Author: paulm100m

How our Fellow Animals make Primates of us all

Over the last 20 years there has been increasing scientific evidence of the reality that “animals” vary little from homo sapiens in terms of their capacity to feel, to have cognition and to be aware of their circumstances. That very ‘useful’  set of historical assumptions  of the lack of true ‘awareness’ of other species compared to  homo  sapiens, which has enabled those of us who  wish to kill  or hurt other species on  the grounds of their implicit inferiority to  humans, has now been fully discredited.

Tilly1
Tilly

It is therefore inevitable that, over the next few decades, a global ethical and moral shift to the full valuing of other sentient life on our little planet will occur. This will in turn translate into a massive reduction in meat eating by homo sapiens and the need for environments where other species are respected and protected. While this world-wide ethical  and moral  shift  and its translation  into  alternative action to  value other species as we would our own, may currently appear absurd to my dear readers, it is worthwhile to  consider how rapid the global moral  and ethical  shifts against issues such  as slavery or the rights of women have occurred in  the last  200 years.

It is therefore vital that  both  states and individuals  start to  explore both the implications of that shift in  attitude towards   species other than our own, and to  assist  in  driving that  change towards a better world for all of us who  inhabit this little blue world.

While the challenges to the economic environment  of those state entities whose economies are predominantly reliant  on the export of meat  are  undoubtedly immense if we are to  shift  to a  no-kill  economy;  the opportunities as a world leader in environmental  and species ethics  and practice are also  enormous.

The evidence for the greater efficiency and sustainability of a non-meat based agrarian economy is out there now; we can start to plan for this inevitable change or be sidelined by other more ethical and forward looking economies.  No-kill agricultural produce that is produced in a fully environmentally sustainable way, will be in huge and ever-increasing demand as the ethical  and moral  framework of our  species shifts its awareness in  the decades to come.

Given the indisputable evidence that other animals than homo sapiens have the same value and senses as ourselves, it is imperative that all laws regarding the management of animals ensure that no cruelty or suffering is permitted under government regulation.

In just one of many examples of research into  animal  behaviour that  explores the real  capacities of  other species,  the recent  Guardian article on the work  of Tetsuro Matsuzawa at  the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University exposes how chimpanzees on  a number of cognitive fronts are superior to  homo sapiens .

It is important to  note that  all  research  by homo sapiens is naturally slanted to  place positive  attributes on  those skills that  are traditionally deemed “human”,  and to either ignore , minimise,  ridicule or even simply not observe those skills and attributes  of other species that  are less familiar to us or deemed by  humans to be not important or irrelevant. In addition,   our sensory range  as humans limits our capacity to  even understand at  a basic level ,  th edepth of  awareness of many other species.

One revealing comment by  Prof. Matsuzawa in  the Guardian article is his statement that “As humans evolved and acquired new skills – notably the ability to use language to communicate and collaborate – they lost others they once shared with their common simian ancestors. “Our ancestors may have also had photographic memories, but we lost that during evolution so that we could acquire new skills,” he says. “To get something, we had to lose something.”  As the supremely arrogant and species-centric organisms that humans are;  we have  glorified our  skills, while ignoring our sensory  and cognitive deficits in  comparison  to other species on the planet.

Perhaps our most unique  skill, is our capacity to   manipulate our environment  to  suit our own ends. It is likely to also be our, and the rest of the species on this planet’s , undoing.

Postscript

A recent article in  The Guardian entitled “The American lawyer seeking human rights for chimpanzees” examines with  some incredulity and implied mirth at  the idea-that  a US lawyer is campaigning for chimpanzees  to have the same legal rights as human beings.  The article references the NonHumanRights Project ;  one of the first  of many  human organisations devoted to  rights and equality for all sentient beings on this planet.

George Galloway and the “Killing of Tony Blair”

The obscene, machiavellian  and calculating Tony Blair may  finally get  his come-upance.

George Galloway,  UK   MP, has launched a crowd-funding project  via    Kickstarter   entitled “The Killing of Tony Blair”, to raise £100,000   so  that George Galloway  can   produce a  film  about Tony Blair and his life of exploitation and mass murder for profit.

Blair@ Karimov
Karimov, (L) the brutal Uzbekistan dictator, and the smiling Tony Blair (R) (courtesy of Craig Murray’s blog)

If this film  can really make a mark  with the public, there is a real chance that Blair and other war  criminals like him ,  will be making  their excuses  before the International  War Crimes Tribunal in  short order .

As of 28th  September,  the project had raised  £87,141  towards its £100,000 goal.

Make your donation now and make a real  difference for the future- lets stop  the killers!

The Slaves of the World

A recent Guardian article about the lives of  migrant workers in  Qatar highlights the issues of forced labour and slavery in  middle eastern and some European countries.

As the Guardian article notes; Qatra has the highest ratio  of migrant workers to  the domestic population in the world; more than 90%.  Aidan McQaude of Anti-Slavery International has no hesitation in calling many of these migrants not just  forced labour, but true slaves;   people who  are treated as objects.

Craig Murray,  ex British ambassador to  Uzbekistan  and long time campaigner against   child labour/slavery in their cotton  fields, notes that  both the tolerance and the exploitation of slavery or cheap  labour inevitably goes right to  the top. In Uzbekistan’s case,  to its  torture loving  President Karimov and his daughter (who  are such good friends with Tony Blair!) .  Anti Slavery  International  describes the working conditions for children  in the cotton  fields thus:  Cotton production in Uzbekistan is a state orchestrated forced-labour system. The Government of Uzbekistan forces over a million children, teachers, public servants and private sector employees to pick cotton under appalling conditions each year. Those who refuse are expelled from school, fired from their jobs, and denied public benefits or worse. The Government harasses and detains citizens seeking to monitor the situation.

In  Qatar’s case, the official responses to  the accusations  of slavery  are so  far at odds with the reality on  the ground ,  that it would be very  surprising that  the government authorities and companies involved did not have full cognisance of the systemic  exploitation occurring.

Asia News notes that  the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)  highlighted “contradictions with Qatari law” that fail “to give workers any real rights or protection from slavery conditions.”

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said the visa sponsorship system in Qatar allows the exaction of forced labour. “Under Qatari law, employers have near total control over workers. They alone choose if a worker can change jobs, leave the country or stay in Qatar,” she said.

In 2012, the Labour Relations Department in Qatar’s Labour Ministry received 6,000 worker complaints. The top concerns facing workers included exploitation, delays in paying wages, violence and work-related safety issues and fatalities.

In one of those most malignant of ironies, Qatar is one of the richest  countries in  the world for its Qatari  citizenship  population of 300,000 (total  population of 1.9  million)

Similarly, across the border in  Saudi  Arabia, the Guardian  in January  2013, noted that  45 foreign maids faced beheading  by  the State executioner . The International  Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of (Labour Rights) Conventions  noted in  2012 that in Saudi  Arabia the   vulnerable situation of migrant workers, particularly domestic workers who are excluded from the provisions of the Labour Code, who are often confronted with employment policies such as the visa “sponsorship” system and subjected to abusive employer practices such as the retention of passports, non-payment of wages, deprivation of liberty and physical and sexual abuse which cause their employment to be transformed into situations that could amount to forced labour.

The Himalayan Times in July 2012  stated that up  to  3,000   migrant workers  from Nepal alone  had died in Saudi  Arabia since  2000.

The GypsyHowever as Migrant Rights notes, the abuse of workers is not limited to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, abuse is epidemic and systemic  in  the middle east and beyond.

As I have noted in  a previous blog , “We are all Immigrants”,  none of us have any rights to  this piece of land we currently  plant our feet on. We are simply travelers, as were our ancestors before us. And to  be fully human ,  we must  welcome those new travelers amongst  us too. And yet we continue to  play  this foolish and deadly game of  “us’  and the “others”.

French  attitudes towards  the Roma are also  indicative of the mindless attitude of those in  power towards those who believe that  simply because they  and their ancestors happen to have lived in  a geographically bounded state territory  for some time, they  are entitled to certain  privileges, and those who  are recent comers are not. The brutal   and barbarous attitude by  many in Australia towards  the “boat people” from  Asian countries, is a supreme example of this  vicious mind-set.

The concept of “citizenship” is a useful mirage,  a fiction created by states to  marginalize some populations.

In  reality any person  who lives under the jurisdiction of a state geographic entity needs to be protected by  its laws;  whether they be  occupiers of the lands for many generations,  recent  migrants,  asylum seekers, or migrant workers.

As  As’ad AbuKhalil,  aka the Angry Arab states, it is the ignorance of racsim that  drives these  brutal policies and systems of exploitation and terror.

Memento Mori

I am  reminded of my own inevitable mortality by  this,  as  always,  superb  and quirky literary  piece by  Lewis Lapham entitled Memento Mori ; The Death of American Exceptionalism — and of Me .

It is a  reminder that  we do  not live forever;  and why  should we should choose to want to?

Daleksmall
                     The Dalek

Yes, this life brings  to each of us a  superb melodrama of emotional  highs and lows ,  both wonderful  and tragic moments,  physical pain  and ecstasy.  But perhaps for me, it will not be a sad day  when  this feeble little ego; constructed upon  nothing but fear  and ignorance, departs this mortal  coil.

But what is indeed sad and tragic,  are those of us who continue to   hurt  our own and other species on  this little planet we chance to  be on, to  inflate our little fragile make-believe egos.

Sustainable Agriculture: It is possible

Over the years, there have been many discussions about the  potential to  create large-scale organic  farming enterprises to  replace the disastrous  impacts of chemical farming.

A lovely article by  Tom Philpott of Mother Jones outlines  one  attempt by  some US farmers to break  the  dead-end cycle of spraying,  tilling and loss of environment caused by commercial  farming, using no-plough methods and winter “cover crops”. While this method does not completely eliminate  the toxic impacts of spraying ;  it does go  a long way  to  develop  large-scale sustainable  farming practice.

Another “new” farming concept is  is the use of charcoal  in  soil.  Native american indians used Terra preta in pre-Columbian times to  create long term sustainable gardens in  environments where high  rainfall  leaching should have made sustainable agriculture impossible.

The ShortcutGiven  that  at  least  a third of commercially produced food is wasted, it would seen perfectly feasible to  create food sources closer to  food  consumers, allowing less wastage in  transit,  and better targeting of food production to  need.

We dont need the environmental  destruction that is touted as necessary  by  agribusiness to  create sustainable  global food production. We don’t need to  keep  killing our essential  insects   with  insecticides, spraying weedicides to  control  the plants we dont want,   constantly digging up  the soil to  destroy  its structure and life, and  destroying more and more natural  environments  and the plants and animals that live there, for short-term gain. We can live a  wonderful  sustainable and more joyful life through  living instead of buying.

 

Laurent Fabius: The Little Lion of Syria

Now that  Assad’s government in Syria has agreed to hand over supervision of its chemical  weapons to the United Nations, some of the wind in the sails of the West’s determination to  attack Syria has dissipated.

Damascus in Flames1926
Damascus in flames as a result of the French air raid on 18 October 1925
http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/d/Damascus.htm

Yet France and its Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius are determined to  ensure that  a military strike remains likely, with  France’s tabling of a UN resolution that   would require “serious consequences” if the chemical  weapons handover was not completed according to  UN  requirements  or on  time.  Currently it is unclear what  is motivating Fabius’ need to  be the leader of the dogs of war against  Syria.  It is possibly some attempt by  the Socialist  government to  regain  some political support in  France-although every French   poll is indicating that   French  involvement in  Syria would have the entirely opposite effect.  Or is it an  attempt to  revive the glories of colonial  France by re-bombing Damascus all over again , as it did in  1925-26 when those dark-skinned natives dared to  fight for their own freedom  from  their French  oppressors?

Or is it simply a matter of cash?,   as  Wayne Madsen  reports  for Iranian  Press TV, where he states that  the Saudi Arabian spy chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al  Saud has been spending large amounts of Saudi  oil  money to  “pay off” key members of the US Senate and House leadership  as well as key  ministers of the French  government.

It may  also be that   Fabius’  war-mongering,  like the UK foreign minister’s  William Hague’s foreign policy decisions,  appear  wholly  based on  unconditional support for the Israeli  state and its expansion.  Hague the UK Foreign  Minister , who , in an interview with the Israeli website YNetNews describes himself as  “a natural friend of Israel”.  Any actions that  turn Shi-ite against  Sunni in the countries surrounding Israel  have to be,  they reason, good for Israel.

Its my guess, that  Al Qaeda think  otherwise…

What is certain is that  “Western” bombing of Syrian  infrastructure will  cause  even  greater suffering than  Syrians from  both  sides  are experiencing now. The experience of Libya in the last Western  bombing campaign, is sadly  illustrative.  And what  should by  now be evident to  anyone  is that bombings or cruise missiles are not “precision targeted’  despite the hype .  They frequently make errors both in  their electronic targetting and,  as is so often  the case, the targeting coordinates are  based on  unreliable inadequate or false information.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia,Qatar, the UK, France and the US have been steadfast  that there should be no  negotiations while Assad is in  power;  in  other words,  that  Assad’s forces will have to be defeated first before there are “negotiations”!-these are not the principles of those who  espouse peace and reconciliation- what  they appear to  want is the destruction of the Syrian  state, with their pundits arguing ( as they have  done in Iraq) that  Syria must be broken up into  its constituent sectarian geographies. Such  a breakup, (largely fomented by  those outside powers themselves) will  certainly not benefit the Syrian  citizens of those enclaves,  but will  certainly benefit  Israel (in the short term) and Saudi Arabia’s salafist mercenaries.

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Links

Moon of Alabama covers many of the issues regarding how a chemical  weapons transfer might occur.

A very  French (and implausible) take on  French  jingoism  for war  in Syria

The New (Syrian) War to end a War

Once again  the United States is beating the drums for war;  just one more country it can  save by  killing its  population and destroying its infrastructure. The ludicrous nature of the arguments for war  put forward by  Obama, Kerry and  McCain  speak  volumes about the intellectual  capacity of those 3 gentlemen.

Bombing and murdering  another country’s people doesn’t stop  the bombing and murdering;  negotiations do. In  the end;  every  time,  the two parties must  come to  the table and talk.  However negotiating is, I recognise,  a  hard thing for bullies to  condescend to  do.

Perhaps wishful thinking on  my part,  but there does seem to be a growing understanding in  the world communities that these endless US wars in the Middle East  are in  fact  just pretexts for  destroying sovereign nations that might oppose US or Israeli interests in  the region.

It is instructive to listen to  Al Jazeera  attempting to whip  up  fear  that  the Assad government will do this or that if it is not stopped- the propaganda line is so obvious and implausible that  most people will  simply turn their news off.

The recent experience of what  happens when NATO and the US “liberate” another dark  skinned country ; Libya,Iraq, Yemen should be enough for anyone to  recognise that  liberation by  Western countries is not a benign  experience.  And as  Press TV notes, the US administration’s assessment  of “high  confidence” that  the Syrian  Assad regime carried out the chemical  attack  is an amazing piece of sophistry.   Since when was anyone convicted and sentenced to death  based on “high confidence”  that they had committed that offence?    Before we murder thousands  of people, and destroy  their capacity to live ordinary  lives-lets please have some evidence.  But that may be way too much to ask.

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Links

A great  article by  David Swanson  at  Washington’s Blog succinctly outlines the insanity of yet  another war.

A lovely article at  Just  World News from Helena Cobban on  the lunacy  of this war  and AIPAC’s lobbying

A   summary of the current  (9th  September 2013) state of affairs re Syria by  Lara Setrakian  at  Syria Deeply

Syrian Chemical Attack: A Summary

This post is predominantly a  compilation of   commentaries on  the gas attacks on  the  Damascus  suburb of Ghouta  on 20th  (or the 21st ) August 2013. Given  the huge implications of an aerial  attack on Syria by  the US France and the UK , using the chemical attacks as justification, it is vitally important that  the truth of the allegations by the Syrian  rebels is established.

There is no  question that  the Assad regime is brutal  enough  to have launched the attacks , but is it stupid enough  to  do  so and why  would it launch  chemical  attacks?

What is not discussed here is the likely catastrophic  fallout from  an aerial  attack   on Syrian infrastructure as we have seen  relatively recently  in Iraq and  Libya.

Russian news media  state that  the YouTube uploads by  Syrian  rebels of the chemical  attack  were uploaded a day  before the chemical  attack  was supposed to have occurred. However they appear to be back-tracking on  that issue. Russian media and state agencies also claim the previous gas attack  was  proved by  their analysis to have been primitive sarin  chemicals  manufactured by  the rebels. It should be noted that  Adnan Silu, Major General and former head of Syria’s chemical weapons programme,  defected to the rebels in July 2012.

While Western media and Western  government leaders are saying the  agreement Sunday  between the Syrian government and the UN to enter Ghouta is “too little, too late”, presumably  because evidence will have gone of  the sarin gas ,  experts note that  while sarin  evaporates in  a similar way  to  water, the residues and  impacts on  body  tissue remain  for some weeks and months:- one wonders therefore at  the  urgency  with which  France, UK and the United States are  threatening to  bomb  Syria now.

The YouTube videos show doctors and others trying to  treat the chemical  victims  without removing their clothing (which  would mean the chemical  residues retain  their impact on the victim (and rescuer) for a considerably longer period of time) ,  and the medical  teams  are not covered in  protective clothing ,  which  would be essential  for the medical teams’  safety in  such  a situation. While the videos show some of the victims’ limbs twitching  as would be expected from neurotoxin  poisoning,  in the video  seen, only the victim’s legs are spasming, which  would be somewhat unusual.

While  a number of  chemical  weapons  experts are saying the videos of the victims is consistent with sarin gas poisoning, t here are  no  signs of the dead victims having soiled themselves ,  one of several key signs of neurotoxin poisoning.

The analysis by by  Rogue Adventurer here shows the rockets the rebels allege to have been fired by  the Syrian government containing sarin. Given that the Assad regime has considerable technical  engineering skills,  the rockets appear  to be relatively unsophisticated, almost “handmade”   weapons;  this could of course be part of the attempt by  the Assad regime to implicate the rebels.  A more  in-depth analysis of the rocket  attacks can be found here.

Doctors without Borders press release here  of 24th August  states that  the three hospitals in Syria’s Damascus governorate that are supported by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have reported to MSF that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died. Angry  Arab notes  “there was internal conflict within Doctors without Borders’ unprecedented political announcement about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  There were people within the leadership of the organization that opposed the statement but the pro-US lobby prevailed.”

The timing of these attacks, coinciding with the arrival of UN  weapons inspectors in Damascus  to  investigate previous chemical  weapons attacks in  Syria   seems  an  unusual  strategy  for the Assad government- but again  – as some reporters have noted, not an impossible piece of bravado  for a dangerous and brutal regime  such  as Assad’s. And would Assad launch  a chemical  weapon attack  so  close to other areas of Damascus where support for  the regime remains, and where chemical  contamination would be highly likely,  as in  this article by Reuters?  PressTV  in  Iran  notes that its government had warned the US that  rebels were  importing sarin  gas into  Syria 8 months ago .

An in-depth  analysis by  Dan Kaszeta of Strongpoint Security here,  whose analysis suggests that  the attack  was not Sarin  or another neurotoxin, and might be the result of other chemical releases. What for instance has happened to this pharmaceutical  factory in Jaramana, Damascus on  the Ghouta plain? Note also this pharmaceutical  factory recently bombed by  either  the Syrian  regime or rebels.

The UN has previously accused Syrian  rebels of small  scale manufacture and  delivery of sarin gas, as in the Daily Telegraph  report from  6th  May  2013 here. However the Assad regime is the only agency  currently  deemed able to  manufacture and deliver such  a large quantity of sarin gas (if that is what the chemical is ) . A detailed list of alleged chemical  attacks over the past two  years is  noted  here

It should also be noted that there are very  large number of  vested interests  (ie controlled by   right wing corporate interests) American  and UK “think-tanks”  gunning for the Assad government.  One of only many examples is the  UK’s Royal  United Services Institute whose motto is ” Independent Thinking on Defence and Security”  whose Research Director, Malcolm Chalmers solemnly stated, with  presumably a straight face , that  “My view is that the Syrian government’s apparent agreement to the U.N. inspection has been triggered by the growing possibility of military action, I think that is why they are doing it.” -somewhat ignoring the fact that  the  UN inspectors had been  given approval  to visit Damascus several months ago, and that the  frontline in  the Damascus suburb of Ghoutta is highly volatile as the recent sniper attacks on UN vehicles attempting to reach East Ghoutta appear to  show.

Note also  that  some (but not all) “human rights” groups, are actively involved in  mobilising  the Western  populace’s support for more gungho  adventures in  foreign lands . See this extraordinarily foolish  article by  Amnesty  UK here.

Interesting to note that  it is Israeli  security who  have provided the “information”  to US officials that the Assad government authorised the chemical  attack . And of course we know that  Israel has absolutely no  axe to  grind with  the Syrian  government and is a reliable source of dis- information! See Craig Murray’s analysis of the likelihood of the Mossad information being truthful here.

Postscript

The December 2013  article by  Seymour Hersh entitled “Whose Sarin” appears to  substantiate the claims by  the Assad regime that   Syrian rebels were responsible for the attack.

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Links

The US “Centers for Disease Control   and Prevention”   commentary on Sarin  and required  safety measures, is listed here

A very  fair and reasonable analysis (surprisingly ) by Stars and Stripes on  the situation as at  26th  August  here

A somewhat  dubious but plausible analysis of the rocketry  used in  the attack  by  Rogue Adventurer here

A vast  leap  to  assumptions of guilt by  Brown  Moses here  and used by  Peter Beaumont of the UK Guardian to  cheerlead  the US France and UK launching air attacks on  Syria.

A short sane  commentary  on chemical  weapons issues by  New Scientist here

A Syrian government  supporter view of the  attacks from  Moon of Alabama

A recent article on  the  Syrian chemical  attack at  Antiwar, by Justin Raimondo

Perhaps also  useful  to note this December 10th 2012 article in Antiwar  about US defence contractors training Syrian rebels in ‘securing chemical  weapon stockpiles”.

An old June 2013, but nevertheless very relevant piece, on  the implications of US “no-fly”  zones, by  the always reasonable  Helena Cobban at Just World News

A somewhat  US-hostile  (perhaps justified) view of the issue from Counterpunch here

Truthout’s version of events by  Gareth Porter here

Gareth  Porter’s assessment  via IPS of the US Government Intelligence report on  the chemical  weapons attack here

Some speculation from  the Strategic Culture Foundation by  Wayne Madsen on  a possible alternative source of the chemical  weapons

A further blog from  Moon of Alabama on  the  hypotheses about the origin  of the sarin  gas, as the UN team has verified the chemical  to be.

A post UN observer assessment  by  Sharmine Narwani and Radwan Mortada  of Al Akhbar

A post UN assessment by Dan Kaszeta  at  Strongpoint Security (pdf)

A Scribd critique of the UN report on chemical  weapons by  Denis R O’Brien (PhD,Esq) can be downloaded  here   (pdf)

A further Moon of Alabama report  based on analysis  by the MIT missile expert Theodore Postol which argues that  the range of  the  chemical  projectiles indicates that  the Syrian regime could not have fired them. The report by  Postol  and Lloyd entitled Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus  Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013 can be found here

The Red Line and the Rat  Line-Seymour Hersh

 

The Predator from the West

Everywhere you look  in  mainstream Western media you see the utter “reasonableness’ of our need to  destroy  this or that country because it is evil  and isn’t democratic or reasonable enough.

History tells us  a different story,  but for some reason,  we choose to ignore it. The recent non-revelation of the CIA and UK  ‘intelligence” community’s  overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister Mossaddegh of Iran, beginning on  19th August  1953 once again  highlights what  the Wikipedia  entry aptly describes as the ongoing “grubby” adventures by these two  states.  Foolishly, Mossaddegh’s  government had  voted to  nationalise the  UK “owned’  oil fields production in  Iran and so Mossaddegh  and Iran  had to pay the price-  a lifetime of imprisonment and the re-installation of the brutal  pretend-King of Persia -the Shah.

The UK and France’s ongoing adventure in  Syria is another such  example of history repeating itself, where the so-called socialist  president of France, Hollande is salivating at  the mouth  with the opportunity to  once again invade their old colony under the pretense of protecting its  inhabitants ( identical  story  to last time), and the evil little UK Foreign  Minister  Hague will do  absolutely anything to please his  Israeli  masters. Funding and supporting Al Qaeda is absolutely not a   problem  to  Hollande and Hague and Obama -as it was no  problem for the US in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Read a great  account of the French aerial bombing of Damascus  in 1925  and again  in  1926. The US has a 60  year history of conflict  with Syria, as noted by  Adam Curtis in  his wonderful  blog, “The Baby and the Baath  Water.”

In  Afghanistan,the US repeats the old adventures played out by  its now junior ally,  “Great  Britain”,  in its  nineteenth century wars of 1839-1842,  and 1878-1880 and  then 1919.

Were those wars about peace, justice and  democracy and the rights of women?  Then,  as now, protecting opium  production was one of the driving forces; protecting the  Western  interests who make  huge monies from  addicting and selling  opium  and now heroin to Chinese, Russians or any other brutalised public.

Protecting  Western  oil  interests and profits  is of course, the other game; a game that heavily relies on Israel  forming a “western”  buttress against  the Arab hordes revolting against  the ‘masters and betters’. Hence the less than subtle tacit  support for the Egyptian  Army generals and their counter-revolution,  and the West’s unconditional  support for the Wahhabi  extremist fiefdoms in  Saudi Arabia  Qatar and the UAE.

“The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all  states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in  which the state is seen by  its people as having moral  legitimacy;  populist, in  which government is viewed as an  expression of the people’s will’; “great beast” in which the ruler’s power depends on  using force to keep  the populace cowed,  and “great fraud” in  which  the elite uses smoke and mirrors to  convince the people of its inherent authority” – 1491- New Revelations of the Americas”: Charles C Mann.   I leave you to  judge  which  of those categories of statehood the UK and US fit into.

The problem with all of these Western adventures is that they benefit only a tiny minority of the UK and US populations;  the very  very  rich (or the less then ‘one-per cent’) , with the trickle-down effects to  the British  and US wider public  negligible. The process can only continue while those publics can continue to be propagandized into  believing that these wars and adventures are about peace democracy  and justice and stopping evil  terrorists blowing us all up..

The desperation of those in  power  and their mercenary backers can be seen in the massive state investment   in  knowing what  everyone is writing and saying online and on the phone  and the need to silence  any whistleblowers quickly.

Time is running out for the predators.

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Links

An  excellent analysis  of the impacts of interventionism in Libya   from  the Belfer Institute by Alan  Ku[perman

Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/23/manning-snowden-and-the-u-s-coup-in-iran/

The War on Democracy

Universal male and female adult suffrage is a relatively recent phenomenon -in a nation  state it first occurred in  1893 in New Zealand . Adult male suffrage ( regardless of property rights)  first occurred in  republican France in  1792.  Universal  suffrage  (including blacks ) was only  enforced in US Federal elections from  1965.  The above dates clearly indicate true universal  suffrage really only  becoming the accepted norm in  recent times in the Western world, let alone globally.

Democracy  in  a given geographical catchment  works most fairly where voters have similar  views and shared identities  (ie  in a nation-state composed of numerous well-defined minorities, only the majority group  will  consider its interests are represented by  ruling governments unless coalitions of minorities are formed). Where there are long-standing minorities in  a given electoral catchment,  resentment and exclusion  naturally follow .

Additionally in  the last 10 years with the advent of the internet  and the fictional  “War on  Terror”,  a new set of issues, both constraining and enabling  democracy, have arisen.

The capacity of private citizens to  find  truthful information on  government decisions and responses has markedly improved  over the last 10 years with the  rise of the internet,  justifiably causing the credibility of most Western politicians to be tarnished as their ongoing epidemic of  lying and posturing  is exposed.

In addition, Western state’s and private corporate’s attack on general elections in  the past few years  in   countries such  as Iran, the Russian Federation and the celebrated colour revolutions of Eastern Europe, have now enabled any electorally defeated opposition  party to claim   fraud and vote rigging and to “legitimately ” resort to  revolution  on the streets ; the principles of majority vote rules are now significantly undermined . This  democratic  revisionism has now also been exacerbated by the West’s recent tacit support  for the Egyptian  Army’s coup  against Egypt’s legitimately elected government .

On top of that , the US and UK security apparatuses and other “democratic ” state apparatus’  insistence on  total knowledge  of their citizens’  online and phone conversations,  is a further deliberate malign attempt to  ensure that only  those who currently have the power and money are able to  circulate their view of the world  to the voters, thereby  attempting to maintain the “status quo”;  somewhat in  opposition to  true democratic  principles.

Democracy  may or may  not be, to paraphrase Churchill, the least worst alternative method of government representation, but the cracks are surely showing…

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Links

http://katieandmartin.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/a-brief-history-of-universal-suffrage/