In this text, John Pilger writes of a "Faustian pact" between war-wielding elites who diminish the dangers of Western, modern fascism – well helped by propaganda disguised as news.
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When the 70 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was marked a short time ago, we were reminded of the great crime of fascism, with the Nazi iconography clearly present in the consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering images of black march shirts, in frightening and clear reminder of the movement's criminal nature. But in the same liberal societies, where the war-ravaged elites urge us never to forget, the increasing danger of a modern form of fascism is diminished – for it is their fascism.
"Starting an attack war," said the Nuremberg court's 1946 judges, "is not only an international crime, it is the largest of all international crimes as it carries with it the accumulated evil."
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, it would have been something Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Had the United States and their militants not begun their war in Iraq in 2003, nearly a million people would have been alive today, and the Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have enslaved us with its cruelty. They are the results of a modern fascism we have come to expect through the bombs, massacres and lies that make up the absurd theater we call news.
Like fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, heavy lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome, thanks to the ubiquitous and repetitive media that carry out its censorship through omissions. Take for example the disaster in Libya.
In 2011, NATO conducted 9700 attacks against Libya. More than a third of these were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misrata and Sirte were bombed. The Red Cross found mass graves, and UNICEF reported that "most [of the children killed] were under ten years old".
The lie of genocide. The public portrayal of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi as a fox with a "rebel bayonet" was greeted by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." The murder of him and the destruction of his country were justified by a great, well-known lie: he planned "genocide" against his own people. "We knew that if we waited another day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could be subjected to a massacre that would resonate throughout the region and put a stain on the world's conscience."
This was the creation of Islamic militias with the prospect of being beaten by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters it was going to be "a real massacre, a massacre similar to the one we saw in Rwanda". On March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark of NATO's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".
Many of the "rebels," secretly equipped and trained by British special forces SAS, became ISIS fighters – whose latest video shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers taken in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by bombers from NATO.
Operation Cyclone became the 'war on terror', which cost countless men, women and children life in the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.
For Obama, David Cameron and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi's real crime was Libya's economic independence and his stated intention to stop selling Africa's largest US dollar oil reserves. The Petrodollar is a mainstay of US imperial power. Gaddafi boldly planned to create a single African currency linked to a gold standard, establish a bank for the whole of Africa, and promote economic union among poor countries with valuable resources. Whether this happened or not was not decisive. Only the idea was totally unacceptable to a US that was preparing to "enter" Africa and entice African governments with military "partnerships".
Following NATO's attack under the auspices of a Security Council resolution, Garikai Chengu writes, Obama confiscated "$ 30 billion from the Libyan central bank, money that Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African central bank and the African gold standard-based currency".
The "humanitarian war" against Libya made use of a model close to liberal western hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia because, they said, the Serbs committed "genocide" on ethnic Albanians in the outbreak province of Kosovo. Davis Scheffer, US ambassador both here and there for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as 225 ethnic Albanian men between the ages of 000 and 14 could have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair urged the Holocaust and "the spirit of World War II." The West's heroic ally was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with a criminal past that was completely ignored. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said they could call him anytime on mobile
his phone.
his phone.
The tragedy in Afghanistan can almost be compared to the epic crime in Indochina.
When the NATO bombing was over and much of Serbia's infrastructure as well as schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national television station were in ruins, international investigative groups came to Kosovo to uncover evidence of the "holocaust". The FBI did not find a single mass grave and returned home. The corresponding Spanish group did the same, and the leader condemned "a semantic pirate from the war propaganda machines". A year later, a UN tribunal on Yugoslavia determined the final number of deaths in Kosovo: 2788. This included fighting on both sides, and Serbs and Roma murdered by KLA. There was no genocide. The "Holocaust" was a lie. The NATO attack had been a deception.
Behind the lie, there were serious intentions. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had served as a political and economic bridge during the Cold War. Most of the country's institutions and larger factories were publicly owned. This was unacceptable for an expanding EU, and especially not for a recently reunited Germany that had started a push eastward to conquer its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. When the Europeans met in Maastricht in 1991 to plan the disastrous eurozone, a secret agreement had been reached: Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was lost.
In Washington, the United States ensured that the weakened Yugoslav economy was denied loans at the World Bank. NATO, which at that time was almost like a dead survivor from the Cold War, was reinvented as an empowerment force. During a "peace" conference in the French Rambouillet in 1999, the Serbs were exposed to the deceptive tactics of the power factor. The Rambouillet agreement contained a secret Appendix B, which the US delegation had added to the last day. It required military occupation of all of Yugoslavia – a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation – and implementation of "free market economy" and privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign such a thing. The punishment came quickly. NATO bombs ruled over a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, over one-third of the UN member states – 69 countries – have been exposed to some or all of the following from modern American fascism: they have been invaded, thrown out of their governments, their people's movements suppressed, their people bombed, their economies deprived all protection, their communities subject to an invalidating siege known as "sanctions". British historian Mark Curtis has calculated that the deaths count millions. In each case, a huge lie has been put out.
"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." These were the opening words of Obama's State of the Union speech in 2015. In reality, about 10 soldiers and 000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. "The longest war in American history is brought to a responsible end," Obama said. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 20 than in any other year since the UN began to count. Most – civilians and soldiers – were killed during Obama's time as president.
Crushed democracy. The tragedy in Afghanistan can almost be compared to the epic crime in Indochina. In his acclaimed and often cited book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes Zbigniew Brzezinski, the sponsor of American politics from Afghanistan to this day, that if the United States is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it can not support a people's democracy – because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that arouses popular enthusiasm… mobilization for empire building. ” He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state robs democracy. In 1976, when Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser, he demonstrated his point by killing Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this important story?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept across Afghanistan, the world's poorest country, and finally threw away the remains of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The Afghan People's Democratic Party (PDPA) formed a government, declaring a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, full religious freedom , equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. Over 13 political prisoners were released, and police files were burned public.
The new government introduced free health services for the poorest, forced labor due to debt was banned, and a mass literacy program was launched. For women, there was unprecedented progress. In the late 1980s, half of college students were women, and women accounted for almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, one-third of public servants and the majority of teachers. "All girls could go to high school and university," remembers Saira Noorani, a female surgeon. “We could go where we wanted and dress as we wanted. We used to go to cafes and theaters on Fridays to watch the latest Indian movies, and listen to the latest music. Everything started to go wrong as the mujahedin began to progress. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was strange and sad to think that it was these people the West supported. "
The PDPA government was supported by the Soviet Union, although former Foreign Minister Cyrus Vance later admitted that "there was no evidence of any Soviet intervention [in the revolution]". Frightened by the growing confidence in liberation movements around the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan succeeded under the PDPA, Afghan independence and progress would mean "a threat from a promising example".
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly approved support for "fundamentalist" tribes known as the mujahedin. It was a program that grew to over $ 500 million a year for American weapons and other aid. The goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first secular, reform – friendly government. In August 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that "the overriding interests of the United States" would benefit from the removal of the [PDPA Government]. no matter what setbacks this may entail for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. " The highlights are mine.
Mujahedin was the forerunner of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Mujahedin also included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was dealing with opium and throwing acid in the face of women who would not wear hijab. He was invited to London and hailed by Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".
Such fanatics could remain in their tribal world if Brzezinski had not initiated an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia, thus undermining secular political liberation and "destabilizing" the Soviet Union by creating "a few agitated Muslims", as he writes in his autobiography. His grand plan coincided with the aspirations of Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haq to dominate the region. In 1968, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI began recruiting people from all over the world to Afghan Jihad. Saudi Arabian multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Friends who could eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and received paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This went under the name "Operation Cyclone". The operation's success was celebrated in 1996, when the last PDPA president in Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah – who had asked the UN General Assembly for help – was hung in a pillar by the Taliban.
The backlash from Operation Cyclone and its "few agitated Muslims" came on September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", which cost countless men, women and children life in the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. . The message of power was and is this: "You are either with us or against us."
Today, the world's largest single terror campaign involves executions of entire families, wedding guests, grieving at funerals. They are Obama's victims.
The common denominator of fascism before and now is mass murder. The US invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones" [assuming that all that was moving were enemy soldiers, overs. note], "body counts" [progress in war was measured in stated number of killed enemies, overs. and "collatoral damage" [killed civilian and destroyed civilian installations], overs. note.]. In Quang Ngai Province, from which I reported, many thousands of "gooks" were murdered by American soldiers; yet only one massacre, the one in My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, history's largest bombing of aircraft created a period of terror that can today be observed from the air in the form of dense rows of bomb craters resembling giant necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world's largest single terrorist campaign involves the execution of entire families, wedding guests, mourners at funerals. They are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama chooses from a "kill list" that the CIA presents to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. Then he decides, without a tab of legal basis, who will live and who will die. His killer weapon is the Hellfire missile, carried by a driverless aircraft known as a drone. The victims are grilled, and the surroundings are adorned with body parts. Each hit is recorded on a screen far away as one "Bugsplat» ( "Insect splatter").
Hollywood's distortion. "Those who march," writes historian Norman Pollock, "are a replacement for the seemingly more harmless militarization of the entire culture. And instead of the hungry leader, we have him who never became a reformer, but who works carefree, plans and kills while smiling all the time. ”
What unites old and new fascism is the cultivation of superiority. "I believe in the exceptionalness of the United States with every fiber in myself," Obama said, sparking live declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was Hitler worshiper Carl Schmitt who said: "The ruler is the one who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. The fact that it is still not recognized as a predatory ideology is the result of an equally little recognized brainwashing. Insidious, unexplained, presented cunningly as successful enlightenment, its complacency pretends to be Western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American greatness where almost everything was distorted. I had no idea it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of 13 million soldiers. By comparison, US losses – including the Pacific War – were 400. Hollywood turned upside down on this.
The difference now is that the cinema audience is invited to be moved by the "tragedy" of American psychopaths who must kill people in distant parts of the globe – just as the president himself kills them. The Incarnation of Hollywood Violence, actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his film American Sniper, which is about an authorized killer and maniac. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, family-friendly movie that broke all audience records on the first show days."
There are no heroic films about America's embrace of fascism. During World War II, the United States (and Britain) went to war against the Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and resisted the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped a fascist military junta to power in Athens – just as they did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and Eastern Europeans who had been secretly leading the Nazis' aggression and crimes against humanity were given a sanctuary in the United States; many were treated extremely well and received rewards for their talents. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V2 terrorist bomb and the US space program.
"Scum". In the 1990s, former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts for NATO, and the heirs of a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given the opportunity. Ukrainian fascists responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union were rehabilitated, and their "new wave" was hailed by Western rulers as "nationalists".
The highlight of this was reached in 2014, when the Obama administration spent $ XNUMX billion on a coup against the elected government. The storm troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Among their leaders was Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for the purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum", which includes gays, feminists and people on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the coup government in Kiev. First Deputy President of the Ukrainian Parliament, Andriy Parubiy, one of the leaders of the ruling party, is among the founders of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced that he would fly to Washington to have "the United States give us high-precision modern weapons." If he succeeds, it will be perceived as an act of war by Russia.
The intensity of the black campaign against Russia and the portrayal of the country's president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I've ever experienced as a reporter.
No Western leader has expressed his opinion on the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe – with the exception of Vladimir Putin, of the country that lost 22 million people in a Nazi invasion that came through Ukrainian border areas. At the security conference held in Munich a short time ago, European leaders were ousted by Obama's Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland for opposing American arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Minister of Defense as "Minister of Defaults". It was Nuland who was the brain behind the coup in Kiev. She is the wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading neoconservative star and one of the founders of the extremely right-wing Project for a New American Century, and was foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney.
Nuland's coup did not go as planned. NATO was prevented from taking Russia's historic and legitimate naval base in Crimea. The predominantly Russian population of Crimea – the peninsula illegally given to Ukraine by Nikita Kruschov in 1954 – voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they did in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary and popular, with international observers present. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime threw itself on the ethnic Russian population in the east with a wildness like ethnic cleansing. They deployed neo-Nazi militias following the pattern of the Waffen-SS, and bombed and besieged towns and villages. They used mass starvation as weapons, cut electricity supply, froze bank accounts and stopped social assistance and pensions. Over a million refugees flooded the border with Russia. In Western media, the "violence" refugees were caused by "the Russian invasion". NATO commander, General Breedlove – his name and actions could have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40 Russian soldiers "gathered". In a time of detailed satellite monitoring, he was unable to provide evidence of this.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual peoples of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long wanted a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both independent and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists", but citizens who want a safe life in their homeland and distance themselves from the coup in Kiev. Their revolt and the establishment of independent "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attack on them. Little of this has been explained to a western audience.
The ink Campaign. On May 2, 2014 in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive at the union's headquarters, with police standing next to it. Right-wing Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history." In the American and British media, this was described as a "gloomy tragedy" caused by "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people who gathered signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times failed to print the story because they rejected the warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients as Russian propaganda. The Wall Street Journal condemned the victims – "Mortal fire in Ukraine probably started by insurgents," the government said. Obama congratulated the junta for his "restraint."
If Putin can be provoked to help them, his pre-assigned "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander said in a way that was, almost inadvertently, removing the entire basis for US and EU sanctions against Russia, as he said during an emphatic press conference: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting regular units from the Russian army. " There were "individuals" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news to worry about. Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister, has called for "full-scale war" against Russia's nuclear power.
Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, tabled a bill on February 21 that would allow US weapons to be sent to the Kiev regime. When he presented it to the Senate, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian forces entering Ukraine, images that have long since been revealed as false. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's false pictures of Soviet installations in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's falsified evidence against the United Nations about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of the country's president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have experienced as a reporter before. Robert Parry, one of America's most prominent investigative journalists and the man who uncovered the Iran-Contras scandal, recently wrote: "No European government since Adolf Hitler's Germany has found it appropriate to deploy Nazi stormtroopers to war against its own people, but the Kiev regime have done so, and that with knowledge and will. Nevertheless, careful work has been done throughout the media and political spectrum in the West to hide this reality. So far it has been overlooked facts that have long been well known… If you were to wonder how the world could stumble into World War III – much like it did in connection with World War I a century ago – just look the rage associated with Ukraine, which has proved unacceptable to facts or reason. "
In 1946, a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Court said of German media: "The way the Nazis used the media in psychological warfare is well known. Before each major attack, with a few exceptions based on expediency, they launched a press campaign to weaken the victims and prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the Hitler State propaganda system, the daily newspapers and radio broadcasts were the most important weapons. "
In The Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash actually called for World War II. "Putin must be stopped," the headline said – "and sometimes only guns can stop guns." He admitted that the threat of war could "fuel a Russian fear of being surrounded," but that was ok. He ramped up the military equipment the job requires, and informed his readers that "America has the best toolbox."
In 2003, Oxford professor Garton-Ash repeatedly repeated the propaganda that led to the massacre in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stored huge quantities of chemical and biological weapons, and he hides what is left of them. He is still trying to get nuclear weapons ”. He praised Blair as a "Gladstone-style Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote: "Now we face the next big test for the West after Iraq: Iran."
The outbursts – or, as Garton-Ash prefers, his "painful liberal ambivalence" – are not atypical of the part of the transatlantic liberal elite that has reached an agreement à la Faust. War criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, where the Garton-Ash text was published, printed a full-page ad for a US Stealth bomber. An intimidating image of the monster from Lockheed Martin read: “The F-35. GREAT for Britain. » This American "tool" will cost British taxpayers 1,3 billion pounds, and the forerunners of the F-model have brought death all over the world. In line with the advertiser, an editorial in the Guardian has demanded increased funding for the military.
And again, there are serious intentions. The rulers of the world do not want Ukraine merely as a base for missiles; they want the country's economy. Kiev's new finance minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former official in the US State Department responsible for US investment abroad. She quickly gained Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine because of the country's abundance of gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son sits on the board of Ukraine's largest oil, gas and fracking company. The producers of genetically modified seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's fertile topsoil.
Above all, they want Ukraine's powerful neighbor, Russia. They will balkanize or divide Russia and exploit the world's largest deposits of natural gas. As the ice on the North Calotte melts, they want control of the North Sea with energy resources there, and Russia's long, arctic coastline. Their man in Moscow was formerly Boris Yeltsin, a drunkard who gave the country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility that rests with the rest of us is obvious. It is to find and show the unjustifiable lies to the warlords, and never to be in secret understanding with them. It is to revive the great, popular movements that transformed a fragile civilization into modern, sovereign states. The most important thing is to prevent us from being conquered – our minds, our humanity, our self-respect. If we keep quiet, our victory is guaranteed and a holocaust beckons.
Translated by Lasse Takle
