The Spin that Never Stops Here: Obama's Middle East Admission Not Enough

Obama's Admission Not Enough: US Spin on Middle East Violence Must Stop

by Ramzy Baroud - Middle East Eye

Truly, US President Barack Obama’s recent call to address the root causes of violence, including that of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) and al-Qaeda was a step in the right direction, but it is still miles away from taking the least responsibility possible for the mayhem that has afflicted the Middle East since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“The link is undeniable,” Obama said in a speech at the State Department on 19 February “When people are oppressed and human rights are denied - particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines - when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism. It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit.”

Of course, he is right. Every word. However, the underlying message is also clear: it’s everyone else’s fault but ours. Now, that’s hardly true, and Obama, once a strong critic of his predecessor’s war, knows it well.

Writing at MSNBC.com, Sarah Leah Whitson went a step further. In “Why the fight against ISIS is failing,” Whitson, criticised the anti-IS alliance for predicating its strategy on militarily defeating the group, without any redress of the grievances of oppressed Iraqi Sunnis, who, last year welcomed IS fighters as “liberators”.

“But let’s not forget how Iraq got to that point,” she wrote, “with the US-led Iraq war that displaced a dictator but resulted in an abusive occupation and destructive civil war, leaving more than a million dead.”

Spot on, well, almost. Whitson considered “displacing of a dictator,” as a plus for the US war, as if the whole military venture had anything to do with overcoming dictatorship. In fact, the “abusive occupation and destructive civil war” was very much part of the US strategy of divide and conquer. Many wrote about this to the extent that that the argument itself is in fact, history.

At least, however, both arguments are a significant departure from the pseudo-intellectualism that has occupied the larger share of mainstream media thinking about terrorism and violence. Not only does the conventional wisdom in US media blame the bloody exploits of IS on the region itself, as if the US and western interventionism are not, in any way, factors, at least worth pondering. (In fact, for them US intervention is a force of good, rarely self-seeking and exploitative.) Even worse, no matter how they unravel the argument, Islam somehow ends up being the root of all evil - a reductionist, silly and irresponsible argument, to say the least.

It is also a dangerous one, for it infers the kind of conclusions that will constantly point the arrow to the direction of a self-destructive foreign policy, the kind that has set the Middle East ablaze in the first place.

But that is not your everyday diatribe. The constant injection of all sorts of bizarre arguments, like that of Graeme Wood’s recent piece in the Atlantic, is aimed at creating distractions, blaming religion and its zealots for their “apocalyptic” view of the world. Wood’s argument, designed to be a methodical and detached academic examination of the roots of IS is misconstrued at best, disingenuous at worst.

“That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfilment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succour if it stays true to the Prophetic model,” Wood concluded with the type of liberal positivism that has become as galling as religious zeal.

Mohamed Ghilan, an Islamic law scholar, dissected Wood’s argument with integrity based on real, authentic knowledge of both Islam and the Middle East region. “An analysis of what ISIS is about and what it wants that looks to Islam as a causal source of their behaviour is not only misguided, but also harmful,” he wrote.

“It obscures the root causes for why we have an ISIS, an al-Qaeda, an Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, and any of the other groups that have risen and continue to arise. It creates further confusion and contributes to a rising Islamophobic sentiment in the West. And when given the guise of academic rigour, it accomplishes all of this rather perniciously.”

Indeed, the age-old ailment of shallow, lacking writing about the complex and involved reality in the Middle East persists, even after 25 years of full American military engrossment in the region.

Since the first Iraq war (1990-91) until this day, America’s mainstream intellectuals and journalists refuse to accept the most prevalent truth about the roots of the current crisis; that military intervention is not a virtue, that war begets chaos and violence, that military invasion is not a harbinger of a stable democracy, but invites desperately violent polices predicated on winning, regardless of the cost.

Nonetheless, that very admission came from former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who, by virtue of his previous position should indeed be able to assess the link between the US war on Iraq and the current upheaval. Although he rightly blamed regional powers for exasperating the conflict, he laid the blame where it surly belongs: the Iraq war, invasion and the way the occupation was handled afterwards. “I was against this invasion and my fears have been founded. The break-up of the Iraqi forces poured hundreds if not thousands of disgruntled soldiers and police officers onto the streets,” he said.

That was indeed the backbone of the initial home-grown resistance in Iraq, which forced the US to shift strategy by igniting the powder keg of sectarianism. The hope then was that the “disgruntled soldiers” of Iraqi resistance would be consumed in a civil war inferno involving Sunni-based resistance against Shiite-based militias, themselves working for or allied with the US and US-imposed Shiite government in Baghdad.

“The aim of creating democracy without the existing institutions ushered in corrupt sectarian governments,” Annan said. For Annan, the war and invasion come first, followed by the sectarian-mismanagement of Iraq, also by the Americans, an admission that is rarely echoed by US officials and media as demonstrated by the obstinately deficient media coverage.

One is rarely proposing to ignore existing fault lines in Middle Eastern societies, standing sectarianism, fundamentalism, brewing, unresolved conflicts, and of course the monster of authoritarianism and corruption. None of this should be unheeded, if indeed a peaceful future is to be made possible. On the other hand, the argument that desperately seeks every possible pretence - from blaming Islam and believers of some strange apocalypse to everyone else but the US and its allies - is a poor attempt at escaping a heavy moral, but also political responsibility.

The danger of that argument lies in the fact that its promoters don’t mind seeing yet another war, like the one that was visited upon the Middle East a decade or so ago, the one that wrought al-Qaeda to the region, and orchestrated the rise of IS, and the bloodbath that followed.

Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net - is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently completing his PhD studies at the University of Exeter. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

Views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Of Empires and Fascist Coups: Greece's Not So Ancient History

The Greek Tragedy: Some things not to forget, which the new Greek leaders have not

by William Blum – The Anti-Empire Report #137 

February 23rd, 2015  

 

American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left.

The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.

Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.

I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.

The Twilight Zone of the US State Department

“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop … the Twilight Zone.” (American Television series, 1959-1965)

State Department Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015. Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, questioned by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Lee: President Maduro [of Venezuela] last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We have seen many times that the Venezuelan Government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan Government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

Lee: Sorry. The US has – whoa, whoa, whoa – the US has a longstanding practice of not promoting – What did you say? How longstanding is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a longstanding practice.

Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history –

Lee: Not in this case.

Psaki: – is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

Lee: In this specific case.

Psaki: Correct.

Lee: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime, even – (laughter)

Psaki: The last 21 years. (Laughter.)

Lee: Well done. Touché. But I mean, does “longstanding” mean 10 years in this case? I mean, what is –

Psaki: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.

Lee: I understand, but you said it’s a longstanding US practice, and I’m not so sure – it depends on what your definition of “longstanding” is.

Psaki: We will – okay.

Lee: Recently in Kyiv, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government at the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and you supported it. The constitution was –

Psaki: That is also ludicrous, I would say.

Lee: – not observed.

Psaki: That is not accurate, nor is it with the history of the facts that happened at the time.

Lee: The history of the facts. How was it constitutional?

Psaki: Well, I don’t think I need to go through the history here, but since you gave me the opportunity –- as you know, the former leader of Ukraine left of his own accord.

………………..

Leaving the Twilight Zone … The former Ukrainian leader ran for his life from those who had staged the coup, including a mob of vicious US-supported neo-Nazis.

If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki, tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War. None of the attempts were democratic, constitutional, peaceful, or legal; well, a few were non-violent.
The ideology of the American media is that it believes that it doesn’t have any ideology

So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.

In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003:

“These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.

Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?

For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”

I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Cuba made simple

“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation – unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.”

Aha! So that’s the problem, according to a Washington Post columnist – Cuba is not a democracy! That would explain why the United States does not maintain an embargo against Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt and other distinguished pillars of freedom. The mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship. Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for blindly following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. (They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries). Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have the Koch Brothers to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.

Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba not a democracy because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement two years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.

Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.

The Ministry of Propaganda has a new Commissar

Last month Andrew Lack became chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US government-supported international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. In a New York Times interview, Mr. Lack was moved to allow the following to escape his mouth: “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

So … this former president of NBC News conflates Russia Today (RT) with the two most despicable groups of “human beings” on the planet. Do mainstream media executives sometimes wonder why so many of their audience has drifted to alternative media, like, for example, RT?

Those of you who have not yet discovered RT, I suggest you go to RT.com to see whether it’s available in your city. And there are no commercials.

It should be noted that the Times interviewer, Ron Nixon, expressed no surprise at Lack’s remark.

Notes

1. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, chapters 3 and 35
2. “Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt”, Spiegel Online (Germany), February 8, 2010. Google “Goldman Sachs” Greece for other references.
3. U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015
4. Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List
5. CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002
6. ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002
7. “60 Minutes II”, February 26, 2003
8. Washington Post, March 1, 2003
9. “60 Minutes”, January 27, 2008
10. Democracy Now!, February 12, 2015, Wright statement made February 10
11. Al Kamen, Washington Post, February 18, 2015
12. Huffington Post, May 3, 2012
13. New York Times, January 21, 2015

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

Aftermath of Haiti Carnival Tragedy

Haiti Carnival Tragedy: What Was Planned, What Was an Accident?

by Ezili Danto - Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network

Evidence Shows More Than 17 People Died: A Rose Crucifixion?- Remèt Kadav yo!

At 2:48 a.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, during the second day of Haiti’s annual Mardi Gras carnival, while on his float, Daniel Darinus, known as “Fantom” who is a member of the Barikad Crew band hit an overhead, high-voltage wire and set off a mass electrocution and stampede tragedy.

Slow motion footage showing electrocution of carnival

goers on left-side and back of the Barikad Crew float

See also Fantom hitting the high-voltage wire with the top of his head in X8 slow motion.

***
Repòtaj Altagracia Jean Joseph nan Repiblik Dominikèn | Konpatriyòt Jean Robert Elie sou kanaval la.

Nouvèl- 17 Fevriye 2015  - Emisyon Eritye Papa Desalin Madi 17 Fevriye 2015

***


Fantom was hospitalized and is recovering. No one on the Barakad Crew float died. Champ de Mars is the main public park of Port au Prince where carnival stands lined both sides of the street for the three day event. Overloaded carnival floats move through the tightly packed, narrow route on the Champ de Mars in front of the grounds of the razed presidential palace. The accident happened at Champ de Mars, right in front of the all-pink, palace-like presidential carnival stand and across from a Mayor of Port au Prince-sponsored cemetery stand.

There is much controversy about the number of people who were electrocuted, and how many were crushed in the stampede. Some say they heard shooting. The government authorities announced that 17 people died and 76 were injured, all, from electrocution and the stampede.

Available video evidence suggests the electrical current arced from the power line to the micro-phone of the lead singer Fantom of Barikad Crew. Then traveled through the conductive framework of the float, earthing and electrocuting carnival revelers at ground level, who were in direct contact with live sections of the float and others in physical contact with them at the time. Carnival goers were crowded, like tightly packed-sardines, on all four sides of the vehicle. It’s a visual nightmare to watch. We believe if the entire charge had passed only through Fantom, he would not be alive today. Most of the charge must have traveled through his micro-phone lead. (See, Answering Questions About the Tragedy.)

Clustered electrocuted victims at side of float. Feb 17, 2015

Eyewitnesses insist that upwards to 100 people died on February 17, 2015. If true, where are all the bodies? Only 17 of the dead were acknowledged at the empty casket state funeral on February 21, 2015. But there seems to be more than 17 dead just in the first photo of clustered deaths, posted above.

THERE ARE LEGITIMATE FEARS OF ORGAN TRAFFICKING IN HAITI

The carnival deaths and the missing bodies bring up the spectacle of organ trafficking that plagues Haiti and African countries, more so with the advent of each new killing catastrophe. During the Haiti earthquake, then Prime Minister of Haiti, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN about the organ trafficking and sale of Haiti children in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. UNICEF said 15 Haiti children were snatched from hospitals in Haiti and there was a group of US charity workers who we jailed for kidnapping 33 Haiti children. At that time, the head of the MINUSTAH/UN forces was Edmond Mulet. Mulet was once arrested for child trafficking in Guatemala and recently his children trafficking past is catching up with him. The Haiti government and security forces are still under the rule of the Charitable Industrial Complex and the UN-MINUSHAH forces.

FAMILIES DEMAND RETURN OF THE MISSING BODIES

The names of the 17 Champ de Mars dead victims, released by the government are: Jeudy Perterson, Joseph Jeff Darel, Lundy Borgella, Cénat Pegyve, Cedieu Joseph, Johny Hilaire, Alain Paul, Alice Bureau, Jean Rony Civil, Felix Origène, Fedelyn Joseph, Rosier Axianax, Yanick Ferdinand, Jasmine Capitaine, Kenson Thermidor, Louis René, et Gabriel Jacques Leconte.

The authorities released these names, but not the autopsies they claim were conducted before the public funeral.

Ceremony without substance? 17 empty caskets. 

Feb. 21, 2015 government funeral of 17 dead. 

Haiti groups claim up to 100 carnival goers died.

The visually well organized, quick government funeral hasn’t closed the need for those who can’t find their family members to understand and find closure about their loved ones. There are reports of people being shot that night. We do not see any evidence of this in the videos. These matters require an independent judicial investigation.

Carnival Electrocution, 2015 | Front view of Barikad Crew truck slowly moving through the crowd. Side view beneath the singer at the arcing moment where crowd gets electrocuted and back view of running, scattering and trampling. (See it in slow motion at the moment of ground impact.)

***
Electrical surge through some micro-phone leads as Fantom contacts the power line. Source for illustration: Mike Perrett. Thanks to Mike Perrett for the video uploads and slow motion footages. Good job Mike! Mesi anpil.
***

See also Fantom hitting the high-voltage wire with the top of his head in X8 slow motion.

***

Haiti Carnival 2015 | Electrocution and Aftermath

The negligence that allows carnival floats to be set so high as to touch live wires should be accounted for and not allowed to happen, ever again. Government entities in charge of public security are accused of putting carnival revelers in danger. If the narrow area had not been so congested with people and the people were not touching the float, the deaths would probably not have occurred. The regime is also heatedly criticized for not putting the concerns of the victims’ families at the center of the grief vigil and funeral. It’s fine for the State to pay for the funerals. But insensitive to go on with the carnival the day of the tragedy. Unacceptable for it to refuse the families access to the remains of their loved ones – remèt kadav yo (return the corpses).

The tragedy began with a terrible accident. But there are so many tragedies in this situation. First of all, just last week Henry Jean Claude, a Haitian in the Dominican Republic was beaten, strangled, publicly lynched and left to hang in a Santiago public park. Haitians in the Dominican Republic are facing state terror, daily slaughters, the theft of their belongings and arbitrary deportation even if they’ve legally resided in the DR for 80 years. Instead of showing national concern, the Martelly-Paul regime holds a massive national carnival to dance, revel and waste monies.

After the Henry Jean Claude’s hanging, the Haiti government reportedly gifted 1,000 pesos or approximately $223 dollars to Henry Jean Claude’s young widow. Erzuline Celuma, the grieving widow has two small girls to raise. She was offered no protection by the Haiti government. Contrast this with the monies the Martelly regime spends on national carnival and the luxurious $450,000 palace-like stand, complete with waiting rooms, bathrooms and air-conditioning, built just to be used for an event that will last only three days.

With all the problems the country is facing, the people who lost their lives shouldn’t even have been there if Haiti had a responsible government.

Secondly, for months, the people have been daily protesting the high gas prices, high costs of living, the dissolution of Parliament, the unconstitutional reign of the Martelly regime. So, how does it make sense to waste so much monies on carnival to begin with?

Haiti needs infrastructure, clean water, sanitation, sewer systems, good roads, food sovereignty and local jobs. But the Martelly regime prioritizes carnival drinking, dancing and singing. It abandons the Haitians being terrorized in the Dominican Republic; abandons justice for the 10,000 dead UN-cholera victims, the 850,000 infected ones; ignores the homeless quake victims from the January 2010 earthquake that are still getting evicted from tarp and tent villages and living in pure squalor. Deception and dictatorship are not democracy. It’s unspeakably cruel and terrorizing.

Lastly, the carnival was scheduled for three days, February 15, 16, and 17th. After the accident, Martelly and his crew announced that the last day of carnival was cancelled. But just as Bill Clinton did not build Haiti back better, Martelly did not cancel the carnival. The show went on to ceremonially show Martelly, like Bill Clinton, can handle an emergency with competency. It was smoke and mirrors. A mourning narrative repeated by the irresponsible media. The hideous truth is that the Martelly regime used the carnival tragedy the way their handlers at USAID, the UN, the NGOs and the Clinton Foundation used the earthquake tragedy. Afterwards, the nation was left bleeding, filled with questions, more traumatized and in more grief. (See, Answering Questions About the Tragedy ; The Carnival Was Not Cancelled and A Rose Crucifixion But Not Vodun.)

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ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CARNIVAL TRAGEDY
Questions About Electrocuted Victims With No Outward Trauma


Since the carnival tragedy, Haiti activists have been called upon to advocate for the carnival goers’ right to get answers to questions the US-puppets seem too busy posturing for carnival photo-ops to publicly provide.

At first, when folks came to HLLN to say that the dead folks clustered on the electrocuted side of the Barikad Crew float or seen in photos looked more asleep than dead and had no electricity entry and exit wounds, we wondered if toxic gasses could account for the clustered deaths that showed no visible outward trauma? We’re not experts on how an electrocuted body looks like. It took some research and time to speak with doctors and understand enough to try to explain what we were told, which is that AC current causes instantaneous cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation. It’s not uncommon to have no visible outward trauma in electrocution cases.

Other questions the family’s raised were about why the people on the float were not killed. How did the people on the ground get electrocuted if the power-line did not fall to the ground and no one on the float died? In an effort to answer credibly, we publicly discussed the questions on-line, invited assistance and scoured tons of on-line video footages to locate the best ones from all angles.

Knowledgeable folks who we sent the videos to and consulted with maintained that it’s not at all surprising that the people on top of the float weren’t shocked, since they were not between the singer and the ground. In a power line electrocution, the current is divided equally among everyone who is in contact directly or indirectly with the victim who touched the line. Fantom who was victim #1 had surface burns, but most of the others would not have visible trauma.

Watch the three videos (posted on the side panel and also here, here, and here) which show Fantom getting electrocuted and best explains how the people on the ground were electrocuted.

The first video video shows the front view of the Barikad Crew truck slowly moving through the crowd. The camera pans for a side view beneath the singer. Shows the moment the crowd gets the electric shock or electrocuted. There’s a flashing spark, people drop instantaneously. There’s a back view of running, scattering and trampling. We’ve cropped and slowed down the first video video by 8 times to make it easier to follow what happened. The slow motion footage shows the moment of impact. How the people touching the float on the left (Fantom side) and only side the electricity traveled were electrocuted and the aftermath back view.

The second video shows the actual front top view of the electrocution of the shirtless Fantom, but there’s no float panic. One sees the rush starting at the back/side view of the float on the ground level. You hear someone say, “gen moun ki mouri anba cha.” – some people are died under the float. See the second video cropped and in X8 slow motion showing Fantom hitting the high-voltage wire with the top of his head.

The third video (13:47) shows a better angled ground view and the longer aftermath footage of the accident. It shows that at the instant of the power-line accident, the crowd of people on the left side, walking next to the float with their hands against the float and everyone within about 5 feet of the rear dropped instantly to the ground, while people right next to them seemed unaffected by the electrocution. There was then a brief panic. Some of the people on the left-side got up and ran after they were shocked. Others from the back began jumping off the float to run. It looks like at least two victims were trampled perhaps 15 ft behind the float. They were later attended to by medics, and didn’t seem to get up. No gun shots are heard on the videos we’ve watched. From what is seen in the third video (13:47 minute) time span, carnival goers, the light green cap-wearing folks from the National Carnival Committee (NCC) and some emergency medical units were there picking up the injured and rushing them out of the area.

In terms of organization during a national emergency, the actually Saturday, February 21, 2015 funeral was visually well executed with 17 empty caskets. But if you look at the videos of the tragedy, some police authorities wandered into the accident area, but didn’t seem to be very effective or have any unified plan or actions.

If more updates come in, we will share it at this post or perhaps in a later essay. There was a power outage at some point, which lasted for 6 or so minutes. Questions remain as to how many died from electrocution, from the float running over them, from being crushed by the crowd, from the little bit of running that’s observable. The victims’ families have the right to examine the remains, see the autopsies, be told the truth so they may get better closure. (For more on the carnival tragedy, go to A Rose Crucifixion but not Vodun ; The Carnival Was Not Cancelled, and More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy.)

Jolly Roger flag with a skull and bones is a symbol for piracy. 

It is the traditional English name for the flags flown to identify 

a pirate ship about to attack during the early 18th century.

WHAT THE QUESTION OF SORCERY AND SACRIFICE REALLY MEANS IS: WAS THIS TRAGEDY PLANNED?

A Rose-crucifixion but not Vodun. Madigra m pa pè w, se moun ou ye.

The carnival tragedy is a product of poor infrastructure and governmental failures. Mysticism cannot be a scapegoat for this catastrophe. The Martelly regime’s cemetery stand, where the accident occurred is filled with the old European pirate’s skull and bones pirate flag symbol. This indeed is a fitting depiction for the plundering US-puppet dictatorship and US occupation of Haiti behind UN mercenary guns. Skull and bones are not Vodun symbols.

In Haiti whenever something bad happens, inevitably someone will blame it on Vodun. Vodun is African. God is the white Jesus according to Western ethos. So, it’s not surprising that many are negatively connecting Vodun to the carnival tragedy. This is irresponsible and lazy. Foreigners and clueless Haitians need to stop feeding that colonial narrative. But what gives this more legs is that the electrocution took place across from the unpopular government’s cemetery stand.

Martelly government-sponsored carnival stand where the electrocution

occurred complete with Martelly pink death motif and messages.

The taunting cemetery billboard stand is sponsored by the mayor of Port-au-Prince, supposedly for the cemetery. Which needs advertising? Yes, you can see the credulity at the outset. It gets worse.

Next to the cemetery stand is where the Barikad Crew float had the accident. The Government’s cemetery is also located not too far away from Martelly’s $450,000 palace-like presidential float. Of course, this only aggravated and provoked morbid rumors, especially with the coded, dual meanings depicted on the cemetery stand like “Frap La” – “Nap Manyen Yo” and “Frap la Revelasyon 2015.“

The coded meanings are readily understandable to the pro-democracy masses in Haiti. Why would the major of Port-au-Prince would sponsor such a stand? Probably because he was appointed by Martelly and in his younger days, Martelly participated in FRAPH, a paramilitary group that helped take down the first democratically elected Aristide government and kept it out of power from 1991 through to 1994.

There’s a sort of Bill Clinton plausible deniability for Haiti officials when they’re charged with taunting the anti-dictatorship protestors and opposition by using carnival and carnival funds for political purposes. There’s a carnival group called Frap La, which literally means “Frap (better known as FRAPH) is still here.” So, it could be argued that it’s the words from that band’s name and music that are part of what’s etched on the government’s cemetery stand. There is no political message directed at the anti-Martelly demonstrators. But then why would such a personal artist’s message be sponsored at the cemetery by the offices of the Mayor of Port-au-Prince?

While the Martelly regime basks in its sudden good fortune in free and heightened publicity from the carnival tragedy, elsewhere in the nation, tensions are running high. People are scared, looking for answers. It seems to Haitians that their lives are being sacrificed left and right with poor infrastructure that causes deaths while the rich live well, drink clean water, have year-round electricity and want to bring in tourists on lands taken from Haitians. The harsh reality is no one with access to any world power seems to care about what happens to Haitians. Certainly not the Martelly dictatorship or its Pamela White/Samatha Powers “Core Group” handlers.

It’s in this context we find certain Haiti journalists, commentators and plain ordinary folks saying, out-loud that Vodun was used to cause the accident or, on the other hand, blaming the carnival victims for their fate for participating in Martelly’s carnival in the first place. Both are untenable. Black life matters, is most precious. None of the carnival goers deserve the bad fortune that unfurled. And certainly the Ancient Ones would not be our warrior ancestors, would not be our winning ancetors of the Haiti revolution if their way (Vodun) would sanction Haiti blood to fuel Empire’s vampires.

 

Martelly’s pink palace-like carnival stand reportedly cost a whopping 

$450,000 to build. For the State funeral for the carnival victims, the 

government re-painted the stand white. A waste of monies? 

The pink carnival stand with the cemetery motif where the accident took place is definitely not Vodouist in design. First off, it’s pink and green, with skulls and bones, a green pentagram and two bodiless heads with the top of their BRAINS chopped off. This makes no sense in Vodun. Guede yo, Baron Samedi, Grann Brigit are not PINK nor GREEN in vibration, vevé nor color. Skull and bones is a European secret society. It’s commonly associated with European elites from an undergraduate senior secret society at Yale University. Members of the power elite, US skull and bones secret society include current US Secretary of State, John F. Kerry, former president George W. Bush. (Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton also went to Yale, but for their law degrees in 1973.)

The strange pink stand has an eye of Horus under one of the skull and bones and it’s painted in green. I’d guess this, combined with the implication that FRAPH is still alive in Haiti – “Frap La” is written on the float – could be some dictatorship/US intelligence operatives making fun of the Haiti struggle to end the outsourced occupation and the Martelly dictatorship by telling pro-democracy militants the CIA-created FRAPH death squads are still around. Frap la!

Deceive, divide, dominate is a tried and true colonial blueprint. But this attempt to show Martelly’s invincibility with a pink cemetery stand or to create chaos and a sort of Papa-Doc psychological terror with the cemetery stand was executed in such a manner that shows the artists and sponsors of the stand have no knowledge of the Egyptian mystery system nor Vodun. The brainless clown faces and their symbolism on this cemetery carnival float are NOT connected to traditional Haitian symbols, much less Vodouist. My point is both evil or good deeds are not mysterious. They’re the work of human beings: Madigra m pa pè w, se moun ou ye. Deliberately or inadvertent that’s the question some Haitians are asking about the carnival tragedy. It’s natural for the families of the victims to want more information and an investigation. They want access to the corpse of their loved ones to examine their deaths.

Haiti carnival should not be an instrument of propaganda for the presidential palace. The Martelly regime routinely excludes carnival artists for lyrics bashing Martelly – their artistic and cultural expressions. But he uses public funds to promote more amenable artists or to fund a huge $450,000 pink, National Palace-sized presidential stand. Or, a Mayor of Port-au-Prince carnival stand with veiled death-threat messages aimed at his detractors and the anti-dictatorship demonstrators. (See, More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy ; Answering Questions About the Tragedy; and The Carnival Was Not Cancelled.)


THE CARNIVAL WAS NOT CANCELLED

The Martelly dictatorships’ political use of the tragedy is unseemly. The carnival was not cancelled. It went forward, but pitched to media cameras and the nation, as an all-white vigil and a state funeral.

Something cannot be both planned and an accident. The carnival tragedy was set off when Fantom’s head hit the overhead power line. But, there is truth to the observation that something was planned. That something is the aftermath. That perception is not a figment of the people’s fertile imagination. The band played on. Martelly, the self-styled carnival king was center stage. Outrageously, there was no breathing room between the tragedy and the resumption of the carnival.

The deaths occurred on Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 2:48 p.m. The government announced on that same day that the carnival was cancelled and a three day period of national mourning would began. But in reality, on the day of the deaths, by 5:00 p.m., the carnival had resumed.

Martelly couldn’t be bothered to really change or delay his big carnival finale plans just because untold numbers of carnival revelers were electrocuted and killed on the second day of his carnival. You see, he’d already paid an unprecedented $450,000 on his own palatial spot at the public square to view the festivities with special friends and entourage. So, blithely, the Martelly presidential band marched on, even better with Martelly marching along, for the cameras and international media, while grieving families and the victims’ friends were scouring hospitals, demanding answers and searching everywhere for their missing relatives. Ceremony and pageantry was valued more than substance.

Martelly just took the opportunity of the tragedy to put on a more effective political show for the cameras. His regime faces constant and widespread demands that he steps down. This was his well-scripted, manna from heaven, big Hollywood comeback. An all-white-outfitted carnival event, etched from the massive, pre-planned street celebrations that normally closes out the carnival festivities. The usual finale was re-formatted and pitched as a mourning vigil for the carnival victims and grieving families. Different sectors participated. The image projected was of an inclusive and popular Martelly government. The reality is the Martelly regime is most known in Haiti, these last three years for its unpopularity, exclusion, elitism, and ruling by decree. People go to carnival not because they approve of Martelly, but because it’s free and distracting. Which is exactly why Martelly holds so many of them. It’s a cheap way, like the old time Roman gladiator games, to keep the people busily distracted from the country’s real issues. It’s a handy way to stop, at least for three days, the widespread demonstrations against his illegitimate rule.

The Band Played On: A Carnival Parade Pitched to The Public as a Vigil

The handling of the vigil without family participation, the sudden great organization skills of Martelly’s emergency response, and the fact that the incident happened across from the weird government-sponsored cemetery death stand, which doesn’t fit into a happy carnival theme, understandably upsets and perplexes many Haitians. The government could dispel this confusion if it put the people’s needs for answers ahead of its media publicity stunts.

The authorities in charge of public security, including the police, the Mayor of Port au Prince, the Director General of Electricity of Haiti (EDH), the National Carnival Committee (NCC), the Minister of Interior, the Minister of Culture and the President, all should be held accountable for the overcrowding and patently unsafe public conditions that led to the Champ De Mars tragedy. The Commissaire de Gouvernment (prosecutors office) must open up an investigation to assure impunity does not reign, due reparations are accorded to the victims and measures to improve public security at future carnivals are put in place. (See also, More Than 17 People Died In Haiti Carnival Tragedy ; Answering Questions About the Tragedy; and A Rose Crucifixion but not Vodun.)






Ezili Dantò, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
and Free Haiti Movement
February 22, 2015

“The West has two faces. One evil.”

Ukraine: A "Pedestrian Dispute" Leading to Possible Global Congflagration

Ready for Nuclear War over Ukraine?

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

 

A senior Ukrainian official is urging the West to risk a nuclear conflagration in support of a “full-scale war” with Russia that he says authorities in Kiev are now seeking, another sign of the extremism that pervades the year-old, U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.

During a recent visit to Canada, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told CBC Radio that,

 “Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in Ukraine — we’ve lost so many people of ours, we’ve lost so much of our territory.”

Prystaiko added, “However dangerous it sounds, we have to stop [Russian President Vladimir Putin] somehow. For the sake of the Russian nation as well, not just for the Ukrainians and Europe.” The deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.

“What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in the spine a little,” Prystaiko said.

Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.

Why should such a pedestrian dispute justify the possibility of vaporizing millions of human beings and conceivably ending life on the planet? Yet, instead of working out a plan for a federalized structure in Ukraine or even allowing people in the east to vote on whether they want to remain under the control of the Kiev regime, the world is supposed to risk nuclear annihilation.

But therein lies one of the under-reported stories of the Ukraine crisis: There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra.

According to the Western “group think,” the post-coup Ukrainian government “shares our values” by favoring democracy and modernity, while the rebellious ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are “Moscow’s minions” representing dark forces of backwardness and violence, personified by Russia’s “irrational” President Putin. In this view, the conflict is a clash between the forces of good and evil where there is no space for compromise.

Yet, there is a craziness to this “group think” that is highlighted by Prystaiko’s comments. Not only does the Kiev regime display a cavalier attitude about dragging the world into a nuclear catastrophe but it also has deployed armed neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists to wage a dirty war in the east that has involved torture and death-squad activities.

Not Since Adolf Hitler

No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.

On Feb. 20, in a report from Mariupol, the Post cited the Azov battalion’s importance in defending the port city against a possible rebel offensive. Correspondent Karoun Demirjian wrote:

“Petro Guk, the commander of the Azov battalion’s reinforcement operations in Mariupol, said in an interview that the battalion is ‘getting ready for’ street-to-street combat in the city. The Azov battalion, now a regiment in the Ukrainian army, is known as one of the fiercest fighting forces­ in the pro-Kiev operation.

“But … it has pulled away from the front lines on a scheduled rest-and-retraining rotation, Guk said, leaving the Ukrainian army — a less capable force, in his opinion — in its place. His advice to residents of Mariupol is to get ready for the worst.

“‘If it is your home, you should be ready to fight for it, and accept that if the fight is for your home, you must defend it,’ he said, when asked whether residents should prepare to leave. Some are ready to heed that call, as a matter of patriotic duty.”

The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.

The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. Though providing much color and detail – and quoting an Azov leader prominently – the Times left out the salient and well-known fact that the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis.

But this inconvenient truth – that neo-Nazis have been central to Kiev’s “self-defense forces” from last February’s coup to the present – would disrupt the desired propaganda message to American readers. So the New York Times just ignores the Nazism and refers to Azov as a “volunteer unit.”

Yet, this glaring omission is prima facie proof of journalistic bias. There’s no way that the editors of the Post and Times don’t know that the presence of neo-Nazis is newsworthy. Indeed, there’s a powerful irony in this portrayal of Nazis as the bulwark of Western civilization against the Russian hordes from the East. It was, after all, the Russians who broke the back of Nazism in World War II as Hitler sought to subjugate Europe and destroy Western civilization as we know it.

That the Nazis are now being depicted as defenders of Western ideals has to be the ultimate man-bites-dog story. But it goes essentially unreported in the New York Times and Washington Post as does the inconvenient presence of other Nazis holding prominent positions in the post-coup regime, including Andriy Parubiy, who was the military commander of the Maidan protests and served as the first national security chief of the Kiev regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass.”]

The Nazi Reality

Regarding the Azov battalion, the Post and Times have sought to bury the Nazi reality, but both have also acknowledged it in passing. For instance, on Aug. 10, 2014, a Times’ article mentioned the neo-Nazi nature of the Azov battalion in the last three paragraphs of a lengthy story on another topic.

“The fighting for Donetsk has taken on a lethal pattern: The regular army bombards separatist positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing to plunge into urban combat,” the Times reported.

“Officials in Kiev say the militias and the army coordinate their actions, but the militias, which count about 7,000 fighters, are angry and, at times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Whites Out Ukraine’s Brownshirts.”]

Similarly, the Post published a lead story last Sept. 12 describing the Azov battalion in flattering terms, saving for the last three paragraphs the problematic reality that the fighters are fond of displaying the Swastika:

“In one room, a recruit had emblazoned a swastika above his bed. But Kirt [a platoon leader] … dismissed questions of ideology, saying that the volunteers — many of them still teenagers — embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of ‘romantic’ idea.”

Other news organizations have been more forthright about this Nazi reality. For instance, the conservative London Telegraph published an article by correspondent Tom Parfitt, who wrote: “Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’… should send a shiver down Europe’s spine.

“Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.”

Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.

Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

The Telegraph questioned Ukrainian authorities in Kiev who acknowledged that they were aware of the extremist ideologies of some militias but insisted that the higher priority was having troops who were strongly motivated to fight.

Azov fighters even emblazon the Swastika and the SS insignia on their helmets. NBC News reported:

“Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past … when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast.”

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of 

Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a 

Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV.)

But it’s now clear that far-right extremism is not limited to the militias sent to kill ethnic Russians in the east or to the presence of a few neo-Nazi officials who were rewarded for their roles in last February’s coup. The fanaticism is present at the center of the Kiev regime, including its deputy foreign minister who speaks casually about a “full-scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.

An Orwellian World

In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not nuclear war.

But these are clearly not normal times. To a degree that I have not seen in my 37 years covering Washington, there is a totalitarian quality to the West’s current “group think” about Ukraine with virtually no one who “matters” deviating from the black-and-white depiction of good guys in Kiev vs. bad guys in Donetsk and Moscow.

And, if you want to see how the “objective” New York Times dealt with demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities protesting last year’s coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, read Sunday’s dispatch by the Times’ neocon national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon, best known as the lead writer with Judith Miller on the infamous “aluminum tube” story in 2002, helping to set the stage for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Here’s how Gordon explained the weekend’s anti-coup protests: “The official narrative as reported by state-run television in Russia, and thus accepted by most Russians, is that the uprising in Ukraine last year was an American-engineered coup, aided by Ukrainian Nazis, and fomented to overthrow Mr. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president.”

In other words, the Russians are being brainwashed while the readers of the New York Times are getting their information from an independent news source that would never be caught uncritically distributing government propaganda, another example of the upside-down Orwellian world that Americans now live in. [See, for example, “NYT Retracts Russian Photo Scoop.”]

In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite a nuclear holocaust for the world.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Year of Sheep, Year of Slaughter: The West and China's Century

Year of the Sheep, Century of the Dragon? New Silk Roads and the Chinese Vision of a Brave New (Trade) World

by Pepe Escobar  - TomDispatch

 

BEIJING - Seen from the Chinese capital as the Year of the Sheep starts, the malaise affecting the West seems like a mirage in a galaxy far, far away. On the other hand, the China that surrounds you looks all too solid and nothing like the embattled nation you hear about in the Western media, with its falling industrial figures, its real estate bubble, and its looming environmental disasters. Prophecies of doom notwithstanding, as the dogs of austerity and war bark madly in the distance, the Chinese caravan passes by in what President Xi Jinping calls “new normal” mode.

“Slower” economic activity still means a staggeringly impressive annual growth rate of 7% in what is now the globe’s leading economy. Internally, an immensely complex economic restructuring is underway as consumption overtakes investment as the main driver of economic development. At 46.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP), the service economy has pulled ahead of manufacturing, which stands at 44%.

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Inside China's "New Normal"

Sometimes this planet changes right under your nose and you still don’t notice. This sentence, buried in a New York Times piece on the Greek debt crisis, caught my attention the other day: “Greece, meanwhile, has suggested that it could turn to Russia or China for help if its talks on debt relief and a rollback of austerity measures break down.” Russia is, of course, an unlikely bulwark, being on distinctly shaky economic grounds itself right now, but I’m not surprised by the thought -- at least from Syriza, the lefty party now in power in Greece. But China? Not since tiny Albania joined the Chinese camp in the Cold War have we seen a sentence that in any way resembled that one. And yet it certainly catches something of the changing face of our planet. After all, as time goes by, the magnetic power of the Chinese economy is moving ever closer to Europe. Just two years ago, the Chinese became the Middle East’s largest trading partner, leaving the European Union in second place and the United States in third. By then, China was already Africa’s largest trading partner, having displaced the U.S. some years earlier.

This may not be making headlines here, but it’s no small thing. The economic rise of China, especially in areas where the U.S. had committed so much in blood, sweat, and drones, should take anyone’s breath away. Fortunately, TomDispatch’s peripatetic Eurasian correspondent Pepe Escobar (the man who invented the term “Pipelineistan” for the web of energy conduits that crisscross that vast continental area) arrives in the nick of time to offer us a view from Beijing of an economy still staggeringly on the rise and the plans of the Chinese leadership, from Asia to Europe, for knitting together what, if it happened, might indeed someday be seen as a new world economic order. Tom  

 

Year of the Sheep, Century of the Dragon? New Silk Roads and the Chinese Vision of a Brave New (Trade) World

by Pepe Escobar

Geopolitically, Russia, India, and China have just sent a powerful message westward: they are busy fine-tuning a complex trilateral strategy for setting up a network of economic corridors the Chinese call “new silk roads” across Eurasia. Beijing is also organizing a maritime version of the same, modeled on the feats of Admiral Zheng He who, in the Ming dynasty, sailed the “western seas” seven times, commanding fleets of more than 200 vessels.

Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing are at work planning a new high-speed rail remix of the fabled Trans-Siberian Railroad. And Beijing is committed to translating its growing strategic partnership with Russia into crucial financial and economic help, if a sanctions-besieged Moscow, facing a disastrous oil price war, asks for it.

To China’s south, Afghanistan, despite the 13-year American war still being fought there, is fast moving into its economic orbit, while a planned China-Myanmar oil pipeline is seen as a game-changing reconfiguration of the flow of Eurasian energy across what I’ve long called Pipelineistan.

And this is just part of the frenetic action shaping what the Beijing leadership defines as the New Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road of the twenty-first century. We’re talking about a vision of creating a potentially mind-boggling infrastructure, much of it from scratch, that will connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Such a development will include projects that range from upgrading the ancient silk road via Central Asia to developing a Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor; a China-Pakistan corridor through Kashmir; and a new maritime silk road that will extend from southern China all the way, in reverse Marco Polo fashion, to Venice.

Don’t think of this as the twenty-first-century Chinese equivalent of America’s post-World War II Marshall Plan for Europe, but as something far more ambitious and potentially with a far vaster reach.

China as a Mega-City

If you are following this frenzy of economic planning from Beijing, you end up with a perspective not available in Europe or the U.S. Here, red-and-gold billboards promote President Xi Jinping’s much ballyhooed new tagline for the country and the century, “the Chinese Dream” (which brings to mind “the American Dream” of another era). No subway station is without them. They are a reminder of why 40,000 miles of brand new high-speed rail is considered so essential to the country’s future. After all, no less than 300 million Chinese have, in the last three decades, made a paradigm-breaking migration from the countryside to exploding urban areas in search of that dream.

Another 350 million are expected to be on the way, according to a McKinsey Global Institute study. From 1980 to 2010, China’s urban population grew by 400 million, leaving the country with at least 700 million urban dwellers. This figure is expected to hit one billion by 2030, which means tremendous stress on cities, infrastructure, resources, and the economy as a whole, as well as near-apocalyptic air pollution levels in some major cities.

Already 160 Chinese cities boast populations of more than one million. (Europe has only 35.) No less than 250 Chinese cities have tripled their GDP per capita since 1990, while disposable income per capita is up by 300%.

These days, China should be thought of not in terms of individual cities but urban clusters -- groupings of cities with more than 60 million people. The Beijing-Tianjin area, for example, is actually a cluster of 28 cities. Shenzhen, the ultimate migrant megacity in the southern province of Guangdong, is now a key hub in a cluster as well. China, in fact, has more than 20 such clusters, each the size of a European country. Pretty soon, the main clusters will account for 80% of China’s GDP and 60% of its population. So the country’s high-speed rail frenzy and its head-spinning infrastructure projects -- part of a $1.1 trillion investment in 300 public works -- are all about managing those clusters.

Not surprisingly, this process is intimately linked to what in the West is considered a notorious “housing bubble,” which in 1998 couldn’t have even existed. Until then all housing was still owned by the state. Once liberalized, that housing market sent a surging Chinese middle class into paroxysms of investment. Yet with rare exceptions, middle-class Chinese can still afford their mortgages because both rural and urban incomes have also surged.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is, in fact, paying careful attention to this process, allowing farmers to lease or mortgage their land, among other things, and so finance their urban migration and new housing. Since we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people, however, there are bound to be distortions in the housing market, even the creation of whole disastrous ghost towns with associated eerie, empty malls.

The Chinese infrastructure frenzy is being financed by a pool of investments from central and local government sources, state-owned enterprises, and the private sector. The construction business, one of the country’s biggest employers, involves more than 100 million people, directly or indirectly. Real estate accounts for as much as 22% of total national investment in fixed assets and all of this is tied to the sale of consumer appliances, furnishings, and an annual turnover of 25% of China’s steel production, 70% of its cement, 70% of its plate glass, and 25% of its plastics.

So no wonder, on my recent stay in Beijing, businessmen kept assuring me that the ever-impending “popping” of the “housing bubble” is, in fact, a myth in a country where, for the average citizen, the ultimate investment is property. In addition, the vast urbanization drive ensures, as Premier Li Keqiang stressed at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, a “long-term demand for housing.”

Markets, Markets, Markets

China is also modifying its manufacturing base, which increased by a multiple of 18 in the last three decades. The country still produces 80% of the world’s air conditioners, 90% of its personal computers, 75% of its solar panels, 70% of its cell phones, and 63% of its shoes. Manufacturing accounts for 44% of Chinese GDP, directly employing more than 130 million people. In addition, the country already accounts for 12.8% of global research and development, well ahead of England and most of Western Europe.

Yet the emphasis is now switching to a fast-growing domestic market, which will mean yet more major infrastructural investment, the need for an influx of further engineering talent, and a fast-developing supplier base. Globally, as China starts to face new challenges -- rising labor costs, an increasingly complicated global supply chain, and market volatility -- it is also making an aggressive push to move low-tech assembly to high-tech manufacturing. Already, the majority of Chinese exports are smartphones, engine systems, and cars (with planes on their way). In the process, a geographic shift in manufacturing is underway from the southern seaboard to Central and Western China. The city of Chengdu in the southwestern province of Sichuan, for instance, is now becoming a high-tech urban cluster as it expands around firms like Intel and HP.

So China is boldly attempting to upgrade in manufacturing terms, both internally and globally at the same time. In the past, Chinese companies have excelled in delivering the basics of life at cheap prices and acceptable quality levels. Now, many companies are fast upgrading their technology and moving up into second- and first-tier cities, while foreign firms, trying to lessen costs, are moving down to second- and third-tier cities. Meanwhile, globally, Chinese CEOs want their companies to become true multinationals in the next decade. The country already has 73 companies in the Fortune Global 500, leaving it in the number two spot behind the U.S.

In terms of Chinese advantages, keep in mind that the future of the global economy clearly lies in Asia with its record rise in middle-class incomes. In 2009, the Asia-Pacific region had just 18% of the world’s middle class; by 2030, according to the Development Center of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that figure will rise to an astounding 66%. North America and Europe had 54% of the global middle class in 2009; in 2030, it will only be 21%.

Follow the money, and the value you get for that money, too. For instance, no less than 200,000 Chinese workers were involved in the production of the first iPhone, overseen by 8,700 Chinese industrial engineers. They were recruited in only two weeks. In the U.S., that process might have taken more than nine months. The Chinese manufacturing ecosystem is indeed fast, flexible, and smart -- and it’s backed by an ever more impressive education system. Since 1998, the percentage of GDP dedicated to education has almost tripled; the number of colleges has doubled; and in only a decade, China has built the largest higher education system in the world.

Strengths and Weaknesses

China holds more than $15 trillion in bank deposits, which are growing by a whopping $2 trillion a year. Foreign exchange reserves are nearing $4 trillion. A definitive study of how this torrent of funds circulates within China among projects, companies, financial institutions, and the state still does not exist. No one really knows, for instance, how many loans the Agricultural Bank of China actually makes. High finance, state capitalism, and one-party rule all mix and meld in the realm of Chinese financial services where realpolitik meets real big money.

The big four state-owned banks -- the Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, and the Agricultural Bank of China -- have all evolved from government organizations into semi-corporate state-owned entities. They benefit handsomely both from legacy assets and government connections, or guanxi, and operate with a mix of commercial and government objectives in mind. They are the drivers to watch when it comes to the formidable process of reshaping the Chinese economic model.

As for China’s debt-to-GDP ratio, it’s not yet a big deal. In a list of 17 countries, it lies well below those of Japan and the U.S., according to Standard Chartered Bank, and unlike in the West, consumer credit is only a small fraction of total debt. True, the West exhibits a particular fascination with China’s shadow banking industry: wealth management products, underground finance, off-the-balance-sheet lending. But such operations only add up to around 28% of GDP, whereas, according to the International Monetary Fund, it's a much higher percentage in the U.S.

China’s problems may turn out to come from non-economic areas where the Beijing leadership has proven far more prone to false moves. It is, for instance, on the offensive on three fronts, each of which may prove to have its own form of blowback: tightening ideological control over the country under the rubric of sidelining “Western values”; tightening control over online information and social media networks, including reinforcing “the Great Firewall of China” to police the Internet; and tightening further its control over restive ethnic minorities, especially over the Uighurs in the key western province of Xinjiang.

On two of these fronts -- the “Western values” controversy and Internet control -- the leadership in Beijing might reap far more benefits, especially among the vast numbers of younger, well educated, globally connected citizens, by promoting debate, but that’s not how the hyper-centralized Chinese Communist Party machinery works.

When it comes to those minorities in Xinjiang, the essential problem may not be with the new guiding principles of President Xi’s ethnic policy. According to Beijing-based analyst Gabriele Battaglia, Xi wants to manage ethnic conflict there by applying the “three Js”: jiaowang, jiaoliu, jiaorong (“inter-ethnic contact,” “exchange,” and “mixage”). Yet what adds up to a push from Beijing for Han/Uighur assimilation may mean little in practice when day-to-day policy in Xinjiang is conducted by unprepared Han cadres who tend to view most Uighurs as “terrorists.”

If Beijing botches the handling of its Far West, Xinjiang won’t, as expected, become the peaceful, stable, new hub of a crucial part of the silk-road strategy. Yet it is already considered an essential communication link in Xi’s vision of Eurasian integration, as well as a crucial conduit for the massive flow of energy supplies from Central Asia and Russia. The Central Asia-China pipeline, for instance, which brings natural gas from the Turkmen-Uzbek border through Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, is already adding a fourth line to Xinjiang. And one of the two newly agreed upon Russia-China pipelines will also arrive in Xinjiang.

The Book of Xi

The extent and complexity of China’s myriad transformations barely filter into the American media. Stories in the U.S. tend to emphasize the country’s “shrinking” economy and nervousness about its future global role, the way it has “duped” the U.S. about its designs, and its nature as a military “threat” to Washington and the world.

The U.S. media has a China fever, which results in typically feverish reports that don’t take the pulse of the country or its leader. In the process, so much is missed. One prescription might be for them to read The Governance of China, a compilation of President Xi’s major speeches, talks, interviews, and correspondence. It’s already a three-million-copy bestseller in its Mandarin edition and offers a remarkably digestible vision of what Xi’s highly proclaimed “China Dream” will mean in the new Chinese century.

Xi Dada (“Xi Big Bang” as he’s nicknamed here) is no post-Mao deity. He’s more like a pop phenomenon and that’s hardly surprising. In this “to get rich is glorious” remix, you couldn’t launch the superhuman task of reshaping the Chinese model by being a cold-as-a-cucumber bureaucrat. Xi has instead struck a collective nerve by stressing that the country’s governance must be based on competence, not insider trading and Party corruption, and he’s cleverly packaged the transformation he has in mind as an American-style “dream.”

Behind the pop star clearly lies a man of substance that the Western media should come to grips with. You don’t, after all, manage such an economic success story by accident. It may be particularly important to take his measure since he’s taken the measure of Washington and the West and decided that China’s fate and fortune lie elsewhere.

As a result, last November he made official an earthshaking geopolitical shift. From now on, Beijing would stop treating the U.S. or the European Union as its main strategic priority and refocus instead on China’s Asian neighbors and fellow BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa, with a special focus on Russia), also known here as the “major developing powers” (kuoda fazhanzhong de guojia). And just for the record, China does not consider itself a “developing country” anymore.

No wonder there’s been such a blitz of Chinese mega-deals and mega-dealings across Pipelineistan recently. Under Xi, Beijing is fast closing the gap on Washington in terms of intellectual and economic firepower and yet its global investment offensive has barely begun, new silk roads included.

Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo sees the newly emerging world order as a solar system with two suns, the United States and China. The Obama administration’s new National Security Strategy affirms that “the United States has been and will remain a Pacific power” and states that “while there will be competition, we reject the inevitability of confrontation” with Beijing. The “major developing powers,” intrigued as they are by China’s extraordinary infrastructural push, both internally and across those New Silk Roads, wonder whether a solar system with two suns might not be a non-starter. The question then is: Which “sun” will shine on Planet Earth? Might this, in fact, be the century of the dragon?

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for RT and Sputnik, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos. Follow him on Facebook by clicking here.

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Copyright 2015 Pepe Escobar