Richard Falk; ex- U.N. rapporteur for Palestine, writes another beautifully effective and rational analysis of the realities of international law in his blog entitled “Opposing Impunity for Geopolitical Criminality” .
In this of many similar articles from Richard Falk, he exposes the hypocrisy of state entities who proselytize about the rule of law in state conflicts.
The ongoing theme of “victor’s justice” permeates all current and historical rule of international law – that needs to change if we are to see the end to wars and state violence.
Once again we see bombs falling in the middle east; this time on the civilians in Sana the capital of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and their arab coalition friends, with the full support of the United States. Once more the mainstream media portrays these bombings as some fair and responsible response to evil aggressors. The reality could not be further from the truth. In reality we see the hereditary dictatorship in Saudi Arabia , which holds to extremist wahhabinist Sunni views, providing logistical support for its Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen: the home of Al Qaeda, and the original home of the Bin Laden family. The Houthi separatist rebels that the Saudis and their friends are now attacking from the air are no angels themselves, but they in no way equate to the terrorists that the Saudis, and by proxy,the United States and its allies, are supporting in the Yemen. The Saudis and the Arab League have been touting the bombing campaign and the preparation for 40,000 Arab league troops to invade Yemen as the result of Iranian “meddling’ in Yemen to support their fellow Shi-ite brethren ( however the Houthi Zaidi Shi-ite sect is apparently more closely related to Sunni practice than it is to Iranian Shiites’). In reality there is currently no evidence but much speculation about Iranian involvement, with the Houthis themselves denying Iranian involvement.
Gareth Porter provides his usual convincing argument to demonstrate the tenuous Iranian arms link. However the spectre of Iranian hegemony is a very useful tool for both the Saudi and Israeli regimes. The reality again is somewhat different. It is Saudi wahhabi extremism and its grand goal of violently eliminating all other “heretical” Islamic sects, (including the Sunni Sufis who form a large proportion of the Yemen Sunni population) as well as Israeli fears of a rising major middle east power which (unlike the other Gulf states) cannot be bought by the United States, that is prompting this assault on Yemen.
Haykal Bafana tweets about the pressure being applied to Yemenese tribes by the Saudis to accept Al Qaeda and its affiliates, while The RealNews notes that the timing of the Saudi assault was designed to stop in its tracks, a multi-party Yemen unity government, that could have seen Saudi and Al Qaeda influence substantially compromised.
Al Qaeda reach in Yemen: 2014
The Houthis have been in danger of fully ousting Al Qaeda from Yemen and therefore had to be forcefully removed as a threat. Be assured that Western intelligence is fully informed of the implications of this invasion, but will not for some months recognise that this new adventure is in fact the beginning of the end of the extremist Saudi regime, with many of their military composed of Yemen nationals not so sympathetic to Wahhabi extremism and its hatred of Shiites and other Muslim sects. The removal of the wahhabist Saudi “monarchy” will remove one of the key drivers for any rationale for the supposed “war on terror” and as such, is something to be feared in Washington and their war industry.
Ironically Iran has proved itself adept in the many middle east wars initiated by the United States and its proxies, at using the confusion and anarchy so created to its advantage . The Saudis and their “allies” have undoubtedly already committed a multitude of war crimes in their bombings of Yemen infrastructure and civilian targets. Those crimes will not be forgotten .
Interestingly the Wall St Journal is clearly (and proudly?) stating that US Command is providing the intelligence and command for Saudi air-strikes in Yemen. Once again this implicates senior US Military and political figures in further war crimes in just another Middle East country. Once again as Pepe Escobar notes; we see the total absurdity of this “War on Terra”.
Postscript
The decision by the U.N Security Council on 14th April 2015, by 13 votes to Russia’s abstention, to condemn the Houthi invasion of southern Yemen, and impose sanctions on the Houthi leadership, is a sad indictment of international politics.
While support for sanctions by the US and UK for their Saudi arms and oil trading partner, was to be expected, most troubling was China’s willingness to support sanctions; this presumably indicates a shift in China’s alliances towards Saudi Arabia as a major oil producer which will then reflect badly on their developing relationship with Iran. This is a serious miscalculation of coming events by the Chinese.
One has also to wonder how these supposedly educated and informed security council members could have failed to notice that , right from the very beginning, that this was a genocidal war; a war by the Saudis that conformed to no international agreements to protect civilians. But of course; this was indeed all known to those representatives who voted to support the Saudi airstrikes. A savage indictment indeed of our international processes designed to protect civilians.
And a lovely lucid article on the role of Iran in all this Persian Gulf game playing from Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett at Consortium News…: the wonderful “turn facts on their head and make them lies” type of gambit from the Saudis and Israelis..
And, as of 20th June 2015, a tranche of top secret Saudi Foreign Ministry files released by Wikileaks, showing the less than savoury role played by the Saudi hereditary dictatorship in the affairs of the Gulf and beyond..
Note: another letter (below) to my local newspaper which funnily enough, was never published..!
I note that NZ soldiers are likely to be deployed to Iraq to fight the terrorist threat, and that their first port of call will be, where else, Saudi Arabia ,the homeland of jihadist wahhabi extremism, from where Saudi billionaires, if not their tyrannical inherited dictatorship, fund support and train their jihadists.
Might I also suggest that our soldiers fly there via Qatar Airways, whose “government” is our next good ally in the middle east also funding jihadist extremists.
And to add to the satirical mix, might I also suggest that our soldiers spend some time in the training camps in Jordan,Turkey and Libya where Western governments have spent vast amounts of money funding the training and arming of “moderate” extremists to fight our ‘real’ enemies.
Its such a shame when “our” terrorists get confused and fight us instead!
Peace vigils calling for increased humanitarian assistance and diplomatic support for Middle East peace processes, and opposing the military deployment to Iraq, will be held around the country from Hokianga to Dunedin at 5pm tomorrow, Thursday 5 March, coordinated by Peace Movement Aotearoa. The details of each vigil are included below and available online at https://www.facebook.com/events/757364991025571 and http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/iraq2015.htm – please share the links, thank you. The details of vigils in other towns and cities will be added to those pages when confirmed.
If there isn’t a vigil in your area, you are invited to gather friends and family at 5pm on 5 March, light a candle for peace, then make your support visible by taking a photo of yourself or your gathering holding the ‘Military deployment in Iraq? Not in our name’ message and posting it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/PeaceMovementAotearoa The ‘Not in our name’ poster is available in colour at http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/nion-col.pdf and in black and white at http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/nion-b&w.pdf If you are not a Facebook member, please send your photo to Peace Movement Aotearoa email pma@xtra.co.nz with ‘Peace vigil photo’ in the subject line of your message and we will post it for you.
The recent murder of Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition politician and ex-physicist, on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge very near to the Kremlin in Moscow, raises many questions.
Predictably, Western politicians and mainstream media are pointing the finger at Vladmir Putin, the President of Russia, as the man who signed off on Nemtsov’s execution. In remarkably similar ways to the their response to the downing of MH 17 over Ukraine last year, they have leapt at the opportunity to once more demonise Putin. Proof of course, is immaterial in this game.
Let us be under no illusions, Putin as an ex-KGB officer is perfectly capable of signing Nemtsov’s death warrant and may have done so, but , as I will attempt to demonstrate, that is the more unlikely scenario in this instance. Western media point to other deaths of Russian opposition politicians and oligarchs where some of the evidence points to Russian state apparatus involvement as proof that this time, once again, another key opposition to Putin has been removed. This despite the fact that Putin’s approval rating in Russia remains at around 86% while Nemtsov’s appears to have been less than 5% at the time of his death.
Nemtsov’s political colleagues argue that he was killed to pre-empt his imminent disclosure of proof of Russian military direct involvement in Ukraine. Why his death would prevent that disclosure happening is unknown, or even why Nemtsov would have access to information that was not immediately available to Western politicians via high-resolution spy satellite imagery, is a mystery.
His death certainly resulted in a Moscow march of many thousands of supporters and also presumably included some who want an end to violence murder and political intimidation in the city . The Guardian newspaper disparagingly reported that Moscow Police estimated 7,000 on the march, whereas in fact the police estimates from RT.com talk of around 50,000.
Boris Nemtsov was undoubtedly an interesting person. With a Phd in physics and a significant number of academic papers under his belt for quantum physics, he turned , instead to politics, and quickly became a rising star in Boris Yeltsin’s alcoholic haze of a government after the fall of Soviet Russia becoming Deputy Prime Minister for four months under Yeltsin in 1998 . Credited as being a “reformist”, he later co-founded the the “Union of Right Forces ” party in 1999 , and then opposed its inevitable merge to survive as part of the ‘Right Cause’ party in 2008. In 2012, Nemtsov was appointed co-chair of the Republican Party of Russia – People’s Freedom Party (RPR-PARNAS) which is a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party .
Nemtsov and many of the parties he has been affiliated to have been accused, with some truth, of being funded supported and guided by European and American political interests such as the (European) Endowment for Democracy – an agency with distinctly U.S. business and right wing agendas, but portraying itself as a supporter of local democracy. Such philosophies are clearly on a collision course with rising nationalist fervour in many parts of Eastern Europe. Implicated in many of the “colour revolutions” in places like Ukraine and Georgia, and in support of the “moderate” rebels in Syria, the agency plays a lead non government role in supporting U.S. government power and control agendas. Very much because of this American bias and Russian nationalism, rather than their neo-liberal agenda, the political parties Nemtsov was active in, played to an increasingly smaller Russian audience over the years.
Russian opposition activists see Nemtsov’s death as an opportunity; “We need to seriously think what to do from now on,” Leonid Volkov, an opposition leader and organizer of the March 1 memorial, said by phone. “We were at a low point but now some things have crystallized that allow us to make plans. I think it’s the start of a new wave of protests. It’s a real shame it took such an event for that to happen.”
Nemtsov certainly had links to what has been termed as the Russian Mafia and oligarchs -to-be , in his role in selling off state assets at bargain prices to criminals after the fall of the Soviet Union- did he still have enemies from those days?-that also seems unlikely; although his recent links to Russian business interests are deemed to be extensive, but unknown to this blogger.
The role of the young girl who accompanied him onto the bridge where he was shot and who escaped entirely unharmed after 4 shots were fired into Nemtsov’s back, warrants investigation. Indeed one may wonder why Western mainstream media is so indignant that she is being held for questioning (as is standard Police practice internationally), and not allowed to return home to the Ukraine. Nemtsov’s was very much opposed to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Russian connection to the Eastern Ukraine rebellion. Such a political view is extremely unpopular and deemed to be unpatriotic in Russia today; was he murdered by Novorussians perhaps because he was considered a traitor?
Or alternatively, was he murdered by his Western intelligence handlers because he was now worth more to them dead than alive? Certainly the track record of Western “intelligence”, would indicate they have absolutely no qualms about torturing, murdering or destroying the lives of anyone who gets in their way to create that ‘better world’ ruled by their funders. Clearly the immediate benefit of his death is to further undermine Putin’s credibility in the eyes of those who read and believe Western mainstream media. The impact on a Russian audience is likely to be negligible given Putin’s high standing with the Russian public.
So, we are left with an implausible reason for Putin and/or Russian intelligence to kill Nemtsov, i.e. “proof” of Russian military involvement in Eastern Ukraine; a possible business deal gone wrong, a murder to meet the needs of anti-Russian sentiment in the West, an opportunity for Russian opposition parties to garner local support, or possibly, but unlikely given the murder ‘s locality on a very public bridge, a murder to avenge a romantic relationship gone sour. The death certainly has the look of a targeted killing rather than an act of revenge, and the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge is an ideal public location to stage opposition solidarity demonstrations after the death with a Kremlin backdrop. And four single bullets to the back? hmmmm
A new piece of analysis of the likelihood of severe drought in the United States in the later half of the 21st century has made some dire predictions.. Entitled Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains, the article posits that the American Southwest ( The broad definition of the South-West includes nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) and the Central Plains of the U.S. (includes Nebraska, Kansas, southern South Dakota and Minnesota, western Iowa and Missouri, and northern Oklahoma), will as a result of global warming and natural climate changes, endure increasingly longer periods of severe drought.- the worst in a thousand years.
The research argues that rainfall measurement and soil moisture levels over the past 100 years do not accurately indicate the drought potential in the United States.
The “mega-droughts” of the 12th and 13th centuries in North America will pale into insignificance compared to the impending droughts beginning to occur somewhere between 2030 and 2050. This drought will be compounded by the then very severe impacts of global warming, and the massive loss of groundwater and river depletion caused by unsustainable agricultural practices, fracking, and the large influx of human populations to the west over the preceding 100 years.
Benjamin Cook, a lead researcher for the study from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies , notes that the models also revealed that the “drying in the Southwest would result from a combination of less rain and greater soil evaporation due to higher temperatures. They were not as conclusive about less rain in the central Great Plains but all showed more evaporation there. “Even where rain may not change much, greater evaporation will dry out the soils,” Cook says.”
If this research is in fact correct, then perhaps, you might argue , this is payback time for the 200 years of devastation to the planet and horrific suffering inflicted on so many human beings by that experiment in global destruction – the United States.
But we must not forget that “innocent” human beings will undoubtedly die , and countless millions of unique species may well disappear from the face of the planet as a result of this calamity. Or perhaps, as many of the Plains tribes ave predicted, this is their opportunity to re-claim their destiny.
The rich of the West and mid-West will have no problem relocating to their houses in the eastern states or overseas. It is the poor of the US who will once again suffer as they did in the dust-bowl era. Will this extreme dislocation lead then to a resurgence in workers’ rights, of equality for all, and true non-oligarchic democracy? Or will it instead lead to a desperate grab for other, more fortunate, countries’ resources by what is still likely to be the largest military machine in the world? It is however indisputable that, over time, this environmental catastrophe will dramatically accelerate the United States’ transition to relatively minor international player .
Will those who assume the mantle of ‘international leadership” be less voracious and barbarous in their responses to international issues?-we will have to hope so.
A research paper published by Oxfam, published to coincide with the World Economic Forum at Davos in late January 2015, shows that the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014, and at this rate will be more than 50 percent by 2016. Members of this global elite had an average wealth of $2.7 million per adult in 2014.
In my view, the issue is less that the disparity between the rich “elite”‘ is widening, and more to do with how that rich “elite” use their power and influence. Provided people have enough to eat, good sanitation, clean water, safe housing and peaceful living environments, the issue of disparate incomes becomes less an issue of need , and more of perception and unfairness. Why should I be poor when you are rich, and you clearly have no more r right to those riches than I do, and certainly don’t use those riches in a way that benefits anyone other than yourself and your immediate clique?
The concern about the majority of the wealth and power and control resting with a minority of the word’s population is therefore not so much an issue of how the world’s “wealth” is shared, but the quality of the decisions that are now being made about our future world as a result of the disenfranchisement of decision-making from those who are connected to their local environment. That wealthy elite make their decisions on the property they own based almost exclusively on how much profit can be accrued through its exploitation.
The history of absentee landlords in Scotland and Ireland in the late 18th and 19th centuries is unequivocally clear on this, and a lesson for today , where more than 50% of the world will soon be owned owned by absentee owners.. The welfare of Scottish and Irish rentees on the land was of absolutely no concern to the landlord in most instances. Neither was the environmental destruction of the land of any concern, unless it impacted on profit or pleasure.
Those who remain connected to the land, particularly inter-generationally, have a much greater driver to ensure it remains sustainable for the long-term. Bad short-term decisions can undoubtedly still be made that destroy natural habitats and species, by those connected to the land, but an algorithm of exploitation based purely on short-term monetary gain, does not make sense to those who will inherit that land in the future.
As just one of so many examples, in New Zealand, the rise of dairy absentee millionaires and conglomerates who buy up large tracts of pasture land (which was once dense bush with a myriad of species within it) and then proceed to destroy the land through unsustainable exploitation of the water resources available to them and the long-term contamination of the water table with dairy foecal and nitrate pollutants. Once the profits have gone from the “business” and the land destroyed, those absentee landlords will take their money and move on to another more profitable exploitation option.
The rapid erosion of local ownership to land and property therefore is not simply and issue of equity or even poverty; but more importantly, just one more ingredient in that lethal recipe for environmental global disaster.
Firstly, it needs to be unequivocally stated that any murder, violence or threats of violence need to be condemned, and repeatedly condemned, until such actions no longer occur on this planet. Violence in any form is a primitive and non-productive way of achieving one’s aims. Because human beings are predominantly social beings, intra-species violence cannot create long-term positive outcomes for either party.
The killings by religious extremists of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists/ journalists and subsequent deaths in other parts of Paris, purportedly because those cartoonist’s denigrated the Prophet, are an abomination, and certainly appear on the face of it, to be designed to inhibit further ridiculing of Islam, or more probably, to incite disenfranchised white males to commit crimes against local Muslim populations to again encourage French muslims to rise against the French state.
But there are, in my view, three things to consider here:
One, is the equity of the Western public and media response to these killings in comparison with the ongoing murders of thousands of people in the Middle East by Western state war-machines. Just one example of this hypocritical perspective is the disgusting and appalling treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state to which every Western country has not only turned a blind eye in the last 67 years, but almost all have actively supported the ongoing atrocities against that imprisoned population. Where are the “je suis une Palestinian” mass rallies I wonder? or where were those demonstrators when the United States for instance delivered “targeted strikes’ into the hotel rooms of Al Jazeera journalists while they were staying in Baghdad in the second Iraq War ? These organised Parisian mass rallies, with their identical laser printed placards, smack of hypocrisy , selective judgement and useful scapegoating.
Secondly, why is the media so keen to portray these killings as organised, premeditated killings by well-trained terrorists?. Losing your ID card in the getaway car does not particularly strike me as the work of a well-honed hit -squad. More than likely (as with so many other “terrorist” attacks) , these pathetic young men were likely supported and encouraged by (in this case) French intelligence services. And before you snarl about “conspiracy theories”, it is worth noting that much of the “terrorist” activity during the French/Algerian war was in fact undertaken by French intelligence; they are no strangers to false flag operations. As The Intercept notes, many Western “law enforcement” agencies have provenly been active in the past few years in recruiting and fomenting “terrorist plots for their own ends.
This blog has noted many times the multitude of advantages to state security apparatus of hyping up some “existential” threat to the population. And if, as some reports suggest, the killers had recently been in Syria fighting with the rebels, then they are most certainly the product of Western tactical and resource support for anti-Syrian government rebels.
This attack also comes at a convenient time, when the President of France , the inept ‘socialist’ Francoise Hollande, appeared to be weakening in his resolve to support U.S. demands for continued sanctions against Russia because of the deleterious impacts on the French economy of those sanctions.
Thirdly, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists were, and are, hardly the epitome of Western liberal tolerance and fair-play. Their cartoons are often racist, and inflammatory. That is of course, no excuse for violence against such bigots, but neither does it provide a rationale to eulogise such people. Western democratic values presume that everyone has the right to insult anyone on the basis of their actions or beliefs, with the opportunity to address outstanding concerns in a court of law. This is largely a civilised approach to working through dis-harmony: one to which Western governments publicly subscribe to in the media, while in reality wreaking indiscriminate destruction and murder in other parts of the globe. The assumption of a “free” media in the West, is however, by and large, true. Notwithstanding Slate’s narrative that “despite its 18th-century constitutional provenance, the First Amendment did not play a significant role in U.S. law until the second half of the 20th century. The First Amendment did not protect anarchists, socialists, Communists, pacifists, and various other dissenters when the U.S. government cracked down on them, as it regularly did during times of war and stress, non libelous anti-government points of view, are in most cases, allowed free dissemination. Western governments rely on the fact that wide spread dissemination of news requires large amounts of financial resources. Those financial resources, by definition, come from those who support the status-quo. Non status-quo points of view are therefore in the vast minority and largely invisible to the public. Status-quo views, even when blatantly and obviously lies, can steam-roll the public to accept them as truth through the sheer volume and multiple sources of the “un-truths”. George Monbiot’s recent examples on Canadian and UK media’s “selective journalism” illustrates this argument well.
Charlie Hebdo journalism falls into that category of being some what right -wing and subtly supporting the conservative status-quo, with simplistic judgements of those who are different from “us”. Interestingly however, Stéphane Charbonnier, who was murdered in the attack, described the newspaper’s positions in 2012 as left-wing, secular, and atheist.
As noted in the Common Dreams article below. As the late great Molly Ivins said, “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.”
As Robert Parry wrote in Consortium News “If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
But this impervious narrative is an essential component of the drive to crush the Russian economy with sanctions and lowered oil prices, along with the attempts to encircle China via the East Asian Pivot.
Much like the sanctions imposed on Iran for decades because of their fictional nuclear weapons development, every political player West and East knows that the fictional Russian troops in Eastern Ukraine (aside from the Crimea) are a wonderful excuse to attempt to economically destroy the country. It is virtually impossible for the sanctioned country to prove the absence of something that did not exist in the first place. But as Cuba has so ably proved in the past 50 years, alternative strategies are possible and even beneficial.
The impact of crashing oil prices -however temporary- on all the major oil producers- including Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar as well as Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the shale oil industries of the U.S. and Canada , are unknown and unpredictable. Did the powers-that-be in Washington and London consider what the impacts of plunging oil prices would have on their jihadists in Syria and Iraq and their consequent capacity to buy more men and equipment? or even consider that weakening oil prices will strengthen China’s economic position in the world?- we may never know…
In response to these threats , Russia and China have launched a whole swathe of economic agreements between themselves and with other neighbouring countries . As Pepe Escobar describes it, the development of the new silk road via high speed rail links between China and the rest of Asia and Europe has begun at a startling rapid pace and will result in a completely changed political/economic dynamic in the world within a very short space of time that will also be out of the reach of U.S. and U.K . interests.
There is therefore urgent need for the UK and US war economies to move fast to eliminate these new threats as Western economies start to crumble and their capacity to control markets and other state and non-entities is progressively reduced.
Perhaps that haste is the reason for the level of incompetency shown by the State Department in putting “their man” Natalie Jaresko as Ukraine’s new Finance Minister. The contempt shown to Eastern Europeans by the US government in the appointment of this corrupt US citizen and State Department official as Ukraine’s Finance Minister is staggering, but yet remarkable for the lack of a response from the (for now) subjugated Western Ukrainians. Or the even more absurd Obama reaction to some hacker group infiltrating Sony and threatening the company for its film which encourages the assassination of a living head of state – something for which the company could in fact be indicted for in an international court of law; (were there such a neutral international player)
The recent reports from the U.S on the types and extent of torture US officials are prepared to disclose, is a tiny drop in the ocean of the countless examples of the extent to which US and UK governments have long been prepared to enslave, murder, torture and destroy indiscriminately if it serves their interests. While the British Empire’s brutality against those of other skin colour should need no further explanation, it is often useful to point out that the United States’ history of state terrorism and genocide is also a very long one; beginning with the terror and genocide against the Plains Indians in the late 18th century, to the US’s brutal colonizations of the Philippines and Caribbean in the 19th century and the genocide committed in the name of “democracy and freedom” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq ( to name just a few). The 21st century is no exception to this long litany of terror, torture and murder by these two so-called “civilised” countries. The scale of devastation and horror inflicted by these two countries against other (‘foreign’) populations, has no equal.
That is not to say that those state entities the United States and the UK wish to destroy are themselves necessarily humanitarian and democratic; but it can be argued that -as in the case of post 1917 Russia, Weimar Germany, North Korea and Cambodia; where civic institutions are crushed by an overwhelmingly powerful outside force, then despotism can freely reign.
The United States , the United Kingdom and a few other ex-colonial powers, have no such excuse. It is interesting to note, that up until the development of the “Terrorist” threat post 9/11, the actions of those two states against their own citizens had been relatively benign; their emphasis has traditionally been on harming external states for commercial benefit; that locus appears to be changing into a more wide-ranging capacity to harm or destroy any individuals or entity within or without their state borders that impinge on the powerful “elite”s capacity to extract more money for itself. In all probability, this shift in focus is directly attributable to the dawning understanding that the days of Western hegemony over the world’s resources are numbered.
What is blindingly obvious in this analysis is the totally banale and infantile drivers for these constant wars, let alone their leaders’ complete lack of understanding and compassion for the suffering of others. And we should not forget the massive contribution to environmental destruction this 300 year old process has delivered. This is certainly not an intelligent process, although the processes of domination and extraction of plunder are often complex.
We can only watch in amazement at the psychopathic behaviours of key US officials delighting in the violent deaths of others -eg Dick Cheney, or Hilary Clinton (below)
or Obama joking about killer drones, knowing full well the impacts in families and communities of the thousands of innocent lives killed by these random killing machines.
In fact recent evidence on Hillary Clinton’s motivation’s for the war in Libya, reveal little else than the fact that she didn’t like Muammar Ghaddafi. Certainly there was absolutely no evidence of the genocide of Libyan civilians by Ghaddafi’s forces as was alleged and provided as rationale to U.S. supporting the jihadist forces there. Clinton’s maniacal delight in Ghaddafi’s brutal death is a warning to us all.
and the UK’s Blair and Jack Straw who simply refuse to acknowledge that their orders resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans based simply on their whim ( ‘I kill because I can’). It may be salutory to read Ahmad Baqawi’s damning analysis of the NATO intervention in Libya and the resultant total and deliberate destruction of Libya as a nation-state, or perhaps Peter Lee’s account of the brutal murder and destruction carried out by the West proxy’s in Syria in the name of “democracy and freedom”
In another more equitable world , those politicians would have long ago been convicted and sent to high security forensic mental health wards; or perhaps, as the highly respected American columnist William Pfaff notes -simply tried Nuremburg style and, if convicted on the evidence, hanged.
The Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change earlier this year noted if action is not taken “soon’ the resultant 2C increase in global temperatures will have ‘severe’, and ‘irreversible” impacts on human habitation and economic activity.
Governments, in their desperation to feed the “god of growth” are increasingly making more and bigger foolish decisions that undermine our sustainability as a species on this planet. Take for instance, the ever-increasing taxpayer dollars pouring into oil and gas explorations, or the actions of corporate-resourced governments such as the UK or New Zealand, with their intent to emasculate regulations that protect the environment against corporate interests . Or the potential horrendous environmental impacts of international agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). The “god of growth” must be fed, regardless of the consequences to our planet and the species who inhabit it.
While climate change gets all the press these days in the media; it should be noted that climate change is just one of a multitude of impacts of homo sapiens’ drive for “progress’ and ‘growth’ over the past 200 years. For those species (including humans) at the sharp end of climate change- those in tropical countries or drier hotter climates, the impacts are likely to be truly horrendous over the next 100 years -and for the next few thousand or perhaps million years beyond that. However what underpins this destruction of our planet is our incurable arrogance that we are somehow “superior” beings who are overlords of the other species on this planet.
It is absolutely undeniable that unless we can co-habitate with the other remaining species that we have not killed off as yet-we too are doomed as a species. We are entirely reliant on other species for our short , medium and long-term survival. No amount of concrete or tar or metal or money can hide this fact. The journey to bio-extinction in the pursuit of profit in New Zealand is just one of countless stories of man’s folly.
What is required is a fundamental shift by all humans on this planet to understand that every other species shares an equal right to life on our little blue ball. Killing off a species or a few million individual sentient beings to make way for a shopping mall, is just nonsensical.
While we may pretend, we have not behaved in any way as caretakers of this planet; we have not behaved rationally and with fore-thought, we have not allowed the blinkers to fall from our eyes to let ourselves see the folly of our shallow understanding that because we are homo sapiens, then anything that does not exist or think like a homosapien is inferior, and not worthy of life, unless it is for our use: for us to kill and eat, or for human tourists to gawp at while they destroy the surrounding environment. A supposed scientific principal which argues that other species are inferior to one particular species whose “superiority” is based on the core attributes of that one species and no other, is a rather dubious piece of scientific endeavour! This superficial belief, called anthropocentrism, must be eliminated from human consciousness, if we are all to continue to thrive or even survive on this planet.
To put it bluntly, those rationales exhibit primitive thinking and zero compassion for other species; let alone a rather dubious understanding of the laws of cause and effect.
As Prof. Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre notes; “Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”
In all the reports about climate change or even loss of bio-diversity it is very rare to see an analysis of the impacts of homo sapiens’ folly on other species. In almost every case you will instead see a superlatively superficial analysis of the impacts of climate change in dollars and cents, or the cost of a species lost we can no longer exploit. Those analyses are proof in themselves that we have lost our way as a species in a spectacularly ignorant way.
(a shortened version of this post was rejected as a letter to the editor of my local newspaper….)
The ongoing media and political frenzy about the sudden emergence of ISIS as the new international terrorist threat would be laughable if it were not tragic for those who stand in the path of both ISIS and the Western military “response”.
The reality is that ISIS, like most of the previous terrorist threats before them, are Western and Arabian Gulf state creations.
As with Osama bin Laden before them (funded if not trained by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan) , the members of ISIS have been trained, financed and equipped by the US, the UK, France and Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar to fulfill other agendas; namely the dismemberment of functioning middle eastern states who cannot be relied upon to agree to US demands; eg Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria . This trail of failed states, brought about first by Western funded terrorism and then by Western aerial bombing campaigns, has brought death, destruction, starvation and fear to their populations with no positive outcome in sight. While Western governments will deny their direct involvement with ISIS and pretend they are financing “moderate” islamacists, the reality is that those men in the training camps in Turkey and Jordan run by western governments and Gulf dictatorships, are indeed one and the same men who sign up to ISIS or who share resources, kidnapped people and equipment with ISIS.
See this delightful CNN interview of former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, who clearly doesn’t have a clue about anything much at all..
For Turkey particularly, the opportunity to both eliminate the Kurdish threat within its own borders using ISIS, whilst enabling the ‘necessity’ for ‘humanitarian’ border corridors and no-fly zones along the Syrian/Turkey border which can then lead to further incursions by Turkish or even NATO troops into Syria , is a double win for the Turkish government.
For Israel, actively supporting ISIS with bombardment of Syrian government position on the Golan Heights and shooting down Syrian military aircraft attacking ISIS military positions, furthers their long-term agenda of destabilizing any Arab (or Iranian) state that could potentially threaten Israel’s territorial integrity at some time in the future.
For Western governments and their ‘intelligence’ agencies, hyping up the threat of ISIS terrorists re-invading the West and blowing up defenseless white people, is a wonderful method to maintain the level of fear and hysteria in the public’s mind. and hence the rationale for more and more “defence” purchases, and more surveillance and control of those who do not abide by the corporate agenda. A new “thirty-year war” by the U.S. is promised against a rag-tag bunch of psychopaths and mercenaries. The reality is that turning off the tap of funding from Western supported agencies, closing the supply routes and “rat-lines”, and shutting down the training camps would turn current ISIS victories into a rout within weeks.
For Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the dream is the predominance of the Sunni Wahhabi ideology in the middle east and beyond, the destruction of Shi-ite Iran, and ultimately the elimination of the Shi-ite sect . ‘Perhaps’ ironically, it is those Shi-ite ‘terrorists’ ; Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah who are actually making the difference in eliminating the threat from ISIS.
This cynical reality is well-known to most of the middle eastern public . The destruction of those states and their infrastructure who do not toe the Western party line, and who have resources than can be appropriated by Western companies, or who might possibly threaten Israel’s hegemony in the region at some future date, is the grim reality for the men women and children who inhabit those desolated countries and who therefore must be made to suffer.
