Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:18 pm

...
Last edited by conniption on Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:21 pm

conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 6:18 pm wrote:
conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 6:17 pm wrote:
conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 6:17 pm wrote:
conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 12:05 am wrote:Randy Newman - Political Science from Live in London

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAElK16OkjQ

I'll continue posting this song until we make our way to page two. >.<

The last NINE posts have been in the black.

Where the heck is page two already?

This is a formal complaint against pages that are way too long.


~

HALLELUJAH!!!
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:31 pm

RT

‘No to NATO’: Hundreds march against militarism, nuclear weapons at Wales summit
Published time: August 30, 2014

Some 400 people have joined a protest camp in Newport to protest against NATO. The march comes ahead of next week’s military summit that will see 60 world leaders descend on the area and is already causing considerable disruption to locals.

"Nuclear NATO - no, thanks!" or "Iraq, Ukraine - no more wars" read the numerous placards as about 400 protesters took in a march on Saturday against the upcoming NATO summit.

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The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said that they expect Saturday’s march to be a “major demonstration” and local officials have said a number of roads will be affected by the march, which began at 2 pm local time.

The campaigners are organizing a week of marches and meetings against NATO as well as a “peace camp” and a Counter Summit to take place on the campsite on Sunday. The NATO summit is to run at the Celtic Manor resort on the outskirts of Newport on the 4th and 5th September.

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There will be representatives from a number of groups at the protests including “No to NATO,” the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Stop the War Coalition and South West against Nuclear (SWAN).

More than 20,000 protesters from around the world are expected to attend the demonstrations in what is being billed as Wales’ biggest protest in a generation.

At least 20,000 protesters, who are gathering in Newport, objecting to everything NATO stands for have accumulated by Saturday, Harry Fear, RT’s correspondent at the scene, said.

Protesters here “associate NATO in their words with imperialism, warring, global in equality and austerity.”

He also said there is a huge policing “operation going on in South Wales to secure the NATO meetings and to facilitate these very significant demonstrations.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_Yw4h8OFTY

NATO and the politicians who back it is increasingly out of touch with ordinary people, John Rees from Stop the War Coalition, told RT.

“The world stands on the edge of a precipice. We have rhetoric which is off the chart about the possibility of a conflict between the major powers in the Ukraine. People think that these are world leaders who are out of control, they have no sense that these policies are deeply unpopular,” he said.

Many of the protesters are against the existence of NATO, which they believe also represents nuclear proliferation. There will also be groups representing refuges from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. NATO has carried out wars and aerial bombardments in all of these countries as a means of carrying out regime change, but now all of them are experiencing chaos to varying degrees.

Eddie Clarke, from the “No to NATO” group, said that the idea was to connect all the protest organizations there so that everyone speaks with one voice.

“The objectives are to get rid of nuclear and NATO, to completely obliterate weapons of mass destruction. The short-term aims are to connect each similar group in NATO member countries to us, to have a single voice, equal in each individual country,” he told the IBTimes UK.

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The protest organizers said they are extremely concerned at the threat to world peace that NATO now represents.

“Many of us are increasingly worried by the threat that NATO poses to world stability and peaceful relations. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has reinvented itself supposedly as a tool of the ‘international community’ to safeguard ‘freedom and security’,” they said.

“In reality it is a vehicle for US-led use of force in the interests of the rich and powerful, accelerating militarization, bypassing the United Nations and the system of international law, and escalating spending on arms.”

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Screenshot from AP video

The Stop the War website says that the 60 world leaders are meeting to “plan their war on the world.” They are expected to respond to alleged Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.

The local community is also displeased with the amount of disruption the summit is causing.

Twelve miles of steel perimeter fencing has been erected in parts of Newport and Cardiff. Roads and schools have been closed, meaning that many people have been forced to take time off work. A local hospital has also been forced to transfer some of its patients.

The fence has been dubbed the “ring of steel” and has been likened to a prison or the Berlin Wall, as fears are running high the summit could be the target of a terrorist attack.

"Nobody has given anything clear as to how much money it will bring into Wales or Newport. People having to take the day off work because of travel disruptions and schools being closed, it looks like it will have the opposite effect. Money's going to be taken out of the economy because people aren't going to be able to get to work," Simon Coopey, who will stand as a candidate for Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, in Newport West at the next general election, told IBTimes UK.

Image
Screenshot from AP video
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 04, 2014 3:08 am

Asia Times
(embedded links)

Sep 3, '14

NATO attacks!

By Pepe Escobar

First thing we do, let's kill all the myths. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is nothing but the Security Council of the Empire of Chaos.

You don't need to be a neo-Foucault hooked on Orwellian/Panopticon practices to admire the hyper-democratic "ring of steel" crossing average roads, parks and even ringing castle walls to "protect" dozens of NATO heads of state and ministers, 10,000 supporting characters and 2,000 journalists from the real world in Newport, Wales - and beyond.

NATO's summit in Wales also provides outgoing secretary-general Anders "Fogh of War" Rasmussen the chance to display his full attack dog repertoire. It's as if he's auditioning for a starring role in a remake of Tim Burton's epic Mars Attacks!

Fogh of War is all over the place, talking "pre-positioning of supplies, equipment" - euphemism for weapons; boosting bases and headquarters in host countries; and touting a 10,000-strong, rapid reaction "spearhead" force to respond to Russian "aggression" and deployable in a maximum of five days.

Meanwhile, in a bad cop-bad cop routine, outgoing president of the European Commission, outstanding mediocrity Jose Manuel Barroso, leaked that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him over the phone later last week he could take Kiev in a fortnight if he wanted.

Well, Putin could. If he wanted. But he doesn't want it. What matters is what he told Rossiya state TV; that Kiev should promote inclusive talks about the future statute of Eastern Ukraine. Once again, the Western spin was that he was advocating the birth of a Novorossiya state. Here, The Saker analyzes in detail the implications of what Russia really wants, and what the Novorossiya forces really want.

With Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite predictably spinning that Russia is "at war with Europe", and British Prime Minister David Cameron evoking - what else - Munich 1938 (Chamberlain appeasing Hitler), Fogh of War has had all the ammo he needs to sell his Einsatzgruppen. Cynics are excused to believe NATO's spearhead force is actually The Caliph's IS goons raising hell in "Syraq".

Warmongering, though, is not an easy sell in a crisis-hit EU these days. Not only Germany, but also France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Hungary and even Poland have expressed "reluctance" one way or another to back NATO's strategy of a more "robust" presence in Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Moreover, the Empire of Chaos and its Brit junior partner in the "special relationship" want everyone to shell out more cash (a minimum of 2% of GDP). Even as the EU is facing no less than its third recession in five years.

The bottom line is there will be no more rotation on NATO's Eastern front. Legally, the set up cannot be defined as "permanent", because it will go against a 1997 NATO-Russia pact. But it will be permanent. That applies to Szczecin, in Poland, near the Baltic, and the so-called multinational Corps Northeast - land, air and sea. Estonia and Latvia for all practical purposes are being touted as "Putin's next targets". And defending them from "Russian aggression" is NATO's new red line.

Additionally, Finland and Sweden may sign NATO Host Nation agreements. This implies NATO forces may use Swedish and Finnish territory in the future on the way to what's hazily referred to as "operations". At least deployment of foreign troops still needs parliamentary approval - and Swedes and Finns are bound to raise eyebrows.

No R2P for you, buddy

Even with all this Mars Attacks! hysteria, NATO in thesis won't discuss Ukraine in depth in Wales - or an imminent R2P ("responsibility to protect") Ukraine from the remixed "Evil Empire" (copyright Ronnie Reagan). But there will be "military consultations" and a bit of cash shelled out to the Kiev military - who are having their (bankrupt) collective behind solemnly kicked by the federalist/separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine as much as NATO had theirs kicked by a bunch of Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan.

By the way, the latest US$1.4 billion the International Monetary Fund shelled out to Ukraine - the Mobster-style interest will hit much later - will be used by an already bankrupt Kiev mostly to pay for a bunch of T-72 tanks it bought from Hungary. Money for nothing, tanks for free.

Ukraine, it must be stressed, is not a NATO member. Technically, every NATO bureaucrat in Brussels admits that a candidate country must request membership. And countries with regions mired in an international dispute are not accepted. So Ukraine would only be considered if Kiev gave up Crimea. It's not going to happen.

Still, Washington's obsessive play to annex Ukraine to NATO will keep marching on (in the matter of accession, by the way, the European Union would issue a firm "no"). Outgoing Prime Minister Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk as well as President Poroshenko, are desperate for a NATO intervention, or at least Ukraine being accepted as some form of privileged ally. Yats expects "monumental decisions from our Western partners at the summit". In vain.

NATO somehow is already in Ukraine. A NATO cyber center group has been in Kiev since March, operating in the building of the Council of National Security and Defense. So it is a bunch of NATO bureaucrats who actually determine the news agenda in Ukraine - and the non-stop demonization of all things Russia.

Ukraine is all about Germany now. Berlin wants a political solution. Fast. Berlin wants Russian gas flowing via Ukraine again. Fast. Berlin does not want US missile defense in Eastern Europe - no matter what the Baltic states scream. That's why Poroshenko's latest "Invasion! Invasion! Invasion!" craze is nothing but pure desperation by a lowly, bankrupt vassal of the Empire of Chaos. Of course that does not prevent Fogh of War - who got the NATO job because he was an enthusiastic cheerleader of the rape of Iraq - to keep crying "Invasion!" till all Danish retrievers come home.

Real deal

And then there's NATO's recent record. An ignominious defeat in Afghanistan. A "humanitarian" bombing that reduced once-stable Libya to a miserable failed state immersed in total anarchy and ravaged by rabid militias. Not exactly fabulous PR for NATO's future as a coalition assembly line with global "vocation", capable of pulling off expeditionary wars all around the world by creating the appearance of a military and political consensus unified by - what else - an Empire of Chaos doctrine: NATO's "strategic concept" approved at the 2010 Lisbon summit. (See US a kid in a NATO candy store, Asia Times Online, November 25, 2010.)

Since those go-go "Bubba" Clinton years; through the "pre-emptive" Dubya era; and now under the R2P dementia of Obama's warring Medusas (Rice, Power, Hillary), the Pentagon dreams of NATO as global Robocop, dominating all the roles embodied by the UN and the EU in terms of security. This has absolutely nothing to do with the original collective defense of NATO signatories against possible territorial attacks. Oh, sorry; we forgot the attacks by those (non-existent) nuclear missiles deployed by evil Iran.

The Ukraine battleground at least has the merit of showing the alliance is naked. For the Full Spectrum Dominance Pentagon, what really matters above all is something that's been actually happening since the fall of the Soviet Union; unlimited NATO expansion to the westernmost borders of Russia.

The real deal this September is not NATO. It's the SCO's summit. Expect the proverbial tectonic shifts of geopolitical plaques in the upcoming meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - a shift as far-reaching as when the Ottoman empire failed at the gates of Vienna in 1683. On the initiative of Russia and China, at the SCO summit, India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia will be invited to become permanent members. Once again, the battle lines are drawn. NATO vs SCO. NATO vs BRICS. NATO vs Global South. Therefore, NATO attacks!

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:10 am

Does NATO's Outgoing Head Have Kurdish Skeletons in His Closet?

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NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen speaks during a news conference in September, 2014. (Photo: Reuters)

Published 29 September 2014

In just a few days Anders Fogh Rasmussen will leave NATO's top civilian job, but questions remain over how he secured the position in the first place.
The secret story of how the outgoing head of the most powerful military alliance landed his job “has everything,” according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“It has the Kurds. It has the destruction of an entire TV station. Corrupt deals between intelligence agencies and the judiciary. The corruption of a Scandinavian country, Denmark. And the head of that country, the prime minister, doing a corrupt deal to get his job,” Assange told teleSUR English in an exclusive interview.

Continuing, Assange lamented the “whole thing, signed off, explicitly by Barack Obama.”

The story with "everything" is now a pending case before the European Court of Human Rights, but it begins two years ago, with the prosecution of a Kurdish language television station in Denmark.




Something Rotten in Denmark

In 2012 Roj TV became the first television station in Denmark's history to be charged with having links to a terrorist organization. The Kurdish station was slapped with a fine worth nearly US$900,000, and eventually Roj TV was pushed off the airwaves.

The decision by a Danish court came after seven years of lobbying by the Turkish embassy for the station to be shut down, due to Roj TV's broadcast into Turkey itself.

As Assange explained, “They operate out of Denmark, beam their satellite signal up, it gets broadcast down by Eurosat and people in Kurdistan and in Turkey are able to watch it.”

“It's very important to have a national language broadcaster. But that had infuriated the [Turks] over many years. And so they had been making constant complaints to Denmark saying 'Ah, they're too critical. They´re too biased. We think they're promoting terrorism, etc,'” he stated.

Danish broadcast authorities responded to Turkish criticism of Roj TV by launching three investigations into the station's programming over a number of years, but found no evidence the station was supporting terrorism. Despite the broadcast authority's investigations, by the middle of the decade, the Roj TV issue became a major sticking point in Danish-Turkish relations.

When then Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was nominated a candidate for secretary general of NATO, Turkey was the only member state to object. Ankara's embassy finally got its way in February 2014, when Roj officially closed its doors, after the Supreme Court upheld the revoking of the station's Danish broadcast license — effectively closing the last option of appeal within Denmark.

At the time, the long-running dispute seemed closed, though some Danes questioned the implications of the decision on free speech.

“It cannot be true that anti-terrorism legislation in a democratic country must mean that the press cannot provide information freely without fear of legal repercussions,” the left wing Red-Green Alliance, Enhedslisten stated earlier this year.

09COPENHAGEN241_a

However,the following May WikiLeaks released a bombshell: secret documents indicating Rasmussen had struck a shadowy deal with the government in Ankara. Under the secret deal, the Turkish government agreed to support Rasmussen's bid to head NATO if Danish authorities shut Roj down.

“They were going to try all different methods and use creative tax investigations — it even uses that word 'creative' — in the cable to work out how to smash (Roj TV).”

The leaked document that WikiLeaks published as 09COPENHAGEN241_a and dated May 26, 2009, brought light to the inner workings of the deal.

The cable was allegedly sent by Terence McCulley, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen at the time.

“Danish pledges to intensify efforts against Roj-TV — among the measures offered to Turkey for not blocking former PM Rasmussen's appointment as NATO secretary general — have given additional impetus to the investigation (into Roj TV),” the cable states.

The cable's author further explained “senior officials” were trying to “tread carefully, to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo (i.e., sacrificing freedom of speech in exchange for a high level post).”

Yet while officials were trying to keep things quiet, a major investigation into the station was being conducted behind closed doors. The cable states a criminal investigation into the station was focusing on establishing links between the PKK and Roj TV.

“No clear evidence has been found to connect the broadcaster with the PKK,” the cable stated.

However, authorities also appear to have been frantically looking at any possible way to shut Roj TV down. While commenting that the “Danes would welcome an opportunity to take action against Roj-TV and rid themselves of this issue once and for all,” the cable bemoans, “they will not move without some new evidence or approach that can shield them against charges of trading principle for the former prime minister's career.”

However, as Assange argues, this is exactly what happened in reality. Under the deal, Rasmussen recruited Danish prosecutors and intelligence agents to “crush” Roj TV, as Assange described it.

“They were going to try all different methods and use creative tax investigations — it even uses that word 'creative' — in the cable to work out how to smash (Roj TV),” Assange said.

Today, Roj TV is appealing the Danish decision to remove it from the airwaves in European courts. “And this cable is the star exhibit for that case,” Assange finished.

The U.S. Connection

If Assange's allegations prove true, it means the head of the largest military alliance in the world secured his job through shady backroom deals. However, there is more to the story than that. Supporting Assange's allegation, Roj TV's lawyer, Bjorn Elmquist, has alleged the deal was done with Washington's approval.

“It seemed like a rather dirty deal.”

“There was big pressure from the (United States) to think in a creative manner how to indict and how to prove that Roj television was promoting terrorism. And in the end, the indictment was there,” Elmquist told RT earlier this year.

“The (United States) intervened because they liked very much (for the) then-Danish prime minister to become secretary general. And therefore they felt confident with him as a secretary general,” he said.

The White House probably supported Rasmussen's NATO bid due to his political conservatism as prime minister of Denmark, according to David Gibbs, a professor of history at the University of Arizona.

“(Rasmussen) was known for shifting the climate of opinion and politics in Denmark to the right, a promoter of neoliberalism in Denmark and also of NATO and U.S. interests,” Gibbs told teleSUR.

As the political and civilian head of NATO, Rasmussen has been no different, Gibbs explained.

“Not atypically, he is obviously very loyal to U.S. interests, because that is invariably what the Secretary General of NATO is for. He's been supportive of pretty much every aspect of U.S. foreign policy, that I am aware of, from the middle east to the Ukraine. That is basically his function,” he said.

Summarizing his take on the WikiLeaks cable, Gibbs said “it seemed like a rather dirty deal.”

Cracking Down on Kurdish Free Speech?

Speaking to teleSUR English, U.S. dissident and academic Noam Chomsky argued the cable is evidence of more than just a questionable appointment of a NATO head.

Chomsky argued the cable illustrates how the United States “continues to support” the repression of the Kurdish people in Turkey. “Turkey’s murderous and destructive repression of its Kurdish population, particularly in the 1990s, relied crucially on a huge flow of U.S. arms, increasing as Turkish terror increased,” Chomsky said.

“Turkey wants to put an end to all that is Kurdish.”

The U.S. weapons were used by Turkish security forces to fight the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — the organization Ankara's embassy in Denmark claimed Roj TV supported.

For decades the PKK fought an armed rebellion against Ankara to carve out an independent state in southern Turkey. Since its founding leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured in 1999, the PKK has tried to draw down fighting with Turkey, and compromise for autonomy instead of independence. The years of conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Around 5,000 ethnic Turks were killed in the war, while over 35,000 Kurds died.

Thousands of Kurdish villages were razed in Turkish efforts to hunt down PKK fighters. Millions of Kurds were displaced. Human rights organizations have accused Turkish security forces of routinely torturing Kurds suspected of having links to the PKK. Kurds themselves say the government in Ankara also repressed Kurdish culture and freedom of expression, though human rights groups have long criticized the government in Ankara for its restrictions on media freedoms – for both Kurds and Turks.

For two years in a row, between 2012-13 Turkey was considered the world's leading jailer of journalists by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In 2013 alone, 40 journalists were put behind bars nationwide.

However, a CPJ spokesperson told teleSUR the government has jailed less journalists this year, and “Turkey is no longer the leading jailer of journalists.”

“Following releases this year, there are currently 11 journalists in jail in Turkey. The leading jailers of journalists are now Iran and China,” The CPJ stated.

Yet Kurdish activists say Turkey's repression of its Kurdish population continues unabated, while the PKK remains listed as a terrorist organization by Ankara, along with the European Union and the United States. The PKK itself denies the claim, instead arguing its goals are to defend Kurdish rights — including the right to self-determination.

“Today, while cultural rights are still mostly withheld, a seemingly unending economic problem exists in the Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey, with unemployment levels reaching as high as 70 percent,” the Alliance for Kurdish Rights (AKR) states on its website. The AKR describes itself as a Kurdish rights advocacy group.

In an interview with AKR, Roj TV's former director Imdat Yilmaz said the closure of his station was part of a wider pattern of Turkish discrimination against the Kurds, both in Turkey and abroad.

“Turkey wants to put an end to all that is Kurdish,” he said.

Yilmaz said the broadcaster “tried to start a debate about the oppression in Kurdistan,” and provide Kurdish views that are otherwise missing from mainstream debate.

“The Kurdish people sees Roj TV as their own TV station. They finance it and they are therefore the real owners. It is the only station that brings news about the Kurds and what they are experiencing. The Kurdish language, the dialects, the culture survive through the programs in TV. People learn their own language and dance to the music that is played on the screen,” he said.

The Big Picture

While this rare expression of Kurdish culture was being blotted out, Gibbs explained Rasmussen was playing a key role in reshaping NATO to keep it seemingly relevant in the 21st Century.

"We have a new pretext to justify NATO's existence, which I think was the real issue all along."

As Gibbs pointed out, NATO has faced an identity crisis since the end of the Cold War, and has been in desperate need of a facelift.

“During the Cold War it was created to repel or contain a prospective Soviet invasion of Western Europe. And that was its sole function. After the Cold War nobody really knew what the function of NATO was,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs told teleSUR many people expected NATO to disappear along with the Cold War.

“The problem with it is that it is an extension of American power. It is a source of prestige and power for the (United States). It is beneficial to a whole block of vested interests that benefit from it,” he said.

Along with U.S. government interests, Gibbs pointed out NATO is also backed by a chorus of corporate voices. Data from the military spending monitor SIPRI indicates the combined military expenditure of NATO member states makes the alliance by far the largest buyer of armaments on the planet. Yet despite this, the United States has continued to push other NATO members to spend more on defense.

During NATO's summit in Wales in September, Rasmussen likewise spoke out in favor of more spending on arms.

“When it comes to security, you get what you pay for, and it doesn’t come on the cheap,” he told a press conference during the summit.

“We agree to reverse the trend of declining defense budgets. And raise them over the coming decade,” Rasmussen explained.

To Gibbs, it came as no surprise that Rasmussen was pushing for further militarization of NATO members amid a political standoff in Ukraine.

“There is going to be some kind of organizational re-orientation of NATO along the lines of preparing for some kind of combat with Russia as opposed to the former Soviet Union, and so NATO trying to revert to its old function to some degree,” Gibbs said.

“This is not as simple or cynical a view as some might think. I don't think that people woke up one morning and decided that they wanted to make Russia an enemy. But in effect, that is what they did. That is, if you treat Russia as an enemy, low and behold they will become an enemy ... and now we have a new pretext to justify NATO's existence, which I think was the real issue all along,” he explained.

Rasmussen was critical to NATO's self-justification. As a White House spokesperson put it, “Rasmussen’s strategic vision for the alliance has helped guarantee our readiness to meet any threat, and our alliance is stronger because of his leadership.”

The comments were made during a glowing statement bidding Rasmussen farewell as he prepared to formally step down from his post in late September.

“In the final year of his tenure, his leadership has been critical in guiding NATO’s response to unexpected and serious challenges posed to our common security by Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and the growing threat of ISIL in the Middle East,” the White House said.

An Ugly Story

So at the end of the story with everything, everyone got what they wanted. Rasmussen received a coveted term at the wheel of NATO, the Obama administration secured a NATO leader firmly aligned with U.S. political interests, NATO was spared from obsolescence, and Turkey was able to eradicate one of the Kurd's few avenues of free speech.

The only party left in the cold were the Turkish Kurds, who still today continue to suffer repression under Ankara's rule. As Chomsky summed it up, it's “an ugly story, all around.”

Learn more about the cable by watching teleSUR's interview with Assange, available below.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sun Oct 19, 2014 1:24 am

Common Dreams

Published on October 14, 2014
by Inter Press Service

The Disturbing Expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex

by Mairead Maguire

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'It is shocking to listen to politicians and military boast of their military prowess when in lay persons’ terms what it means is killing of human beings.' (Photo: US Navy / flickr)

BELFAST - How can we explain that in the 2lst century we are still training millions of men and women in our armed forces and sending them to war?

There are more choices than war or peace, there are multi-optional choices and a civilian-based non-military diplomatic-political policy has more chance of succeeding in solving a violent conflict.

In war, the cost in civilian lives is incalculable, not to mention the many military personnel whose lives are destroyed. Then there is the cost to the environment and the cost to human potential as our scientists waste their lives planning and researching even more horrific weapons which increasingly, in modern war, kill more civilians than combatants.

For example, the United States and the United Kingdom committed genocide against the Iraqi people when, between 1990 and 2012, they killed 3.3 million people – including 750,000 children – through sanctions and wars.

We all also watched our television screens in horror in July and August this year as the Israeli military bombarded civilians in Gaza for 50 days.

But, why are we surprised at this cruelty of military when they are doing what they are trained to do – kill, at the behest of their politicians and some people?

It is shocking to listen to politicians and military boast of their military prowess when in lay persons’ terms what it means is killing of human beings.

Every day through our television and local culture, we are subjected to the glorification of militarism and bombarded with war propaganda by governments telling us we need nuclear weapons, arms manufacturers, and war to kill the killers who might kill us.

However, too many people do not have peace or the basics to help them achieve peace.

They live their lives struggling with the roots of violence, some of which are poverty, war, militarism, occupation, racism and fascism. They have seen that they release uncontrollable forces of tribalism and nationalism. These are dangerous and murderous forms of identity which we need to transcend.

To do this, we need to acknowledge that our common humanity and human dignity are more important than our different traditions; to recognise that our lives and the lives of others are sacred and we can solve our problems without killing each other; to accept and celebrate diversity and otherness; to work to heal the ‘old’ divisions and misunderstandings; to give and accept forgiveness, and to choose listening, dialogue and diplomacy; to disarm and demilitarise as the pathway to peace.

In my own country, in Northern Ireland, when faced with a violent and prolonged ethnic/political conflict, the civil community organised to take a stand, rejected all violence and committed itself to working for peace, justice and reconciliation.

Through unconditional, all-inclusive dialogue, we reached peace and continue to work to build up trust and friendship and change in the post-conflict era. The civil community took a leading role in this journey from violence to peace.

I hope this will give an example to other countries such as Ukraine, where it is necessary for an end to the war, and a solution of the problem on the basis of the Charter of the United Nations and the Helsinki Accords.

We are also challenged to continue to build structures through which we can cooperate and which reflect our relations of interconnection and interdependence. The vision of the founders of the European Union to link countries together economically in order to lessen the likelihood of war among nations is a worthy endeavour.

Unfortunately instead of putting more energy into providing help for E.U. citizens and others, we are witnessing the growing militarisation of Europe, its role as a driving force for armament and its dangerous path, under the leadership of the United States/NATO, towards a new ‘cold’ war and military aggression.

The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on.

It is for this reason that I believe NATO should be abolished and that steps be taken towards disarmament through non-violent action and civil resistance.

The means of resistance are very important. Our message that armed groups, militarism and war do not solve our problems but aggravate them challenges us to use new ways and that is why we need to teach the science of peace at every level of society.

The whole of civilisation is now facing a challenge with the growth of what President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) warned the U.S. people against – the military/industrial complex – saying that it would destroy U.S. democracy.

We know now that a small group made up of the military/industrial/media/corporate/academic elite, whose agenda is profit, arms, war and valuable resources, now holds power worldwide and has a stronghold on elected governments. We see this in the gun and Israeli lobbies, among others, which wield great power over U.S. politics.

We have witnessed this in ongoing wars, invasions, occupations and proxy wars, all allegedly in the name of “humanitarian intervention and democracy”. However, in reality, they are causing great suffering, especially to the poor, through their policies of arms, war, domination and control of other countries and their resources.

Unmaking this agenda of war and demanding the implementation of justice, human rights and international law is the work of the peace movement.

We can turn our current path of destruction around by spelling out a clear vision of what kind of a world we want to live in, demanding an end to the military-industrial complex, and insisting that our governments adopt policies of peace, just economics and cooperation with each other in this multi-polar world.
_________

© 2014 IPS North America

Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book, The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from http://www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: http://www.peacepeople.com
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Thu Feb 12, 2015 6:47 pm

The Mind Renewed <<< Click here to listen.

TMR 097 : Dr. Daniele Ganser : NATO's Secret Armies - GLADIO & The Strategy of Tension

Published on Friday, 30 January 2015

Our guest this week is Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser, author of the seminal book NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, who joins us for a fascinating (though at times unsettling) conversation on the subject of Operation GLADIO.

Shortly after WWII a Europe-wide network of secret armies was organised under the aegis of NATO, tasked with providing military and intelligence resistance in the event of a feared Soviet invasion. Modelled on the resistance movements of the war years, many of these "stay behind" units remained faithful to their original mandate. But by the early 1960s - under the pressures of anti-communist politicking and flirtations with the Far Right - some of these groups began to morph into something more sinister, linking up with extreme right-wingers who carried out acts of false-flag terrorism, harassment of left-wing parties and coups d'état.

But was this morphing simply an unforseen consequence of the unaccountability and instability of the network itself? Or was it, at least in part, engineered by the very Anglo-American establishment which gave birth to the project in the first place? And to what extent, therefore, can such acts of terror be seen as manifestations of 'the strategy of tension', carried out by the State against its own citizens for the purposes of control at home and geopolitical gain abroad? (We also discuss: Operation Northwoods, the so-called War on Terror, 9/11 and the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks.)
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby cptmarginal » Sat Feb 14, 2015 12:29 am

I thought this was well-written, though of course it's instantly discredited in the eyes of dummies by dint of where it's published:

http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20150 ... 58169.html

Crossing the Bridge From Eurasia to NATOstan

28.01.2015

Pepe Escobar

Seen from Asia, the ghastly crisis in Europe looks and feels like a galaxy away. So as I was back from the Middle Kingdom to the austerity-ravaged, stagnated collection of dysfunctions also known as NATOstan, I decided to stop midway, in the City of Cities, for a moment of reflection.

ISTANBUL, December 31 (Sputnik) — I had no agenda other than to connect the future (the Eurasian Century) with the past (the crumbling European Union dream) via God’s favorite abode, the City of Cities; Constantinople, the New Rome. Just a Eurasia pilgrim on the move, absorbing those flows coming from the Balkans and ancient glorious Thrace; from the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara through the Bosphorus; and from chaotic, teeming peripheries where gleaming towers coexist with miserable huts.

Morning was a question of being immersed, between myth and history, in the thundering silence of centuries of stony sleep. Istanbul should be read as a scroll – beyond methodological cunning and stylistic ornaments. Jean Cocteau wrote that Constantinople was a city born in purple, a city of blood, sunsets and fires. Casanova wrote that as Constantine arrived by the sea, seduced by the sight of Byzantium, he instantly proclaimed, “This is the seat of the empire of the world.” So, in style, he left the seat of the old empire, Rome, for good.

Take it to the bridge

Turkey under the AKP party has been busy positioning itself as the ultimate crossroads between East and West. So as I set on my pilgrimage I could not forget how, at the height of the Belle Époque, Germans and Russians were planning a railway from Berlin to Moscow, and that would end on both the Siberian coast of the Pacific and in Beijing. Now Beijing is bound to realize the dream as part of the vast New Silk Road project — an extended Trans-Siberian on high-speed rails running in parallel to a cross-Central Asian high-speed railway whose key hub will be Istanbul.

As I eventually crossed the bridge over the Bosphorus I had seen plenty of Kemalists in crisis, and perhaps a few dissimulated jihadis. The Ottoman empire for over six centuries crystallized the unity of the Sunni Mediterranean and Middle Eastern umma, confronting the Persian Shi’ite empire, inheriting and metabolizing the Byzantine institutional tradition, and keeping a wise balance between faith and ethnicity using the institutions of the community – millet – and respecting the prerogatives of its non-Muslim subjects – dhimmi.

The fragmentation of this plurinational, multicultural empire led to a process of modernization and laicization that fatally engendered a fundamentalist reaction; that’s the basis of the somehow irreversible instability and violence that today characterizes the whole region; something that the Pentagon, with a measure of wishful thinking, characterized as the “arc of instability”.

Everything from the Palestinian tragedy to Iraq, from Persian Gulf Wahhabi plutocrats to the fake Caliphate known as ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, manifests itself as debris of World War I, of the obsession by Western powers to extinguish at any cost the Ottoman experience of imperial, supra-national governance. It’s the “West” that created the “arc of instability” – no less than a century ago.

The glory of Neo-Ottomanism

This time I did not cross to Asia. Instead, Asia came to me on the European shore, as I met my friend Can Emritan, who lives on the Asian side, at midday in Eminonu. And then he turned into my Virgil, leading me from the best, centenary joint to savor Black Sea fish to the best baklava at Karakoy Gulluoglu; from the best European Istanbul view to passages that evoke Paris; from the Great London Hotel, which Turks call Buyuk Londra, and who sheltered foreign correspondent Ernest Hemingway covering the Greek-Turk war in 1922 to an absolute jewel – a lavish Armenian church hidden in a fish market.

We evoked shades of White Russians in the early 1920s and we retraced the steps of Gurdjieff, the esoteric mystic extraordinaire who was an adept of the dervish fraternity Naqshbandi in Bukhara. No encounters with whirling dervishes though; in 1924 Kemal Ataturk, as part of his secular reforms, hit them hard and they survived only as a “Museum of divan literature,” as in classic Ottoman poetry.

Naturally our key conversation point had to be President Erdogan, whom Emritan calls The Sultan of Kitsch. So many overtones, from Islamo-traditional to Islamo-Ottoman, all drenched in nostalgia for the imperial Golden Age. And ruling above all the AKP party as a monster real estate speculation racket; after all “urbanization drive”, as in China, but Turkish style, means urbanization of the lower middle classes issued from the Anatolian countryside – the political basis of conservative Islam.

Erdogan, a fierce critic of the Islamophobia now rampant in the West, is warning of a "clash of civilizations" after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. He has a point, as the notion itself was penned by an ethnocentric, xenophobic and racist former US National Security Council member, Samuel Huntington – and given multiple free rides after 9/11; when in doubt, blame Islam.

My pilgrimage started in Hagia Sophia before sunrise, and ended at night in Taksim square – now an unfriendly cement square, adverse to any possible replay of an Occupy Istanbul. In 1934, Kemal wanted Hagia Sophia turned into a museum to honor the glorious Byzantine and Ottoman traditions. Hagia Sophia will revert to being a mosque, as soon as the Studion monastery, which was itself a mosque from 1453 to 1920, is restored.

This could be yet another manifestation of the neo-Islamic wave; or a graphic case of what Zygmunt Bauman called “religionization of politics” – secular politics reshaped by religious certitude.

Whatever the case, the Sultan should prevail, and get his wish. He already turned NATO upside down – spurning an alliance created to fight the USSR, and kept running against Russia, by clinching the vast Turk Stream pipeline deal with Moscow. And now Sberbank is willing to finance it – alongside Istanbul’s third airport and a nuclear power plant in Akkuyu.

Turk Stream has graphically demonstrated how Turkey is well on its way to become the ultimate crossroads between Eurasia and NATOstan — on its own terms. And the City of Cities is bound to remain — what else — the jewel in the neo-Ottoman crown.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Sputnik.

You can buy Pepe Escobar’s latest book "Empire of Chaos" here


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_%28news_agency%29

Sputnik is an international multimedia news service launched on 10 November 2014 by the Russian Federation owned and operated agency, Rossiya segodnya. Sputnik replaces the RIA Novosti news agency and the Voice of Russia international radio broadcaster.


Separate the wheat from the chaff; it's not that hard...
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 15, 2015 9:45 am

just as a reminder
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sat May 16, 2015 5:55 pm

NATO foreign ministers sing 'We Are The World' at dinner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_wfMrz9_mY
Reuters

Published on May 14, 2015
Setting aside for a moment all the world's major problems, NATO foreign ministers let their hair down at the end of a meeting in Antalya, Turkey. NATO
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Sat Dec 05, 2015 8:19 am

RT

The Warsaw Pact is dead, so why is NATO still alive?

Hafsa Kara-Mustapha

Published time: 5 Dec, 2015 10:30

Image
NATO soldiers participate in "Operation Hazel” military drill at the Adazi training field, Latvia © Ints Kalnins / Reuters


Unlike state armies that exist to protect the integrity of the nation, NATO has no defined purpose other than to continuously engage in conflict. This explains the organization’s desire for conflict , when diplomacy is the best answer.

Imagine a kitchen fully equipped with the latest cooking gadgets, stocked up with the freshest and best quality produce and staffed with the most highly trained chefs on the planet. Now imagine these passionate cooks, whose lives revolve around the art of gastronomy, are told that while they have to stay in that kitchen, they cannot cook... not unless there is a dinner party to cater for.

Wouldn't these chefs, eager to use those groceries and cooking appliances be tempted to find any excuse to host a party which would lead them to live out their passion? When the world is at peace, the men and women of NATO, a military outfit entirely dedicated to warfare, must feel like these skilled chefs left redundant in a professional kitchen.

Their raison d'être is war; they need it to justify their existence.

Unlike state armies that exist to protect the integrity of the nation, NATO has no defined purpose other than to continuously engage in conflict. This explains the organization’s eagerness to go to war, when so many times, diplomacy is the answer.

What is NATO?

In the aftermath of the World War II, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. In response, the Warsaw Pact was signed, aimed at giving equal protection to Soviet Russia and its allies against Western imperialism.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it became apparent that the Warsaw Pact would no longer be necessary and was consequently declared 'at an end' in February of that year. In the spirit of buried hatchets and a return to normalized relations, dismantling NATO should have been the natural response.

Instead NATO was not only maintained, it was expanded.

The months and years that followed the fall of the Soviet Union were characterized by economic hardship for the smaller, resource-dependent nations that were once dependent on the Soviet Union for their survival. These struggling economies struck deals with Western nations in the hope of economic benefits that would extract them from the likely specter of severe economic breakdown.

Tragically, however, the aid packages came with hefty price tags and, in a bid to be welcomed into the now more prosperous Western fold, the former Warsaw Pact countries were lured into the membership of the US-led military bloc. The move was not only crass. In light of the difficulties faced by these small nations coming to terms with massive changes, it was a very blatant and hostile act towards a Russia that no longer posed a threat.

Hungary, Czech Republic and most notably Poland were the first to join NATO, soon followed by Estonia Latvia and Bulgaria some five years later. By 2009, NATO bases were all around Russia. Since then, NATO has been involved in a number of wars around Europe and the Middle East with devastating long term consequences for those bearing the brunt of its formidable bombing capabilities.

One of NATO's first victims came in 1999 in Yugoslavia, which eventually disintegrated thanks to the US, which was keen to operate the age old rule of 'divide and conquer' over an already fractured Eastern Europe. When the conflict between the forces of the federal republic of Yugoslavia and the newly formed Kosovo liberation army erupted, NATO rapidly stepped in to support the essentially Muslim Kosovars. NATO attempted to justify its actions, saying the military offensive sought to stop human rights abuses in Kosovo. It also marked the first time NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council.

Rising tensions between warring parties could have been mitigated, in particular from a committed Europe supposedly keen to stop yet another massacre and ethnic cleansing operations on its continent. Instead, NATO bombing raids led to hugely controversial operations that caused great loss of civilian life and destruction of vital infrastructure.

Supported by the much-discredited former British PM Tony Blair, the war would become instrumental in selling NATO to Muslim peoples as a Muslim friendly outfit working for its benefit.

Propping up rampant nationalism and feeding into tribal and religious divisions among the various ethnic/religious groups of the once non-aligned nation, Yugoslavia collapsed and the US was eager to fuel the next conflict that would propel NATO further into Eastern Europe.

This of course despite the ongoing sanctions on Iraq by NATO American leadership which by 1999 were causing up to 3,000 deaths a month. Or in Palestine, a major sore spot for Muslim public opinion, which remained occupied by US-supported Israel and despite the lauded Oslo Agreement signed on the back of the first Gulf War.

In the years that followed the Kosovo War, whenever Muslims expressed oppositions to wars in Muslim countries - namely Afghanistan and Iraq - US and UK officials would reply that Kosovo was proof that NATO did step up to help Muslims when necessary.

That Kosovo is now a major hub for human traffickers is always absent from the positive spin pushed in favor of the US lead military intervention.

As for neighboring Albania, since 2009 it has played host to one of Europe's largest NATO bases.

The way in which NATO has gnawed into Eastern Europe has naturally incensed Russia and begs the question of how Britain would react if, say Ireland, were to host a major Russian military base. Somehow the other side's perspective is never taken into account and instead western public opinion is goaded into seeing wrong-doing in Russian interventions while downplaying its own.

Perhaps NATO's most catastrophic intervention to date, as well as its most illegal would have to be its onslaught on Libya back in 2011. What initially started out as an imposition of a no-fly zone backed by a UN mandate quickly transformed into a blatant regime-change operation.

NATO war planes were initially tasked at stopping Libyan jets from bombing the rebel city of Benghazi, where French-backed militias spoke of an upcoming massacre at the hands of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Facts were distorted and such a massacre never occurred. Even Western-based NGOs such as Amnesty International and HRW spoke of 100 protesters and police officers killed in the first few days of protests, as opposed to the 10,000 victims being broadcast in the mainstream media.

Nevertheless, Western capitals, this time lead by France, were clamoring for another conflict. A coalition was rapidly formed and within three weeks, NATO war planes were pounding the Libyan coast destroying what took over forty years to build.

Once again courting peace brokers in the hope of averting war was set aside. NATO officials hadn't had a war in far too long and were keen to test out their latest equipment.

Speaking to the Guardian in May 2011, a British defense analyst casually dismissed the operation as an opportunity to test out military capabilities against real targets: "A lot of what they are doing out there, the analyst said, is a substitute for training that would have cost anyway."

Never mind that between 30,000 and 50,000 Libyans lost their lives according to Libyan sources, that much of the eastern coast line of the country was turned to rubble and that the power vacuum left by Gaddafi transformed Libya, once a major rampart against Al Qaeda groups operating in sub-Saharan Africa, into an ISIS powerhouse.

Once again, no chance was given to peace talks and NATO's military personnel, keen on engaging in another conflict, resorted to blind bombings until the capture and cold-blooded killing of the Libyan leader. During that time, public opinion was lead to believe that all of Libya opposed Gaddafi and that the Libyan rebels supported by the Gulf sheikdom of Qatar, were the better alternative.

And yet it took six months of continuous bombing by NATO to finally bring the leadership to its knees. Had all Libyans been in support of the NATO-backed rebels, Tripoli would have fallen within a week, a month at best. Instead, it took all the military might of the world's most sophisticated and well-equipped army to bring about the Libyan leader's demise.

Today, Syria is faced with a similar prospect. In the wake of the terrorist attacks that rocked Paris on November 13, 2015 and attributed to ISIS, Western capitals are once again baying for Arab blood. Never mind that Syrian government forces are at the forefront of the fight against the ISIS network, France is forging an alliance that will endeavor to do to Syria what it did to Libya four years ago.

No long-term strategy is being discussed but the veiled aim is to bring down the Assad government. NATO wants its war, and like the petulant child in need of its toy, its bosses in Paris, London and Washington won’t quit til it gets what it wants.

The vampire outfit known as NATO that feeds on innocent blood will find it in abundance in the Middle East.
_______

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


~



Montenegro: 1000s protest against plans for NATO integration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibUQBvkI7ig
Ruptly TV

Published on Nov 28, 2015

Roughly seven thousand people gathered at the centre of the Montenegro's second largest city of Niksic, Saturday, to protest against policies of NATO integration proposed by Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Dukanovic.

Protesters waved Montenegrin and Serbian flags, while chanting protest slogans against the Montenegrin Prime Minister, such as 'Milo, you thief," "Milo, assassin" and "you betrayed Kosovo'.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Mon Apr 04, 2016 5:16 pm

RT

Happy Birthday, NATO: It’s time to retire!


Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance journalist and media analyst. She has lived in the US and Germany and is currently based in Moscow. She previously worked as a digital desk reporter for the Sunday Business Post in Dublin. She studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism in Washington, DC and also has a degree in business and German. She focuses on US foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias.

Published time: 4 Apr, 2016

Image
Flags fly at half mast at NATO headquarters in Brussels © Francois Lenoir / Reuters

Birthdays are always a good time to take stock of one’s achievements, make some resolutions and contemplate the road ahead. So, with NATO turning sixty-seven today, perhaps it’s time for the military alliance to engage in some honest self-reflection.

The problem is, sometimes it’s just hard to let go. No one wants to admit their glory days are behind them. Everyone wants to feel they have a purpose, some grand vision yet to fulfill. When the time comes to hang up your hat, some bow out gracefully. Others need to be dragged kicking and screaming.

If Supreme Allied Commander General Philip Breedlove’s latest comments are anything to go by, the alliance won’t be performing a graceful exit any time soon. Instead, the 28-member bloc is simply recalibrating its efforts in an attempt to justify its existence and remain relevant.

‘Not a peace program, a war program’

Intending to provide collective security against the Soviet Union, the military alliance was founded on April 4, 1949 by 12 countries, led by the United States. The bloc would aim to prevent the spread of communism and promote American economic interests across the European continent. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and ceased to exist in December 1991, NATO was at a bit of a loose end. Instead of disbanding, the organization continued to usher in new members in bouts of expansion that were sure to provoke modern Russia.

As I have written before, there were those even at the time of the organization’s founding that foresaw such a situation emerging. US Senator Robert A. Taft — the son of President William Howard Taft — was one of them. Taft was outspoken in his misgivings about the appropriateness of such an alliance. He believed that a military bloc built on arming nations against the USSR could leave Moscow feeling “ringed” in and could lay the groundwork for another world war — even going so far as to say it is “not a peace program, it is a war program.” In a speech explaining his vote against the formation of the alliance, he asked: “How would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?”

For as long as it has existed, NATO has been geared primarily towards serving Washington’s geostrategic interests. It was then, as it is now, far more about creating vassal states in Europe that would do America’s bidding than it was about keeping them safe. The goal was to unite as many nations as possible under a pro-Washington umbrella which would rarely, if ever, question US foreign policy.

NATO’s greatest hits

Despite the fact that its original adversary obviously no longer posed any threat to its member states, NATO could hardly just sit twiddling its thumbs, waiting for something to happen. It wouldn’t do to simply disband such a useful tool of political influence, so Washington needed to make it look useful. It needed to justify its existence.

Suddenly, the alliance was about to fall head over heels in love with “humanitarian” interventions. Or, as Noam Chomsky has put it, the NATO that emerged after 1991 was basically “a US-run intervention force”. More interesting though, was the fact that NATO’s interventions over the past two-and-a-half decades have actually had little to do with maintaining the security of its members, despite the fact that it claims its “essential purpose” is to “safeguard” their freedom and security. The “defensive” alliance, which is “committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes,” has simply acted as a front for US aggression on three different continents.

In one of NATO’s most recent displays of its commitment to peace, it called for the implementation of a no-fly zone in Libya and then proceeded to bomb the country — once the richest in Africa — back into the dark ages, leaving it a failed state. Under the guise of humanitarian intervention, NATO provided cover for a regime-change operation that Washington had been planning for decades.

During the 1990s, NATO intervened in the Yugoslav wars, which involved a disastrous attempt to implement a no-fly zone in Bosnia between 1993 and 1995 and a 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia which reduced much of Belgrade’s infrastructure to rubble and killed hundreds of civilians. These conflicts posed no direct threat to NATO states, but the pretense was that of necessary “humanitarian” intervention. The reality, as ever, was about little more than shifting the political balance into Washington’s favor.

Justifying its existence

But none of that is enough. Washington can’t sell NATO as a peace-loving military organization that intervenes in external conflicts out of the goodness of its heart. Nobody would be much interested in joining that. There still must be a tangible, visible threat to the safety of member states. Enter a “resurgent and aggressive” Russia. NATO’s press office has gone into overdrive since 2013 hyping a Russian threat. Vladimir Putin has been on the verge of invading the Baltics for about two years now. That there is no evidence of any imminent threat to anyone is irrelevant; the idea is to keep repeating it until everyone believes there is.

Moscow’s sin, Breedlove recently said, is that it “continues to seek to extend its influence on its periphery and beyond.” There is of course huge irony in hearing this from the head of a military organization that allows the US to extend its influence about four and a half thousands miles away from its border.

Not content to let bygones be bygones and work in tandem with Moscow on crucial issues, differences aside, NATO has continued to exacerbate tensions. As one analyst noted, by expanding towards its border, NATO has “deliberately and recklessly posed a major threat to the security of the Russian Federation”. All the while, NATO has played the victim.

Time to say goodbye

A broken clock is right twice a day. US presidential candidate Donald Trump may be a bumbling fool, but in his latest assessment of NATO as “obsolete” he is absolutely correct.

Sixty-seven years after its founding, NATO exists for no good reason. Where threats don’t exist, it imagines them. Where tensions should be minimal, it heightens them. In the grander scheme of things, it serves the interests of only one of its members.

It’s time to call it a day.
_______

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Thu Aug 18, 2016 5:35 am

defend democracy press

NATO’s Warsaw Communiqué: Planning the Crime of Aggression


20/07/2016
By Christopher Black

I have been a defence lawyer most of my working life and am not used to gathering evidence for a prosecution, but circumstances impelled me to open a file for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or perhaps some future citizen’s tribunal, in which is contained the evidence that the NATO leaders are guilty of the gravest crime against mankind, the crime of aggression. I would like to share with you some brief notes of interest from that file, for your consideration.

Article 8bis of the Rome Statute, the governing statue of the International Criminal Court states:

For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter on the United Nations.

The NATO communiqué issued from Warsaw on July 9th is direct evidence of such planning and preparation and therefore of a conspiracy by the NATO leaders to commit acts of aggression against Russia, and would be the subject of an indictment of the International Criminal Court against the leaders of the NATO military alliance, if the prosecutor of the ICC was in fact independent, which she is not, and of course, if the articles relating to crimes of aggression were in effect which will not take place until January 1, 2017, if at all, under the articles of the Rome Statute.

Nevertheless, the technical issue of jurisdiction that prevents the issuance of an indictment against the NATO leaders at this time does not legitimate the planning and preparation of acts of aggression as are contained in the NATO communiqué nor reduce the moral weight of the crime of aggression set out in the Statute and the Nuremberg Principles, for the crime of aggression is the supreme crime of war.

On their own words, set out in black and white, in their communiqué of July 9th, the NATO leaders, each and every one, and the entire general staffs of the armed forces of each and every NATO country, are guilty of the crime of aggression. The fact that there is no effective body to which they can be brought for trial is irrelevant to the fact of the crime being committed. They are the enemies of mankind and charged or not, tried or not, they are international outlaws who must be identified as such and called to account by their own peoples.

The evidence of their crimes of course predates this communiqué and consists in years of actions by the NATO powers, since the Soviet Union dissolved itself and the Warsaw Pact, under the agreement with NATO, the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act, that NATO would not expand into any of the countries formally members of the Warsaw Pact or the USSR, nor place nuclear weapons there. NATO has broken that agreement continuously since and has, as an organisation, or through groups of its member states, committed acts of aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Russia (during the Georgian attack on South Ossetia and through support of Chechen terrorist groups inside Russia itself), Ukraine and Syria with each act of aggression supported by massive propaganda campaigns to attempt to justify these crimes as legitimate. The western mass media are all complicit in these crimes by distributing this propaganda to the people they are meant to inform.

The same powers have committed and are committing further acts of aggression against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Iran and China and continuously increasing their planning and preparation for aggression against those nations. These plans are also set out in the NATO communiqué but the gravest threat to mankind is the immediate existential threat against Russia, to which the principal part of the communiqué is directed.

The NATO communiqué is in fact a declaration of war against Russia. There is no other way to interpret it.

Many months ago I stated that we can regard the NATO build-up of forces in Eastern Europe, the NATO coup that overthrew the Yanukovich government in Ukraine, the attempt to grab the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, the immediate attacks on Ukrainian civilians in the eastern provinces that refused to accept the NATO coup, the constant propaganda against Russia as “aggressor” and the economic warfare conducted against Russia under the guise of “sanctions,” to be tantamount to a second Operation Barbarossa, the Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. I was hesitant to so describe it but the facts were there and now others have recognised that the analogy is the correct one. And just as the leaders of the Third Reich were finally held responsible for their crimes at Nuremberg, so should be the leaders of the new Reich that the Americans and their vassal states are planning to impose on the rest of us.

At Paragraph 5 of the communiqué and following, they commit the first part of their crime by setting out supposed “aggressive actions” of Russia, in which, in every instance, they are the real aggressors.

At paragraph 15 they state, after some drivel about “partnership between NATO and Russia,” that,

“We regret that despite repeated calls by Allies and the international community since 2014 for Russia to change course, the conditions for that relationship do not currently exist. The nature of the Alliance’s relations with Russia and aspirations for partnership will be contingent on a clear, constructive change in Russia’s actions that demonstrates compliance with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities. Until then, we cannot return to “business as usual.”

What they mean by Russia “changing course” is, of course, doing what they order, and “compliance with international law” means nothing less than complying with NATO diktats. The world saw what happened to Yugoslavia, when President Milosevic had the guts to tell them to go to hell when Madelaine Albright issued her long list of demands, to him, including the occupation of Yugoslavia by NATO forces and the dismantling of socialism, followed by the choice, comply or be bombed. The Yugoslav government had the right and the courage and so defied them, and so NATO leaders activated the leg-breakers, the enforcers, and the murderers who serve in their armed forces and began the vast destruction of a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement.

We saw it again with Afghanistan, invaded on a legal pretext of harbouring an alleged criminal, Bin Laden, who has never been charged with a crime and who was working under US Army command in Kosovo in 1998-9, fighting against the Yugoslav government.

We saw it with Iraq, ordered to surrender weapons it never had, and then attacked with “shock and awe” a display of military power meant not just for Iraq, but for the whole world; this I what we will do to you if you don’t play ball.

We saw it with President Aristide in Haiti in 2004 when American and Canadian soldiers arrested him at gunpoint and exiled him in chains to Africa, while the world looked away. We saw it in 2010 when President Laurent Gbagbo was arrested by the French and thrown into the morass of the International Criminal Court. We saw it in 2011 when NATO destroyed socialist Libya and we see it now as they try the same against Syria and Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China and most importantly, Russia.

Paragraph 15 is nothing less than a diktat, “obey us or we cannot return to business as usual,” meaning, ultimately, war.

There then follows a long series of paragraphs of lies and distortions about events with everything blamed on Russia. They know these are lies and distortions of course but the point is that these communiqués are generated in Washington as propaganda devices to be quoted over and over again in the western media and referred to by their diplomats and politicians in every speech.

At paragraph 35 and following they refer to their plans for their new Operation Barbarossa, the build-up of NATO forces in Eastern Europe. They call it the Readiness Action Plan. In other words, all those paragraphs set out their plans for preparing the logistical and strategic capacity to attack Russia. That they intend to do so is now clear with the placement of anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania and soon on Russia’s southeast flank in Korea, that are intended to ensure the success of a nuclear first strike on Russia by NATO nuclear forces. The anti-missile systems are meant to intercept any retaliatory missiles launched by survivors in Russia. But, as President Putin pointed out, they can also be used directly in an offensive capacity.

They then emphasize that nuclear weapons are an important part of their strategy and in paragraph 53 state,

“NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture also relies, in part, on United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe and on capabilities and infrastructure provided by Allies concerned.” The fear is that with recent exercises in Poland and in the Arctic in which the use of air strikes to launch nuclear weapons such as nuclear tipped cruise missiles against Russia played a prominent part, the United States and its NATO allies are planning for and preparing for a nuclear attack on Russia. This is the only conclusion possible since it is clear that Russia has no intention of attacking any country in Eastern Europe nor anywhere else and so the excuse given that the presence of nuclear weapons in Europe is a deterrent against Russian “aggression” is established as a lie and therefore their presence can have only one purpose-to be used in attack.

The evidence is before us, the dossier complete. It sits on a desk, gathering dust, of no use to anyone, except the court of public opinion, and what is that worth these days? But perhaps some one out there will take it, develop it and give it to a tribunal, perhaps one of the people, for the people, set up by the people, to try those who plan to destroy the people, that can act quickly, before the final crime of aggression is committed against Russia; against us all.
_____
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, he is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and he is known for a number of high-profile cases involving human rights and war crimes, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”


~~~

defend democracy press

The Death of Milosevic and NATO Responsibility


18/08/2016

This article first appeared in Izvestia in March of 2015.

On March 11, 2006, President Slobodan Milosevic died in a NATO prison. No one has been held accountable for his death. In the 10 years since the end of his lonely struggle to defend himself and his country against the false charges invented by the NATO powers, the only country to demand a public inquiry into the circumstances of his death came from Russia when Foreign Minister, Serge Lavrov, stated that Russia did not accept the Hague tribunal’s denial of responsibility and demanded that an impartial and international investigation be conducted. Instead, The NATO tribunal made its own investigation, known as the Parker Report, and as expected, exonerated itself from all blame.

But his death cannot lie unexamined, the many questions unanswered, those responsible unpunished. The world cannot continue to accept the substitution of war and brutality for peace and diplomacy. It cannot continue to tolerate governments that have contempt for peace, for humanity, the sovereignty of nations, the self-determination of peoples, and the rule of law.

The death of Slobodan Milosevic was clearly the only way out of the dilemma the NATO powers had put themselves in by charging him before the Hague tribunal. The propaganda against him was of an unprecedented scale. The trial was played in the press as one of the world’s great dramas, as world theatre in which an evil man would be made to answer for his crimes. But of course, there had been no crimes, except those of the NATO alliance, and the attempt to fabricate a case against him collapsed into farce.

The trial was necessary from NATO’s point of view in order to justify the aggression against Yugoslavia and the putsch by the DOS forces in Belgrade supported by NATO, by which democracy in Yugoslavia was finally destroyed and Serbia reduced to a NATO protectorate under a Quisling regime. His illegal arrest, by NATO forces in Belgrade, his illegal detention in Belgrade Central Prison, his illegal rendition to the former Gestapo prison at Scheveningen, near The Hague, and the show trial that followed, were all part of the drama played out for the world public, and it could only have one of two endings, the conviction, or the death, of President Milosevic.

Since the conviction of President Milosevic was clearly not possible after all the evidence was heard, his death became the only way out for the NATO powers. His acquittal would have brought down the entire structure of the propaganda framework of the NATO war machine and the western interests that use it as their armed fist.

NATO clearly did not expect President Milosevic to defend himself, nor with such courage and determination. The media coverage of the beginning of the trial was constant and front page. It was promised that it would be the trial of the century. Yet soon after it began the media coverage stopped and the trial was buried in the back pages. Things had gone terribly wrong for Nato right at the start. The key to the problem is the following statement of President Milosevic made to the judges of the Tribunal during the trial:

“This is a political trial. What is at issue here is not at all whether I committed a crime. What is at issue is that certain intentions are ascribed to me from which consequences are later derived that are beyond the expertise of any conceivable lawyer. The point here is that the truth about the events in the former Yugoslavia has to be told here. It is that which is at issue, not the procedural questions, because I’m not sitting here because I was accused of a specific crime. I’m sitting here because I am accused of conducting a policy against the interests of this or another party.”

The prosecution, that is the United States and its allies, had not expected a real defence of any kind. This is clear from the inept indictments, confused charges, and the complete failure to bring any evidence that could withstand even basic scrutiny. The prosecution case fell apart as soon as it began. But once started, it had to continue. Nato was locked into a box of its own making. If they dropped the charges, or if he was acquitted, the political and geostrategic ramifications were enormous. Nato would have to explain the real reasons for the aggression against Yugoslavia. Its leaders themselves would face war crimes charges. The loss of prestige cannot be calculated. President Milosevic would once again be a popular political figure in the Balkans. The only way out for NATO was to end the trial but without releasing Milosevic or admitting the truth about the war. This logic required his death in prison and the abandonment of the trial.

The Parker Report contains facts indicating that, at a minimum, the Nato Tribunal engaged in conduct that was criminal regarding his treatment and that conduct resulted in his death. The Tribunal was told time and again that he was gravely ill with heart problems that needed proper investigation, treatment and complete rest before engaging in a trial. However, the Tribunal continually ignored the advice of the doctors and pushed him to keep going with the trial, knowing full well that the stress of the trial would certainly kill him.

The Tribunal refused prescribed medical treatment in Russia seemingly for political reasons and once again put the Tribunal’s interests, whatever they are, ahead of Milosevic’s health. In other words they deliberately withheld necessary medical treatment that could have lead to his death. This is a form of homicide and is manslaughter in the common law jurisdictions.

However, there are several unexplained facts contained in the Parker Report that need further investigation before ruling out poison or drugs designed to harm his health: the presence of the drugs rifampicin and droperidol in his system being the two key ones. No proper investigation was conducted as to how these drugs could have been introduced into his body. No consideration was given to their effect. Their presence combined with the unexplained long delay in getting his body to a medical facility for tests raises serious questions that need to be answered but which until today remain unanswered.

The Parker Report, despite its illogical conclusions, exonerating the Nato tribunal from blame, provides the basis for a call for a public inquiry into the death of President Milosevic. This is reinforced by the fact that the Commandant of the UN prison where President Milosevic was held, a Mr. McFadden, was, according to documents exposed by Wikileaks, supplying information to the US authorities about Milosevic throughout his detention and trial, and is further reinforced by the fact that Milosevic wrote a letter to the Russian Embassy a few days before his death stating that he believed he was being poisoned. Unfortunately he died before the letter could be delivered in time for a response.

All these facts taken together demand that a public international inquiry be held into the entirety of the circumstances of the death of President Milosevic, not only for his sake and the sake of his widow Mira Markovic and his son, but for the sake of all of us who face the constant aggressive actions and propaganda of the NATO powers. Justice requires it. International peace and security demand it.
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Mon Jul 27, 2020 11:17 pm

Nobel Prize

Art, Truth & Politics
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2005


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conniption
 
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Re: Stop NATO - Opposition to global militarism

Postby conniption » Tue Aug 11, 2020 4:26 am


Strategic Culture
(embedded links)

NATO 2030: How to Make a Bad Idea Worse

Matthew Ehret
June 23, 2020



Just when you thought the leaders of NATO could not push the limits of insanity any further, something like NATO 2030 is announced.

After helping blow up the Middle East and North Africa, dividing the Balkans into zones of war and tension, turning Ukraine upside down using armadas of neo Nazis, and encircling Russia with a ballistic missile shield, the leaders of this Cold War relic have decided that the best way to deal with instability of the world is… more NATO.

In a June 8th online event co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the launch of a planning project to reform NATO called NATO 2030. Stoltenberg told his audience that in order to deal with Russia and China’s strategic partnership which is transforming the global balance of power, “we must resist the temptation of national solutions and we must live up to our values: freedom, democracy and the rule of law. To do this, we must stay strong militarily, be more united politically and take a broader approach globally.”

In the mind of Stoltenberg, this means expanding NATO’s membership into the Pacific with a high priority on the absorption of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea into NATO’s dysfunctional family. It also means extending NATO’s jurisdiction beyond a military alliance to include a wider political and environmental dimension (the war on climate change is apparently just as serious as the war on terrorism and should thus be incorporated into NATO’s operating system).

Analyzing China’s intentions through the most Hobbesian dark age lens on the market, Stoltenberg stated “they are investing heavily in modern military capabilities, including missiles that can reach all NATO allied countries. They are coming closer to us in cyberspace. We see them in the Arctic, in Africa… and they are working more and more together with Russia.”

In spite of NATO’s Cold War thinking, Russia and China have continuously presented olive branches to the west over the years- offering to cooperate on such matters as counter-terrorism, space exploration, asteroid defense, and global infrastructure projects in the Arctic and broader Belt and Road Initiative. In all instances, these offers have been met with a nearly unanimous cold shoulder by the western military industrial complex ruling NATO and the Atlantic alliance.

The Engine of War Heats Up

As Stoltenberg spoke these words, the 49th Baltic Operations running from June 1-16th were underway as the largest NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea featuring “30 ships and submarines, and 30 aircraft, conducting air defence, anti-submarine warfare, maritime interdiction and mine countermeasure operations.” In response Moscow reinforced its armored forces facing Europe.

Meanwhile in China’s backyard, three aircraft carriers all arrived in the Pacific (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz) with a senate Armed Services Committee approval of $6 billion in funds for the Pacific Defense Initiative which Defense News stated will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that America is deeply committed to defending our interests in the Indo-Pacific”. The committee also approved a U.S. Airforce operating location in the Indo-Pacific for F-35A jets in order to “prioritize the protection of the air bases that might be under attack from current or emerging cruise missiles and advanced hypersonic missiles, specifically from China.”

Another inflammatory precursor for confrontation came from a House Republican Study Committee report co-authored by Secretary of State Pompeo calling for sanctioning China’s leadership, listing Russia as a state sponsor of terror and authorizing the use of military force against anyone on a Foreign Terrorist Organization list. When one holds in mind that large sections of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard happen to be on this list, it is not hard to see how quickly nations doing business with Iran can be considered “state sponsors of terror”, justifying a use of military force from America.

With this level of explicit antagonism and duplicity, it is no wonder that China’s foreign ministry announced on June 10th that it would not participate in joint three-way arms talks between the USA and Russia. If America demonstrated a coherent intention to shift its foreign policy doctrine towards a genuine pro-cooperation perspective, then it is undoubtably the case that China would enthusiastically embrace such proposals. But until then, China is obviously unwilling to loose any part of its already small nuclear deterrent of 300 warheads (compared to Russia and the USA, who each own 6000).

The Resistance to the Warhawks

I have said it many times before, but there is currently not one but two opposing American military doctrines at war with each other and no assessment of American foreign policy is complete without a sensitivity to that fact.

On the one hand, there is the sociopathic doctrine which I outlined summarily above, but on the other hand, there exists a genuine intention to stop the “forever wars”, pull out of the Middle East, disengage with NATO and realign with a multipolar system of sovereign nation states.

This more positive America expressed itself in Trump’s June 7th counter-attack on former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis who had fueled the American Maidan now unfolding by stating his belife that solutions can happen without the President. Trump had fired Mattis earlier over the Cold Warrior’s commitment to endless military enmeshment in Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this Oval Office interview, the President called out the Military industrial complex which Mattis represents saying “The military-industrial complex is unbelievably powerful… You have no idea. Some legit, and some non-legit.”

Another aspect of Trump’s resistance to the neo-cons running the Pentagon and CIA is reflected in the June 11 joint U.S.-Iraq statement after the Strategic Dialogues summit of American and Iraqi delegates which committed to a continued reduction of troops in Iraq stating:

“Over the coming months, the U.S. would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces as both countries turn their focus towards developing a bilateral security relationship based on strong mutual interests”.

This statement coincides with Trump’s May 2020 call to accelerate U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which has seen a fall from 12000 troops in February to under 9000 as of this writing.

Most enraging to the NATO-philes of London, Brussels and Washington was Trump’s surprising call to pull 9500 American troops out of Germany hours before Stoltenberg gave his loony NATO 2030 speech with Johann Wadephul (Deputy head of the CDU) saying “these plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process”. In his next breath, Wadephul made his anti-Eurasian delusion transparent saying “Europe gains from the Alliance being unified. Only Russia and China gain from strife.”

Just a few months earlier, the President showed his disdain for the NATO bureaucracy by unilaterally pulling 3000 American military personnel out of the Trident Juncture exercise held annually every March.

In Defense of President Trump

In spite of all of his problems, Trump’s resistance to the dark age/neocon faction which has been running a virtually independent military-industrial-intelligence complex since FDR’s death in 1945 demonstrates a high degree of courage unseen in American presidents for many decades.

Most importantly, this flawed President represents a type of America which is genuinely compatible with the pro-nation state paradigm now being led by Russia and China.

Trump’s recent attempt to reform the G7 into a G11 (incorporating Russia, India, South Korea and Australia) is a nice step in that direction but his exclusion of China has made it an unworkable idea.

To solve this problem, American University in Moscow President Edward Lozansky stated in his recent Washington Times column that adding China to the list making it a G12 would be a saving grace to the idea and one of the best flanking maneuvers possible during this moment of crisis. Lozansky’s concept is so important that I wish to end with a larger citation from his article:

“Both Russia and China got the message a long time ago that they need to stay together to withstand the efforts to destroy them in sequence… The G-7 indeed is an obsolete group and it definitely needs a fresh blood. Therefore, a G-12 meeting in New York in late September during the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly would be a perfect place and timing since Mr. Trump had already announced that he is willing to hold a G-5 summit with the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France — the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — to discuss nuclear security issues. China so far is reluctant to join these talks, arguing that its smaller nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat. However, for the discussion in the G-12 format Mr. Putin might be able to convince his pal Xi to accept Mr. Trump’s invitation. This would be a huge achievement for the world’s peace and at the same time allow Mr. Trump to score lots of political points not only from his electoral base but from undecided and even from his opponents who want to save their families from nuclear holocaust.”

Unless world citizens who genuinely wish to avoid the danger of a nuclear holocaust learn how to embrace the idea of a G-12, and let the NATO/Cold War paradigm rot in the obsolete trash bin of history where it rightfully belongs, then I think it is safe to say that the future will not be something to look forward to.

For the next installment, we will take a look at the British Imperial origins of NATO and the American deep state in order to help shed greater light on the nature of the “two Americas” which I noted above, have been at war with each other since 1776.

Matthew Ehret
The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com


https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... dea-worse/


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Strategic Culture
(embedded links)


The Age of Chatham House and the British Roots of NATO

Matthew Ehret
June 28, 2020



NATO secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recent announcement of a NATO 2030 anti-nation state vision to extend the spheres of NATO’s jurisdiction into the Pacific to contain China demonstrates a disturbing ideology which can lead nowhere but World War III if not nipped in the bud soon.

In my previous article NATO 2030: Making a Bad Idea Worse (above^), I promised to shed light on the paradoxical situation of NATO’s unabashed unipolar agenda on one hand and the many examples of President Trump’s resistance to NATO witnessed by his removal of 9500 American personnel from Germany announced on June 11, his cutting of American participation in NATO military exercises, and his recent attacks on the military industrial complex.

The paradox: If NATO is truly a wholly owned tool of the American Empire, then why would the American Empire be at odds with itself?

Of course, this only remains a paradox to the degree that one is committed to the belief in such a thing as “The American Empire”.

Please do not get me wrong here.

I am in no way saying that America has not acted like an empire in recent decades, nor am I romantically trying to whitewash America’s historic tendencies to support colonization and defend systemic racism.

What I am saying is that there are demonstrably now, just as there have been since 1776, TWO opposing dynamics operating within America, where only one is in alignment of the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of independence while the other is entirely in alignment with the ideals of the British Empire and hereditary institutions from which it supposedly broke away.

One America has been defended by great leaders who are too often identified by their untimely deaths while in office, who consistently advanced anti-colonial visions for a world of sovereign nations, win-win cooperation, and the extension of constitutional rights to all classes and races both within America and abroad. The other America has sought only to enmesh itself with the British Empire’s global regime of finance, exploitation, population control and never-ending wars.

Lord Lothian and the White Man’s Burden

These two Americas frustrated Round Table controller Sir Philip Kerr (later “Lord Lothian”) in 1918 who wrote to his fellow Round Tabler Lionel Curtis explaining the “American problem” with the following words:

”There is a fundamentally different concept in regard to this question between Great Britain … and the United States …. as to the necessity of civilized control over politically backward peoples…. The inhabitants of Africa and parts of Asia have proved unable to govern themselves … because they were quite unable to withstand the demoralizing influences [i.e. their desire for modernization and independence–ed.] to which they were subjected in some civilized countries, so that the intervention of an European power is necessary in order to protect them from those influences. The American view… is quite different… The extent of this work after the war, sometimes known as the white man’s burden, will be so vast that it will never be accomplished at all unless it is shared… Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the problem but has been led to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism. They take an attitude towards the problem of world government exactly analogous to the one they [earlier] took toward the problem of the world war…. “If they are slow in learning we shall be condemned to a period … of strained relations between the various parts of the English-speaking world. [We must] get into the heads of Canadians and Americans that a share in the burden of world government is just as great and glorious a responsibility as participation in the war” (1)

At the time of Kerr’s writing, the British Roundtable, led by Lord Milner had just orchestrated a British coup in 1916 ousting Labour’s Herbert Asquith in order to bring Milner’s Round Table group into dominance as a shaper of imperial foreign policy at a pivotal moment in history. This coup allowed this group to define the terms of the Post-war world at Versailles).

These imperialists were obsessed with ending the dangerous spread of anti-colonial feelings from India, Ireland, Africa and other nations who firmly believed their sacrifices in WWI merited their independence. Most dangerous of all was that their sentiments were very much shared by many leading members of the American government who rejected the evil philosophical roots of the “white man’s burden”.

Sir Philip Kerr (who later took on the name Lord Lothian before becoming ambassador to America during WWII) and his Round Table gang did everything they could to control the terms of Versailles in 1919 which involved the creation of the League of Nations as a new global political/military hegemon powerful enough to destroy sovereign nation states forever under a new British-run empire.

American resistance to this agenda was so strong that Lothian, Milner and the other leaders of the Round Table soon established a new organization called the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) in 1919 with branches soon set up across what later became the Five Eyes Anglo-Saxon nations. This network would coordinate and adapt 19th century British Imperial policy using new 20th century techniques.

In America, the Round Table decided that the name “American Institute for International Affairs” was a bit too conspicuous and chose instead the name “Council on Foreign Relations” (CFR) in 1921. Canadian, and Australian Institutes for International Affairs were created in 1928 and 1929 accordingly known as the CIIA and AIIA, but for all their efforts, the pro-nation state dynamic within America could not be broken, and the League of Nations soon collapsed along with its ambitions for a global military and banking monopoly (the latter attempt having been officially destroyed by FDR who sabotaged the London Economic Conference of 1933).

The rise of NATO in the wake of WWII and the death of anti-colonialist Franklin Roosevelt can only be understood by keeping this historical dynamic in mind.

NATO’s Birth was August 1947… NOT April 1949

It is popularly believed that NATO was set up on April 4, 1949 as a tool of the American colonialism. The truth is a bit different.

As Cynthia Chung reported in her recent paper “The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence”, 1947 was a very bad year for America as a new intelligence agency was created with the birth of the CIA, now purged of all pro-FDR influences who had formerly dominated the OSS. National Security Council paper 75 (NSC-75) was drafted calling for America to defend the possessions of the British Empire under the new Cold War operating system, leading to a new era of Anglo-American assassinations, wars and regime change.

On March 4th, 1947, the Anglo-French Treaty of Dunkirk established a collective defense pact extending itself the next year to include Belgium, France, Luxemourg and the Netherlands under the guise of the Brussels Pact. Both collective defense pacts operated outside of the UN structure but lacked the military teeth needed to give them meaning- all nations of the time having been crippled by the devastation of WWII. Only America had the military might to make this new alliance meaningful as global military force capable of subduing all resistance and usher in world government.

Escott Reid’s NATO Vision of 1947

In a memorandum called “The United States and the Soviet Union” written in August 1947, a highly influential Oxford Rhodes Scholar and radical promoter of global governance named Escott Reid, then Deputy Undersecretary of External Affairs of Canada “recommended that the countries of the North Atlantic band together, under the leadership of the United States, to form ‘a new regional security organization’ to deter Soviet expansion.”

The motive for this memorandum was to escape the Soviet Union’s veto power in the U.N. Security Council, which prevented the British Great Game from moving forward. The goal was to establish an instrument powerful enough to bring about an Anglo-American Empire as desired by Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill and which the League of Nations failed to accomplish.

Escott Reid extrapolated upon his thesis for the creation of such an institution at an August 13, 1947 Canadian Institute of Public Affairs (2) Conference at Lake Couchiching when he stated:

“The states of the Western world are not…debarred by the Charter of the United Nations or by Soviet membership in the United Nations from creating new international political institutions to maintain peace. Nothing in the Charter precludes the existence of regional political arrangements or agencies provided that they are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations, and these regional agencies are entitled to take measures of collective self-defence against armed attack until the Security Council has acted.”

This new anti-Soviet military organization would have the important feature of creating a binding military contract that would go into effect for all members should any individual member go to war. Reid described this intention as he wrote:

“In such an organization each member state could accept a binding obligation to pool the whole of its economic and military resources with those of the other members if any power should be found to have committed aggression against any one of the members.”

It was another year and a half before this structure gained the full support of External Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson, and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would be formed on April 4, 1949 with its headquarters on 13 Belgrave Square in London.

Image
Escott Reid and Lester B. Pearson: Both Roundtable Oxford Men

Reid had made a name for himself serving as the first Permanent Secretary of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs (CIIA), also known as the Canadian Branch of Chatham House/Roundtable Movement of Canada under the direction of CIIA controller Vincent Massey. Massey was the protégé of racist imperialist Lord Alfred Milner and the controller of the Rhodes Scholar groups of Canada throughout a career that saw him act as Canadian Ambassador to Washington (1926-1930), Liberal Party President (1930-1935), Ambassador to Britain (1935-1945) and Head of State (aka: Governor General of Canada (1952-1959). Reid himself was the founder of the self-professed “Canadian Fabian Society” alongside four other Rhodes scholars known as the eugenics-promoting technocratic League of Social Reconstruction (LSR) in 1932, whose name changed to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1933 and again later to the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 (3).

Reid spent years working closely with fellow Oxford Massey Scholar Lester B. Pearson, who himself was Vincent Massey’s assistant in London before becoming a controller of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Image

The Racist Agenda Behind the Rhodes Trust

It is vital to remind ourselves that these networks were driven by the design outlined by genocidal diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, who wrote the purpose for the Scholarship that was to receive his name in his First Will (1877):

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object – the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

Later in that will, Rhodes elaborated in greater detail upon the intention which was soon to become official British foreign policy.

“The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy land, the valley of Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire. The consolidation of the whole empire, the inauguration of a system of colonial representation in the Imperial parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the empire”

The “recovery of the United States” should seriously resonate with anyone with doubts over the role of the British Empire’s ambition to undo the international effects of the American Revolution and should also cause honest citizens to reconsider what nationalist Presidents like John F. Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle were actually struggling against when they stood up to the power structures of NATO and the Deep State. This should be kept in mind as one thinks of the British-steered networks that ran the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, as well as the attempted Russia-Gating of Donald Trump in our modern day.

Notes

(1) Lothian to Lionel Curtis, Oct. 15, 1918, in Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 68-70.

(2) The Canadian Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) was created in 1935 as an affiliate to the Canadian Round Table in order to shape national internal policy while the CIIA focused upon Canada’s foreign policy. Original featured speakers were the CIIA’s Norman Mackenzie, and the eugenicist leader of the newly created CCF Party J.S. Woodsworth. It would be another 20 years before both organizations began to jointly host conferences together. Today, CIPA exists in the form of the Couchiching Conferences and their regular brainwashing seminars have been broadcast across the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for over 70 years.

(3) Reid’s other Rhodes Scholar co-founders of the LSR were Eugene Forsey, F.R. Scott, and David Lewis. Frank Underhill was a Fabian Society member. Rhodes Scholar F.R. Scott became a leading mentor of a young recruit of the Fabian Society named Pierre Elliot Trudeau upon the latter’s 1949 return from the London School of Economics in order to work in Ottawa’s Privy Council Office. This Trudeau went on to groom himself as a CCF member before being selected to take over the Liberal Party after the ouster of pro-nationalist forces who had led the Liberals from 1935-1958.

* All Reid quotes are taken from Escott Reid, Couchiching and the Birth of NATO by Cameron Campbell, published by the Atlantic Council of Canada.

**The author wrote a larger series of studies on this Round Table-driven world history under the title “Origins of the Deep State in North America parts 1-3 and an even fuller picture is told in volume 4 of The Untold History of Canada.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

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