Fascism on the March

October 30, 2018

by Peter Koenig for The Saker Blog

Latin America is re-converting into Washington’s backyard and as a sideline is returning to fascist rule, similar but worse than the sixties seventies and eighties, which stood under the spell of the CIA-led Operation or Plan Condor. Many call the current right-wing trend Operation Condor II which is probably as close to the truth as can be. It is all Washington / CIA fabricated, just with more rigor and more sophistication than Plan Condor of 40 and 50 years ago. As much as it hurts to say, after all the glory and laurels sent out to Latin America – with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Lula, the Kirchners, José Mujica, Michelle Bachelet – more than 80% of the population of Latin America were living for some 15 to 20 years under democratically elected mostly left-leaning governments, really progressive. – Within no time, in less than 3 years the wheels have turned.

Latin America was for about 20 years the only western part of the world, that was fully detached from the fangs of the empire. It has succumbed again to the forces of evil, to the forces of money, the forces of utter corruption and greed. The people of Latin America have betrayed their own principles. They did it again. Humans remain reduced as in ancient times, to the unfailing powers of reproduction and ego cum greed. It seems in the end, ego and greed always win over the forces of light, of good, peace and harmony. That’s why even the World Bank calls corruption the single most hindrance to development. They mean economic development; I mean conscientious development. This time the trick is false and fraudulent election campaigns; bought elections; Washington induced parliamentary coups – which in Brazil brought unelected President Temer to power, a prelude to much worse to come, the fascist, misogynist, racist, and self-styled military man, Jair Bolsonaro.

The 2015 presidential election in Argentina brought a cleverly Washington manufactured win for Mauricio Macri, a friend and one-time business associate of Donald Trump’s, as it were. The election was manipulated by the by now well-known Machiavellian Cambridge Analytica method of cheating the voters by individualized messages spread throughout the social media into believing all sorts of lies about the candidates. Voters were, thus, hit on the head by surprise, as Macri’s opponent, the left-leaning Daniel Scioli of the Peronist Victory Front, the leader in the polls, was defeated.

Today Macri has adopted a fascist economic agenda, indebted the country with IMF austerity packages, increased unemployment and poverty from12% before his election in 2015 to close to 40 % in 2018. He is leading Argentina towards a déjà-vu scenario of the 80s and especially 1990’s when under pressure from the US, IMF and World Bank, the country was to adopt the US dollar as their local currency, or to be exact, Argentina was allowed to keep their peso, but had to commit to a one-to-one parity with the US dollar. The official explanation for this, in economic terms, criminal move (to impose the use of the currency of one country for the economy of another country is not only insane, its outright criminal), was to stop skyrocketing inflation – which temporarily it did, but to the detriment of the working class, for whom common staple and goods became unaffordable.

Disaster was preprogrammed. And the collapse of Argentine’s economy happened in 2000 and 2001. Finally, in January 2002, President Eduardo Duhalde ended the notorious peso-dollar parity. The peso was first devalued by 40% – then it floated towards a 70% devaluation and gradually pegged itself to other international trading currencies, like the euro, the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. Eventually, the newly floating currency allowed the Argentine economy to get a new boost and recovered rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly, for Argentina’s own good.

The economy grew substantially under the left, fully democratically elected Kirchner Governments. Not only did the economy grow rapidly, it also grew in a widely ‘distributive’ mode, meaning reducing poverty, assessed at almost two thirds of the population in 2001, cutting it to about 12%, just a month before Macri was catapulted into office, by Washington and Cambridge Analytica in December 2015. Argentina has become rich again; she can now be milked again and sucked dry by the banking sector, and international corporatism, all protected by three to be newly established US military bases in the provinces of Neuquen, Misiones and Tierra del Fuego. They will initially be under the US Southern Command, but most likely soon to be converted into NATO bases. NATO is already in Colombia and may soon spread into Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Though nobody really understands what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has to do in South America – the answer is unimportant. The empire suits itself with whatever fits the purpose. No rules, no ethics, no laws – everything goes under neoliberalism. NATO is to become a world military attack force under Washington’s control and directed by those few “enlightened”, pulling the strings from behind the curtains, form the deep dark state.

Macri marked the beginning of Latin America’s new fascism. South America struggled for 15 -20 years to become independent from the neoliberal masters of the north. It has now been reabsorbed into the northern elite’s, the empire’s backyard — yes, sadly, that’s what Latin America has become for the major part, a mere backyard of Washington.

Argentina’s Washington imposed right-wing dictatorship was preceded by Paraguay’s 2012 parliamentary coup that in April 2013 brought Horacio Cartes of the right-extreme Colorado party to power. The Colorado Party was also the party of Alfredo Stroessner, the fascist brutal military dictator, who ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

In Chile on 9/11 of 1973 a democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, a was overthrown under the guidance of the CIA and a brutal military dictator, Augusto Pinochet installed for almost 30 years. After a brief spring of center and left-leaning governments, Chile, in December 2017, has returned to right-wing, neoliberal politics with Sebastian Piñera, a former associate of Pinochet’s. With the surroundings of his neoliberal friends and close accomplices in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and even Ecuador, to be sure, he will move to extreme right, neo-fascist economic rules and, thus, please Washington’s banks and their instruments, the IMF and the World Bank.

Fascism is on the march. And this despite the fact that 99.99% of the population, not just in Latin America, worldwide, want nothing to do with fascism – so where is the fraud? Why is nobody investigating the scam and swindle in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia? – and then putting the results up for everyone to see?

In the meantime, we have learned about Cambridge / Oxford Analytica (CA & OA). How they operate and cheat the electorate. They themselves have finally admitted to the methods within which they operate and influence voters with lies – and with data stealing or buying from social media, mainly facebook; millions and millions of personal data to target electronically special groups of people – bombarding them with lies to promote or denigrate the one or the other candidate.

And precisely this happened in Brazil. A week before the run-off election that took place this past Sunday, 28 October, Fernando Haddad, (PT), launched a criminal investigation precisely for that reason against Bolsonaro’s campaign. Of course, nothing happened. All the judges, courts and lawyers are under control of the unelected corrupt right-wing Temer Government – which came to power by a foreign directed ruthless parliamentary coup, impeaching under totally false pretenses democratically elected Dilma Rousseff.

And now – there is nobody investigating what happened in Brazil, bringing a military boy, Jair Bolsonaro to power? The left is dead? Flabbergasted into oblivion -indeed? – How come? With all the lessons to be learned around the world, and not last in Argentina, the neighbor – why can the Brazilian left be so blind, outright naive, as to not understand that following the criminally legalized system in their country is following the path to their own demise and eventually to shovel their own grave?

From day One, the US firmly counts on Bolsonaro to encircle Venezuela, together with Colombia. President Trump has already expressed his expectations to work ‘closely together’ with the new Bolsonaro Government in “matters of trade, military – and earthing else.” Bolsonaro has already met with Mike Pompeo, the US Foreign Secretary, who told him that the situation in Venezuela is a “priority’ for Brazil. There you go; Washington dictates foreign leaders their priorities. Bolsonaro will oblige, for sure.

Wake up – LEFT! – not just in Latin America, but around the world.

Today, it’s the mainstream media which have learned the tricks and cheats, and they have perfected the Cambridge and Oxford Analyticas; they are doing it non-stop. They have all the fake and fiat money in the world to pay for these false and deceit-campaigns – they are owned by the corporate military and financial elite, by the CIA, MI6/5, Mossad – they are owned and directed by the western all-overarching neoliberalism cum fascism. The rich elite groups have free access to the fake and fiat money supply – its government supplied in the US as well as in Europe; debt is no problem for them, as long as they ‘behave’.

Yes. The accent is on behaving. Dictatorial trends are also omni-present in the EU, and especially in the non-elected European Commission (EC) which calls the shots on all important matters. Italy’s Fife-Star Eurosceptic Government presented its 2019 budget to Brussels. Not only was the government scolded and reprimanded for overstretching its accounts with a deficit exceeding the 3% EU imposed debt margin, but the government had to present a new budget within 3 weeks. That is how a not-so-well behaving EU government is treated. What a stretch of authoritarian EU rule vis-à-vis a sovereign government. And ‘sovereignty’ is – the EU boasts – the key to a coherent European Union.

On the other hand, France has for years been infringing on the (in)famous 3% rule. And again, for the 2019 budget. However, the French government received a friendly drafted note saying, would you please reconsider your budget deficit for the next year. No scolding. One does not reprimand a Rothchild Child. Double standards, corruption, nepotism, are among the attributes of fascism. It’s growing fast, everywhere in the west. It has taken on a life of itself. And the military is prepared. Everywhere. – If only they, the military, would wake up and stand with the people instead of the ruling elite that treats them like their peons. Yet, they are part of the people; they belong to the most common of the people. In the end, they get the same shaft treatment as the people – they are tortured and shot when they are no longer needed, or if they don’t behave as the neocon-fascists want.

So, Dear Military Men and Women – why not pre-empt such risks and stand with the people from the very beginning? – The entire fake and criminal system would collapse if it wouldn’t have the protection of the police and the military. You, dear Men and Women form the Police and Military, you have the power and the moral obligation to stand by the people, not defending the ruthless, brutal elitist and criminal rulers – à la Macri, Bolsonaro, Piñera, Duque, Macron, May and Merkel. And there are many more of the same blood.
———-

One of the first signs for what was to happen throughout Latin America and spreading through the western world, was the “fake election” of Macri, in 2015 in Argentina. Some of us saw it coming and wrote about it. We were ignored, even laughed at. We were told – we didn’t understand the democratic process. Yes, right. In the meantime, the trend towards the right, towards a permanent state of Emergency, a de facto Martial Rule has become irreversible. France has incorporated the permanent state of emergency in her Constitution. Armed police and military are a steady presence throughout Paris and France’s major cities.

There are only a few, very few exceptions left in Latin America, indeed in the western world.

And let’s do whatever we can to save them from the bulldozer of fascism.

—–
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Fascism on the March

October 30, 2018

by Peter Koenig for The Saker Blog

Latin America is re-converting into Washington’s backyard and as a sideline is returning to fascist rule, similar but worse than the sixties seventies and eighties, which stood under the spell of the CIA-led Operation or Plan Condor. Many call the current right-wing trend Operation Condor II which is probably as close to the truth as can be. It is all Washington / CIA fabricated, just with more rigor and more sophistication than Plan Condor of 40 and 50 years ago. As much as it hurts to say, after all the glory and laurels sent out to Latin America – with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Lula, the Kirchners, José Mujica, Michelle Bachelet – more than 80% of the population of Latin America were living for some 15 to 20 years under democratically elected mostly left-leaning governments, really progressive. – Within no time, in less than 3 years the wheels have turned.

Latin America was for about 20 years the only western part of the world, that was fully detached from the fangs of the empire. It has succumbed again to the forces of evil, to the forces of money, the forces of utter corruption and greed. The people of Latin America have betrayed their own principles. They did it again. Humans remain reduced as in ancient times, to the unfailing powers of reproduction and ego cum greed. It seems in the end, ego and greed always win over the forces of light, of good, peace and harmony. That’s why even the World Bank calls corruption the single most hindrance to development. They mean economic development; I mean conscientious development. This time the trick is false and fraudulent election campaigns; bought elections; Washington induced parliamentary coups – which in Brazil brought unelected President Temer to power, a prelude to much worse to come, the fascist, misogynist, racist, and self-styled military man, Jair Bolsonaro.

The 2015 presidential election in Argentina brought a cleverly Washington manufactured win for Mauricio Macri, a friend and one-time business associate of Donald Trump’s, as it were. The election was manipulated by the by now well-known Machiavellian Cambridge Analytica method of cheating the voters by individualized messages spread throughout the social media into believing all sorts of lies about the candidates. Voters were, thus, hit on the head by surprise, as Macri’s opponent, the left-leaning Daniel Scioli of the Peronist Victory Front, the leader in the polls, was defeated.

Today Macri has adopted a fascist economic agenda, indebted the country with IMF austerity packages, increased unemployment and poverty from12% before his election in 2015 to close to 40 % in 2018. He is leading Argentina towards a déjà-vu scenario of the 80s and especially 1990’s when under pressure from the US, IMF and World Bank, the country was to adopt the US dollar as their local currency, or to be exact, Argentina was allowed to keep their peso, but had to commit to a one-to-one parity with the US dollar. The official explanation for this, in economic terms, criminal move (to impose the use of the currency of one country for the economy of another country is not only insane, its outright criminal), was to stop skyrocketing inflation – which temporarily it did, but to the detriment of the working class, for whom common staple and goods became unaffordable.

Disaster was preprogrammed. And the collapse of Argentine’s economy happened in 2000 and 2001. Finally, in January 2002, President Eduardo Duhalde ended the notorious peso-dollar parity. The peso was first devalued by 40% – then it floated towards a 70% devaluation and gradually pegged itself to other international trading currencies, like the euro, the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. Eventually, the newly floating currency allowed the Argentine economy to get a new boost and recovered rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly, for Argentina’s own good.

The economy grew substantially under the left, fully democratically elected Kirchner Governments. Not only did the economy grow rapidly, it also grew in a widely ‘distributive’ mode, meaning reducing poverty, assessed at almost two thirds of the population in 2001, cutting it to about 12%, just a month before Macri was catapulted into office, by Washington and Cambridge Analytica in December 2015. Argentina has become rich again; she can now be milked again and sucked dry by the banking sector, and international corporatism, all protected by three to be newly established US military bases in the provinces of Neuquen, Misiones and Tierra del Fuego. They will initially be under the US Southern Command, but most likely soon to be converted into NATO bases. NATO is already in Colombia and may soon spread into Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Though nobody really understands what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has to do in South America – the answer is unimportant. The empire suits itself with whatever fits the purpose. No rules, no ethics, no laws – everything goes under neoliberalism. NATO is to become a world military attack force under Washington’s control and directed by those few “enlightened”, pulling the strings from behind the curtains, form the deep dark state.

Macri marked the beginning of Latin America’s new fascism. South America struggled for 15 -20 years to become independent from the neoliberal masters of the north. It has now been reabsorbed into the northern elite’s, the empire’s backyard — yes, sadly, that’s what Latin America has become for the major part, a mere backyard of Washington.

Argentina’s Washington imposed right-wing dictatorship was preceded by Paraguay’s 2012 parliamentary coup that in April 2013 brought Horacio Cartes of the right-extreme Colorado party to power. The Colorado Party was also the party of Alfredo Stroessner, the fascist brutal military dictator, who ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

In Chile on 9/11 of 1973 a democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, a was overthrown under the guidance of the CIA and a brutal military dictator, Augusto Pinochet installed for almost 30 years. After a brief spring of center and left-leaning governments, Chile, in December 2017, has returned to right-wing, neoliberal politics with Sebastian Piñera, a former associate of Pinochet’s. With the surroundings of his neoliberal friends and close accomplices in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and even Ecuador, to be sure, he will move to extreme right, neo-fascist economic rules and, thus, please Washington’s banks and their instruments, the IMF and the World Bank.

Fascism is on the march. And this despite the fact that 99.99% of the population, not just in Latin America, worldwide, want nothing to do with fascism – so where is the fraud? Why is nobody investigating the scam and swindle in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia? – and then putting the results up for everyone to see?

In the meantime, we have learned about Cambridge / Oxford Analytica (CA & OA). How they operate and cheat the electorate. They themselves have finally admitted to the methods within which they operate and influence voters with lies – and with data stealing or buying from social media, mainly facebook; millions and millions of personal data to target electronically special groups of people – bombarding them with lies to promote or denigrate the one or the other candidate.

And precisely this happened in Brazil. A week before the run-off election that took place this past Sunday, 28 October, Fernando Haddad, (PT), launched a criminal investigation precisely for that reason against Bolsonaro’s campaign. Of course, nothing happened. All the judges, courts and lawyers are under control of the unelected corrupt right-wing Temer Government – which came to power by a foreign directed ruthless parliamentary coup, impeaching under totally false pretenses democratically elected Dilma Rousseff.

And now – there is nobody investigating what happened in Brazil, bringing a military boy, Jair Bolsonaro to power? The left is dead? Flabbergasted into oblivion -indeed? – How come? With all the lessons to be learned around the world, and not last in Argentina, the neighbor – why can the Brazilian left be so blind, outright naive, as to not understand that following the criminally legalized system in their country is following the path to their own demise and eventually to shovel their own grave?

From day One, the US firmly counts on Bolsonaro to encircle Venezuela, together with Colombia. President Trump has already expressed his expectations to work ‘closely together’ with the new Bolsonaro Government in “matters of trade, military – and earthing else.” Bolsonaro has already met with Mike Pompeo, the US Foreign Secretary, who told him that the situation in Venezuela is a “priority’ for Brazil. There you go; Washington dictates foreign leaders their priorities. Bolsonaro will oblige, for sure.

Wake up – LEFT! – not just in Latin America, but around the world.

Today, it’s the mainstream media which have learned the tricks and cheats, and they have perfected the Cambridge and Oxford Analyticas; they are doing it non-stop. They have all the fake and fiat money in the world to pay for these false and deceit-campaigns – they are owned by the corporate military and financial elite, by the CIA, MI6/5, Mossad – they are owned and directed by the western all-overarching neoliberalism cum fascism. The rich elite groups have free access to the fake and fiat money supply – its government supplied in the US as well as in Europe; debt is no problem for them, as long as they ‘behave’.

Yes. The accent is on behaving. Dictatorial trends are also omni-present in the EU, and especially in the non-elected European Commission (EC) which calls the shots on all important matters. Italy’s Fife-Star Eurosceptic Government presented its 2019 budget to Brussels. Not only was the government scolded and reprimanded for overstretching its accounts with a deficit exceeding the 3% EU imposed debt margin, but the government had to present a new budget within 3 weeks. That is how a not-so-well behaving EU government is treated. What a stretch of authoritarian EU rule vis-à-vis a sovereign government. And ‘sovereignty’ is – the EU boasts – the key to a coherent European Union.

On the other hand, France has for years been infringing on the (in)famous 3% rule. And again, for the 2019 budget. However, the French government received a friendly drafted note saying, would you please reconsider your budget deficit for the next year. No scolding. One does not reprimand a Rothchild Child. Double standards, corruption, nepotism, are among the attributes of fascism. It’s growing fast, everywhere in the west. It has taken on a life of itself. And the military is prepared. Everywhere. – If only they, the military, would wake up and stand with the people instead of the ruling elite that treats them like their peons. Yet, they are part of the people; they belong to the most common of the people. In the end, they get the same shaft treatment as the people – they are tortured and shot when they are no longer needed, or if they don’t behave as the neocon-fascists want.

So, Dear Military Men and Women – why not pre-empt such risks and stand with the people from the very beginning? – The entire fake and criminal system would collapse if it wouldn’t have the protection of the police and the military. You, dear Men and Women form the Police and Military, you have the power and the moral obligation to stand by the people, not defending the ruthless, brutal elitist and criminal rulers – à la Macri, Bolsonaro, Piñera, Duque, Macron, May and Merkel. And there are many more of the same blood.
———-

One of the first signs for what was to happen throughout Latin America and spreading through the western world, was the “fake election” of Macri, in 2015 in Argentina. Some of us saw it coming and wrote about it. We were ignored, even laughed at. We were told – we didn’t understand the democratic process. Yes, right. In the meantime, the trend towards the right, towards a permanent state of Emergency, a de facto Martial Rule has become irreversible. France has incorporated the permanent state of emergency in her Constitution. Armed police and military are a steady presence throughout Paris and France’s major cities.

There are only a few, very few exceptions left in Latin America, indeed in the western world.

And let’s do whatever we can to save them from the bulldozer of fascism.

—–
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Khashoggi Cover-Up Underway

Finian Cunningham

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed this week to reveal the “naked truth” about the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; however, in fact, he didn’t uncover anything extraordinary, but why?

It is significant that the day before Erdogan’s much-hyped speech to Turkish parliamentarians, President Donald Trump dispatched his CIA chief to Turkey to “investigate” the evidence of Khashoggi’s killing.

The involvement of the CIA at such a high level in an overseas criminal case is unprecedented. Surely, FBI crime investigators would have been more appropriate, if at all.

What was the real purpose of CIA director Gina Haspel going to Turkey? Haspel, or “Bloody Gina” as she is known, has an ignominious record of being personally involved in past CIA torture cases and destroying incriminating evidence. Was her trip to Turkey not so much about discovery of facts, and rather more about covering-up the truth of what really happened to Khashoggi?

It is subsequently reported by the Washington Post that Haspel listened to the secret Turkish audiotapes recording the moments of Khashoggi’s murder.For his part, President Erdogan’s speech this week provoked much disappointment among many international observers who had been expecting him to reveal hard evidence incriminating the Saudis in a murder plot. There was an expectation that Erdogan would finally release audio and video tapes, which Turk investigators claim to have, which would expose the grim way in which Khashoggi was allegedly disposed of.

The Turkish leader certainly laid out plainly the charge that Saudi Arabia had carried out “a premeditated murder” in its consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Erdogan called it a “brutal” killing which implies Khashoggi was tortured and dismembered, as Turkish officials have been leaking for the past three weeks to media.

But Erdogan did not name names of who the Turks believe was ultimately responsible for ordering the assassination.

The Saudis have stated that Khashoggi was killed in a “botched interrogation” carried out by a “rogue” team of state security agents. They have strenuously denied that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old heir to the throne, had any involvement in ordering the plot.

Prince Mohammed this week in his first public comments on the killing, called it a “heinous act” and promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. Notably, in a conciliatory overture to Erdogan, the monarch also warned anyone trying to “drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and Turkey”.

Nonetheless, unnamed American and Turkish intelligence sources have separately told various media outlets they have telecoms intercepts implicating the crown prince in personally sanctioning the murderous operation.

The holding back of damning evidence by Erdogan this week suggests that the Turkish leader is trying to maximize his leverage over the Saudi rulers and President Trump to get a deal for his country. This may explain the real reason why CIA’s Haspel rushed to Turkey this week.

Erdogan is a renowned Machiavellian politician. He may have been personal friends with the doomed Khashoggi, but when Erdogan vows to “expose the full truth” while holding back purported damning evidence, what he is aiming to do is extract further concessions from the Saudis and the Americans.

Turkey needs the US to back off from its recent campaign of hostility and sanctions which have thrown the Turkish economy into turmoil. US-Turkish relations soured over the detention by Ankara of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, on charges of espionage. The return of the pastor earlier this month only days after the Khashoggi case emerged suggests the beginning of Erdogan’s gambit to appease the US for favors.

It can also be anticipated that Erdogan will extract eye-watering financial concessions from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which reportedly has huge investments in Turkey. That could involve debt write-offs for Ankara or more soft loans into the future.

For the Saudis and Washington, they want the whole Khashoggi scandal to go away as fast as possible. President Trump has helped create the media narrative that the Khashoggi killing was a “horrible mistake” carried out by “rogue agents”. This week, ironically, Trump described the Saudi version of events as “the worst cover-up in history”. Cynically, what Trump means is that the alibi needs to be improved with a more sophisticated deception.

This US president has staked much of his Middle East plans on the Saudi crown prince, or “MbS” as he is known. Trump’s son-in-law and White House advisor on Middle East affairs Jared Kushner is personal friends with the young monarch. The White House is relying on Prince Mohammed to sell what amounts to a pro-Israeli peace deal to the Arab world, which Trump has bragged about as being “the deal of the century”.

The Saudi monarch is also crucial to Trump’s policy of aggression towards Iran. The US needs the Saudis to ramp up oil production in order to offset the expected decrease in Iranian crude supply if Trump’s anti-Iran sanctions due to kick in next month are to succeed.

Maintaining multi-billion-dollar arms sales to Saudi Arabia is, of course, another imperative reason why the White House does not want the truth about what happened Khashoggi to come out. It wants to whitewash the role played by senior House of Saud figures.

A bipartisan move by US congress members was launched this week to limit arms sales to Saudi Arabia if President Trump does not show that senior Saudi royals were not involved in the Khashoggi killing. Trump is therefore under pressure to absolve the Saudi authorities of culpability.

For the Saudi rulers they have been caught in a global public relations disaster. Their image, never too positive anyway, has been shattered over the foul murder of a journalist. Saudi’s oil economy is not as secure as one might think. The military operation in Yemen and ballooning social costs internally are making the kingdom heavily reliant on foreign capital. The “Davos in the Desert” conference this week has seen many top investors stay away due to the Khashoggi scandal.

The House of Saud desperately needs to find a cover-up that absolves its senior figures in Khashoggi’s murder.

For these reasons, Turkey, the US and Saudi Arabia are positioning for a sordid deal which will involve burying the truth about what happened to Khashoggi and who ordered his murder.

For ordinary people around the world one might expect justice and truth to prevail. But in the dirty business of politics – especially involving these three arch-practitioners of dirty politics – justice and truth are values more likely to be liquidated.

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

READ MORE

• Erdogan Vows to Reveal Details Concerning Khashoggi Death on Tuesday
• ‘Can Never Happen Again’: Riyadh Vows Thorough Probe Into Khashoggi’s Death
• Turkey Does Not Deem Int’l Probe Into Khashoggi Case Necessary — Ankara
• Pence Confirms CIA Director Haspel in Turkey to Review Evidence in Khashoggi Murder
• ‘Antagonism and Hostility’: US Struggling with Relations on Both Sides of Saudi-Turkey Rivalry
• Saudi King, Crown Prince Meet Khashoggi Family – Reports

Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat

Source

Despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.

by Whitney Webb

NEW YORK — The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies. The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins declined to elaborate on the workshop when pressed on social media.The decision on the part of The Intercept is particularly troubling given that the publication has long been associated with the track records of its founding members, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, who have long been promoted as important “progressive” and “anti-war” voices in the U.S. media landscape.

Greenwald publicly distanced himself from the decision to host the workshop, stating on Twitter that he was not involved in making that decision and that — if he had been — it was not one “that I would have made.” However, he stopped short of condemning the decision.

Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.

For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.

Bellingcat’s funding is even more telling than its professional associations. Indeed, despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.

Google has also been actively promoting regime change in countries like Syria, a policy that Bellingcat also promotes. As one example, leaked emails between Jared Cohen, former director of Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that Google developed software aimed at assisting al-Qaeda and other Syrian opposition groups in boosting their ranks. Furthermore, Cohen was once described by Stratfor intelligence analysts as a “loose cannon” for his deep involvement in Middle Eastern regime-change efforts.

Under President Donald Trump, Google’s connections to the U.S. government have become even more powerful, as the current Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence once worked as a corporate lobbyist for Google.

Synergy in the service of empire

Given the clear alliances between Bellingcat and the military-industrial complex, The Intercept’s decision to host a Bellingcat workshop in its New York offices may seem surprising. However, The Intercept has long promoted Bellingcat in its written work and its parent company has actually been associated with Bellingcat since 2015.

Indeed, Google-owned YouTube announced in 2015 the formation of the “First Draft coalition,” which nominally sought to bring “together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media.” That coalition united Bellingcat with the now-defunct Reported.ly – another venture of The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media.

In the years since, The Intercept has repeatedly promoted Bellingcat in its articles, having called the Atlantic Council-connected, Google-funded group “a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones.” Furthermore, prior to the recent workshop in late September between The Intercept and Bellingcat, both jointly participated in another workshop hosted in London earlier this year in April.

$250 million well spent? imagine if the Intercept actually had a team of people trying to poke holes in UK/US narratives about Russia instead of their own paid journalists promoting Bellingcat pic.twitter.com/QJyTXf4fp0

— Robbie Martin (@FluorescentGrey) October 3, 2018

Omidyar’s connections

In addition, the Intercept’s main funder – eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar – shares innumerable connections to the U.S. government and has helped fund regime-change operations abroad in the past, suggesting a likely reason behind the publication’s willingness to associate itself with Bellingcat.

For instance, Omidyar made more visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He also donated $30 million to the Clinton global initiative and directly co-invested with the State Department — funding groups, some of them overtly fascist, that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014.

Even after Obama left office, Omidyar has continued to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative also cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, a direct link between Omidyar initiatives and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Such promotion of the regime-change wars has been reflected in reporting done at The Intercept, particularly in regards to Syria. Indeed, Intercept writers covering Syria frequently promote Syrian “rebels” and the opposition while also promoting pro-regime-change talking points.

Another former Intercept contributor and now Intercept “fact checker,” Mariam Elba,wrote a poorly researched article that sought to link the Syrian government to U.S. white nationalists, claiming that the Syrian government sought to “homogenize” the country despite its support for religious and ethnic minorities in stark contrast to the Syrian opposition. Notably, Elba recently praised the Intercept/Bellingcat workshop, which she had attended.

If that weren’t enough, last year the paper hired Maryam Saleh, a journalist who has called Shia Muslims “dogs” and has taken to Twitter in the past to downplay the role of the U.S. coalition in airstrikes in Syria. Saleh also has ties to the U.S.-financedpropaganda group Kafranbel Media Center, which also has close relations with the terrorist group Ahrar al-Sham.

Furthermore, MintPress noted last year that The Intercept had withheld a key document from the Edward Snowden cache proving the Syrian opposition was taking marching orders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Intercept published that document only after the U.S. State Department itself began to report more honestly on the nature of these so-called “rebels,” even though The Intercept had had that document in its possession since 2013.

Even “anti-interventionist” Intercept journalists like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have
come under fire this past year for allegedly promoting inaccurate statements that supported pro-regime-change narratives in Syria, particularly in regards to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. That attack is now widely believed to have been staged by the White Helmets.

Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Author’s Note | John Helsby contributed research, particularly in regards to social media, to this report.

Editors Note: After objection from Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, this story was updated to read: “The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public”, This was updated from the original: “The details of the workshop have not been made public” as Higgins interpreted this to mean details made prior to the event. MintPress was well aware of the pre-event details that were made public prior to the workshop, such as cost to attend, date and location as a link that the announcement of those details can be found in the second sentence of the article, which remains unchanged.

Top Photo | Bana Alabed promotes Bellingcat at an event put on by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Photo | Twitter

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

NATO Hypocrisy’s Twilight Zone

By Finian Cunningham

October 06, 2018 “Information Clearing House“ –  What a week it’s been for trying to tolerate hypocrisy and hysteria from the United States and its NATO partners. The slanderous accusations against Russia and China, in particular, can hardly become more absurd, or unhinged.

US Vice President Mike Pence, speaking at the imperialist Hudson Institute, accused China of “interfering” in elections to oust Trump from the White House. Beijing hit back, slamming the claims as “ridiculous”.

Then we had Britain’s pipsqueak Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson denouncing Russia as a “pariah state” over allegations that the Kremlin has been conducting a “global computer-hacking campaign”.

Surely, the hypocrisy can’t get more superlative than this.

Pence’s diatribe against China over “interference” follows the barrage of humongous trade levies imposed on Chinese exports by the Trump administration, as well as the recent sale of billion-dollar weapons by the US to Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province.

Just days before Pence uttered his unctuous words, a US warship was involved in a near-collision with a Chinese navy vessel after the Americans breached Beijing’s proclaimed territory in the South China Sea. The incident — which could have sparked a war — was but the latest in a series of provocative incursions by US forces into China’s maritime spaces, under the guise of “freedom of navigation” exercises.

As for Britain’s defense minister Williamson, his rhetoric about Russia being a pariah state reminds one of the admonition to not throw bricks in a glasshouse. After its spate of criminal wars in the Middle East, destroying millions of lives — and that’s just counting the most recent years — Britain is not in any position to indict others for pariah status.

Specifically though, Britain’s pious flourishes this week concerned allegations against Russia for conducting cyberattacks in various countries. The British claims were conveniently amplified by NATO allies, including the US, Canada and Netherlands, as well as partners Australia and New Zealand.

Again, the hypocrisy and hyper preciousness here are cringe-making. US and British state intelligence are known to run the biggest, most pervasive illegal hacking of telecommunications across the entire globe. American whistleblowers Edward Snowden, William Binney and other honorable people, have provided irrefutable evidence of the mass global hacking carried out by the CIA, NSA and Britain’s GCHQ.

Recall just one example: the Americans spying on personal phone calls by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

What’s particularly nauseating, however, is when the criminals who have been caught redhanded on numerous grave violations then turn around and accuse others of alleged misdemeanors. That is what we may call “hyper-precious hypocrisy”.

In the case of Mike Pence’s grandstanding on alleged Chinese attempts to oust Trump from the White House, what he was referring to was Beijing’s retaliatory trade sanctions on US exports from agricultural states. The corn-belt states of Iowa, Idaho and Illinois were crucial to electing Trump in the 2016 presidential race.

The Chinese government also paid for advertorials in an Iowa newspaper last month which criticized Trump’s policies for inciting a trade war, in which US farmers could suffer consequences from retaliatory measures. There was nothing underhand in what Beijing was doing. It was simply explaining to American voters the damaging impact of starting a trade war — an explanation that the US president has not been leveling to his rural supporters.

For the Trump administration to launch into shrill accusations against China of “interfering” in American democracy is a sign of how far Washington has become divorced from reality.

We can go way back to the Boxer Rebellion in the late 1800s, when American and British troops slaughtered Chinese civilians in order to prop up a corrupt regime so that they could sell narcotic opium to a lucrative oriental market.

Over the past century, the Americans and British have subverted more foreign governments and elections than any other foreign power. The American and British hacking into elections is off the charts, involving hundreds of occasions, which often resulted in bloody mayhem and failed states, wracked by poverty and sectarian violence.

If we can set aside the rank hypocrisy for a moment, what about the latest US, British and other NATO claims of Kremlin hacking operations around the world?

It was claimed this week that Russian military intelligence agents were involved in trying to hack into numerous entities. Those entities targeted by supposed Russian computer-espionage related to the Skripal poison affair in England; meddling in US elections; the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014; the use of doping by Olympic athletes; and investigations into chemical weapons in Syria.

Western media reports came up with the imaginative theory that Russian state hackers were trying to “clean up” past illicit operations.

What’s really going on here is now a concerted effort by the NATO powers to consolidate all their desperate, bankrupt anti-Russia propaganda into a neatly fortified package. It’s called getting your stories straight.

Each one of the sensational stories impugning Russia, from the Malaysian airline disaster to the alleged poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, have been failures. Failures, that is, to galvanize world public opinion against Russia’s so-called “malign activities”. People around the world just don’t buy the absurd, hollow accusations slated by NATO powers.

That’s why the NATO powers, especially the biggest liars America and Britain, are being forced into consolidating their voices and bizarre accusations against Russia. They are now being forced to use loudspeakers and chorused hymn sheets to try to win their failing information war.

But shouting lies ever louder does not make these lies more credible.

Perhaps Russian agents were trying to hack into various systems in NATO countries. We don’t know. But in the murky realm of all foreign powers being involved in information gathering and espionage, the alleged transgressions are relatively redundant. Again, look at the massive surveillance being carried out by the US and Britain.

Another possible factor is this: it would be reasonable for Russia to want to learn what NATO powers and their partners are concocting in the way of fabricated incriminations against Moscow. If that were the case, it still does not justify the hysterical claims made by the US, Britain and others this week of Russia running global cyberattacks.

Indeed, we have entered a sort of twilight zone of propaganda and hypocrisy.

The Trump administration itself accuses domestic political opponents of conducting witch-hunts, “fake news”, and contriving accusations.

Yet this administration, along with its NATO minions, shows the same reprehensible tendencies towards Russia and China.

Russia and China are right to be wary of the madness that has taken hold in the West’s political class. The madness is beyond reason and therefore highly dangerous. As Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned this week, the NATO powers are pushing the rest of the world down a dangerous path, at the end of which is the abyss of world war.

The Western public must get rid of their warmongering political class before it’s too late. Ironically, and absurdly, such observation coming from a Sputnik columnist will no doubt be construed as “evidence” that Russia is inciting revolution in Western states. Such is NATO hyper-hypocrisy in the twilight zone.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

This article was originally published by “Sputnik” –

TERRORIST ATTACK IN AHVAZ HAS US-‘ISRAELI’-SAUDI-EMIRATI SIGNATURE

by Jonathan Azaziah – What an absolute horror in Iran’s Ahvaz. As veterans of the Iranian Armed Forces, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij and their families were gathered for a parade marking the 38-year anniversary of the start of the Imposed War led by the tyrant Saddam Hussein, gunmen dressed in Iranian military garb opened fire on the attendees with reckless abandon. They didn’t care who they hit. And the total casualty count shows–with at least 29 martyrs, including women, children, disabled vets and journalists, and more than 70 wounded. The whole thing felt very… and we do mean VERY… ‘Israeli’. And it didn’t take long for the usurping Zionist entity and all its regional cronies to rear their ugly heads. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) claimed responsibility for the cowardly, murderous attack, as did Al-Ahwaz Arab Popular Democratic Front (APDF), a wing of ASMLA.

The leader of ASMLA is Habib Jabour, who openly and proudly flaunts his relationship with the House of Saud. Al-Arabiya–or as it should be called, Al-Ibriyya–is the literal stenographer of all ASMLA and APDF propaganda and praised the attack both online and on air. So did the hideously sectarian channel Al-Wesal TV–an Arabic-Urdu-Farsi platform infamous for declaring that its main objective is to discuss “the accords and speeches of the turbaned Shi’ites and scholars, exposing them and uncovering their falsehoods”— which covered the Ahvaz horror as a “heroic effort to liberate an ‘occupied’ region from Iran”. Indeed, the delusional terrorists say Iran is another ‘Israel’ and Ahvaz is another Palestine and when they’re done “liberating” Ahvaz from the “occupiers”, they will then offer their support to the Palestinian struggle. A classical Takfiri-esque perspective: Kill anyone and everyone before you wage Jihad against the Zio-Imperialists–who just so happen to be funding, arming and training you. Should also be noted that Fatah and APDF have close ties, which is, in and itself, a damning proof of the ‘Israeli’ nexus as Mahmoud Abbas is of course a ZOGer–a real stooge to end all stooges.

The Zionist hands are further exposed by the fact that nearly all of the leaders of the ASMLA and the APDF are based in Australia, which has played a major role in destabilizing Syria and whose intelligence services are overrun with Mossadniks, as well as the Netherlands, a historic partner of the usurping Zionist entity, home of a massive Judaic-bankrolled Islamophobia industry headed by Zionist Jew hatemonger Geert Wilders, a provider of attack dogs used by IOF against Palestinian civilians, and, up until about two seconds ago, a top funder of the ‘Israeli’-Sorosite-partnered White Helmets. Moreover, the neocon-run Bush regime, through both the CIA and JSOC, ramped up major support to Ahvazi separatist gangs, the ASMLA included, with the specific purpose of attacking, weakening and destabilizing the IRGC. Verily, Iranian Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi said in no uncertain terms that the murderers were trained by ‘Israel’ and Amreeka in two Persian Gulf countries. One is Saudi Arabia. And the other is the UAE’s Abu Dhabi sheikhdom.

In fact, the Emiratis aren’t even trying to hide it. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent UAE intellectual routinely quoted in mainstream press outlets and a senior “royal” advisor to the criminal Nahyan clan, blatantly declared on Twitter, “Taking the battle into the depths of Iran is an option that has already been declared and will increase even further in the future.” This is an echo of what Saudi “Crown Prince” and butcher of Yemen Muhammad Bin Salman said last year, “We will work so that the battle is on their side, inside Iran.” The Saudi and Emirati collaborators are so far gone in their services to the Empire that there just isn’t anywhere else to go. They’ve made their beds… With Shlomo… And they enjoy their own stench after coming up from laying down with “chosenite” mutts.

World Zionism operatives, from the artificial Jewish regime as well as its lobbying apparatuses, have been vociferously campaigning for separating Ahvaz from Iran for years. Rape enthusiast, Aman agent and war criminal Mordechai Kedar engaged in some obscene, quintessential Jewish projectionism with his piece, “Iran is an Artificial Country”, praising the ASMLA and salivating over Ahvaz’s oil. Mark Langfan, the head of Americans for a Safe ‘Israel’ (AFSI), picked up on this theme and ran with it in his “Free Arab Shia from their Iranian slavemasters” drivel in Arutz Sheva. It’s essentially become a preeminent talking point of Organized Jewish Interests.

And lest we forget that Ahvaz was a center of Jewish commercial activity throughout the Middle Ages as well as one of the first hotbeds for Zionist activity inside Iran. Simply put, the Ahvazi separatists and the Jews are thick as thieves. Make no mistake, any ethno-nationalism or communal-nationalism expressed inside Iran’s borders is Jewish at the root. Full-stop. Whether it’s in Balochistan with Jundallah and Baloch separatist groups or in Kurdistan with PJAK,Mossad is present. Busting up Iran into statelets has always been a Zionist imperative, from Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy For ‘Israel’ In The 1980s” to the Saban Center’s “Which Path To Persia?”, which, by the way, also salutes Ahvazi terrorists.

Most despicable of all is that the whole of the Zionist media from Reuters to AFP, the Times of ‘Israel’ to BBC, Al-Jazeera (aka Al-Khanzeera) to CBS, CNN to the Wall Street Journal, did not call the Ahvaz carnage a terrorist attack nor refer to the ASMLA and the APDF as terrorists. It’s an unabashed dehumanization technique that has been employed against the Islamic Republic by the US ZOG and ‘Israel’ from the moment that Imam Khomeini (R.A.) brought down the Shah. But ask yourselves this: Wouldn’t a like-similar attack on the CIA be terrorism? Even though the CIA has toppled over 100 governments since its founding between election rigging, assassinations and coups. Even though the CIA backs head-chopping Takfiris, death squads of all types and dictators worldwide. It’s still terrorism, no?

Because what about the secretaries and the janitors, the paper-pushers and the food delivery workers, the receptionists and particularly the analysts opposed to US interventionism. In other words, the innocent people. This is above and beyond the fact that God forbid any such attack occurs, we’d have to look at ‘Israel’ in a false flag scenario. Ultimately, terrorism is terrorism. And a mass shooting that leaves elderly disabled people who had fought for their country in defense of independence as well as 6-year old children liquidated… Can’t be called anything but. The Jewish-controlled corporate press doesn’t want you to see photos of Shouhada like hero Hossein Monjazi (R.A.), who was being honored in the parade, and little Taha (R.A.), that’s why it prevents its usual spheres of (dis)information-dissemination from showing such images and in alternative spheres, such as social media, it blocks, suspends, deletes and shadow-bans to halt counter-narratives from festering. Like the @IranTactical account on Twitter that was 86ed as the Ahvaz chaos was unfolding.

Speaking of ‘Israeli’ false flags, it is telling that Saeed Ghasseminejad, the resident “Iranian” native informant and Shabbos Goy extraordinaire over at the FDD–the Talpiot-linked, ‘Israeli’-infested 3rd incarnation of PNAC–actually had the gall to say that the IRGC, which has lost many a good man to the mercenaries of the ASMLA and the APDF, was working with these groups to slaughter their own and portray the Iranian government as a victim before the upcoming UN General Assembly extravaganza. Fallacious, felonious and filthy! This is reminiscent of Russian-Jewish gazillionaire Boris Berezovsky (L.A.) and the Jewish neocons of the Bush White House accusing Vladimir Putin of plotting the attacks on Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in the infamous “Apartment Bombings”. Zion’s think-tank-industrial-complex has ZERO issue invoking the concept of false flags when it needs to smear enemy states and use their dead as hasbara props for an ongoing soft war campaign. When the REAL perpetrator of false flags comes up however, i.e. ‘Israel’, especially when it comes to the Zionist granddaddy of them all, 9/11, everyone who promotes such truth turns into an “anti-Semite”, a “conspiracy theorist” or a “Nazi”.

It’s more than pornographic and yet another proof of the Empire’s shameless execution of the Ahvaz attack that the House of Rothschild’s errand boy Rudy Giuliani, an anti-Iranian regime change fanatic as well as a key Gentile agent of Zion’s terrorism on September 11th, 2001, was frothing at the mouth about the US leading the overthrow of the Islamic Revolution all before the blood of the Ahvaz martyrs was even dry; before the casualty count had even been tallied up properly. His speech was sponsored by another terrorist group, the Zionist-aligned MEK, which has been bathing in the plasma of Iranian civilians for nearly four decades. And this is, without a doubt, the US-‘Israeli’-Saudi-Emirati end goal: Toppling Wilayet al-Faqih and replacing it with a pliable regime led by goons like ASMLA and the MEK that will serve Shlomo ad infinitum.

Sadness aside for a moment over this terrible crime, perhaps it is fitting that it happened in the midst of Sacred Defense Week–a sign that ALLAH (SWT) is the Best Planner of All. Because just as Saddam Hussein failed to put out the candles of Khomeiniism when he began his aggression on the Jewish Imperium’s behalf 38 years ago, so too will Washington, “Tel Aviv”, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. They can drop monies and weapons to whatever gaggle of degenerates they like. The Islamic Revolution has not come this far to crumble at the hands of mere weakling terrorists that target babies, women and men in wheelchairs.

As Imam Khamenei said to a group of foreign cultural activists last month, “Do not worry at all about our situation. Nobody can do a damn thing against the Islamic Revolution. Be certain of that. There isn’t any doubt about it. Inform everyone of this truth!” We recite Al-Fatiha over and over again for the martyrs. We send Striking Star Salutes to the Islamic Republic of Iran, its military-intelligence organs, its people, its leadership and its thinkers during this most blessed time when Iranians commemorate fighting off the whole world to maintain what Imam Khomeini (R.A.) helped bring to fruition. And we pray for the punishment of the perpetrators–both local and global. May they feast on the Zaqqum’s fruit forever.

Syria or Southeast Asia – The West lied, lies, and always will

I’m sitting at the splendid building of the Singapore National Library, in a semi-dark room, microfilm inserted into a high-tech machine. I’m watching and then filming and photographing several old Malaysian newspapers dating back from October 1965.

These reports were published right after the horrible 1965 military coup in Indonesia, which basically overthrew the progressive President Sukarno and liquidated then the third largest Communist party on Earth, PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia). Between one and three million Indonesian people lost their lives in some of the most horrifying massacres of the 20th century. From a socialist (and soon to be Communist) country, Indonesia descended into the present pits of turbo-capitalist, as well as religious and extreme right-wing gaga.

The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Holland and several other Western nations, directly sponsored the coup, while directing both the pro-Western treasonous factions in the military, as well as the religious leaders who stood, from the start, at the forefront of the genocide.

All this information is, of course, widely available in the de-classified archives of both the CIA and U.S. State Department. It can be accessed, analyzed and reproduced. I personally made a film about the events, and so have several other directors.

But it isn’t part of the memory of humanity. In Southeast Asia, it is known only to a handful of intellectuals.

In Malaysia, Singapore or Thailand, the Indonesian post-1965 fascism is a taboo topic. It is simply not discussed. “Progressive” intellectuals here are, like in all other ‘client’ states of the West, paid to be preoccupied with their sex orientation, with gender issues and personal ‘freedoms’, but definitely not with the essential matters (Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, the savage and grotesque forms of capitalism, the plunder of local natural resources and environment, as well as disinformation, plus the forcefully injected ignorance that is accompanied by mass amnesia) that have been shaping so extremely and so negatively this part of the world.

In Indonesia itself, the Communist Party is banned and the general public sees it as a culprit, not as a victim.

The West is laughing behind the back of its brainwashed victims. It is laughing all the way to the bank.

Lies are obviously paying off.

No other part of the world has suffered from Western imperialism as much after WWII, as Southeast Asia did, perhaps with two exceptions, those of Africa and the Middle East.

In so-called Indochina, the West murdered close to ten million people, during the indiscriminate bombing campaigns and other forms of terror – in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The above mentioned Indonesian coup took at least 1 million human lives. 30% of the population of East Timor was exterminated by the Indonesian occupation, which was fully supported by the West. The Thai regime, fully subservient to the West, killed indiscriminately its leftists in the north and in the capital. The entire region has been suffering from extreme religious implants, sponsored by the West itself, and by its allies from the Gulf.

But the West is admired here, with an almost religious zeal.

The U.S., British and French press agencies and ‘cultural centers’ are spreading disinformation through local media outlets owned by subservient ‘elites’. Local ‘education’ has been devotedly shaped by Western didactic concepts. In places like Malaysia, Indonesia, but also Thailand, the greatest achievement is to graduate from university in one of the countries that used to colonize this part of the world.

Victim countries, instead of seeking compensation in courts, are actually admiring and plagiarizing the West, while pursuing, even begging for funding from their past and present tormentors.

Southeast Asia, now obedient, submissive, phlegmatic and stripped off the former revolutionary left-wing ideologies, is where the Western indoctrination and propaganda scored unquestionable victory.

The same day, I turned on the television set in my hotel room, and watched the Western coverage of the situation in Idlib, the last stronghold of the Western-sponsored terrorists on Syrian territory.

Russia has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting warning that the terrorists might stage a chemical attack, and then blame it, together with the West, on the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

NATO battleships have been deployed to the region. There can be no doubt – it has been a ‘good old’ European/North American scenario at work, once again: ‘We hit you, kill your people, and then bomb you as a punishment’.

Imperialist gangsters then point accusative fingers at the victims (in this case Syria) and at those who are trying to protect them (Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, China). Just like in a kindergarten, or a primary school; remember? A boy hits someone from behind and then screams, pointing at someone else: “It was him, it was him!” Miraculously, until now, the West has always gotten away with this ‘strategy’, of course, at the cost of billions of victims, on all continents.

That is how it used to be for centuries, and that is how it still works. That is how it will continue to be, until such terror and gangsterism is stopped.

For years and decades, we were told that the world is now increasingly inter-connected, that nothing of great importance could happen, without it being immediately spotted and reported by vigilant media lenses, and ‘civil society’.

Yet, thousands of things are happening and no one is noticing.

Just in the last two decades, entire countries have been singled-out by North America and Europe, then half-starved to death through embargos and sanctions, before being finally attacked and broken to pieces: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya to mention just a few. Governments of several left-wing nations have been overthrown either from outside, or through their own, local, servile elites and media; among them Brazil, Honduras and Paraguay. Countless Western companies and their local cohorts are committing the unbridled plunder of natural resources in such places as Borneo/Kalimantan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), totally ruining tropical forests while murdering hundreds of species.

Are we, as a planet, really inter-connected? How much do people know about each other, or about what is done to their brothers and sisters on different continents?

I have worked in some 160 countries, and I can testify without the slightest hesitation: ‘Almost nothing’. And: ‘Less and much less!’

The Western empire and its lies, has managed to fragment the world to previously unknown extremes. It is all done ‘in the open’, in full view of the world, which is somehow unable to see and identify the most urgent threats to its survival. Mass media propaganda outlets are serving as vehicles of indoctrination, so do cultural and ‘educational’ institutions of the West or those local ones shaped by the Western concepts. That includes such diverse ‘tools’ as universities, Internet traffic manipulators, censors and self-censored individuals, social media, advertisement agencies and pop culture ‘artists’.

There is a clear pattern to Western colonialist and neo-colonialist barbarity and lies:

Indonesian President Sukarno and his closest ally the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were trying to build a progressive and self-sufficient country. Therefore, they had to be stopped, government overthrown, party members massacred, PKI itself banned and the entire country privatized; sold to foreign interests. The overwhelming majority of Indonesians are so brainwashed by the local and Western propaganda that they still blame the Communists for the 1965 coup, no matter what the CIA archives say.’

Mossadegh of Iran was on the same, progressive course. And he ended up the same way as Sukarno. And the whole world was then charmed by the butcher, who was put to power by the West – the Shah and his lavish wife.

Chile in 1973, and thereafter, the same deadly pattern occurred, more evidence of how freedom-loving and democratic the West is.

Patrice Lumumba of Congo nationalized natural resources and tried to feed and educate his great nation. Result? Overthrown, killed. The price: some 8 million people massacred in the last two decades, or maybe many more than that (see my film: Rwanda Gambit). Nobody knows, or everyone pretends that they don’t know.

Syria! The biggest ‘crime’ of this country, at least in the eyes of the West, consisted of trying to provide its citizens with high quality of life, while promoting Pan-Arabism. The results we all know (or do we, really?): hundreds of thousands killed by West-sponsored murderous extremists, millions exiled and millions internally displaced. And the West, naturally, is blaming Syrian President, and is ready to ‘punish him’ if he wins the war.

Irrational? But can global-scale fascism ever be rational?

The lies that are being spread by the West are piling up. They overlap, often contradict one another. But the world public is not trained to search for the truth, anymore. Subconsciously it senses that it is being lied to, but the truth is so horrifying, that the great majority of people prefer to simply take selfies, analyze and parade its sexual orientation, stick earphones into its ears and listen to empty pop music, instead of fighting for the survival of humanity.

I wrote entire books on this topic, including the near 1,000-page : “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”.

This essay is just a series of thoughts that came to my mind, while I was sitting at a projector in a dark room of the Singapore National Library.

A rhetorical question kept materializing:

Can all this be happening?” “Can the West get away with all these crimes it has been committing for centuries, all over the world?”

The answer was clear: ‘But of course, as long as it is not stopped!’

And so, A luta continua!

By Andre Vltchek
First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook