by  PATRICK COCKBURN

The ISIS claim: Bogus or real?

Once again the world has underestimated the strength and viciousness of Isis. The group has always retaliated against any attack by targeting civilians and killing them in a way that ensures maximum publicity. This happened most recently in Turkey on 10 October when Isis suicide bombers killed 102 people attending a pro-Kurdish peace demonstration. In Kobani in Syria at the end of June, Isis suicide squads avenged recent military defeats by the Syrian Kurds by murdering at least 220 men, women and children. In Iraq, the leader of the Albu Nimr tribe told this newspaper how 864 of his tribesmen had been killed over the previous year for resisting Isis advances.

It was always likely that Isis would retaliate against the Russian air campaign in Syria that is targeting its forces and al-Qaeda clones such as the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. But the carefully planned destruction of a Russian plane with 224 people on board by a bomb on 31 October has presented Western governments and media with a publicity problem. They had been relentlessly pursuing a propaganda line that the Russian air strikes in Syria have avoided hitting Isis and are almost entirely directed against “moderate” or “Western-backed” Syrian opposition forces seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. The fact that Syrian armed opposition in north-west Syria is dominated by al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham is seldom mentioned.

Th author against a backdrop of Syria destroyed.

Isis evidently does not have any doubts about the Russian air strikes being aimed at itself and cannot have done so since the raids started on 30 September, because an operation such as getting a bomb on to a plane at Sharm el Sheikh airport would take weeks to set up. There is a further misunderstanding about the Russian attacks on Isis and other salafi-jihadi armed groups in Syria. They are much heavier than anything being carried out by the US-led coalition, with 59 Russian strikes on one day recently compared to the US launching just nine.

There is a limitation on the use of US air power in Syria which may not be immediately evident, even to those who study communiqués issued by the US defence department. Of nine strikes on 6 November, three are described as being near Hawl, an Arab town in north-east Syria where the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) are fighting Isis. Two strikes were near Hasakah, also in north-east Syria and, again apparently, in support of the YPG. The remaining four were near Abu Kamal, near the Iraqi border, said to be an Isis “crude oil collection point”.

This is in keeping with the US air campaign’s almost exclusive focus in Syria on helping the Syrian Kurds in fighting Isis, and also attacking Isis-controlled oil facilities in north-east Syria. There are seldom any attacks on Isis when it is engaged in fighting the Syrian army because this might be interpreted as keeping Assad in power in Damascus. [Why would the US care one whit about this?Its clear Washington does not respect world opinion.—Eds] But this does not make much sense because American and British policy is meant to be to remove Assad, but keep the Syrian state in being. This would be unlike Iraq in 2003 when the US-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein, but destroyed the Iraqi state in the process and opened the door to a Sunni insurgency and the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

It would therefore make sense, and have made sense over the last year, for the US air force to attack Isis when it is advancing against the Syrian army. It is this army which is the most important institution of the Syrian state, and if Washington and allies such as the British do not want to repeat the disastrous fiasco of their intervention in Iraq, they should support it when fighting Isis.

Again, sensible policy decisions are blocked by a view of the situation on the ground in Syria that is largely shaped by sloganeering and propaganda. In this case, the Syrian opposition claim is that the Syrian army has never seriously fought Isis and, indeed, is complicit in its growth and expansion. This view has been widely credited, though it is demonstrably false because Isis has repeatedly fought and usually defeated the Syrian army in eastern Syria. It captured Palmyra in May and has since advanced to within a few miles of the crucial north-south M5 highway linking Damascus to Homs. For a few days recently, it cut the last government-held road into Aleppo before being driven back by the Syrian army supported by Russian air strikes.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of  The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

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SURELY THE GREAT INTELLECT REALIZES HE IS OBJECTIVELY HELPING IMPERIAL PROPAGANDA?

What Gives?

By Jay Tharappel

Jay Tharappel on Facebook

My Email Correspondence With Noam Chomsky: 1/1/15 – 3/1/15

[Originally] 3 January 2015 at 11:13
SPOTTER: VANESSA BEELEY

Note: As I understand legal principles. This transcript has not been altered to the extent that it constitutes a misrepresentation of the original source. All alterations are purely cosmetic, i.e. the removal of repetitive back correspondence. Disclosing this correspondence is ONLY an invasion of privacy if the publication contains material that a reasonable person would expect the author (of the said material) to remain private. This is highly unlikely given that Mr. Chomsky’s career involves publicly discussing the very topics featured in this transcript.

Jay Tharappel

Hey, in this interview you state at 4:33.

“The major ground forces that are fighting ISIS are apparently the PKK and its allies in Syria…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5meC4Z61qGg

By allies in Syria it’s clear you’re referring to the YPG. Just curious why you didn’t mention the Syrian Arab Army, which has been fighting ISIS since its inception?

Noam Chomsky

The Syrian army appears to be pursuing Assad’s own objectives, fighting ISIS being a secondary concern on the ground.

Jay Tharappel

What’s “Assad’s own objectives” and why are they more important than fighting ISIS, in your opinion?

Noam Chomsky

Assad’s own objectives are to stay in power no matter how many Syrians he kills and how much damage he does to the country

Jay Tharappel

What do you make of the efforts made by the Syrian government, over the past four years, to address the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people with a constitutional referendum removing the Baath party’s political monopoly, the parliamentary elections, and the presidential elections of 2014 in which 15.6 million Syrians were eligible to vote, 11.6 million Syrians voted, 10.3 million for President Assad?

Doesn’t this suggest, at the very least, that the status quo is preferable to Syrians over the alternative, which is for the government to fall to sectarian death-squads?

Noam Chomsky

The efforts were a poor joke, particularly while Syria was slaughtering the Syrian people.

Whether the monstrous Assad regime is better than the various possible alternatives – Rojava, ISIS, the now defunct Free Syrian Army, the Syrian democrats who protested repression and then were crushed by violence,… — I leave to you to decide.

Jay Tharappel

There’s much to suggest the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is NOT slaughtering its own people.

Around 30K SAA soldiers have died in this conflict, which would imply that a significantly larger number of rebels have been killed.

Given the uneven casualty-exchange ratios to be expected between a mechanised army and guerrillas, it’s quite possible that up to 3 or 4 times as many rebels have been killed, which would imply that the majority being killed are armed combatants on all sides.

These claims about the SAA mowing down civilians are provided by unreliable opposition sources as Nir Rosen, who you’ve cited as credible in the past, has already pointed out:

“Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many of those reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden and they are described in reports as innocent civilians killed by security forces, as if they were all merely protesting or sitting in their homes.” [13/02/2012 Al-Jazeera]

The atrocities committed by ISIS, Al-Nusra, the Islamic Front, the FSA etc. are frequent and uncontested, whereas the crimes that the Syrian government has been accused of committing by the US backed SNC opposition  i.e. Houla, Banias, Bayda, Tremseh, have been bitterly contested and crushed by different sources.

The Syrian democrats, far from being “crushed by violence”, have won most of their demands.

They wanted, an end to the Baath party’s political monopoly, an objective constitutional criteria for the licensing of new political parties, an end to sweeping security laws, a constitutional referendum parliamentary elections, and presidential elections – ALL of which have been delivered by Assad’s government in the middle of a violent insurgency.

Now the only people fighting the Syrian state are extremist reactionaries.

If you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”?

Again, out of the 15.8 million eligible voters, 11.6 million voted, 10.3 million voted for President Assad. That’s 88 percent of the vote with a participation rate of 73 percent, which is around 20 percent better than US elections which you encourage people to participate in.

I’m just curious as to why you haven’t vocally opposed US support for death-squads in Syria?

Final question.

Are you, at the very least, willing to voice your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?

These sanctions, on top of the effects of war, have contributed to a sharp devaluation of the Syrian pound and potentially may end up being as damaging as the sanctions on Iraq?

P.S. I wanted to thank you personally for your books which really helped me understand the world as a teenager.

Regards,

Jay Tharappel

Noam Chomsky

Some of this is accurate, the exculpation of the vicious Assad regime is not. I haven’t written about the rather ambiguous US role in Syria (sic)

Jay Tharappel

I asked you a few other questions, Noam.

If you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”? Are you, at the very least, willing to voice your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?

Jay

[*THIS IS NOT PART OF THE CORRESPONDENCE: Admittedly I would have been better off asking him “If you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, and given that they largely achieved their demands, is it fair to dismiss the government’s efforts at reform as a “poor joke”?”]

Noam Chomsky

I notice that you depart from the normal practice, and do not include back correspondence so that the recipient can know what you are talking about.  I took the trouble to look it up.  You wrote: “What do you make of the efforts made by the Syrian government, over the past four years, to address the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people…”

I responded that “the efforts are a poor joke.”

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

I accidentally deleted everything on that email,hence the absent back correspondence. Sorry about that. Yes, I know you answered that question. Thank you.

I also asked two other questions which I was curious to get your answer on.

They are:

1. If you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”?

2. Are you, at the very least, willing to voice your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?

For context, these were the questions I asked in that long email I sent earlier.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

It seems that you don’t read the letters you receive, which makes correspondence impossible.  Take a look at my last letter, and your question 1.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Believe you me I’ve read everything you wrote.

I asked you: “What do you make of the efforts made by theSyrian government, over the past four years, to address the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people…”

And you responded with “the efforts are a poor joke.”

The reason I asked you the question, ‘if you sympathise with thoseSyrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”?’, is because earlier you mentioned “the Syrian democrats who protested repression and then were crushed by violence”.

In response to this I pointed out that the demands of the Syrian democrats were all agreed to and implemented by the Syrian government and I cited all the major examples of this.

As such, to suggest (as you did) that they were crushed in any significant political sense is false.

I was also hoping to direct your attention to the irony of you initially expressing sympathy with those “Syrian democrats”, only to then discredit the democratic reforms they demanded and won as a “poor joke”.

If you sympathise with the “Syrian democrats” you have to concede that they got what they wanted, which is good.

If the reforms were a “poor joke” because according to you they were accompanied by the Syrian government “slaughtering the Syrian people”, then I provided separate reasoning for why such a characterisation is false, and am more than happy to provide you with more reasons.

P.S. don’t forget the other question, ‘are you, at the very least,willing to voice your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?’.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

In short, when you asked why I denounce the achievements of the Syrian democrats as a “poor joke,” you knew that I was not referring to them at all, but rather to the Syrian government and your claims about its achievements.

Nothing could show more clearly that your attempt at correspondence is a poor joke.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Well yes, obviously I *know* you weren’t referring to the Syrian democrats as a “poor joke” but rather to my claims about the Syrian government’s reforms.

My  point is that the Syrian democrats (who we both sympathise with) ended up getting what they wanted, i.e. the series of constitutional reforms I mentioned to you earlier.

Therefore your original contention that the “Syrian democrats”were “crushed by violence” is clearly false given that their demands for constitutional reform were implemented by the government.

To avoid any semantic confusion, I have assumed that the only political significance the term “crushed by violence” can have, is in referring to the successful suppression of a popular movement.

In Syria this didn’t happen because as I said, the Syrian democrats got what they wanted.

That’s my point.

How about the sanctions question?

‘Are you, at the very least, willing to voice your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?’.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

Since you *know* I wasn’t referring to the Syrian democrats as a “poor joke,” then why did you write: “If you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”?

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Because they’re two completely different claims.

We both know you didn’t refer to the Syrian democrats as a “poor joke”.

However the question I asked was why you appear to denounce their *achievements* as a “poor joke”.

Those *achievements* referring to the series of constitutional reforms I mentioned earlier.

Again, my actual contention was stated in my first long post.

“The Syrian democrats, far from being “crushed by violence”,have won most of their demands.”

Given that the Syrian democrats got the reforms they wanted, clearly your claim that their movement was supposedly “crushed by violence” is plainly false.

Sorry for any ambiguity on my part.

Regards

Jay

Noam Chomsky

“’if you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a “poor joke”?

If you’re not capable of recognizing simple and unambiguous facts, don’t waste your time and mine.

Jay Tharappel

What “simple and unambiguous facts” are you referring to now?

Are they “facts” about Syria’s reforms that validate your “poor joke” claim? If so, why haven’t you detailed any?

Again, my ORIGINAL contention is that the following claim of yours is false:

“the Syrian democrats who protested repression and then were crushed by violence”

In response to this, I am saying that the Syrian democrats were NOT crushed by violence because they ended up getting ALL the reforms they wanted. 

You then began accusing me, of accusing you, of referring to the Syrian democrats themselves as a “poor joke”, which I NEVER did.

Please focus on my ORIGINAL contention.

Regards,

Jay

Noam Chomsky

The simple and unambiguous facts are that you claimed that I denounced the achievements of the Syrian democrats as“poor joke,” when you knew perfectly well that I was referring to the Assad regime.

For reasons that are you’re business, you continue to pretend otherwise.

Until you can bring yourself to face simple and unambiguous facts, there’s no point pretend to have a correspondence.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Some clarification.

I asked you: “What do you make of the efforts made by theSyrian government…to address the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people…?”

To which you replied: “The efforts were a poor joke” and followed that up with “the Syrian democrats who protested repression…were crushed by violence”. 

In response, I stated that I disagreed with your claim that the Syrian democrats were “crushed by violence” on the basis that their demands were acceded to by the government.

After making this point, I asked you “if you sympathise with those Syrian democrats, why would you denounce their achievements as a”poor joke”?”

The *purpose* of this question was to highlight the contradiction in your argument.

My premise (backed up by facts) is that the Syrian democrats got what they wanted, which, if true, undermines your claim that the government’s efforts were “a poor joke”.

If you’re saying the efforts were a “a poor joke” because of the Syrian government’s military measures, then it’s my contention that one shouldn’t conflate the Syrian democrats with the armed insurgency.

Why? Because the former wanted merely to reform the state (and they succeeded) whereas the latter still want to overthrow the state (and replace it, I’d argue, with something worse than the existing government).

As such, your claim that the “Syrian democrats” were “crushed by violence” is wrong for TWO reasons.

Firstly because the Syrian democrats got the reforms they wanted.

Secondly because the Syrian democrats were NOT the targets of the government’s military operations. This source details my reasoning: http://www.premshankarjha.com/2014/02/27/syria-who-fired-the-first-shot/

I appreciate your willingness to discuss these issues.

Regards,

Jay

Noam Chomsky

Sorry, but there isn’t the slightest contradiction, just your falsification, which is, again, simple and unambiguous.   As you now recognise, my statement that “The efforts were a poor joke” referred to your claims about the Syrian government. You then asked why I denounce the achievements of Syrian democrats as a poor joke.

That’s straight, simple, unambiguous falsification.  If you can’t accept that much, there’s no point pretend to have a correspondence.

Jay Tharappel

Yes, we’ve clarified this a few times now.

I accept that there’s a difference, at least semantically  between your denouncing the government’s reform efforts as a”poor joke”, and my inference that this in turn amounted to you denouncing the achievements of Syrian democrats.

However, the underlying*substance* of my inference was that the Syrian democrats got the reforms they wanted, and as such, the government’s efforts cannot be considered a “poor joke”.

My main point however was that your claim that the “Syrian democrats” were “crushed by violence” is wrong.

You seem unwilling to address this point.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

I’m sorry, it’s not a difference “at least semantically.” It’s simply a straight falsehood.  And there’s no possible inference of the kind you mention.

Since you don’t want to enter into a discussion, I shouldn’t bother answering your “main point,” which is incorrect, severely, as you can easily learn from the correspondents who do the best working the area: Patrick Cockburn, Charles Glass, Jonathan Steele, others.  If you want to debate them, contact them.  But I think I can predict that if you refuse to acknowledge simple and unambiguous facts, they won’t even bother responding.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

It’s not a falsehood if you accept the argument that the Syrian democrats got what they wanted, and as such, that their ”achievements” match the efforts of the Syrian government.

This would also mean you can’t simply write off the Syrian government’s efforts as a “poor joke” if those efforts matched the demands of the Syrian democrats.

Whether I believe I adequately qualified my statement or whether it’s a falsehood as you allege is entirely peripheral to my main point, and as such doesn’t preclude entering into a discussion about my main point.

In response to my main point, you’ve merely asserted that I’m wrong, and then appealed to the authority of three correspondents who apparently disagree with me, although I doubt you know their arguments.

That you couldn’t, and still can’t provide any reasons of your own suggests that you’re really not familiar with this topic.

Do you even know what the new constitutional laws are for the licensing of new political parties?

Jay

Noam Chomsky

If you were capable of rising to a minimal level of honesty, a discussion would be possible. And I would then suggest that you learn something about the topic, referring you to sources.  But until you can accept the first condition, don’t waste your time and mine any further.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Fine, we both accept that you referred to the Syrian government’s efforts as a”poor joke”, not the achievements of the Syrian democrats.

That still takes nothing away from my MAIN point.

When you finally got around to addressing my main point all you could do was name three journalists, whose reports I read avidly by the way, as if that constituted an argument.

The point, which I will repeat again, is that your claim that Syrian democrats, referring more broadly to the reform movement, was “crushed by violence”  is false for two reasons.

Firstly, it was not crushed in any serious political sense because all the major demands of this movement were addressed through major constitutional reform.

Secondly, those Syrian democrats cannot be conflated with the armed insurgency.  The Syrian state has targeted the latter, not the former.

To be sure, there was a well-documented incident in Maarat Al-Nu’man in Idlib where state security was allegedly responsible for killing protestors.

The local government then struck a deal with the protestors and removed four hundred security personnel from the town and confined the remaining 90 police/army personnel to their barracks.

Five thousand people marched in peacefully, but this time they were joined by armed men, initially with pistols, then with ”rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers held by men with heavy beards in cars and pick-ups with no registration plates”

[See ‘Syria caught in crossfire of extremists: Pro-democracy demonstrators in Syria fear that armed jihadis are provoking much of the latest bloodshed’ by Hala Jaber, Sunday Times, 26/06/14]

This incident, and many others like it, of peaceful protests calling for reforms being infiltrated by armed insurgents who used them to stage attacks against state forces, which then elicits a predictable violent military response, have definitely happened, but the Syrian democrats were not the targets.

Again what was your response to me?

To tell me to go read the works of Patrick Cockburn, Charles Glass, and Jonathan Steele, as if that constituted an argument.

So yes, to borrow your own words, if you were capable of rising to a minimal level of honesty, a discussion would be possible.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

Glad to know that you accept the unambiguous fact.

If you don’t agree with the few people who are following the situation closely, and have excellent reputations for accuracy, then by all means communicate with them to explain to them why they are wrong.

Jay Tharappel

When did I say I don’t agree with them?

Again, all you’ve done is allege that they disagree with me without so much as pointing to an article of theirs to back up your argument that ”the Syrian democrats who protested repression then were crushed by violence”.

As I said before, I’ve read their reports, especially those of Cockburn and Glass, and none of them come close to implying, as you have, that the Syrian government’s reform efforts are a “poor joke”. 

Take for example the reforms that led to last year’s Presidential elections, Cockburn writes:

“The presidential election – which Mr Assad will inevitably win –is a public rejection of demands by the opposition and its foreign backers that he should leave power.”

The implication from Cockburn being that the elections demonstrate the will of the Syrian people. If he thought they were a “poor joke” as you’ve done, he would have questioned the election’s relevance if not its validity.

So no, I don’t need to communicate with them to disagree with you. 

What *are* your opinions regarding the reforms implemented by the Syrian government?

Surely you’ve got a better answer than “poor joke”.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

When Cockburn says that he will “inevitably win” he means that they’re a poor joke.

If you think you agree with them about the “reforms,” then write to them to express your thanks for their praise for Assad and his reforms.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

How can you infer such an interpretation from Cockburn?

Especially given that he follows “which Mr Assad will inevitably win” with “is a public rejection of demands by the opposition and its foreign backers that he should leave power”.

For an election result to represent a “public rejection” of anything implies that it represents the will of the electorate.

Syria’s presidential election was the culmination of the reforms in that it necessarily had to come after a constitutional plebiscite and parliamentary elections.

So as I said before, if Cockburn thought the reforms (which culminated in presidential elections) were a “poor joke” as you’ve done, he would have questioned the election’s relevance if not its validity.

You said: “If you think you agree with them about the “reforms,” then write to them to express your thanks for their praise for Assad and his reforms.”

Why should I?

Also, I never stated that these journalists praised Assad, only that, unlike you, they don’t view the Syrian government’s reform efforts as a “poor joke”.

So tell me, will you be voicing your opposition to the sanctions on Syria?

Jay Tharappel 

Actually Noam, now that I’ve read it again, I *could* be wrong in my interpretation.

By “public rejection” Cockburn *could* be saying that the presidential elections are a means by which the Syrian government publicly repudiates the “demands by the opposition and its foreign backers that he should leave power.”

This secondary interpretation doesn’t however add credence to your interpretation that Cockburn considers the election a “poor joke” so you still have some explaining to do.

Jay

Noam Chomsky 

Sorry, but I have no explaining to do.  If you’re interested in coming to understand Cockburn’s views, you know how to proceed.

Noam Chomsky

Glad that you began to understand, as your later letter indicates.  If you want to proceed, you know how.

Jay Tharappel

Hi Noam,

Still, my secondary interpretation doesn’t validate your interpretation now does it?

You claimed the Syrian government’s reform efforts were a “poor joke” and STILL are unable to back this up with your own reasoning.

I’m happy to leave it there.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss these issues with me, and have a nice day.

Jay

Noam Chomsky

To translate to English, you are unwilling to check the validity either of your belief or of your interpretations of the writings of serious correspondents on the scene.  Your problem, not mine.

More than happy to leave it there.  And, incidentally, I didn’t discuss these issues with you, for reasons you know.

THE END

The Wall Will Fall, a site helmed by Vanessa Beeley.

Note to Commenters
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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

The U.S. doesn’t announce this as its goal. Instead, the U.S. says simply, that Syria’s President, Bashar al-“Assad must go,” or, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside” so that there will be “a new government, without Bashar Assad.” This is like George W. Bush’s constant demands for “regime change in Iraq.” Who gave the U.S. the right to replace nations’ leaders and still claim that doing this doesn’t constitute an international crime, of aggression, if not of aggressive invasion — the war-crime for which Nazis were hung at Nuremberg?

Many people in the Middle East haven’t been fooled by Obama’s snake oil rhetoric or the nonstop Orwellian lies of the American media.

The New York Times  reported, on 5 December 2012, that America’s bombing campaign in Libya had been planned in conjuction with the Thanis, the owners of Qatar, who supplied weapons to the jihadist rebels who were doing the actual fighting to bring down Gaddafi. And then, once he was killed, the U.S. continued using the Qataris to supply arms to those jihadists in Libya. However, this U.S. aid to jihadists disturbed secularist leaders in Libya. “Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American officials. … The United States … provided little oversight of the arms shipments.” Obama merely wanted to overthrow Gaddafi, who was allied with Russia. And he was allied with the Sauds and Thanis. Also, supplying Islamists in Libya, instead of secularists there, meant that the arms-flow to Islamists in Syria would continue. So, Obama really had no reason to object to what the Qataris were doing there.

Obama remains the smoothest practitioner of friendly fascism: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” America uber alles.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Eric Zuesse

Salman, the new Saudi King.

It’s not “because we’re addicted to their oil.” That reason ended long ago, but the popular belief that we’re allied with hardline Islamic Arab states, Sunni-run nations in the Middle East, because of the oil-issue — that they have oil, and we need their oil — continues on as popular lore, long after the reality ended, because it’s constantly being pumped by the U.S. aristocracy’s ‘news’ media and the journalists they hire.

If you want to know why we despise Tom Friedman, NYTimes columnist, warmonger, arrogant billionaire, and hypocrite, click on the bar below.

---

 

Friedman: an ego as inflated as his bank account. White Charger of the warmongering punditocracy.

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This video from the USA is called: Greenwash Guerrillas Pie Thomas Friedman on Earth Day.

Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.” Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a surprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating: Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face… * Because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet * For telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand. * For helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged * For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of “green” – the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. * For his pure arrogance.

On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.[/learn_more]

American leaders have been close and sometimes ostensibly subservient to the Saudi royal despots for generations, but the Bush clan has taken the affiliation to new, undignified heights. Photo: George W Bush with the late King Abdullah.

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[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome historical background of America’s evolving relationship with the Saudi royal family is necessary in order to understand in a truthful way, U.S.-Saudi (and broader U.S-Arabic) relations. (On the Saudi side, incidentally, that refers to relations between the U.S. Government and the King of Saudi Arabia, because the King is  the Government of Saudi Arabia: he’s an absolute dictator there, and he owns not just the Government, but much of the economy. For example, ever since 1980, the Saudi Government, the King, has owned 100% of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. Aramco’s reserves are more than 250 billion barrels, which at $40/barrel are, alone, worth $1 trillion, but Forbes  and Bloomberg refuse to calculate the fortunes of royalty and other heads-of-state; so, the fiction is spread, by those business-publishers and others, that the world’s richest person is instead Bill Gates, at a mere $79.2 billion (according to Forbes), which is far less than a tenth of King Salman’s fortune. The Saudi King owns the Saudi Government, and the Saudi Government owns Aramco and lots more — a fortune that’s probably worth several trillion dollars. The U.S. is allied with the Saudi King. But it’s no longer because of all the oil he has.)

There is no more communism — it’s just raw greed and power-politics, which have now grown like a cancer to obliterate other priorities of the U.S. Government in international relations.

FDR: A visionary and authentic democrat or cunning capitalist defender?

Hillary with King Salman: polishing the Saudi apple.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

Grover Furr |   Montclair University

Dateline: August 5, 2015

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]obert Conquest, next to Leon Trotsky arguably the chief anticommunist and anti-Stalin propagandist of the 20th century, has died. Naturally, the capitalist media are fawning over him.

A lot could be said about Conquest. I’ll say a bit at the end.

Here are some facts — I have checked them — concerning Conquest’s most famous book The Great Terror:

Robert Conquest has also been identified as having worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956. The Information Research Department (IRD), was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task was to combat Communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion.

“We should realize that no one so honored by the chief mass murderers of world history can ever be telling the truth…”

A 1978 story in the The Guardian alleged that Conquest’s work there was to contribute to the so-called “black history” of the Soviet Union — in other words, fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion. After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with Secret Service support.

His book The Great Terror, a basic anti-communist text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources.

Conquest’s book was intended for presentation to “useful fools”, such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV. Conquest to this day remains, for anti-communist historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.

– http://www.fact-index.com/r/ro/robert_conquest.html

The article from The Guardian in 1978 documents the propaganda activities of the IRD:

David Leigh, “Death of the department that never was.” The Guardian January 27, 1978, p. 13, at

http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/e/fo_deceit_unit_graun_27jan1978.html

[A facsimile of the original article may be downloaded here:

http://www.mariosousa.se/TheGuardianFridayJanuary271978050831_Sida_1.jpg

and

http://www.mariosousa.se/TheGuardianFridayJanuary271978050831_Sida_2.jpg ]

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his Ph.D. dissertation (but not in the book that he wrote from it) Arch Getty pointed out:

The dominant tendency [in writing the history of the “purges”] has been automatically to believe anything an emigré asserted while automatically denying the truth of everything from the Stalinist side. If one wanted a balanced picture of Tsar Ivan IV, (“The Terrible”), one would not accept at face value the descriptions of the exiled Prince Kurbsky in Poland, during a period of Russo-Polish war. If one wanted a balanced picture of Mao Tse-Tung’s regime in China, one would not accept Chiang Kai-Shek’s version in the early 1950’s as essentially reliable. If one were not interested in such a view, one would. The apparent monstrosity of Stalin’s crimes and a generation of Cold War attitudes have contributed to what would be considered sloppy scholarship in any other area of inquiry.

SIDEBAR
Britain has produced a bountiful harvest of polished disinformers and Cold War propaganda hacks, unprincipled individuals who quickly saw their opportunity for fame and riches in the relatively naive and brutish American anticommunist obsession. In this sordid sphere the suave anglo-American Robert Conquest was, all by himself, a mini-industry, and his contributions to polluting the historical record of the Soviet Union will likely cast a toxic shadow for generations. Or maybe not.  Manure has a way of dissolving in the rain, and intellectual manure seldom survives even a drizzle of truth, no matter how augustly served or endorsed.) In any case here’s UK’s Telegraph‘s defense of Robert Conquest, just to show —one more time—how loyal the capitalist barons are to their star propagandists. The page is reproduced in toto so our readers may judge (we reprint the page in full in case The Telegraph site might somehow drop the material later.)—P. Greanville

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When will Russia stop trying to re-write history?

The Russians are ganging up on the historians again because the regime doesn’t want truth to tarnish the legend

Sir John Keegan, left, and Antony Beevor Photo: Martin Pope/Geoff Pugh

 

By Antony Beevor

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o hear on the very same day that the great historian Robert Conquest had died and that my books and John Keegan’s were being removed from libraries in Siberia, produced a sinister frisson from the past. The Russian authorities were once again accusing me of repeating Goebbels’s propaganda about the Red Army, stereotyping its soldiers as rapists. It is perhaps worth mentioning that any such criticism is now a crime under Russian law with up to five years imprisonment on conviction.

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Ever since my book, Berlin – the Downfall, was published in 2002, senior Russians and the Kremlin-controlled media have fulminated against the passages dealing with the mass rapes committed by Red Army troops during their advance on Berlin. The fact that the information comes principally from Soviet sources is deliberately ignored. The state archives of the Russian Federation have numerous reports on the subject passed to Beria and Stalin, to say nothing of the diaries and accounts by Soviet officers and journalists in other archives. On the other hand, perhaps the files themselves are now being weeded to remove the evidence.

Even though a quarter of a century has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian sensibilities have hardly changed. If anything, they are again paranoid about the idea that the world is ganging up against its barely concealed intervention in Ukraine. As the May 9 celebrations of the victory in 1945 over “the Fascist Beast” demonstrate each year, the defeat of Germany is regarded as sacred. Nothing must be allowed to tarnish the legend, which is why the truth about the rapes has proved so uncomfortable.

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The Russia Day parade celebrates victory in 1945 over “the Fascist Beast”.  Photo: EPA

But it remains a mystery why the books of the masterly John Keegan, who was long the Telegraph defence editor, have also been targeted. Apart from the panoramic view in his general history of the Second World War, he hardly wrote about the Red Army. I owed John a great deal, having studied under him at Sandhurst and been encouraged by him later. And every one of us acknowledges the importance of the book which made his name, The Face of Battle, a work which led to the revolution in the writing of military history. John believed that historians should not shy away from controversial aspects of the past. But that also means governments should not try to control history, whether in fostering nationalist myths or in attempting to ban discussion.

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If there were any logic in this Russian purge, then Robert Conquest’s books would have been the first to be burned. He was a very courageous man. He published his most famous work, The Great Terror, in 1968, producing howls of outrage from the Left and vicious personal attacks. Those Lenin called “the useful idiots” – the fellow-travellers in the Cold War who tried to justify everything the Soviet Union had ever done – treated him as a liar and a fanatical anti-Communist propagandist. But Conquest never lost his nerve, and continued his research and writing, which included The Harvest of Sorrow in 1986, the most detailed account so far of the Ukraine famine unleashed by Stalin.

Robert Conquest’s ‘The Great Terror’ altered our view of the communist experience.  Photo: Charles Hopkinson

Nobody can agree on the figures of those who died being worked to death in the Gulag, or who died from famine and disease as a result of forced collectivisation, but when the Russian archives finally opened in 1992, Conquest’s account was triumphantly vindicated. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested that when The Great Terror came out in a new edition he should change the title to: I Told You So You F—ing Fools.

No doubt the Russian authorities removed Conquest’s books on Stalin’s crimes a long time ago, but perhaps they should also look at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic poem Prussian Nights, which he translated so well. It included the following lines about the rapes which Solzhenitsyn himself witnessed in East Prussia as a lieutenant of Red Army artillery:

“A moaning, by the walls half muffled:

The mother’s wounded, still alive.

The little daughter’s on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon, a company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse.”

That, I repeat, was Solzhenitsyn, not Goebbels.

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REGULAR ARTICLE RESUMES HERE

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]etty also pointed out that Conquest specialized in anticommunist propaganda masquerading as scholarship while working for British intelligence.

Sometimes, the “scholarship” had been more than simply careless. Recent investigations of British intelligence activities (following in the wake of U.S. post-Watergate revelations), suggest that Robert Conquest, author of the highly influential Great Terror, accepted payment from British intelligence agencies for consciously falsifying information about the Soviet Union. Consequently, the works of such an individual can hardly be considered valid scholarly works by his peers in the Western academic community.

Conquest’s book was intended for presentation to “useful fools”, such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV

Already in 1979 Getty concluded:

The point of view adopted here is that the standard interpretations of the “Great Purges”, such as those by Fainsod and Conquest, are seriously flawed, cannot account for the available evidence, and are thus no longer tenable. (53)

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/vv.html

Of course there was no “deliberate famine.” Quite the opposite: Collectivization put an end to famines in Russia / Ukraine. Conquest later retracted his view that Stalin had deliberately caused the famine.

Our view of Stalin and the famine is close to that of Robert Conquest, who would earlier have been con-sidered the champion of the argument that Stalin had intentionally caused the famine and had acted in a genocidal manner. In 2003, Dr Conquest wrote to us explaining that he does not hold the view that ‘Stalin purposely in?icted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first — thus consciously abetting it’.

– R. W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft. “Debate. Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932 — 33: A Reply to Ellman.” Europe-Asia Studies 58 (4) June 2006, 629; also in Davies & Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931 — 1933 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 441 n.145.

For all these quotations and more see my book :Grover Furr, Blood Lies. The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False. (New York: Red Star Publications, 2014), Chapter 1 “ The ‘Main-Made Famine’ and ‘Deliberate Famine’ Arguments in Bloodlands, Chapter 1.”

After my book Khrushchev Lied was published in Russia I was interviewed by Literaturnaia Rossia, a literary-cultural journal. The interviewer asked me some tough questions, which was fine!

Part of my reply was about Conquest’s book The Great Terror:

As a graduate student from 1965-69 I opposed the US war in Vietnam. At one point somebody told me that the Vietnamese communists could not be the “good guys”, because they were all “Stalinists”, and “Stalin had killed millions of innocent people.”

I remembered this remark. It was probably the reason that in the early 1970s I read the first edition of Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror when it was published. I was shaken by what I read!

I should add that I could read the Russian language since I had already been studying Russian literature since High School. So I studied Conquest’s book very carefully. Apparently no one else had ever done this!

I discovered Conquest was dishonest in his use of sources. His footnotes did not support his anti-Stalin conclusions! Basically, he used any source that was hostile to Stalin, regardless of whether it was reliable or not.

– “The Sixty-One Untruths of Nikita Khrushchev. “ At https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/litrossiainterv0608_eng.html

Conquest — with the help of the British intelligence service, expert and shameless disinformers –took the lies about the Stalin period concocted under Khrushchev and by him, added more lies from anticommunist sources in the West like Alexander Orlov and Walter Krivitsky, and presented this as “history.”

Conquest’s The Great Terror has lots of footnotes, which are intended to fool the educated but naive reader. But those same footnotes made it possible for me to discover that Conquest used phony evidence and never proved any of his anticommunist, anti-Stalin claims.

Some 25 years later, when Gorbachev took up Khrushchev’s anticommunist and anti-Stalin lies, repeated them, and added more lies of his own, Conquest issued a new edition of The Great Terror and told everybody “I was right.”

He wasn’t “right.” Gorbachev was simply telling the same kinds of lies, and often the very same lies, about the Stalin period that Khrushchev and his people had told.

Conquest got a lot of honors from the mass-murdering imperialists, from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan and beyond. He earned their praise. He also got a cushy, high-paying post at the Hoover Institution.

Such are the rewards for telling lies on behalf of the anticommunists.

We should realize that no one so honored by the chief mass murderers of world history can ever be telling the truth.

Those of us who want to struggle for the better, communist world need to learn from the successes, as well as from the mistakes, of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and the worldwide communist movement of the 20th century, so we can imitate what they did right while avoiding what they did wrong. So, let’s redouble our commitment to doing just that.

CODA:

“Conquest later retracted his view that Stalin had deliberately caused the famine…”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Grover Carr Furr III is an American professor and author of books and articles in Russian and English on Soviet history under the period of Joseph Stalin, particularly relating to the Great Purges and the “Secret Speech.”

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD,  HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO.  EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS. 

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