alert and intelligent Europeans have caught on to Washington’s campaign to demonize Russia. A Dutch group of professors sent an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin on August 12 in which the signatories officially apologized for the propaganda lies sprewed by Western media. http://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/an-open-letter-from-the-netherlands-to-putin-we-are-sorry/

The former “quality media” in Europe have lost the confidence of readers. A growing number of Europeans relying on Internet sites such as www.paulcraigroberts.org are quite well informed about the propagandistic nature of the Western mainstream media.

The chart recently published by a leading German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) indicates that for one reason or the other, Germans have turned away from German newspapers. The cumulative sales of German newspapers reached their climax back in the year 1983 – with a circulation of 30.1 million copies.

Ever since, things have been deteriorating. In 2013, the circulation shrank to only 17.3 million sold copies – a significant decline of 42.5%, which really hurts many publishers. Persistent cost-reduction programs, massive job cuts and the demise of daily newspapers such as the Financial Times Deutschland are the consequence of newspapers in vassalage to Washington. Many excuses are made for the decline, but the real reason is that German newspapers no longer take
their readers seriously

Germans wonder why their reunited country is still occupied by US troops 69 years after the end of World War II, why their country has no foreign policy independent of Washington, and why the German media provides no public discussion of these highly unusual characteristics of an allegedly sovereign state.

During the last several years the media’s propagandistic character has led to massive resistance among newspaper readers, especially in Germany. You only have to take a look at the comments published on Internet sites of the mainstream media to see angry and disappointed readers turn away from their once favorite newspapers that are accused of actively participating in Washington´s propaganda campaign. Readers see propaganda instead of investigative journalism. In place of evidence and honest reports, there are insinuations and ridiculous accusations. The German newspaper Die Welt even blamed the outbreak of the ebola virus on Russia! http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article131459175/Russland-hat-Ebola-zur-Waffe-gemacht.html

Given the danger of Washington pushing Europe into war with Russia, one can be glad that so many Europeans see through the perfidious propaganda lies spread by the mainstream media. Internet sites now perform the role abandoned by newspapers. These mainly independent internet media refer to themselves as alternative media, which have the goal to provide objective and truthful information in place of propaganda.

Some of the large German newspapers destroyed what little credibility they had left when they used social media to spread their claim that the negative comments on their websites were written by people on the payroll of Vladimir Putin. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this grotesque assertion.

The unanswered question is why does German mainstream media serve Washington instead of Germany? Does Washington pay well for propaganda services?

If we now come to the recent events in Ferguson, these incidents made us realize that the U.S. police state is not just on the rise, but is already in place! Scenes on TV and Internet videos of brutal militarized police equipped for battlefield combat applying extreme violence to protesters and journalists alike has raised the question in Europe whether America is a democracy or a police state. The continuing American massacre of people in the Middle East, together with Washington’s support for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians and now the massacre of Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine by the government that Washington installed in Kiev have changed the image of America from white hat to black hat. America no longer reassures us; America frightens us.

In a recent story Die Welt journalist Ansgar Graw wrote: “The day when the U.S. police became my enemy.”

Even Washington’s German media vassals reporting for Die Welt have now experienced firsthand the full brunt of American police violence. See http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article131363772/Der-Tag-an-dem-die-US-Polizei-mein-Feind-wurde.html and http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/krawalle-in-ferguson-panzer-gegen-protestler/10356412.html

German journalists who have been living in the United States for 15 years are telling their readers that they have come to the decision to leave the US. They report that things have changed for the worse in the “land of the free” since 9/11, and that they were threatened, handcuffed and arrested for covering the protests in Ferguson.

The policeman who killed the 18-year old black man set off protests, the response to which opened the world’s eyes to the transformation of America into a police state. A country whose military bases occupy much of the world in the name of human rights and freedom, a country that violently interferes in internal affairs of sovereign nations and fights wars at its leisure is now perceived as waging war against its own oppressed propulation. By arrogantly exempting itself from the standards it applies to everyone else, the US has destroyed its credibility.

Now the Dutch wait for the appearance of US troops to show up at the Hague should international law ever be applied to Washington’s war criminals. As one German magazine put it recently, “with friends like America, we don’t need enemies.”

Roman Baudzus is co-founder of German finance and economics blog “wirtschaftsfacts.”

26 August, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org