Telephones Cut Off, Mousavi Arrested, Rafsanjani Resigns

[Sweejak]

A little more. Too bad this blogger stopped his work in 2007.

http://guerillas-without-guns.blogspot. ... lence.html

[AlicetheKurious]

BTW Alice, I'm interested in your explanation for where the charred bodies found inside the plane fuselage at the Pentagon were from? Were the dozens of people who saw the plane that day all plants?

I confess I haven't kept up with developments related to the Pentagon attack in years, nor have I read Meyssan's book about it. I hadn't even heard that charred bodies were found in the fuselage. That would be / presumably was a good topic for a thread. If there is one, anybody gotta link?

[JackRiddler]

.

Alice, the presence of Gene Sharp in China does not turn millions of protesters into his robot legions. It's funny that you seem appalled by your own strawman, i.e. the idea that I accused the Chinese army of being heartless automatons (which I did not, and which would be beside the point).

But at the same time, you call the protesters "pawns," as though Gene Sharp (who would have been unknown to 99.999% of the protesters) were their commander in chief, but the Deng who could indeed move the entire Red Army with a command was just a comrade foot-soldier.

We see where your sympathies lie, when you feel you have an ideological match: with the brave troops facing down the designated enemies of your preferred governments. (Come on people: Do you support the troops? Are you saying they're fighting for a lie?)

You spend a lot of space -- mostly reams of cut and paste, of course -- disputing the possible number of people killed in the suppression of the 1989 protests, but you can't deny that the protesters (students and otherwise) who camped out for weeks in many major Chinese cities numbered in the millions and did not initiate any violence, before they were driven out by tanks. My last word on China here will be to repeat what I already wrote, as you didn't actually address it:

A million unarmed people peacably assembled at Tiananmen Square for several weeks, and millions more did so in other cities around China, demanding the basic political rights and democratic elections denied to them by the regime, until thousands of them were murdered by the army on the streets at Deng's orders. Deng then continued with implementation of a neoliberal agenda that turned China into the forced-labor workshop of global capitalism and the de facto primary foreign financial supporter of the US war machine, to this day.

The italicized part is the only thing you're bothering to dispute in your epic cut-and-paste. The last sentence is bolded to indicate something undeniable about Chinese policy, something that makes utter mincemeat of Meyssan's outrageous characterization of Deng as the nationalist protecting the country against Zhao's "pro-American" policies. De facto there is nothing Zhao could have done that would have been more "pro-American" than having millions of Chinese labor under "Manchester capitalism" conditions to serve as the manufacturing sector for American consumers, and then to recirculate the dollars thus accumulated into T-bills that financed the American wars!

The Chinese struggle of 1989 was indigenous, both sides. Neither was the puppet of a foreign power. Neither was doing it to be for or against America. It doesn't matter which side the CIA or whatever other foreign force would have liked to see win. It doesn't matter if the US media favored one side, they didn't create the situation. There were still millions of protesters for weeks, they were peaceful, they were the more progressive and democratic force against a tyranny that wanted them to go back to work making trinkets for the rich nations, and the tanks commanded by Deng's regime crushed them (and proceeded to integrate China into the neoliberal world order).

I get it, you have your set of string-pulling villains, mostly "the neocons." Wherever they appear, or appear to appear, you're on the other side, even that of the Chinese regime in suppressing its own people, preventing democracy and, by any measure, holding back the country from greater economic justice and, in the end, a stronger role in the world as a democratic and nationally-interested counterweight to the United States (which is the likelier course that would have been taken, if the protesters had won their struggle in 1989).

After some days of research, I'll also stick with what I wrote above about Iran:

The Iranian uprising is also not a product of the West. The theocracy weighs down the lives of millions who have a legitimate cause to protest. Perceptions of what's happening are orchestrated to make it seem like a majority voted against Ahmedinejad (which is almost certainly not true), and Mousavi appears to have recklessly triggered the uprising with false accusations of fraud, but Meyssan presents the other extreme, where everyone in the protests is dancing only because the CIA and Soros pulled a few levers. Great human tragedies are reduced to the mere matter of Tehran (or Beijing, or the Burmese dictators) righteously suppressing foreign agents, while Meyssan nods approval for the hardliners of all nations, long as he can characterize them as (nominally) anti-American.

Meyssan's Pentagon hoax, one of the primary means by which 9/11 research has been discredited and dead-ended, has been discussed exhaustively elsewhere and given several hundred times the attention the question merits. Go find those threads if you want to knock heads on it some more. The hole was not too small, it was just big enough.



.

[John Schröder]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF27Ak03.html

US misunderstanding on Iran lingers

By Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON - After 30 years of enmity closed off most lines of communication, the recent crisis in Iran has suddenly engendered a boom of American interest in the Islamic Republic.

But much of the attention in Washington and elsewhere in the US is often misplaced, misguided, or completely detached from the realities currently embroiling Iran in its most significant crisis since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

United States diplomatic relations with the nascent Islamic Republic were severed after a hostage crisis, when a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held many of its occupants hostage for 444 days.

Since then, few significant steps have been taken towards repairing relations, and the remaining contacts between the US and Iran atrophied as US experts with firsthand knowledge of Iran grew older and their knowledge grew more obsolete.

"[The revolution] was 30 years ago," said ambassador Nick Burns, a former State Department under secretary for political affairs in the George W Bush administration. "We have a whole generation of foreign service officers who didn't learn Farsi."

Furthermore, while there have been some diplomatic contacts with Iran on matters such as Afghanistan - before 2003 when Bush placed Iran in the "axis of evil" - and later Iraq, those contacts were uncommon and narrow in scope.

"I was the point person on Iran from 2005 to 2008, and I never once met an Iranian official," said Burns.

The resulting knowledge deficit has haunted attempts at easing relations, as when president former president Bill Clinton's secretary of state Madeline Albright waited outside a conference room at the United Nations. As a gesture, Albright planned to catch her Iranian counterpart on the way out and shake his hand. But the Iranian foreign minister wouldn't shake a woman's hand, nor did he want pictures of him with a high-ranking US official to get back to Iran.

Many pundits and politicians in the US view the current crisis as an opportunity to instigate a regime change in Iran, projecting their own aspirations on those of the demonstrators and supporters of the ostensible loser of Iran's election, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.

"This is not about my expertise versus somebody in a think-tank," declared Senator Lindsey Graham as he announced his sponsorship for a bill that would boost funding to Radio Farda and Voice of America in Farsi to help the US-sponsored news outlets get broader reach in Iran. "This is about me doing what I need to do."

Along with Graham, neo-conservative Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator John McCain announced their support for the bill, to be written over the next Congressional break.

The Iranian government has charged that the broadcast of foreign news sources into Iran is spurring on demonstrations. This claim is cited in the oft-repeated government mantra that the protests are merely foreign meddling in Iranian affairs.

These accusations became all the more vocal this week, with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad on Thursday telling US President Barack Obama to avoid "interfering in Iran's affairs".

"Our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously [former US president George W] Bush used to say," Ahmadinejad was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying.

In response, the White House accused Ahmadinejad of seeking to blame the US for unrest following the disputed election which saw Ahmadinejad re-elected for a second term.

"There are people in Iran who want to make this not about a debate among Iranians in Iran, but about the West and the United States," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "I would add President Ahmadinejad to that list of people trying to make this about the United States."

Early in the crisis, when tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets objecting to the landslide victory of Ahmadinejad, Mousavi said that the ultimate objective of the protests was to get the allegedly fraudulent results annulled in favor of a new election.

When Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced a crackdown against the protests, rumors began to fly that a campaign was underway to unseat Khamenei as the supreme leader. While this presented a challenge to the order within the system, no credible evidence has emerged to suggest that the protest movement as whole endorses an overthrow of the system.

Indeed, Mousavi has repeatedly said the demonstrations are within the constitutional rights of Iranians granted by the Islamic Republic (article 27 permits peaceful protest). Even attempting to unseat Khamenei can be accomplished through the existing structures of the system - namely the Assembly of Experts, which appoints and can impeach the leader.

Undeterred by those realities, or perhaps unaware of the dynamics, US commentators continue to present the protesters as opposed to the system of the Islamic Republic. For example, widely read New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman seized on the Mousavi campaign's green color scheme and declared the movement "Iran's Green Revolution to end its theocracy".

Asieh Mir, an Iranian who formerly worked in government and civil society there and who now is a fellow at the US Institute of Peace (USIP), says that the battle being waged in Iran is between two factions within the regime. Even Mousavi's faction, she says, seeks a "workable democracy for Iran that holds to Islamic values" and does not necessarily want to install a democracy in the Western sense.

At the same USIP forum, Brooking Institution fellow Suzanne Maloney said that in the current crisis, reliable information about elite wrangling was at a minimum because those with knowledge and a stake in the process were unlikely to get on "international phone lines" or the Internet to distribute the information around the globe.

Furthermore, Maloney contends that the crisis itself is evidence of a knowledge deficit in the US, "As we've seen in the past two weeks, we had no idea what was going on in Iran," nor an ability to predict what happened, noting that there is little information from "anyone who means anything".

But the most glaring misunderstanding of Iran seems to come from US neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, who have called on Obama to make broader efforts at democracy promotion in Iran and stronger denunciations of the Iranian regime in light of the maltreatment of peaceful protesters.

But Maloney, mirroring Mir's comments, contends that a pro-democratic faction already exists in Iran, but the US doesn't understand or know much about it.

"This movement already exists and we don't touch it," she said. "We have no idea where it is."

Nonetheless, neo-conservatives, some of whom like Daniel Pipes admitted their preference for an Ahmadinejad victory, have urged Obama to make demands of the Iranian leadership and levy sanctions against the regime.

But Iranian-American journalist and author Hooman Majd, one of the best-connected Western journalists in Iran, rejects the neo-conservative mantras as an example of ignorance about Iran and an inability to get over the Bush goal of regime change.

"The neo-cons know nothing about Iran, nothing about the culture of Iran," Majd told Salon.com. "They have no interest in understanding Iran, in speaking to any Iranian other than Iranian exiles who support the idea of invasions - I'll call them Iranian Chalabis," a reference to now-disgraced neo-conservative darling Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who reportedly provided some of the bad intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and was slated for a prominent post-invasion role in Iraq.

"It's offensive, even to an Iranian American like me," said Majd. "There are people who would have actually preferred to have Ahmadinejad as president so they could continue to demonize him and were worried, as some wrote in op-eds, that Mousavi would be a distraction and would make it easier to Iranians to build a nuclear weapon. And now all a sudden they want to be on his side? Go away."

[AlicetheKurious]

JackRiddler said:

The Chinese struggle of 1989 was indigenous, both sides. Neither was the puppet of a foreign power. Neither was doing it to be for or against America. It doesn't matter which side the CIA or whatever other foreign force would have liked to see win. It doesn't matter if the US media favored one side, they didn't create the situation.

That's just disingenuous, given the fact that the so-called National Endowment for Democracy had not one, but two active offices in Beijing, which ran seminars for prominent writers and scholars in "democracy" (recruiting a number of the more promising ones, no doubt), while Voice of America (another CIA front) was becoming the no. 1 source of supposedly unbiased 'news' for Chinese students. The NED also published a magazine aimed at Chinese students named "The Chinese Intellectual".

China, 89: In Nanjing students had boom boxes turned high to the Voice of America as it described events in China. The most effective dispenser of truth was Voice of America which stepped-up programming in Mandarin to 11 hours a day. VOA said they usually have 60 million regular listeners in China. In the crisis the number may have been as high as 400 million. In early June VOA cameras started beaming the service's first TV news program Via satellite to about 2000 dish antennas in China. Most of them at military installations, but that's exactly the point, said VOA director Carlson: to make sure a major player in the power struggle, get an accurate account of what is going on. Newsweek 6/19/89 p29

www.friendsoftibet.org/databank/usdefence/usd4.html
(Slide 24)

And let's not forget George Soros:

THE PHILANTHROPIST SPOOK

In 1980, Soros began to use his millions to attack socialism in Eastern Europe. He financed individuals who would cooperate with him. His first success was in Hungary. He took over the Hungarian educational and cultural establishment, incapacitating socialist institutions throughout the country. He made his way right inside the Hungarian government. Soros next moved on to Poland, aiding the CIA-funded Solidarity operation and in that same year, he became active in China. The USSR came next.

It is not coincidental that the Central Intelligence Agency had operations in all of those countries. The goal of the Agency was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros’ Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them “assets.” As Soros said, “In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief…”16 Soros’ Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. 17 His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros’ Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections. 18

Link

So, Jack, what do you suggest? That we assume that all that money and effort expended by the CIA and its various fronts from 1980 onward had NOTHING to do with the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989? Even the "symbol" chosen by the protesters just happened to look just like the Statue of Liberty. As the protests went on for weeks, including almost certainly deliberate provocations designed to provoke a harsh response by the army, when the response did come the "leaders" escaped to the U.S. embassy and eventually ended up in the U.S., where they've no doubt been very useful assets to the mother of all democracies.

But no, of course not: "It doesn't matter which side the CIA or whatever other foreign force would have liked to see win. It doesn't matter if the US media favored one side, they didn't create the situation."

If you say so...

There were still millions of protesters for weeks, they were peaceful, they were the more progressive and democratic force against a tyranny that wanted them to go back to work making trinkets for the rich nations, and the tanks commanded by Deng's regime crushed them (and proceeded to integrate China into the neoliberal world order).

Though some were clearly the subversive agents of a foreign government the vast majority of these people were manipulated, misled and used as pawns by the same CIA that has done the exact same thing over and over and over again, all over the world, ever since.

I am NOT defending the Chinese government, any more than I supported Saddam Hussein when George Bush the Elder called on the Kurds and Shi'a of Iraq to "rise up" and then sat back and watched them being crushed, for his own purposes. The Kurds and Shi'a have every right to be free, but that makes Bush's incitement no less cold-blooded and cruel.

Imagine if a foreign country was busy recruiting anti-US government operatives, providing them with funds and training, flooding the U.S. with broadcasts, buying off prominent writers and intellectuals, specifically targeting idealistic students and then inciting them to "rise up" against the capitalist system. People in America have plenty of legitimate grievances, and many are suffering grievously under its form of capitalism. But that would make it no less contemptible for a foreign state to exploit these weaknesses for its own nefarious ends.

We see where your sympathies lie, when you feel you have an ideological match: with the brave troops facing down the designated enemies of your preferred governments.

Talk about a straw man! "My sympathies" lie with ordinary people who struggle for dignity, freedom and the right to participate equally in shaping their nation's political and economic destiny. Not with those predators who would use these legitimate aspirations to enslave them even more: i.e. NOT with the CIA, the neocons, Soros or any other sleazy snakes.

[JackRiddler]

.

Imagine the Sandinistas fighting the Somoza dictatorship. Seeing no other choice, they take arms from the Soviets and training from Cuba. The Soviets in particular do not have pure motives, to them Central America is a chessboard in the Cold War conflict. Which, in the eyes of the American right-wingers of the late 1970s, makes the Sandinistas into communist pawns and foreign agents subverting the local government. Unlike the later Tiananmen Square protesters, they also engaged in real, not imagined violence! Armed conflict, in fact.

This is the rigid dichotomous thinking of which you provide the mirror image.

I get it, I get it.

"Sleazy snakes" = CIA, Soros, neocons, Israel.

Anything "they" (or any one of them, even against the wishes of other members of the "sleazy snake" set) appear to support, at least in your estimation of the appearances = dupes, foreign agents, pawns, subersives, scum, rioters, purveyors of "violence," provocateurs, disgruntled spoiled middle-class brats, etc. Oh, wait, also: people with legitimate aspirations for rights and democracy who nevertheless turn themselves into fair game for state repression, the minute any ONE of them happens to associate with a possible "sleazy snake."

Anything "sleazy snake" appear to oppose, in your estimation = the good guys. Or, the excusable ones. Even Deng and his regime, who were just your average nationalist tyrants beset by an all-powerful imperialist plot out to turn their country into a CIA colony. Even though Deng and his successors followed up on the crushing of the Tiananmen Square movement by continuing the transformation of China into the planet's most radical experiment in neoliberal economics, with essentially forced laborers providing the junk sold at Walmart for dollars, and with the Chinese central bank and sovereign funds recycling the dollars thus earned into the Pentagon budget by way of T-bills. Because, nominally, Zhao was on the "pro-American" side. And the Chinese were getting their only non-state-approved news from the American propaganda station, and some of them were receiving support from Soros or CIA fronts, so it must have been these "sleazy snakes" that stirred them up to demand human rights, elections, and economic justice. (A measure of the latter, by comparison to what happened instead, was likely to have ultimately come through elections in which the workers could actually vote to defend their interests.)

But never mind that the central demand was rights and democracy, this was a delusion because, as you saw, they had a Statue of Liberty as their symbol. (Poor kids, they bought the French hype about America!) So effectively those were 1 million US agents in the square. And millions more in the other major Chinese cities. Good thing they were crushed, so that China could then become the most important foreign support to the American economic system and US empire! But under great "nationalist" leaders like Deng, note.

Imagine the East German regime in Nov. 1989 had, in fact, chosen the Tiananmen solution (as they were considering, when Krenz displaced Honecker). Imagine it had worked. Would you be talking today about how just and understandable this was on the part of the GDR, given that the demonstrations that spoke for 75 percent of the country's people were also being stirred up and supported by the American empire? Guess so!

Granted, you're not the only one who thinks like this, or I could ignore it more easily.

.

[AlicetheKurious]

JackRiddler said:

Imagine the Sandinistas fighting the Somoza dictatorship. Seeing no other choice, they take arms from the Soviets and training from Cuba. The Soviets in particular do not have pure motives, to them Central America is a chessboard in the Cold War conflict. Which, in the eyes of the American right-wingers of the late 1970s, makes the Sandinistas into communist pawns and foreign agents subverting the local government. Unlike the later Tiananmen Square protesters, they also engaged in real, not imagined violence! Armed conflict, in fact.

The Somoza dictatorship was first imposed on the Nicaraguan people, just like the Pinochet dictatorship was imposed on the Chilean people, just like the Armas dictatorship was imposed on the Guatemalan people and just like so many bloody tyrants and American-trained death squads and torturers were imposed on so many countries in Latin America, all in the name of American-style Freedom and DemocracyTM. In each case, the result was a virtual enslavement of the people, robbery and exploitation on a massive scale and widespread, horrific and systematic human rights abuses.

In struggling to free one's people from such an overwhelmingly powerful and relentless foe, it would make perfect sense for the weaker indigenous movements to appeal for help from a powerful rival to the Great Satan, and during the Cold War, the Great Satan's only rival was the USSR.

During the 1950s and 60s, the Third World, or Non-Aligned, Movement emerged among former colonies faced with this dilemma: it was believed that they could avoid having to be part of either bloc through economic, political and military interdependence among smaller, weaker countries with each other. That didn't work out.

This left them with the choice of either being consumed like so many have been, by America, or seeking an alliance with the USSR. The Soviet Union was hardly an ideal "boss", but neither was it in the same league as the United States when it came to insatiable greed and cruelty. Simply compare Afghanistan under Mohammed Daoud Khan during its alliance with the Soviet Union, with Afghanistan once the Americans got involved with its "Freedom Fighters" and today. Or Cuba when it was America's whorehouse and casino, and Cuba today, even with all the sanctions and subversion Uncle Sam has been throwing its way. In fact, it's safe to say that with the exception of the states that actually made up the USSR (specifically under Stalin), the Soviets were not nearly as malign and predatory as America has been towards the countries it dominates.

Today, China and to a lesser extent Russia, globally and, in the Middle East, Iran, and in Latin America, Cuba and Venezuela are emerging as alternative 'big brothers' to the Great Satan with its network of corrupt puppets. None of them are nearly as powerful as the U.S., but at least for now, some countries are able to get some kind of protection, plus financing for vital infrastructure projects, plus some genuine help in developing their people's education and health, while the U.S. is left to fume and hatch sinister plots.

These are strategic alliances, with both parties knowing exactly what they're getting into, without all the glitz and glitter of America's extravagantly phony promises.

Obviously, all this is not free, and even big brothers expect some kind of a quid pro quo -- but in most cases the exchange is something the weaker party can usually live with, unlike "alliances" with the U.S.

This is the rigid dichotomous thinking of which you provide the mirror image.

It's not "rigid dichotomous thinking", it's my conclusion based on the evidence of decades spent observing the methods and consequences of America's promotion of "democracy". It's amazing to me that some (though fewer) ordinary people are still falling for America's siren song.

Unless I'm missing something... Maybe if you could point out an example or two, where such CIA-backed "democracy movements" have led to an improvement in people's lives?

I get it, I get it.

"Sleazy snakes" = CIA, Soros, neocons, Israel.

Anything "they" (or any one of them, even against the wishes of other members of the "sleazy snake" set) appear to support, at least in your estimation of the appearances = dupes, foreign agents, pawns, subersives, scum, rioters, purveyors of "violence," provocateurs, disgruntled spoiled middle-class brats, etc. Oh, wait, also: people with legitimate aspirations for rights and democracy who nevertheless turn themselves into fair game for state repression, the minute any ONE of them happens to associate with a possible "sleazy snake."

No, you don't get it.

[JackRiddler]

The Somoza dictatorship was first imposed on the Nicaraguan people, just like the Pinochet dictatorship was imposed on the Chilean people, just like the Armas dictatorship was imposed on the Guatemalan people and just like so many bloody tyrants and American-trained death squads and torturers were imposed on so many countries in Latin America, all in the name of American-style Freedom and DemocracyTM. In each case, the result was a virtual enslavement of the people, robbery and exploitation on a massive scale and widespread, horrific and systematic human rights abuses.

In struggling to free one's people from such an overwhelmingly powerful and relentless foe, it would make perfect sense for the weaker indigenous movements to appeal for help from a powerful rival to the Great Satan, and during the Cold War, the Great Satan's only rival was the USSR.

During the 1950s and 60s, the Third World, or Non-Aligned, Movement emerged among former colonies faced with this dilemma: it was believed that they could avoid having to be part of either bloc through economic, political and military interdependence among smaller, weaker countries with each other. That didn't work out.

This left them with the choice of either being consumed like so many have been, by America, or seeking an alliance with the USSR. The Soviet Union was hardly an ideal "boss", but neither was it in the same league as the United States when it came to insatiable greed and cruelty. Simply compare Afghanistan under Mohammed Daoud Khan during its alliance with the Soviet Union, with Afghanistan once the Americans got involved with its "Freedom Fighters" and today. Or Cuba when it was America's whorehouse and casino, and Cuba today, even with all the sanctions and subversion Uncle Sam has been throwing its way. In fact, it's safe to say that with the exception of the states that actually made up the USSR (specifically under Stalin), the Soviets were not nearly as malign and predatory as America has been towards the countries it dominates.

Your lecture is all true, so I'm happy to repeat it. I've delivered the same at times in my own words. In fact, it amounts to an attempt to usurp, as though it were your own, exactly the point I made: that the Sandinistas were in practice forced to seek help from the Soviet Union, and that doing so did not make them into puppets of the Soviets or of world communism, contrary to the talking points of the American right-wing.


Similarly, people who live in horrible dictatorships not imposed by the US (of which there are a few) in their efforts to fight back may see themselves forced to accept help from shady organizations with spook connections in the US, or may be subjected to US-orchestrated manipulations of their genuine aspirations. They make even make mistakes! That does not automatically make them into US puppets, or invalidate the aspirations and the righteousness of their cause. China is an excellent case in point. That you can't see that the US couldn't manage to fuck the people there worse than their own indigenous regime has done is your matter.

What's getting hilarious in your defenses of the Tiananmen crackdown is the repeated failure to acknowledge the most obvious point, which I've now made two or three times:

After stopping the supposed "pro-American" Zhao and the supposed machinations of the insidious Gene Sharp, Deng and co. -- the absolute darlings of the capitalist business press! -- proceeded to turn China into the low-wage industrial workshop of the US, integrated their economy to the needs of global capitalism, and by way of dollar-Treasury recycling covered the US budget deficit reliably for the next 20 years, in effect financing the very Pentagon and US empire you imagine they provide a counterweight against! Said counterweight function being the justification for massacring peaceful protesters on the street, in your view. So what the hell would Zhao have done that was worse than that, or more essential to maintaining US empire in that period?

And believe me, I get it. At this point, I even have a radar for it.

.

[AlicetheKurious]

...people who live in horrible dictatorships not imposed by the US (of which there are a few) in their efforts to fight back may see themselves forced to accept help from shady organizations with spook connections in the US, or may be subjected to US-orchestrated manipulations of their genuine aspirations. They make even make mistakes! That does not automatically make them into US puppets, or invalidate the aspirations and the righteousness of their cause.

I didn't say "the people" were puppets, I said they are being used as pawns by serious predators who specialize in using their legitimate grievances and aspirations in order to suck them into something even worse.

China is an excellent case in point. That you can't see that the US couldn't manage to fuck the people there worse than their own indigenous regime has done is your matter.

There, you've lost me. Of course the US could fuck the people there much, much worse than their own indigenous regime. Take a look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, Angola, etc., etc., etc.

What's getting hilarious in your defenses of the Tiananmen crackdown is the repeated failure to acknowledge the most obvious point, which I've now made two or three times:

After stopping the supposed "pro-American" Zhao and the supposed machinations of the insidious Gene Sharp, Deng and co. -- the absolute darlings of the capitalist business press! -- proceeded to turn China into the low-wage industrial workshop of the US, integrated their economy to the needs of global capitalism, and by way of dollar-Treasury recycling covered the US budget deficit reliably for the next 20 years, in effect financing the very Pentagon and US empire you imagine they provide a counterweight against! Said counterweight function being the justification for massacring peaceful protesters on the street, in your view. So what the hell would Zhao have done that was worse than that, or more essential to maintaining US empire in that period?

Welcome to the real world. I am not "defending the Tiananmen crackdown" -- I am saying that it was predictable, given the presence of well-placed infiltrators and agents provocateurs, and that from the point of view of the CIA "black hands" who carefully planned it, desirable.

As for China's cultivation of trade with the United States, the Chinese are nothing if not pragmatic -- they did what they had to do in order to develop a country with a mainly agrarian population of over 1 billion, which was severely underdeveloped and economically very weak only a few decades ago and headed for catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Now that it's fast becoming an economic and industrial powerhouse, its global role is evolving accordingly, and not necessarily in a way that suits the American empire. If you believe that China is merely a stooge of the United States, you haven't been paying attention lately.

And believe me, I get it. At this point, I even have a radar for it.

Whatever. (Sometimes actually reading what somebody writes and trying to understand it works better than "radar".)

[Ben D]

FWIW, based purely on my own personal intuition, the Tiananmen Square event was definitely an attempt by the west to bring about regime change.

Thank you Alice, am very appreciative for the corroborating material you posted on this.

Oh and BTW, also based on my intuition, Falun Gong is another example of the west's attempt to cause insurrection in China.

[American Dream]

I don't imagine that Falun Gong originated with a CIA plot, but as time went on, they probably felt they had little choice but to align themselves with the Americans. This is the sort of thing that Jack was pointing us towards and it is a very important element.

Nuance matters...

[American Dream]

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.c ... ontra.html

Mousavi and Iran Contra

From: "The New Republic: What Spies Don't Know"
by Eli Lake
NPR
June 29, 2009

NPR.org, June 29, 2009 · About ten days after the start of Iran's insurrection, I asked a senior administration official what, if anything, the White House knew about the people behind the demonstrations. His reply: "I think it is fair to say senior administration officials are busily trying to understand how the opposition is generated and where it came from." In other words, there's a lot about the protesters we still don't know.

True, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the people directly surrounding him are known quantities in the U.S. intelligence community. Both Mousavi and his most powerful ally during the campaign, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were key interlocutors in the Iran-Contra affair. (It was Mousavi's office—working through a deputy named Mohsen Kangarlu—that arranged the details of the exchange of TOW missiles for the release of American hostages kidnapped by Hezbollah in Lebanon.) We also know that Mousavi was a strong supporter of Iran's modern nuclear program. In 2007, Tehran handed over documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency showing that Mousavi approved a decision to purchase centrifuge technology from A.Q. Khan's clandestine black market in 1987. Meanwhile, the Mousavi campaign's head of "voter protection" is Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, who is generally credited with helping to found Hezbollah. During the Lebanon war, he lost his right hand when he opened a book on Shia holy places laden with explosives. ...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =106036311

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Mir-Hossein Mousavi's Iran/Contra Connection?
Reza Fiyouzat, Revolutionary Flowerpot Society
June 8, 2009

What do Michael Ledeen (the American 'neo-conservative'), Mir-Hossein Mousavi (the Iranian presidential candidate of 'chagne') and Adnan Khashoggi (the opulent Saudi Arabian jet-setter) have in common?

They are all good friends and associates of Manuchehr Ghorbanifar (an Iranian arms merchant, an alleged MOSSAD double agent, and a key figure in the Iran/Contra Affair, the arms-for-hostages deals between Iran and the Reagan administration). In one or two, at most three, degrees of separation, these people hung out in the same circles and very likely drank to the same toasts.

You can find all kinds of trivia about Ghorbanifar in the Walsh Report on the Iran/Contra affair. In Chapter 8, for example, we learn:

"Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and former CIA informant who had been discredited by the agency as a fabricator, was a driving force behind these proposals [for arms-for-hostages deal];" or, "Ghorbanifar, as broker for Iran, borrowed funds for the weapons payments from Khashoggi, who loaned millions of dollars to Ghorbanifar in "bridge financing'" for the deals. Ghorbanifar repaid Khashoggi with a 20 percent commission after being paid by the Iranians." (see: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_08.htm).


Here is a bit from an article by Time magazine that shows Ghorbanifar's circle of associates; it is from a January 1987 cover story (The Murky World of Weapons Dealers; January 19, 1987):

"By [Ghorbanifar's] own account he was a refugee from the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confiscated his businesses in Iran, yet he later became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government. Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: "[Ghorbanifar] is one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known." Others call him a liar who, as one puts it, could not tell the truth about the clothes he is wearing," (emphasis added).

This second bit is from Chapter 1 of Walsh Iran/Contra Report: (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_01.htm)

"On or about November 25, 1985, Ledeen received a frantic phone call from Ghorbanifar, asking him to relay a message from [Mir-Hossein Mousavi] the prime minister of Iran to President Reagan regarding the shipment of the wrong type of HAWKs. Ledeen said the message essentially was "we've been holding up our part of the bargain, and here you people are now cheating us and tricking us and deceiving us and you had better correct this situation right away.''
[...]
"In early May, North and CIA annuitant George Cave met in London with Ghorbanifar and Nir, where the groundwork finally was laid for a meeting between McFarlane and high-level Iranian officials, as well as financial arrangements for the arms deal. Among the officials Ghorbanifar said would meet with an American delegation were the president and prime minister [Mousavi] of Iran and the speaker of the Iranian parliament," (emphasis added). ...

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=54948

[Ben D]

I don't imagine that Falun Gong originated with a CIA plot, but as time went on, they probably felt they had little choice but to align themselves with the Americans. This is the sort of thing that Jack was pointing us towards and it is a very important element.

Nuance matters...

Or again...as time went on and the Falun Gong prospered, the CIA saw it as an opportunity for furthering their plans for China.... yes, nuance does matter.

[Sweejak]

Let's look at some context/nuance by way of comparison. I think of it this way, in the 60's the US youth were in the streets, but the nation itself was not threatened by a nuclear armed Vietnam constantly running bombing drills. Canada and Mexico were not imposing sanctions on us, the US didn't have Soviet air bases surrounding them and the USSR wasn't running militant black ops inside Texas bombing churches. In other words it was quite clear that we were protesting the system and aspects of the culture. Many mistakes were made, and yes there were outside influences and CIA/FBI influences too, but the context was not one where the existence of the nation was being compromised.

This is the first time ever that I haven't been cheering on somebody storming the government, it's usually a 'no brainer', perhaps too literally.

Anyway, I wish the opposition had a leader that was worthy of their apparent cause or had the ability to switch tactics from street demos to something else. I suppose Gene Sharp can be used by anyone.

[JackRiddler]

I am not "defending the Tiananmen crackdown" -- I am saying that it was predictable, given the presence of well-placed infiltrators and agents provocateurs,

If there had been no such infiltrators and agents, do you think there would have been no crackdown? Do you think if not for the existence of a CIA somewhere in the background, Deng would have invited the students to talks and held elections? (Zhao did talk with the students, just before he was deposed.) I'd agree the crackdown was predictable, given the long track record of the regime, and its clear unwillingness to tolerate political dissent (including during the frequent line-changes in the Cultural Revolution period, when today's hero was tomorrow's traitor). And it's equally predictable that the protests would be blamed on foreign agents. Having that come from you does amount to an exculpation of Deng and Co.

So why is it that when China goes neoliberal, provides the hunger labor and pays for the Pentagon war machine under Deng, it's just realpolitik, but if it had happened under an elected regime led by Zhao, it would have been the product of "pro-American" subversion?

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