“_I want to pay special homage to my father and to all those who gave their lives in the fight to recover democracy,” an emotional Isabel Allende said upon taking office as the Senate President this Tuesday. Allende is the daughter of Salvador Allende, the former socialist president of Chile who died during a US-backed military coup in 1973. “I know he’d be proud to see his daughter in this role.”

Later that day, Allende, (different from the novelist with the same name, who is a distant relative), passed the presidential sash to left-leaning President Michelle Bachelet as she entered her second term in office. The two embraced warmly; it was the first time in Chilean history the sash had been passed between two women.

This historic event marks a crack in the legacy of dictator Augusto Pinochet, an event he and his allies probably believed would never be possible when they oversaw the bombing of Allende’s presidential palace, the systematic torture and murdering of thousands of people, and the application of a disastrous neoliberal economy.

Bachelet’s return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile’s educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.

The success of Bachelet’s second term will depend on how well she can move forward with progressive plans to benefit a population besieged by one of the most stratified income inequalities in the world, and how well she meets the demands of the hundreds of thousands of students who have taken to the streets in recent years.

Bachelet’s Progressive Plans

Bachelet herself was a victim of the dictatorship; she was tortured under the regime, and her father was tortured and died in jail because of his support for Allende. After escaping the dictatorship, Bachelet returned to Chile from exile in 1979 to work as a pediatrician and human rights activist. She later entered politics and was elected president of Chile for her first term from 2006-2010. Though she enjoyed an 80% approval rating at the end of this time in office, the constitution bars a president from seeking a consecutive term.

During the elections in December of last year, she defeated right-wing opponent Evelyn Matthei with a record 62% of the vote. On March 11th, 2014 she took over the presidency from the unpopular neoliberal Sebastian Piñera, one of the richest people in the country and a staunch enemy of the country’s student movement.

Camila Vallejo

Though a major economic powerhouse, Chile suffers from a high level of income inequality. On the campaign trail, Bachelet pledged to tackle such inequality with sweeping structural reforms in the social, economic and political sphere. In her inauguration speech, Bachelet said, “Chile has but one great enemy, and its name is inequality. Only together can we take it on.”

Bachelet has promised to make quality higher education free for all, end state funding for elitist private educational institutions, and raise taxes to pay for the educational reforms. She also plans to try and form a national assembly or plebiscite to rewrite the country’s constitution. Chile’s current constitution was imposed under military rule in 1980, and re-writing it has been seen by many as a crucial step toward deepening democracy.

Standing on the balcony of the presidential palace where Allende died during the 1973 coup, Bachelet spoke to the crowd gathered in the Constitution Plaza: “My promise is that this plaza becomes the plaza of a constitution that was born in democracy.”

In bringing about a new constitution, Bachelet would be joining her counterparts in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, three nations which have also re-written their constitutions in recent years. With a majority in both houses of congress, she may be able to make the constitutional changes a reality, along with pushing through the other promised reforms.

Her plans for the coming years also include raising corporate taxes by 5%, expanding funding for healthcare, and opening a debate in congress on legalizing gay marriage. Bachelet also seeks to legalize abortion in cases of rape or risk to the mother’s or child’s health; according to a study by the University of Diego Portales in Santiago, 70,000 clandestine abortions take place in Chile each year.

While Bachelet’s right-wing predecessor Piñera didn’t have the support he needed in congress to proceed with many of his administration’s plans, Bachelet’s prospects are good; she has a considerable amount of support inside and outside the government as she moves forward.

Student Movement: In the Streets and in the Government

In 2011, students organized the largest protests the country had seen since the end of the Pinochet regime in 1990. Central demands from the student movement have long included free access to quality education and an overhaul of Pinochet’s constitution, a constitution many activists believe keeps neoliberalism and unequal education thriving in the country. The student movement’s pressure for change helped pave the way to Bachelet’s re-election and formed the backbone of what became key promises on her campaign trail.

After winning the elections in December, Bachelet thanked the student movement, saying that her victory at the ballot box was due in part to “the citizens who have marched through the streets in recent years.”

Many students growing up over the past decade in post-dictatorship Chile have demanded more from democracy than their parents, and pushed for changes that expanded the discourse about the type of country people wanted to build and how they could build it – in the classroom, the street and the government. Some student activists directed their energy toward building social movement alternatives to traditional political institutions. Others set their sights on changing the political system from the inside out.

Student movement leader Camila Vallejo supported Bachelet in her second bid for the presidency, and was elected to congress during the December 2013 elections. At a press conference following the December vote, Vallejo told reporters, “Given the result of the elections, we have a majority that allows us to make structural changes. Social movements are pressuring many sectors that were not in favor of change before and that have now changed their mind.” She said, “We were elected because Chile changed.”

Vallejo joined three other student leaders in their twenties in congress; at 25, she is the youngest member of congress. When she entered office on Tuesday, she brought her baby daughter Adela with her. Vallejo said, “I want to be able to tell her when she’s older that she was there with me for the handover of power.”

Some sectors of the student movement do not support the electoral route to change what Vallejo and her colleagues have taken up, and have oriented their momentum into social movements outside the government sphere. Others have pledged to maintain mobilizations to ensure that elected officials carry out reforms.

Allende’s dream for a truly democratic Chile may have been postponed by a US-backed dictatorship, but over the past decade the youth have been marching out of the nightmare of Pinochet, against the empty promises of a neoliberal democracy and toward a better society. Inside and outside the halls of power, the students are leading the way. After taking office, Camila Vallejo said she would keep “one foot in the government and the other in the street.”

Benjamin Dangl’s latest book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press) is on contemporary Latin American social movements and their relationships with the region’s new leftist governments. He is editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com.

 [NATO’s goal is] to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
— Hastings Ismay, first NATO Secretary-General

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
— James Madison (1751-1836), fourth American President

The hazards associated with American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 should appear obvious to all, because it is precisely this policy that has caused the crisis in Ukraine with all its negative consequences for the coming months and years.

President Barack Obama was candid in admitting it on March 3, 2014: “we are indicating to the Russians [that] if in fact they continue on the current trajectory they’re on, then we are examining a whole series of steps — economic, diplomatic— that will isolate Russia.”

Well, it is precisely this desire to expand NATO and to isolate Russia by incorporating all the countries bordering Russia into NATO;  i.e., a strategy of geopolitical and military encirclement of Russia, which has provoked that country when it felt threatened in its national security.

This is easy to understand.

For example, what would the United States do if a hypothetical Russian Empire were to incorporate Mexico or Canada into a military alliance? To ask the question is to answer it. Why is it so difficult to understand that the best way to start a war is to threaten a country’s vital interests?

The truth is that NATO should have been disbanded after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, and especially after the Warsaw Pact was itself dismantled. Europe should have then moved to build an expanded Europe of nations, large, democratic and peaceful, within a framework of economic and political cooperation and peace. But no! The United States wanted to take advantage of the situation and demanded that everything fell into the military-financial U.S. empire.

That is the source of many problems.

In my book The New American Empire, originally published in 2003, just before the onset of the Iraq war, I pointed out the dangers of the American global imperial ambition and explained the reasons. The Middle East was the first to suffer under this global policy of interventionism. And now, Europe as a whole, most unfortunately, may have to pay the price for this unbridled American hubris, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, although that policy goes back to George H. Bush and Bill Clinton.

This is why President Obama and his neocon advisers do not think beyond their nose, as was the case for the not-too-bright George W. Bush, when they adopted such a global imperialist ideology.

In 2008, it just happened that I wrote an article in which I advanced the idea that Europe had a vital interest in disbanding that relic of another age: NATO. Indeed, we must blame European leaders not to have understood that the fundamental interest of Europe was not to blend into the American Empire but rather to build an independent and united Europe. Because that reality has not been well understood, Europe is now running the risk of falling prey to a new Cold War with divisive and ruinous conflicts, while the United States will try to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, with the U.K. as its convenient ally from within Europe.

It may be not too late for European leaders to rectify the situation. This would, however, require wisdom and the courage to tell the American neo-cons who have designed American foreign policy for a quarter of a century that they are not masters of the world and that the European Union has no intention to pursue an aggressive policy of military encirclement of Russia. Point to the line.

Rather, on the contrary, Russia should be invited to join an expanded Europe of nations, large, democratic and peaceful within a framework of economic cooperation and peace.

What is needed of them is vision, insight, and a spirit of independence, which currently seems to be lacking badly in many current European governments.

Carelessness and the current European abdication in letting Washington decide European foreign policy may serve the interests of the American empire, but this could lead Europe to disaster.

NOTE: Now things get more muddy. Details of a leaked phone call between EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister Urmas Paet suggest that the US-backed opposition was responsible for hiring snipers who gunned down protesters in Kiev and not the deposed government of Viktor Yanukovich, as the media widely claimed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and author of the book The New American Empire. He can be reached at: rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com

The Omission of NATO’s Low-Intensity Warfare against Russia and the Deployment of GLADIO II, under the Pretext of a purported Lack of US Policy with regard to the Demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine, by Dr. Henry Kissinger, in his Washinton Post Article of 5 March 2014

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned against Western attempts to demonize Russia’s President Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine and stressed that the demonization of Putin was not a policy but a sign of the absence of a policy. Meanwhile, Kissiger fails to recognize that both the violent overthrow of the Kiev government with UNA-UNSO troops, known for having ties to NATO intelligence and GLADIO, as well as the demonization and propaganda against Russia and Putin are, very much, signs of a consistent policy.

In an article, published in The Washington Post, Dr. Henry Kissinger describes the notion of a war between the USA and Russia as nonsense and stressed that the demonization of Putin is not a policy but a sign of the absence of a policy. Both statements are false.

Kissinger’s statement, that the notion of a war against Russia is nonsense, is correct only to the extend, that one considers a conventional, or worse, a nuclear conflict between the USA and Russia, or the two nuclear armed blocks NATO and CSTO.

The USA is neither planning such a conventional war with Russia or anywhere else. The main emphasis of modern US and NATO military doctrine is on unconventional warfare. The USA and NATO are, however, not only planning, but actively pursuing an unconventional war against Russia.

Admiral ret. James G. Stavridis. Libya a teachable moment and model for future interventions

One of the main architects of this new NATO doctrine of unconventional warfare is the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Commander of the U.S. European Command, Admiral James G. Stavridis.

In a 2011 article in Foreign Affairs, NATO`s Victory in Libya. The Right Way to Run an Intervention. Foreign Affairs. March/April 2012. Pp.2 – 7., Stavridis and Ivo H. Daalder, describe NATO’s intervention in Libya as a “teachable moment and a model for future interventions”.

As we know today, US and NATO intelligence services have been involved in preparing the subversion of Libya with the help of Muslim Brotherhood militants and Al-Qaeda brigades since 2007.

The NATO  ”intervention” in Libya was again discussed in the same terms during NATO’s 25th Summit in Chicago in 2012. A 2010 US Special Forces Training Circular, the TC 18-01, describes the strategy of subversion in great detail and stresses that “the USA, for the foreseeable future, predominantly will be engaged in unconventional warfare”.

Stavridis describes the reason for the change of strategy in great detail, in a 2012 Forestal Lecture. Stavridis elaborates on the development of military strategy and technology, starting with the pre World War I period over the two great World Wars, to the post World War II cold war period and the doctrine of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

Stavridis concludes, that the massive casualties suffered during the two great wars and the notion of a nuclear war would be “politically unacceptable” today. Stavridis is, also in this lecture, proposing “unconventional warfare” as the strategy of modern US and NATO warfare. The lecture has been published on the YouTube channel of the Supreme Headquarter Allied Powers Europe and Allied Command – SHAPA ACO.

I am aware of Dr. Kissinger’s statement, that military men, are “stupid animals to be sacrificed”, but I have a difficult time, convincing myself that Dr. Kissinger is unaware of the most significant developments in US and NATO military doctrine. Especially when the “stupid animal” is called Admiral ret. James G. Stavridis. It is within this context that one has to understand Dr. Kissinger’s statement, that the Ukraine could not be the center of a decisive battle between respectively the USA/NATO and Russia/CSTO.

Dr. Kissinger correctly notes the strong historical, cultural, religious and political ties between Russia and the Ukraine, adding the Ukraine has been a part of Russia for centuries. Moreover, Kissinger proposes a status for the Ukraine, similar to that of Finland, adding that the Ukraine should not become a member of NATO.

It would, however, be a tragic mistake to assess Kissinger’s statement and the eventual proposal of similar policies by core NATO member states, as a recognition of the Ukraine’s political independence or as a sign for NATO’s recognition of legitimate Russian security concerns. Kissinger’s statement is, much rather, consistent with NATO doctrine and strategy as discussed above.

A Ukrainian NATO membership would endow radical nationalists with the ability to launch provocations against Russia and to invoke article five of the alliance in case of a Russian response. It would lead to exactly that direct, conventional confrontation, that NATO wants to avoid because it has become unfeasible.

Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton

Again, Dr. Kissinger’s suggestion that the demonization of President Putin and Russia is not a policy and that it shows a lack of policy is wrong. The false reports about a “Russian Invasion” ,the false reports about “Russian troops without insignia” in Crimea, disseminated by the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and cohorts of other Western media do not show a lack of policy either.

One of the many functions of this “demonization“, as Dr. Kissinger describes it, is to cover-up the fact that top-EU diplomat, Foreign Affairs Chief Catherine Ashton and the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet knew that members of the NATO-installed Kiev Parliament have given the shoot to kill order to snipers and other gunmen who killed 90 police officers and protesters and blamed it on President Yanukovich and Ukrainian police.

Western media reported very little, if at all, about it after the release of the leaked audio of their phone conversation. Those who did report about it failed to pursue the fact that core NATO countries continue cooperating with MPs, who are known to be mass murderers.

The demonization of President Putin, the demonization of the Crimean Prime Minister, the positioning of the self-defense forces organized by the Crimean authorities as “Russian troops without insignia”, and the description of the need to self-defense as “Russian geopolitical interests” and “separatism” cover up one additional factor, which is NATO’s use of GLADIO armies in Georgia first, and now in the Ukraine.

The “stupid animals to be sacrificed”, as Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Kissinger would designate them, who carried out the mass murder of 90 protesters and police officers, and who injured more than 500 protesters and police officers in Kiev,were troops from the Ukraine’s UNA-UNSO.

The UNA-UNSO is, by no means, a fringe, extreme right wing organization. It is a well trained, well armed, and combat experienced army, that played no insignificant role in Georgia’s war against Russia.

The UNA-UNSO has been a constant and consistent element of the Allied, and later NATO’s “Stay Behind Armies”.

These stay behind armies were established in Western and Eastern Europe at the end of the second world war. They have been known under several designations, depending on in which country they were operating.

The most commonly known designation is the Italian GLADIO. These stay behind armies were, among others, involved in terrorism against civilian, military and political targets in Western Europe during the so-called cold war period.

The main function of their terrorism was the scapegoating of left wing parties and organizations. Among their most known operations, were the bombing of the railway station in Bologna, Italy, the killing of school children in Belgium, and the infiltration of the Italian Brigade Rosse and the kidnapping and assassination of Italian P.M. Aldo Moro. Another function of the stay behind armies was their use as a first line of resistance in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and the resistance against Soviet and later Russian geopolitical interests in Soviet-, now former Soviet republics.

Image: Pravy Sector leader Yarosh calls on Top-Russian terrorist Doku Umarov to take action against Russia. -Click on image to enlarge.

_______________________________
CONTINUES—

In 1992, coinciding with the purported end of the cold war, the British BBC2 broadcast a documentary series that detailed the history of GLADIO. While the revelations about GLADIO and its operations in Western Europe are correct, the BBC documentary suggests that NATO had disbanded GLADIO at the end of the cold war.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It was reorganized and refocused, and began, among others, to embrace Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in Libya.

Within this context, it is noteworthy that Dmitry, Yarosh a leader of the ultra nationalist /National Socialist Ukrainian Pravi Sector (Right Sector), publicly called on Russia’s most wanted Islamist terrorist, Doku Umarov, to act against Russia.

The encouragement, styled to the Wahhabi terrorist, was posted on Pravy Sector’s page inVKontakte.

Let us recall the close ties of both core NATO member States intelligence services and Saudi Intelligence to the Chechen terrorists and other Islamist terrorist groups in Russia’s Caucasian republics. GLADIO has never been disbanded.It has been transformed into GLADIO II.

I submit that Dr. Kissinger’s statement, that the demonization of President Putin and Russia over the Ukraine is no policy, but represents a lack of policy is false. Moreover, I submit that it is a willfully made false statement that has the explicit purpose of misinforming the public. More specifically, I submit that it is most likely aimed at misguiding and misinforming the left liberal segment of the public, including US Democrats and European Social Democrats and Liberals.

At closing, I submit that Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Henry Kissinger is one of the most dangerous war criminals and that he should be submitted to the International Criminal Court to be prosecuted.

Dr. Christof Lehmann 9. March 2014

Read more in our extensive coverage of the events in and around the Ukraine with news, analysis and opinion, in nsnbc international – your daily independent.

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