Moti Nissani, PhD
No Planet – No People

Combined flag of Anglosphere nations.

Part IV of: Why does the Invisible Government Continue to Grow in Strength?

We must admit to ourselves that there are truly evil geniuses out there, and in most cases these characters have taken control of the power structure. — Mike Krieger

The Controllers

Juan O’Gorman, Enemies of the Mexican People

This article takes if for granted that the five major countries of the Anglosphere—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US—are governed behind the scenes by a small group of people.

This group in turn shapes historical events, accounts for the near-uniformity of these five countries’ political developments, and enjoys partial or full control of most countries of the world. As far as we can guess, this group is comprised of a few banking families and their allies in the information, corporate, military, intelligence, and “religious” worlds. This group goes by such names as the deep state, invisible government, bankers, oligarchy, Bilderbergers, and Directors. In this posting, following Aldous Huxley, I shall refer to the members of this group as the Controllers.

What is it that the Controllers are after? Why aren’t they content with what they already have? The best guess is that they are just as sick as the fictional Eddorians:

While not essentially bloodthirsty—that is, not loving bloodshed for its own sweet sake—they were no more averse to blood-letting than they were in favor of it. Any amount of killing which would or which might advance an Eddorian toward his goal was commendable; useless slaughter was frowned upon, not because it was slaughter, but because it was useless—and hence inefficient. And, instead of the multiplicity of goals sought by the various entities of any race of Civilization, each and every Eddorian had only one. The same one: power. Power! P-O-W-E-R!! (Doc Smith, Interplanetary, 1948)

David Rockefeller

The Mush-for-Brains Misconception

Most independent analysts take a dim view of the Controllers’ intelligence. Mao Zedong, for instance, referred to the USA as a paper tiger.

In a recent speech—one of his most outspoken yet—President Putin said:

“I am under the impression that our counterparts [read: America’s Controllers] have mush [porridge] for brains. They really have no idea what is going on in Syria and what they are trying to achieve.”

In other words, the people controlling the USA are poor strategists: They are stupid, do not understand what’s going on, and don’t have clear goals.

In his wonderful China Rising, Jeff Brown writes:

“Baba Beijing and the Chinese think in terms of decades and centuries. Americans can’t think past the 24-hour propaganda spin and quarterly stock reports.”

Likewise, A. Raevsky (“Saker”) believes that the Western leadership is clueless, lacking political vision and professionalism. The American empire is weak and delusional. Echoing Khruschev’s famous reply to Mao, “yes, a paper tiger, but with nuclear teeth,” Raevsky feels that the Russians are only worried about the West because it “does not take a great deal of intelligence to trigger a nuclear war.”

Dmitri Orlov et al. likewise talk about “a string of foreign policy and military disasters such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine.”

A few more examples of this fundamental misperception appear below, in the Middle East section.

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Origins of the Mush-for-Brains Misconception

Alexander Zinoviev’s Self-Portrait: Thinking is Painful.

We shall shortly see that the Controllers have, over the past three centuries or so, made enormous strides: they have accumulated power and riches at a steady pace. This is nothing new. Taylor Caldwell, a novelist, saw this worrisome and astounding progress already in 1972:

“[The men of the Invisible Government] would continue to grow in strength, until they had the whole silly world, the whole credulous world, the whole ingenuous world, in their hands. Anyone who would challenge them, attempt to expose them, show them unconcealed and naked, would be murdered, laughed at, called mad, ignored, or denounced as a fantasy-weaver.”

Why would so many knowledgeable people ignore such a striking and obvious historical record? Let me offer two overlapping speculations.

One possibility involves a failure to appreciate the difference between wisdom and cleverness. The Controllers are indeed utterly clueless about the true meaning of our brief journey on earth. Anton Chekhov said:

“In reality, everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”

The Controllers are manifestly oblivious to these higher aims. Subscribers to the mush-for-brains view confuse this profound lack of wisdom with stupidity.

This confusion is aided in turn by the seeming contradiction between the Controllers’ avowed and real goals. If you take them at their word, they are indeed idiots. If, on the other hand, you judge the success of their actions by their hidden agenda, they are evil geniuses.

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Why is this Mush-for-Brains Controversy Important?

Sun Tzu famously said, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” To retain their independence, Russians, Chinese, and revolutionaries the world over must indeed know their enemy. And they certainly must know whether they are confronting imbeciles or Machiavellians.

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The Historical Record

The key to the proper assessment of the Controllers is their achievements. Are they steadily nearing the goal they set for themselves (enslaving humanity)? Who is gaining ground, the Controllers or the rest of us?

The historical record, as Caldwell so clearly saw, is unequivocally in favor of the evil geniuses view. One could fill an entire Kindle with examples, but here a few scattered fragments should be enough to drive the point home.

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The Domination of Europe

The vicious brilliance of the Controllers at times defies belief. Thanks to bribes, assassinations, the recent variation of the Gladio conspiracy, extensive wiretapping and blackmail of who’s who in Europe, economic warfare (e.g., the FIFA “scandal,” the VW “scandal”), and control of the banks, corporations, media, and intelligence services of Western and central Europe, this continent is now a submissive colony of the USA. In the words of one historian, “the level of abjection passes belief.”

Likewise, the level of strategic planning needed to bring this abjection about, to force once-independent countries like Germany and France to betray the interests of their people in the service of the Controllers’ agenda, also defies belief.

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Latin America

As we speak, the Controllers are brilliantly undermining the progressive governments of Latin America, once more turning this entire area into their back yard. Thus, “a new gang of vassal regimes has taken-over Latin America. The new rulers are strictly recruited as the protégés of US financial and banking institutions. Hence the financial press refers to them as the ‘new managers’ – of Wall Street.”

The most brilliant move involves Argentina and Brazil, countries who maintained friendly relations with Russia and China and pursued, now and then, independent policies that served the interests of their own people. In Brazil, especially,

“A phony political power grab by Congressional opportunists ousted elected President Dilma Rousseff. She was replaced by a Washington approved serial swindler and notorious bribe taker, Michel Temer.

“The new economic managers were predictably controlled by Wall Street, World Bank and IMF bankers. They rushed measures to slash wages, pensions and other social expenditures, to lower business taxes and privatize the most lucrative public enterprises in transport, infrastructure, landholdings , oil and scores of other activities.

“Even as the prostitute press lauded Brazil’s new managers’, prosecutors and judges arrested three newly appointed cabinet ministers for fraud and money laundering. ‘President’ Temer is next in line for prosecution for his role in the mega Petrobras oil contracts scandal for bribes and payola.

“The economic agenda by the new managers are not designed to attract new productive investments. Most inflows are short-term speculative ventures. Markets, especially, in commodities, show no upward growth, much to the chagrin of the free market technocrats. Industry and commerce are depressed as a result of the decline in consumer credit, employment and public spending induced by ‘the managers’ austerity policies.

“Even as the US and Europe embrace free market austerity, it evokes a continent wide revolt. Nevertheless Latin America’s wave of vassal regimes, remain deeply embedded in decimating the welfare state and pillaging public treasuries led by a narrow elite of bankers and serial swindlers.”

The remaining bastions of semi-independence—Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba—are obviously being targeted now by the “witless” Controllers—while the Russians and Chinese are standing by, doing next to nothing.

China in particular, offers a puzzling example of shortsightedness. China is sitting on trillions of digital dollars that it is surely going to lose. Yet, it doesn’t occur to Xi and his colleagues to counter American aggression by creating their own version of the CIA, NGOs, and regime change outfits. It doesn’t even occur to them to give Venezuela an outright gift of at least $50,000,000,000, to help it ride the current American-engineered maneuvers and especially the masterstroke of manipulating the price of petrol downwards. China faces a far greater peril now than the Controllers-imposed opium addiction, and yet it nickel-and-dimes its few remaining potential allies.

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The Middle East

From its inception, America’s modeled itself after the vicious Roman Empire, not the far more civilized Democratic Athens or the Iroquois Confederation. Like the Americans, the Romans endlessly bragged about bringing peace to the world. The reality was diametrically opposite, as one eloquent victim explained: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

In the Middle East, one independent, secular, country after another has come under American control. The countries whose leaders sought an independent path suffered genocide, neo-colonialism, devastating wars, sectarian and ethnic conflicts where hardly any existed before, millions of refugees, fragmentation, environmental contamination, and as a consequence, higher cancer, mutation, and birth malformation rates.

Most independent analysts feel that America (the Controllers’ chief enforcer of military and economic conquests) is failing in the Middle East. These analysts seem to believe American politicians and presstitutes when they say that their main goal is to bring peace and democracy to Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Yemen (the Americans of course prefer to keep silent about the vicious dictatorships of their Wahhabi friends). These analysts, as we have seen, believe the politicians when they say that their hearts go out to the long-suffering Arabs, that they really care about the ongoing genocides of Christians and everyone else.

In a typical naïve outburst, for instance, a Georgetown University professor asks: “Why did the United States fail in its war on Iraq?”Eric Margolis calls the Iraq War “the worst disaster for the United States since Vietnam.” Paul Craig Roberts sees America’s policies in the Middle East as a failure.

These astute commentators see the American-created desert, the devastation, the hate that America incurred in the Middle East and elsewhere, and they conclude that these policies have been a failure. But the consistent pattern of “failures” suggests that these “failures” are not an unintended consequence caused by the pursuit of other, loftier, goals. Rather, the “failures,” future conflicts, and chaos themselves are the goal.

Sharmine Narwani describes the real goals of the Controllers:

“A 2006 State Department cable that bemoans Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strengthened position in Syria outlines actionable plans to sow discord within the state, with the goal of disrupting Syrian ties with Iran. The theme? ‘Exploiting’ all ‘vulnerabilities’ [and suggesting, among other things, playing] ‘on Sunni fears of Iranian influence.

“In 2013, influential former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger openly advocated redrawn borders along sectarian, ethnic, tribal or national lines that will shrink the political/military reach of key Arab states and enable the west to reassert its rapidly-diminishing control over the region.”

As usual, Israeli strategists are more outspoken than their American counterparts. By 1982, they had already spelled out its goal of redrawing

“the Mideast into small warring cantons that would never again be able to threaten the Jewish state’s regional primacy. Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan.”

Thirty years later, that nightmare describes the world. Narawani warns:

“Arabs and Muslims need to start becoming keenly aware of this ‘small state’ third option, else they will fall into the dangerous trap of being distracted by detail while larger games carve up their nations and plunge them into perpetual conflict.”

Similarly, Russia, China, and humanitarians everywhere must become keenly aware that the Controllers are international grandmasters. Given the comparative naiveté of the people who oppose them, they almost always win.

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Former Members of the Warsaw Pact 

The “featherheaded” Controllers now manage, impoverish, and run roughshod over many former countries that had been part of the Russian alliance. Who would have thought, just 30 years ago, that the Americans would one day find a peaceful way of placing nuclear delivery vehicles in countries like Romania and Poland? Who would have predicted that they would ever again place German soldiers 100 miles from St. Petersburg?

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Other Nations

The Controllers manage most of the world’s countries. Their armies conquered Japan, Germany, and Italy—and never left. They stole parts of Mexico and Colombia, and turned most of Latin America into subservient, violence-ridden, colonies. Again and again, they assassinated patriotic leaders and replaced them with quislings willing to enrich themselves by serving their foreign masters. No people is safe from their regime change operations (including the American people), and no country—even traditional safe haven Switzerland—is safe from their financial blackmail.

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The Controllers’ Brilliant War on their Own People

Sadly, owing in part to the 1990s manufactured collapse of the USSR, America’s Controllers have acquired vastly more power and riches, while gradually relegating the American Constitution to a meaningless piece of paper (see Part I of this series). They, assassinated or brutally tortured their real and imaginary opponents, stole so much from so many to the point that America’s 20 wealthiest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, neglected America’s infrastructure, elevated self-serving mendacity to an art form, conducted a phony war on drugs, used these very drugs and an utterly broken justice system to turn the USA into an incarceration nation in which jailers enjoy a de facto license to kill, destroyed American industry, and converted a once-rich country to the “most bankrupt nation in history.”

Take as just one example the so-called bailout of Western banks. In reality, that was the biggest transfers of money (and hence power) in history—from the vast majority of the peoples of these countries to the Controllers.

The criminals who planned the 2008 crisis, the criminals who are deliberately undermining the world’s economies, were paid handsomely for their misdeeds. 

The money the bankers got, had Western governments chose to nationalize these banks instead of giving them the people’s money, could have worked miracles in improving the economic situation of the world’s people.

I must confess that I wouldn’t have thought it possible that anyone could perform such astounding hat tricks as “bailouts” and not have to contend with a revolution the following day. The Controllers had a deeper understanding of the power of propaganda and human nature.

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The 1990s Neo-Colonization of Russia and Its Aftermath: Four Trojan Horses

Throughout the 1980s, I studied the Russian-American standoff. And yet I failed to predict Russian naiveté, decency, inferiority complex, and the enormous damage inflicted on the Russian psyche by Stalin. I still find it hard to believe that the “dumb” Controllers were able, in the 1990s, to achieve the de facto occupation of Russia, sinking that once-powerful country into chaos, poverty, criminality, corruption, assassinations, organized crime activities, and social discord. Washington and its quislings were running—and deliberately ruining—the country.

Gratefully, the Americans eventually left—but only after leaving four Trojan horses behind.

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Trojan Horse #1: Western-Style “Democracy”

Instead of establishing real democracy, the controllers re-created Russia in their “democratic” image. Even at the best of times, such “democracies” do not represent the interests of ordinary people. Sooner or later, they are doomed to be taken over by psychopaths.

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Trojan Horse #2: Oligarchs and the Russian Economy

Another brilliant move on the part of the Controllers was the patronage and creation—from thin air—of the scourge of the Russian oligarchs. These “shysters basically stole Russia’s most valuable companies in the 90s, minting a small handful of mega-billionaires, while the rest of the country ate”—and is still eating—dirt. Very little has so far been done “to strip said shysters of their ill-gotten gains, and redistribute shares to the people.” As a result, unlike the much-maligned Soviet Union, Russia is plagued by vast income inequalities, poverty for the majority, inequality before the law, and unaffordable housing.

These oligarchs, “are still in full control of the Russian financial and banking sector, of all the key economic ministries and government positions, they control the Russian Central Bank and they are, by far, the single biggest threat to the rule of Putin and . . . to the Russian people and Russia as a whole.” Moreover, these oligarchs “connive to make Russia join the West as a junior partner.

Besides controlling the economy, the oligarchs corrupt everything they touch and provide a demoralizing proof that in Russia—as in the West—crime pays.

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Trojan Horse #3: Russia’s Central Bank and Constitution

It is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the following question to the wealth and liberty of a nation: Is its central bank private or public?

Here are two quotes (many more are available here), both underscoring the import of this question.

“The issue which has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks.”—John Acton (1834-1902)

The second quote provided a dire warning to the American people from the very start. William Pitt, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, said of the inauguration of the first privately-owned central bank of the United States under Alexander Hamilton:

“Let the American people go into their debt-funding schemes and banking systems, and from that hour their boasted independence will be a mere phantom.”

This is exactly what the Controllers accomplished, taking control of Russia’s Central bank. From that point to the present day, Russia’s boasted independence has been a mere phantom.

Controllers bearing gifts: The Central Bank of Russia

The most meticulous documentation of this paradoxical reality known to me comes from historian Nikolay Starikov’s Rouble Nationalization (you can read a book review here or freely download the entire English translation of the book here):

“The structure of today’s world is a financial one par excellence. Today’s chains consist not of iron and shackles, but of figures, currencies and debts. That’s why the road to freedom for Russia, as strange as it may seem, lies in the financial sphere. Today we are being held back from the progress at our most painful point—our rouble… Our rouble, the Russian currency unit, is—to put it delicately—in a way, not quite ours. And this situ­ation is the most serious obstacle to our country’s development. . . .

“Let us start with the simplest question—who issues roubles? This is easy—the Central Bank of Russia, also known as the Bank of Russia, has the monopoly on issuing the Russian national currency.

“‘Article 6. The Bank of Russia is authorized to file suits in courts in ac­cordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation. The Bank of Russia is entitled to appeal to international courts, courts of foreign countries and courts of arbitration for protection of its rights. . . .

“The Russian economy does not have as much money as required for its proper operation but equal to the amount of dollars in the reserves of the Central Bank. The amount of roubles that can be issued depends of the amount of dollars Russia received for its oil and gas. That means that the whole Russian economy is artificially put in direct correlation with the export of natural resources. This is why a drop in oil prices causes a collapse of everything and everywhere. . . .

“An idea of a bank independent from the state was brought into the Soviet Union as a Trojan horse—through ‘advisors’, through those who had practical trainings at Columbia University, those who were recruited or simply betrayed their country . . .

“Among other things, it contains such amusing details as article 7: ‘Drafts of federal law and regulatory documents of the federal bodies of executive power concerning duties of the Bank of Russia and its performance shall be submitted to the Bank of Russia for approval.’ If you want to dismiss bankers through making amendments to the legislation—kindly submit the draft of the bill to them in advance. Otherwise, they might as well sue you for your legal mayhem in a court of Delaware . . .

“The second security level is the Constitution, as the ‘reformers’ shoved some words on the Central Bank and its status even into the Constitution. Article 75 (points 1 and 2) says that ‘the currency of the Russian Federation is the rouble’, and ‘issuing of money shall only be done by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation’, that ‘it performs independently from any other governing bodies.’ If you want to be surprised—have a look at Soviet Constitutions. Read the Constitution of the USA. You will find no mention of a bank that issues money independently anywhere, because such articles should not be a part of the main law of the country. What body issues the currency is a technical question, it is not fundamental for the country and its people. For the people it is not very significant, but it is a key issue for enslaving the country. That is why it was hastily dragged into the Constitution. And now this technical detail is there next to the fundamental rights of Russian citizens.”

Western control by proxy of Russian banking, finance, and the economy as a whole, has yet another sinister aspect. Prof. Michael Hudson and others underscore the fact that the USA has consistent, massive, balance of payment deficits with such countries as Russia, China, and Japan. Financialized and deindustrialized America buys real goods abroad and pays by running its printing press. Consequently, such countries accumulate the digital equivalents of billions or trillions of dollars.

They then use a good part of this money to buy U.S. treasury bonds. The net result of this convoluted, scarcely credible, process is straightforward: By financing the U.S. military and economy, these countries empower their own oppressors.

That is then one other legacy of the Controllers: They created a situation whereby Russia, while fighting for its very survival, finances its own military encirclement and the ongoing attacks on its economy and currency. Thanks to the powerful fifth column and alien constitution the Controllers bequeathed, Russia is “economically enslaved to the United States.”

Can witless people plan and execute such a coup?

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Trojan Horse #4: Information

Inside Russia too, the Controllers left behind another curious legacy: Hostile foreigners and their agents indirectly own some mainstream Russian media. And state-owned, independent, and private media are still afraid to tell the people of Russia and the world ugly truths about the West, still trying to curry favor with Washington and its Controllers, still often take the Controllers and their vassals at Langley and Washington at their word.

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Parting Words

The Controllers have been trying to subjugate Russia, its vast resources, and educated and creative people, for centuries. They tried direct or proxy wars, and so far failed. They tried nuclear brinkmanship, and they failed. They tried sleight of hand in the 1990s—and almost succeeded. They are resorting to blood-curdling brinkmanship now, and it remains to be seen whether this will lead to the conquest of Russia, its annihilation, or the destruction of humanity.

They are now resorting to military intimidation and economic warfare. They came close several times to turning Russia and China into vassal states, and they are now pursuing that goal, full steam.

They hope that one day soon they will have reached at long last their vision of the future: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

The Controllers are engaged in a cross-generational undertaking. They are closest now to achieving their dream than any other empire in history has ever been. They could be the brightest bunch of psychopaths that ever lorded over humanity. If Russia, China, and revolutionaries everywhere wish to prevail, they must never underestimate their opponents. As well, they must level the intellectual playing field.

Moti Nissani

is an organic farmer (in Argentina), a former university professor (in the USA), a jack of many trades, and the compiler of  “ A Revolutionary’s Toolkit.”.

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‘PROPAGANDISING FOR WAR’ – GARETH PORTER RESPONDS TO THE BBC TODAY PROGRAMME ON SYRIA

Source: Media Lens.

Photo Credit:WWI US government propaganda. Public Domain

A report published by the London School of Economics last month found extreme levels of bias in BBC reporting. The ‘impartial’ BBC’s early evening news was almost five times more likely to depict Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in a negative light. In the time period studied (September 1 – November 1, 2015), no headlines on this key news programme presented Corbyn in a positive light.

But this is a mere drop in the ocean of the corporation’s pro-establishment bias. It could hardly be more obvious that BBC news reports, comment pieces and discussions are overwhelmingly hostile to US-UK government enemies like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Syria, and overwhelmingly favourable to the United States and Israel. It has long been clear to us that BBC journalists perceive this, not as bias, but as an accurate depiction of a world that really is divided into well-intentioned Western ‘good guys’ and their enemies, the ‘bad guys’.

The idea the BBC is a reliable information source is as false as is the notion that any media are free from class bias.

On August 20, the BBC website featured a Radio 4 Today programme discussion hosted by former political editor Nick Robinson interviewing BBC World Affairs Editor John Cody Fidler-Simpson and Dr. Karin von Hippel, a former State Department official dealing with US strategy against Islamic State.

The discussion was introduced with the following written text, which was repeated in slightly altered form in Robinson’s spoken introduction:

‘Exactly five years ago President Obama called on the Syrian President Bashir-Al-Assad to step down but today he is still in power.’

The prominence and repetition of the observation of course conferred great significance. The implication: for the BBC, Obama is not just the leader of another country, he is a kind of World President with the authority to call on other leaders to ‘step down’. In reality, Obama made his demand, not in the name of the United Nations, or of the Syrian people, but because, as President George H.W. Bush once declared: ‘what we say goes’.

In his introduction, Robinson described a disturbing image that ‘has gone viral on social media’ of a Syrian child allegedly injured by Russian or Syrian bombing. The child, five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, is depicted sitting between Obama and Putin. Robinson noted that one of these images carried the sarcastic caption: ‘Thank you for keeping me safe.’ We have found the image but not that caption.

One reasonable interpretation of Robinson’s introduction, then: five years ago, Obama called on Assad to go, but ‘failed’ to follow through in making that happen – ‘little Omran’, and numerous other Syrian civilians, are continuing to suffer as a result. Adam Johnson writes that the viral picture of Daqneesh has ‘amped up calls for direct US intervention against the Syrian government’ made by numerous ‘laptop bombardiers’ ‘jumping from one outrage in urgent need of US bombs to the next’. The BBC’s Today programme discussion can be understood as a further example of this media herd behaviour.

John Simpson agreed with Robinson that Obama had been keen to avoid ‘the kind of dreadful errors’ – he meant crimes – that George W. Bush had committed in Iraq, and so had ‘wanted to stay out of things’. According to Simpson, Obama’s failure to intervene in Syria has been a ‘disaster’. After all, Russia recently ‘managed to attack Syria with its planes from the airfields of Iran’. As investigative journalist Gareth Porter notes below, the Syrian government in factinvited Russian military support, so Russia can hardly be described as attacking Syria. Simpson, by contrast, argued that Russo-Iranian cooperation was ‘a link up which would have caused absolute consternation in the United States, and worldwide, just a few years ago’. In other words, the world’s sole superpower has proven powerless to stop the kind of military cooperation it practices the world over all the time – how awful!

Simpson’s imperial sympathies have been aired before on the BBC, notably in October 2014:

‘The world (well, most of it) wants an active, effective America to act as its policeman, sorting out the problems smaller countries can’t face alone.’

INTERFERING IN A BIG WAY

In a classic example of BBC imbalance, Dr. von Hippel then supported Robinson’s and Simpson’s interpretation of the cause of the Syria disaster, noting of Obama that, ‘as John Simpson was saying, he didn’t believe that America interfering in a big way would help… he was never convinced that force, or greater use of force, would make a difference. Now, I personally disagree with that…’.

Von Hippel went so far as to assert that ‘there were many things you could do between sending 100,000 troops in and nothing’. The comment was ambiguous but, in the context of the discussion, invited listeners to conclude that Obama had indeed done next to nothing in Syria. And yet, von Hippel herself noted that US special forces are working with anti-Assad groups in Syria and Turkey, and that this and other support ‘has made a difference’.

In fact this is only the tip of the iceberg. In June 2015, the Washington Post reported of the US:

‘At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget… US officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.’

The US media watch website, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, added some context:

‘In addition to this, the Obama administration has engaged in crippling sanctions against the Assad government,provided air support for those looking to depose him, incidentally funneled arms to ISIS, and not incidentallyaligned the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army with Al Qaeda. Regardless of one’s position on Syria — or whether they think the US is somehow secretly in alliance with Assad, as some advance — one thing cannot be said: that the US has “done nothing in Syria.” This is historically false.’

Ignoring these entirely uncontroversial facts, Robinson observed that, ‘there were a series of occasions’ in which David Cameron ‘tried to persuade Obama – others were doing it, too – to take some form of military action, and at each stage he didn’t want to do it.’ ‘Yes’, Simpson replied, ‘I think that David Cameron was really frustrated towards the end…’.

Obama, we are to believe, then, repeatedly refused ‘to take some form of military action’ and is even guilty of ‘silence, almost’ on Syria. Robinson then affirmed the whole narrative:

‘So, in other words… this is a disaster, not just for the people of Syria, but a strategic disaster for the United States – makes them look weak.’

If there was any doubt what ‘strong’ means to Robinson, it was removed when he concluded the discussion by asking Simpson to respond to potential listener criticism:

‘Just address those people who we know are listening at home who’ll go: “Haven’t they learned anything? Weknow that military intervention in the Middle East always produces a worse disaster than the one that we started with.”‘

In a tragicomic, Rumsfeldian reply, Simpson acknowledged that the conflict is ‘fiendishly complicated, Nick, really, as you know’, adding:

‘Whatever you do is going to have tremendous downsides. But that doesn’t mean to say that everything you do, or don’t do, um, is, is, is… simply going to be the worst thing you can possibly do. There are some things that are worse than others.’

Perhaps it takes a World Affairs Editor to join the big picture dots with such insight. Simpson continued:

‘And I think, sitting on your hands watching Putin running away with the whole thing is the worst possible thing that Obama could have done, and I think it’s going to be a stain on his reputation permanently.’

This reminded us of the many sociopathic comments that viewed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq as primarily a problem for the American brand, with tragic implications for the reputations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

ANY FLAVOUR YOU LIKE – GARETH PORTER RESPONDS

We were so astonished by the propaganda bias and gross omissions in this BBC discussion – with literally no balance challenging the false consensus that Obama had been ‘sitting on his hands’ on Syria, even doing ‘nothing’ – that we sent the discussion to Gareth Porter, one of the most knowledgeable and honest reporters on Syria. We expected a paragraph or two in reply, but Porter felt moved to respond at some length:

‘The BBC interview is so one-sided and distorts the most basic realities of the issue in Syria that it is a caricature of the media propagandizing for war. It has offered the public two flavors of essentially neoconservative thinking — one perhaps closer to Bush administration thinking, the other closer to the views of Hillary Clinton.

‘John Simpson and Karin von Hippel both score the Obama administration’s policy for failing to exert more power in Syria and thus allowing Russia to play a dominant power role in the conflict. Simpson is scandalized by the fact that Obama allowed Russia, which he calls a “second-rate” or even “third-rate” country to “run away with the whole thing” in Syria, which he calls “the worst possible thing Obama could have done”.

‘Von Hippel similarly laments the fact that Obama did not take steps to build up the Syrian armed opposition and has now allowed the Russians to play the role of peacemaker in Syria. She invokes the threat of a “power vacuum” in the Aleppo area because Obama did not intervene on the side of the armed opposition. That phrase recalls Hillary Clinton criticism of Obama’s Syrian policy for having created a “power vacuum” by refusing to support a proposed CIA program for building up the armed opposition when she was Secretary of State.

‘BBC listeners were not made aware of the crucial fact that Russia was able to play the role it has in Syria because it is intervening at the request of the Syrian government. Nor were they told that the Obama administration, on the other hand, has been seeking to overthrow the regime in cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which began in 2012 supplying arms to Islamic extremists who cooperated with al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al Nusra Front.

‘By early 2013, it was already clear to close observers of the war that al Nusra Front was the dominant armed opposition organization in Syria. By 2016 none of the U.S.-supported armed groups were willing or able to fight without the full cooperation of al Nusra Front. That reality helps to explain why Russia, and not the United States, was better positioned to broker a ceasefire in 2016, and why the Obama administration has been unwilling or unable to get the opposition it supports to go along with it.

‘As for von Hippel’s complaint about Obama’s failure to arm the opposition earlier, she should know very well (because Hillary Clinton acknowledges it in her memoirs) that Obama’s argument to his advisers was that the United States should not repeat the mistake it made in Afghanistan, of arming anti-regime rebels only to contribute to the rise of al Qaeda. Since there was never a time when that was not a very serious threat, the argument for an aggressive CIA covert operation in Syria was always highly questionable — except, perhaps to those seeking to make a career out of interventionism, like von Hippel. But von Hippel never even mentions the fact that a jihadist terrorist organization that is officially regarded by the United States as a primary global security threat is the most powerful political-military force seeking to overthrow the regime. Nor does either von Hippel or Simpson acknowledge that the Obama administration sold 15,000 TOW anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia in late 2013 knowing that hundreds or thousands would be sent to armed opposition groups in Syria. That was a very risky move, given the near certainty that large numbers of those highly effective weapons soon ended up in the hands of al Nusra Front.

‘In the context of the Syrian war in 2016, with a powerful al Qaeda-led military coalition that had gained control over an enormous territory and planning to declare an Islamic emirate in northwest Syria, the argument that Obama is risking a “power vacuum” in Aleppo is the height of dishonesty. The only real “power vacuum” that is being risked is the one that would be created if the al-Qaeda-led coalition were to be successful in defeating the Assad regime. Then Syria would either have a jihadist terrorist state in Damascus or would experience a civil war between ISIS and al Qaeda similar to the civil war among jihadists in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew.

‘That outcome — not the success of Russia in brokering a peace agreement that keeps the Syrian government intact — would be the “worst possible thing that Obama could have done”. But BBC listeners have been spared having to deal with such troublesome realities.’ (Gareth Porter, email to Media Lens, August 22, 2016)

None of this should come as a surprise. BBC ‘balance’ typically involves the selection of interviewees guaranteed to accept false propaganda claims made by the interviewer. This is how elite media manufacture the kind of false consensus that is vital for the proper functioning of a ‘managed democracy’.

DE

Our work is crucially dependent on our ability to search press archives. If anyone is willing and able to donate a Lexis-Nexis account to the Media Lens cause, we would be extremely grateful. Please contact us: editor@medialens.org

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Nauseated by the
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Ron Ridenour
Author, Activist, Journalist

Scandinavia on the Skids: The Failure of Social Democracy

(Part 6 of a 7 part series on Scandinavia “Socialism”)

“Do I live in a rogue state?” Mette Fugl’s column was headlined in “Politiken”, June 4, 2016.

Mette Fugl is a major name in Danish Establishment journalism. She worked for the largest broadcast media, Denmark’s Radio (DR), for nearly 40 years, mainly as foreign correspondent. Many view her as a prima donna in mainstream journalism. So it has special meaning that she implies that her traditionally harmless cozy country has become unprincipled, a swindler state.

Fugl outlines recent political and legal developments that warrant the “rogue” characterization.

1. The so-called “respect package”, which permits the state to punish people more severely who act “disrespectfully”, including use of violence but also verbal insults, over for official employees. Clamping down on “rioters” can cross the line of abusing civil liberties, such as the right to assembly and freedom of expression. The “respect package” includes the un-constitutional public listing of people who make “undemocratic” statements, as determined by the current government. Penalties are as high as eight years in prison.
2. The “blackout law”, as the Freedom of Inform Law of 2013 enacted by the Social Democrats is commonly referred to, allows governments to deny public access to important information necessary for democratic decision-making. A recent example is the government’s refusal to reveal documents that the former Iraq Commission collected when investigating what occurred in wars in which Denmark participates. Some evidence concerned Danish military allowing prisoners under its protection to be tortured, and that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen had agreed to help the US invade Iraq the year before the invasion, and before consulting parliament. When the current government assumed power, in 2015, it shut the commission down.
3. Tax laws that ordinary people cannot understand, and tax officials who don’t communicate and don’t collect taxes from the rich.
4. Politicians who dismiss social critics as liars. Decision-makers who refuse to be held accountable. Officials who scare those who are already scared.
5. Officials who defy international conventions on human rights, and do so with prideful joy. Politicians who virtually stand in front of barbed-wire fences and give the finger to the injured on the other side.

Refugee Bashing: Stringent! Harsh! Sour!—is the flavor of the day

Reference here is to the ever-tightening rules and laws that Danish governments make to prevent life-threatened refugees from finding shelter in this rich country, or once here their lives are made as unpleasant as possible: providing tents as residencies, preventing asylum-seeking children from attending schools, preventing couples and their children from joining one another for three years, confiscating jewelry and cash of asylum-seekers.

While many Danes, and most political parties, have become stingy towards and leery of refugees, a good number of ordinary people have helped refugees who crossed into Denmark from Germany by transporting them to Sweden, especially in September-October 2015. They did this without payment rather because the refugees had relatives or friends there, or because they felt they’d have a better chance of being accepted than in Denmark. These Danes were observed offering help by border police without being stopped. Later, the government decided to punish them as “human smugglers”. A few hundred have been judged guilty and made to pay large fines. (1)

One of the hateful politicians to which Mette Fugl refers is Inge Stoejberg, the Liberal government’s minister of immigrant and refugee “integration”. She is a principle lawmaker of the “respect package” law, which includes the right to exclude foreigners, namely and especially Islamic Inmans, from visiting Denmark if they have made statements that the government considers “anti-democratic” or “threatening” to human rights.

At the same time Stoejberg prohibits opinions and statements she cannot abide she recently pressed charges against two young native Danish women for calling her a “fascist” when the minister was in a bar. Stoejberg claims such a statement falls under a law that forbids people from “cussing-insulting-harassing” persons who are “in pursuance of official duties”, that is, drinking in a bar. This anti-freedom of expression law can cost the outlaw 6-12 months jail time.

“Fascist” is a common term frequently used about people who are fundamentally authoritarian and racists. This is how I presume these women characterize Stoejberg, and not without reason.

Stoejberg ignores the contradiction concerning her wish to deny their freedom of expression and the government backing the freedom-of-press right for “Jylland-Posten” to publish cartoons depicting Muhammad in a light that most Muslims consider blasphemous and “insulting”. The 12 editorial cartoons published on September 30, 2005 caused “Denmark’s worst international relations incident since the Second World War,” according to the right-wing Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen then in office. He and Stoejberg are in the same “Venstre” party.

Danish products were boycotted by many Muslim majority countries, and attacks occurred on Danish diplomatic missions and Christian churches. Violence between demonstrators and police ended in 200 deaths, in several countries.

Last year, the major private bus company, Movia, copied government censorship by removing an advertisement from 35 buses paid for by the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association. The ad depicted two women alongside the statement: “Our conscience is clean! We neither buy products from the Israeli settlements nor invest in the settlement industry.”

Bus Ad: “Our conscience is clean! We neither buy products from the Israeli settlements nor invest in the settlement industry.”

The United Nations has condemned the settlements as discriminatory against the Palestinian people, whose lands have been stolen. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: an occupying power must not transfer its population into its occupied territories.

Yet when a few Jews and others complained about the statement the ad had to come down. The government made no protest. There are 6,300 Jews and 270,000 Muslims living in Denmark.

One of the many rules to make immigrants-refugees lives miserable is reversing the rule that all municipalities must offer asylum-seekers medical checkups. This is especially harmful to those persons who have been tortured. According to Dignity, one of the two Danish private organizations that help rehabilitate torture victims, 30 percent of refugees have been tortured and most have traumas that make it difficult to perform their roles as parents or to be effective workers; in fact, to be integrated. Dignity denounces the new rule, saying that it would result in many torture victims not being identified and thus not receiving treatment.

Under the pretext of supporting women’s rights, the government now forcibly separates married couples if one is under 18—almost always the female—even when the male is 18 and the female is 17. This causes asylum seekers to cry on a daily basis, to feint, and many have attempted suicide.

The tenor of times concerning refugees is so hostile that one can read this: “Seldom is there good news these days. This could have been better but something is better than nothing: About 2500 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year. We are only halfway through the year. Much can still happen.”

If the highly respected Danish theologian-philosopher K.E. Loestrup—imprisoned in a concentration camp during WWII for standing in solidarity with Jews—were still alive today, he might have said of these warped persons what he spoke in a 1938 sermon:

“To be a human being is to be blameful [responsible], or co-blameable,” that is what we must understand, meant Loegstrup, and if we do not understand that, “we are so blunted and hypocritically calcified that we are no longer human beings.”

The current tenor of immorality has finally woken up some editors and reporters in the mass media, who are sometimes taking a stand for decency, and this is also prompting some otherwise indifferent celebrities to come out of their closets. Sofie Graaboel is one of them.
Graaboel is known international for her roles in TV detective series, such as “The Killing”. When making a production in England earlier in 2016, “The Guardian” asked the shy star actress what she thought about the squeeze on asylum-seekers in her homeland. I read her remarks in the April 2016 edition of the Danish state train magazine, “Ud & Se” (Out and See), which I translate.

“Every morning when I passed by the big TV in the hotel lobby I could see the story tick in from home…It seemed so fierce to me that it was that impression that was put out in the world—that Englishmen suddenly got the unequivocal picture of Danes as people who just wanted to build a wall and frighten others away. This is not the [total] reality.”

Graaboel told the newspaper reporter that she wanted to be proud to be Danish but it was difficult with the current political steps taken regarding refugees.

One of many reasons for the tone of hostility towards refugees and non-white, non-Christian immigrants is the fact that the traditional workers “solidarity” party, Social Democrats, has joined forces with the two other major parties, the blue Liberals and the “blue social democrats”, as former PM Fogh Rasmussen calls the Danish People’s Party (DF). All of them have made rules and laws limiting admission of these immigrants-refugees and reducing their rights and benefits once here.

The former S.D. spokesperson on foreigners, Mette Reissmann, called them “unwanted guests”.

Denmark’s People’s Party was made kosher, in fact, by the Social Democratic party, by its PM in 2001, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, and by S.D. leaders of LO, the major union alliance.

Then a member of one of LO’s unions, I attended a conference, in 2002, concerning social dumping. The major union ideologue, Harald Boersting, was present when I spoke from the podium. I pointed a knarred finger at him, and harshly said:

”By your reaching out to the Danish People’s Party recently, by proposing cooperation, you have taken them in from the cold. You have thereby accepted their major premise for existence: racism and foreign-hatred, splitting the working class. You send out a wrongful, immoral signal to the entire people.

“If we do not throw out Boersting and the other career opportunists in leadership, then we workers who know what our interests are must form our own unions. Part of my life was in the US, where race discrimination and war enthusiasm ruled the AFL union alliance. This was a major reason why part of the coalition formed their own unions (CIO). Discrimination within our ranks only supports big capital’s divide-and-conquer strategy, and they laugh at us when we are weak.

“I can only call what LO’s top is doing for what it is: treachery!” A major Danish daily (Ekstra Bladet) and the union magazine “Fagbladet” printed my speech.

There was some applause, but Boersting later became LO’s chairman, and DF’s founder Pia Kaersgaard was given the honorable position of parliament chairperson. The Danish People’s Party and the Social Democratic party are currently speaking for the first time of joining forces to form a coalition government, if they gain the majority next election. In July 2016, a DF theoretician and outspoken anti-Muslim Luthren preacher Soeren Krarup came forth with the proposition that his party could cooperate with the traditional Social Democrats in a coalition government.
Something Rotten in Denmark

Danes cannot remember when or if it has ever been revealed that so many civil servants had taken bribes as now. In June 2015, government auditors charged 13 civil servants with receiving gifts of up to $10,000 each from an IT business, Atea, which sold them equipment for the institutions they represent. Two of the gifts for two government employees who could decide which company would sell equipment received $50-70,000 trips to Dubai and USA. A year later, another 32 civil servants were charged with the same crimes of receiving brides from the same company. We’re talking about major government institutions: national police, foreign ministry, military secret service, state transportation, and even the criminal justice system, including public prosecutors.

A popular blogger, Anne Sophia Hermansen, reminded us that there have been individual cases of gift-taking by individuals in state institutions, including leaders of the Treasury Department and a Conservative business minister, not to mention the Royal Family, but never so many at the same time. In one case, it was not a matter of just receiving gift bribes, but of a police service employee giving two friends work orders amounting to $4 millions without allowing bidding for the jobs.

Hermansen thinks that Transparency International’s usual ranking of Denmark as the least corrupt country is in danger of being replaced by the label “Banana Republic”. And she points the figure to the key cause: the neo-liberal outsourcing of public services to private firms and the privatization of public companies. She especially points a finger at the energy company DONG, part owned and primarily directed by Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs is currently defending itself in a court case in London, in which Libyans claim GS illegally hid state monies from the public during Gaddafi’s regime, in 2010-11.

All readers have heard of the Mossack Fonseca law firm from the famous Panama Papers, and I have already mentioned this scandal as the reason for Iceland’s PM leaving office so I won’t go into any depth. But some Denmark bankers and many of the wealthiest Danes have been major players in this fraud, in which 300,000 so-called off-shore companies were set up as shells for tax evasion.

Nordea Bank Copenhagen Denmark
Photo: Roman Hobler.

Journalists digging into the 11.5 million documents released by yet another whistle-blower estimate that $6 trillion (yes trillion) are hidden away in multiple tax havens. The Danes’ “share” is calculated at between $20 and $30 billion. One of the world’s largest banks is the Scandinavian Nordea. It is a prime culprit in assisting its rich customers in hiding their wealth from tax collectors.

Of the 543 banks throughout the world associating with this fraud in Panama, Nordea ranks 11th in creating the largest numbers of false companies between 1977 and 2015, and number six since then—tens of thousand shells in all. Nordea is listed in 10,000 Mossack Fonseca secret documents. Nordea has also falsified dates and names to hide wealth from government tax authorities.

The media has also revealed that some top leaders have been enriched by this fraud. One vice-directed smuggled over one white-washed million dollars through an anonymous account in a Luxembourg branch. He is one of the top executives having assisted many wealthy Danes with doing the same, none of whom have been charged with any crime.

Another example of how Nordea operates concerns associate Vianca Scott. She was selected as the chief executive officer of several hundred companies falsified by her employer, Mossack Fonseca, many of them for Nordea. She also managed 30 shells for eight years after her death, in 2005. #

Governments have known about at least some of Nordea’s illegal activities for some time. Swedish finance inspectors caught Nordea at this tax-cheating game at least twice and fined it $10 million in two cases. But the bank is so rich it can afford to pay fines and continues business as usual.
Besides the tax shelters, the Danish tax department has lost several billions of dollars through its inability, or lack of desire, to collect taxes from people they know owe them money. Part of the reason for this inefficiency is because the government has cut back on tax staff.

The breakdown in public confidence for United States and European governments and the major political parties has reached Denmark. The chief editor of “Politiken”, Bo Lidegaard, is one of those journalists who now dares to write the truth about how “small groups have become incomprehensibly rich”, how “globalization stands weakened in voters eyes,” how ever-growing “inequality is the big sinner,” as he wrote April 10 and June 5, 2016.

Lidegaard is concerned that the very roots of the Constitution are in danger, because some contemporary laws threaten its 19th century authors’ vision—that of humanism opposed to authoritarianism, the very notion of free-mindedness, tolerating various points of view in open debate in which opponents listen to one another.

# The company is so overworked with setting up hundreds of thousands of false companies (shells) and do not expect being exposed that they select one living person to be the director of hundreds of companies, which is not possible in itself, and then when they die they don’t notice or don’t care since there is impunity, and whistle blowers are not expected — a case of oversight.

Next and last: Denmark: Return of the Vikings
……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Notes:

1) Sweden had been quite open in accepting refugees. 162,000 came in 2015. Those accepted were granted asylum permanently. This year, lawmakers have tightened the law and stopped refugees from entering without having gone through procedures prior to arrival. Now, once asylum is granted it is only for three years. The state seeks to deport 80,000 asylum-seekers. Only 20,000 refugees came to Denmark last year, 11,500 from Syria; many of the rest from lands Denmark has bombed.

Ron Ridenour

is the author of six books on Cuba including: “Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn”, Cuba Beyond the Crossroads with Theodore MacDonald, and Cuba at Sea, plus other books such as "Yankee Sandinistas", “Sounds of Venezuela”, and “Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka”. He has lived and worked in Latin America including in Cuba 1988-96 (Cuba's Editorial José Martí and Prensa Latina), Denmark, Iceland, Japan, India. www.ronridenour.com; email: ronrorama@gmail.com. 

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Liaoning (CV 16) spec sheet. (World-Wide Aircraft Carriers)

Last week, Chinese TV boasted about the “growing combat capabilities” of its Liaoning (CV-16) aircraft carrier, noting that the battle platform can carry up to 20 fighter jets, bolstering Beijing’s balance of naval and aviation power in the Pacific rim amid growing tensions.

Last Monday’s footage revealed the Liaoning carrying eight Shenyang Aircraft Corporation (SAC) J-15 fighters, along with a Z-18 and a Z-9 helicopter, the largest number of aircraft yet seen on the carrier, suggestive of plans by China to build up its aerial presence in the Pacific Ocean.

Speaking about the J-15 fighter jets during an August 4 program, Chinese Rear Admiral Yin Zhou said, “Once all eight aircraft fly out in formation, they have a strong combat capability.” He noted that the Liaoning can carry up to 20 aircraft, prompting Chinese media to further comment that the carrier exhibits “growing combat capability.”

Topping out at a speed of 1,585 mph (2551 kmh), the J-15 possesses semi-stealth capabilities, with China boasting that it is a fifth-generation weapon, with a range of 2,175 miles, providing the aircraft both the capabilities of an intercept fighter and a traditional combat warplane. Joined with the Z-18J and Z-18F helicopters, Beijing’s airpower in the Pacific is considered by some to be unrivaled.

The increased capacity of the Liaoning is substantial in the wake of a growing Chinese military presence, in response to not only the Hague arbitrational court’s ruling contrary to Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, but also demands by regional and Western governments that the administration of Xi Jinping simply rescind areas they have long held.

China has flatly stated that the Hague court has no jurisdiction in the case. Beijing also feels increasingly cornered by the Obama Administration’s “Asian pivot” and the acceptance by the South Korean regime of the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system which China fears will lead to weapons proliferation in the region.

Beijing has told its people to prepare for war, and the state-run People’s Daily urged the regime to undertake a violent assault on Australia, for their position on the South China Sea dispute. The increased combat capabilities of the Liaoning show that if China chooses to fight, it has the technical capability to dominate on a battlefield.

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Nauseated by the
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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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Dispatches from
G a i t h e r
Stewart
European Correspondent • Rome

Aftermath of coup attempt in Turkey. Getty

The world has lost its anchors. The concept of permanence no longer exists anywhere. What were once perceived as anchors of security have transformed into uncertainty and darkness, to  fear and terror,. Everything people thought of as integral is today disjointed, and once significant words themselves empty and meaningless. Everything has changed. Love has lost its power to dominate and has become transitory and its keeper, the heart, illogical. The world seems overcome with the criminal impulse. To kill is good. To die is nothing. Madness seems to have taken a hold on everyone and everything, each person erratic and lost.. Even death which unites all living beings like nothing else has changed. Death has become insignificant. Death is banal. Yet we know that death ends everything. How many lives ending in our times. The Palestinian novelist, Elias Khoury, puts stories on the same footing as life, because a story is about a life that didn’t happen, life is a story that didn’t get told.

What anchors hold Turkey together if not the threat of death. A criminal holding together a nation of eighty million  people and no one understands why or how it came about that the putsch that failed ended so many untold lives and empowered its mad leader to up the ante and lift the anchor and set sail on the transitory, in which direction no one knows. Six Italians whose stories will never be told died on the seashore of Nice, France together with seventy-eight other lives adrift.

While the mass proletarianization of the Islamic world, accompanied by Western-made globalization continues unabated, so also the intensification of the reality of exclusion and growing inequalities in that “other” world of over one billion Muslims. And thus grows the numbers of Muslims intent on  killing indiscriminately the peoples  and destroying the symbols of their tormentors too busy with getting elected to consider putting a halt to murderous globalization. And thus the “assymetrical” war of kamikaze bombs and bullets mowing down now also Europeans, a war which can hardly be won or even controlled without the contribution of the people of partly European Islamic Turkey, today radicalizing at home instead of pacifying across its borders. A situation which began in the 1970s following the onset of mass unemployment in the Islamic world of workingmen, transforming them into defeatists and creating their thirst for revenge for the losses they have suffered.

After decades of this catastrophe, unstoppable, apparently inevitable in a world where only power counts, an unstoppable attack on the Islamic way of life, what is the response of the West today to death? The response is weeping and mourning the dead, the granting of ever greater powers to western governments and their institutions and leaders. And in the Occident’s most powerful and power mad country, a madman contestant for leadership believes his electoral opponent should be executed.

Meanwhile wave after wave of refugees, young men, women and many children trying to escape the mayhem created by the West in their lands, continue to set out for Europe from Africa and the Middle East across the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean Sea, many of whom end up in the graveyard at the bottom of that ancient sea.

The chaos in Turkey, the terror spread by the Islamic State (IS-ISIL-ISIS), the ascendancy of populists like Donald Trump, and the exit of Great Britain from the European Union (Brexit) are all expressions of the lifting of familiar anchors of security worldwide, which should be sufficient to convince sane human beings to re-think their behavior. The Italian philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, notes that “the essential aspect of ancient tragedy consisted of the catharsis that caused it in the first place. But modern man has been struck blind and consequently insane. The world has apparently been struck blind and rendered mad by a chain of events only apparently disconnected one from the other and which contribute to the Great Global Disorder: the Turkish chaos, the ascendency of Donald Trump and Brexit, while the West holds fast to its conviction that its culture is still an unbreakable network covering the entire planet. Never have mere words been more significant than the expression made popular in German: Wen die Götter verderben wollen, den schlagen sie mit Blindheit. (Whom the gods want to ruin they strike with blindness.)

Gaither Stewart

Our Senior Editor based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.

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