JOHN PILGER

“10 to 20 million killed…tops!”

_I watched Dr. Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong goes “toe to toe with the Rooskies” and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it’s left to General ‘Buck’ Turgidson to reassure the President. Strike first, says the general, and “you got no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops.”

President Merkin Muffley: “I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler.”

General Turgidson: “Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.”

The genius of Stanley Kubrick’s film is that it accurately represents the cold war’s lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today, because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant; yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same “invisible government”, as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.

In 1964, the year Strangelove was made, “the missile gap” was the false flag. In order to build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John Kennedy approved the CIA’s propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. This filled front pages as the “Russian threat”. In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in the production of ICBMs, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has tightened the ring around Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its “Nato Enlargement Project”. Reneging a US promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the East”,  Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucuses, Nato’s military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.

In February, the United States mounted one of its proxy “colour” coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia. Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler’s Nazis, who were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The UPA was the military wing, inspiring today’s Svoboda party.

Since Washington’s putsch in Kiev – and Moscow’s inevitable response in Russian Crimea, to protect its Black Sea Fleet – the provocation and isolation of Russia have been inverted in the news to the “Russian threat”. This is fossilised propaganda. The US Air Force general who runs Nato forces in Europe – General Breedlove, no less – claimed more than two weeks ago to have pictures showing 40,000 Russian troops “massing” on the border with Ukraine. So did Colin Powell claim to have pictures of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What is certain is that Obama’s rapacious, reckless coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.

Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, then invented a “nuclear rogue” in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone.

A Nato Membership Action Plan or MAP – straight from the war room of Strangelove – is General Breedlove’s gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. “Rapid Trident” will put US troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games throughout eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on America’s borders. Cue General ‘Buck’ Turgidson.

And there is China. On 24 April, President Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his “Pivot to China”. The aim is to convince his “allies” in the region, principally Japan, to re-arm and prepare for the eventual possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war.

In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Jeju less than 400 miles from the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US.  Obama’s “pivot” is designed to undermine China’s influence in its region. It is as if world war has begun by other means.

This is not a Strangelove fantasy. Obama’s defence secretary, Charles “Chuck” Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a menacing warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea with China’s complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. “You cannot go around the world,” said Hagel with a straight face, “and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation”. As for America’s massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is “a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide”.

Obama is currently seeking a greater budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Strangelove. The United States is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a “manifest destiny” made right by might.

This article first appeared in the Guardian, UK

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

A full ivory ban would close the legal loophole that currently enables criminal syndicates to launder “blood ivory” from the black market into commercial circulation. Photo: Gary Stolz / USFWS

In China, civil society is pressuring the government to replace the current dual-market, mixed-message ivory legislature with a full blanket ban.

At the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 3, former NBA star Yao Ming delivered a petition calling for an outright ban of the sale, import, purchase and transport of ivory and ivory products. Among the signatories were influential heads of big business – many of which belong to the ruling Chinese Communist Party – such as Wang Wenjing (Chairman and CEO of Yonyou Software) and Liu Jun (Chairman of Eagle International Holdings).

If this was adopted, it would seal the legal loophole that currently enables criminal syndicates to launder “blood ivory” from the black market into commercial circulation. Despite the worldwide ivory trade ban in 1989, the CITES Parties voted to allow China to purchase more than 60 tonnes of stockpiled ivory in a one-off sale in 2008. Reintroducing tusk trading to a market of maturing purchasing power both stimulated demand and encumbered regulation — and cultivated a thriving black market, since distinguishing illegal from legal ivory is not possible. A 2011 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) investigation on China’s ivory markets discovered that 59.6% of licensed facilities sold illegal ivory, and unlicensed and non-compliant ivory facilities outnumbered legal ones nearly six to one.

Since the 2008 sale, elephant poaching rates have made a tragic comeback, reaching pre-1989 levels of up to 30,000 a year. Meanwhile, a 2012 survey by WildAid revealed that the Chinese knew little of the pain behind the ivory products they were purchasing. Of the 961 Beijing, Shanghai and Gaungzhou participants surveyed, more than half thought ivory came from domesticated or living elephants (11.5% and 11.3% respectively) or elephants that had died of natural causes (33.8%).

But there now are signs that awareness, and support, is spreading among the Chinese public.

Also on March 3, which was the first ever World Wildlife Day, a six-minute documentary On Elephant and Ivory was released. The film features Transformers 4actress Li Bingbing, speaking in her native Mandarin and coming face to face with the carcass of a speared female elephant – her face removed by poachers for her tusks.

And this is just the latest in a number of developments in a campaign which has seen an intensification in momentum and results recently. A series of public service announcements entitled “Say no to ivory” featuring the popular actress and basketball star have gone viral on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. Then on February 27, a number of big business CEOs in China – including 10 individuals from the Forbes 2013 China Rich List – released a pledge to never purchase, possess, or give ivory as a gift.

On top of this, the WildAid survey reveals that 94% of the participants support an out right ban on ivory products in China, to stop the poaching of elephants.

And the government seems to be responding. Last year, the State and National Forestry Departments launched an ongoing effort where it appeals to travelers through text message not to purchase ivory or rhino horn. In January, Chinese officials crushed more than six tonnes of its seized ivory stockpile – a symbolic move that was widely documented in national and global media. The following month, on February 13, the Chinese government took part in and signed up to a declaration at the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, stating that they “support the existing provisions of CITES prohibiting commercial international trade in elephant ivory”.

Meanwhile Hong Kong, the gateway through which much of the ivory is smuggled to mainland China, in January took decisive action to burn its ivory stockpile, and local organisation HK for Elephants has launched a petition to ban ivory sales in territory, and will deliver this to the region’s government. Show your support and sign here.

Elephant populations have halved in the last 10 years, and the significance that extinguishing the black market in China – world’s largest demand source – would have, cannot be underestimated. It would be a monumental step towards protecting elephants themselves being extinguished from this planet – a scenario that would amount to an environmental, and moral, catastrophe.

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About the Author
Astrid Andersson is an Annamiticus contributor and passionate wildlife enthusiast. Originally from Sweden, she grew up in Hong Kong and has spent the last five years working as an editor and journalist in both Hong Kong and Thailand’s media industry, after graduating with a BA in International Development and Politics from the University of Leeds, England. Being based in Southeast Asia – a veritable highway for the global traffic of endangered animal parts – she hopes to influence the trade and market in that region.

OpEds—
If you really want to save the elephants, farm them
The war on ivory, like the war on drugs, intensifies demand. Legalise the trade and breed the animals for their tusks

By Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Thursday 13 February 2014

London conference of Cites, the world wildlife organisation, saw panjandrums from 46 countries meet with British royalty in the painted halls of Lancaster House. Previous Lancaster House conferences liberated Africans from bondage. This one put them back. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge pledged to “end the ivory trade” and “secure the future of these iconic species”, notably the rhino and the elephant. Never were words so futile.

The problem with the author’s proposal is that it’s pretty disgusting, reeking with a realistic acceptance of speciesism, but what alternatives do we really have? 

The futility would not matter if it were not so counterproductive. Cites is to wildlife what the US Drug Enforcement Administration is to narcotics. Its chief, John Scanlon, talks like a hardline cop about the need for ever more “undercover operations and harsher penalties“. But however many NGOs and bureaucrats it takes fill a luxury hotel, you cannot defy the law of economics. You cannot stifle demand by banning supply. You merely raise price. One rhino horn can be worth as much as $300,000. That figure is a death sentence on every rhino.

Few people care deeply enough about distant wildlife to challenge those who offer to make them feel good. Hence the ghoulish PR that precedes Cites conferences, of members destroying quantities of ivory in fires and crushers. This time Barack Obama ordered the US to crush six tons and China duly crushed the same. France crushed three tons. This appalling waste merely increases poachers’ profits and insults Africa, to which the value of the ivory properly belongs. It is like medieval princes burning food to taunt starving subjects.

When Cites first began flexing its muscles in the 1980s an argument took place between ivory-producing southern Africa and western wildlife charities. The Africans, notably South Africa, Namibia and Tanzania, argued that conservation was best achieved if local people had a vested interest in it – whether from tourism, controlled hunting or ivory sales. As long as people craved ivory, the alternative was massive poaching.

The American writer Raymond Bonner, in his book At the Hand of Man, described how US charity fundraisers overwhelmed the Africans. Big money required “charismatic megaspecies” to be saved from imminent extinction. The elephant was declared endangered when it was not. The world was flooded with pictures of mangled animals and in 1989, the trade in ivory and horn was banned.

Every prediction made by the Africans was right. Prices soared. In 10 years elephant numbers halved, and have continued to plunge by another two thirds. An estimated 22,000 African elephants are killed annually in industrial massacres. The Asian elephant faces extinction. Rhino deaths have gone from a handful a year to more than a thousand, with horns the price per kilo of gold.

It is hard to think of a more desperate failure of world government. Yet those responsible gather at Lancaster House to call for more of the same. Reducing consumption of any product requires reducing demand. Birds of paradise were hunted close to extinction until they went out of millinery fashion. Ivory demand did decline in Japan in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, leading to lower prices and less poaching. The market soon recovered with economic liberation. Illegal suppliers now hold 90% of the Chinese market and rule their empires like Afghan drug lords.

The survival of wild animals depends entirely on those among whom they live. Elephants eat up to 453kg of vegetation a day and, in India, kill up to 200 people a year. They may be glorious creatures but they are destroying their ever-shrinking habitats. Unless local people want to save them, they will be poached to the point where just a few remain in fortified reserves.

The movement for African “community conservation” gained ground in the 1990s, with such ventures as Campfire in Zimbabwe and regulated hunting in Tanzania and Namibia. It has gained little purchase with western conservationists. Tanzania’s wildlife director, Alexander Songorwa, had to plead with the US in the New York Times recently “on behalf of my country and all our wildlife” not to ban trophy hunting. His $75m revenue supports 26 game reserves.

Meanwhile Namibia auctions up to five ageing rhinos a year for culling, recently fetching $350,000 each. This is far more than photography tourism could ever generate, and goes straight into wildlife protection and breeding. While more than 1,000 rhinos a year are reportedly poached in South Africa, Namibia’s population is rising. Yet the auctions are vilified in the US. Richard Conniff, author of The Species Seekers, wonders that Americans who struggle to preserve the prairie dog “should be telling Namibians how to run their wildlife”.

But hunting will not deliver the sort of money for conservation that could come from sales. Here Cites has an example from elsewhere. The killing of wild crocodiles has virtually ceased, demand for skins being met from captive breeding. The South African conservationist Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes has already made a powerful case for “ranched horn” from rhinos to underpin their protection.

Vague promises to get tough with ivory and horn dealers will have no more impact than getting tough with drugs growers. Animals will not be protected in the wild unless some value can be imputed to them. They will go the way of the European bear and the American bison. That value must accrue to those who alone can save them – Africa’s hard-pressed farmers, now increasingly inclined to turn to poaching. They and China’s consumers have a shared interest in wildlife conservation. Why criminalise them both?

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Obama’s ProtoWar Against Russia and China

Nuclear Brinksmanship

One of China’s Air Force strategic bombers. Far more advanced craft is being developed. China is no longer a backwater nation in weapons designs. (Public domain)

by ERIC SOMMER

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war.   ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.

Protowar methods include threats against the targeted country; economic sanctions; military encirclement around its borders. cyber-warfare, drone warfare, and use of proxy forces from within or from outside the country for political and/or military action against the local government.

U.S.-led protowars also invariably include propaganda campaigns against the targeted governments. The media campaigns are  waged by the five giant media conglomerates which now control 90% of the U.S. media and which are directly  linked to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment through various means including corporate memberships in the Committee for Foreign Relations.

You can recognize these media campaigns because they frequently employ the words ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ as the pretext  for U.S. state protowars against other countries.  Sometimes, of course, these words cannot possibly be applied at all, as in the massive support currently given to the murderous military dictatorship in Egypt or the midevilist kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  In these cases  the U.S. media and government substitute the words ‘U.S. National Interest’ for ‘human rights’ as the pretext for targeting another country.

Proto-warfare often precedes, or leads up to, hot wars, as when a decade of economic sanctions, media demonization, and media-supported lies about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ led up to the Iraq war.   Thousands of young American men and women were sent over to kill and be killed, or to be injured or traumatized, to say nothing of the up to a million Iraqis who died as a result of the war.  However, Iraq did not possess nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, so there was no danger of a nuclear conflagration.   Matters are much different with respect to Russia and China, both nuclear powers.

The ProtoWar Against Russia and China

U.S.-led proto-warfare against Russia and China has a number of elements.  To begin with, it conforms to two popular doctrines in U.S. foreign policy circles.  The first doctrine states that the U.S. must never allow another super-power to emerge, and must remain the unchallenged dominant force on Earth.  This doctrine is clearly set-out in the original version of the U.S. Defence Department policy document  known as ‘the Wolfowitz doctrine:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The document containing this statement and similar notions was changed for public consumption after the original provoked an outcry when it was leaked to the press.

The second doctrine underpinning proto-warfare against Russia and China is that U.S. dominance of the planet depends on control of the Eurasian land mass, on which Russia and China occupy key positions.  This doctrine has been heavily  promoted by  former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.  “For America,”  he has written, ” the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Eurasia is the globes largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the worlds’ three most advanced and economically productive regions… Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.

In pursuit of Eurasian dominance a whole gamut of protowar tools are now being used by the U.S. in its campaigns against Russia and China.  Militarily, the U.S.-led Nato military alliance has progressively squeezed Russia’s’ strategic space by enlisting one former Russian aligned state in Eastern Europe after another.  Now, with a U.S.-supported coup-imposed government in power in Kiev, there is open talk of Nato also incorporating Ukraine, a country right on Russia’s’ border.

To help U.S.  readers understand the significance of Natos’ movement around Russia, imagine that from South America, up through central America, and up to Mexico and Canada, one country after another was being integrated into a Russian-dominated military system.

Russia’s Sukhoi Su-34 is an advanced tactical strike fighter. Russia currently has many more advanced planes, some surpassing the US designs. (Wikimedia)

Other current protowar actions against Russia include economic sanctions; the use of the Ukraine crisis as a pretext to mobilize more U.S. and other Nato forces in Eastern Europe for purposes of intimidating or threatening Russia; and the publication by the U.S. media conglomerates of an unending series of lies, half-truths, and obscurantism’s regarding the Ukraine, in order to demonize Russia and prepare the U.S. public to accept whatever actions the U.S. state and military chooses to take.

On the other side of Eurasia, U.S. military encirclement of China has also recently proceeded apace.   Military bases and transfers of billions of dollars in military equipment have been positioned around China for years in areas such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Now, with the Obama administrations’ so-called ‘pivot to Asia’, a new more ambitious program called ‘Air-Sea battle plan’ involves deployment of large amounts of very hi-tech military systems and equipment in the pacific area all aimed at China.

At the same time, new U.S. military bases are being opened across the Pacific arena, from the Philippines to Australia, with no other conceivable target but China.

In conjunction with this Pacific military build-up, the U.S.state is attempting to use previously minor disputes over ownership of maritime resources to turn a number of smaller Asian nations into proxies to help it destabilize China.  These nations include Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  By offering its support, and in some cases promises of military assistance in any maritime conflict with China, the U.S. has stoked the ambitions and aggressive nationalist tendencies of these smaller nations vis-a-vis China.

Coinciding with the military build-up against China is extensive cyber-penetration of China by the U.S. NSA (National Security Agency), as revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

This penetration includes wholesale capture of hundreds of thousands or millions of Chinese mobile text messages; the monitoring of mobile phone conversations of Chinese leaders; and serious intrusions into the computer network backbone system of Beijings’ Tsinghua university, which is linked to large numbers of Chinese research centers including labs engaged in sensitive military-related work.

The NSA has also penetrated and compromised the server computers made by Chinese Huaweii, a giant telecommunications equipment and networking company, whose equipment is used throughout China and around the world.

Russia’s strategic deterrent comprises an advanced submarine fleet armed with ICBMs. (Photo: Russian Pacific Fleet).

It should be noted – and emphasized – that the U.S. government has never apologized or stated that these cyber-attacks on China will stop.

Other U.S.attempts to destabilize China include political and economic support for separatist movements by some members of ethnic minorities in the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet.   Since the 1950’s, first the CIA and later the so-called “National Endowment for Democracy’, which is funded by the U.S. government, have transferred millions of dollars to the so-called Tibetan government-in-Exile in India. Both sets of money transfers are in the public domain, due to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

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At the same time, a so-called ‘East Turkistani Government In Exile’ claiming to represent XInjiang province was formed in Washington DC in 2004.  On his way to the Beijing Olympics in 2008l, then President George W. Bush stopped by the see one of the leaders-in-exile  of the Xinjaing separatist movement.

To put all these U.S. protowar actions against China in perspective, we need to consider who is really the aggressive actor in Asia.  The U.S. has over 650 military bases in other peoples’ countries, including Asia, while China has none.   The U.S. is impinging militarily and politically in China’s backyard; China is not interfering in U.S. relations or military activities in the U.S. backyard.  The U.S. has a doctrine of global supremacy; China has no such doctrine and basically wishes to be left alone to develop economically and to engage in economic trade with other nations.

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Russian BUK anti-aircraft battery.

The danger of the U.S.Eurasian protowar erupting into hot war – or even nuclear war – stems from a single factor:  Previous U.S.-led protowars which erupted into hot wars were against countries like Serbia, Iraq, or Libya.  Those countries did not have nuclear weapons and could not effectively defend themselves against U.S. military and other pressures   Russia and China are in a different category – they are nuclear- armed and can defend themselves.

The U.S. state presumably does not intend to provoke a hot war with Russia and China.. But directing intensive protowar against powerful nuclear-armed states is to risk the possibility of ‘sleep walking’ into the abyss through miscalculation, or through a gradual hightening of conflicts which finally go out of control.  In 1914, with the European powers of the day already on edge, it took just the assassination of a minor duke in a peripheral country to trigger World War I.   As an old adage has it, “If you play with fire, you may get burned.”

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Eric Sommer is an international journalist.

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What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

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