Welcome to the Era of the Great Disillusionment

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

JONATHAN COOK

his is a column I have been mulling over for a while but, for reasons that should be immediately obvious, I have been hesitant to write. It is about 5G, vaccines, 9/11, aliens and lizard overlords. Or rather, it isn’t.

Let me preface my argument by making clear I do not intend to express any view about the truth or falsity of any of these debates – not even the one about reptile rulers. My refusal to publicly take a position should not be interpreted as my implicit endorsement of any of these viewpoints because, after all, only a crazy tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist sympathiser would refuse to make their views known on such matters.

Equally, my lumping together of all these disparate issues does not necessarily mean I see them as alike. They are presented in mainstream thinking as similarly proof of an unhinged, delusional, conspiracy-oriented mindset. I am working within a category that has been selected for me.

Truth and falsehood are not what this column is about. To consider these topics solely on the basis of whether they are true or false would distract from the critical thinking I wish to engage in here – especially since critical thinking is so widely discouraged in our societies. I want this column to deny a safe space to anyone emotionally invested in either side of these debates. (Doubtless, that will not deter those who would prefer to make mischief and misrepresent my argument. That is a hazard that comes with the territory.)

I am focusing on this set of issues now because some of them have been playing out increasingly loudly on social media as we cope with the isolation of lockdowns. People trapped at home have more time to explore the internet, and that means more opportunities to find often obscure information that may or may not be true. These kinds of debates are shaping our discursive landscape, and have profound political implications. It is these matters, not questions of truth, I want to examine in this column.

Social media and 5G

Let’s take 5G – the new, fifth-generation mobile phone technology – as an example. I am not a scientist, and I have done no research on 5G. Which is a very good reason why no one should be interested in what I have to say about the science or the safety of 5G. But like many people active on social media, I have been made aware – often with little choice on my part – of online debates about 5G and science.

Eamonn Holmes talking about the 5G conspiracy theory. I just can’t. pic.twitter.com/vdwlQe0M1L

— Richard (@gamray) April 13, 2020

Like TV presenter Eamonn Holmes, I have inevitably gained an impression of that debate. To a casual viewer, the debate looks (and we are discussing here appearances only) something like this:

a) State scientific advisers, as well as scientists whose jobs or research are financed by the mobile phone industry, are very certain that there are no dangers associated with 5G.

b) A few scientists (real ones, not evangelical pastorspretending to be former Vodafone executives) have warnedthat there has not been independent research on the health effects of 5G, that the technology has been rushed through for commercial reasons, and that the possible dangers posed long term to our health from constant exposure have not been properly assessed.

c) Other scientists in this specialist field, possibly the majority, are keeping their peace.

Business our new god

That impression might not be true. It may be that that is just the way social media has made the debate look. It is possible that on the contrary:

+ the research has been vigorously carried out, even if it does not appear to have been widely reported in the mainstream media,

+ mobile phone and other communication industries have not financed what research there is in an attempt to obtain results helpful to their commercial interests,

+ the aggressively competitive mobile phone industry has been prepared to sit back and wait several years for all safety issues to be resolved, unconcerned about the effects on their profits of such delays,

+ the industry has avoided using its money and lobbyists to buy influence in the corridors of power and advance a political agenda based on its commercial interests rather than on the science,

+ and individual governments, keen not to be left behind on a global battlefield in which they compete for economic, military and intelligence advantage, have collectively waited to see whether 5G is safe rather than try to undercut each other and gain an edge over allies and enemies alike.

All of that is possible. But anyone who has been observing our societies for the past few decades – where business has become our new god, and where corporate money seems to dominate our political systems more than the politicians we elect – would have at least reasonable grounds to worry that corners may have been cut, that political pressure may have been exerted, and that some scientists (who are presumably human like the rest of us) may have been prepared to prioritise their careers and incomes over the most rigorous science.

Looney-tunes conspiracism

Again, I am not a scientist. Even if the research has not been carried out properly and the phone industry has lobbied sympathetic politicians to advance its commercial interests, it is still possible that, despite all that, 5G is entirely safe. But as I said at the start, I am not here to express a view about the science of 5G.

I am discussing instead why it is not unreasonable or entirely irrational for a debate about the safety of 5G to have gone viral on social media while being ignored by corporate media; why a very mainstream TV presenter like Eamonn Holmes might suggest – to huge criticism – a need to address growing public concerns about 5G; why such concerns might quickly morph into fears of a connectionbetween 5G and the current global pandemic; and why frightened people might decide to take things into their own hands by burning down 5G masts.

Explaining this chain of events is not the same as justifiying any of the links in that chain. But equally, dismissing all of it as simply looney-tunes conspiracism is not entirely reasonable or rational either.

The issue here is not really about 5G, it’s about whether our major institutions still hold public trust. Those who dismiss all concerns about 5G have a very high level of trust in the state and its institutions. Those who worry about 5G – a growing section of western populations , it seems – have very little trust in our institutions and increasingly in our scientists too. And the people responsible for that erosion of trust are our governments – and, if we are brutally honest, the scientists as well.

Information overload

Debates like the 5G one have not emerged in a vacuum. They come at a moment of unprecedented information dissemination that derives from a decade of rapid growth in social media. We are the first societies to have access to data and information that was once the preserve of monarchs, state officials and advisers, and in more recent times a few select journalists.

Now rogue academics, rogue journalists, rogue former officials – anyone, in fact – can go online and discover a myriad of things that until recently no one outside a small establishment circle was ever supposed to understand. If you know where to look, you can even find some of this stuff on Wikipedia (see, for example, Operation Timber Sycamore).

The effect of this information overload has been to disorientate the great majority of us who lack the time, the knowledge and the analytical skills to sift through it all and make sense of the world around us. It is hard to discriminate when there is so much information – good and bad alike – to digest.

Nonetheless, we have got a sense from these online debates, reinforced by events in the non-virtual world, that our politicians do not always tell the truth, that money – rather than the public interest – sometimes wins out in decision-making processes, and that our elites may be little better equipped than us – aside from their expensive educations – to run our societies.

Two decades of lies

There has been a handful of staging posts over the past two decades to our current era of the Great Disillusionment. They include:

+ and now the criminal failures of our governments to prepare for, and respond properly to, the Covid-19 pandemic, despite many years of warnings.

Anyone who still takes what our governments say at face value … well, I have several bridges to sell you.

Experts failed us

But it is not just governments to blame. The failings of experts, administrators and the professional class have been all too visible to the public as well. Those officials who have enjoyed easy access to prominent platforms in the state-corporate media have obediently repeated what state and corporate interests wanted us to hear, often only for that information to be exposed later as incomplete, misleading or downright fabricated.

In the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, too many political scientists, journalists and weapons experts kept their heads down, keen to preserve their careers and status, rather than speak up in support of those rare experts like Scott Ritter and the late David Kelly who dared to sound the alarm that we were not being told the whole truth.

In 2008, only a handful of economists was prepared to break with corporate orthodoxy and question whether throwing money at bankers exposed as financial criminals was wise, or to demand that these bankers be prosecuted. The economists did not argue the case that there must be a price for the banks to pay, such as a public stake in the banks that were bailed out, in return for forcing taxpayers to massively invest in these discredited businesses. And the economists did not propose overhauling our financial systems to make sure there was no repetition of the economic crash. Instead, they kept their heads down as well, in the hope that their large salaries continued and that they would not lose their esteemed positions in think-tanks and universities.

We know that climate scientists were quietly warning back in the 1950s of the dangers of runaway global warming, and that in the 1980sscientists working for the fossil-fuel companies predicted very precisely how and when the catastrophe would unfold – right about now. It is wonderful that today the vast majority of these scientists are publicly agreed on the dangers, even if they are still trapped in a dangerous caution by the conservatism of scientific procedure. But they forfeited public trust by leaving it so very, very late to speak up.

And recently we have learnt, for example, that a series of Conservative governments in the UK recklessly ran down the supplies of hospital protective gear, even though they had more than a decade of warnings of a coming pandemic. The question is why did no scientific advisers or health officials blow the whistle earlier. Now it is too late to save the lives of many thousands, including dozens of medical staff, who have fallen victim so far to the virus in the UK.

Lesser of two evils

Worse still, in the Anglosphere of the US and the UK, we have ended up with political systems that offer a choice between one party that supports a brutal, unrestrained version of neoliberalism and another party that supports a marginally less brutal, slightly mitigated version of neoliberalism. (And we have recently discovered in the UK that, after the grassroots membership of one of those twinned parties managed to choose a leader in Jeremy Corbyn who rejected this orthodoxy, his own party machine conspired to throw the election rather than let him near power.) As we are warned at each election, in case we decide that elections are in fact futile, we enjoy a choice – between the lesser of two evils.

Those who ignore or instinctively defend these glaring failings of the modern corporate system are really in no position to sit smugly in judgment on those who wish to question the safety of 5G, or vaccines, or the truth of 9/11, or the reality of a climate catastrophe, or even of the presence of lizard overlords.

Because through their reflexive dismissal of doubt, of all critical thinking on anything that has not been pre-approved by our governments and by the state-corporate media, they have helped to disfigure the only yardsticks we have for measuring truth or falsehood. They have forced on us a terrible choice: to blindly follow those who have repeatedly demonstrated they are not worthy of being followed, or to trust nothing at all, to doubt everything. Neither position is one a healthy, balanced individual would want to adopt. But that is where we are today.

Big Brother regimes

It is therefore hardly surprising that those who have been so discredited by the current explosion of information – the politicians, the corporations and the professional class – are wondering how to fix things in the way most likely to maintain their power and authority.

They face two, possibly complementary options.

One is to allow the information overload to continue, or even escalate. There is an argument to be made that the more possible truths we are presented with, the more powerless we feel and the more willing we are to defer to those most vocal in claiming authority. Confused and hopeless, we will look to father figures, to the strongmen of old, to those who have cultivated an aura of decisiveness and fearlessness, to those who look like down-to-earth mavericks and rebels.

This approach will throw up more Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons and Jair Bolsonaros. And these men, while charming us with their supposed lack of orthodoxy, will still, of course, be exceptionally accommodating to the most powerful corporate interests – the military-industrial complex – that really run the show.

The other option, which has already been road-tested under the rubric of “fake news”, will be to treat us, the public, like irresponsible children, who need a firm, guiding hand. The technocrats and professionals will try to re-establish their authority as though the last two decades never occurred, as though we never saw through their hypocrisy and lies.

They will cite “conspiracy theories” – even the true ones – as proof that it is time to impose new curbs on internet freedoms, on the right to speak and to think. They will argue that the social media experiment has run its course and proved itself a menace – because we, the public, are a menace. They are already flying trial balloons for this new Big Brother world, under cover of tackling the health threats posed by the Covid-19 epidemic.

Surveillance a price worth paying to beat coronavirus, says Blair thinktank https://t.co/AAb1nnv4pG

— Guardian news (@guardiannews) April 24, 2020

We should not be surprised that the “thought-leaders” for shutting down the cacophony of the internet are those whose failures have been most exposed by our new freedoms to explore the dark recesses of the recent past. They have included Tony Blair, the British prime minister who lied western publics into the disastrous and illegal war on Iraq in 2003, and Jack Goldsmith, rewarded as a Harvard law professor for his role – since whitewashed – in helping the Bush administration legalise torture and step up warrantless surveillance programmes.

Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman, credits China's enlightened authoritarian approach to information as "largely right" and laments the US' provincial fealty to the First Amendment as "largely wrong." https://t.co/1WyQtgE8bK pic.twitter.com/1M03ybxh0I

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) April 26, 2020

Need for a new media

The only alternative to a future in which we are ruled by Big Brother technocrats like Tony Blair, or by chummy authoritarians who brook no dissent, or a mix of the two, will require a complete overhaul of our societies’ approach to information. We will need fewer curbs on free speech, not more.

The real test of our societies – and the only hope of surviving the coming emergencies, economic and environmental – will be finding a way to hold our leaders truly to account. Not based on whether they are secretly lizards, but on what they are doing to save our planet from our all-too-human, self-destructive instinct for acquisition and our craving for guarantees of security in an uncertain world.

That, in turn, will require a transformation of our relationship to information and debate. We will need a new model of independent, pluralistic, responsive, questioning media that is accountable to the public, not to billionaires and corporations. Precisely the kind of media we do not have now. We will need media we can trust to represent the full range of credible, intelligent, informed debate, not the narrow Overton window through which we get a highly partisan, distorted view of the world that serves the 1 per cent – an elite so richly rewarded by the current system that they are prepared to ignore the fact that they and we are hurtling towards the abyss.

With that kind of media in place – one that truly holds politicians to account and celebrates scientists for their contributions to collective knowledge, not their usefulness to corporate enrichment – we would not need to worry about the safety of our communications systems or medicines, we would not need to doubt the truth of events in the news or wonder whether we have lizards for rulers, because in that kind of world no one would rule over us. They would serve the public for the common good.

Sounds like a fantastical, improbable system of government? It has a name: democracy. Maybe it is time for us finally to give it a go.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

Covid-19 has put this site on ventilators.
DONATIONS HAVE DRIED UP…
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Anti-semitism is for fools and bigots, anti-Zionism is for those who love peace and justice.

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

This article is part of a series on disgusting US-led imperialism

Patrice Greanville

Dr. Paul Ehrlich (w. Dr Sahachiro Hata), at his research institute. Ehrlich, who won a Nobel for his efforts against syphilis, tuberculosis, and other diseases, pioneered the use of antibiotics, "magic bullets", among many other advances in medical chemistry. Humanity is indebted to people like Dr. Ehrlich.

Anti-semitism, especially of the indiscriminate visceral kind, rooted in blind hatred and ignorance, is vile because it paints a big, highly-diversified cultural and ethnic community with the same brush, while denying its numerous accomplishments. Humanity's debt to Jews is considerable: we find it in the contributions of men of science from Maimonides in 12th century Spain, down to Nobelists Dr Paul Ehrlich, the father of antibiotics ("magic bullets") and first healer of syphilis in 1909, as well as pioneer in a multitude of diagnostics, to Dr Jonas Salk, of Polio conquering fame, son of Ashkenazi Jews from Minsk, Belarus, to Baruch Blumberg (Nobel for Hepatitis B vaccine), with hundreds of others before and after. In the struggle for social justice, authentic democracy, and a peaceful world, Jews occupy a distinguished place and continue to do so. Karl Marx is of course the titan in this category, but there are countless others who also fought for a better world as union organizers and civil rights organizers, or soldiers (the Lincoln Battalion in Spain was headed at one point by a Jew, Milt Wolff, who also fought in WW2 with distinction, and later became involved in civil rights and against the Vietnam War ), while many Jews have also gained prominence in many other fields, including literature, music, physics, chemistry, the academia, motion pictures, the theater, and cultural criticism. This is so obvious that it almost requires no mention.

Regrettably, some Jews have also been prominent in this late-stage imperialist phase of the United States as nefarious advisors and foreign policy shapers. Neocons like Irving and Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom Friedman, and many others of the same plumage have left and are still leaving an ugly stain on the image of all Jews, and enabling the spurious hate-filled rationales of many hard core anti-semites. Haaretz itself, which, incidentally, despite its obvious flaws as an organ embedded in an imperialist culture, is a much better paper than the New York Times (or the WaPo, for that matter) has admitted that much. Writing on 02.04.2003, Ari Shavit noted that, "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical." (bold italics mine).

Neturei Karta adherents demonstrating against Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Opposition to Zionism, of course, is a different thing. Zionism is an ideology, not an ethnic/cultural community, an ideology which provides the philosophical justifications for the creation and actions of modern Israel, by now an openly de facto Apartheid state. Many Jews—secular and religious— are anti-zionist, including many Orthodox Jews, such as Naturei Karta (part of other currents chiefly found in the Hasidic tradition). Thus, contrary to the deliberate confusion instigated by Israeli Hasbara to cripple critics of Israel by accusing them of "anti-semitism" (a charge taken up with alacrity by the Atlantic establishment, and spearheaded by the liberals "cancel culture" which is busy promoting anti-Constitutional laws to silence Israel's critics), it's perfectly possible to be an anti-zionist without being anti-semitic, and many brave Jews are. Norman Finkelstein, one of Israel's bêtes noires, who lost both parents to the Nazis, even wrote the highly controversial book, The Holocaust Industry, arguing that deliberate propaganda to whitewash Israeli policies and fortify support for the often isolated Jewish state had vitiated the real suffering of millions of Jews and even commodified it in the actions of fundraisers and hucksters like Elie Wiesel (a longtime favorite of middlebrow queen Oprah Winfrey). Against this contentious backdrop, Tel Aviv's cynically abetted confusion between anti-semite and anti-zionist can prosper and, from an imperial standpoint, pay off handsomely, as was recently seen in the enormous kerfuffle over anti-semitism accusations that engulfed and eventually doomed Jeremy Corbyn's bid for the UK premiership.

What can we learn from all this messy history? The bottom line is that racial and ethnic generalizations are socially and politically dangerous, not to mention possibly immoral. Using that perspective, we can argue that anti-semitism, historically grounded in arbitrary generalizations, cannot be equated to anti-zionism, which is planted in specifics, far firmer terrain, and is historically verifiable.

Odious generalizations can and often do occur in the case of any nation engaged in crimes against humanity, chiefly through imperialist war or domestic oppression of minorities, or internal tyranny. Thus, as it is wrong to accuse all Jews of certain despicable qualities (which are often shared by many other national and ethnic subdivisions of the human race), it is also a gross error to accuse anyone opposing Nazism with hatred for all Germans, and the same goes for those anticommunists who indulge in rabid Russophobia. Same argument can be made regarding the normally heinous US imperialism, a historical evil of almost unique proportions. Opposing the depraved imperialist cliques that misrule the US is not a license to hate all Americans, per se, since, despite their invisibility on the US billionaire-owned media many Americans are objectively anti-imperialists (reason why their sense of decency is constantly manipulated to make them accomplices in imperial crimes) and many more would be subjectively anti-imperialist if they were properly educated and informed. To see that, of course, we'll have to wait ad calendas graecas.

To conclude, being anti-Zionist, being in firm opposition to Israel's criminal policies toward Palestinians, its meddling and depredations in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, as well as its constant and reckless warmongering against Iran, Lebanon and other nations, and last but definitely not least, Jerusalem's sordid partnership with the US in a broad array of imperialist adventures, is defensible and justified. Meanwhile, the material below, featuring eloquent British Jewish voices denouncing the collaboration of many establishment Jews with the forces which would like to muzzle all criticism of Israel, especially within the ranks of the Labour Party, a completely spurious claim that derailed Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy, proves the disgusting moral emptiness of anti-semitism in all its variants, and the fact that it is often class, more than any other factor, that colors a person's moral and political stance.

New video from #JustJews: Jews have never spoken with just one voice. #BoardofDeputies #ManyJewishVoices pic.twitter.com/KSpyy8Sqcw

— Just Jews (@JustJewsUK) August 6, 2020

Jewish mathematician Moshé Machover was born in 1936 under the British mandate in Palestine: says accusation that the Labour Party is riddled with antisemitism "doesn't correspond to any evidence that I've heard of." pic.twitter.com/HLAhfZz8rd

— Just Jews (@JustJewsUK) March 13, 2020

New video from #JustJews: Jews have never spoken with just one voice. #BoardofDeputies #ManyJewishVoices pic.twitter.com/KSpyy8Sqcw

— Just Jews (@JustJewsUK) August 6, 2020

Patrice Greanville is editor in chief and founder of The Greanville Post.

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

[google-translator]

[premium_newsticker id=”213661″]

THIS WORK IS LICENSED UNDER A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

The heroism of the Syrian army reminds us of the Red Army’s unconquerable steadfastness in World War 2

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Vanessa Beeley
COMMENTARY BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

We feel privileged to join Vanessa Beeley in her homage to the Syrian Arab Army (yes, the army defending the Syrian nation, the army shielding Damascus, the army of Bashir al-Assad, from its many brutal enemies summoned by the empire). We said so in 2016, when we supported The Saker's 2013 decision to choose the Syrian soldier for his own "man of the year" award. Our intro note read as follows:

In 2013 The Saker chose the Syrian soldier for his "Man of the Year" award. We completely agree, for all the reasons The Saker lays out so well in [his] essay, and that's why we are reposting it here, a belated move we regard as doubly apt considering the constant denigration the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) receives at the hands of their doctrinal enemies, assembled hypocrites, and career disinformers in the imperialist media. We also salute the principled and heroic contributions to anti-imperialist struggle.of Hezbollah and the Russian Military forces in Syria, without which, barbarism would have conquered this ancient cradle of humanity.

Jobar, Eastern Ghouta after liberation by Syrian Arab Army. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

"Pacifists" in other countries will never understand the heroism of Resistance. When your country, your people, your families, your children, your beliefs, your existence, your freedom are under attack, you have no choice but to defend yourselves and the Syrian Arab Army has done that for a punishing ten years. They have died and sustained dreadful injuries so that externally fomented terrorism will be defeated for all our sakes. I thank these doctors, nurses, students, farmers, dentists, veterinarians, civilians (who joined the Army to defend Syria) and all these heroes for taking up arms against the greatest threat faced by this world - the psychopathic minds of the criminals who rule us in the rogue-state-hemisphere. —Vanessa Beeley

Probably the most hideous propaganda to be spewed by the establishment media cartel in the West is that which portrays the Syrian Arab Army as some kind of militia, "Assad's gang", disconnecting these defenders of homeland from the people they are fighting for and dying for every day.

I travelled to #Aleppo by Pullman bus a few days ago, it was full of young soldiers heading to the frontlines in West Aleppo and Idlib. Young men from all areas of Syria, all communities, united in the common cause - to liberate their country from the infestation of extremism and sectarian terrorism, to bring peace back to a country that everyone in Syria describes as "the safest place in the Middle East before 2011".

Most of them slept, curled up in their seats, exhausted.. others hopped off the bus when we stopped, to have a coffee or a cigarette. All of them polite, friendly and tired.

I was in Layramoun, an industrial area to the north of Aleppo two days ago as the SAA soldiers prepared for the military campaign to liberate the areas surrounding the factories that are occupied by the West's "moderates" - Al Qaeda in Syria - it was freezing cold, a biting wind cutting to the bone, not one of the soldiers had really warm clothing or boots. They arrived one by one, their faces full of purpose, their weapons slung over their shoulder, greeting each other with grim camaraderie before the battle begins. Tanks nestling inside open garages, hidden from view, artillery trucks carrying missile launchers parked on the roadside, groups of soliders discussing plans... there was a feeling of calm before the storm.

These soldiers do not have the equipment or food that the terrorist groups have. Turkey ensures that their proxies have everything they need, including US manufactured TOW missiles (anti-tank). The SAA soldiers often do not have food for weeks/months, they survive literally on what they can forage except when local people risk their own lives to bring them sandwiches & tea. The illegal US/EU sanctions are a major part of the war waged against these soldiers who defy all this hardship until victory is the sweetest taste in their mouths.

Their weapons are old and battered compared to the sophisticated equipment supplied to groups like #ISIS - BUT these young men are winning their battles, because they believe in their cause, they know they must win or die and that if they do not win, their people will die at the hands of these monsters camped on their land.

To reduce these heroes, these brave Resistance fighters to some kind of homogenous brigade of government militia is a crime in itself. Every young man (and woman) has dreams, hopes and ambitions that they put on hold to fight a war that has shattered their dreams.

When we see videos of terrorist missiles scything through these young people to cries of "Allah Akhbar", more lives are lost, more blood is shed and more hopes are destroyed. Every single soldier is an individual fighting side by side with a thousand other individuals to defeat the enemy that would see them divided. They do not fight for one man, they fight for us all.

God bless the Syrian Arab Army and their allies.

Here are some messages from supporters of the Resistance from many countries in the world, showing that there are those who recognise the magnitude of the war being fought by the Syrian Arab Army on behalf of us all.

"We would like to thank the courageous soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army and we wish to show you that you are supported even behind the enemy lines in the countries who are so hostile towards your people. We thank you for your valiant battle against these imperialist nations because we understand you fight for us also.

We understand that if Syria is lost or destroyed, we are all facing the end of civilization. A victory for Syria will mean the end of the imperialist construct as we know it and there will be the opportunity for humanity to evolve away from endless war to protect the supremacy of one nation and its allies. We know you are our brave soldiers on the frontlines for humanity and wherever we live, wherever we come from we love and support you."

[...]

"The Syrian Arab Army has resisted economic, media and military terrorism for 7 years. We call upon all peoples of the world to stand in solidarity with these courageous men & women of Syria in their stand against International terrorism. History will honour them in the future, but we must honour them now and not turn away from our duty to support them.

On behalf of all the awake in this world, I wish to recognise the sacrifices made by the SAA and their allies, sacrifices made with their blood that has mingled with the soil of their beloved nation, Syria. The soil from which all our futures will grow.

You gave up your families, your homes, your careers, your futures, to fight for the honour & freedom of your people, we will not ever let this sacrifice be in vain. The Syrian people live in our hearts, your kindness, generosity and compassion in the face of such adversity is the flame that will never be extinguished by the cold hand of oppression that is outstretched by our governments towards your country. Instead we extend our hands and place them inside your’s so we are one hand in this war for all our sakes. May God protect you in your mission which is our mission also.”

https://21stcenturywire.com/2018/05/02/in-honour-of-the-syrian-arab-army-and-allies-war-on-terror/

Eloquent words indeed. Proffered by an incorruptible witness.

Regarding Vanessa and her immensely valuable work in Syria, work of truthful testimony on the ground, at her personal risk, something no Western journo has done, no better endorsement can be found than the poisonous CIA-redacted "official" bio blurb circulating on Wikipedia. See if you can count all the tendentious bits they packed in this hatchet job filled with dog whistles, directed at someone they obviously hate and fear. (They also show their hand by trying to rescue the character of the White Helmets, a terrorist / propaganda organization useful in imperialist adventures, founded and funded by British intelligence, and logically supported by the US/UK deep state):

Vanessa Beeley is a British activist and blogger. She is known for her pro-Bashar al-Assad advocacy, and for promoting conspiracy theories and falsehoods about the Syrian Civil War, in particular the White Helmets who she falsely claims are a terrorist organization.

The imperialists are up in arms against people like Vanessa because through sheer commitment to truth, irrevocable decency, and an intelligent grasp of world events, they succeed in exposing the empire's crimes, just as Assange, Manning and Snowden did, at great cost to themselves. People of this kind are basically counter-disinformers. Just like bomb squads go around detecting and dismantling bombs, these journalistic heroes zero in on disinformation—the lifeblood of the imperial Big Lie—and expose it. Their salutary effect would be much greater if even a fraction of the whore media did its job, and gave them a bit of space, but, of course, such a thing is by definition unthinkable. Independent counter-disinformers like Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Aaron Maté, Caitlin Johnstone, John Pilger, Jonathan Cook and others of similar caliber exist precisely because the corporate media—uniformly owned by criminal billionaires—is not even remotely doing its job. They are not the cure, they are the disease.

In the appendix below we expand on this topic, the battle of communications between the Big Lie and truth, with an analysis published by The Communists, official organ of the Communist Part of Great Britain (ML).—PG

The ‘independent media’ that exist to attack independent media

The enemy’s supposed to hate it: Beeley and Bartlett under attack again.

THE COMMUNISTS.ORG

Saturday 7 April 2018

Bartlet and Beeley. A thorn on the imperial backside.

A disturbing (but not surprising) new phenomenon has been brought to our attention recently: the emergence of new and apparently ‘independent’ media, whose journalists present themselves as being opposed to and outside of the corporate narrative, but who then go on to use whatever credentials this appearance gives them to train their fire on the few voices that really are prepared to call out the lies of the warmongering ‘mainstream’ imperialist media.

In a recent article in Proletarian, we analysed the Guardian’s vicious attack on Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and others whose work has done so much to expose the lies that are put out to ‘justify’ the unjustifiable war against Syria. (See Blunt hatchets: Guardian attempts to discredit real journalism on Syria, February 2018)

Who is behind Newsbud?

The vitriolic voices of the corporate liberal warmongers at the Guardian, Independent, Channel 4 and the BBC have recently been swelled by another, less obviously imperialist-aligned source: the apparently independent outfit Newsbud, whose tagline is ‘Where media integrity matters’, and which claims to be completely non-partisan and audience-funded. It also presents itself as being on the side of the Syrian people and government, and against the imperialist war against Syria.

A recent video entitled Syria under siege: guarding against wolves in sheep’s clothing, Newsbud’s founding editor Sibel Edmonds started by presenting the situation in Syria as one that is so complex and ‘multifaceted’ as to be impenetrable to outsiders. (Note Newsbud's insidious warning about the character of Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett):

Having made such banal but apparently unarguable observations as that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, she went on to talk emotionally about the fate of babies and children who are killed in war, and proceeded, with her co-presenter Spiro Skouras, to deliver an increasingly hysterical 75-minute tirade against the independent reporters Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett, who, she claims, have fundamentally failed to abide by the essential standards and ethics of independent journalism, and who are guilty of the most heinous crimes and disinformation besides.

For a detailed deconstruction of the malicious content contained in the report, we recommend our readers watch Fact checking Newsbud’s ‘Syria under siege’ video by James Corbett of the Corbett Report website.

The only conclusion one can come to having watched both Corbett’s video and the Newsbud piece is that Newsbud is not at all what it pretends to be. No doubt an investigation into these investigators is overdue.

Singing from the imperialist hymnsheet

Tellingly, the main points that the Newsbud report made about Eva and Vanessa are along identical lines to those that were made in the Guardian hit-piece back in January. These include:

– That the two reporters have no journalistic qualifications and are not well versed in middle-eastern politics.

– That they spread ‘disinformation’ that harms the Syrian cause.

– That their pointing out that there are doctors in such organisations as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), etc working to support the terrorist agenda is an outrageous lie and absolutely beyond the pale. Doctors are, it is maintained by Edmonds, completely beyond reproach and are all motivated entirely by humanitarian concerns and the Hippocratic oath, and to call this into question is the most horrendous crime against journalism and human decency. (It is worth noting here that MSF was described recently by Syrian ambassador to the UN Dr Bashar al-Jaafari as a branch of the French intelligence service.)

– That they are denouncing innocent journalists online (“issuing fatwas”), and also reporting them to the authorities in Britain, the US and Syria, and asking for them to be jailed

– That they are 100 percent supportive of the Syrian government to the point of losing all credibility.

– That their funding is mysterious and dodgy, and that their claims to be self or crowd-funded are bogus.

– That they haven’t really seen what they claim to have seen, but spend their time in Syria in plush hotels in Damascus and the odd package tour and day trip.

– That they are arrogant ego-maniacs, with a personal agenda of self-promotion, who hope to get famous and make money out of the war in Syria.

– That they wrongly describe all those whom they oppose, or who oppose them, as being ‘not real Syrians’.

– That any useful work they have done was all plagiarised (a charge denied by at least one of the authors – Cory Morningstar – they are alleged to have ‘stolen’ from!)

In summation, the Newsbud team would appear to share the imperialist media’s outrage that a few independent voices have been able, through dogged work and the systematic use of social media, to bring true information to those who are keen enough to search it out, that they have exposed the imperialist lie machine and its presstitutes for what they are, and that their audience is growing as the national-liberation forces in Syria win victory after victory.

Going one step further than the hints in the Guardian hit-piece, the Newsbud report ended with an explicit call to the Syrian government to stop allowing Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett into Syria, to the independent media to stop giving them a platform, and to social media outlets to ban their content, including an impassioned call for systematic censorship of social media, whether self-censorship instituted by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter or censorship imposed by governments from outside.

The video has been followed up by a concerted campaign by Sibel Edmonds on Twitter to try to get various independent media outlets to drop all connection with the two reporters, where she describes them as ‘fake activists’, ‘communists’ and embezzlers, besides hurling the most egregious of personal insults at them (all in the interests of promoting ‘ethical journalism’, of course).

Connections to communists

The report also referred to the two having received funding from the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’. Since we assume that Ms Edmonds is referring to our party, the CPGB-ML, we wish to make it quite clear, for the record, that we do not fund and have never funded the work of either Vanessa Beeley or Eva Bartlett.

This is not because we do not think their work is worth funding, or because we would be ashamed to be connected with them. Quite the reverse. We make no secret of the fact that we consider the work they have done in smashing the narrative of the imperialist war propaganda machine to be more useful and more effective in laying the groundwork for a real anti-war movement than anything that has been done in 15 years by the Stop the War coalition (StW). Presumably, this is why StW never invites either of them to speak on its platform.

This is why we have helped to organise meetings at which they have spoken (one for Vanessa in Birmingham last year; one for Eva in London this January), and have mobilised for meetings in Bristol, Frome, London and Derry put on by other organisations. Unfortunately, since we are a small party and very low on funds, although we would have liked to have given more, the most either Vanessa or Eva received from us on each occasion was a train ticket, a meal and a bed for the night.

We make this clear not because we feel there would be anything wrong in our funding their work to a greater extent, but to illustrate how the “triple fact-checking” Sibel and her colleagues go about their business. We have no idea who informed her that we were funding Vanessa and Eva, but it was not a member of our party’s leadership, none of whom has been contacted to verify the claim.

No doubt such claims are also meant to discourage people from paying any attention to the testimony of Vanessa or Eva on the basis that if they receive funding from or associate in any way with communists, anything they have to say must necessarily be suspect. This is a well-worn bourgeois trope that doesn’t need dissecting in this article, except to note in passing that affiliation to the bourgeois Labour party, with the blood of millions on its hands, is never used in this way by such anti-communists.

A plea for censorship and repression

Accusing Vanessa and Eva of being “fake activists” and of conducting “vicious violent and malicious operations”, Edmonds goes on to call on “you the people, who value human decency”, and ends her report by making an impassioned plea for action to be taken against the “dangerous duo”:

“Any of you who is against online violence, profanity and terrorising, take it upon yourself to make it your priority to stop this operation. Do whatever you deem appropriate, for the sake of thousands of Syrian civilians, hundreds of decent journalists and activists, whose lives have been endangered, dozens of doctors who have been facing death threats …”

As James Corbett pointed out in the video cited above: “This is a concerted 75-minute in-depth hate piece that then ends with the launching of this campaign for ‘ethical journalism’ and ‘human decency’, which so far has only been and only is a drive to get Beeley and Bartlett expunged from the internet.”

Imperialism in trouble

The Newsbud report actually illustrates the weakness of the imperialists: they are on the run in Syria and their impotent rage is showing in such crude hit-pieces as we are now witnessing. The fact that such ‘mainstream’ outlets as the Guardian are no longer sufficient to the task of destroying an opponent’s credibility speaks volumes about the increasing lack of trust of official news outlets and the growing audience for independent sources of information about the world.

The campaign against media channels such as RT and Press TV, the growing clamour for censorship of social media, and the direct attacks on reporter-activists like Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett are all symptoms of this rage and of the imperialists’ fear that they are losing their hold on the minds of the workers at home.

For our part, we can only see this latest attack as a sign that Ms Beeley and Ms Bartlett, and others like them, are doing useful and effective work, and they should take it as a compliment that they are being singled out for such treatment.

As the 19th-century Russian poet Nikolay Nekrasov wrote:
    I hear the sound of approbation
    Not in the dulcet tones of praise,
    But in the roar of irritation.

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

[google-translator]

The Brookings Hand Behind Russiagate Points Back to Rhodes Trust Coup on America

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Matthew Ehret

An incredible report on Real Clear Politics by Paul Sperry on July 24 has revealed a new dimension to the Russiagate frenzy that contaminated American politics for the last four years. While all claims of Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin have been thoroughly debunked over recent months, it was believed that the culprits of this coup effort were merely swaths of deep state operatives in the DNC alongside British Intelligence assets like Christopher Steele, and Sir Richard Dearlove.

All of these things are still very true, but the story has just become significantly more interesting.

Strobe Talbott of Brookings with Hillary Clinton. Everywhere we turn we find the same usual suspects.

As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.

This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on Trump in the first place!

Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).

The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.

Nunes stated:

“You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”

Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.

Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006 and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a “creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on his Linkedin account.

The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.

Apparently having two dossiers full of the same lies is more believable than only one.

Other information which has surfaced- especially since Steele’s recent UK trial testimony was made public, is that Talbott reached out to the MI6 asset in August 2016 to discuss the dossier, while comparing notes on the Shearer file. With Trump’s surprise election in November 2016, both Steele and Talbott met to strategize how they should handle the Steele dossier going forward.

Another Brookings Institute player who interfaced directly with Steele and ensured that the dossier made it into the hands of prominent pro-impeachment figures and news media outlets in America was none other than regime-change queen Victoria Nuland herself who hired Steele as an advisor during the Ukraine Maidan debacle and met with him on several occasions to discuss the dossier before Trump’s election. Both Nuland and her neo-con husband Robert Kagan serve as Senior Fellows at Brookings Institute.

The Real issue of Talbott’s British Pedigree

It would here be the height of folly to presume, as some commentators have done, that Talbott’s role in this operation indicates an American guiding hand between the plot to undo the 2016 elections. The fact is that Talbott’s entire life and world outlook have been shaped not by wholly anti-American ideas but rather by British Imperial principles that are programed into the minds of all Rhodes Scholars during their time in Oxford from 1966-1968.

Talbott with another Brookings worthy: Madeleine Albright.

It was here that young Nelson Strobridge (Strobe) Talbott III adopted a near-religious commitment to a post-nation state world order. Upon his return to America, Talbott was positioned into a prominent role in the western propaganda bureau serving as a leading editor of Time Magazine. It was during the end of this phase of his career that the soon-to-be Assistant Secretary of State outlined his manifesto for the New World Order in a July 20 1992 article entitled “The Birth of a Global Nation”. Where Talbott stated:

“All countries are basically social arrangements….No matter how permanent or even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary….Perhaps national sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all….But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government.”

Everything Talbott has done in the ensuing three decades (along with the throngs of other Rhodes Scholars who flooded into the White House with Clinton’s 1992 election) can be understood by this general philosophical premise and gets to the heart of the false dispute between neoconservative imperialists whom Talbott appears to despise, and neoliberal imperialists of a Malthusian/Green New Dealing variety like Talbott.

The Rise of the Rhodes Trust

Talbott’s neoliberal outlook [essentially one that supports global capital-imperialist ideas] was originally expounded by the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 Confessions of Faith and upon whose name and will, the scholarship founded in 1902 was based. In this document Rhodes stated:

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”

The fear which Rhodes and leading imperialists presiding over a dying British Empire faced at the end of the 19^th century was that a new global system of win-win cooperation was fast emerging in the wake of Lincoln’s victory over the British-supported slave confederacy in 1865. This was a system defined by a mandate to ensure credit functioned as an instrument for agro-industrial progress and internal improvements outlined by Lincoln’s advisor Henry Carey (who also acted as lead organizer of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition which exported this system globally) who stated in his Harmony of Interests:

William Gilpin or Henry Carey, China’s President Sun Yat-sen, Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier or Russia’s Sergei Witte, a calamitous 20^th century of war and assassinations unfolded as the British Empire was re-organized under the guiding light of the Roundtable Movement/Rhodes Trust from Oxford, and the Fabian Society from the London School of Economics. Both think tanks indoctrinated talented youth from around the world, who were deployed back into their home countries to permeate all layers of public and private policy and which ultimately aimed at 1) abolishing sovereign nation states, 2) instituting world government in order to impose population control under a scientific dictatorship and 3) eliminate the conception of mankind and natural law that gave rise to the greatest renaissance movements over the previous 2500 years.

Rhodes described this indoctrination process in the starkest terms in his 1877 Testament of Faith:

“Let us form the same kind of society a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country.”

To this day over 8000 students have been processed by the Rhodes Trust, with 32 being taken in from America every year permeating every branch of society.

The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment”:

“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

created NATO, managed the Cold War, orchestrated the fall of Canada’s Prime Minister in 1963, led in creating a post-industrial paradigm in 1971 and brought the world close to thermonuclear war on more than one occasion.

With the return of nationalism on a global scale guided by the post 2013 New Silk Road framework, and especially within America itself since Trump’s 2016 election, these hives of indoctrinated scholars have been in conniption fits over the loss of their utopian blueprints for a New World Order. Putin-hating ideologues like Strobe Talbott and his ilk can kick and scream all they want but since Russiagate was their last and biggest gamble to run a coup on Trump, the hope for America’s accepting Putin’s offer for a 5-nation emergency summit to re-organize the world system is still possible.

Of course, it should never be forgotten that animals are not less dangerous when they are wounded and desperate, and with the meltdown of Russiagate and the light increasingly shining on the British agents in America, these beasts are more dangerous than ever.

In my next article, we will tackle the psychology of a Rhodes Scholar using Strobe Talbott as a convenient case study.

Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

Covid-19 has put this site on ventilators.
DONATIONS HAVE DRIED UP…
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

THE BEIRUT EXPLOSION: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Posted on 07/08/2020 by Elijah J Magnier

By Elijah J. Magnier: @ejmalrai

On Tuesday 4^thof August, an explosion at the Lebanese harbour in the heart of the capital Beirut caused devastating human casualties and material destruction. Over 140 people died instantly, 80 are still missing under the rubble, and over 5000 were wounded. More than 300,000 homes were destroyed and many more were damaged. 2,750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate (AN) (an equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT) somehow ignited and registered the largest explosion since the end of World War II. Many theories, accusing Israel or Hezbollah or the CIA, are circulating like wildfire in the Lebanese capital. Where is the truth? Cui bono?

The Rhosus, a ship flying the Moldavian flag was sailing from Georgia to Mozambique carrying (among other merchandise) 2,750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate destined for the Fabrica de Explosives in Mozambique. This shipment was paid for by the Banco Internacional De Mozambique. It stopped in Beirut on 20/11/2013 to offload agricultural machines and was expected to load goods from Lebanon for Jordan on its way to Mozambique. An inspection concluded the ship was unfit to sail, and local Lebanese authorities effectively prevented the Rhosus from sailing. Lebanese port authorities discharged the cargo into Port Warehouse no.12 and later confiscated the cargo due to bills unpaid by the shipowner.

Ammonium Nitrate has many properties, notably as a component of explosive mixtures (Mellor, 1922; Elvers 1989, Suslick 1992). Pure AN is very stable and should meet specified quality requirements to be used in the production of industrial explosives. According to the European Fertilizer Manufacturers Association, AN is especially difficult to detonate and does indeed need a substantial stimulus for this to happen. But it must be stored in a dry, well-ventilated and sealed storage area. Moreover, any electrical installation in the storage area must be resistant to ammonia vapour.

For over six years, the 2,750 tons of AN remained in the Lebanese warehouse without any plans to relocate or re-sell it. Moreover, the storage area chosen is subject to the changing weather of the Lebanese climatic seasons, which include suffocating heat in the summer. The storage area was of metal construction with no proper ventilation.

Last year, Captain Naddaf who works at the harbour under the National Security Service, called his superior to inform him about the presence of a “dangerous cargo at warehouse no. 12.” His superior officer, General A. instructed the young officer to provide a written report and take pictures of the warehouse and the contents. The warehouse construction had a breach big enough for the passage of a man, which would facilitate entry or even theft.

How is the Lebanese harbour organised? It is controlled by a kind of local mafia composed of high ranking officers, customs directors, administrators and security officials. Each person in charge has been appointed by a political leader offering his men immunity and protection. The harbour produces immense amounts of money and bribes are the daily bread of all those who run this “show”. In the face of such corruption, it is now clear that scientific expertise about what is happening to store AN and the conditions in which 2,750 tons of it are stored counted for little. Actually, many officers in this Port have no competence for the jobs they do and are appointed, as we have seen, by favouritism and through political connections. This is indeed the case for the Director of Customs and the Army intelligence, General S., responsible for harbour movements and contents. So, given all that, when a problem or a disaster occurs, as it did on Tuesday, it will obviously be very difficult to find those really responsible. So how did the conditions for this AN explosion arise?

On the 4^th of August, at 15:00 local time, a blacksmith was asked to close the holes in the warehouse to prevent potential smuggling of the content. The blacksmith was not informed about the hazardous content of the warehouse, nor he was told to take the necessary precautions to prevent the spread of metal particles that produce fragments and can trigger a fire. He was working at a distance no more than a few centimetres from the AN bags that were lying on the floor, from which a clear substance was leaking. Once the job was done, between 16:30 and 17:00, smoke was seen coming from the warehouse.

Firemen were called to deal with the potential fire. At 18:08 the first explosion was heard, followed by the second one over a minute later. After the first explosion, a fire ignited inside the warehouse. The fire generated more heat, enough for the entire stock of AN to blow up and create a vacuum (negative pressure). The pressure of the explosion caused the many casualties and devastating destruction in the city.

Who called the blacksmith and allocated the budget for his work? Was he informed of the hazard of welding next to Ammonium Nitrate? Why were the 2,750 tons of AN left for more than six years in non-regulation storage for no justifiable reason whatsoever?

The question has to be asked: “who benefits from the explosion?” The affected area belongs mainly to people who are not generally friendly to Hezbollah. Therefore, it would not have been in Israel’s interest nor in that of the US to bomb and cause so much damage to the properties and businesses of friendly parties. Destroying this part of Beirut in order to impose a “new Middle East” or a “new Lebanon” makes no sense either, because the anti-Hezbollah population is currently weaker than ever and is not in a position to confront Hezbollah. France and the US are in no better position to influence the population.

Speculation about Hezbollah storing weapons at warehouse 12 is ridiculous and unfounded- because the place was under constant surveillance by cameras controlled by the security forces themselves. Hezbollah would certainly not store weapons in an area both unfriendly and not under its own control.

Hezbollah, in fact, is currently waiting for the Special Tribunal for the assassination of the ex-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri to announce its verdict. This is how the US, to please Israel, is trying to curb Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon- but to no avail. Indeed, the US and Israel have tried everything in their power in Syria, in Iraq and in Lebanon but failed in their attempts. The US is imposing harsh sanctions on Syria and Lebanon (preventing Gulf and European countries from assisting with the severe Lebanese financial crisis) but the outcome is the same: Hezbollah won’t submit.

The many “conspiracy theories” fail to line up with the facts of this accident. Ignorance, incompetence, favouritism and bureaucracy are the reasons for the loss of so many lives and the destruction of Beirut, a capital where people have not learned to stand together. This is a huge national tragedy. The Lebanese hold property in many foreign countries, west and east. This expresses the lack of a sense of belonging- because this is a country where elected politicians have amassed and stolen all the country’s wealth, where they hoard power, and where they pass it on to their sons.

Proofread by: C.G.B. and Maurice Brasher

[post-views]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License