Tag Archives: Civil War

Dead Chetnik discovered in US embassy

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Standard of the First Serbian Rebellion against the Ottoman EmpireAngry Serbs stormed the American embassy in Belgrade to protest the US support of Kosovo independence. In the aftermath a charred body was found. Strange detail, don’t you think? Standard news reports would say one killed, or that there had been one casualty. Instead the stories describe “a charred body was discovered in an unoccupied area” of one of the embassy buildings. State Department spokesmen made clear it wasn’t a US national, nor an embassy employee, suggesting this was a protester. Or was it a secret detainee? Was this an interrogation water-boarding victim, left to dry, then to burn to a crisp? Was this a Janet Reno set fire?

The trouble for George’s crew was that the discovery was not in the part of the embassy breached by the rioters. Nor was it where the US diplomats have their offices. For what uses are the “unoccupied” buildings behind the embassy walls?

Otherwise it’s damned convenient to suggest the charred body could be one of the rioters. As a rebellious anti-American Serb, his/her profile would likely coincide with that of a person of interest US agents might have been holding for extraordinary rendition, or working over for intelligence.

Why is the USA a backer of Kosovo independence? Kosovo has long been a province of Serbia, but suffered in WWII when the Germans massacred most of the families who lived there in retaliation for the deeds of the Chetnik partisans. As Albanian refugees moved into the empty houses, the population of Kosovo shifted until today the separatists outnumber the historic inhabitants. Otherwise, what cause has Kosovo to split from its countryside?

America fought a civil war to keep its southern states from seceding from the union. Yet today we cheer when minority regions want to break from their national borders, when those borders are those of our enemy. The soviet member states from the former union for example, or Chechnya from Russia, or Kosovo from Serbia. When it involves our allies, we show less enthusiasm: Kurdistan, Timor, Taiwan.

Chad

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There is a civil war going on in Chad, and this throws the simplistic accounts about Darfur put forward by some American bleeding hearts into total disarray. The strife in Chad, Darfur, and Sudan is about much more than bad Arabs on horseback and the evil Chinese government. It is about much more than repeating GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE over and over and over. It is about much more than ‘The Lost Boys,’ which is a simplistic propaganda display currently playing in a Colorado Springs library that supports increased US military interventionism into the region of Sudan and Chad.

The United Nations Security Council, France, and the US support the current government in Chad and this government is liable to fall within days. And this is yet another government that lacks any real support from its own people. This is yet another government where imperialists, colonialists and the international ‘bodies’ they control want to determine outcomes in the favor of their own outside interests. This is a conflict that is about Africa though.

We need to get the Europeans and Americans out of Africa altogether. They are the countries most responsible for the many African wars and the misery that comes out of that continent’s continual warfare. We need to oppose all US Pentagon interventions into Africa and not encourage them with naiveté, tears, and hypocritical and song and dance. US Out of Africa Now!

Who are we to encourage our horrible government and horrible corporate world to get involved in African affairs? The answer is maybe…FOOLS … if we do.

World Economy 101

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Graph showing US, China and India shares of world output.Here is a graph that I think illustrates world economic history quite well in a very simple way. It takes three countries and charts their portions of the world economy over 2 centuries. The three countries are the US, India, and China. See the graph Output and Outlook

Ignore the conclusion of the Harvard Professor, Greg Mankiw, as he glowingly quotes Michael Milken of the Wall Street Journal. Both these guys are American apologist buffoons who overlook the obvious about the graph they are looking at.

In 1820 India and China held almost 50% of the world’s economic output between themselves, whereas the US had less than 2% of it. But just about then the US was importing slaves ripped away from the African continent by European imperialism. As this stolen wealth in human slaves accumulated in the US and was used as labor in agricultural production, the US portion of world wealth shot up, and later not even the Civil War could brake it.

And then, European imperialism began to spread its hooks and tentacles toward India and China, where they began to colonize the 2 regions. Now you see the swing begin downward in the Chinese and Indian portions of world wealth as they were bled drier and drier by the Europeans, and in the case of the Chinese also by Japan.

It is only in the 1980’s where China, and a lesser extent India began to recover some. That was when both societies began to recuperate themselves some from the destructive effects of colonial occupation.

Since the end of WW2, the European countries and the US have had to discard colonialism and embrace neo-colonialism, where the looting of other countries is done primarily through economic structures (banks and lending institutions), and not military ones of direct occupation.

Now with the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, we see the US Empire beginning to return to using the old methods of traditional colonialism by direct military occupation to loot other countries’ wealth to enrich its own treasuries. Or at least, this seems to be the current direction where US government is now trying to implement its foreign policies.

Direct colonization by occupation troops does not have a recent history of being successful though, except in the case of the construction of the Jewish Apartheid state of Israel. The US occupation of Iraq is somewhat an extension and outgrowth of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, while the occupation of Afghanistan is more a remote fortress garrison occupation than a direct colonization attempt of any sort.

So what we have is the US Empire today directing a kind of hybrid imperialism where traditional colonialism is fused with neo-colonialism, and then again with a sort of return to the old colonial style fortess enclave structures, like the British and Portugese used to specialize in.

But now, we are off some from the theme of the simple educational graph that we linked to.

Say’s Law and undemocratic monetarism

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Richard C. Cook has written an excellent synthesis of C. H. Douglas, Keynes and Galbraith in Global Research repudiating the orthodox economics used to legitimate the Federal Reserve under which the world’s capitalist economies are enslaved.
 
Cook writes: “Overall, banks have served four main purposes—one legitimate, one dubious, one puzzling, and one deeply flawed.

1. Legitimate
“The first purpose—a legitimate one—is to facilitate commerce. It is often cheaper for a business to borrow capital from a bank than to stockpile cash itself. This was the purpose of the state banking system in the U.S. prior to the Civil War. The state-chartered banks existed to provide working capital for commercial transactions, such as stocking inventory, or for business expansion. Use of banking for these purposes was tied to specific commercial activities—the “real bills” doctrine. Of course credit used for this purpose has a cost which is factored into prices. When these loans are repaid, they are canceled at the bank which thus removes purchasing power from the economy. This is another area, besides retained corporate earnings, that contributes to the gap between prices and purchasing power identified by C.H. Douglas. But lending for commerce itself remains a legitimate activity.

2. Dubious
“The second use of banking—the dubious one—is for capital formation in the creation of new businesses, a function which overlaps with capital markets such as the stock exchanges. But this use very easily turns into lending for speculation by permitting investors to borrow money in order to buy stock on margin or to “leverage” investing by borrowing money in order to purchase whole companies. The costs of this borrowing also show up in consumer prices without introducing any new purchasing power into the system.

“This practice has mushroomed in recent decades starting with the buyout/merger/acquisition mania of the 1980s and has reached disastrous proportions through the creation and growth of equity and hedge funds. The use of bank borrowing for such speculative purposes is an obvious abuse that should not even be legal. It is actually a form of theft from the nation’s natural and normal store of credit that should be carefully administered by competent public authorities as a utility as critical to social health as the water supply.

3. Puzzling
“The third use of banking—the puzzling one—is for consumer credit. This includes borrowing for big purchases such as buying houses and automobiles, or small ones such as items bought with credit cards. Increasingly it includes purchasing even the necessities of life such groceries.

“Buying an object with a credit card often means that a person cannot afford to buy it at the present moment. So the person is gambling that he or she will be able to pay off this loan—including interest—at some point in the future. What is puzzling is that in the midst of what is claimed to be the most productive economy in the history of the world, why are most people so poor that they cannot buy what they need to live with the proceeds of their present earnings? This is the ultimate repudiation of Say’s Law and its derivatives—Libertarianism, supply-side economics, and the like.

4. Flawed
“The fourth use of banking—the one that is deeply flawed—is the financing of government inflation through purchase of public debt instruments which allow deficit financing of public activities, most particularly the waging of war. Banking for the purpose of financing war has a long pedigree, going back to the medieval times where kings were perpetually in hock to the money-lenders. Today we have the national debt, which has been used primarily for war, as well as for the Keynesian pump-priming described previously. A classic case of the use of banking for deficit financing of war is the borrowing by the federal government under the Bush/Cheney administration to raise the trillion dollars already spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”

Barack Obama is just more of the same bad US foreign policy

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Barack Obama’s dad was from Kenya and was a Luo, which is one of many tribes in Kenya. Last year, Barack Obama visited his family’s ancestral home in Kenya but what has come of it?

Kenya has now fallen into a state of civil war because the US supports the dictator ruling there, Mwai Kibaki, who is from another ethnic tribe, the Kikuyu. He, along with the dictator, Meleze, that rules over Ethiopia are the 2 key US government allies that have brought terror and chaos to Somalia during the last year, all under Pentagon direction.

So just what does Obama have to say about the US policy of continuing to support the Kenyan dictator who just stole the recent presidential election from Raila Odinga, a member of the same family tribe Obama’s family is part of? Does Obama criticize the US foreign policy of Bush which advocates pretending that the election was not stolen? Does he call for the US to stop supporting dictators in the region? The answer is NO that he doesn’t, on all accounts.

Barack Obama has pretended to be for something vaguely called CHANGE, but he is not for that at all, and the following BBC commentary Could US elect a Luo before Kenya? illustrates quite well what we can expect form Obama if he were elected to craft American foreign policy. We could expect just more of the same bad US foreign policy that has been in evidence for decades, and not just during the Bush years.

Obama is not for change it seems. He is a total fraud, and the way he has responded to the recent events in Kenya illustrates once again just how much so that is the case.

Kenya’s ethnic civil war today is a result of the US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia one year ago

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Kenya is threatened by a fall into a horrible ethnic civil war since last week’s theft of the national elections there by the US supported puppet who was voted out of office.

This dictator named Kibaki, has made 200,000 Kenyans refugees within a period of one week, and the US refuses to denounce him. Why? The answer is simple. He, along with Ethiopia’s dictator, Meles Zenawi, are the US allies in destroying the peace of neighboring Somalia, where the US took its stupid so-called ‘War on Terror’ and terrorized that people. See you tube video about the US role in planning Ethiopia’s invasion

Key to the US planning of this intervention intro nations that expand from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda is Jendayi Frazer, a former assistant of Condoleeza Rice who backed here to become Bush’s principle director as US interventionist in the Horn of Africa. She was prominently seen on the previous video, and can be seen once again on you tube video Jendayi Frazer on Al Jazeera

Frazer is at this moment in Kenya trying to patch up a deal between the winner of the Kenyan elections, Raila Odinga, and the US backed dictator still in office, Kibaki. See Kenya opposition demands poll re-run as US envoy flies in It is rather doubtful that the US government is planning to dump the man in power, just as they have not done so in Pakistan with Pervez Musharraf.

Jendayi Frazer is an interesting figure, because it is she that is the present US thug in charge of directing US intervention against Sudan. And it is she that is in charge of current US meddling in Congo, too, where what was called ‘Africa’s World War’ is on the brink of reopening back up once again.

Refugees from Kenya are flowing into Uganda at this point, too. The best thing that the US, Britain, and France could do for Africa, is just to get out of the region altogether. The more they meddle and try to control, the more destabilization is brought to the region. For example, without French meddling in Burundi and Rwanda, there might never have been a Holocaust there. It was an integral part of the cause of the genocide.

No more militarization of Africa. US out of Africa Now! Economic aid and not military interventions. US military intervention in Somalia is spreading disaster throughout the region and needs to be stopped.

The United Nations engages in war in East Congo

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In East Congo, Just like in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Sudan, and Somalia, the United Nations is playing a propaganda role backing up the US government and the Pentagon. But in East Congo , see Brutal peacekeepers: Congo’s election, the UN’s massacre, the United Nations is actually battling the population same as it has done in Haiti.

It’s troops go into battle alongside Congo government forces, and what a sorry war it is waging indeed.

What is the United Nation’s actual record in preventing strife between the Tutsi and Hutu? Pretty horrible. And now once again, this same ethnic divide is the cause of the reopening of the Congo’s on again /off again Civil War. The United Nations directed by Pentagon power from afar has no solution offered to help end this strife, beyond sending in ‘peacekeeping troops’, and ones that often engage in battle themselves, though most often they are behind the front lines support troops for occupation approved of by the US government.

What is needed, as in Sudan and Somalia, is a FULLY funded economic assistance plan that helps out ALL ethnic groups, not just one against another. As long as the United Nations is controlled by the US and European colonizers, we can expect continual outbursts of ethnic violence, not just in Africa, but around the globe. The UN currently is not really doing much more than follow Pentagon lead as directed to do so from D.C., and the Pentagon thrives off using one ethnic group against another. There is no major economic aid being offered to end the warfare in Eastern Congo.

The World Peace Movement should not see the United Nations as its friend in the effort to stop all the wars being waged by our US government. It just isn’t, and East Congo is yet another example of how ‘peacekeeping troops’ just don’t keep the peace, but instead even engage in the war.

Like the wars in Somalia/ Horn of Africa, this war in East Congo/ Rwanda/ Burundi is easily as deadly as the regional strife has been in Sudan, and the UN is having little positive role to play in actually stopping the slaughter. Nothing will until economic stability is actually created, but that is not part of the United Nations activities nor is it part of what the bi-partisan US government wants to do in Africa. The US government just wants to play one ethnic group off against the other to better control the continent.

Darfur

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Darfur AID not sanctionsYesterday’s Colorado College rally (October 29) by the interventionist group, ‘Save Darfur’, was quite an educational event. There, we got to see a train load of comfortable American speakers demand that we begin an economic war against a Fourth World country, Sudan, to be carried out by US corporations and the US government.

How could anybody be against that, their puzzled faces questioned those few of us that were there with signs against the increasing US military presence in Africa? Don’t you want to help the people of Darfur? As a matter of fact, we do, and that is precisely why we oppose groups like ‘Save Darfur’. They do not advocate economic assistance to Africans, but rather they advocate ‘policing’ them and dominating them from Washington D.C.

Not a word was said about opposing AFICICOM, the new Pentagon intervenionist command center designed to terrorize Africa. Not a word was said about the US use of Ethiopian troops to invade Somalia and overthrow the government there. The Eritrean government is predicting an attack on their country backed by the US government since they opposed, and continue to oppose, US actions against the people of Somalia. Not a word was said against US military aggression in Africa at the rally.

The mention of the US genocide against the Iraqi people met a shout from the crowd to ‘stay on focus’ about Darfur. Nobody talked about the need to end the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Pentagon. Nobody talked about the genocide of the Palestinians by the combined US and Israeli governments’ aggression. Not a word was said against the what is being done in Gaza and Lebanon, Pakistan and Iran by current US foreign policy. Not a word was said in opposition to the so called ‘War on Terror’, a made-in-the-US war that breeds terror, and celebrates terror and torture everywhere. Not a word was said against US government torture and rendition of POWs to be tortured by other countries.

Instead, we were exhorted by the speakers to begin a campaign to blame China for African bloodshed! This campaign is to be brought to bear on the Sudanese government and China from the countries that have terrorized Africans for centuries! Nobody in the pro interventionist rally crowd seemed to see anything much wrong with this? Instead they acted as if their actions were some how saintly and divine.

They talked about genocide a lot, though even Jimmy Carter has just declared most recently that the killings in Sudan do not meet the defintion of being a genocide. We agree. See the Christiian Science Monitor report ‘Elders’ criticize West’s response to situation in Darfur…Brahimi says West ‘pampered’ rebels, while Carter calls US’s use of term ‘genocide’ to describe violence ‘unhelpful.’ We too want to see the civil war and bloodshed in Sudan to come to an end, but do not agree with the activities of the group ‘Save Darfur’.

The US has spent at least $2.5 trillion in tearing apart Iraq and Afghanistan. We call on the US to spend that sort of money to end poverty, war, and disease in Africa. Why isn’t ‘Save Darfur’ doing the same? Instead they are calling for troops to be sent in, economic war to be begun against an impoverished country, and blame to be cast on the developing country of China. We find this to be shameful, and say that the Peace Movement should not put its stamp of approval on this campaign by the misnamed ‘Save Darfur’.

Peace Now. Spend the war budget on human needs. End the bloodshed by holding our own government responsible, instead of calling for it to increase its intervention into other countries’ affairs. We demand that the US start an economic aid package, without strings attached, that gives billions of dollars of reparations for the crimes that our government has done to Africans over several centuries. Forgive all of Africa’s foreign debt now. That’s how you help the people of Darfur, not by urging US power plays to control African resources.

Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission must demand no more US intervention into the affairs of other nations.

The democracy that just isn’t

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One of the pillars of US mythology is that the US is the epitome and embodiment of evolutionary democracy. From ancient Greece to us. It is a belief that is more embedded in most Americans’ souls deeper than US believers’ Christianity is. It is the foundation of our country’s recidivistic nationalism, in fact. Such a pure and developed democracy makes us superior, goes the mythology.

All very pretty a picture, except the democracy just isn’t there. Money runs the USA show, and money is the antithesis of democracy and always has been. Few have big money, yet big money runs the national show, and it runs the show so that big money can make yet more money and make the mass of people yet more powerless to stop the big.

The little want to belong so hard. That is why they identify so often with the big, even when the big is kicking them in the teeth. That is why the average US Joe and Jane is so insistent that they are seeing democracy even when all reality shouts out that it is untrue. What little was had at the time of the American Revolution was high jacked by the slave owning class, and even after the Civil War the industrial class took over from them.

Today the corporate ruling class rules through a military-industrial combined that they rule over. Americans don’t control it, they just work for it. The politicians just work for it, too. Even the ‘winners’ at the democracy game do not direct the combined, they just get pushed around by it. They chortle and bray to get elected but do not dare rock the boat. Not that they would even if they could.

For the next 14 months, the propaganda system will go into high gear to convince us that you and I are the part of the democracy that works. For most they will succeed in convincing, for some few they will fail. And afterwards, things will go on exactly the same for we have the democracy that just isn’t. What are you planning to do about it? Will you continue to believe in it?

6 1/2 million face danger of starvation in Afghanistan

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It is extremely difficult to find out what the US is doing today to Afghanistan. The press censorship is almost total and there are few reports, but according to the UN itself, 6 1/2 million Afghans continue to suffer from hunger and are in danger of starving.

Let’s face it, the UN itself is to blame, as it is in Afghanistan aiding and abetting the illegal US occupation of that country by US controlled forces. The UN, the US, and NATO have occupied Afghanistan for 6 years now, and did so after the US had used Afghanistan in a proxy war against the former USSR for some many years. This caused civil war among varying ethnic groups, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism into power, and the deaths of at least 2,000,000 people over a period of several decades.

It is high time to get the US, the UN, and NATO out of Afghanistan, and for these government bodies to begin paying billions of dollars in reparations to the people of that country. Micro-dropping out relief under the cover of continued occupation is not what the people of Afghanistan deserve after the many years of bloodshed caused by US foreign policy. Time for the US to get out, and the rebuilding of that country to begin under the control of the Afghans themselves.

Dubya, there’s been a change of plans about attacking Iran

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For months it appeared that an expansion of war from Iraq into Iran was getting underway but there has been a change in plans. No, it wasn’t that the US has been flubbing up its occupation and humiliation of Iraq so bad that made the Powers That Be pull back. Not that at all. The reason to holding back on spreading war into Iran is for another reason. That reason is Afghanistan and the Pashtuns.

It seems that the war in Afghanistan is going as bad, if not worse, as the War Against the Iraqi People is. Due to geographical , social, and historical illiteracy, the US captains of War didn’t seem to realize that the Pashtuns are spread between 2 countries, and were not merely concentrated in Afghanistan. So now, the corporate political parties are calling for new blood, but this time in Pakistan!

Obama and Hillary are fighting to out do themselves on this one. Obama doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons inside the nuclear state of Pakistan, but Hillary wants to swing with all that we got. Or at least threaten to do so. So Time Out! No bombs for you yet, Iran! Wait a sec, Tancredo.

Pakistan is calling for Great Britain to pull out of Afghanistan. Musharraf and Gordon Brown now look like Larry and Curley Stooge trying to balance themselves to not get hit by Moe. What an episode! Forty million Pashtuns….

Hey, the Arabs still have some friends around in the world. But let’s face it, we can pick on Pashtuns until Hell freezes over without anybody saying anything. And nobody in the US will ever learn a word of their Pashtun language either. It will make it that much harder for reporters to ever get out of beddedness with the Pentagon if they can’t communicate with the locals, not even in Arabic! That will teach Al Jazeera…. Al, jeer us.

This new switch in alliances is already underway as the US government plans to increase the amount of nuclear tech it gives to India. Blowback, Blowback, Blow us away back! Clowns should never be given anything other than pies to battle with. Unfortunately, our ‘leaders’ got other toys. Uh, US out of Pakistan Now! The list just gets bigger and bigger.

Pakistan is crumbling into civil war. Yet another great victory for Homeland Security!

Condoleezza Rice pushes for US into Sudan intervention

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The liberals pushing for US/ European ‘action’ on Darfur seem totally delusional. Right now, they are pressuring Rice and Bush to do what Rice and Bush want to do anyway, which is to push US governmental intervention into Sudan. The Save Darfur crowd thinks that necessary to stop genocide.

And who’s to stop US genocide against the Iraqis and Palestinians? In a decade and half of US intervention in Iraq, 10 times the number of Iraqis have lost their lives compared to those lives lost in the Darfur conflicts. Two million+ Iraqis have lost their lives while the US has lost less than 5,000 dead. In Darfur, several hundred thousand have lost their lives inside their own country of Sudan. It is a civil war, unlike the Iraqi vs US War/ Invasion/ Occupation.

GENOCIDE, that is what the US has been about for decades now. Not just in Iraq, too. How stupid to ask genocidists like the American government to intervene, supposedly all to stop a supposed genocide. It is crazy to be doing just that.

Next weekend, the CS Justice and Peace group will be holding a ‘benefit for Darfur’. I will be there with a sign that demands that the USNATO stay out of Darfur. Those inside will be demanding that the US take ‘action’. That’s what Condoleezza Rice plans to do. See BBC commentary about the Paris Summit and Rice and the result will be a US firmly planted in Africa and yet more bloodshed across that continent.

The OAS under Bush

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‘Orgies on the negotiating table’ by Colombian death squad leaders is in the news in Latin America.

A pretty picture of what the Organization of American States (OAS) located in Washington DC has actually deteriorated to, since they sponsored and secured the area where these criminals partied. And think that the US and its allies have a tough-on-crime attitude? How about a monthly $200 pension for death squad members who lay down their knives and stop dismembering peasants and other poor folk with?

Isn’t that nice? All part of the so-called War on Drugs, otherwise know as the daddy of the so-called ‘War Against Terrorism’.

See also, Colombia’s Civil War and the US

The ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ propaganda in support of US African military intervention is utterly reactionary

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Sunday in Denver one of the many nationwide rallies by the so-called ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ will be held, demanding that Bush, John Negroponte, Condaleeza Rice, and The Pentagon move troops into Sudan supposedly to help stop a civil war in that country.

Their incredible demands pushing for yet more US militarism come at the exact same time that the US government has just created close to half a million refugees in Somalia in the short time span of just 6 weeks! The US is the cause of genocides worldwide not the relief of any of them.

One cannot imagine anything more totally reprehensible and retrograde than what these nitwitty do-gooder liberal types are doing now than in currently rallying to justify to the public yet more US global foreign interventionism at this particular moment. It’s like they haven’t an ounce of common sense about them at all? It’s all very sad to see liberal peaceniks actually push for US governmental militarism rather than opposing it as they should be spending their entire energies doing.

Sure, all in the antiwar community want the end of warfare in Sudan as well as throughout Africa to occur. But calling for ‘peace’ to be implemented by the Pentagon meddling is hair brained at best. And asking for the Pentagon to intervene in Darfur is exactly what the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is doing despite their stealth tactics in going about it.

Their ‘Call to Action’ is the polar opposite of the mainstream International Peace Movement’s strategy, which is to call for the US to end the Made-by-the-US genocide currently being implemented by the US military against the Iraqi people. It is the job of the Peace community to oppose one’s own government’s imperialism and not to help justify it, as the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is currently doing.

With the construction of a US military African command center (AFRICOM) now underway, the ‘Save Darfur Coaliton’ should be opposing this. Instead, they are actually demanding that it be put into service! And once in Darfur, where else in Africa will the call go out to to send in US or US directed troops as directed by AFRICOM? We know already, do we not? AFRICOM is directing the war against the Somali people now and abducting POWs taken there to be taken out and tortured in other countries, same as has been done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The call to ‘Save Darfur’ in actuality is a call to plan out more genocides, rather than to eliminate one of them.

US troops out of Africa, not into the continent! Stop the Pentagon! No more military adventures using supposed humanitarianism as the justification.

PS… here is from the ‘Save Darfur’ blog. The same types that had the US kidnapping and removing President Aristide from Haiti and occupying that country with US directed troops are the same people now running the “Save Darfur Coalition’. This is not a group of humanitarians at all. They are from the US State Department.

….
Global Day for Darfur III – A Critical Initiative Now!
Posted on Monday, 04/23/07 – 9:23 am
Cross-posted at Globe for Darfur

Amb. (ret.) Lawrence Rossin, Senior International Coordinator at the Save Darfur Coalition, is responsible for designing and leading implementation of the Coalition’s outreach to foreign governments and non-governmental organizations to advocate on behalf of the people of Darfur. Rossin joined the Coalition after serving as Assistant Secretary General and Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, and as part of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. He has also served in a number of diplomatic positions in the U.S. Department of State.

More on the St Patricks Day parade

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Why did a group of people with the non-confrontational message of “PEACE” deserve to be kicked out of a local parade and then blamed for the disruption?

We were gathering with the same green shirts, some peace flags and a few banners for an hour before the parade began. Parade organizers had time to advise us if we were not welcome. We—thought a peace message would—fit well with the “child-like mentality” of the event, and the message did receive support from onlookers.

There was no intention to be disorderly, or children would not have been involved as they were last year. We were shocked by the police’s rude actions and lack of prior notice.

Much has happened since Bookman’s “Let there be PEACE on earth” message in last year’s Old Colorado City parade:

America’s continued escalation (surges) in Iraq against the advice of many military experts while other nations were pulling out of that country’s civil war.

Our country was seen by the rest of the world as at least indirectly supporting Israeli incursion into—Lebanon and—Israel’s taking of Palestinian land on the West Bank.

The November election was a loud and clear message from U.S. citizens to end the Middle East conflicts, which have been strengthening the terrorists’ resolve.

Wouldn’t an inquiring mind find one of those reasons alone enough to support a banner suggesting getting out of an endless war?

Members of the local Justice and Peace Commission have been in this area for years trying to raise local consciousness about dangers of greed leading to injustices and war, and how peace will only come if it begins within ourselves.

(Printed in Letters to the Editor, The Independent, April 12)

Clinton’s South American death squads haunt Bush on tour

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That other US war is still in the news outside of the US. That war the liberal Democrats want us all to forget about. Colombia.

The Clinton Era foisted off on us more than a few acts of US government military interventionism besides the US War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. The other big one (other than the war waged by the Clinton team against Iraq) was the intervention into the long festering Colombian Civil War. There our government went in big sponsoring and funding military created death squads called paramilitaries.

The big pretense was that these were private Colombian military units ouside of Colombian and American government control, but that lie is coming unglued in a huge scandal now being unfolded in the Latin American press. Bush enters with his LA/ Hollywood propaganda tour in the middle of all this, and Alternet.org has good coverage of this.

US Out of Colombia!

What’s Australia doing occupying East Timor?

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East Timor, remember it? It was the cause celebre of liberal minded world imperialist do-gooders for quite some time, and now much forgotten. Liberals in the English speaking world demanded that East Timor be split off from West Timor and the rest of Indonesia, and then established as a new ‘nation’.

Never mind that the off shore oil under the poor Third World nation of Indonesia’s control would then go into the hands of Australia. Never mind that this tiny new political structure would not be independently viable or sustainable, economically, politically, or socially outside of Austrlain government directive.

Now where are some of the liberals today? Do they support Australian troops out of East Timor? No. In fact most have totally forgotten about East Timor after it got captured as a new satellite of Australian imperialism, a junior imperialism tied in with British and American imperialisms in their region. People in East Timor are half starved and unemployed, and have their Lilliputian pseudo ‘nation’ occupied now with Australians, and not Indonesians as before. And the Australian liberal socialist group called Democratic Socialist Party that campaigned for Australian imperialism to ‘liberate’ the 1/2 of an island from Indonesia is not pressing for Australian troops to come home from East Timor now, but rather is pressing for more ‘humanitarian’ interventionism into other parts of Indonesia, to split yet more islands away from that country into Australian government control.

What’s Austrlalia doing occupying East Timor? Under the pretense of peacekeeping, they are supporting one side against another in a civil war there. Time to get these Australian troops out and back home where they belonged all along.

No peacemakers without justice makers

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The Gun that won the WestThe Peacemaker of the American west was a Colt 45. What does Peacemaker mean to you?
 
I’ll start. A peacemaker would be someone within a community, preferably a peer, who polices the activities between fellow members such as to temper the periodic injustice to which human nature is prone. Fair enough?

A peacemaker would not be an overseer of slaves for example, bent on keeping the oppressed from overwhelming their master. Not a peacekeeper. A peacekeeper would not be a security guard contracted to keep a population from disrupting the extraction of mineral wealth of a country by a foreign corporation. Not a peacemaker. A peacemaker is not a caretaker of properties fretted over by international investors. A peacemaker would not be a foreign soldier sent in to protect the sovereignty of a ruling elite who no longer can control the displeasure of their impoverished subjects. A peacemaker would not be an international police agency trying to quell a civil war, where revolutionaries are trying to free the people of their post-colonial dead weight.

A UN peacemaker in Africa is often a white cop in a black neighborhood. A United African peacemaker is often a neighbor’s soldiers occupying your land. Foreign intervention into the affairs of a sovereign nation is an invasion. Interrupting the violence of a people’s uprising is to shove into their throats more fistfuls of the status quo. And call it keeping the peace.

The principle of an international governing body such as the UN being able to dispatch peacekeepers who have no ulterior motive is an honorable one. The principle of an international body being able to make loans to small nations to provide aid for their development is likewise honorable, unless the bureaucrats in between are corrupt.

A peacemaker is meant to maintain a peaceful equilibrium, but the equilibrium must be just. The Justice and Peace movements worldwide say: no peace without justice. And who is it that’s pursuing the justice beside the reformers and the rebels? It’s not the banks.

No peacemakers without justice makers.

Is Iraq in ‘Civil War’?

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Our national debates often enter into surreal territories, and I got to say that I find the liberal sites to be almost as bad as the conservative ones when it comes to their examination of US militarism. Today finds the liberal sites, like Alternet and CommonDreams celebrating what a supposed advance forward it is that NBC started calling the situation in Iraq a civil war. The White House duly responded with, “Is not! Is not!”. So there, we now have lined up the two sides of the usual American idiocy, The Democrats versus the Republicans. Yawn…. But is the Iraq conflict in reality a ‘civil war’ like the liberals are now declaring it to be? I think not.

See, the liberal Democratic Party types don’t dare call the Iraq conflict what it really is, which is an imperialist war and colonial occupation Made in America. So they do the next best thing they can come up with, and that is to say that the US has troops centered in a country with a ‘civil war’ flaring up. Oh my! Despite ‘our’ good intentions, we’re in danger! Let’s cut and run!
This way of stupidly arguing this issue of war and peace with the Right, allows pro-warmongers to say, Look, the Iraqis need us to keep themselves from killing each other. Oh how humane we shall always be!

Liberals, this is no civil war at all. Can you imagine in our real American Civil War, would we have ever called it a Civil War if all the American cities, both South and North, had been occupied by a bunch of murderous imperial troops, from say Mongolia or Japan? And that these troops were causing the chaos between different sections of our own country’s population? See the simple difference between a real civil war, and an imperialist war? Apparently, the liberals have big trouble on that! Our American Civil War was a civil war, whereas the Iraqi chaos is not.

If one remembers this, the Vietnam War was once described by the American press as a civil war, too. The supposed good guys in South Vietnam were our friends, and the bad guys there were the commies. It was taught that South Vietnam was in a civil war where another country would not leave the South Vietnamese alone to solve their internal difficuties. That bad country was called North Vietnam. Just like then, the argument went that we had to occupy the country, simply because without us, the ‘civil war’ there would go much for the worse. Plus, another country, Iran… uh I mean North Vietnam, was wrongly entering into another country’s civil strife. and trying to turn it into a ‘civil war’! We had to save the South Vietnamese from foreign intervention into their civil war! Oh such tortured logic the warmongers must use.

Liberals refuse to tell the truth to people, back then and right now. They don’t go out and say that we have torn apart another society because we are an imperialist country that invaded and occupied their land. God forbid it if the liberals , who are such great flag waving patriots, would ever speak bad of the troops! Instead, the liberals have a tendency to revert to just moaning and groaning about, Why be over there in such a bad neighborhood? Look, there’s a civil war going on. Gotta go now! We’re getting hurt. Today, some liberal nuns were actually here in Colorado delivering food to our US soldiers! Poor soldier boys and girls. Get them out of harm’s way. They’re innocently in the midst of a ‘civil war’, and need some canned goods delivered to them! They’re starving! Bring them home and feed them better. Such nonsense makes me want to cry, but that’s what the liberal nuns were pushing today in Colorado.

What to say when the US spent all that time previous to the invasion, arming and training Kurds in the North of Iraq? When they take orders from DC, Iraqi Kurds are not fighting a ‘civil war’ then? But if they free lance like the Shia and the Sunni are currently doing, well that’s ‘civil war’? No? That’s nonsense. Iraq is still a conflict where ethnic tensions are being provoked by foreign powers. There is a simple name for doing that, too. It is called IMPERIALISM, not ‘civil war. The US is an imperialist country as is Britain. Imperialism often times picking on weaker countries, not countries that can better fight back. So the first cousin of American imperialism is COLONIALISM. Iraq is in the center of a colonial war, not civil war, Olbermann. I center on this liberal, because he is the point man of the Democrats within the media at this time. It is he that is pushing this use of ‘civil war’ to describe the battlefield that his government has made in the Middle East. LOL. Well he would say, at least, that Bush is not ‘his’ government. But then again, both Iraqi Shia and Sunni agree on one thing. This is not a ‘civil war’, but a warfare forced on them by colonial occupiers. My Fellow Americans, this is an imperialist war and a colonial war. It’s kind of shameful for us continually putting the guilt on the Iraqis on this matter.

The sheer nature of imperialism, is that the imperial power always uses one sector of the colony against another. It only gets called civil war, when the imperial country doesn’t klike the way things are spinning out of its control. Then they can withdraw, and say, “Oh those primitive people. They hate each other. They are always in a civil war”. I’m waiting for the day when NBC and Olbermann start calling the Middle East wars of the US for what they are. What they really are. That’s right. I’m waiting to hear the righteous Olbermann to start calling the foreign policy of the US, IMPERIALISM. But Democratic Party motivated liberals and their liberalism can’t be depended on too much.

Is Africa’s World War about to restart?

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We don’t hear much about this one in the US, but only in the last 5 years, ‘Africa’s World War’ has left approximately 7 times the number dead that the US has been responsible for killing in Iraq in the same time frame. As one commentary put it, it is as if the National Republic of Congo (Zaire) has suffered a 9/11 sized disaster everyday of the last 5 years.

Actually that would only be about 1 and 1/2 million deaths, but I see that most estimates are that 5-8 million have died since Mobutu fell in 1997. Another statistic I have also seen, is that Africa as a whole has suffered 90% of the world’s victims lost through world warfare since the fall of the exSoviet Union. And the National Republic of the Congo has been the centerpiece of all this carnage. Why the warfare here?

In short, it is a continuation of the colonial destruction done to the Congo by Belgium, which slaughtered off upwards of 25,000,000 a century ago when it ruled this area, and by the US Cold War supported dictator Mobutu, who ruled for 32 years until overthrown by Kabila-led forces in 1997. The income of the 45,000,000 inhabitants of this Western Europe sized country dropped to 1/10 of what it was within the first 2 decades of his reign. His wealth held in Swiss banks was at an estimated $5 billion at his fall! Multiple US presidents gave him his needed support in American efforts to prop up ‘friendly’ regimes in Africa against the Soviet Union.

Cut to the recent cease fire. This was brokered in 2003 under an arrangement to hold ‘free elections’ in 2006, and put a temporary halt to the conflict. The elections just finished, and despite a certain US peanut farmer saying that all was done Southrern Baptist fair, the most popular candidate never was allowed to participate and the vote between Kabila and Bemba is now being contested by Bemba’s forces, who just burned down the Supreme Court building alleging that the whole election was a fraudulent farce. The final judicial decision is to be made within days, but the result is already in as far as the US and Europeans are concerned. They’re sticking with Kabila to say in power.

THe UN has 17,000 troops in place. Not even enough to begin to stop renewed warfare. Bush is now spending about $5 billion per year in US aid sent to the country. Contrast that to the trillion plus spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Probably all it would take to stop the renewal of bloodshed would be a fair distribution of some billions or so to the respective sides of this civil war in the years ahead. But where is the US war industries profits in doing that? So the likelihood is that this horrible war will crank up full speed within weeks once again.

Israel’s Targeted Assassinations leading to renewed Lebanese Civil War

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‘Targeted Assassinations’ have become an integral part of official US policy and official Israel policy. Nowhere is this illustrated more than with Israel’s constant running after Hamas leaders to try to sniper them out. By sniper though, often times this means dropping bombs or shelling neighborhoods and murdering entire families of innocent people, and not just firing away at a single person using a rifle with scope attached.

The US leadership likes this Israeli Jewish terrorist mode so much, that it is now using the same tactic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and with the exact same consequences. As we have come to see, ‘collateral damage’ is often quite high. It should be clear, that what the Israeli and US governments refer to as targeted assassination’ in reality is nothing more than terrorism. It’s another semantics game like the Right also plays with the meaning of what constitutes torture. When the Right Wing US and Israeli governments do it, it supposedly does not constitute torture, or so say their apologists.

So what does this have to do with Lebanon? It is quite simple really. When state terrorism (targeted assassinations) becomes official policy, the victims almost always reply in kind. They too start targeting the leaders of the Right for ‘targeted assassinations’. Both sides, Right and Left, then usually enter into a prolonged sort of ‘dirty war’, where both sides employ terrorism against each other’s leaderships. Yesterday, Israel murdered Hamas leaders in Gaza, and today, Hezbollah murders a US-Israel allied, Christian Lebanese leader, Perre Gemayel. And as pointed out previously, this situation is actually being fomented and inflamed by the deployment of United Nations troops into Lebanon in order to save Israel from any consequences from beginning a bombing attack on Iran.

The European’s tolerance for Israel’s policy of ‘targeted assassination’ of Arab leaders it doesn’t want to deal with, PLUS the allowing of the US to turn UN ‘peacekeepers’ into agents of Bush’s foregin policy is throwing fuel onto the regionalization of the Iraq and Afghan fiascoes. The US government seems intent on turning the entire ME oil producing region into a zone of anarchy and chaos, where eventual control can ultimately only fall into Pentagon hands. It is a policy to drench in blood this entire area of the world in order to grab the energy supplies out of the ensuing chaos.

The United Nations preps the way in Lebanon for US/ Israeli war on Iran

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Once again, like with Haiti, the UN is acting as just another arm of the Pentagon. In Haiti, the Bush Adminstration toppled the popular government of Aristide, and then moved UN troops in as occupation force in support of the group of US installed thugs. Now in Lebanon, once again the UN is being used as US spearhead for Bush’s foreign policy of aggression against yet 2 other countries, Iran and Syria.

The 15,000 UN troops that are being set up in Lebanon are not being sent there to protect Lebanon from attack by Israel. It is a little late for that, is it not? Quite the contrary. They are being deployed so as to neutralize a front where Iran and Syria, with their Lebanese Hezbollah allies, could resist military attack from Israel and the US, and try to strike back at Israel for bombing them. The UN, is effectively now just another NATO/ Pentagon/ Israeli military army in operation on the Lebanese regional front.

By this deployment, the UN is also actually fomenting and fueling new flareups of civil war within Lebanon. Kofi Annan, despite all his sweet talk, is basically making himself nothing more than a paid whore for George Bush, and paving the way for an new US-Israeli war, this time against against Iran and Syria. And Lebanon be damned.

It is unfortunate that the US and European antiwar communities still have so many delusions about the United Nations. There is nothing united about the world’s nations, and the UN ‘peace keeping units’ are now a totally captured body of troops being used by the US in its plan to reorganize its colonial control over the Middle East and world oil supplies. NATO in Afghanistan, Pentagon in Iraq, UN as ‘buffer’ in Lebanon, and Israel free to attack Iran on behalf of its US master. It’s a bad situation for those looking for a peaceful world and an end to this continual bloodshed. Don’t count on the UN ‘peacekeepers’ anymore. They are part of the problem, not any solution to it.

Jay Fawcett, Moderate Republican at best

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It is really sad to see the local liberals buying into the campaign of Jay Fawcett. Granted that his opponent Doug Lamborn is about as repulsive as you can get, but that’s still little excuse to go out and vote for Fawcett. The most notable aspect of his campaign has been how he has tied himself into alliance with the national campaign for president of Wesley Clark, Clinton’s man for invading Yugoslavia.
 
How is supporting Fawcett and Clark pushing for peace and less military? Both were quiet for those 8 long years, as Clinton and Gore waged war on Iraq through bombings and economic sanctions that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent civilians. Which also led to the beginning of the ethnic dividing up of Iraq that is destroying the country at present. Clinton’s military people pushed into Kurdish Iraq to arm and use them against the Sunni Bathists of Hussein. Now Iraq has an ethnic civil war running hot that is destroying the country.

Fact is, both Fawcett and Clark have straddled the line between the Democrats and the Republicans. Today, Fawcett published a big propaganda piece trawling for Republican votes titled ‘Why Local Republicans Don’t Support Doug Lamborn for Congress’. The real question is why are liberals so desperate that they would vote for Jay Fawcett, moderate Republican? Have they not gone to his website? Do they not know what he actually is? How is a vote for this militarist jerk ‘taking back the Democratic Party’? If he had already been elected to Congress, he would have certainly voted alongside of Democrat Salazar in supporting the Bush Adminsitration’s use of torture on POW’s taken in the fighting. In no way is Fawcett a break from supporting US militarism. He endorses it. He is part of it. Not an obstacle to Bush at all. Why would any liberal want another Democratic Party enabler of Bush’s program in Congress? Fawcett supports a continual US military agression against the rest of the world as Bush and Cheney do. He just thinks that Bush is botching the operation.

Blood diamonds

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Before it was a movie title, it distinguished a type of diamond. Blood Diamond was a diamond industry term, a Scarlet Letter, to characterize an uncertain, perhaps blood-tainted, provenance. To be specific, a diamond bought from a rebel controlled region of the third world where the diamonds are traded illegally, meaning outside the market share of the diamond cartel, because a diamond sold without profiting the traditional diamond merchants is an illegal diamond. Don’t you find that odd?

The price of diamonds is kept artificially high as a result of the diamond cartel. By a tradition of laws, the Antwerp merchants have managed to make anyone else’s trading of diamonds illegal, enforcing their monopoly. If you were to discover a diamond mine and did not want to do business with the Antwerp monopoly, you’d be considered an international criminal. In the turmoil of a civil war, if you seized a mine, by definition owned by one of their partners, the cartel would label your merchandise bloody.

The diamond cartel/monopoly is reeling, so we hear, from the Hollywood release of the movie Blood Diamonds. Not because it enlightens the public about the diamond market, but because the movie embellishes upon the unpalatable stigma of blood diamonds. Diamond sellers are worried that their business will be tarnished by their own ugly creation, in this case the severed limbs of the people of Liberia forced to work in the diamond mines by feuding rebels. The merchants are selling those same diamonds after all, it only depends on who sold which to whom.

Therefore the industry is stepping up its reassurances that showroom products are guaranteed not to be blood diamonds. There are stamps of authenticity, for example, which would be lacking on blood diamonds. Really? Do you imagine they hold huge bonfires to destroy contraband diamonds like so much unwanted weed? A blood diamond captured from diamond smugglers becomes a plenty-fine diamond, once again profitable to the cartel. The logic being that the diamonds were confiscated, thus no money went to reward their bearers, thus no bloodletting was given a monetary encouragement.

Even if this was true, it doesn’t address what blood diamonds are about.

The diamond cartel was a fortuitous monopoly to grow out of a few merchants’ control of the then known diamond mines. It’s a throwback legacy of the early trade monopolies granted by kings to encourage exploration and trade. The Portuguese were once given the exclusive right to trade around the horn of Africa, then later around the horn of America. The advantage was held later by the Spanish, the Dutch and the English. The Dutch East India Trading Company was a corporate example, the Hudson Bay Fur Trading Company another. We’ve long since outgrown the need to grant exclusives to conquering explorers. Except for diamonds.

The diamond monopoly upholds diamond prices which is sort of in everybody’s interest, the everybody who owns a diamond. Unregulated, it’s calculated that diamonds would lose half their value, maybe more were diamonds to lose their “a diamond is forever” allure.

There’s another common interest which I’ll address in a moment.

For now, imagine the cartel/monopoly concept if it had been granted for automobiles. Daimler Benz would be producing expensive cars for the wealthy and Henry Ford’s Model-T would be a blood-car. Only the rich would be driving cars and policemen would be chasing the poor in illegal vehicles.

Today’s monopolies are granted through patents and copyrights. Artificial rights which ensure high prices and that the poor are left out. As this applies to medicines and technology, the price differential becomes inhumane. Aids drugs are a tragic example.

The other important reason we tolerate the diamond monopoly is to maintain stability for the ownership class within the globalized economy. Diamonds are one of the few commodities which compete with a global currency. Drugs are another. The movement of value, as represented by diamonds, can fuel economic activity outside the control of banks and regulatory agencies. Commodities represent real value, as compared to currency which represents but a representation. As a result, diamonds which are easily concealed from government tax collectors, can readily be used to fund counter-government activities such as rebellions and emancipations. Bad for business.

Banners make the news

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See stills from the TV spotThe local NBC affiliate 5/30 did an excellent story involving Camp Casey. See the video clip here.
 
They covered our Sunday morning send-off of IVAW members who were leaving to join the March 14 peace march along the Gulf Coast. And they also gave our banners some visibility.

THERE IS NO WAR ON TERROR flies in the face of the Media worldview. Let’s dispell a couple of other media reported fallacies, too verbose for banners.

Dubai port scandal
The problem with a port takeover by a Dubai owned company has nothing to do with U.S. security, not as concerns terrorists. The takeover is part of the larger globalization move to privatize world infrastructure and enforce “free trade” subjugation.

The only tie-in with terrorism has to do with Dubai’s involvement with the 9/11 hijackers. Whoever let 9/11 happen, under the nose of the FBI, could make something happen again, out of reach of American security agencies, facilitated with Dubai’s complicity.

Samarra mosque bombing
Who is it that wants a civil war in Iraq? The quick and mutually diffused tensions following the mosque bombing suggests that Iraqis do not want a civil war.

Evidence is pointing to U.S. involvement in the destruction of the Golden Dome Shrine in Samarra. Residents are fighting US and UK efforts to begin rebuilding the dome before the forensic evidence can be analyzed to determine the real culprits behind the explosives.

Experts doubt that Sunnis were behind the destruction of a mosque which is revered by both Shia ad Sunni alike. Pious peoples do not behave that way. Even the troubles in Ireland never devolved to exploding each other’s churches.

Where in the world are there peoples so uncultured, so spiritually callous, so uneducated, insentitive and irreverant that they destroy their brother’s places of worship?