THE WEST MUST CONFRONT ITS WRONGS

Letter in The Age, 24 MARCH 2016

 

The West must confront its wrongs

 

After every attack on the West (note: not those in Turkey), our so-called leaders state the mantra, "they will not make us live in fear, we will carry on with our lives" etc. The people who commit these terrorist acts are immediately vilified, correctly, but with little discussion of cause and effect. The manifest lie that intelligence agencies and police have any way to prevent these atrocities needs to be ridiculed. Historically, there is no evidence to suggest terrorism committed by individuals can be stopped by monitoring. The root of the issue lies in the British and French destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the ongoing wars and support of dictators in the region, predominantly over oil, that have occurred since. Ongoing hegemony that has fuelled our economies at the expense of others. But strangely no one wants to talk about it, so instead of a robust discussion on where the West has gone wrong and what can be done to fix it, the West presents itself as an immaculate victim of Arab/Muslim ignorance. Without our friends the Saudis, Islamic State wouldn't financially exist. As long as we continue the "we have done nothing wrong" or "they're just fanatics" dialogue we are doomed to allow these dreadful people to increase in number.

Gerard Grant, Knoxfield

REFUGEES PERSECUTED FOR SEXUALITY - FOCUS OF MIDSUMMA PLAY - 2016

Refugees persecuted for sexuality focus of Midsumma play directed by John Kachoyan

12 January  2016

• Article in The Age supplement - the shortlist - 15 JANUARY 2016

John Bailey

Nick Simpson-Deeks stars in Elegy. Photo: Hayden Bevis

It can come as a surprise to learn that post-invasion Iraq is a much more dangerous place to be queer than it was before. "We tend to think in the languages of these countries being 'liberated' and 'freedom' being installed, but with the destabilisation came the rise of militias and things like ISIS," says director John Kachoyan. "You assume that the previous regime was always oppressive and always more rigorous. It's the same with the Taliban. You look at Afghanistan in the '70s and it was, relatively, an incredibly liberal place."

Kachoyan is directing the first Australian production of acclaimed UK play Elegy, a one-hander that taps into the real experiences of refugees persecuted for their sexuality. The typical image of an asylum seeker rarely gives rise to thoughts about sexual orientation, but Elegy was inspired by the work of photojournalist Bradley Secker, in particular a series of images named Iraq's Unwanted. From Turkey, where he is based, Secker says the series sought to convey "the reality of life in Iraq after the US-led invasion for minorities, and the fact that it clearly wasn't better than it was before for them. The images were trying to show their lives of hiding, their waiting, and total uncertainty of those that escaped the death squads."

UK writer and director Douglas Rintoul discovered the images and was stunned. "I was shocked that a country that we had 'liberated' showed more intolerance towards its minorities than it had under Saddam Hussein. This combined with a number of reports detailing the horrific injustice LGBTI asylum seekers were experiencing when they reached the UK compelled me to make Elegy."

John Kachoyan is directing the first Australian production of acclaimed UK play Elegy. Photo: Eddie Jim

It's not illegal to be gay in Iraq, and before the war there was a healthy gay scene. "It was tolerated," says Rintoul. "But the conservative Islamic forces that won power were unwilling to tolerate Western values, and homosexuality became wrongly linked with that. LGBTI people became easy and popular targets. Many are kidnapped, tortured and killed.

"ISIS have been grabbing news headlines more recently, with their unbelievable brutality towards LGBTs and wider humanity," says Secker. "[But] many people seem to have forgotten that militias in Iraq slaughtered hundreds of men they perceived to be gay after the fall of Saddam." Secker shot Iraq's Unwanted in Syria in 2010 – many of the gay men he captured on film have since been displaced a second time.

Elegy deals with the unthinkable horrors queer asylum seekers are fleeing, but it is also a love story; the figure at its centre is defined by much more than his refugee status, and in fact doesn't define himself as one. Such complexities of identity are compounded by the fact that "there is no word for homosexual in the Arabic language and many men who have sex with men don't necessarily identify in the same way we do."

All of Elegy's makers seem wary of what Kachoyan calls "well-meaning white people's theatre." The work draws on actual interviews, giving it "a little bit more of a claim to authenticity," he says.

But Rintoul notes how important it is to speak about, rather than for, these real individuals.

In its early stages the monologue was written in the first person, which felt "uncomfortable and untruthful," says Rintoul. "I remember the moment when we put the text into the third person. 'He'. A great barrier was removed and the piece became a collective imagining, a piece of storytelling."

He's directed three productions of the piece, and in every case has to remind his actors to dial back the theatricality. "Actors are naturally pulled towards the emotion of a piece. This is their language. I would constantly pull them back, away from sitting in the emotional centre of the experiences. We would listen to recording of refugees talking about their experiences and, in the same way we ourselves talk about the distressing events of our own lives, they spoke very simply about their experiences."

Kachoyan has tried to retain that unadorned aesthetic. "We thought we might Australian-ise it, or make it a story that wasn't about lorries and border crossings in Europe but about boats and sinkings. But Nick Simpson-Deeks plays the man talking to us and he essentially just tells us a story, so for me the show became about the simplicity of that storytelling. He's not pretending to be Iraqi or putting on an accent or anything like that."

Elegy opens at Gasworks Arts Park on January 19 gasworksartspark.org.au; an exhibition of Douglas Secker's photography will accompany the production.

BDS IN THE CROSSHAIRS - ARTICLE IN COUNTERPUNCH

Article from CounterPunch  8 January 2016

BDS in the Crosshairs

by Lawrence Davidson

Most readers will know that the United States has served as the patron of Israel for decades. Why has it done so? The commonly given reasons are suspect. It is not because the two countries have overlapping interests. The U.S. seeks stability in the Middle East (mostly by supporting dictators) and Israel is constantly making things unstable (mostly by practicing ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, illegally colonizing conquered lands and launching massive assaults against its neighbors). Nor, as is often claimed, is the alliance based on “shared Western values.” The U.S. long ago outlawed racial, ethnic and religious discrimination in the public sphere. In Israel, religious-based discrimination is the law. The Zionist state’s values in this regard are the opposite of those of the United States.

So why is it that a project that seeks to pressure Israel to be more cognizant in foreign affairs of regional stability, and more democratic and egalitarian in domestic affairs, is now under fire by almost every presidential candidate standing for the 2016 election?

That project in dispute is BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, promoted by civil society throughout the Western world. BDS is directed at Israel due to its illegal colonization of the Occupied Territories and its general apartheid-style discrimination against non-Jews in general and Palestinians in particular.

The Candidates and BDS

With but two exceptions, every presidential candidate in both parties is condemning the BDS Movement. Lets start with the two exceptions. The first exception is the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has taken the accurate position that “the United States has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Israeli government.” She has pledged to use both diplomatic and economic means to change Israeli behavior, behavior which she rightly believes is in contravention of international law and violates human rights.

The second exception is the Republican candidate Donald Trump, who recently told a meeting of Jewish Republicans that he didn’t think Israel is serious about peace and that they would have to make greater efforts to achieve it. When he was booed he just shrugged and told the crowd that he did not care if they supported him or not, “I don’t want your money.” Unfortunately, this appears to be the only policy area where Mr. Trump is reasonable.

Jill Stein gets absolutely no media coverage and Donald Trump gets too much. And neither is in the “mainstream” when it comes to American political reactions to BDS. However, the rest of the presidential candidates are. Here is what is coming out of the “mainstream”:

Jeb Bush (Republican), 4 December 2015: “On day one I will work with the next attorney general to stop the BDS movement in the United States, to use whatever resources that exist” to do so.

Ted Cruz (Republican), 28 May 2015: “BDS is premised on a lie and it is anti-Semitism, plain and simple. And we need a president of the United States who will stand up and say if a university in this country boycotts the nation of Israel than that university will forfeit federal taxpayer dollars.”

Marco Rubio (Republican), 3 December 2015: “This [BDS] coalition of the radical left thinks it has discovered a clever, politically correct way to advocate Israel’s destruction. As president, I will call on university presidents, administrators, religious leaders, and professors to speak out with clarity and force on this issue. I will make clear that calling for the destruction of Israel is the same as calling for the death of Jews.”

Hillary Clinton (Democrat), 2 July 2015: In a letter to Haim Saban, who is a staunch supporter of the Zionist state and also among the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, she said, “I know you agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority, I am seeking your advice on how we can work together – across party lines and with a diverse array of voices – to fight back against further attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel.”

Bernie Sanders (Democrat), 20 October 2015: “Sanders’ fraught encounter with BDS supporters who challenged his defense of Israel at a town hall meeting in Cabot [Vermont] last year was captured on YouTube.” Sanders told them to “shut up.”

The Legitimacy of Boycott

This hostility to the tactic of boycott runs counter to both U.S. legal tradition and the country’s broader historical tradition.

For instance, advocating and practicing BDS can be seen as a constitutionally protected right. It certainly is more obviously protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech than is the use of money to buy elections.
Thus, if Zionist lobbyists can use money to buy support for Israel, why can’t anti-Zionists use their free speech rights to challenge that support? It should be noted that, in this regard, most Americans of voting age think it is the Zionists, and not the anti-Zionists, who have gone too far.

According to a December 2015 Brookings Institute poll, 49% of Democratic voters and 25% of Republican voters think that Israel has too much influence with U.S. politicians. Those supporting BDS in the United States might give some thought as to how to use these numbers to uphold their cause.

Then there is the fact of well-established historical tradition. The war for American Independence was build upon a framework of boycott. In November 1767, England introduced the Townshend Acts, requiring the colonists to pay a tax on a large number of items. The reply to this was both a boycott of British goods by many colonial consumers which was eventually followed by a boycott on the importation of such goods on the part of colonial merchants.

Subsequently, Americans have used the tactic of boycott against:

— (1930s) Goods produced by Nazi Germany
— (1960s and 1970s) California-grown grapes in support of the United Farm Workers


 — (1970s and 1980s) All aspects of the economy and cultural output of South Africa

 — (1980) The Moscow-hosted Olympics of 1980

— Myriad number of boycotts of various companies and products ranging from Nestle (baby formula) to Coca Cola. See the list given by the Ethical Consumer.

The reality is that the tactic of boycott has long been as American as the proverbial apple pie.

Apple pie not withstanding, the legal and historical legitimacy of boycott no longer has much impact on the attitudes of presidential candidates or, for that matter, members of Congress. Nor does the fact that the changes the BDS movement seeks to make in Israeli behavior would be to the benefit of U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Instead what the positions of the candidates seem to indicate is that there will be an almost certain attack on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, coming from the very highest levels of U.S. power, sometime soon after the 2016 elections.

How is it that such a contradiction between national interests and established tradition on the one hand, and imminent government policy on the other can exist? The answer is not difficult to come by. It is just a matter of fact that constitutional rights, historical tradition, and indeed the very interests of the nation, can be overridden by special interest demands. The demands of what George Washington once called “combinations and associations” of “corrupted citizens” who would “betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country” in favor of those of some other “favorite nation.” It is exactly such demands that are now given priority by the politicians in Washington.

This form of corruption will go on as long as the general public does not seem to care that it is happening. And it is sadly clear that the BDS activists alone cannot overcome this indifference. Thus, the politicians can dismiss the Brookings Poll numbers mentioned above. They can shrug and say, So what? As long as that majority does not express their opinion by actively demanding a change in the situation, as long as they are not successfully organized to do so, their opinion cannot compete with the millions of special interest dollars flowing into political campaigns.

In many ways our greatest enemy is our own indifference to the quiet erosion of important aspects of the democratic process. Allowing the attack on BDS only contributes to this disintegration of rights. A combination of localness and ignorance sets us up for this feeling of indifference. However, in the end, there can be no excuse for not paying attention. One morning you will wake up to find that valued rights and traditions are no longer there for you.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

WHY THE RISE OF FASCISM IS AGAIN THE ISSUE

The following article from CounterPunch is by John Pilger and is subtitled:

THE RECKLESS LIES OF WAR MONGERS

Weekend Edition 27 February-1 March 2015

Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue

by JOHN PILGER

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.

“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened.  Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery.  They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.

The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.”  His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention”.

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.

Following Nato’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency”.

The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59″ might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War”. The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines”. A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.

In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans.  Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions”. The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.

“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.  “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records.  The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina.  In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.”  He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?

In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]“. Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example”.

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a “freedom fighter”.

Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilise” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims”.  His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of  the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone”. Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.

The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror”, in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts” and “collatoral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains.  Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat”.

“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing.  Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days”.

There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists”.

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government.  The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include  Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry”. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.

No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as “the minister for defeatism”. It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.

Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s.  The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.

At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. The Nato commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing”. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by.  The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army”.  There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups”, but there was no Russian invasion.  This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime.  In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established ….If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack …. In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit”.

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist”.  In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”

The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world.  In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas “investment”. She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.

They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

John Pilger can be reached through his website:

www.johnpilger.com

ISRAEL'S EXISTENTIAL THREAT - ARTICLE FROM COUNTERPUNCH

WEEKEND EDITION JUNE 27-29, 2014 counterpunch

The Politics of Panic Mongering in the Middle East

Israel’s Existential Threat

by ANDREW LEVINE

Israel thrives on what it calls “existential threats,” fabricated perils that are just plausible enough to be believed.

As social divisions mount, they help hold Israeli society together.  They also keep “diaspora” Jews on board.

And they keep Western, especially American, diplomatic, military and economic support coming.

This is crucial now that Western publics are beginning to realize that untrammeled support for a European colonial project, an ethnocratic settler state, in the heart of the Middle East is problematic – not only for moral reasons, but for reasons of national interest as well.

Serviceable existential threats are hard to find.  So far, however, Israel has made due.

But times change.  Before long, it may actually face a real one, an existential threat worthy of the name.  The irony is palpable.

If and when this happens, it will be an object lesson: be careful what you wish for.

* * *

It was easier when the entire Arab world was nominally – though never really – at war with Israel.  This hasn’t been the case for decades.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, leaders throughout the region began to concoct a more secure modus vivendi than had previously existed.  With American help, they made decisive progress.

After the 1978 Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty signed the following year, the most threatening of the Arab armies, Egypt’s, could no longer be construed as a threat.  This was the good news.

The bad news – for Israel — was the same: an existential threat had gone missing.

Jordan and Israel didn’t actually sign a peace treaty until 1994, but the Hashemite Kingdom had been collaborating with Zionists since even before the state of Israel was established.  Lebanon was never much of a problem for Israel either.

There was still Syria, of course; and far off Iraq.  But, despite the sense of insecurity to which Israeli and diaspora Jews are prone, and despite the best efforts of the Zionist propaganda machine, it became increasingly difficult to maintain that Israel’s neighbors threatened Israel’s existence – except in their dreams.

Militarily, Palestinians were even less up to snuff; there has never been much they could do that the Israeli juggernaut could not easily withstand.

Nor is there much they can do diplomatically to challenge the Occupation regime under which they suffer; not with the United States backing Israel a thousand percent.

Palestinian resistance – in Israel, they call it “terrorism” — can be a nuisance.  It can also be a pretext.  But there is no way to sell it as a threat to the state itself.

Palestinian birthrates are another matter.  Zionists worry that they are too high, and that Jewish birthrates are too low.  Jewish Israelis, secular ones especially, also have high emigration rates.

Members of Israel’s several large and growing extreme Orthodox sects do heed the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.”  But for many – still, probably, most – Jewish Israelis, this is small consolation.  Even those who welcome the addition of any and all Chosen people, no matter how benighted, still have cause for concern: the godly folk living in the Promised Land are not nearly fruitful enough.

And so, despite relentless ethnic cleansing and despite aggressive efforts to attract Jewish immigrants from countries where there are no Israel lobbies that could be helpful to the Israeli state, Palestinians “threaten” to outnumber Jewish Israelis throughout Mandate Palestine and, conceivably some day, even within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

It is instructive to reflect on the kind of threat this is.  I’ll return to this question presently.

Since neighboring Arab states no longer pass muster, and since the kind of existential threat Israelis say Palestinians pose doesn’t do much to keep external support flowing in, the next move was all but inevitable: turn Iran into “existential threat” Number One.

Under the Shah, Iran had been Israel’s best friend in the region.  This changed after the 1979 Revolution, though not nearly as quickly as is widely assumed.  Old habits die hard.

In time, though, thanks to Iran’s unwitting cooperation, the strategy worked.  To the relief of Zionists everywhere, Israel had an existential threat adequate for its needs.

The Iranian nuclear program was icing on the cake.  It was a godsend.  So was Iran’s former President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  He could even be cast – not quite correctly, but convincingly enough – as a Holocaust denier.

Too bad for Israel that what the Lord giveth, the Lord doth also take away.  Unlike Ahmadinejad, Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, is eminently reasonable in both senses of the term: his views, insofar as they bear on world politics, are well-grounded and evidence-based; and he is disposed to cooperate, even with the United States, for mutual advantage.

This is good news everywhere outside official Tel Aviv.

With the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement on the rise, and with the entire region in turmoil, Israel needs an existential threat now more than ever.

But it is losing the best one it has had since its salad days, when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his confederates were always at the ready.

Poor Benjamin Netanyahu – first Eric Cantor, and now this.

* * *

I have not been able to track down when “existential threat” first entered the political lexicon.  I am fairly sure, though, that it was not long ago, and I suspect that Israeli propagandists had a lot to do with it.

They may even have concocted the expression.  They had been deploying the concept for decades; why not also name it?  With a name, it would be more useful.

The downside, though, is that naming the concept also exposes its problematic nature – by calling attention to the gap between what the words say and the reality that Israeli propagandists use them to describe.  Fortunately for the propagandists, hardly anyone notices.

When the words are taken literally, as is plainly the intention, then to say that there is an existential threat is to assert that the existence ofsomething is in jeopardy.  What might that something be?

In principle, it could be anything that could fail to exist.  In practice, the expression is used more restrictively.

In view of how the expression is used, one might almost think that it applies only to Israel — or only to the kinds of things that concern Israel’s defenders.

Of course, one it was out there, it was inevitable that it would spill over into a broader universe of discourse.  Remarkably, it has not spilled far.

For instance, no one says that people dealing with fatal diseases face existential threats, though they literally are.  Similarly, species face extinction, not existential threats; and it would be odd, to say the least, to use the expression in reference to buildings or neighborhoods about to be demolished.

It is noteworthy too that people seldom use the expression even in reference to countries, especially countries far from the Near East.  When they do, it is almost always “regimes,” not countries, that are said to confront existential threats.  Israel is the one salient exception.

Thus the demonstrations in 2011 in Tahrir Square and elsewhere throughout Egypt were said to pose an existential threat to “the Mubarak regime,” not to Egypt itself.  It was the same with the demonstrations that led to the coup against the elected government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

The expression is sometimes also applied to institutions and organizations.  This usage is revealing.

It can be said, for example, that public sector unions in the United States face an existential threat from legislation proposed by right-wing financiers, pro-business foundations and opportunistic politicians.  But this is only a colorful way of saying that these forces are leading a charge aimed at weakening or destroying public sector unions.

Merely adding dramatic flair, which is all the expression does, can be rhetorically – and therefore politically — useful.  Nevertheless, the expression is seldom used in contexts where it might actually do good.  It is still too linked to its origins for that.

This is why it sounds odd to say, for example, that the world faces an existential threat from nuclear war or from nuclear accidents, though this is literally true, and the danger is certainly grave enough to merit emphasis by any and all means.

In a similar vein, capitalist firms court ecological disasters that threaten a vast array of living things with annihilation.  But, again, the expression is seldom used to refer to impending catastrophes of this kind.

More in line with current uses, one could honestly say that political projects that are genocidal in nature pose existential threats to targeted populations.

For example, it would have been appropriate to maintain that the rise of Nazism and cognate political movements in Europe before and during World War II posed an existential threat to European Jewry.   Saying that then might have done some good.

Similarly, it would be fair to say – both factually and rhetorically — that European settlers in the Americas posed existential threats both to indigenous peoples and to their cultures.

The expression could also be used appropriately to describe aspects of the Atlantic slave trade, to cite just one more obvious example.

But “existential threat” is seldom used in salutary ways.

Instead, a smooth talker with an American accent, and a state sponsoredhasbara (public diplomacy/propaganda) campaign led by deceivers skilled in the dark arts of public relations, popularized the concept and the term.

One result is that words that could be helpful, when used without meretricious intent, are now tainted, perhaps irreversibly so.

* * *

The idea that Israeli Jews today – or the Hebrew culture of modern Israel — face a threat that rises to a level that could properly be called “existential” is more than just far-fetched.

To be sure, were the state of Israel to put its own legitimacy in jeopardy domestically or internationally – say, by overreaching egregiously – the regime it superintends might find itself facing a bona fide existential threat.

Then, in that sense, so would Israel itself – but only insofar as “Israel” is understood to designate the ethnocratic regime in place there.

When Communism imploded and the Soviet Union became undone, Russia underwent a very radical transformation.  But the country survived along with its people and its culture because, however closely connected they had been, the regime, Communism, and the country, its people, and its culture were not one and the same.

It would be the same for Israel if, like all states based on Enlightenment principles – and from traditions established during the French and American Revolutions — it became a state of its citizens, regardless of their religious or ethnic identities.

This is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future because, at this point, too few Jewish Israelis are willing to give up on the idea of a Jewish state – and they hold a strong enough hand to guarantee that they will get their way.  A “two state solution” is more feasible.  Though less satisfactory, it probably is the only way forward, at the present time, to advance justice and peace.

But even were the more radical solution on the agenda – in other words, even if the regime in place now in Israel really did face an existential threat – the Jewish citizens of Israel would be facing nothing of the sort.

Blowback from Israeli depredations in the Occupied Territories puts individual Israelis at risk; changing the regime responsible for blowback would not.

It is the same with the all but inexorable, “demographic bomb.” Palestinian majorities in mandate Palestine – or even behind the so-called Green Line – do not put the lives or fortunes of Jewish Israelis at risk, much less in mortal danger.  And neither would they spell the end of the Hebrew culture Zionism brought to life.

All that is safe, as long as the world itself does not become unhinged.

This was a sure thing back when Israel and its existential threats were running true to course.  But circumstances sometimes change – abruptly and without warning.

* * *

The problem is not that Israel’s luck in finding existential threats is running out.  It is the opposite; instead of no luck at all, Israel now seems to have too much.

Events are now unfolding, so it is too soon to be sure; but it appears that Israel may soon find that it has a genuine existential threat on its hands.

It would be the first time.  And it does not bode well – not for Israel, not for the region, and not for the world.

Indeed, the existential threat facing Israel is not even directed at it.  The threat to Israel is just one of many possible by-products of a far broader peril that could indeed unhinge our world.

For this, as for so much else, Israel, and all the other affected parties, has America – or rather the ill-led national security state America has become — to thank.

When Barack Obama won in 2008, there was a chance that the worst excesses of the Bush-Cheney era would finally be ended.  Instead, we have just gotten more of the same, and worse.

Even the old malefactors are still at it.  Some six years into the Age of Obama, they are finally recovering their stride.

Witness, for example, the unreconstructed neoconservatives who are still around causing trouble.  Our media give them a platform, and so they keep at it.  Remarkably, members of the Bush and Cheney families – reprobates all – are still at it too, and still drawing media attention.

But, by now, everyone else who gives the matter a moment’s thought realizes that starting the Iraq War was a colossal mistake.

Almost every decision the United States made in waging it was wrong-headed too; and it only got worse when the Obama administration took up where its predecessor left off.

In time, Obama did wind down overt combat operations; after seven years, there was little point in keeping them going.

But, by outsourcing most of the killing, his administration only continued the war and occupation in a different, less conspicuous, guise.

The ploy worked for a while because the United States was able to buy off most (evidently, not all) opposition, and because Obama kept the Iraqi government afloat with American taxpayers’ dollars.

And, on the home front, Obama was able to fool most of the people most of the time because, as per usual, the media didn’t do its job.  Having been notoriously gung-ho since even before the Iraq War began, the media lost interest as soon as the murder and mayhem began to subside.

Because they couldn’t just ignore what was going on, they therefore took the lazy way out: repeating what the State and Defense Departments told them.

But now, thanks mainly to American ineptitude, the situation on the ground is changing.   Suddenly, the occupation structure America contrived over the past decade is crumbling – along with the Iraqi regime itself.  Sunni jihadists are on the march, and Shia militias are reconstituting.  Civil war is brewing.  Arguably, it has already begun.

How ironic that what the Americans put in place is now being replaced by what George Bush and Dick Cheney told the world the U.S. invaded Iraq to prevent: the establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the heartland of the Middle East!

Iraq is not the only country in peril.  The Syrian civil war has already spilled over to its neighbor, and vice versa – putting the regional state system established after World War I in jeopardy.

For all this and more, American bungling is largely at fault.  Bush and Cheney hadn’t a clue what they were getting into and neither they nor their successor were any better prepared to deal with the situation their machinations had conjured into being.

The question now is how to keep the instability they created in bounds.

Will it spill over into the entire region – into Lebanon, for example?  Will it destabilize Jordan?   Egypt is already deeply in turmoil.  What will be the effect on it?

The one sure thing is that Israel will finally be facing a genuine existential threat.

Even if the threat can be confined just to its Syrian border, that will be more than enough; an out of control regional war waged by bitterly opposed parties who agree only on their hostility to the Israeli state comes as close as one can imagine to putting the seemingly impregnable security Israel provides its Jewish citizens in peril.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been crying wolf for so long that it has become his nature.  Now he is about to get what he has been bleating about; and neither he, nor those who think like him, are going to like it one bit.

The consequences of the Bush-Obama Iraq War are coming due.  One of those consequences – not the most dire, but certainly the most ironic – is that Israeli panic mongering will soon be overcome by events, putting Israel itself at more risk than it has ever been.

Be careful what you wish for – indeed!

ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).