Category: War on Terror

The Role of Racism in Western Colonialism: A Historical & Contemporary Analysis

Racism was not a side-effect of empire—it was its operating system. From the 15th-century “Age of Discovery” to 21st-century border regimes, racial hierarchies have justified land theft, slavery, resource extraction and permanent war.

We outline how racism powered colonialism—and why it still shapes our world, as we see in the large recent populist responses in Europe and the US to immigration from non-white countries.

I would argue that we are, as human beings, inherently racist. We cherish the human group we belong to; the way we look, the way our group behaves, the things that are important to us. Those that look, and/or behave differently to us are therefore not ‘one of us”- they are outsiders, a threat to us and our group’s safety and wellbeing. Who we are is ‘normal’ – those ‘others’ are not normal.

That defensiveness against ‘others’, I would argue, is the root of racism. While that fear response may be deeply imbedded in our psyche, it can, and must be rooted out with clear rationality and understanding for those ‘others’. If we are to be truly human, we must treat all other living things with the kindness and compassion we expect for ourselves.

Conquest Begins with Name-Calling: “Savage” as a Licence to Kill

Greek and Roman writers already labelled outsiders “barbarians”, but the Atlantic world turned prejudice into policy. English colonisers depicted the Gaelic Irish as dark-skinned degenerates; Spaniards painted Indigenous Americans as cannibals; Dutch and Portuguese traders recast West Africans as “beasts of burden”. Once economic incentives for plantation slavery exploded, stereotypes hardened: Africans were now naturally servile, sexually voracious, mentally inferior—and therefore made for slavery. The perjorative demeaning language used to describe non-whites by ‘white’ people across the world is no accident. Language defines..

In the 21st Century, non-white immigrants to Western countries are seen as a threat to European ‘values’ culture and economic wellbeing. Current immigrant levels to the US and Europe are a direct result of economic and safety destabilisations caused by earlier extractive colonial policies and the West’s immensely destructive wars in those countries. In addition, Western governments, as opposed to their ‘white’ populations, have welcomed these new cheap labour immigrants to bolster their GDPs.

“Scientific” Racism: Empire in a White Lab-Coat

19-century European universities measured skulls, mapped skin tones and coined terms like “Caucasoid” to give racism the veneer of objectivity. The Dawinian science of evolution was used to delineate some human ‘races’ as less genetically evolved, with of course the white races at the top! This absurd and unscientific use of evolution were used by many in the West and exploited in the eugenics movement, and in its extreme form by the Nazis, and latterly the Zionists.

3. Britain’s ‘Liberal’ Empire

“Violence was not a one-off occurrence… it was systemic and part and parcel of Britain’s liberal imperialism.”– ‘Legacy of Violence-
A History of the British Empire’ Caroline Elkins (2023)

In the 19th century, Medical journals warned that “negro lungs” were unfit for cold climates to help justify keeping indentured labourers on Caribbean sugar plantations. Anthropology museums displayed colonised peoples alongside fauna. These ‘scientific’ findings were incorporated into colonial legal codes: the 1885 Berlin Conference carved up Africa on the assumption that Whites could best steward African land and bodies. Britain’s ‘protectorates’ listed below are a ‘sublime’ example of the racist mentality of the British Foreign Office. Why these populations would need ‘protecting’ from themselves was never adequately explained…

TerritoryProtectorate proclaimedToday part of …
Malta1800Malta
Ionian Islands1815Greece
Mosquito Coast1838Nicaragua / Honduras
Aden (W. & E. Protectorates)1872Yemen
Cyprus1878Cyprus
Sultanate of Zanzibar1890Tanzania
Bechuanaland1885Botswana
British Somaliland1884Somalia
North Borneo1888Malaysia (Sabah)
Brunei1888Brunei
Sarawak1888Malaysia
Maldives1887Maldives
Sikkim1861India
Barotseland1900Zambia
East Africa Protectorate1895Kenya
Uganda Protectorate1894Uganda
Nyasaland1893Malawi
Northern Rhodesia1924Zambia
Swaziland1903Eswatini
Basutoland1868Lesotho
Gambia Protectorate1894The Gambia
Sierra Leone Protectorate1896Sierra Leone
Nigeria (N. & S. protectorates)1900Nigeria
Qatar1916Qatar
Bahrain1861Bahrain
Trucial Oman1887UAE
Cook Islands1888New Zealand (self-governing)
Niue1900New Zealand (self-governing)
Tokelau1889New Zealand
British Solomon Is.1893Solomon Islands
Gilbert & Ellice Is.1892Kiribati & Tuvalu
Tonga1879Tonga
Oman (Muscat & Oman)1800Oman
Bhutan1911Bhutan

From Kenya’s “Pipeline” detention camps to Malaya’s New Villages, London cast mass incarceration, forced labour and sexual violence as “rehabilitation” for racially suspect subjects. Files were then sealed for decades under the Colonial Papers Destruction Policy.

Comparative Brutality: France, Belgium, Germany


  • French Algeria: Settler colonialism embedded in the département system; with 1.5 million Algerians killed during the 1954-62 war of independence (Al-Jazeera retrospective).

  • Belgian Congo: Leopold II’s rubber regime caused an estimated 10 million deaths—A BBC investigation calls it “one of the greatest mass murders in history”.

  • German South-West Africa: 1904-08 extermination order against the Herero and Nama is now officially recognised by Germany as genocide.

British India: current scholarship puts the excess-mortality death toll attributable to British colonial policy in India between 1881-1920 alone at roughly 50–165 million people.

Racism after the Empires Recede

Decolonisation brought new flags, but not justice. The UN confirms that “colonialism lives on” in racial profiling, poverty and unequal trade. Former plantation economies still dominate global commodity chains, even while end-use processing for value addition to those raw commodities continues to happen in the Global North. France’s banlieues, Britain’s Windrush deportations, and the U.S. racial wealth gap all map precisely onto old imperial shipping routes.

Environment Impacts of Racism

The climate crisis is driven by the same extractive logic that cleared forests for sugar and cotton. Former colonies already suffer temperature increases twice the global average—a direct legacy of shipping carbon to Europe while deforesting the colonies’ natural environment- that same natural world many indigenous populations relied upon for their survival.

Towards Reparatory Justice

  • Unveiling the Truth: Ensure that all colonial archives are opened to the public and for research (UK still classifies this information under the “migrated archives” rule).
  • Reparations: From debt cancellation to technology transfers—see UN-DESA Policy Brief #96 along with fair funding reparations from ex colonial powers for their brutality and economic extraction.
  • Education: Develop truthful, accurate and non-ideologically driven curricula for each ex-colonial country and its coloniser which explains the rationales and impacts of racism and consequent colonialism from each side.

Palestine 2023-25: A Live-Streamed Genocide Enabled by Racialised Imperial Logic

The same racial logic that once classified Indigenous peoples as “savages” and Africans as “natural slaves” is now redeployed to portray Palestinians—especially in Gaza—as irredeemable terrorists whose lives are expendable. Western diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel’s 2023-25 assault is therefore not an aberration; it is the continuity of a 500-year-old pattern in which white-majority states licence settler violence against racialised “others” while declaring themselves civilised.

Genocide is apparently what “non-white” actors commit; white or white-allied states are presumed incapable of it. Western media highlights Israeli “security” and terrorists’ ‘hostages’ while Palestinian deaths are counted in opaque “casualty” statistics, stripped of names, faces, context, and their 70 + years living under Israeli colonisation completely ignored. Bizarrely, peaceful protesters against Israeli savagery in Gaza in France, Germany, Britain and the US, among many, have themselves been labelled as terrorists and arrested.


France banned pro-Palestine demonstrations within days; police invoked emergency powers against students wearing the keffiyeh. The UK Home Secretary equated Palestinian flags with “support for terrorism”. Germany’s Berlin Senate excluded Palestinian speakers under the IHRA definition. These measures show how racialised imperial violence abroad is coupled with shrinking anti-racist space at home.

Trump’s ‘War’ on Immigration

The role of racism in Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is not incidental—it is the engine. From his 2015 campaign launch to the executive orders signed on Day 1 of his second term, Trump has consistently racialised immigrants, fused white-nationalist grievance with policy, and leveraged state power to punish Black, Brown and Muslim communities. Bizarrely the United States economic growth has historically largely been fuelled by immigration- but only immigration from the ‘right’ places; from Western Europe.

Trump’s language about immigrants betrays the racist underpinnings of his anti-immigration policies -‘“These aren’t people. These are animals” (referring to Central-American migrants), “Shithole countries” (Jan 2018): Trump asked why the US admits people from Haiti, El Salvador or Africa instead of Norway..

Such statements activate what scholars call “demographobia”: the fear among whites that they are being “replaced” by higher-fertility non-white minorities.

The Great Replacement theory—the belief that elites are deliberately replacing whites with non-white immigrants—moved from far-right chatrooms to Trump’s 2025 National Emergency declaration, which frames migration as an “invasion” threatening “national character”.

Further Reading & Tools

All links open in a new tab. Bookmark this list for classroom or activist use.

Feel free to republish under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 with attribution to the author and a live link to this post.

The demise of the U.S. ‘rule based order’?

The following is an AI Qwen based analysis of the impact of the U.S. ‘rule based international order’ and the reality of the chaos, wars and destruction its supposed ‘rules’ exert on the world.

The development of this post was promoted by the overwhelming number of New Zealand international political ‘analysts’ who quote the ‘U.S. rule based order’, (not the U.N. set of obligations) as some kind of golden age of civilisation , peace and freedom. -the reality could not be more stark. They fear that the new Trump administration-cum-oligarchy will no longer adhere to that ‘rule based order’ .

So why are these ‘analysts’ referring so enthusiastically to these great ‘rules’ that have caused so much suffering in the world?

It has recently been revealed (Feb.2025) via Wikileaks that the US government’s USAID ‘programme’ has been funding a US ‘non-government’ agency Internews Network, with millions upon millions of dollars to ensure Western media around the world regurgitate media messages ‘consistent’ (tell-tale identical phrasing in news items on issues from Covid responses to the Ukraine war and Russia), with US foreign policy objectives. Could it be that Western university international affairs ‘analysts’ (and politicians) have been similarly compromised over a long period of time?

I leave it to you to judge where their ‘influences’ come from.

AI analysis follows:

The concept of a “rules-based international order” is often invoked by the United States and its allies to describe a system of global governance that emphasizes adherence to international laws, norms, and institutions such as the United Nations, international treaties, and trade agreements. Proponents argue that this order promotes peace, stability, and cooperation among nations by providing a framework for resolving disputes and fostering mutual interests.

However, critics argue that the U.S.-led “rules-based order” has been selectively applied, often serving as a justification for military interventions, economic sanctions, and other forms of coercion that have led to significant human suffering, including mass murder, wars, and violence.

1. Selective Enforcement of Rules

  • Double Standards: Critics argue that the U.S. and its allies have frequently violated the very principles they claim to uphold. For example, the U.S. has engaged in military interventions without UN Security Council approval (e.g., the 2003 invasion of Iraq), while condemning other countries for similar actions. This selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of the “rules-based order” and can lead to conflicts where weaker states feel justified in acting outside the system.
  • Regime Change and Destabilization: The U.S. has supported or directly engaged in regime change operations in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria, often under the guise of promoting democracy or protecting human rights. These interventions have frequently resulted in prolonged civil wars, state collapse, and mass civilian casualties. In Iraq, for instance, the 2003 invasion led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, widespread displacement, and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS.

2. Economic Warfare and Sanctions

  • Sanctions as a Tool of Coercion: The U.S. has frequently used economic sanctions as a tool to punish or pressure countries that defy its interests. While sanctions are often framed as a “non-violent” alternative to war, they can have devastating humanitarian consequences. For example, U.S. sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians due to lack of access to food, medicine, and clean water. Similarly, sanctions on countries like Venezuela and Iran have exacerbated economic crises, leading to widespread poverty and suffering.
  • Weaponizing Global Institutions: The U.S. has also been accused of weaponizing international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to impose structural adjustment programs on developing countries, which often result in austerity measures, increased inequality, and social unrest. This economic violence can indirectly fuel conflict and instability.

3. Proxy Wars and Arms Sales

  • Arming Conflicts: The U.S. is the world’s largest arms exporter, supplying weapons to both state and non-state actors around the globe. These arms sales often fuel conflicts in regions like the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. For example, U.S. arms supplied to Saudi Arabia have been used in the Yemeni Civil War, resulting in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, with tens of thousands of civilians killed and millions facing famine.
  • Proxy Wars: During the Cold War, the U.S. engaged in numerous proxy wars, supporting anti-communist forces in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America. These conflicts often involved backing authoritarian regimes or insurgent groups that committed atrocities against civilian populations. In Afghanistan, for example, U.S. support for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War helped create conditions that eventually led to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

4. Militarization and the “War on Terror”

  • Global War on Terror: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. launched the “Global War on Terror,” which has been used to justify military interventions, drone strikes, and indefinite detentions in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. These operations have often been conducted with little regard for international law or civilian casualties. Drone strikes, in particular, have been criticized for causing significant collateral damage, killing thousands of civilians, and radicalizing local populations.
  • Normalization of Violence: The rhetoric of the “rules-based order” often masks the normalization of violence as a means of achieving foreign policy objectives. The U.S. military-industrial complex benefits from perpetual warfare, and the language of “humanitarian intervention” or “counterterrorism” is sometimes used to legitimize aggressive military actions that result in mass death and destruction.

5. Undermining Sovereignty and Self-Determination

  • Imperialism and Neocolonialism: Critics argue that the U.S.-led “rules-based order” often serves as a cover for imperialist policies that undermine the sovereignty of weaker states. By imposing economic and political conditions on countries through institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. and its allies have been accused of perpetuating a form of neocolonialism that stifles self-determination and exacerbates inequality.
  • Resistance and Blowback: When countries resist U.S. hegemony or attempt to assert their independence, they are often subjected to punitive measures, including coups, invasions, or covert operations. This resistance can lead to cycles of violence, as seen in cases like Iran (1953 coup), Chile (1973 coup), and more recently, Venezuela and Syria. The blowback from these interventions can manifest in the form of terrorism, insurgency, and regional instability.

Conclusion

While the U.S. and its allies present the “rules-based international order” as a framework for peace and stability, critics argue that it has often been used to justify interventions, sanctions, and other forms of coercion that result in mass violence and human suffering. The selective application of rules, the militarization of foreign policy, and the prioritization of U.S. strategic interests over international law have contributed to a legacy of wars, destabilization, and humanitarian crises. In many cases, the very principles of sovereignty, self-determination, and human rights that the “rules-based order” claims to uphold are undermined by the actions of those who enforce it.

New Zealand Aligns itself with Genocide

23/01/23

New Zealand’s new Coalition government has, as of 23rd January 2023, formally agreed to support Israel’s genocide in Palestine by agreeing (at US request) to provide a small military force to support the American ‘coalition” to bombard Yemen.

The New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon, has committed outrageous lies to say there is no connection between the Gaza terror and the actions of Ansarallah (Houthi). Ansarallah has made it abundantly clear that the reason it has been attacking shipping heading to Israel is to try and force Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mr Luxon is self-evidently lying through his teeth in saying there is no connection between the Red Sea attacks by Ansarallah and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, our ‘great’ New Zealand journalists at the news conference where Luxon was interviewed on the Yemen announcement, blindly accepted these lies without a question.

The UK and US in their bombing campaign in Yemen are simply continuing the genocide that their previous Saudi proxy had waged in Yemen for 9 years from 2014, using American and UK weapons, American and UK military instructors and guidance systems, and in all likelihood, “retired” British and American pilots to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world.

New Zealand’s conservative National Party which Chris Luxon leads, has a long history of sucking up to every US war of atrocity- from Korea, (shelling North Korean fishing villages from our warships) Vietnam (sustained mortar fire into Vietnamese villages), Iraq( hiding in their military camp in Basra) , Afghanistan (supporting the US and Australians to murder and torture Afghans) to its proxy war in Ukraine ( providing logistics to Ukrainian neonazis to shell Donetsk City civilians with cluster munitions) ; but all tiny amounts of military support  intended to bolster the U.S.’s ‘legitimacy’ in fighting these wars on the world stage.

However, the United States no longer has the credibility or respect of the Global South or indeed much of the world; particularly because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal savagery in Gaza.

As Caitlin Johnstone notes:

We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.

Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.

The National Party, along with its right wing allies; New Zealand First and ACT, are stuck in a time warp where the “civilised’ white man rules the world, and might is right.

New Zealand’s credibility globally has just sunk to a new low.

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Links

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/01/hoping-that-china-will-help-with-yemen-is-delusional-bullshit.html#more

A Change is Gonna Come..

The great Sam Cooke’s beautiful and visionary song ‘A Change Gonna Come’ epitomises the tipping point of a global transition we are now living through.

It seems astonishing that it cannot be understood that, as with individual’s power and influence, so too do nations rise and fall; from luck and opportunity -rarely from great leaders, and certainly never from the superiority of ‘race’.

It should be noted that the concept of human ‘races’ dates from deliberate misinterpretations of genetic theory.

The genetic variations between different human populations are so small that differing individual aptitudes of ‘intelligence’ -a quality entirely defined by culture and environments which either support or diminishes their mental and physical opportunities. Racial superiority is therefore a completely foolish myth used by those who wish to manipulate others for their own nefarious purposes.

A superb modern example of this cartoon-like myth of genetic superiority can be seen in this ‘white” ( more appropriately termed ‘pink’) supremacy painting circulated by one Carl Bildt – a former prime minister of Sweden and who one would have presumed to be an ‘intelligent’ man- alas not.

The painting depicts ‘racially superior’ Western Ukrainian Knights (descended from ‘Aryan’ Vikings in their myths) heroically destroying the evil Russian ‘orcs’ ( who are apparently ‘genetically inferior’ Asians , according to those same myths.)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is to be condemned- as is any violence directed against another country or peoples, but likewise, so are the actions of the Kiev government army in Donbass , killing its own population since 2014. There is good evidence to suggest that Western European countries and the U.S. actively encouraged , financed and weaponised the Kiev government to fight the Russian speaking Donbass ‘separatists’ for 8 years, and ignore the Minsk agreements Kiev had signed up to- agreements that would have restored peace to Ukraine.

Perhaps Carl Bildt’s tweet is one clue to the West’s determination to ensure a war between Russia and Ukraine.

And we can see racial prejudice in the extreme brutality against the Korean people in the Korean war ( what can only be called genocide)– a war between Europeanised countries supporting a brutal dictatorship in South Korea against a nationalist Korean communist army in the North supported by the Chinese and Russians.

Or perhaps we can see it in the savagery Western armies fought against a Vietnamese army trying to restore their country’s independence. Or the obliteration by the U.S. of an almost defenceless Iraqi army and Iraqi civilian infrastructure ( a society battered to its knees by remorseless evil sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children to the apparent delight of that much esteemed U.S. stateswoman Madeline Albright) prior to the Iraq war.

Or perhaps in Libya, where Libyan society was obliterated by Western powers in a mad grab for its oil. Or the well-documented use of jihadists in Syria by Western governments attempting to overthrow the Damascus government. Or the unconditional U.S. and U.K. support of Israeli European ‘settlers’ who have steadily continued to violently steal the lands of those ‘dirty Arabs’ in Palestine for the past 74 years.

The ‘Nakba” 1949. Expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine at Israeli gunpoint

And shall we remember the barbarous futility of the war in Afghanistan?- where the United States continues to believe it has the right to steal Afghan state bank money ( along with the theft of Venezuelan government and Russian state funds)

And we do not need to go back more than a century to know about the complete lack of morality of European and United States colonial troops or their proxies in Africa, India, South America or the Philippines.

In addition, the development of the Western controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund, have provided a secondary opportunity for Western countries to exploit and defraud by ‘legal’means former colonies of their resources.

We are talking about centuries of barbaric ‘white ‘ conquest and exploitation of most of the globe by force. And now, the times they are a changing.

With Russia being forced to turn East because of Western sanctions, and China now a very much an ascendant super-power, previously ‘third-world’ countries are beginning to asset themselves in the face of Western blackmail, bribery and military coercion.

The June 2022 Los Angeles meeting of the Organisation of American States was characterised by the courage of the Argentinian president calling out the United State’s presumptuous decision to ban South American countries it did not like ( Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela). Bizarrely the former Empire of Spain has permanent observer status at OAS meetings.

A number of the South Pacific island nations, previously beholden to their former colonisers and exploiters, Australia and New Zealand, are now looking north-west for economic and security agreements with China; agreements which are signed from a position of equality, not colonial subjugation. Ironically Australia has recently sent their Malaysian born Chinese born foreign minister Penny Wong, to the island nations to try and recoup the ‘damage’ to the West, by displaying a more ‘non-white’ face to the Pacific, while New Zealand sends its Maori foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta – but the island nations are not fooled by this subterfuge; they know their history by heart. All the while, the United States simply makes threats to the Chinese on the sidelines.

Pacific nations are well aware of the bizarre racist viciousness from the whole Australian political spectrum against refugees and migrants, or indeed the decades long exploitation of seasonal Pasifika workers who harvest crops in Queensland and New Zealand.

Western media portrays these agreements with China as threats to the ‘rule based order’: the United States’ unilateral and often erratic and nonsensical set of decisions to exploit other countries, (‘rules’ much quoted by New Zealand’s Jacinda Adern), on what other countries should do unless they want to be threatened militarily, rather than an extension of China’s mutual trade agreements to supplement her hugely ambitious Belt and Road commerce initiative across the globe.

As has been often noted, China has one foreign military base, while the United States has at last count, 800 overseas military bases; all designed to intimidate at least one other country, or to intimidate the very country in which the military base is itself located, to follow the ‘rules’.

China has never been a colonial power. However, let us not be fooled into thinking that just because a currently weaker or emerging country does not as yet display the barbarity of the current ascendant countries (like the U.S. and U.K.) that does not mean that those arising powers will not descend into the same myopic and racist stupidity of thinking that they are somehow the exceptional nation, somehow always bound for glory.

Racism is not the distinct province of ‘white’ people, as those who were brutalised by the Japanese in the Second World War well remember.

All nations, when they ‘ascend’ to a position of power and global influence, are wont to believe in the fantasy that they are somehow naturally superior to others.

But we are definitively all equal as human beings.

My hope is that some time in the not too distant future, we realise that all other species are our equals too. Different skills, different attributes, but equal. Without that realisation we humans will continue to exploit this world until the natural world collapses around us – perhaps at that point we may realise we are an intrinsic and inseparable part of that natural world and that we need to cooperate – not destroy.

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Links

https://www.eurointelligence.com/column/the-west-and-the-rest

https://orinocotribune.com/solomon-islands-build-up-to-the-us-war-against-china/

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3180953/eyes-others-us-not-benign-power-it-thinks-it

https://fee.org/articles/perpetuating-poverty-the-world-bank-the-imf-and-the-developing-world/

Nuclear testing and colonisation explain Pacific Island Nations’ alignment with China

Ukraine and the NeoNazis

The conflict in Ukraine grinds on. The recent talks in Istanbul between Ukrainian Kiev representatives and the Russians indicated some small steps to a peaceful settlement.

However the largest stumbling block in the long-term (aside from further American military involvement in Ukraine after the war ends), is the de-nazification of Ukraine.

While Western media frequently displayed concern prior to 2014 of neo-nazi elements in Ukraine, we are now told that nazis are a figment in the imagination of the Russians- an excuse to invade Ukraine. However the history and evidence of neonazis in Ukraine is unequivocal, dating back to the Ukrainian nationalist movements of the late 19th century, where pride in a Ukrainian state was tied to Ukrainian slavic racial identity- unique (and vastly superior) to either Russians or Poles, and most certainly Jews and Gypsies.

The now ‘Hero of Ukraine’ Stepan Bandera is one of many extreme Ukrainian nationalists who espoused the fantasy of genetic superiority of ‘true’ Ukrainians.

The superiority of one or other of the ‘white’ races was an accepted and normative view of many Western populations and governments after Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” was published in 1859. What else could explain the ease with which European and American forces could over-run, terrorise, enslave and loot countries in Asia, Africa and South America, if it was not that those races were ‘inferior’?

The Empires of Britain, Belgium, France, Holland and Germany and the United States’ colonies, were proof enough of the ‘white’ man’s superiority! A superiority, they reasoned that was timeless. The ‘science’ of eugenics allowed Western citizens to indulge in a fantasy world that explained and validated their brutality of other countries’ citizens.

The German physician and anthropologist Alfred Ploetz first laid out the major assumptions and definition of “racial hygiene” in his book, entitled “Foundations of a Eugenics” in 1895.

Many clinicians in the United States particularly became passionate eugenicists- eager to ensure that only the ‘purest’ survived. The film “Black Stork” of 1917 epitomises the eugenicist approach.

The current American view of the United States as the ‘exceptional nation’ continues to embody much of these bizarre prejudices.

As Samuel Phillips Huntingdon noted in his “The Clash of Civilizations (1996)“; The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values of religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted), but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ book of 1925 simply piggy-backed on the flawed concepts of eugenics- creating an elaborate fantasy about the genetic superiority of the ‘genius’ Aryan race, of which the Germanic tribes were the ultimate and lesser ‘races’ could be exterminated.

In turn, Ukrainian nationalists seized on the ‘principles’ of eugenics and later the racial aspects of National Socialism (Nazism) as a way to ‘purify” Ukraine from the inferior ‘invader’ races; the Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Russians. The Ukrainian nationalist groups,; the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera ( established in 1929) , and others vacillated between enthusiastically supporting the Nazis in their brutal occupation of Ukraine , and trying to create a Ukrainian state free of both the German Nazis, communists, Jews and Russian speakers.

While Stepan Bandera and many of the other Ukrainian nationalists were eliminated by the Soviet Union after the second world war, their dream of a ‘pure’ Ukraine lived on- largely in Canada in the significant Ukrainian diaspora there, and in the United States.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992, new opportunities for the Banderites and other Ukrainian nationalists arose, supported through discreet channels in the United States, British and likely Canadian intelligence communities as a way to undermine and dismantle Russia; (which continued to be seen as a potential threat to Western interests, despite no longer being communist).

Endemic corruption throughout Ukraine facilitated and funded the growth of violent neo-nazi militarized groups, like the Azov and Aidar battalions and the Right Sector political party.

Once the United States had enabled the Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 and eliminated any possibility of Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians having a political voice in Ukraine, those extreme nationalist groups were able to consolidate their power, and their para-military groups were formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military’s structure.

The Azov and Aidar battalions particularly were thus able to access the vast amount of NATO weaponry pouring into the country after 2014. (Note that while Ukraine is not, and likely never will be , a NATO ‘member’, it is formally recognised as a NATO ‘ally’, and its military structures and weaponry are completely aligned with NATO structures).

While extreme nationalist parties have not been able to grab a significant proportion of the people’s votes in Ukrainian elections, their influence on the internal mechanics of the ruling political party, Zelensky’s “Servant of the People”, has been considerable. The Jewish and Russian-speaking Zelensky was voted in as Ukrainian President in 2019 on a platform of ending the war in Eastern Ukraine (the Donbass), but promptly had to reverse his position under threat from nationalist leaders.

The Ukrainian Army war (predominantly via the neo-nazi battalions) against the separatist Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine- (the Donbass), thus dragged on for 8 years after 2014 ,with the loss of 14,000 lives- mainly Russian speakers in the Donbass.

As the war with Russia too drags on, more and more stories and videos are surfacing of the savagery and brutality of those neo-nazi groups and the much feared government ‘Security Service of Ukraine’ (the SBU), in Eastern Ukraine.

The neo-nazi Banderite theology after all, states that morality is not something to take into account when addressing the needs of the state. The goal of a ‘pure’ Ukrainian state takes all precedence over morality, and the ‘cockroach’ Russian speakers can therefore be brutalised and eliminated with impunity, as they are not ‘pure ‘ Ukrainians, if indeed they are really human at all.

Such sadistic and thuggish views have become endemic in Ukrainian society; particularly, but not exclusively in the Western regions of Ukraine. 8 years of white supremacist propaganda have done their work on the population.

‘It’s February 16, 2019, in Ukraine, and the stairs of the “Horodok” shopping mall in Kyiv — on a street named after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera — have been lit up with a giant swastika. Nobody seems to react! Incredible !’

Or perhaps this…

Not only has the Ukrainian population been propagandized into accepting Nazi ideology as ‘normal’ and acceptable in the face of the Russian threat, but Western media has, since the beginning of the war, been simultaneously pumping out denials of the existence of Nazis in Ukraine whilst showing videos of them in the war!

As a New Zealander, I am ashamed to note that our government is circulating neo-nazi media stories and videos on its state funded media, while decrying the mass shooting of Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019 by an Australian white supremacist who had explicit connections with the Azov Battalion.

And so, as Westerners, we are astonished as to why the Russians would invade Ukraine, when the Ukrainians are just trying to live peaceful lives with the help of the West and NATO! ( which ‘clearly’ is not a threat to Russia , (despite arming all its neighbours to the teeth with weaponry!)

The level of hostility to all things Russian, along with a complete unwillingness to show a Russian perspective about the war in Western media, would indicate that the white Western world is at war with Russia in all but name.

Putin therefore must be depicted as a cartoon mad-man character whose lust for power has resulted in his deranged invasion of little Ukraine.

This does not mean that we should not condemn the Russian invasion in the strongest possible terms- we most certainly should.

But instead of attempting to re-arm the Ukrainians and prolong a dreadful war where millions have been displaced and thousands killed and wounded, we need to acknowledge the enormous threat that a re-energised nazi movement has; not just for Ukraine and Russia, and as Germany once again, re-arms, but for the world, and remove the possibility of a Nazi party ever coming to power again in the world.

We owe that to our children!

We are all humanly equal in this world; we may not all have the same experiences and opportunities in life- but we are indubitably equal and all worthy of kindness, love and respect.

Postscript:

An in-depth damning report from Jacques Baud: a former colonel of the Swiss General Staff, an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries, trained in the American and British intelligence services, and a Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. Jacques Baud details the explicit complicity of NATO members in the Kiev government’s war using the Neonazis paramilitaries against Russian speakers in the Donbass since 2014, and their deliberate intent to provoke Russia into military action in Ukraine.

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Links

https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/545134d251854fef65000001

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mein-Kampf

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html

https://www.academia.edu/12951527/The_Fascist_Kernel_of_Ukrainian_Genocidal_Nationalism

(SBU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_detention_centers_of_SBU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/eastern-front

https://www.globalmilitarynews.com/2022/03/17/under-the-wolfsangel-the-uncomfortably-truthful-reality-about-extreme-ideas-in-neo-nazi-ukrainian-politics/

The Military Situation In The Ukraine
Far-Right Group Made Its Home in Ukraine’s Major Western Military Training Hub

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-lobby-group-adl-rehabilitates-hitlers-accomplices-ukraine/35021

A War in Ukraine?- Again?

Kiev officials continue to describe the Donbass separatists as “terrorists’ even while the Kiev administration has signed up to negotiating with separatists as part of the Normandy and Minsk agreements – but has never actioned that agreement . Defining the separatists as ‘terrorists’ makes it virtually impossible for Kiev to negotiate anything with them. Kiev is supported in this position (at least officially) by Poland, the U.K and U.S.)

The new government in Berlin however appears to be currently more reticent in supporting Kiev in its aggressive stance and has declined Kiev’s request for more weapons. There are real risks to Ukraine’s neighbours of neo-nazi military brigades like the Azov battalion and other extremist groups supported by the Right Sector, that those groups would not only continue to fight against the Donbass separatists , kill Russian speaking Ukrainians in other parts of Ukraine, and, as in the past, Poles and Jews as well as Russian speakers elsewhere, but also foment trouble in disaffected youth in their own countries…

The U.K. and the U.S. continue to support these extremist groups with arms and training , as they have done since the end of the Second World War (using the extremist OUN-B group led by Stepan Bandera ( now an official hero of the Kiev government ), in an effort to destabilize first the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation and the Donbass.

Despite the 9/11 blowback that occurred with the U.S. and U.K support of Saudi and Turkish backed wahhabist extremists in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the strategy of using local extremists continues to be a key item in the U.S. destabilisation playbook. Extensive Ukraine government and Right Sector media has portrayed Western Ukrainian as ‘true slavs’, unlike the Russians in the north and east who are deemed to be lesser beings with eastern mongol genes; a strategy that gives permission for extremist groups like the Azov battalions to exterminate Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians with impunity.

Berlin’s current reticence to fully support the NATO and U.K./U.S. agenda in Ukraine appears to come from a sudden realization that they are hugely reliant on Russian gas. The Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russian to Germany was initiated at the insistence of Germany with the understanding that Russian gas would not only be much cheaper than U.S. gas shipped across the Atlantic to Germany, but was also both more reliable and able to be delivered in greater volumes than the Americans could ever provide. Germany’s economy therefore relies on cheap Russian gas, particularly now that its coal fired electricity producers have been largely shut down in response to climate change concerns . The German government therefore walks a tightrope between supporting its NATO allies, and getting the energy it needs for its economy .

The Russians have insisted that the expansion of NATO up to its borders be reversed ( an outcome of the negotiations that led to East Germany and the other Easter European countries becoming independent from Russia in the 1990s, on the verbal understanding that NATO would not expand beyond its 1990s borders). U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and NATO’s Stoltenberg have insisted that that agreement never existed ( despite multiple citings of evidence of its existence) and that NATO will continue to expand its membership and site weapons wherever it wishes to, regardless of the resultant explicit threat to Russia’s existence..

Exactly what NATOs current purpose is now that communist Soviet Russia has gone, is never explicitly stated, but it is clear that its purpose is to stop Russian ‘aggression’ and intimidate Russia through ongoing military threats. U.S. think tanks have also intimated their wish that Russia be balkanised, so that the carve-up of Russia’s economy can continue from the Yeltsin years, and so that Russia does not have the capacity to militarily oppose any Western military plans (as it has done in Syria).

While Western media and the U.S. continue to hype up the threat of a Russian land invasion of the Ukraine ( with extensive videos of Russian tanks conducting military exercises in Russia), the reality is that it would simply not be worth-while for Russia to invade Ukraine with tanks and troops.

It is possible however, that if the Kiev government or its extremist wings were to launch a large scale attack on the Russian speaking Donbass ( emboldened by Western weapons supplies and bombacity) that Russia would feel obliged to protect its Russian speaking neighbours and respond militarily. Sending columns of Russian tanks into Eastern Ukraine, let alone across the Dnieper River into Western Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalism is most fierce, would however be a suicidal endeavour; not least because the Ukrainian economy is devastated after years of corruption and mismanagement, and Russia would have to take responsibility for economically supporting 37 million Ukrainians, whilst countering an Eastern Ukrainian insurgency (supported and trained by the U.S. and U.K)

Russian not only wants a NATO pullback, but also the Kiev government to officially adhere to and implement the Minsk agreements they signed up to-i.e. negotiate with the Donbass separatists and agree to their self-government within a Ukrainian federal structure. However the level of Kiev propaganda against the ‘terrorists’ in the East and against Russian speaking people generally, seems to indicate that such a compromise is currently not possible; particularly while the extremist right wing groups hold such sway in Kiev. Those groups would also be fearful that a re-integration of the Donbass population into a federal Ukrainian democratic framework, would tip the balance towards a national government that once again would be more favorable to Russia, and likely result in many of the underhand deals that have occurred since 2014 between the Kiev government and Ukrainian oligarchs, being re-aligned once more towards Russian interests.

Ukraine is in crisis; its young people drifting in the multitudes to more favourable economic conditions in Western Europe, and an accelerating drift towards a centralized autocracy in Kiev driven largely by extremist groups like the Right Sector, with corruption widespread throughout the economy. The loss of revenues from Russia from the Russian gas pipeline which passes through Ukraine to Europe (and the siphoning of some of that gas for Ukraine’s use) with the inevitable advent of the opening of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline to Germany and beyond, via the Baltic Sea , will only exacerbate this crisis. The Ukrainian ex-comedian President Zelensky’s position is extremely fragile- torn between the demands of the ever-increasing power of the right wing extremists in Kiev and Western Ukraine, and the demands of the U.S and U.K., while his popularity with the majority of Ukrainians plummets. Zelensky has tried to eliminate some of his key political rivals like Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk, with legal challenges of ‘treason’, but the opposition forces are gathering against him.

What options does someone like Zelensky now have in the face of such challenges ? War can so often improve a leader’s political chances..

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Links

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/16/common-sense-and-self-preservation-go-mainstream-in-washington-d-c-capitulation-to-russian-demands-becomes-discussable/

CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine since 1953

The tragedy that is Julian Assange

Julian Assange will one day be universally feted as a hero for the right of men to know the truth about the brutality and lies of their own governments- who talk of freedom and democracy while engaging in never-ending acts of extreme violence against those they wish to exploit, for power and money.

There is not much that can be added to the articles linked below which describe the pathetic show trial that is the U.K. Assange criminal proceedings and their likely approval of his extradition to the United States for a further show trial and imprisonment in the United State’s appallingly brutal criminal ‘justice’ system.

Julian Assange will one day be universally feted as a hero for the right of men to know the truth about the brutality and lies of their own governments- who talk of freedom and democracy while engaging in never-ending acts of extreme violence against those they wish to exploit, for power and money.

Sadly that day has not yet come.

As Chris Hedges notes in his article below:

Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the Director General of the UK Security Service or MI5.

Those people will be now forever known as the scourge of freedom, justice, human rights, compassion and humanity….. and unlike Julian Assange, they will eventually be given a fair trial for their criminality.

_______________________________________________Links

ttps://scheerpost.com/2021/12/13/hedges-the-execution-of-julian-assange/

The Judicial Kidnapping of Julian Assange
No justice for Julian Assange, but plenty of cruelty
Your Man Back in the Public Gallery: Assange Extradition, US Appeal Result
US/UK: “Travesty of justice” as extradition appeal fails to recognise that it would be unsafe for Julian Assange to be sent to the US
Amnesty International : US/UK: “Travesty of justice” as extradition appeal fails to recognise that it would be unsafe for Julian Assange to be sent to the US
“A Lot of Mistakes”: The Guardian and Julian Assange 
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/09/30/inside-the-cia-plot-to-kidnap-kill-julian-assange/
https://scheerpost.com/2021/12/10/rewind-julian-assanges-father-and-brother-on-the-public-and-personal-urgency-of-his-case/

https://thedissenter.org/assange-plans-appeal-high-court-decision-extradition/

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/classified-documents-cast-doubt-on-us-assurances-for-assange

https://thedissenter.org/assange-plans-appeal-high-court-decision-extradition/

A ‘Terrorist’ in New Zealand

On 3rd September 2021, a Sri Lankan refugee,  Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, 32, living in Auckland New Zealand , stabbed 6 people with a knife he had just picked up from a supermarket shelf.

According to later reports the man had been once again seeking asylum in New Zealand for some years, but had been denied because of previous violent actions and an interest in ISIS literature, and had been released from a New Zealand prison 3 years before the attacks.

During the subsequent years from Ahamed’s release, he had been constantly followed by Police when out and about in Auckland, to monitor his actions and keep others safe.

Auckland was in lockdown 4 at the time of the supermarket attack- masks required and no less than 2 metres between people in places like supermarkets. Within hours the New Zealand prime minister was announcing that this was a ‘terrorist attack’, and that the man was known to her. However Ahamed Aathill Mohamed made no known statements about allegiance to ISIS immediately before his death, and no terrorist organization attributed the stabbings to themselves.

The terror, trauma and physical danger to those he attacked is beyond question, and this blog does not in any way endorse his or any other person’s violent behaviour to others.

With 60 seconds of his knifing of 6 people in the supermarket, he was fatally shot 7 times by Police with semi automatic weapons, who had been following him.

We might contrast his fatal shooting with the response of the Police to a knife attack by a New Zealand European in Dunedin some 4 months before, when at least 4 people were injured. The man was apprehended without injury, and is now in gaol, and has been described as having a mental health issue.

Or again the horrendous Mosque shootings in Christchurch in March 2019 where 51 people were killed and 40 injured, by a white supremacist using automatic rifles, the white male was subdued, unharmed, heroically by a police officer.

While we acknowledge that every violent incident is different and must necessarily be handled differently by Police, it does seem strange that a man in an enclosed supermarket aisle with a kitchen knife, could not be subdued without fatal consequences, by a number of police officers who were presumably wearing protective clothing.

Police subsequently noted that their policy is to shoot for the largest body surface area (i.e. the torso) so that they don’t miss the target, but clearly other options than shooting the attacker were possible, or alternatively those seven shots could have immobilised him in that enclosed space, without causing his death.

We know that Ahamed’s life history before his arrival in New Zealand as a young man was incredibly traumatic- witnessing his father being kidnapped and almost killed, and himself being tortured by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The Spinoff notes that Ahamed ‘had been in New Zealand since 2011 when he arrived on a student visa. He made a claim for refugee status soon after, but was declined. He appealed, and was granted the status the following year. The prime minister said on Friday that his claim was based on a fraudulent document’

We also know that Ahamed had been on remand (i.e. charged with an offence but not convicted in court) in New Zealand for threatening activities for some years before his conviction – during which time he was held in prison, but was not able to access any supports that might have reduced his risk to himself or others because he had at that stage not been convicted and the government was attempting to deport him. Additionally once released from gaol after his conviction, he was constantly tailed by armed Police; actions which would not have helped his fear and paranoia.

It is clear that Ahamed was acutely distressed because of his trauma, but did not receive the necessary supports by New Zealand authorities to reduce the impacts of that trauma and distress. Instead, he was immediately labelled a ‘terrorist’ by the New Zealand prime minister and the New Zealand media after his death, and there was no call for an independent review into his death.

Is it coincidental that 3 violent attacks were handled so very differently by Police; that a dark skinned man could so easily be deemed a terrorist and shot dead, but two white males, despite the acute violence of their attacks, be subdued without fatality?

We are informed that the New Zealand government, in a knee-jerk reaction to this attack, now wants to ‘tighten’ the responses around ‘terrorist activities’. Andrew Geddis has noted that the draft legislation’s proposal, allowing for people to be prosecuted for planning an activity, but not actually executing that plan , is currently an unheard of judicial procedure in New Zealand.

Listen to the University of Otago Peace and Conflict studies debate about the ‘terrorist attack’ below.

We need to acknowledge too, that no act of violence is acceptable; whether it be in a persons’ home, a random attack in public, a terrorist attack, or violence by the state.

The terror of those 2997 killed, and the trauma experienced by those many bereaved and the first responders to the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, are very real and still raw. However the barbaric responses to those attacks by the United States and their ‘Coalition of the Willing’, defies both logic and humanity. Millions of people in Arab nations killed, economies and environments ravaged, and thousands tortured or drone murdered, with the rationale being suppression of terrorism, rather than the reality of more arms sales and theft of foreign resources, and the resultant creation of more angry terrorists.

As Chris Hedges notes, those responses are the work of evil killers. The fact that ex President George W Bush can stand up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and be applauded in Western media for his demonic destruction of Iraq, and Afghanistan, defies belief.

In any sane and just society, such a man ( along with the deranged Tony Blair and their other neoliberal cronies)

Tony Blair shaking hands with Mike Pompeo (ex U.S. Secretary of State)

would have long ago been locked away for their lifetimes – for the common good.

What we desperately need now is for ex-colonial states like New Zealand, to show global leadership in addressing terror threats, in the absence of leadership from the larger powers.

We need to undertake more research to explore opportunities to better respond to threats of violence, to implement strategies that reduce group and individual threats of terror; through acknowledging the genuine basis of the anger, trauma and fear that created those threats, acknowledging that often our state responses to ‘terror’ threats by ‘others with dark skins’ is a relic of our racist and colonial history, (as witnessed by New Zealand Police’s infamous ‘anti-terrorist’ raids into the Ureweras in 2007); and beginning to treat responses to terror threats as a normal and just and equitable part of our range of enforcement and judicial responses to violence, which respects everyone’s human rights, rather than something that needs to be responded to beyond the normal rule of law.

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Links

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300384815/man-shot-dead-by-police-six-injured-after-terror-attack-at-aucklands-lynnmall-countdown

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/09/auckland-terror-attack-new-zealand-reacts-in-shock-to-new-lynn-stabbing.html

https://www.dw.com/en/new-zealand-man-stabs-5-in-supermarket-knife-attack/a-57479834

https://scheerpost.com/2021/09/10/hedges-the-evil-we-do-is-the-evil-we-get/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings

https://www.police.govt.nz/major-events/new-lynn-incident-operation-rally

The story of the Auckland terrorist

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/05/new-zealand-stabbings-officials-tried-for-years-to-deport-terrorist-prior-to-auckland-attack-jacinda-adern-says

Would harsher terrorism laws have prevented the mall attack?

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/341457/ten-years-on-from-the-urewera-raids

9/11: Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked

‘Highly Likely’ in Afghanistan

The last United States and its ‘partners” troops have now left Afghanistan after almost 20 years of futile war with the Taliban.

The chaotic tragedy over the last week of desperate Afghans wanting to leave Afghanistan via Kabul Airport for a better and safer life, is now also over.

In the final few days of the exodus, the Taliban apparently informed United States forces of a likely threat from ISIS Khorasan forces at Kabul Airport. A suicide bomber duly arrived at one of the U.S. entry points to the airport and blew himself up, killing himself, an indeterminate number of Afghans (in the 100s), and 12 U.S. force personnel.

It would appear from Afghan accounts on the ground that the U.S. soldiers in the surrounding watchtowers then panicked and opened fire with automatic fire on the Afghans below- killing at least another 100 people.

Subsequent to the ISIS attack, the U.S. president stated in the usual petulant child-like way of American presidents that, ‘vengeance shall be ours’; rather than a thoughtful and lawful approach to such acts of premeditated murder which act to limit the risks of further attacks.

 “To those who carried out this attack … we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.”-Joe Biden

(Interesting to note that President Jo Biden also noted the ‘droned’ Iranian General Suleimani as a terrorist threat they had ‘eliminated’ in the past. Suleimani has been well vindicated as the key person managing the destruction of the ISIS threat in Iraq

Miraculously U.S. forces already knew the location of the planners of the ISIS attack and duly dispatched a drone to kill the planners and further attackers. (why the attackers weren’t arrested or killed before the attack is not explained)

The U.S. subsequently reported (as per usual) that it was ‘highly likely’ that the ISIS K planners and bombers had been killed in the drone attack. Given the history of U.S. drone attacks it is also ‘highly likely’ that those killed were guilty of owning several goats that were coveted by a neighbour who had then reported them as ISIS K combatants to the authorities.

One notes that the images of the vehicle supposedly hit by the subsequent U.S. drone attack show a somewhat burnt out vehicle-not a vehicle with a bomb on board, as claimed by the Americans , which would have disintegrated with the explosion of the ISIS bomb, after the drone missile impact.

Unsurprisingly the ruling Taliban have objected to the U.S. launching drone attacks on sovereign Afghan territory, but any objections by the Taliban will be ignored as the U.S. continues to bomb and drone Afghans that it believes are ‘highly likely’ to be terrorists. Only once the Taliban acquire anti-air missiles ( as the Mujahedeen before them did ) will the scourge of drone warfare be over.

With the elimination of U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan, the Taliban are now free to follow up in every corner of the country, the threat that their mortal enemy ISIS, poses to Afghan security.

We know for certain that the United States did indeed facilitate the rise of extremist Wahhabist movements including Al Qaeda across the Middle East-in collaboration with U.K. ‘special’ forces, the Saudis, Turkey and some of the Gulf ministates; initially to confront the Russian forces in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and later to attack any secular government that the American and their ‘partners’ saw as a threat to their control of local resources.

We also know that the Iranians, Syrians and Russians have long complained about the U.S. facilitating the rise and ongoing support of ISIS groups in the Middle East, including the transport by helicopter of ISIS remnants from Syria into Afghanistan, and training and support by the Israelis of ISIS Syrian teams. How true are those statements from the Russians Syrians and Iranians? However we do know that the American’s definition of what they have traditionally called ‘moderate’ jihadists in the Middle East, is not one shared by many.

Despite the calls for an end to the drone murders, it is ‘highly likely’ that the Americans will continue to provide any excuse to continue to “precision’ bomb, drone and assassinate anyone they believe is not in their best economic interests and will support a new Mujahideen to confront the now more moderate ruling Afghan Taliban.

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Other Links

Trump’s Fatal Mistake: Killing Soleimani vs. Countering ISIS
Media Bury Story That US May Have Fired on Crowd at Airport
https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/30/demand-for-moratorium-on-drone-warfare-follows-latest-u-s-killing-of-afghan-civilians/

https://richardfalk.org/2021/08/29/crime-and-punishment-in-afghanistan/

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/blowback-taliban-target-us-intels-shadow-army/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09592318.2020.1777618

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201802211061871761-us-helicopters-transporting-daesh/

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/31/c_1310158468.htm

https://realalexrubi.substack.com/p/did-the-us-support-the-growth-of

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/30/hedges-the-empire-does-not-forgive/

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/31/c_1310158157.htm

Western Hypocrisy on Afghanistan

As Hollywood has noted, and later U. S. records confirm, the predecessors to the Taliban, the U.S. funded and armed brutal Afghan Mujahideen or jihadist freedom fighters were instrumental in securing the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s , who were supporting the communist secular Afghan government in Kabul. A government it should be noted, who fully supported the rights of Afghan women to be educated, to work and live a life equal to men.

After several years of extreme violence and turmoil across Afghanistan, the Taliban came to power in the late 1990s,

As Consortium News notes: The triumphant Taliban imposed harsh Islamic law on Afghanistan. Their rule was especially cruel to women who had made gains toward equal rights under the communists, but were forced by the Taliban to live under highly restrictive rules, to cover themselves when in public, and to forgo schooling.

The Taliban also granted refuge to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s. Bin Laden then used Afghanistan as the base of operations for his terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, setting the stage for the next Afghan War in 2001.

After the 9/11 attacks in New York by Al Qaeda, the Taliban agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States. However their offer was refused, and instead President Bush launched a war to remove the Taliban from power beginning with a brutal bombing campaign in October 2001

If the purpose of Bush’s Afghan war was not to trap Osama bin Laden – what was the purpose?

The United States had been negotiating with the Taliban for an oil pipeline to traverse Afghanistan from Central Asian oil fields, and appeared to be on relatively good terms with them.

It was only much later that the hype about a humanitarian intervention for women’s rights etc came to the fore in Western media. However this supposed human rights agenda by the United States and the United Kingdom is contradicted by their wholehearted support for the brutal Mujahideen the Saudi regime, and their unconditional support for the Israeli genocidal actions against Palestinians (amongst many other brutal regimes supported and armed by Western governments)

This was simply one more racist colonial invasion; putting more money into the pockets of U.S. war profiteers.

See below, John Pilger’s video ‘Breaking the Silence’ from 10 years ago in Afghanistan

http://johnpilger.com/videos/breaking-the-silence-truth-and-lies-in-the-war-on-terror

As a Western person I oppose discrimination against any person of any gender or race- however I also oppose the barbaric use of violence to impose one’s will on others we do not agree with- something my country New Zealand has been complicit in along with other Western white countries.

Setting up an indigenous Afghan army funded and trained and managed by foreigners to oppose local people who they may in fact know by tribe or family, and who are trying to defend their country from invasion, was always a recipe for failure. Such troops’ only motivation could be their paycheck, not patriotism for their country: so when the occupation force goes in the dead of night, the money goes with them and the local funded military disintegrate- they have nothing to fight for.

Similarly a ‘democracy’ funded and approved and beholden to an occupying power is not a democracy -it is a mockery of ‘democracy’.- and an extraordinarily corrupt one at that– why else would you pretend to lead your country whilst under an occupying power?

As Marshall Auerback and Patrick Lawrence note in ‘The Scrum’: Ashraf Ghani, (the last of the U.S. appointed Afghan ‘Presidents’) was among the more preposterous creations of the Obama administration, a man who personified our American presumption that we can go around the world making all others in our image without reference to histories, cultures, or political traditions. 

We know the colonial occupation forces killed many thousands of civilians (through bombing campaigns, drone murders, the brutal occupation and destruction of villages and people’s homes and the use of torture at Bagram airbase and other locations in Afghanistan- civilian losses that the occupying forces continue to largely deny.

New Zealand’s ex-prime minister Helen Clark’s commentary on the resurgence of the Taliban might be interpreted as disingenuous, were it not for the fact that she is a United Nations employee and knows full well the extent of the indiscriminate murder, torture and destruction, let alone the phenomenal levels of corruption by NGOs supposedly ‘re-building Afghanistan’ committed by the occupying powers in their 20 year presence in Afghanistan.

We might also note the opium and heroin rat lines from the Afghan poppy
fields which miraculously came into full bloom (Afghanistan  now supplies by  far the largest  share of opium in  the world), after the American occupation
and which will now , once again, be shut down by the Taliban. Mysteriously drug trafficking explodes in volume in those areas where Western intelligence
operatives, and particularly the CIA, are heavily involved: Colombia,
Afghanistan, Laos….

The New Zealand presence in Afghanistan is one more shameful example of our complicity in the United States’ war crimes..

While there will be many in Kabul and other major Afghan cities who have come to enjoy Western values, comforts and the easy money that came with the occupiers, there will be many many more Afghans who are thankful that the brutality and systematic racism of the Western occupying powers is finally at an end.

The lessons other vulnerable countries have learnt from Western occupying powers’ brutal occupation of Afghanistan will not be soon forgotten..

Nor will the boys coming home from that 20 year war be immune to its effects on the psyche..

“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”
– Booker T. Washington

That is not to say Afghanistan is going to become some liberal, rights respecting country any time soon: traditional rigid views about women’s rights and other ethnicities and belief systems -particularly in rural areas, are gong to prevail for some time to come. And Sharia law is not exactly a very forgiving dogma; but there are signs that the new Taliban leadership recognise that they will have to adapt to the modern world if they are to be accepted by the wider international community, especially investment from Chinese and  other neighbouring countries. Certainly, as of 17th August 2021, the Taliban command have so far largely behaved with honour and discipline for the defeated.

It should also be noted that the Taliban are not ‘terrorists’ and in no way resemble ISIS or the earlier Mujahideen . While they may have sheltered Al Qaeda in the past, they have no record and no stated intent of terrorist actions outside (or within) Afghanistan.

And it should also be remembered that the Taliban’s astonishing victory in the past week has been at minimal cost of human life and suffering; a victory, as Pepe Escobar notes, contrived by ” lots of persuasion, tribal deals, zero columns of tanks (and) minimal loss of blood”.

It is  time now for the new Afghan  government to  demand reparations from all those Western  occupation governments for the deaths,  torture,  trauma and misery;  and land and property losses of the last 20  years.

Perhaps Westerners could also remember, for the future, that the way for outsiders to encourage change in any other society, is to demonstrate your positive values: your generosity, your honesty, your capacity to forgive and your willingness to listen…

Postscript

As Richard Falks  and others note, what follows next in Afghanistan  will  depend not only on how the Taliban keep  their promises of greater tolerance , but also  on  the United States and its Western  occupying allies respond to the Taliban in power.  To  date Western media is hyping up  the threat  and supposed savagery of the Taliban  to extraordinary  degrees  (my local  New Zealand  TV news channel  interspersed commentary of the Taliban  with video of ISIS troops marching in uniform) and the  U.S.  withholding of Afghan federal  reserve money  and aid by  other Western countries . Without the  Western aid that  Afghanistan infrastructure has come to  rely on  over the last 20  years,  severe hardship  and starvation will  be the lot of Afghans already  brutalised by  this pointless war.

It is now likely that  further Western brutal  adventures, such  as the Afghan occupation , will not be viable options , as China particularly expands its  somewhat  more benign influence in  the region.

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Links

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/20-years-invasion-afghanistan-unnecessary-post-imperial-fantasy

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/126081418/utterly-surreal-and-devastating-former-pm-helen-clark-shellshocked-to-be-back-where-we-were-in-afghanistan-as-taliban-take-over

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/08/16/diplomacy-not-bombs-anti-war-voices-say-afghanistan-shows-need-stop-any-further?

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/the-islamic-emirate-of-afghanistan-back-with-a-bang/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanistan-history-taliban-collapse-504977

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/afghanistan-taliban-press-conference-notes.html#more

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/16/hollywoods-dangerous-afghan-illusion-2/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/and-now?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/17/the-u-s-government-lied-for-two-decades-about-afghanistan/

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/16/what-the-classroom-didnt-teach-me-about-the-american-empire/

https://original.antiwar.com/Yves_Engler/2021/08/17/what-a-waste-of-human-life-and-resources/

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-failed-afghanistan-not-the-other?

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/19/create-two-three-many-saigons/

https://www.sigar.mil/interactive-reports/corruption-in-conflict/lessons.html

As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/08/17/afghanistan-the-end-of-the-occupation/

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CIA_report_into_shoring_up_Afghan_war_support_in_Western_Europe,_11_Mar_2010

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232167.shtml

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232142.shtml

https://richardfalk.org/2021/08/23/everything-went-wrong-in-afghanistan/

John Pilger: The Great Game of Smashing Nations

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/wests-meddling-has-caused-calamity-afghanistan