Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 12, 2014 7:33 pm

Syria's war, 3 years on: 'a horror film', in faces of the dead and voices of revolt

Molly Crabapple

For the anniversary of a civil war no side can win, painting a history, with the Western left failing at every stroke

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Batoul, 12, died in a car bombing in Kafat this January. Photograph: Courtesy of Molly Crabapple for the #100000Names Oral Memorial for Syria

Friday 14 March 2014

This weekend marks the third anniversary of the Syrian war. Amal Hanano, a writer from Aleppo, has organized a reading of the names of 100,000 people killed. In front of the White House, mostly Syrian readers recite these names. It will take 72 hours.

In wars, it’s easy to see the dead as gore on a Twitter feed, as statistics to be shrugged away. Hanano’s #100000Names Oral Memorial for Syria is an attempt to give Syria’s dead back their humanity.

To see the dead as people – who ate ice cream and studied literature, who took pictures and dodged bullets and loved – is also to see what could have been, and all the world failed to do.

At Amal’s request, I drew some of their portraits.


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Firas Al-Salem, age unknown, from the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, died under torture after being detained for a year by security services in Damascus. Photograph: Courtesy of Molly Crabapple for the #100000Names Oral Memorial for Syria

These faces remind you that the revolution began with hope.

In 2011, a wave of protests swept the world, from the US, Greece and Spain to the Arab World. From Tahrir to Tunisia, people took to the streets, mobilizing against the cruelty of their regimes. In Syria, with a police state and its latest neoliberal reforms driving people into shanty towns, these protests were the first time many had ever raised their voices against Bashar al-Assad.

Razan Ghazzawi, an influential activist, feminist and blogger since 2006, who survived detention by the regime, described the excitement of “discovering each other as people with oppressed dreams”. She went on:

I would reach the area where we would protest. I see the protesters gathering. ... I jump, sing, hold hands, and we move our bodies together in harmony with the chanter’s voice. No one can take those days from us. Not even the revolution.

The ecstatic quality Ghazzawi described was a quality I heard over and over again from activists around the world who took part in 2011’s protests. There was disbelief that the moment had come. In the West, these protests were put down with police batons; in Syria, the Assad regime responded with lethal force.

Police tore out the fingernails of teenagers for spray-painting Arab Spring slogans on a high school. Soldiers were instructed to fire live ammo at protesters. Those who refused were executed on the spot. Many early protesters, like Ghaith Matar, believed in nonviolence. Matar was nicknamed “Little Ghandi” for greeting soldiers with roses. He was arrested by security forces, returning to his family as a tortured corpse.


Continues at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ist-voices
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby conniption » Fri Dec 12, 2014 8:28 pm

^

conniption » Fri Dec 12, 2014 4:01 pm wrote:
8bitagent » Thu Nov 20, 2014 3:18 am wrote:Call me a sell out, ban me, etc I dont care. I fucking HATE Russia, and I see them way more of a threat than the US. You think I like the idea of living in California and having long range tactical nuke armed Russian jets patrol my coastline, or Alaska or Canada or the east coast

And all these people calling Ukraine a bunch of fascists. Russia IS THE MOST far right gay hating minority killing psychopathic group on the plannet. Russia was the main arm suppliers to the Sudanese genocide. Putin orchestrated false flag terror attacks to oppress Muslims. Putin orders the assassination of hundreds of journalists.

Don't tell me Russia is innocent. Russia is worse than they ever were during the Cold War, and sorry if I lose conspiracy progressive points for saying so



I'm sorry you feel that way.

~

counterpunch

Weekend Edition December 12-14, 2014

The Trigger-Happy West

Blaming Russia for Everything?

by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The Fox News website headline of November 20 was startling. The world was informed that “Russian Bombers Threaten Guam”, which was an astonishing revelation. What on earth could be happening? Could this “threat” be a run-up to war?

But even Fox News had to report the US Pacific Command statement that “the aircraft were flying safely in international airspace and in accordance with international norms.” There was not the slightest indication that there was any threat to Guam, but this didn’t stop other reports that “two Russian strategic bombers circled the US island of Guam last week in what US defense officials say is the latest in a series of nuclear provocations by Moscow.”

(Guam is an “unincorporated organized territory” of the United States — a colony, in other words — whose citizens are not permitted to vote in US presidential elections and whose member in Congress is not allowed to vote on anything. It lies 6,000 miles from the west coast of the United States and 2,000 miles from the east coast of Russia. In April 2014, President Obama declared that “the United States and Japan are also making sustained progress towards realizing a geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable US force posture in the Asia Pacific, including the development of Guam as a strategic hub.”)

It wasn’t apparent how US defense officials could declare so conclusively that Russia was indulging in “nuclear provocations” but details like that do not matter in the river of anti-Russian propaganda that is surging day by day. The headlines are eye-catching — as well as mind-bending — and the allegations that Russia is intent on war are reaching flood levels.

On December 4 the US House of Representatives passed legislation demonstrating US official hatred of and hostility to Russia. It is now official policy that the United States of America “strongly condemn[s] the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighboring countries aimed at political and economic domination.”

The sponsor of the legislation stated that “The US, Europe and our allies must aggressively keep the pressure on Mr. Putin to encourage him to change his behaviour.”

It is apparent that these people don’t only want to confront Russia — they want war.

For once the legislators took their cue from the White House, because the president of the United States has said that Russia was involved in the shooting down of the Malaysian aircraft, Flight MH17, over Ukraine. His statement at the recent meeting of the G-20 countries in Australia was the most objectionable and insulting made by any US president about Russia since the height of the Cold War, which he and his Congressional allies have now revived. He announced that the United States was “leading in opposing Russia’s aggression, which is a threat to the world — which we saw in the appalling shoot down of MH17.”

There is no proof whatever that Russia was involved in any way in destruction of MH-17. The results of the inquiry are being kept secret by the western countries involved in examining the circumstances. The final report by the investigating nations (including Ukraine but excluding Russia and, bizarrely, Malaysia, the owner of the aircraft) has not been completed, yet the president of the United States — without a shred of evidence to justify his statement — declared that the shooting down of the aircraft was due to Russia’s “aggression.”

But aggression has for a long time been the trademark of western dealings with Russia.

At the G-20 jamboree the Australian government set the scene for a series of insults directed at President Putin by Britain, Canada and America. On arrival in the country he was met by the assistant defense minister, the governor of the state of Queensland, and the secretary to the Governor General (who is head of state in Australia; the Queen’s representative). To say that this was the ‘C’ Team is to understate matters. It was appalling rudeness to an important visiting head of state to be met by a trio of such officials. It was a planned, calculated and deliberate affront to Russia, its president and its people.

The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, America’s Barack Obama and President Joko Widodo of Indonesia were met by the Governor General, His Excellency Sir Peter Cosgrove, as is the customary courtesy to visiting heads of state. But Mr Putin and his country were purposefully insulted by Sir Peter’s absence at the airport. So, too, was President Hollande of France who was met by the Queensland Health Minister John-Paul Langbroek, an even further dive down the protocol chain. The government of Australia excelled itself in making it abundantly clear who it regards with disdain. This will not be forgotten by those who were insulted.

It should be pointed out that the Governor General is required, constitutionally, to accept the “advice” of the government as to his actions in foreign affairs. Sir Peter, a most civilized person, would not himself have acted in such a crass and juvenile fashion.

The playground immaturity was continued by Britain’s prime minister David Cameron who considered it a great joke to say “I didn’t feel it necessary to bring a warship myself to keep myself safe at this G20.” He was referring to the fact that at the time of Mr Putin’s visit there were two Russian warships and two support vessels in international waters near Australia. The Australian defense department displayed more maturity by stating simply that “the movement of these vessels is entirely consistent with provisions under international law for military vessels to exercise freedom of navigation in international waters,” and the Australian destroyer Parramatta conducted a communications exercise with Russia’s cruiser Varyag, as is the courteous custom of the sea. But Mr Cameron though it terribly witty to poke childish fun at Mr Putin by referring to Russia’s ships in the region.

What is indeed hilarious is the fact that Mr Cameron’s Britain has itself so few ships. He and his predecessors have all but destroyed the Royal Navy, which has no aircraft carriers, no combat aircraft, and only a few other warships — ten submarines, six destroyers and a dozen frigates. (I remember with pride but sorrow when the Royal Navy had two aircraft carriers, a cruiser, a destroyer squadron, a frigate squadron, four submarines and over twenty other vessels in Asian waters alone.) It would have been impossible for Mr Cameron “to bring a warship” because Britain hasn’t got one to send.

In addition to insulting President Putin the G-20 gathering achieved nothing for the world that is in any way binding on those who attended. Although it was a farce of photo-ops and flatulent pomposity it succeeded in showing the level of hatred and contempt for Russia that is so evident in the governments of the United States and some of its allies.

The western media’s cover of Russian affairs is verging on what it was in the Sixties, when hysteria reigned about the Soviet Union. Many of us thought that the West — the US-led NATO grouping — would relax its pressure on Russia after the welcome collapse of the Soviet Union, but this was over-optimistic.

On May 27, 1997 it was agreed that “The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its member States, on the one hand, and the Russian Federation, on the other hand” would refrain “from the threat or use of force against each other.”

Russia has not made any “threat or use of force” against any NATO nation. It would be crazy to even hint at doing so because Russia wants peace and trade, especially with the Baltic states and Poland, which are major trading partners. (As well as being, in the case of Lithuania and Poland, recent hosts to US CIA black site prisons in which victims were tortured by psychotic sadists.)

It is obvious that if Russia wanted to take over Ukraine it could have done so months ago without a problem. The military forces of Ukraine are incompetent, and the Russians could have invaded and conquered Ukraine in about three weeks if they had wanted to. But they didn’t and don’t want to do that. Russia doesn’t want to squander billons of dollars on a pointless war, such as those of America on Iraq or in Afghanistan.

All that Moscow wants to do is to ensure justice and freedom for the Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured, pro-Russian inhabitants of the eastern regions of Ukraine — just as it did for the inhabitants of Crimea, who voted to accede to Russia.

The 1997 pact between NATO and Russia includes agreement that NATO will perform its mission without “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” But in spite of this the US Land Commander Europe, General Frederick Hodges, said on November 23 at a press conference in Lithuania that “The US will keep troops in Poland and the Baltic states for at least the next year.” According to the general this will not contravene the pact because “We have planned rotations out through next year. Units are designated that will continue to do this. There are going to be US army forces here in Lithuania, as well as Estonia and Latvia and Poland for as long as is required to deter Russian aggression and to assure our allies.”

In some weird fashion, if the US keeps the same number of different troops menacing Russia there is no “permanent stationing.” How very clever.

The US House of Representatives and the US-led NATO alliance are being aggressive and confrontational. But it is our lives and the future of our world they are playing with. Their belligerence would be understandable if Russia was in any way threatening the Baltic States and Poland. But there isn’t any such threat. There is, however, a threat from western trigger-happy dummies who are spoiling for war.

Brian Cloughley lives in France.


just sayin'
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 12, 2014 8:34 pm

http://palestinianreflections.wordpress ... -of-fools/

The Anti-Imperialism of Fools

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معاً ضد الديكتاتورية. Juntxs contra la dictadura. Together Against Dictatorship
(Poster featuring Rokan a Kurdish PYD fighter from Aleppo)



AUGUST 26, 2014

As we all witnessed yesterday Syria’s foreign minister Walid Muallem said that Syria will offer to help the US fight the Islamic State (IS) militant group. This of course has left the so called Anti-war camp and “Anti-Imperialist” left in the U.S/West and even Arab assadists that support Assad either confused or silent on the matter. It’s important to note these are the same leftists or as some call them ‘tankies’ that support Russian imperialism and Iranian mini-imperialism in the Middle East and don’t even care whether Russia is a capitalist oligarchy or if Iran has communist political prisoners in its jails or killed because of their ideas this shows you how unprincipled they can be by becoming reactionary by supporting bourgeois nationalism and fascism. This article will focus on the many ways to break the regime’s “resistance” and “rejection of U.S/Western Imperialism” narrative and a way for critically think about Syria and the peoples mobilization against the regime.

I. Understanding the Assad regime and Syria

In order to understand what led to the masses in Syria rising up against the regime we must look into the social,economic and material conditions in Syria. I will provide a short introduction from comrade Yasmeen Mobayed:

the ba’ath party staged its first military coup in syria in 1963. in 1966, hafez al-assad participated in the second military coup, which brought salah jadid to power. from 1950-1970, hafez al-assad was a lieutenant in the syrian air force, the head commander of the syrian air force, and the minister of defense. then in 1970, hafez al-assad led the third military coup to topple salah jadid, finally forcing himself into power. hafez al-assad actively used sectarianism as a method of consolidating and maintaining his power – he greatly increased alawite dominance in the regime’s security and intelligence branches, though his elite class was of all sects. the core of the assad regime, however, consisted (and still consists) of assad family members/relatives who control everything from the army to the economy (ex. rami makhlouf, bashar al-assad’s cousin, controls 60% of syria’s economy).
an introduction to syria – its history and its present revolutionary struggles

Beginning in the 1980’s Hafez Al-Assad began implementing neoliberal policies and especially in 2005 where the “social-market economy” was introduced which was according to Professor Omar S. Dahi This “was more market than social”. This type of authoritarian neoliberalism caused a crisis and mass poverty and unemployment where the peasants in the country side and the proletariat in the city suburbs and working class neighbourhoods suffered and these include the rise of “informal housing” or slums where people were forced in because the rent and housing prices and gentrification rocketed in Syrian cities they people were left in despair and it’s not surprising that when the protests broke out in Tunisia, Egypt the Syrian people saw that they had nothing to lose and rose up against the regime.

II. The Assad regime has always been a servant of Imperialism and Zionism

According to syrian regime narrative it has always been a “resistance” and “Objector to Zionism and U.S Western Imperialism” now we know from it’s history that it is far from that. Beginning with the Golan Heights a Syrian territory occupied by Israel Hafez-Al Assad never bothered to fight to return it and left it under occupation and zionist settler-colonisation. During the Lebanese Civil War Hafez-Al Assad and the Syrian Army led a war on Palestinian refugee camps which resulted in the deaths of many Palestinian civilians and was condemned by Palestinian revolutionaries like George Habash the founder of the PFLP who was critical of the regime in this video he criticizes the syrian regime for being a tool of zionism and imperialism and the regime being a killer of the Palestinian people next to israel. Now recently his son Bashar Al-Assad launched his own war on the camps in Syria with siege and shelling of Yarmouk Refugee camp and other camps. like Ramel in Lattakia and Dar’aa camp in southern Syria, Homs Al’Aiddeen camp and Handarat Aleppo camp where many of the inhabitants were killed, starved and made refugees again. The Assad regime has always served U.S/Western Imperialism besides the recent offer to aid to U.S strikes on I.S it collaborated with the U.S in the gulf war and under Bashar looked to re-establish ties with Israel. Also we can’t forget that the Syrian regime and it’s mukhabarat (intelligence services) worked with the C.I.A to torture on people on “extraordinary rendition” like the case of the Syrian-Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was kidnapped, deported and sent to be tortured by the syrian mukhabarat.

III. The Assad regime is Anti-Communist

This has to be always repeated the Assad regime is a bourgeois nationalist, capitalist and social chauvinist state that has always repressed any dissent against it with the use of it’s Mukhabarat (intelligence services) and especially the air force intelligence, Army and Shabiha (Regime backed Death Squads). Yes the Assad regime is Anti-Communist which is not surprising since the 1970 coup by Hafez Al-Assad was a right-opportunist and reactionary takeover against the Marxist and leftist Salah Jadid. The Regime has cracked down on many communist groups especially the Syrian Communist Action Party it has a Maoist tendency and was heavily repressed in the 70’s and 80’s by the Syrian regime and many of its cadres were militants in the 70’s student radicalism especially in Aleppo University where it was centre of a revolutionary organization. Also the regime heavily repressed Palestinian groups like the Palestinian Popular committees which was established in the 80’s and supported the Syrian communist action party and other leftist and communist militants the group had many of its cadres killed,arrested and tortured in Syrian regime prisons. And many of these militants were from all sects especially the Alawite, Sunni, Ismaili, Druze,Shia and Christian sects. Regarding the Kurdish people the syrian regime prisons have always been filled with Kurdish political prisoners and the regime itself denied Kurds citizenship and cultural and linguistic rights. Syrian communists in jail include Abd al Aziz al Khatyyer, Jihad As’ad. Also the Palestinian filmaker from Yarmouk camp Hassan Hassan who was tortured to death by the regime. The Assad regime is no different from the Somoza, Pinochet, Suharto and Kuomintang regimes it should be condemned by every Marxist-Leninist, Anti-Imperialist, leftist and socialist.

V. There are progressive forces in Syria

The Syrian Communist Action Party is part of the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change a front of left-wing parties and organizations who oppose the regime and seek to overthrow it. There is also the PYD (People’s Protection Unit the military wing of the Kurdish leftist Democratic Unity Party which has declared peoples war on the regime taken control of Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo and northern Syria or Western Kurdistan (Rojava) and built an autonomous self-governed region and has been fighting both the Assad regime and (I.S). Regarding non-Kurdish leftist groups who gave taken up armed struggle the Syrian Revolutionary left Current established the People’s Liberation Faction to commemorate the third anniversary of the Syrian revolution. Also these include the L.C.C (Local coordination committees), Left-wing and communist organizations like the Syrian leftist coalition and Syrian Communists. All these parties and organizations are Anti-Imperialist opposing U.S/Western Imperialism and the Arab Gulf states are part of this and Iranian-Russian Imperialism in the country and are struggling against them. Usually an assadist “leftist” will tell you that there is a communist party in the Syrian parliament yet fails to understand that the syrian communist party-Bakdash is a reactionary tool of the regime and the ruling class in Syria.

V. An end of the Anti-Imperialism of Fools

Comrades and friends, let’s put an end to this Anti-Imperialism of fools and be principled to our ideals and not fall into supporting those who blindly back the fascist,social chauvinist and bourgeois nationalist Assad regime that is oppressing the Syrian masses we have to unite and support the syrian people’s struggle and progressive forces of Syria against the Assad regime and Imperialism whether it is US/Western Imperialism, Russian imperialism or Iranian and Arab gulf countries interventions in Syria.

- Mahmoud E.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 12, 2014 8:43 pm

parlor game...

find the 6-7 million starved to death Indians in these books

find the words Bengali Holocaust

Image

just saying'

we can go tit for tat
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 13, 2014 10:08 am

http://mkaradjis.wordpress.com/2014/12/ ... ficiently/

As Assad and US play two-step bombing Raqqa, Assad demands US bomb more efficiently
December 12, 2014

In a recent interview in Paris-Match, Bashar al-Assad was asked whether coalition airstrikes were helping him, to which he replied that …

“there haven’t been any tangible results in the two months of strikes led by the coalition. It isn’t true that the strikes are helpful. They would of course have helped had they been serious and efficient.”

(http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201 ... ar_as_isis)

Assad’s call on the US to bomb his country more seriously and efficiently comes from someone who knows how that’s done. The following account of the US-Assadist bomb-Raqqa two-step dance over the last week or so shows who really knows how to kill all those Sunni wretched of the Earth “efficiently”:

- On Sunday 23 November, US warplanes carried out two strikes against an ISIS-occupied building in the city of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria. No civilian casualties were reported.

- On Tuesday 25 November, Assad’s air force carried out ten air attacks on Raqqa, reportedly killing as many as 209 people, most if not all civilians. Targets were reported to include a busy marketplace, a bus depot, and a mosque where dozens of people were gathered for prayers.

- On Thursday 27 November, Assad’s air force carried out between seven and ten further attacks, including one at the city’s National Hospital, reportedly killing at least seven more people.

- On Friday 28 November, Assad’s air force carried out three attacks in Raqqa, killing at least five people including three children.

- On Saturday 29 November, Assad’s air force again attacked Raqqa’s National Hospital. LCC Syria named five people killed.

- In the evening of Saturday 29 November, US-led coalition aircraft were reported to have carried out at least 15 airstrikes. Later reports said the total had exceeded 30 airstrikes. The activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently reported that all the targets of the US-led coalition were ISIS bases, hitting a high number of ISIS fighters.

The following are press reports of casualties from Tuesday’s attacks in Raqqa. Numbers given for people killed rose over time. No press reports gave precise numbers for people maimed and injured.

Activists: Syrian strikes kill 60 in IS-held city, Associated Press, 25 November. Cites initial counts of number killed – SOHR: over 60, LCC: at least 70, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently: over 80 killed.

Syria conflict: Raqqa air strikes death toll rises, BBC News, updated 26 November. Cites LCC as documenting 87 deaths and warning of more injured likely to die due to lack of medical facilities. Cites SOHR saying at least 95 killed, of whom at least 52 have been confirmed as civilians.

‘Scores dead’ in air strikes on Syria’s Raqaa, Al Jazeera, updated 26 November. Updated to cite activists as saying 135 people were killed.
By Friday 28 November, the activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently said they had documented 209 people killed in Tuesday’s air attacks.
Full:

http://leftfootforward.org/2014/12/raqq ... slaughter/

Following Assad’s grisly massacre of 209 people on November 25 (this high figure has been confirmed), the official US State Department twitter site tweeted: Government in #Syria has launched airstrikes designed to hit #ISIS in #Raqqa; civilians caught in the crossfire: https://twitter.com/StateCSO/status/537384003624787968

Analysis: Why are they bombing together?

Incidentally, I don’t agree with the article’s analysis of why the US and Assad are jointly bombing Raqqa at the same time with such ferocity. It reads:

“One reason is the fear, voiced to him by “a senior administration official” that any direct attack on Assad by the US would be met with retaliation by Iran’s militia proxies against US forces in Iraq.”

While I doubt that this is the main reason at all, even if this was the reason for not launching a “direct attack on Assad,” that is just a red herring. The question here is not why the US does not attack Assad, but why it actively collaborates, as for example in this bombing two-step over the dead bodies of hundreds of Raqqa civilians. It continues:

“The other reason is Obama’s desire to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran. According to leaked accounts, a recent letter from President Obama to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the nuclear negotiations included an assurance that the US didn’t intend to strike Assad’s forces in Syria.”

There is no doubt that this agreement was made and the “secret” letter is a fact. But while this may be an added incentive, it is in no way the essential reason.

The fundamental reason is that the US never had any intention or interest in trying to bring down the Assad regime, still less of intervening to do so; the US has intervened to help shore up capitalist class rule in Syria, which means the state and the regime (even if the US believes that Assad himself and his closest cronies should “step down” to help save the regime).

There is simply nothing remarkable about the fact that the US and Assad bomb the same targets; indeed, Assad didn’t bomb Raqqa or ISIS for a whole year (preferring to collaborate with ISIS against the revolutionary forces) and only began bombing ISIS when the US did, in order to demonstrate its usefulness to the US so-called “war on terror.” Meanwhile, the US bombs not only the barbaric ISIS, but also Jabhat al-Nusra and even the Islamic Front, more genuine opponents of the Assad regime than ISIS ever was.

The US and Assad, in a word, bomb Raqqa together not due to some mind-boggling coincidence or some conjunctural factor but because they are fundamentally on the same side.

In particular, Assad’s grisly massacre of the Raqqa civilian population demonstrates that the regime considers the impoverished, dispossessed Syrian Sunni population to be untermenschen; after treating their Iraqi cousins in the same way during its occupation of Iraq, the US is in familiar territory.

Confusion about the reasons for this is also expressed in other articles. For example, Edward Dark (http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/sh ... 1105355734) notes with some bewilderment:

“With American and Syrian warplanes both bombing Raqqa, residents of the Syrian city are wondering if the two are working together.”

Yeh? No shit, Sherlock. He continues:

“Last week I spoke to Manaf, a resident of the Syrian city of Raqqa currently controlled by the Islamic State. He made his frustration clear: “the politics don’t matter to the people here, all we see is one type of death – it comes from the sky, whether the Americans are dropping the bombs or Assad, it makes no difference. They are both murdering us.”

“He added: “What do you expect any sane person to think here? One day American airplanes and the next Bashar’s, how do they not crash or shoot each other? It is simple, they call each other and say today is my turn to kill the people of Raqqa, please don’t bother me, it will be yours tomorrow”.

“Manaf” seems to be smarter than the vast majority of western journalists and analysts on this question.

Dark also notes:

“The US, despite wading into the Syria conflict, appears to have given up on its former rebel allies, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) who have themselves been sidelined by the powerful Jabhet al-Nusra, al-Qaeda Syria branch.”

Calling the FSA America’s “allies”, even former, is of course just the usual use of Orwellian language to describe the US refusal for years to give anything other than radios, night goggles, tents and ready-meals to select groups of rebels, while stationing people in Turkey with the express aim of blocking any supply of manpads (shoulder-fired anti-aircraft guns), the only thing the FSA can use against Assad’s aerial genocide. After the FSA and its rebel allies launched a highly successful war on ISIS in January 2014, the US did begin providing some weapons to some select groups of rebels, but precisely for the purpose of fighting ISIS, not the regime, and encouraging them to attack Nusra as well. “Given up” on “former allies” should read “thrown under a bus those it previously pretended to half-support in order to co-opt.” The co-option failed. But anyway, he then explains:

“This has left America in a tight-spot; since it is unwilling or unable (due to public perception and internal politics) to work openly with the one strong military force fighting Nusra and Islamic State – the Syrian regime.”

Says Dark. No Edward, listen to Manaf, he is the one who knows what he is talking about.

“America’s alternative – training and equipping a new, carefully vetted, rebel army – will take at least a year.” Even the “vetting” has not begun for a mere 5000 alleged troops; the “training” (as if battle-hardened rebels who have been calling for manpads and quality arms for years need “training”) will begin, supposedly, sometime in 2015 and take 18 months, so maybe by late 2016 or early 2017 we might see these imaginary figures. Why any analyst would take that seriously when discussing a conflict that has reached such a decisive point right now is beyond me.

Dark goes on:

“So the US is stuck; each militant it kills strengthens Assad and lessens the power of the rebels fighting him.”

Stuck? Why do so many analysts continue to argue that everything the US has done with Syria over the last 4 years has simply been due to incoherence and getting it wrong? Perhaps that is the best result for the US?

“A conflict “freeze” seems to be what the U.S is seeking now, in an effort to halt ongoing advances by the regime into rebel-held territory around Aleppo. The regime is unlikely to agree to a ceasefire unless it can gain assurances of its own survival, in other words a reversal of the US’s “regime change” policy. This does not necessarily mean the continuation of Assad’s presidency, but the structural integrity of the regime he heads, the perseverance of its interests and networks of power. Such a deal, while difficult to negotiate, is not entirely out of the question.”

Which US “regime change” policy is this? It has never existed. Curiously, the policy Dark just described, of regime survival, of its structural integrity (while not necessarily including Assad’s individual presidency) has been US policy since late 2011; there is no need for the US to “reverse” any policy. For some reason, Dark imagines that he, not Obama, invented it.

He concludes:

“Some in Raqqa already believe a covert alliance between the US-led coalition and the Syrian regime – who have taken turns bombing their city – is in place. Denials by the US will not convince them otherwise.”

No, but apparently it can convince the bulk of western journalists and analysts, curiously enough.

How then do they explain that, right now, the US is also bombing ISIS as it advances on the regime-controlled airport of Deir-Ezzor, also in the north-east, in other words directly intervening to protect the regime? As admitted by the US embassy (https://twitter.com/hxhassan/status/541138358106193920). The significance of an airport to the regime is great. Deir Ezzor airport is distant from the bulk of regime-controlled territory in the south-west; and ISIS controls the rest of Deir-Ezzor (since conquering it from the FSA and rebel allies in July, with the *direct* collaboration, at that time, of the regime!).

However, while ISIS has no planes, the regime has hundreds and massacres Syrian children in enormous numbers with them. If ISIS seizes the airport, it would gain no warplanes, and the territorial gain, since it already controls the region, would be minimal. On the other hand, the regime would lose an airport which it uses for its daily aerial genocide. That is what the US is directly bombing to protect in Deir-Ezzor.

And it is simply no miracle, blunder or conspiracy; the US is opposed to the overthrow of a regime which is the concentrated expression of the Syrian mega-capitalist plutocracy, whether by jihadists like ISIS or, even more, by democratic revolution.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby slimmouse » Sat Dec 13, 2014 11:36 am

When the Empire decides to move against rogue regimes, such as those who are the current in focus ( Assad and Putin) We dont need to start looking at the rulers, instead perhaps we should focus on the prize.

This entire shell game has fuckall to do with anything other than the small clique insisting that they have more right to rape the earth and control its people, than say Assad or Putin.

At one level, I am recently leaning towards the idea that one of the prizes is the creation of a form of real life snuff movie, for the global edification of anyone with a TV set, being beamed across the world 24/7/365.

Since, as I mentioned earlier this is also about who has the right to rape the planet , other prizes include Oil and Gas routes and reserves.

As Nafeez Ahmed recently opined, this is truly an environmental issue in the greater sense, since It involves both our physical environment and our psychological environment. ( though Im not sure he refers to the latter in this particular instance )

As I see things , It would appear to me that there is some kind of co-ordinated effort to destroy both.

But, thats just me.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 15, 2014 8:43 pm

SmirkingChimp

U.S. Taxpayers Now Alone in Financing Ukraine’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign

Ukraine
by Eric Zuesse | December 15, 2014 - 8:09am

IMF Says Ukraine Fails to Meet Conditions of the April 30th 2014 $17 Billion Loan

The IMF has concluded that it was too optimistic when loaning Ukraine $17 billion at the end of April, and that the Ukrainian Government’s economic condition is far worse than the IMF expected, and also that the Government’s anti-corruption program is too weak to justify the planned loan-installments or “tranches” going to Ukraine. Therefore, “even providing the program of the next two tranches is open to question.”

However, this only confirms an earlier assessment, made public on October 28, about which Reuters headlined at the time, “Ukraine unlikely to receive IMF loan tranche this year: finance minister.” And this was already “after warning in September that if Ukraine's conflict with the separatists runs into next year, the country may need as much as $19 billion in extra aid.” Ukraine has made clear that it will continue the war, and so the additional $19 billion will also need to be paid to Ukraine in order for its war against the “separatists” to continue.

This rejection comes as a severe disappointment to the Ukrainian Government, whose central bank chief said on November 16th, "I am still optimistic about us being able to do it [to receive the third tranche] this year.” Clearly, that expectation won’t be able to be met.

So, since Ukraine is nonetheless now gearing up, with American taxpayers’ money, to replace its weapons-supply that was used-up or destroyed in the war to-date, and also to build an immense new military graveyard for a planned 250,000 corpses of Ukrainian soldiers in the next and future rounds of invasions against the rebelling region in Ukraine’s (former) southeast, the IMF is basically quitting continued financing of that ethnic-cleansing campaign against the residents in that region. The EU has already quit funding it, other than a token half-billion-euro donation delivered on December 10th. Only the U.S. remains committed to funding it, by donating whatever weapons and military guidance are deemed necessary in order to conquer, and/or to expel, the pro-Russian residents in Ukraine’s former southeast. 98% of the U.S. House voted for it, and so did 100% of the U.S. Senate. At least 67% of the U.S. public are against it.

_______
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby conniption » Fri Dec 19, 2014 5:13 pm

NEO

18.12.2014
Author: William Engdahl


Foreign Bankers Rape Ukraine

Image


If it were not for the fact that the lives of some 45 million people are at stake, Ukrainian national politics could be laughed off as a very sick joke. Any pretenses that the October national elections would bring a semblance of genuine democracy of the sort thousands of ordinary Ukrainians demonstrated for on Maidan Square just one year ago vanished with the announcement by Victoria Nuland’s darling Prime Minister, “Yat” Yatsenyuk, of his new cabinet.

The US-picked Ukraine President, billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko called “snap” elections at the end of August for October 26. He did so to make sure genuine opposition to his regime of murderers, gangsters and in some cases outright Nazis would be able to push an unprepared genuine opposition out of the Verkhovna Rada or Parliament. Because the parliament had significant opposition parties to the US-engineered February 22 coup d’etat, they had blocked many key pieces of legislation that the Western vultures were demanding, from changing key land ownership laws to privatization of precious state assets. By law, the old parliament would have sat until its five year term ended in October, 2017. That was clearly too long for State Department neo-con Ukraine puppet-mistress Victoria Nuland and her backers in Washington.

Now, with a new parliament that is controlled by the Petro Poroshenko bloc as largest party and the boyish-looking former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who is also new Prime Minister as head of the second largest party, the way was clear to get on with the rape of Ukraine. What shocked some is the blatant foreign takeover that followed, like a Wall Street vulture fund raid on a distressed debtor country of the Third World.

The ridiculous charade


Yatsenyuk, former finance minister in a previous criminal regime, and a suspected senior member of the US-intelligence-friendly “Church of Scientology,” has named three complete foreigners as cabinet ministers in key economic posts. And in an extraordinary act, the three have been made instant Ukrainian citizens by Poroshenko in a ridiculous ceremony. Ukraine is looking more and more like the US-occupied Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898 when General Arthur MacArthur, father of the mentally-dis-ordered Douglas, was Washington’s dictator on the spot.

The new Ukrainian Finance Minister, the one who will control the money and decides where it goes, is one Natalia A. Jaresko. She speaks fluent Ukrainian. Only problem—she is an American citizen, a US State Department veteran who is also a US investment banker. Now, the Ukrainian Constitution, prudently enough, stipulates that government ministers be Ukrainian. How then does our sweet Natalia come in?

The President of Ukraine, another Victoria Nuland favorite, the “Chocolate King” corrupt oligarch billionaire, Petro Poroshenko, made her a Ukrainian citizen in a bizarre ceremony the same day just hours before the parliament declared her Finance Minister.

In justifying his astonishing move, Poroshenko declared, “There are absolutely extraordinary challenges facing Ukraine…All this requires innovative solutions in the government…These decisions mean searching for candidates for the new government not only in Ukraine but also abroad.”

Forget your earlier silly schoolbook notions about how a democracy and a nation function. This is the age of no nation state, of private capital taking over the world for sake of profit. Looting über alles is the motto. The nation of Ukraine is being put on the auction bloc to be privatized anyway, so it makes sense that the auctioneers at the US State Department head-hunt the ones to do the inside job of preparing that auction wherever they find the willing executioners. And because what the privatizers have planned, it is easier to believe a non-Ukrainian would let the country be raped easier than a native Ukrainian, even corrupt natives.

In her acceptance speech Jaresko declared, “The new team aims to change the country, to improve its transparency and to eliminate corruption. The members of the team are ready to deal with the challenges Ukraine faces today. This is a government of professionals and technocrats, and we intend to work. I’ve been living in Ukraine for 22 years and until this day I was the head of a large company that controlled three investment funds.,” she told Ukrainian television news service TSN.

What Jaresko did not say was that she had been sent to Ukraine 22 years before as a member of the US State Department.

Jaresko’s qualifications for the job fit the requirements of a vulture fund rapist banker. She was founder and CEO of Horizon Capital Associates, LLC. Her Horizon Capital is “a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in early stage, buyouts, growth capital, and expansion opportunities. It prefers to invest in financial services, fast moving consumer goods, retail, and industrial goods sectors. It typically invests in mid-cap companies based in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova,” according to Business Week. They were founded in 1995 and have offices in Kiev. Jaresko is also at the same time CEO of a private equity fund WNISEF.

WNISEF or Western NIS Enterprise Fund is a $150 million private equity fund, active in Ukraine and Moldova investing in small and medium-sized companies. Since its inception, “WNISEF has invested approximately $168 million in 118 companies in the region in a range of industries with a concentration on fast moving consumer goods, construction materials, packaging, retail, and financial services. WNISEF is managed by Horizon Capital Associates, LLC. WNISEF was established by the US Congress and funded by the US government via US Agency for International Development (USAID).”

Before she founded Horizon and WNISEF, the Harvard-trained Jaresko worked for the US State Department in the IMF-steered looting of the country that began just after the US-inspired collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. From 1992-1995 she was Chief of the Economic Section of the US Embassy in Kiev. When US-backed Viktor Yushchenko was installed via Washington’s “Orange Revolution” as President in 2004, Jaresko served on his Foreign Investors Advisory Council.

US State Department deputy spokeswoman, former CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf has already denied Washington had any hand in her appointment. Of course she would never lie.

Another foreign banker as Economy Minister


Apparently not satisfied that only one investment banker as Finance Minister would suffice, Nuland’s Washington friends have installed Aivaras Abromavicius, a Lithuanian investment banker, to be Economy Minister. According to the official US Government propaganda site, Radio Free Europe—the old CIA Cold War propaganda news service still exists, with its old name as kind of a sick joke—Abromavicius, born in Vilnius, Lithuania, has worked in Kyiv since 2008 as partner and fund manager at the East Capital asset management group. East Capital reportedly has invested almost $100 million in 2012 in Ukrainian projects. It would be interesting to know whose money. Abromavicius describes himself as a Ukrainian patriot (sic!), and has pledged “radical measures.”

East Capital is a Sweden-based “frontier markets” fund active in 25 emerging market countries. The founder of Abromavicius’ East Capital is Peter Elam Håkansson according to their website. Before that Håkansson held leading positions with the Swedish Wallenberg family’s Enskilda Securities.

And a Georgian Health Minister


Rounding out the bizarre new Cabinet of Yatsenyuk is Alexander Kvitashvili, a Georgian. Kvitashvili was health minister in Georgia between 2008 and 2010, under then-President Mikheil Saakashvili, like Yushchenko, another US-installed corrupt puppet President from the US-financed Rose Revolution of 2003. Kvitashvili studied and worked in the United States before becoming Georgia’s health minister.

According to Radio Free Europe, “Yatsenyuk has tasked Kvitashvili with introducing sweeping reforms to tackle rampant corruption among health authorities.” However, the designated corruption-fighter has one handicap: he does not speak the Ukrainian language. That doesn’t matter apparently, as he has stated that he has a “deep respect for Ukraine and its people.” More than that, a corruption-fighting health minister in Ukraine these days apparently doesn’t need.

Rape of an entire country, just as rape of a small child, is murder. It is a form of murder of the soul and ultimately of the child. Forty five million Ukrainians do not deserve such treatment any more than an innocent four-year-old child does.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2014/12/18/forei ... e-ukraine/
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 19, 2014 6:31 pm

http://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/08/ ... kable-war/

Syria in Revolt: Understanding the Unthinkable War
AUG 20

By Sadik J Al-Azm

Image
Burning Syria, Tammam Azam


The people’s intifada in Syria, against the military regime and police state of the Assad family, took me by surprise. I was fearful at first that the regime would crush it almost instantly, given its legendary ferocity and repressiveness. Like other Syrian intellectuals, I felt total impotence before this devouring monster, which precluded any thought of an imminent, or even possible, collective “no.”

I was surprised by the revolution, but I should not have been. Daily experiences and recurrent observations foretold a crisis that many Syrians tried hard to deny. And deny we did. Let me explain.

After the violent suppression of the Damascus Spring in 2001–2002 and again after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut in 2005, which led to the humiliating withdrawal of Assad’s troops from Lebanon, angst spread throughout Syria. I was working in Damascus, where the trepidation was especially pronounced. The country, it seemed, was teetering on the edge of an abyss.

But life flowed routinely on the surface. Talking about the situation publicly was out of the question. Even hinting at it was dangerous. When someone did speak up, others quickly changed the subject. A conspiracy of silence was the order of the day.

This period marked a palpable deterioration in relations among Syrians. Sectarian lines hardened, undermining long-standing friendships, harmony among colleagues, and the daily interactions of citizens. Even our way of joking changed.

Like many in Damascus, I found myself beginning, almost unconsciously, to weigh every word according to the religious affiliations of passing acquaintances and close friends alike. Social engagements lost spontaneity. Confidence and trust evaporated, and offense was taken more quickly than ever before. An unusual dose of suspicion seeped into the Syrian intelligentsia’s traditional solidarity against oppression.

By 2009–2010, it was impossible to go about the day without repeatedly hearing from working people expressions such as, “All it needs is a match to ignite,” “It needs a spark to flare up,” and “All it needs is a fire-cracker to explode.”

More educated Syrians, particularly intellectuals, had their own favorite metaphors. Mine was a pressure cooker, where the heat is mounting and the safety valves have been destroyed. Yasine Haj Saleh, a former political prisoner and the most prominent underground commentator and critic on behalf of the revolution, as well as a fine writer of prison literature, warned that if the people did not quickly find a way of letting their “Syrianness” prevail, the country would be in for the worst. The cartoonist Ali Ferzat said in a 2007 Newsweek interview, “Either reform or le deluge.” In 2011 Ferzat was assaulted by regime thugs and left for dead on the side of the road, but he survived.

A prominent colleague and friend in the philosophy department emphasized the inevitability of a civil war because the worst had already happened: the antagonistic Sunni-Alawi divide in Syrian society is a fait accompli, he told me. War was preordained.

Others maintained that one thing could be said for the regime: it alone was holding Syrians back from massacring each other.

Had you asked me what would happen if the tsunami that started in Tunisia reached Syria, I would have answered: the Sunni of Hama would sharpen their knives and pour out into the neighboring Alawi villages to take revenge for the rape and destruction of their city by Assad’s storm troopers in 1982.

But sectarian slaughter did not come to pass. Instead, the unthinkable happened: a people’s revolution against the regime.

• • •

How did we fail so badly in predicting this outcome? Denial was not the only factor; a number of ideas and questions were the talk of the town during this crucial period, at all levels of society. Many of these ideas, especially among intellectuals and elites, were wrong.

Some felt the alliance of Sunni and Alawi upper crust would end, thereby weakening the regime in the absence of any uprising. I once called this alliance the merchant-military complex; a new generation of activists and analysts dubs it the merchant-military-financial-security-complex. This is the ruling class.

All Damascus knows that the army, Ba’ath Party, security agencies, Soviet-style managed economy, and state administrative apparatus—all Alawi-dominated—represent one side of the complex. The other side—urban and business-minded—is dominated by Sunnis.

The people who run this complex have over the years formed an arrogant and corrupt elite. The men manage the day-to-day affairs of Syria, and on their own time they close deals, interact socially, and arrange marriages between their children. They party together, frequent the same restaurants and clubs. Their wives, mothers, sisters, and female cousins attend the same cultural and philanthropic events. Both sides despise each other, but they tolerate each other’s hatred because their relationship is mutually beneficial.

According to today’s younger analysts, the two sides have coalesced into an insolent, Brahman-like upper caste that sees itself beyond all accountability, with an assumed right to lord over the common people, whom they regard as no more than rabble—ignorant, backward, unprepared for democracy, and undeserving of liberty of any sort. Each side is strong in its destabilizing capacity but weak in its constructive power, so they stick together in the face of any possible opposition.

Before the Intifada, intellectuals, in particular, mistakenly believed that the Sunni bourgeoisie might wrest power from their Alawi counterparts, bringing to an end their costly relationship. Costly because the merchants were sick of being blackmailed; paying tributes, commissions, bribes, kickbacks, and protection money; and fronting false business partnerships. However, the complex proved sturdier than anyone had predicted. “The essence of Damascus is trade and politics,” as Syria’s most famous poet, Adonis, put it. The bourgeois core of Damascus has remained true to its essence.

Another erroneous belief within the intelligentsia held that corruption in Syria might decline in favor of the rule of law. This idea was bolstered by the theory that aggressive corruption at the top is a form of “primitive capital accumulation,” as Karl Marx called the phenomenon. Eventually Syria’s primitive accumulators might reach the stage where they had a vital interest in establishing law and order so as to protect their loot. Old American Westerns were recalled, in which the bandit moves away with his ill-gotten gains to a far-off place and reinvents himself as a legitimate businessman, a pillar of the community, and eventually sheriff of the county. The speculation was wrong.

Another view, which proved false, was that the crushing power wielded by the regime through its exploitation of fissures within Syria’s Ahli society—an Arabic pre-civil societal order similar to the German Gemeinschaft—made any kind of organized popular opposition unthinkable.

Ahli society is characterized by the primacy of familial relations and forms of social organization—kinship, tribe, village, ethnicity, religious sect and so on—each with its own asabiyya. The concept of asabiyya comes from the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun and is usually translated as “group solidarity.” But that is too weak a term; it fails to communicate the powerful charge of fanaticism and intransigence within the asabiyya.

The regime fragmented whatever civil society Syria may have achieved by energizing latent asabiyyas. It did so by manipulation—by idolizing the ruling family, co-opting the notables and chiefs of various communities and pitting them against each other, and underwriting rampant crony capitalism that enriched the favored few at the expense of the majority, especially the Sunni. This is also how the Damascus Spring was so swiftly and brutally crushed.

Syrians at the highest reaches of power might have seen change coming, but they refused to act on what they likely knew. Before the revolt, disbelieving minds asked whether the incendiary situation really escaped the attention of the establishment and its inner circle, in spite of all the spies and surveillance, the intelligence services including the ubiquitous Mukhabarat with its innumerable branches and extensions. Some well-meaning optimists argued that the state would wake up eventually and, for self-preservation if nothing else, do something to avert the worst.

Some intellectuals argued that the inner circle and its accomplices refused all reforms because they thought any tampering would lead to the collapse of the whole system. Alawi elites whispered about the absolute priority of survival. By 2005 Assad’s early promises of reform had slid back to the more technical and vague talk of development and modernization. This backward march culminated that year in former Deputy Premier for Economic Affairs Abdulla Dardari’s “Five Year Plan for Deregulation,” which he explained to Senator John Kerry at a dinner party in Damascus hosted by U.S. Ambassador Margaret Scobey. When Kerry pointed out that deregulation and five year plans do not go together, Dardari responded, “We have to call it that.” I was at that event and cut in to ask, “Why don’t you tell us, the people, what you are really doing?” Silence prevailed. I was supposed to understand that deregulation was a lie no one was supposed to notice. Now we know that this deceit failed miserably.

During the last two years, I had the opportunity to discuss Syria’s predicament with business elites—some of them distant relatives—implicated by their own admission in the rampant high-level corruption. They all confessed that, even a few months before the start of the Intifada, they were optimistic about the future of the country and its economy. They were investing generously, negotiating all sorts of agreements with incoming German investors, and closing highly profitable deals with outgoing Dutch business delegations.

Benefitting from business as usual, they thought that the power structure was invincible and that common people were too submissive to protest. These tycoons had, they said, no clue about what was in store, and all expressed disbelief about what had happened to them and regretted their shortsightedness. They lost a great deal—above all the favorable treatment of Assad’s Syria—and quickly immigrated to greener pastures.

Finally, the Sunni majority hoped and anticipated that the United States would help to deliver Syria to them, as it had Iraq to its Shi’a majority. Damascus murmured with wonder: if the Shi’a could have Iraq, why couldn’t the Sunni have Syria? In fact, the panic created by regime change in Iraq only tightened Assad’s grip. As for the expectation of American assistance, Syria’s Sunnis would be gravely mistaken.

• • •

When the intifada began in January 2011, small demonstrations gently pierced the calm in the souk and Damascus’s Omayyad Mosque.

To everyone’s surprise the real eruption occurred in the rural south, in the Hauran district and its capital, Dar’a. The region is traditionally known as “the reservoir of the Ba’ath,” since it supplied party and state with a high proportion of their functionaries and second-rank leaders. The Ba’ath had billed itself as the party of the workers and peasants, but this presumption proved wrong when the workers and peasants openly revolted.

I will not rehearse the Dar’a story here, as it is famous and has been covered well: the school children scribbling anti-regime graffiti on walls, their arrest and torture by the Mukhabarat, the humiliation and degradation to which their parents and families were subjected.

Soon after the Dar’a incidents and the subsequent repression and killings, much of Syria found itself in an all-out protest against the regime. At first, security and military agencies tried to intimidate peaceful demonstrators using the tactics of shock and awe. This phase of repression culminated in Homs, where protesters attempted to replicate Cairo’s Tahrir Square experience with a large gathering in their city’s main square. They were met by the revolt’s first massacre of nonviolent, civilian demonstrators.

With the protest movement spreading in spite of mounting casualties, the repression went into what may be called the Pinochet phase: schools, stadiums, hospitals, soccer fields, and public facilities became mass detention centers; prisons overflowed with random detainees; torture reached an all-time high.

When the Pinochet phase also failed to quell the protest movement, the repressors moved on to the Samson option: tearing down the temple of Syria on everybody’s head. Villages, towns, and city quarters were razed to the ground; crops and forests set on fire; schools, hospitals, university buildings, and health centers were systematically bombed and destroyed. Doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and other health care personnel were imprisoned or killed. The Samson phase reached its fullest realization in the poison gas attack on Ghouta, a desperate, criminal act.

This ruthless repression was not spontaneous but premeditated and predictable. To many it echoed the words of Rif’at Assad’s entourage from its heyday in the 1970s—that the Assad clan and the Alawis conquered Damascus by force, and if the Sunnis wanted it back, they would get it only as a ruin. All this metamorphosed into the regime’s current slogans of “Assad or no one else” and “Assad or we incinerate the country.” In Arabic, they rhyme.

When sustaining a unified movement proved impossible thanks to the ferocious suppression, observers accused the revolution of lacking leadership and strategy. But this was mistaken. The leadership of the revolution simply looked different than one might expect. The old organized parties and charismatic personalities were replaced by youthful local coordinating committees known as tansiquiyat. These committees led and energized the street power of the revolution and continue to be responsible for what is left of its nonviolent side.

Despite the spontaneity of the committees, they have been able to knit themselves into a national network and to maintain contact with similar activists in Syria, the Arab world, and across the globe. With great expertise, they use the most up to date forms of electronic communication to further their revolutionary agenda. They have been able, as well, to frustrate the military regime’s efforts to block the flow of information by producing a steady stream of real-time images and information concerning what is actually taking place on the ground.

Add to that the various innovative art, music, performances, plays, dances, balloons, prayers, satirical cartoons, sarcastic comments, and critical graffiti that this revolutionary generation resorts to in resistance, and you have what I would call the finest hour of Syrian civil society. The carnivalesque spirit in these practices—in the Bakhtinian sense of mocking and deflating the pretensions of high power and oppression—was unheard of in the classical struggles of decolonization but has been a consistent feature of contemporary protest, especially the Arab Spring.

The armed counterparts of the coordinating committees, dispersed all over Syria, forced the regime’s storm troops to spread themselves thin, scattering and exhausting them as they shuttled suddenly from Dar’a in the south to the Turkish border in the north and then back south again. This is why we heard that troops invaded, occupied, and then retreated from Dar’a at least twenty times during less than fifteen months.

At the moment it seems an uneasy stalemate prevails between the military and the revolution. But there is something deceptive about this appearance.

Consider where each of the two sides started. Before the uprising, the regime’s security agencies saw themselves as invincible, a granite block; anything that bumped into them would crumble to dust. Indeed many jailed dissidents reported upon release that during interrogation and torture officers would warn them: “Why do you bother to criticize, oppose, and protest, when you know we are invincible, with a will of steel that crushes anything and anyone that stands in its way? Find something better to do than dabbling in hopeless politics and opposition.”

The revolution has destroyed this omnipotent image both within the regime and outside of it. That is why Assad had to call on Hezbolla militias from Lebanon and paramilitary Shi’a organizations from Iraq and Iran to bolster his hold on the country. That is also why his storm troops, Hezbolla, and the other militias struggled so long to take a small, rural town such as Kusair, in spite of their far superior numbers and firepower.

Damascus, in particular, is now atoning for having watched from a comfortable distance the savage destruction and pillage of Hama and its people in 1982; for having quietly tolerated for so long the arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture, murder, and disappearance of countless citizens; for accepting almost as a natural fact the extermination of more than one thousand souls in the Palmyra Prison Complex in June 1980; for having shamelessly swallowed the indignity of turning the republic, in no time, to hereditary dynastic rule; and for having seen the Damascus Spring—Syria’s last flicker of hope—brutally crushed without batting an eye.

Just as misconceptions among Syrians failed to predict the intifada, international discourse around the revolution has failed, perhaps willfully, to understand it and respond properly.

One issue at the heart of the confusion is how a largely peaceful, youthful civilian protest movement turned into an armed revolution in less than a year. This is particularly pressing given the disdainful language President Obama has used to describe the common people’s protest movement.

This past March, in a long and frank interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg View, Obama described the Syrian conflict as “a professional army that is well-armed and sponsored by two large states [Russia and Iran] . . . fighting a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer, who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict.”

This description is mistaken. There was nothing sudden about the transformation of the peaceful protests into armed “civil conflict.” It was the result of the abandonment of the protestors by the international community in spite of the escalating violence perpetrated by the Assad regime, the solidarity of Syrian soldiers with ordinary people, and the predictable influx of armed extremists to a desperate situation.

The realpolitik mindset of the international community reduces the crisis in Syria to ridding Assad of his chemical weapons and then reinstating him, despite accusations that Obama and Kerry have heaped on him: criminal, murderer, tyrant, and even a new Hitler. Syrians understand this.

Hardly any Syrian believes the United States is the hero of the chemical weapons deal. Syrians knew that the chemical weapons stockpile alarmed the major powers from the beginning of the intifada. Russia gave public assurances and private guarantees to its “partners” that the Syrian chemical weapons were fully under control and would not fall into the wrong hands. When Assad made limited use of diluted chemical agents against civilian centers to test the West’s tolerance, Russia doubled down on its assurances. This helped Obama draw his famous red line and declare the use of such weapons a “game changer,” but his threat was irrelevant to the eventual agreement on the weapons.

In fact, as Obama admitted in the Bloomberg View interview, Syria was responding to pressure from Iran and Russia: “In the span of 10 days to two weeks, you had their patrons, the Iranians and the Russians, force or persuade Assad to come clean on his chemical weapons, inventory them for the international community, and commit to a timeline to get rid of them.”

Furthermore, Syrians remember that Kerry, trying to bolster his indictment of the regime, mentioned that the United States knew three days before the Ghouta assault that the chemical agents were being mixed, prepared, and mounted on delivery systems for attack. In other words, Kerry knew beforehand what crime was coming but failed to do anything to stop it.

The whole episode reveals a common pattern: when faced with a serious threat, tyrants such as Assad capitulate. Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, did so when he turned over the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan to Turkey in 1998. After years of resistance and denial, Hafez buckled the moment the Turkish military threat became imminent. The same pattern repeated itself in 2005 when Bashar capitulated under pressure from President George W. Bush and the European Union, especially France, and withdrew his troops from Lebanon. Both Assads fit the profile drawn long ago by the Frankfurt School of the petty fascist personality in power: cruelty and contempt for the weaker and craven servility before the stronger.

After the strong seized the chemical agents, a no-less-lethal weapon went into effect against the weak: siege tactics to force the population into submission. The regime calls this, “Kneel or starve.” The international response has been silence.

Syrians also understand why Western realpolitik requires the international community’s effective position on Syria today: “let it bleed,” as the journalist Christopher Dickey put it. The main contenders in this macabre drama—Syria, Iran, Hezbolla, al Qaeda plus an assortment of Islamists, jihadists, and Talibanis—all have longstanding and confirmed anti-Western credentials. Why stand in the way of your enemies while they kill each other? Obama himself says Syria is “bleeding them”—Iran, Hezbolla, and the Sunni extremists fighting in Syria. The political value to the United States is unmistakable. The rest of the West has also walked away for similar reasons.

So President Obama has thrown up his hands, in part on the basis of a convenient but faulty excuse about dentists and farmers. And he professes ignorance as to how the peaceful protests became an armed revolution, as evidenced by his mistaken view that the fighting was a “sudden” turn of events. At least three factors beyond the aggression of the regime helped to turn the nonviolent demonstration into a war, all of which should have been visible to Western intelligence.

First, most of the educated and skilled leaders who energized the initial, nonviolent phase of the intifada quickly ended up in jail, permanently impaired, exiled, or dead. They were replaced by less educated and less progressive leaders disillusioned by the peaceful character of the protest movement.

Second, the formation and rise of the Free Syrian Army spurred the militant revolution. This, too, was foreseeable—a consequence of the defections, at all ranks, from the regular army after soldiers were called upon to suppress the uprising with unrestrained violence. At great risk to their lives and the lives of their families, they refused orders to bomb villages and people like their own. Syrians should be thankful that their army is still a conscripted people’s army, not a professional one.

Finally, the stakes for both sides in this struggle are high enough that the resort to arms should have come as no surprise. On the one hand, the Alawis have so much to lose that they will stop at nothing to maintain power. On the other, the revolting Sunni are dug into their position, willing to retrieve Syria at any cost. It all seems to boil down to the old paradox: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Anything and everything.

Alongside these misconceptions about who is fighting in Syria and why the peaceful movement degenerated into violence, international discourse is also flawed when it comes to the nature of the conflict.

Syria is incorrectly lumped in with other sectarian conflicts, such as Lebanon’s. There, communities, sects, and factions attacked and fought each other ferociously while the state pretty much stood by helplessly. Another example is Iraq, where the U.S. occupation abolished the state, the army, and the ruling party, leaving the Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurds to mobilize against each other.

In Syria the regime, state, army, and party on one side, and the popular uprising on the other, are the primary combatants. There are no indications of sectarian contest. Syria’s Druzes are not about to attack their Sunni neighbors in Hauran, nor are the Sunni preparing to invade en masse Ismaeli or Christian territories, nor are the Ismaelis readying themselves to violently settle old scores with the Alawi community and so on. Neither did any Syrian community, sect, or ethnicity mobilize itself collectively to fight on the side of the regime or to defend it.

Syria is not in a condition of generalized civil war. If a historical precedent or analogy is needed, recall Hungary’s armed revolution against the Stalinist regime there in 1956—a revolt crushed by Russian tanks much as Syrian tanks aim to crush today’s. As Hungary’s revolution unfolded, no one said that the country was in the throes of a civil war because Hungarian was killing Hungarian.

Perhaps it is because the international community wrongly sees sectarian violence that, outside Syria, there is such concern about the country’s minorities—Kurds, Christians, Alawis, Druzes, Ismaelis, Turkoman, Circassians, and so on—and their rights. This at a time when the Sunni majority of the country is getting a savage beating from the storm troops, militias, and scud missiles of a small militarized minority that monopolizes the power and wealth of the country. The cities that have been destroyed are Sunni cities, while minority communities have remained relatively safe and calm. The large majority of the more than 200,000 killed so far, of the wounded, of the permanently impaired, of the disappeared and vanished, of the imprisoned and tortured are Sunni. Most of the millions who have been exiled and internally displaced are Sunni.

So what is trampled underfoot in Syria right now is the majority and its rights, about which no one seems to speak outside of Syria. Underlying this silence is the assumption that the Sunni majority is just waiting for the right moment to assault the minorities of the country, to persecute and oppress them. But, right now, all Syria, needs rights, protection, concern, and attention.

This international discourse about protection of Syria’s minorities takes me back to the Europe of the nineteenth century, with its famous gunboat diplomacy. Every European power worth its salt was searching for a minority in our part of the world to adopt and protect: France, the local Roman Catholics and Alawis. Russia, the Greek Orthodox. Britain, the few Anglicans and Protestants along with the Druze minority, and so on. Today Russia wants to be the protector of all these minorities and to replace France as the main guardian of the Christian and Alawi minorities, in particular.

As in the past, at present the international community sublimates Syria to the ethereal levels of grand geopolitics, a pawn in the game of nations. Little attention is paid to the internal springs and dynamics of the revolution itself, something I am trying to emphasize. It’s not just the realpolitik strategists of the major powers who think this way. A segment of the left, both Arab and international, buys into a version of this approach in its view that the revolution is an imperialist plot against the only regime that still stands up to Israel and remains an obstacle to Western domination of the Middle East, its countries and resources. Most on the Arab left promote civil society and human rights, but a minority, seeking to continue the old anti-imperialist fight.

With Syria and its intifada absorbed into grand-strategic conflicts, the reality of the people’s oppression is at best neglected; at worst it becomes irrelevant. This is a grave error because the longer Bashar Assad and his police state cling to power with Sukhoi airplanes and Scud missiles, the greater become the dangers of extremisms.

For, in all societies, in moments of severe crisis, people turn to God. This brings solace and endurance, and sometimes it brings desperation and holy vengeance. The high-tension Islam now coursing through Syria promotes the recruitment of young Islamists, Muslim Brothers, jihadis, Talibanis, suicide bombers, and extremists of all stripes.

When genocidal dictators are applauded and adulated in the language of the eternal, is it surprising that the oppressed counter by raising their own banners of eternity? When the arbitrary law and order of the Ba’ath police state is discredited and reviled, is it surprising if people revert to customary law and order, which, naturally, contain a high dose of shari’a?

The way out of the impasse is not simply to decapitate the murderous system by removing Assad and leaving the criminal police state beneath intact, all in the name of stability, continuity, and an orderly transfer of power. Neither is it in the Godot of
Geneva’s conferences.

The solution can come only with the termination of political Alawitism. This is pretty much the way the Taef Agreement, in 1989, brought the Lebanese civil war to an end—by jettisoning political Maronitism and its predominance over Lebanon. In Syria’s case, that means the end of the dynasty, the end of Alawi supremacy, the end of the sway of the minority, and the rebirth of the republic. The West does have a role to play. Instead of letting Syria bleed, the West needs to help end Assad’s grip on the country and its future and negotiate political accommodation for Alawis within a democratic framework that will necessarily favor the Sunni majority. The West will inevitably intervene because the great powers will not permit Syria to fall into the hands of jihadi Islam. The question is whether that intervention will be guided by a proper understanding of the war.

As I write, no one claims to know where Syria is heading or what will end the bloody struggle. Still, I am certain that the Assad and Alawi dynasties will never rule again.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby conniption » Fri Dec 19, 2014 6:45 pm

Mikhail Gorbachev: America needs a Perestroika

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZgBKc78zMI

Published on Dec 19, 2014

The Ukrainian issue has intensified the tension that existed between the West and Russia: now, another Cold War is possibly lurking on the horizon. Are we to witness another stand-off - or will it be averted? The relations between Russia and the West seem to be stuck at dead-end, so is there hope common ground will emerge between the two? We ask these questions to the man who prides himself on ending the Cold War, the last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, on Sophie&Co today.

Read the full transcript here: http://on.rt.com/i653m9
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby conniption » Sat Dec 20, 2014 8:30 am

John Pilger: 'Real possibility of nuclear war' - Ukraine crisis could start World War 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_pS2oFG9lI

Published on Dec 20, 2014

John Pilger, film-maker and award winning journalist, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about the headline events of the year, from CIA torture to the Ukraine crisis. He says the whole tenure of the BBC coverage of the Torture report was ‘does torture work?’ Modern British history is full of torture, and the British were ‘masters’ at it. When the OSS become the CIA, it split into 2 sections – one an intelligence gathering section, the other a covert operations arm for the presidency, the central part of which was torture. He warns that the culture of apologising for the state, to minimise its responsibility, has ‘burrowed’ into the minds of correspondents, citing the defence correspondent on Newsnight failing to mention the role of Britain when appraising why the Middle East was a mess. He also says that parliamentary inquiries like the Nolan inquiry and the Chilcot inquiry are stopped before they can get anywhere, describing it as a ‘series of whitewashes.’ He talks of a ‘consensus’ to cover up, citing the arms to Iraq inquiry, where the only person that the judge commended was a Foreign Office official who described the Foreign Office as a ‘culture of lying.’ He says that the number of high-ups in the British establishment who committed serious offences ‘numbered in the dozens,’ and the only difference between the US and UK in torture is ‘in terms of scale.’ The real issue in democracies is ‘dissent being constrained’ physically on the streets. He believes it is ‘dangerous’ to protest in the way people did in 2003, whether you are an establishment figure, a journalist, or just a man on the street.

He says the Sydney siege, whilst horrific, still has to be deconstructed to find what’s missing from it. He points out that the Australian PM declared it a ‘terrorist act’ within minutes of it starting, when it turned out to be a lone wolf, and asks why someone with his history was on the loose. He argues that looking at the list of demands, they were all negotiable, and asks why force was used, and says ‘it seems very likely that the people in there were killed by the police and not by the terrorist.’

With Russia, he says he has never known the truth ‘so inverted’ over any one issue. He believes we are in the midst of a cold war more dangerous than the one he grew up with, comparing the raw propaganda of the prior to what we’re seeing now, with a ‘real possibility’ of a nuclear war. He compares it to Iraq, because both involved ‘fiction,’ the idea that Russia is attacking the West. He says oil prices were driven down by agreement between the US and Saudis, to wreck the Russian economy. He says it was NATO and the US that took over Ukraine, to the point that Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest private gas provider. At a meeting in Yalta in September 2013, the ‘takeover of Ukraine was planned’ by prominent politicians and multinationals. There was a ‘coup stage-managed by the Obama administration,’ and blame shifted to Russia, who acted purely defensively. He says there is a ‘real prospect of war’ with a nuclear power and strong conventional military, and Putin has now started ‘talking red lines’ himself. He describes ‘extraordinary propaganda’ promoting tension and demonising Russia, which ‘may end up being self-fulfilling.’
John is crowdfunding his new documentary, ‘The Coming War between America and China’, about the perceived threat to the US from China.

You can find out more and contribute at bit.ly/ComingWar
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby semper occultus » Mon Dec 22, 2014 9:31 pm

How the war in Syria has flooded the market with marijuana

Lebanon's new drugs kingpin, Ali Nasri Shamas, shows off three tons of hashish and says business is flourishing in the shadow of the Syrian conflict

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... juana.html


Image
A huge mound of marijuana at Ali Nasri Shamas's factory

Amid rising anti-Syrian sentiment in the years before its troops withdrew, Damascus quietly stopped destroying marijuana crops in an attempt at appeasement.
Since then Beirut has, to come extent, done the same, farmers said. And with each cycle of leniency a new kingpin emerged.
At the start of the new century Jamal Hamieh was the drug lord of the region. Protected by a private army, Time magazine reported the lavish parties he threw for Syrian intelligence officials and New York gangsters alike.
Now that role is ascribed to Mr Shamas. So confident is he of his power that he speaks on the record, and allowed The Telegraph to film the three tons of hashish in his factory - just part of the crop he has gathered this year.
Two years ago, speaking live on Lebanese television, he fingered Col. Adel Mashmouchi, the then head of the country's counter narcotics, for corruption, accusing him of extracting large bribes from the farmers and taking cuts from cocaine imports.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 31, 2014 1:14 pm

CIA fingerprints’ all over Kiev massacre – Oliver Stone
Published time: December 31, 2014 07:30 Get short URL
Protesters build a barricade on February 21, 2014 at the Independent square in Kiev.(AFP Photo / Bulent Kilic)Protesters build a barricade on February 21, 2014 at the Independent square in Kiev.(AFP Photo / Bulent Kilic)

The armed coup in Kiev is painfully similar to CIA operations to oust unwanted foreign leaders in Iran, Chile and Venezuela, said US filmmaker Oliver Stone after interviewing Ukraine’s ousted president for a documentary.

Stone spent four hours in Moscow talking to Viktor Yanukovich, who was deposed from power during the February 2014 coup, the filmmaker wrote on his Facebook page.

“Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators,” he said. “Many witnesses, including Yanukovych and police officials, believe these foreign elements were introduced by pro-Western factions – with CIA fingerprints on it.”

The filmmaker added that the events in Kiev, which led to collapse of the Ukrainian government and imposition of a new one hostile towards Russia, were similar to those in other countries, which he called “America’s soft power technique called ‘Regime Change 101’.”

Historically those were CIA-perpetrated coups against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 – both leaders with policies undesired by Washington or its allies.

More recently there was the 2002 coup in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez was briefly deposed “after pro and anti-Chavez demonstrators were fired upon by mysterious shooters in office buildings” and the anti-government protests against Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro, which “was almost toppled by violence aimed at anti-Maduro protestors,” as Stone put it.

“A dirty story through and through, but in the tragic aftermath of this coup, the West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’ The truth is not being aired in the West,” Stone wrote. “It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ campaign. But I believe the truth will finally come out in the West, I hope, in time to stop further insanity.”


In addition to the documentary about the Ukrainian coup, Stone is currently working on a film about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum in Russia after exposing the practice of mass electronic surveillance by the US and its allies.

Snowden became stranded in transit at a Moscow airport as his passport was revoked and he couldn’t continue his journey to Latin America. The US wants to try him for his actions, but for many human rights activists and privacy advocates he is a heroic hero, who is being persecuted for revealing a government’s dirty secrets.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 31, 2014 3:41 pm

http://avtonomia.net/2014/03/03/stateme ... anization/

STATEMENT OF LEFT AND ANARCHIST ORGANIZATIONS ABOUT “BOROTBA” ORGANIZATION

Березень 03, 18:30, 2014

Image

We, the collectives and members of Ukrainian leftist and anarchist organizations, announce that “Borotba” union is not a part of our movement. During the whole time of this political project’s existence, its members tended to be committed to the most discredited, conservative and authoritarian “leftist” regimes and ideologies, which do not represent the interests of working classes in any way.

”Borotba” has proved itself an organization with a non-transparent funding mechanism and unscrupulous principles of cooperation. It uses hired workers, who are not even the members of the organization. The local cells of “Borotba” took part in the protest actions together with PSPU (Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, which is an anti-Semitic, racist, and clerical party, and has no relation to the world socialist movement) and with Kharkiv pro-government, anti-Semitic and homophobic group “Oplot”; and are known for their linkage with an infamous journalist O.Chalenko, who openly stands for Russian chauvinism.

Recent events demonstrate that the leadership of this union, following the example of the “Communist” Party of Ukraine, have been overtly defending the interests of president Yanukovych, justifying the use of weapons by security forces and denying the acts of unjustified violence and cruelty on their part, the use of tortures and other forms of political terror. The representatives of “Borotba” take an extremely biased stance concerning the composition of protest movement, which is represented both on their own web resources and in the media commentaries. According to them, the Maidan protests are supported exclusively by nationalists and radical right, and were aimed only at a coup d’etat (“fascist putsch”).

We stand on antifascist positions, and our activists have often been victims of radical rightists’ attacks. We do not support some of the Maidan’s ideas, and are against the bourgeois opposition. We also condemn conservative, nationalist, and radical right sentiments, which are tolerated in the protesters’ circles nowadays. However, we emphasize that labeling all active citizens as “fascists” is not only false, but also dangerous. This one-sidedness is fueling chauvinist hysteria and divides society, which is only favourable for the ruling class.

On January 24th, the region council deputy and “Borotba” representative Oleksiy Albu participated in the protection of Odesa region administration building against “Nazis”, accompanied by Russian Cossacks and nationalists (“Slavic Unity”) and the members of ruling Party of Regions and Communist Party. In his later interview, he admitted his cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine.

On March 1st, “Borotba” activists together with pro-Putin organizations took part in the assault on Kharkiv region state administration, which resulted in raising of a Russian flag and severe beating of many Kharkiv Maidan activists, including a leftist poet Serhiy Zhadan. The members of “Borotba” call all of this “an antifascist action” and claim that these violent actions were aimed against radical rightists.

Therefore, we conclude that the leadership of “Borotba” union not only support the authoritarian Soviet past, but also consciously manipulate public opinion, and are acting as “pocket revolutionaries” of the ruling elites. Their activity at the moment does not have anything in common with leftist politics and class struggle, and is aimed at the support of pro-Putinist forces behind the mask of “antifascism” and “communism”. Thus, the actions of this organization are discrediting both its name (which is derived from revolutionaries-“borotbists” of the beginning of the XXth century) and all the modern Ukrainian left in general. Moreover, “Borotba” does not disdain overt lies and fact manipulations, deceiving foreign leftists and antifascists.

We urge all the conscious revolutionaries, who are still the members of “Borotba”, to leave this treacherous, pro-bourgeois union and to cease all the political relations with its leadership. We also hope that European and Russian left will reconsider their attitude to “Borotba.” The organization of this kind should be isolated.

No gods, no masters, no nations, no borders!

Workers of all countries – unite!


Autonomous Workers Union

Independent Student Union “Direct Action “

Journal of literature and social critique ProStory

Editorial board of Tovaryshka.info

Anarchist Black Cross – Ukraine

Anarcha-feminist collective Good Night Macho Pride

Anti-Fascist Action Ukraine

Visual Culture Research Centre

Left Opposition

Ivan Shmatko

Ostap Kuchma

Oleksandr Bogachenko-Mishevsky

Andriy Rosdolsky

Sviatoslav Stetskovych

Andriy Zdorov

Myroslav Chaikovsky

Serhii Ischenko

Pavlo Myronov

Vadym Gudyma (Left Opposition)

Olga Papash

Yevgen Leshan

(The statement is open for further signatories, organizations as well as individuals)
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Re: Libya, Syria And Now Ukraine - Color Revolution By Force

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 31, 2014 3:56 pm

so predictable :roll:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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