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=By= Patrick Henningsen

It’s now clearer than ever: The US are leading a dirty war, under the table, in Syria. This is the true backdrop of the stage play in Geneva, where US diplomats are providing cover and buying time for CIA and Pentagon covert operations on the ground in Syria.

What the US State Department said yesterday is very telling, and should be a clear guide to anyone about what Washington DC’s actual agenda is in Syria:

“We look to Russia… to press for the Assad regime’s compliance with this effort, and the United States will do its part with the opposition,” Wednesday’s statement said. Russia and Iran are the primary backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the United States heads a group of regional and European countries supporting the opposition to his rule.”

Given the fact that the CIA (and the British) have both been working with these very forces – providing logistical support, weapons, and special forces training, and that it was also revealed yesterday that the US tried to include the al Nusra terrorist-held areas in its part of the “ceasefire” agreement, one can only conclude that western-backed “opposition” fighters” in Syria are comprised mostly of sectarian and Islamist militant terrorists.  So, by its own admission then yesterday, the US is managing al Nusra/al Qaeda in Syria – and thus prolonging the bloodshed.

21WIRE editor and global affairs analyst Patrick Henningsen spoke to RT International about what diplomats are doing in Geneva, but more importantly, about what western intelligence agencies and terrorist mercenaries are attempting to pull-off in Aleppo. Watch:

In the same Washington Post report, the so-called “opposition” further underlined the desperate US-led ceasefire ploy:

“The opposition said that it was “impractical to speak of only local cease-fires” and that the cessation of hostilities “must apply to all of Syria, without exception.” A statement issued by Salem al-Meslet, spokesman for the opposition High Negotiations Committee, said that they remained committed to political negotiations to end Syria’s civil war.”

Moreover, readers should also be aware by now that the multi-million dollar public relations and social media campaign entitled #AleppoIsBurning is not ‘grassroots’ at all, and is a 100% Soros-funded US digital media creation which can be classed as ‘marketing for regime change.’ This marketing campaign was triggered by what appears to be a completely fabricated story that was spoon-fed to the western media about an alleged MSF/Doctors Without Borders “hospital” in terrorist-held east Aleppo which “rebels” claimed was hit by “barrel bombs” dropped in Syrian Army “airstrikes.” According to all available evidence, this entire story appears to have been made-up for an eager western media.

Washington’s transparent agenda is now fully exposed. Will their next move be an even more desperate?

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Patrick Henningsen is a writer, investigative journalist, and filmmaker and founder of the news website 21stCentury Wire.com. He has appeared on RT news and has also written for the Guardian.co.uk, GlobalResearch.ca, and Infowars.com. He is currently investigating issues on location in the Middle East and in Southern Europe. Patrick is a graduate of California State University at San Luis Obispo.

Lead Graphic: McCain was the cheerleader for utilizing “moderate” militants to fight in Syria (Halifax Media Co-Op).

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Murray Polner
Past in Present Tense

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter the carnage of the Second World War the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what it was to lose their sons, daughters, husbands and other near relatives in war. “We’d rather not talk about it,” one mother, whose son was killed in WWII, told the St. Petersburg Times fifteen years after the war ended. “It’s a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal.” But thanks to our wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan –not to mention our proxy wars around the globe– too many Moms (and Dads too) now have to mourn family members badly scarred or lost to wars dreamed up by the demagogic, ideological  and myopic.

But every year brings our wonderful Mother’s Day. Few Americans know that Mother’s Day was initially suggested by two peace-minded mothers, Julia Ward Howe, a nineteenth century anti-slavery activist and suffragette who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Anna Reeves Jarvis, mother of eleven, who influenced Howe and once asked her fellow Appalachian townspeople, badly polarized by the Civil War, to remain neutral and help nurse the wounded on both sides.

Anna Jarvis

Howe had lived through the barbarism of the Civil War, which led her to ask a question that’s as relevant today as it was in her time: “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the costs?” Mother’s Day, she insisted, “should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines.” Howe soon moved beyond  her unquestioned support for the Union armies and became a pacifist, opposed to all wars. “The sword of murder is not the balance of justice,” she memorably wrote. “Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.”

Though not a mother, my favorite female opponent of war and imperialism was the undeservedly forgotten poet and feminist Katherine Lee Bates who wrote “America the Beautiful” as a poem in 1895, which is now virtually our second national anthem for all Americans, left, right and center.  The poem I love best is her “Glory,” in which an officer heading for the front says goodbye to his tearful mother.

Again he raged in that lurid hell

Where the country he loved had thrown him.

“You are promoted!” shrieked a shell.

His mother would not have known him.

More recently there was Lenore Breslauer, a mother of two, who helped found Another Mother for Peace during the Vietnam War and also helped coin their memorable slogan: “War is not healthy for children and other living beings.”  Years later I came to know three mothers named Carol (Adams, Miller and Cohen, plus my wife Louise) who formed Mothers and Others Against War to protest President Jimmy Carter’s absurd resurrection of draft registration. They stayed on to battle Ronald Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America.

On this Mother’s Day we could use more anger and dissenting voices of many more women of all political stripes to protest the needless and cruel sacrifice of their sons, daughters, wives and husbands as cannon fodder, as Russian mothers did in protesting Moscow’s invasions of Afghanistan and Chechnya. In Argentina and Chile, mothers and grandmothers marched against U.S.-supported torturers and murderers during the late seventies and early eighties. And in this country, the anti-war movement has often been led by women who no longer believe “War is a glorious golden thing…invoking honor and Praise and Valor and Love of Country”—as a bitter, disillusioned and cynical Roland Leighton, a WWI British combat soldier, wrote long ago to his fiancée, Vera Brittain, the great British anti-war writer.

Sadly, on Mother’s Day yesterday, today, and in the years ahead, peace  and justice seems further away than ever. How many more war widows and grieving families do we need? Do we need yet another war memorial to the dead in Washington?  More bodies to fill our military cemeteries? More crippled and murdered soldiers and civilians so our weapons manufactuers’s stock prices can rise? Do we really need to continue disseminating the myth –and lie– that an idealistic America always fights for freedom and democracy?
Thousands of American men and women have been killed in our recent and endless  wars. They all had mothers.

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=By= Roberto García Hernández

 

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the main objectives, as revealed by recent statements of high ranking officials in the US Department for Defence is to ‘neutralise’ the political, military and economic progress of powers such as Russia and China which constitute an obstacle to Washington’s thirst for global domination.

To this end (and others) the US will have during the course of the 2017 fiscal year, which begins on the 1^st of October, recourse to a budget in the region of $600 billion: a figure which exceeds (as has been the case during other periods in the past) the military spending of almost all of the other top twenty countries in the world in terms of arms expenditure.

Although President Obama has been speaking out since 2009 about the need for a world ‘free of nuclear arms,’ he has endorsed a programme for modernising these weapons: one which seeks to improve their accuracy and increase their destructive capabilities.

According to The New York Times and at a time when Obama is coming to the end of his term in power, the debate on this topic has profound implications for the country’s military strategy, federal spending and his own legacy.

American scientists are developing a new model of nuclear bomb as part of a process aimed at revitalising their atomic warheads – making them smaller, more accurate and difficult for radar to detect – at an estimated cost of more than a trillion dollars.

In addition, a programme aimed at manufacturing a thousand (technologically) high end cruise rockets which carry nuclear warheads at a cost of $30 billion is reaching completion.

The Chinese government expressed its deep concern over the potential consequences of these plans on the world’s geopolitical balance and Russia called them irresponsible and openly provocative. {Of course, as usual, the American people don’t have a clue about any of this, nor its implications. This is how their money is wasted by the ruling class.—Editor]

x

In recent weeks, high ranking officials and military personnel from Obama’s administration discussed these and other reforms before the Senate, the House of Representatives, the press and also academic institutions committed to studying defence and security issues.

The president of the board of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford indicated that the US must adjust its thinking concerning the action it takes in wars it will face in the future ‘in many regions and in a variety of different kinds of combat.’

Dunford confirmed that Commander-in-Chief of the US Obama is examining the changes which the various other American Chiefs-of-Staff must make to achieve these dynamic and complex new operations which would include terrestrial, naval and air combat as well as that conducted in cyberspace.

Obama’s aim is for his armed forces to act as a deterrent to any potential opponent that might wish to challenge the US’s position in the world and as such they are to be ready to be deployed wherever Washington feels its interests threatened. (Which is everywhere.)

Dunford, who is the highest ranking American official, made this assertion during an event at the end of March at the Centre for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), one of the main think tanks whose headquarters are in Washington D.C.

According to the general, although the US armed forces were well prepared for the wars it was engaged in over the last 15 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘significant changes’ are needed to prepare for the more complex conflicts of the future.

He recognised with regards to this that the armed forces’ abilities in terms of their leadership, control, organisation, infrastructure, defence against ballistic missiles and intelligence are not up to dealing with the more comprehensive nature and ‘broader spectrum’ of current wars.

Some of the proposals for reform will be presented publicly to Congress over the next few weeks – in order to canvass for the corresponding finance – but others may be included in a more detailed and classified report.

The basic mission behind this is to create the conditions under which the US can stand up to countries which it deems to be its main enemies among which Dunford cited Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

However, the high ranking chief pointed to terrorism as the most important challenge facing the US currently and indicated that the main objectives of the Pentagon are directed at eliminating terrorist leaders and fighters as well as the war capabilities of Islamic State (IS).

Currently, the campaign of the military coalition led by the US aims to place simultaneous pressure on IS in Iraq and Syria, however as for Syria Dunford recognises that the coalition faces serious difficulties in achieving its planned objectives.

Against Iraq

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]gainst this backdrop, the US Department for Defence made it known on the 25^th of March that it was planning to step up the number of military personnel in Iraq – where the Pentagon has some 5,000 soldiers deployed – and plans are awaiting discussion with Obama.

The announcement took place a few days after commemorating, on the 19^th of March, the 13^th anniversary of the start of the invasion of Iraq: considered by experts to be one of America’s biggest foreign policy disasters.

In this war, 4,048 US soldiers died and 32,000 were wounded at a cost of over $767 billion. In the opinion of the official shortlisted Presidential candidate Donald Trump this war ‘was a big mistake because we caused great damage not only to the Middle East, which is completely destabilised, but to the whole of humanity.’

The billionaire magnate considers that the more than five trillion dollars spent on Iraq would have been better spent on schools, hospitals, roads, airports and on other areas of the country’s infrastructure.

Criticisms of Obama

Obama’s proposals for reform are being interpreted as an attempt to neutralise strong criticism from Republican opposition levelled at his policies towards ISIS and in dealing with the threat posed by the US’s global rivals.

Seen in this context, Republican congressman Ryan Zinke indicated that the strategy in Iraq deployed in recent years by the head of the White House created a power vacuum which occasioned the emergence and development of ISIS. [The rise of ISIS was largely deliberate, with plenty of aid by Washington and its accomplices in the Gulf and elsewhere.—Editors]

Criticisms are also evident in academic and political circles including even Democrat congressmen allied with Obama.

The unending conflict in Afghanistan, the complex situation in Iraq given the military operations of IS, the possibility of an escalation of opposition against fundamentalists in Libya and the worsening of other conflicts in Europe and Asia clearly make for a complex situation for the US leader. (PL)

(Photos: Pixabay)

(Translated by Nigel Conibear – DipTrans IoLET ACIL – nigelconibear@gmail.com)

Documents of Interest

2014 Quadrennial Defense Review

CIA-Backed Artificial Intelligence Firm To Spy on Wall Street Traders

National Security Archive Launches Cyber Vault Web Site

 NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY 2010

Exemption 5 FOIA Reform Would Not Have Chilling Effect on Agency Deliberations, MDR Fees Should Be Comparable to FOIA Fees, and More: FRINFORMSUM 4/28/2016

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=By= Graeme Baker

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] British defence contractor hired mercenaries from Africa for a reported $16 a day to fight in Iraq for the US, with one of the company’s former directors saying no checks were made on whether those hired were former child soldiers.

James Ellery, who was a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said contractors recruited from countries such as Sierra Leone to reduce costs for the US presence in Iraq.

Speaking to the Guardian, the former brigadier in the British army said none of the estimated 2,500 men recruited from Sierra Leone were checked to see if they were former child soldiers who had been forced to fight in the country’s civil war.

They were cheaper options and fulfilled contracts to defend US bases in Iraq, he said.

“You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England,” he said.

“But it can’t be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I’m afraid all we can afford now is Africans.”

Aegis had contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to protect US bases in Iraq from 2004. It originally employed UK, US and Nepalese mercenaries, but broadened its recruitment in 2011 to include Africans.

Ellery, who said he was speaking in a personal capacity, told the Guardian that it would be “quite wrong” to ask whether people had been child soldiers, as it would penalise them for things they had often been forced into doing.

He said they were not liable for war crimes committed under the age of 18 and, “they are, once they reach 18, in fact citizens with full rights to seek employment, which is a basic human right”.

“So we would have been completely in error if, having gone to Sierra Leone, we excluded those people.”

The recruitment of African mercenaries and, more specifically, former child soldiers, is the subject of a new documentary by Mads Ellesoe, a Danish journalist who spent two years researching the subject.

Ellesoe told Middle East Eye that he had interviewed a “good handful” of former child soldiers who had fought in Iraq for Aegis, although there could be many more.

“There is no register so it is difficult to know exactly how many there were,” he said.

“I spoke to people who were child soldiers who had done all the worst things – cut off arms, mutilated people. They told me they were living in poverty. No one wanted to take up arms again but they needed jobs, so they went to Iraq.”

He disagreed with Ellery’s contention that former child soldiers should be allowed to take up arms for money as adults.

“The worst thing you can do is give former child soldiers a gun again. It destroys all the efforts to rehabilitate them after being dehumanised as children. Experts told me it will simply roll back the process of trying to make them human again.”

Ellesoe’s documentary provided detailed evidence from former child soldiers in the employment of Aegis. Contract documents say that the soldiers from Sierra Leone were paid $16 a day.

The worst thing you can do is give former child soldiers a gun again. Experts told me it will simply roll back the process of trying to make them human again. Mads Ellesoe

One subject, Gibrilla Kuyateh, told the documentary: “Every time I hold a weapon, it keeps reminding me of about the past. It brings back many memories.”

He said rebels forced him to amputate limbs, “not always with a sharp instrument”, and trained him to fire a Kalashnikov – a weapon he struggled to carry because he was so small.

Dan Collison, the director of programming at the War Child UK charity, said: “In our experience, children who have been involved in armed groups carry the scars of that experience deep into their adult life.

“It’s true that former child soldiers should not be discriminated against when it comes to future career choices, and that they are free and independent agents.

“However, seeking out the poorest and most vulnerable to carry out this kind of work is a business model that seems to take advantage of their situation and could well spark future trauma. “

Aegis was founded in 2002 by Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer who was at the centre of the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal, in which his previous company Sandline was found to be breaching sanctions by importing 100 tonnes of weapons to Sierra Leone in support of the government.

A current serving director is Nicolas Soames, the Conservative MP and the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill.

Sierra Leone was torn apart by a a civil war which began in 1991 and last for 11 years. The UN mission spent millions on demobilising more than 75,000 fighters, including 7,000 children, after it ended.

Ellery served as chief of staff to the UN’s mission in Sierra Leone while the organisation was demobilising thousands of former child soldiers.

A request by MEE for comment from an Aegis spokesman did not gain a response.

The documentary, The Child Soldier’s New Job, is due to be broadcast tonight in Denmark and will be distributed to other countries.

The video below discusses this story in more detail.

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Graeme Baker has worked as a reporter and editor at Al Jazeera English, The National, the Daily Telegraph and The Independent.

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Hillary Clinton…embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

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John Pilger

The following is an edited version of an address given by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled ‘A World War Has Begun’.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 – the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

Barack Obama: One of the greatest and most dangerous frauds in recent history.  (IMAGE: whoohoo120, Flickr)

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear]weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”.  According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” – a Dan Rather equivalent, say – asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (IMAGE: Gage Skidmore, Flickr).

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

A US Predator Drone. (IMAGE: Wikipedia).

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported – such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self-absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signalled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

 

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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.