A Tale of Two Nuclear Powers: Comparing Israel and North Korea

A Telling Comparison: Israel versus North Korea

by Kim Petersen - Dissident Voice

November 14th, 2017

Missing from corporate media accounts is what causes the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea) to be singled out for opprobrium for what, essentially, is developing a deterrent against any entity that would attack it.

A comparison with how the United Nations deals with North Korea vis-à-vis another member state state, Israel, is instructive.

Israel occupies Palestinian territory; destroys Palestinian olive groves and poisons Palestinian sheep; sprays Palestinian homes with sewage; sabotages Palestinian water supplies; cuts off power to Palestine; terrorizes Palestinians for hours at checkpoints, including the sick, infirm, and pregnant women, some who are forced to give birth at the checkpoints; stops fishermen from earning a living from the sea; shells hospitals, schools, and playgrounds; blows up kids on beaches; and commits myriad other war crimes. Israel has nuclear weapons and ICBMs. The last point is the only one that North Korea shares with Israel.

Yet only North Korea is vociferously criticized and sanctioned by the US and its allies. Is this fair? And is it just that North Korea is bullied and sanctioned for developing a self-defense?

Creation

Israel was brought into existence by the UN granting Palestinian land from Mandate Palestine to Jews, who happened to be mainly migrant Jews from another continent – Europe.

North Korea was created by World War II victors, predominantly the United States, splitting a country into two halves. Thereby, one ethnic group was separated from the other by a border.

Occupation

Whereas the Koreans are indigenous to Korea, Americans are occupying the territory of many Indigenous nations, as are Jewish Israelis (with the exception of Mizrahi Jews) occupying Arab territories.

Israel signifies a situation whereby one group of outsiders was favorably positioned by the UN to carry out an occupation of an Indigenous people.

The DPRK signifies a situation where a people indigenous to a territory were separated from kin by an outside entity. The self-determination of Koreans was not respected.

Notably, the US came into existence as a colonizer, a colonial-settler state, that remains in occupation of the territory of many Indigenous peoples; this includes the Hawaiian islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, Saipan, and other islands of Micronesia, the Chagos archipelago, etc.

The Role of the UN

Over and over again, the US and NATO ideologues describe the DPRK as a threat. Why? What country has DPRK ever been at war with other than an internecine conflict with the Republic of Korea over half a century ago, a war into which the US inserted itself and the United Nations provided diplomatic approbation. Since the preamble to the UN Charter stated its determination to allay future generations from experiencing the scourge of war, what could be more hypocritical than for the UN to authorize war against another UN member?

The scope of the tendentiousness of the US and UN becomes fully transparent when the case of Israel is considered.

The case of Israel is another blight on the UN as it abnegated its Article 1 which calls for “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” The people of Mandate Palestine were not permitted self-determination, and the land was carved up. The Palestinian majority wound up with 42 percent of the land, the Jews were gifted 56 percent of Palestinian land, and Jerusalem was designated an international city. Palestinians rejected the plan. Subsequently Jews ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the land, waged wars, built settlements in occupied Palestine, and erected an illegal wall that has rendered the remainder of Palestine into discontiguous bantustans.

Israel has hardly been a sterling member of the UN, and the list of UN Resolutions targeting Israel is long. The list would be much longer were it not for the US wielding its veto power in the UN Security Council.

If indeed the UN is handling similar issues differently depending on who the member states are, then a question arises: How is the supposed neutrality and image of the UN as an honest arbiter affected by its differential treatment of members? And: What impact does this have for international justice?

Israel’s Wall and the DMZ

The World Court has ruled the Apartheid Wall (Wikipedia calls the 650-700-km structure that reaches a maximum height of 8 meters and cuts through much of the West Bank the “Israeli West Bank barrier”) to be illegal and ordered it torn down.

William Parry’s picture book — Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2010) — vividly drives home the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. The book portrays Israelis separating Palestinian families from one another, Palestinians being prevented from tending to their crops, Israelis inflicting economic deprivation on Palestinians, Israelis targeting of school children, and Israelis intended humiliation of Palestinian workers passing through checkpoints in the wall. Against the Wall also depicts the spirit, art, and determination of the Palestinian resistance, the anger of the occupied people, and messages to the world.

In the case of Israeli Jews, the wall is their statement of desiring separation from Palestinians. In stark contrast, the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula is a demilitarized zone forced by Americans on Koreans, many of who still desire reunification.

With the defeat of Japan looming in the closing days of World War II, the division of Korea was decided at the Potsdam Conference. North Korea states, “[T]he Korea question was decided according to the interests of the United States … contrary to the requirement and demand of the Korean people.”1 Koreans also blame Japan for the separation:

"Had the Japanese not occupied Korea, the United States could not have interfered in Korean affairs and the question of the 38th parallel would not have come into being. Therefore, Japan also takes blame for the division of Korea."2

Pyongyang’s Arch of Triumph consecrated to liberation from Japanese occupation

Nukes and ICBMs

Although undeclared, it is well known that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, yet it escapes censure by the US and sanctions by the UN.

One might inquire how a state like the US with its huge stockpile of nuclear-tipped ICBMs has standing to criticize other states for doing what it does? Does this not pose a moral quicksand for the US? Also why does the US elude censure for not abiding by article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons?

Some Questions

If outsiders had allowed Koreans to decide their fate, if outsiders had not forcibly split the Korean peninsula, would Koreans be agitating, fighting to unify the Korean peninsula?3

If Palestinians had been able to determine and control immigration to their country, as is the case for nation states everywhere, would they have allowed a group of outsiders to establish an exclusive state for that group’s people negating their own state?

If the answer to both questions is no, then why are the Palestinians and North Koreans demonized for decisions made by outsiders that denied them their natural rights?

Conclusion

On the one hand we have a self-designated Jewish State that was carved out from a landmass colonized by Britain. Britain passed the matter to the UN which took a chunk of the land and gave it to others, without the consent of the Palestinian people who for millennia have lived, loved, played, worked, and farmed there. Israel, the Jewish state, ethnically cleansed 800,000 non-Jews from the land and later expanded its non-declared borders. Israel is clearly a racist state. All this was with the acquiescence of the US. Israel has been in contravention of several UN resolutions, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and has never been sanctioned by the UN. In addition, the US has exercised several vetoes in the UN Security Council to protect Israel from censure. As well, Israel became a nuclear-armed state with ICBMs. Does the US demand sanctions against Israel? No, it lavishes billions upon Israel each year; currently running at $3.8 billion a year. Most of this “aid”4 is in the form of military assistance — which is being challenged as violating US law against supporting secret nuclear states.

Korea, the state of the Korean people, saw its people separated into the two halves of the peninsula. This again was imposed from the outside, without the consent of the Korean people, chiefly by the US. North Korea has committed no acts of ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, it was the victim of major devastation caused by the US when the latter intervened in a civil war, committing numerous war crimes.5 The US threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons during the war on the Korean peninsula, had nuclear weapons stationed on South Korean soil for several years, has nuclear-armed warships docking in South Korea, has nuclear-armed warplanes and nuclear-armed submarines stationed in nearby Japan. Yet North Korea, in stark contrast to Israel, is singled out for the severest vitriol from the US and its western allies. The UN bends to the US through its Security Council imposing sanctions on North Korea although it has attacked no other country. It has pursued nuclear weapons and ICBM capability as has the US, Israel and the seemingly hypocritical China and Russia, the latter two nuclear states having voted for sanctions against North Korea.

A simple analogy should suffice: If a bully — much larger than you and who has used unrestrained violence against you in the past — threatens you with a gun, would you want to face the bully without a gun?

Is there a moral principle that would posit that North Korea should face the mightily armed US, a US which rejects peace with North Korea, without a deterrent to attack against it?

Unless one can reasonably answer yes to the preceding two questions, then the punitive actions targeting North Korea should cease immediately. If actions targeting any entity are required, then how about targeting the entity/entities that caused North Korea to seek a nuclear deterrent?

First published at Global Research.

Notes

1. Korea in the 20th Century: 100 Significant Events, (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 2002), p 98. 

2. Korea in the 20th Century, p 98. 

3. An earlier article looks at what was transpiring in Korea following the defeat of Japan: “A ‘Presence’ in the South of Korea.” 

4. It is farcical to refer to financial gifts to an OECD member state as “aid.” 

5. See Korean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001 (New York: 2001). 

Featured image is from Al-Monitor.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Kim Petersen, Global Research, 2017

Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: kimohp@gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen.

Read other articles by Kim.

Trump's Artful Middle East Dodge?

Art of the Deal: Behind Saudi-Lebanon Crisis Is Trump's Middle East 'Peace Project'

by Patrick Henningsen - 21st Century Wire 

November 13, 2017

The recent ‘forced’ resignation by Lebanese PM Saad Hariri in Riyadh under the influence of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and subsequent threats by Saudi Minister Thamer al-Sadhan against Lebanon and Hezbollah – have puzzled analysts as to the motivation behind this seemingly irrational series of events.

While true, Saudi Princes and their Wahhabi order have been slighted by both Shia-based popular mobilization movements’ eradicating ISIS from the region – Hezbollah in Syria, and the Hashed al-Shaabi in Iraqi – with Arabian Sheikhs having to watch their Gulf billions invested in the destablization of Syria and Iraq go down a blood-soaked drain of history – in reality, neither Lebanon nor its Hezbollah movement pose any direct threat to Saudi Arabia.

So who is directing these events?

Is this Saudi tirade just a case of an unstable young, soon-to-be king in 32 yr-old Crown Prince, consolidating too much power too soon, or is there more to it? Some analysts have been speculating that maybe Israel is the invisible hand pushing the oil Kingdom to do its bidding in the region as they both share a common enemy in Iran.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (right) also made the claim this week that Saudi Arabia has offered Israel ‘billions of dollars’ to attack Lebanon on its behalf, as well as accusing the Saudis of strong-arming Lebanese PM to resign on camera. Nasrallah knows that both Tel Aviv and Riyadh (with full US backing) have Hezbollah in mind when any threats are made toward Lebanon, but as Middle East analyst Eisa Ali explained on yesterday’s Sunday Wire radio program, this perceived joint-threat by Israel and Saudi has driven Lebanon closer to political unity on this issue.

Last night the Israeli press began to try and distance itself from a Saudi-led conspiracy, with Haaretz being the first to dismiss the ranting threats coming out of Riyadh, while simultaneously pushing the Trump Administration to the frontline.

Writer Amos Harel’s op-ed entitled, “Saudi Arabia Is Opening a New Front Against Iran, and Wants Israel to Do Its Dirty Work,” helps to reveal part of a still concealed agenda:

“As the days passed, the resignation seemed more like a Saudi dictate, stemming from Saudi Arabia’s displeasure at the way Hariri was compelled to cooperate with Hezbollah in Lebanon’s government.

It’s unclear if the Saudis will necessarily make do with these moves. The royal house is particularly close to the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia was one of the few countries, along with Israel, which enthusiastically welcomed Trump’s election, this time last year. Over the past year there have been a growing number of reports around the world of increasing diplomatic coordination between Riyadh and Jerusalem, accompanied by cooperation in intelligence matters. Israel and the Saudis see Iran as a common enemy, and both are frustrated at the West’s incompetence in dealing with Iran’s growing influence in what is known as the “Shi’ite Crescent” in the region.”

If Lebanon and Hezbollah do not pose a direct threat to Saudi Arabia, then what’s really going on? Is this really an American-led stage-managed drama that we are watching unfold now?

While the liberal Israeli press may be taking a stand-offish position in relation to recent events, you can be certain that Israel is very much involved in this process, albeit working diligently behind the scenes through an Israeli-friendly White House in Washington, and Netanyahu and Trump’s shared personal assistant, wunderkind Jared Kushner. Indeed, it’s through Kushner that we can track the real agenda which is in motion right now, as these latest events between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon are directly linked to Donald Trump’s big-ticket item – the Israel-Palestine “Two State Solution” peace deal – which he had promised on the campaign trail. It’s happening as we speak.

Make no mistake about it: this ‘peace deal’ will become Trump’s major pièce de résistance for his first term, and his ticket to redemption heading into the 2020 election cycle. The question is, who in America will resist it?

Here Haaretz lets the cat out of the bag as to how this will be used to leverage Israeli interests:

“The string of events, starting with the Qatari crisis last summer, strengthens the assumption that this is part of a wider Saudi move, an ambitious attempt to reach a new regional order. On the diplomatic front this is linked to the internal Palestinian reconciliation, led by Cairo but which also requires financial backing by the Saudis and the Emirates. This won’t be all, apparently. The defense establishment and political circles in Israel are preparing for the likely possibility that the Trump administration will soon present Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a new document, in an attempt to jumpstart the stalled peace process. Such a move may be pursued in a coordinated way between the United States and the Saudis. Saudi ambitions may have other results as well.”

There it is. The Art of the Deal, and it’s not going to be Camp David style this time. It will be a transactional deal – to be fronted in part by Egypt, with Syria left out, and most certainly with large strings attached for Lebanon, likely designed to first isolate Hezbollah and then used to try and evict Iranian influence from the region. You can be sure of one thing though – if this ‘deal’ is being drafted by the US and Israel then you can be certain that it will not be well-thought out, and it will surely discount the interests of Syria, and the Shia majorities in Lebanon, and in Iraq too. This will be drafted as another neocolonial sectarian project.

And what about the Palestinians? It’s also a safe bet that any ‘deal’ drafted by the US and Israel will not be a very good deal for the Palestinians – who will be the last party considered in all of this high-flying talk of ‘peace and stability’ in the region.Will they get the right of return? Will their current situation really improve from such a deal? Looking at Israel and the US track record of running the ‘peace process’ in this part of the world, I’d say it’s highly doubtful.

What about Mohammed bin Salman’s purge and all of the detained Saudi billionaires and officials detained in the Ritz Charlton Hotel in Riyadh? What is the Crown Prince angling for out of this three-way deal?

For starters, how about cash from the west, and cash from China, needed for the Kingdom to attain its lofty ‘Vision 2030’ goals and the Kingdom’s vast privatization scheme? Trump already let that cat out of the bag when he declared that Saudi’s biggest state-run oil and construction firm, Saudi ARAMCO, should do its IPO and be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. That would mean an initial cash injection based on 5% of ARAMCO market cap – around $100 billion (that’s a total market cap of $2 trillion for this company!) to Saudi Arabia via western stock exchanges, and more to come if each year Saudi keeps gradually milking its state-owned golden cash calf.

This money will be used to help finance the Crown Prince’s new NEOM futuristic ‘smart city’ – but also ARAMCO will be the main contracting firm charged with building the new city – which means guaranteed returns for ground floor investors.

Who will those preferred initial share holders be? Trump’s friends, and the Chinese? Your guess is as good as mine.

So there you have it – now we know it’s the US, in conjunction with Israel, who are maneuvering behind the scenes, and who will observe a mutual Saudi-Israeli-American desire to keep Iran weak and mitigate its influence throughout the region. Easier said than done.

So these are some of factors are what’s really driving events that we see rapidly unfolding in the Middle East, but that’s not all that’s not well in Arab wonderland:

“An article in Haaretz this week by former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro asked whether the Saudis were pushing Israel into a war with Hezbollah and Iran.”

So which will come first – the war, or the peace?

It’s difficult to tell. Certainly, avoiding the war should be everyone’s first priority.

And how long with the west continue to ignore Saudi and the UAE’s (with US-UK military backing) mass atrocities in Yemen?

In the meantime, Lebanon is still in the dark as to when they will get their Prime Minister back.

Should Lebanon (once again) consider itself a target in the crosshairs of the great powers in their latest plans to reshape the region?

READ MORE ISRAEL NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Israel Files

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Britain's 'Tyranny of Correctness' Not a Priti Picture

Priti Patel and Jewish Conspiracies

by Gilad Atzmon

November 12, 2017

The British Jewish media is upset. Priti Patel, a cabinet minister responsible for international development, had no fewer than 14 meetings with Israeli politicians and political leaders. It seems that Patel didn’t clear any or most of these meetings with the Foreign Office. So Patel had to go and but now the British Jewish media is pressing the panic button.

The ultra Zionist Jewish Chronicle’s (JC) headline warns that the Patel Affair “will set us [the Jews] back 20 years.”

The JC predicts that it will have “a devastating impact on British Jewry.” It may even “bolster antisemitic conspiracy theories and damage relationships with British politicians for a generation.”

This is the crux of the matter -- Jews hate ‘Jewish conspiracy theories.’ Why? Because Jews do not conspire or operate in clandestine manner. They do it all in the open.

Jews wrote the Balfour Declaration on behalf of Lord Balfour and made sure everyone knows who really wrote it. They make sure we know that it was Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein who initiated the Manhattan Project. AIPAC, CFI, LFI and the CRIF openly push for immoral interventionist wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran while JC writers Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch advocate these global wars in the media.

All this is not merely a ‘Zionist agenda.’ Jewish anti Zionists employ the same technique to claim that it is down to progressive Jews to define the boundaries of free speech on Israel. I reiterate -there are no Jewish conspiracies. Everything is done in the open. And this was Patel’s mistake. She foolishly attempted to conceal her loyalty to our foreign rulers.

In a country led by Theresa Je suis Juif, there is no reason for minister Patel to hide her subservience to the Jewish Sate. In a country where the biggest lobby group in the parliament is the Conservative Friends of Israel there is no reason for a minister to be shy about what may seem to be disloyal inclinations. With 80% of the leading party listed as CFI members, treachery is the norm. Patel didn’t have to hide her allegiance to the Jewish State, she should have done it all in the open, like the PM and Sir Eric Pickles (see picture above).

The JC confirms the,

“CFI is the largest group in Westminster with an open line to almost every Tory MP, dozens of other countries’ diplomatic and political groups, and influence in Downing Street for decades.” 

The JC doesn’t attempt to conceal how forceful the CFI is, however, it is honest enough to reveal that “one senior (Jewish) communal figure said CFI would now be regarded as ‘toxic’.”

If you are looking for light Jewish entertainment, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) is the place to go. The CAA is a self-appointed Jewish thought police. It devotes its energies to the total castration of the Brits and their ability to think rationally, morally and independently.

The CAA provides a spectacle of anti-ethical thought totally foreign to the Western ethos.

“The resignation of Priti Patel,” the CAA writes, “ has unleashed some disturbing comments, including from politicians and journalists who have carelessly or deliberately evoked sinister stereotypes of powerful Jews.”

Let’s examine what the CAA considers to be a ‘disturbance’ and what is it they don’t want us to say: In an article in The Times, Policy Editor, Oliver Wright and Political Editor, Francis Elliott, cited an unnamed senior Conservative MP:

“Another senior Conservative MP claimed that Ms Patel planned to use her ministerial position in DfID (Department for International Development) to curry favour with Jewish Tory donors by supporting Israel. ‘The Israel lobby in the Party is hugely influential and this was about Priti cynically trying to win their support. She thought she could be the next leader.”

Confusing, don’t you think?

The JC admits that the CFI is the strongest body in Westminster, while the CAA insists that reference to CFI’s power and influence ‘evokes sinister Jewish stereotypes.’

The CAA openly attempts to police British journalism by stifling criticism of Israel. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. If Jewish power is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power, here is the CAA exercising this power in broad daylight.

But there is good news. This power in falling apart now, and this may explain the panic within the JC’s ranks and the tantrum thrown by the CAA and other Jewish thought police organisations (CST, ADL, Hope not Hate, et al).

The ‘rationale’ of the CAA policing strategy deserves close attention:

“Under the International Definition of Antisemitism adopted by the British Government, ‘Making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions’ is antisemitic.”

This is a revolutionary legal defence strategy. According to the CAA, X is not guilty of committing Y as long as X is stereotypically associated with committing Y. If X is guilty, for instance, of shoving a banana into someone’s eye (Y), the defence would be that shoving bananas into other people’s eyes (Y) is one of the stereotypes about X.

Similarly, the CAA claims it is anti-Semitic to refer to the Jewish Lobby as the strongest lobby in Westminster because the accusation is consistent with the Jewish stereotype of Jewish lobbies being influential.

Likewise we should vindicate Harvey Weinstein of any wrong doing because Larry David admitted on Saturday Night Live that predatory behaviour has become a Jewish stereotype. I expect Bernie Madoff to capitalise on this line of defence and appeal for his immediate release. Alan Dershowitz can also come clean about his bad habits by blaming them on Jewish stereotypes.

The paradox here is obvious, The CAA’s circular argument has nothing to do with any consideration of ethics, truthfulness or correspondence with reality. The ‘stereotype’ redeems the sin. By this logic the CAA itself is innocent of any wrong thinking because such a Jerusalemite anti-ethical intellectual pattern is also a Jerusalemite stereotype.

The CAA practically calls upon British commentators and politicians to fib.

“It is therefore incumbent upon those commenting on the Priti Patel affair to do so in a way that is proportionate and rational. It is a dangerous stretch to accuse Ms Patel of doing Israel’s bidding in order to please wealthy Jews who have the power to influence the selection of the next Conservative leader.” 

Neither the CAA nor any other Jewish body has offered an alternative rationale for Patel’s misconduct. The CAA demands that British journalists set aside their intelligence and common sense. They expect British politicians and commentators to put Jewish sensitivities first.

We are touching upon the core of Jerusalemite thinking – a tyranny of correctness that is removed from morality and Western ethos. Instead of ethics, we are told to follow Mitzvoth, regulations and commandments.

For the Brits, Priti Patel is a wake up call. It is a final reminder that for the nation to sustain its values it must search for its Athenian roots: philosophy, science and ethics as opposed to a tyranny of correctness that is anti ethical and zero principled.

 

Being in Time - A Post Political Manifesto, 

If they want to burn it, you want to read it!

Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com and here (gilad.co.uk).

Saudi's Heavy Hand Boosts Hezbollah Resistance and Hariri Support

Saudi's 'War on Lebanon' Backfires 

by TRNN

November 11, 2017

The standoff between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia is escalating in the aftermath of the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. On Thursday, Saudi Arabia said Lebanon has effectively declared war against it and ordered all Saudi citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. On Friday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Saudi Arabia is holding Hariri against his will in a bid to exploit internal divisions and weaken the Lebanese state. Nasrallah's comments come one day after the US State Department fueled speculation about Hariri's status, refusing to say whether he is being detained in Saudi Arabia.

After being accused of forcing him to resign, Saudi Arabia's apparent detention of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has boosted support for Hezbollah, says author and professor Amal Saad

Can Congress Save the World? Convening on Climate Change

Hidden Dangers Lurking Behind the Scenes at Congressional Hearings on Cloud Seeding

by Robert Hunziker - Dissident Voice

November 10th, 2017 

OMG! Congress held hearings recently on geo-engineering techniques to stop the evils of global warming. Whew! The irony is absolutely fantastically mind-boggling, a real knee-slapper. Think about the paradox as Dr. James Hansen, the top climate scientist of NASA at the time warned Congress of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming way back in 1988, and it resulted in a major New York Times headline “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

So, Congress has had 30 years to ruminate the global warming warning, never seriously addressing possible fixes, like conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy as a nationwide program, kinda like the Marshall Plan, which if started back then, we’d be closer to out of the woods today and closer to 100% renewable energy. But, back in the day Congress could only see their way to make the Space Station 100% solar-powered, hmm.

However, now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, meaning global warming/climate change is so real as to be the prevailing narrative, they’ve belatedly decided to hold hearings on how to put toothpaste back into a tube. Dr. James Hansen must be chuckling, maybe crying, maybe on his hands and knees in a rage of demonic laughter, who knows?

This story is full of irony like the most-absurdity award of all time. It’s also somewhat of an insult to the intelligence of serious scientist that worked on the global warming quagmire ever since the Great Anthropogenic Warming Warning of 1988. After all, Congress has flipped the bird at science all these years, denialism at its most potent. Even worse yet, nowadays science is totally demonized. Are we back in the Middle Ages?

Here’s the scoop: The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology recently held hearings on the potential for geo-engineering, or human-induced influence over the atmosphere to cool things down a bit, or maybe try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere instead of emitting it into the atmosphere like a house afire.

Of course, it almost goes without saying, how in the world is it possible, even remotely possible, to hold hearings about combating global warming by a Congress that has so steadfastly failed to recognize it in the first instance. They’re deniers! Aren’t they? Why are they worried about climate change all of a sudden? From an outside observer’s viewpoint, it’s kinda like watching the worst episode of The Twilight Zone, over and over, again and again, until a migraine splits one’s head wide open.

As one might suspect, there’s a hook: According to the NYT article “We Can Brighten Clouds to Reflect Heat and Reduce Global Warming. But Should We?” McClatchy DC Bureau, d/d November 8, 2017, here’s what Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chairs the house committee, claims:

“As climate continues to change, geo-engineering could be a tool to curb resulting impacts… Instead of forcing unworkable and costly government mandates on the American people, we should look to technology and innovation to lead the way to address climate change.” (Notice the careful wording, never a mention of global warming, especially anthropogenic.)

As a consequence of those hearings, just imagine the activity in the halls of Congress: Representatives slapping each other on the back and teething big fat unlit cigars soaked wet drooling down chins, as a solution to public criticism of their pathetic denialism is at hand. Long live fossil fuels! If the committee can somehow demonstrate man-made solutions to curb the curses of global warming, which they’ve never recognized in the first place, then Congress has reason to continue, forever and forever more, their massive fossil fuel subsidy giveaways, and lots of payola along the way (oops, probably shouldn’t have mentioned that last item).

On second thought, maybe the cynicism of this article is too heavy-handed, but on the other hand, the big question mark remains: Why are climate deniers, meaning members of Congress, suddenly entertaining geo-engineering techniques to offset the dangers of global warming? What’s Up? Time and again over the past three decades, they’ve claimed no belief in anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

Of course, the answer is found in the cynicism that motivated this article in the first place, which is: It’s a dream come true for congressional climate deniers. Now they have an excuse for the administration pulling out of the Paris climate accords and a rationale, even though paltry, for abject failure to address the issue over the past three decades. Who needs international accords or national policies to fix something when there is no risk to using fossil fuels till the cows come home? Answer: Fix “climate change” with geo-engineering. If this rationale seems too far out in left field, it pales in comparison to how far out of touch Congress has been to the global warming threat for endless decades.

Well, there is an unfortunate twist to the geo-engineering solution, as geo-engineering is still experimental. And, it’s a massive undertaking, literally as large as the planet itself, and nobody can say with certainty that it works, that it does not have nasty unintended consequences, that it solves the underlying problem of spewing too much CO2 into the atmosphere. In that regard, in all likelihood, it may be no more than a gigantic Band-Aid at best. The thing is, nobody really knows the outcome, nobody, absolutely nobody. It’s an experiment, period.

The experts that appeared before the congressional committee talked about cloud brightening by adding particles to clouds to reflect sunlight back into outer space, which, of course, is exactly what the icy Arctic itself has done for eons, until global warming melted its icy cap down to toddler size. The geo-engineering proposal utilizes high-powered nozzles to spray “saltwater droplets” onto the clouds, but the initial testing of that methodology proved difficult, if not impossible, because of corrosive properties burning through titanium and even burning through diamond. And, the experimentation continues.

They also talked about stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering putting reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, maybe using “calcium carbonate,” which is non-toxic. However, accomplishing such a major feat remains a very big unsolved puzzle. And, there are plenty of critics who fear unintended consequences, whatever those may be, and how could anyone know ahead of time?

Still, the very fact that a congressional committee entertained the idea of combating global warming is a real mind-blow, like coming off an acid trip, reconnecting with reality, everything seems kinda fuzzy. As the world slowly comes back into focus, it’s discovered that Congress is actively looking into geo-engineering techniques that hopefully stop the planet from runaway over-heating thereby spoiling the big party of record stock prices and neoliberal growth, ad-infinitum.

Meanwhile, the big picture event swirling around the global warming nexus continues: From Tokyo to Paris to Silicon Valley scientists and engineers in private settings are investigating solutions to the global warming threat, and geo-engineering is the preferred course of action. It’s believed that human intelligence is truly boundless, almost deific, in pursuit of technological miracles, similar to registered successes with the Internet and the Moonshot and maybe Mars.

But, whether the global warming quandary is bigger than all knowledge of science and engineering remains a very big question mark. Indeed, it is the biggest question mark of all time as well as the biggest threat since T-Rex bit the dust.

Along the way, wouldn’t it be truly wonderful if Congress really truly cared, even though belatedly and delinquently late to the upcoming World’s Biggest Weenie Roast of all time? Don’t count on it.

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Read other articles by Robert.

When the Rubber Hits the Road: Trump Blinks on MH17 Story

The MH17 Information War – In the End Trump Blinked

by John Helmer - Dances with Bears

November 10, 2017

It’s possible Donald Trump meant the little he has said about who was responsible for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014. If he did, he didn’t mean it for long. If he didn’t mean what he said, with the retrospect of two years that comes as no surprise.

On MH17 there’s now no difference between former President Barack Obama, defeated presidential rival Hillary Clinton, and Trump.
Key to the lead images and the interview segments:
1 = Trump in October 2015 at Minute 0:32; 2 = Billy Six,
Min. 0:51; 3 = Elmar Giemulla, Min. 1:34; 4 = Joost Niemoller,
Min. 3:33; 5 = Christopher Black, Min. 4:38; 6 = John Helmer, Min. 7:30.

Trump has done nothing to answer with the evidence at the disposal of the incumbent president what the US Government knows about who and what shot down the aircraft, killing all 298 people aboard.

A year ago, independent German journalist Billy Six prepared a letter to Trump signed by an international group of reporters and lawyers. Read it in full here.

The letter reminded Trump what he had said on US television network MSNBC on October 10, 2015, when he was campaigning for election. He was asked “if you were president, would you hold President Putin and Russia accountable.” Trump replied:

“They say it wasn’t them. It may have been their weapon, but they didn’t use it, they didn’t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”

At the time Trump said this, it was Obama Administration policy and official rationale for the escalation of sanctions against Russia in July 2014 to blame Russia, including President Vladimir Putin personally, for the destruction of MH17. The letter asked Trump as president to order a new internationally credible investigation, and to release the classified US satellite evidence the Obama Administration said it had.

Four of the signers have now been filmed in interview with Billy Six analyzing what Trump hasn’t done in office to remedy the holes in the official Dutch Government reports, which remain the accepted version of the western media.

 Watch the film by clicking here.

Genetically Modified You: Toxic Glyphosate Load Skyrockets Say Researchers

Exposure to Glyphosate, Chemical Found in Weed Killers, Increased Over 23 Years 

by Yadira Galindo - UC San Diego

October 24, 2017

​Analyzing samples from a prospective study, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers found that human exposure to glyphosate, a chemical widely found in weed killers, has increased approximately 500 percent since the introduction of genetically modified crops.

“The data compares excretion levels of glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid in the human body over a 23-year time span, starting in 1993, just before the introduction of genetically modified crops into the United States,” said Paul J. Mills, PhD, UC San Diego School of Medicine professor of Family Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health.

Glyphosate is a key ingredient in the herbicide brand Roundup. Use of this herbicide has increased approximately 15-fold since 1994, when genetically modified “Roundup Ready” glyphosate-tolerant crops were introduced. Historically, it is used on genetically modified soy and corn, but it is also sprayed on a substantial portion of wheat and oats grown in the U.S., said Mills.

“Our exposure to these chemicals has increased significantly over the years but most people are unaware that they are consuming them through their diet.”

In a paper published in the journal JAMA on October 24, Mills and a team of researchers compared urine excretion levels of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) in 100 people living in a Southern California community who provided samples during five clinic visits that took place between 1993 to 1996 and 2014 to 2016. Samples were extracted from the Rancho Bernardo Study of Healthy Aging (RBS), a prospective population-based investigation started by Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD, Distinguished Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a co-author of the study.

“What we saw was that prior to the introduction of genetically modified foods, very few people had detectable levels of glyphosate,” said Mills.

“As of 2016, 70 percent of the study cohort had detectable levels.”

Of study participants with detectable amounts of these chemicals, the mean level of glyphosate increased from 0.203 µg/L in 1993-1996 to 0.449 µg/L in 2014-2016. The mean level of AMPA went from 0.168 µg/L in 1993-1996 to 0.401µg/L in 2014 to 2016.

In July, glyphosate was listed by California as a carcinogen. As exposure to this chemical has increased, interest in how much risk it poses to human health and what exposure levels are safe has become a topic of ongoing debate.

There are few human studies on the effects of glyphosate, but animal studies demonstrate that chronic exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides can have adverse effects, said Mills. The authors point to other studies in which consistently feeding animals an ultra-low dosage of glyphosate resulted in liver disorders similar to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in humans.

Mills said there is an urgent need for studies to thoroughly examine the impact on human health of the increasing exposure to glyphosate from the foods people eat.

The Herbicide Awareness & Research Project , an ongoing UC San Diego research program through which individuals can get their glyphosate level determined, will be looking more deeply into the RBS study to examine potential longitudinal associations with glyphosate exposure and clinically-relevant outcomes.

“The public needs to be better informed of the potential risks of the numerous herbicides sprayed onto our food supply so that we can make educated decisions on when we need to reduce or eliminate exposure to potentially harmful compounds,” said Mills.

Co-authors include: Izabela Kania-Korwel, John Fagan, Linda K. McEvoy, and Gail A. Laughlin, UC San Diego.

This research was funded, in part, by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA021187), National Institute on Aging (AG028507, AG007181), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (DK31801), Solomon Dutka Fund, Caroline Young Foundation, Westreich Foundation.

Saudi Palace Coup and Where's Hariri?

Marwa Osman Reports on the Saudi Purge

by James Corbett - The Corbett Report

November 8, 2017

The Lebanese Prime Minister has “resigned” on Saudi tv. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has rounded up a dozen other princes in the House of Saud in a startling move that threatens to upset the kingdom. Reports that King Salman will step aside for the crown prince abound. What on earth is happening?

Joining us to help sort through the rubble of this incredible week is Marwa Osman, a political analyst and commentator in Beirut.

Priti Pink-Slipped: Tory Minister Canned for Al-Qaeda Lobbying

Priti Patel Resigns - Israel Lobby Mourns The Loss Of A Valuable British Asset

by Moon of Alabama

November 9, 2017

A British Minister of Hindu heritage was fired after it emerged that she secretly met Israeli officials in Israel and elsewhere without informing the Foreign Office.

Back in Britain she then tried to arrange additional finances for Israel's arming of al-Qaeda in the Golan heights. The affair shines light on the nefarious influence of the Israel lobby on British politics.

Priti Patel was International Development Secretary, responsible for British aid to various countries and organizations. She is a Thatcherite Conservative, a vocal supporter of Britain's exit from the European Union and of Hindu fascism in India:

She has been a strong cheerleader of the Narendra Modi government, publicly praising a number of its policies including demonetisation.

In August Patel went on a "family holiday" to Israel. Instead of enjoying the beach she met dozens of Israeli officials from Prime Minister Netanyahoo down to the heads of Zionist aid organizations. She was shepherded by one Lord Polak, a long time Israel lobbyist in British politics. Polak accompanied her to every meeting. None of these were disclosed to the British Embassy, the Foreign Office or Downing Street. Cabinet rules demand that all such meetings are coordinated and briefed through these official channels.

Stuart Polak is a major character in Zionist lobbying in Britain:

Ennobled by David Cameron two years ago, Lord Polak is a veteran of Westminster’s corridors of power. He has taken literally hundreds of Tory MPs to Israel over the years, educating them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and securing their support in parliamentary votes and the public arena.

Under his guidance, CFI became the biggest lobbying group in Westminster, holding lunches for 700 guests, making countless Downing Street visits, and developing contacts throughout Israel and the Middle East.

Polak fled when the media tried to question him about his Israel visit arrangements for Patel.

One of Patel's meetings was at an army hospital in the Israel occupied Syrian Golan heights where the Israeli military patches up al-Qaeda Jihadis which were wounded while fighting the Syrian government. Only last week the Israeli army in the occupied Golan supported a murderous attack of al-Qaeda Jihadis on the Syrian Druze village of Hader in the Quneitra area. The Jihadis in the Golan are surrounded by Syrian government forces. Their only supply line is through Israel occupied land. Druze in Israel who protested against the attack were arrested.

Back in Britain Priti Patel asked her department to move British aid money from Palestinian causes to the Israeli military operation in the occupied Golan. (Funny how the Guardian in its wrap-up fails to mention that point ...)

Additionally to her busy holiday, Priti Patel had two other meetings with Israeli officials which she similarly did not disclose.

When it became clear yesterday that Priti Patel's behavior would cost her her job, the British Zionist lobby launched a rescue attempt. Based on anonymous sources the Jewish Chronicle claimed that Prime Minister May had been informed about two of the meetings and had ordered Patel to not disclose them:

Number 10 instructed Development Secretary Priti Patel not to include her meeting with the Israel foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York on 18 September in her list of undisclosed meetings with Israelis which was published on Monday, the JC has learned.

Downing Street immediately denied the claim and no other source backed it up. The blackmail attempt failed. The Jewish Chronicle also was at the forefront of the slander campaign that tried to smear the British labor leader Corbyn as anti-semite.

The Independent notes about the Patel affair:

[T]here is another point about all those meetings which Patel helpfully, if belatedly, detailed in her apologetic statement on Monday: their remarkable one-sidedness. Patel heads a department which has a long history of humanitarian and development funding for Palestinians. Indeed she has taken a close interest in that funding, going so far as to announce a review last year which has already resulted in notable cuts of some £17m. This includes, to the widespread dismay of NGOs, cuts in funding to Gaza, where humanitarian and economic conditions are generally agreed to be at their direst ever.

Cutting aid money to a devastated Gaza while handing it to the Israeli occupation army that supports Takfiris fighting Syria is beyond the already extreme British Zionist sculduggeries.

Prime Minister May is herself a strong Zionist. She recently celebrated the Balfour declaration in which, a hundred years ago, the British empire promised land it did not own to a people that did not exit at the cost of the owners and inhabitants of that very land. That promise, handed to a very influential Jewish banker, opened new credit lines for the British war against Germany. It also reinforced lobbying efforts in the U.S. for entering the war on the British side. May asked the British people to feel "pride" for the treacherous paper and completely ignored the devastation it caused for the Palestinian people:

The Israelis will be celebrating – and why not, for it set Britain’s seal on the future Israeli state in Palestine. Perhaps Israel would not have been created without it. But the fearful suffering and tragedy of the Palestinian refugees which was to follow in the coming years suggest that the Balfour letter – through its very wording – was certain to create a terrible wrongdoing which to this day curses the place we used to call the Holy Land.

In January AlJazeera broadcasted an in depth investigation on the Zionist lobby in Britain. It proved that the lobby is directed by and its slander campaigns run from Israel's embassy in London.

Peter Oborne and James Jones just published a long paper on The pro-Israel lobby in Britain. They find:

The Friends of Israel groups in the House of Commons have firmly established themselves in the interstices of British political life. Their heavy presence at party conferences is taken for granted, their lunches and dinners an ingrained part of the Westminster social scene, the donations a vital part of the political financing. An environment now exists where MPs and ministers feel cautious about criticizing the foreign policy of the Israeli state, wary of opening themselves to criticism on the home front.
...
While this pro-Israel lobbying is lawful, it is emphatically not transparent. We have shown in this pamphlet that journalists very rarely declare their [Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre] funded trips to Israel. We have also shown how patterns of donations from [Conservative Friends of Israel] members to Tory candidates are sometimes opaque.

Indeed, the financial structure of the CFI as a whole is obscure.
...
A similar observation applies to other pro-Israel pressure groups. While BICOM’s work is entirely legitimate, it is by no means transparent. They never declare, for example, which journalists go on trips and who they meet.

Oborne and Jones also find that the Israel lobby does not reflect the opinion and values of British Jews. It is an extremely right-wing syndicate arranged to disguise its sources of money and the foreign interests involved in it.

The Zionist lobby in Britain is vicious. It operates in the dark and hides its financing. This affair removes the curtain it uses to hide its malicious influence. It does not welcome the disinfecting sunlight this affair shines on it and is mourning the loss of its valuable asset.

Priti Patel has been removed as a minister but is still a conservative Member of Parliament. The new revelations about her and the sinister powers influencing her will hopefully convince the British voters to finally kick her out.

Trumping the Arctic: "Drill Baby, Drill" Back in the Far North

Drilling, Drilling, Everywhere... Will the Trump Administration Take Down the Arctic Refuge?

by Subhankar Banerjee - TomDispatch

November 9, 2017   

What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay up north. It affects the world, as that region is the integrator of our planet’s climate systems, atmospheric and oceanic.

At the moment, the northernmost places on Earth are warming at more than twice the global average, a phenomenon whose impact is already being felt planetwide.

Welcome to the world of climate breakdown -- and to the world of Donald Trump.



Porcupine River caribou migrating to the coastal plain
for calving, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee, 2002

The set of climate feedbacks contributing to further warming in the Arctic are about to be aided and abetted by President Trump, his Interior Department, and a Republican-controlled Congress. The impact of their decisions will be experienced around the world.

Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, The Destruction of a Vast Transnational Nursery?

Back in May 2013, a word came to mind that I wanted to see in all our vocabularies. It wasn’t the ever-present “terrorist” but “terrarist” and I meant it to describe people intent on destroying the planetary environment that had welcomed and nurtured so many species, including our own, for so long; in other words, human beings willing to commit “terracide.” I had in mind the CEOs of the biggest energy companies, the ones whose scientists understood global warming perfectly well decades ago and who still were ready to put their corporate money into supporting climate denialism. At the time I wrote:

“If the oil execs aren’t terrarists, then who is? And if that doesn’t make the big energy companies criminal enterprises, then how would you define that term? To destroy our planet with malice aforethought, with only the most immediate profits on the brain, with only your own comfort and wellbeing (and those of your shareholders) in mind: Isn’t that the ultimate crime? Isn’t that terracide?”

Of course, that was in the good old days before Donald Trump and his cronies filled a whole administration to the tipping point with so-called climate skeptics and outright climate-change denialists. And this continues to happen, even as one report or study after another confirms that humanity and its fossil fuels are heating the planet at a remarkable rate and filling its atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a record pace. In the end, Trump and his crew may prove to be the biggest collection of criminals -- in terms of harm to this world -- ever. And it should be considered a historical irony (of sorts) that, on this issue, the Republicans, once the American party of the environment, are with them all the way.

If you want an example of what this means in practice, take Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior, former Montana Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke. In June, he addressed the American Petroleum Institute’s board of directors at Washington's Trump International Hotel (on the very day his department announced plans to get rid of an Obama era regulation on payments for drilling and mining on federal land) and he also chartered a plane owned by oil and gas execs at a cost of $12,000 to American taxpayers for a domestic trip that would have cost $300 commercially; meanwhile, he’s been doing everything in his power to open up America’s protected areas to energy exploitation, shrink the boundaries of such areas, slash the Park Service budget meant to protect them, and even make them more expensive for ordinary Americans to visit. And if you think that’s a mouthful of a run-on sentence, it only begins to hint at where this administration is heading with its energy fantasies about how this planet should operate. As TomDispatch regular Subhankar Banerjee, an expert on Alaska’s Arctic lands and seas, points out today, no previously protected spot is likely to be spared such attention. In this context, think of the Trump White House as the Exxon Valdez of administrations and a group of terrarists all rolled into one. Tom 

Drilling, Drilling, Everywhere... Will the Trump Administration Take Down the Arctic Refuge?

by Subhankar Banerjee

 

While the United States is still recovering from the deaths, suffering, and devastation caused by extreme hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as historically deadly wildfires across the West, Trump’s Department of the Interior is preparing a five-year strategic plan that never once mentions climate change or climate science. It does, however, plan to open previously protected public lands of all sorts to the increased exploitation of fossil fuels -- and Arctic Alaska is anything but exempt.

“Alaska [is] open for business,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a cheering crowd at an Alaska Oil and Gas Association conference in Anchorage earlier this year. The secretary was visiting as part of a presidential mandate to “prepare our country to be energy dominant” -- even though the U.S. has been the largest global producer of oil and gas since 2012 and, in this era, has often been referred to as “Saudi America.” What that energy-dominance slogan signals is nothing short of the beginning of a war against environmental conservation, justice, and the planet as a welcoming habitat for all life.

“The only path for energy dominance is a path through the great state of Alaska,” Zinke assured the Anchorage audience. What he evidently wants to do is sell off the most ecologically and culturally significant places in the state to Big Oil. On the sacrifice block is a long endangered stretch of public land, Area 1002, or the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a biological nursery of global significance and a place sacred to the indigenous Gwich’in Nation. Like her father, also a Republican senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski is championing the task of opening the refuge to drilling by abusing the filibuster-proof budget process rather than debating this controversial issue as stand-alone legislation in Congress.

I first visited the Arctic Refuge in March 2001, spending a never-to-be-forgotten 14 months there during which, among so many other remarkable sights, I watched a polar bear mother playing with her two cubs outside their den in the Canning River Delta. As sea ice in the region continues to rapidly disappear, thanks to accelerating global warming, and as species like the polar bear that once used that sea ice as a primary denning habitat struggle for survival, the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge becomes increasingly significant as a land-denning habitat. And keep in mind that it’s a place that harbors the highest density of onshore polar bear dens in Alaska. Any seismic exploration and drilling activities in the refuge are expected to severely affect those bears. (Seismic exploration is the process by which subsurface deposits of fossil fuels and minerals are detected by using shock waves.)

On that first visit to the refuge, I witnessed caribou from the Porcupine River herd giving birth around our tent. Nearly 200,000 of them migrate more than 1,500 miles annually from their wintering habitats to the south to their calving grounds on the coastal plain and back again, the longest land migration of any mammal on Earth. In the summer months, I had difficulty sleeping because the sun quite literally never sets and birds sing around the clock. More than 90 species of them migrate from five continents and all 50 states to nest and rear their young on that coastal plain. No wonder the Gwich’in people call it “the sacred place where life begins.” 

A Vast Transnational Nursery

“Saddle up, it’s going to be a tough fight, but we come from survivors, we come from warriors,” Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee wrote in a Facebook post, as she faced the increasingly grim Trumpian future that seems to be in store for the preserve. To understand the situation she and her people find themselves in, join me on a brief journey into what might be called multispecies justice.

On December 6, 1960, after a decade-long campaign by conservationists George Collins, Lowell Sumner, and Olaus and Mardy Murie, among others, Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton signed Public Land Order 2214 setting aside 8.9 million acres in northeast Alaska as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Its purpose: “preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values.” Twenty years later, the “range” was renamed a “refuge” and more than doubled in size as part of the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act, or ANILCA, signed into law on December 2, 1980, by President Jimmy Carter. Protecting the habitat of the Porcupine River caribou herd was a crucial focus of the conservationists who helped create the refuge.

Just as the original refuge was being established, the Gwich’in were beginning their own advocacy for the protection of the caribou. “Our people have been raising concerns about the impact of development on the caribou since the sixties,” Gwich’in elder and activist Sarah James of Arctic Village told me during my visit to Alaska last month.

Jonathon Solomon from Fort Yukon, who would later become one of the most influential indigenous activists in Alaska, founded Gwichyaa Gwich'in Ginkhe (“people of the flat speak”) to fight a proposed dam on the Yukon River, which would have flooded 10 indigenous villages on the Yukon Flats. He also advocated for the animals whose habitats the dam might damage or destroy, including caribou, salmon, and waterfowl. In 1967, the project was shelved and in 1980, as part of ANILCA, the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge was established adjacent to the Arctic Refuge. This represented a major victory for the indigenous people and the conservationists who had united in defense of environmental justice. Without them, there would have been a mud-banked reservoir the size of Lake Erie and 10 indigenous villages under hundreds of feet of water, with salmon migrations blocked, and the loss of one of North America’s most productive waterfowl nesting areas.

In the early 1970s, a major Arctic pipeline project was proposed to carry natural gas from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields across the Arctic coastal plain to the Mackenzie River Delta, and from there south to Alberta, Canada. “Our people were very concerned about the potential impact on the caribou as the pipeline would traverse their birthing grounds in the Arctic Refuge and in Canada,” Sarah James told me. Jonathon Solomon helped organize opposition in the villages of the region. In his 1977 report, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, the influential Canadian jurist Thomas Berger recommended that “no pipeline be built and no energy corridor be established across the Northern Yukon.”

Berger further advocated for the establishment of a national park in the region, one in which the “native people must continue to have the right to hunt, fish, and trap.” His proposal prevailed. The pipeline was never built and, in 1984, in line with the land claims of the Inuvialuit people, a Northern Yukon National Park was established adjacent to the Arctic Refuge. In 1992, it was renamed Ivvavik National Park.

In the Inuvialuktun language, Ivvavik means “nursery” or “birthplace.” Fran Mauer, a retired wildlife biologist who has studied the caribou and worked for 21 years in the Arctic Refuge, explained to me that the Porcupine River herd uses the coastal plain that stretches across Alaska and the northern Yukon as one large birthplace and nursery. Any oil and gas development in that protected plain on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, however, would endanger the herd’s survival and so the way of life of the Gwich’in, who have always called themselves “the caribou people.” As a map prepared by the Gwich’in Steering Committee indicates, the habitat of the caribou overlaps their own traditional homeland of 15 villages spread across Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest territories. They depend on that vast herd for nutritional, cultural, and spiritual sustenance. Their map is an exemplary depiction of multispecies justice in which the border between the two countries is no more than a dotted line.

In 1995, based on Gwich’in land claims in Yukon, Canada, one more refuge, Vuntut National Park, was established adjacent to both Ivvavik National Park and the Arctic Refuge. Following a recent Senate vote that could portend the future opening of the refuge to Big Oil, Chief Bruce Charlie of the Vuntut Gwitchin (People of the Lakes) First Nation said, “Our mandate from our elders is to permanently protect the sacred calving grounds on the coastal plain of the refuge, and we will not stop our fight until that is achieved and our human rights are respected.” In this spirit, he and his compatriots urge us to set aside national territorial claims in favor of multispecies justice.

The four contiguous protected areas -- the Arctic Refuge, the Yukon Flats Refuge, Ivvavik National Park, and the Vuntut National Park -- should be thought of as a vast transnational nursery for innumerable species and a living testament to seven decades of hard work by conservationists and indigenous peoples from two countries. To destroy this interconnected, interdependent web of life by turning the “sacred place where life begins” into a vast oil field and so fossil-fuelize Donald Trump’s dreams of 1950s-style American glory, would be little short of a crime against both nature and humanity. In the wake of any such development, there will, of course, be the inevitable oil spills, toxic residues, and other environmental crises as ever more oil and natural gas are extracted from a planet that can ill afford to see them burned.

A Vast Reservoir of Intimidation, Myths, and Deception

In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan appointed James Watt as his secretary of interior and Anne Burford as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, conservationists became alarmed about the large-scale sale of public lands and waters to the extractive industries. In fact, the opening up of the Arctic Refuge coastal plain to oil and gas development would soon become a priority for the Reagan administration.

In 1984, seismic exploration was conducted on the coastal plain. At that time, federal scientists working at the Arctic Refuge’s office in Fairbanks, Alaska, were put under a gag order by the Department of the Interior and forbidden to discuss the value of the Refuge’s wildlife or wilderness with the media or the public, as biologist Pamela Miller who resigned in protest, becoming a conservationist and defender of the refuge, told me. In 1988, alarmed by developments in Washington and Alaska, all 15 Gwich’in villages called an emergency gathering and passed a resolution, Gwich’in Niintsyaa, which demanded that, “the United States Congress and president recognize the rights of our Gwich’in people to continue to live our way of life by prohibiting development in the calving and post-calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd.” They further requested that “the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be made Wilderness to achieve this end.”

Given the groundwork put in place by the Reagan administration and the Alaska congressional delegation, a bill to open up the refuge to drilling was nonetheless sailing through the Senate in 1989. In March of that year, however, an ironic twist of fate occurred. The Exxon Valdez, a giant oil tanker made national headlines by running aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling almost 11 million gallons of crude oil into its waters and polluting the region. In response to an environmental disaster on such a scale, congressional lawmakers pulled the plug on oil exploration and drilling at the refuge.

But that didn’t end matters. The Alaska congressional delegation renewed the push to open up the refuge as soon as George H.W. Bush took office. Ever since then, advocates of drilling have continued to peddle a laughable myth: that oil development would actually be good for the region’s caribou because, as George W. Bush would claim at a rally in the 2000 election campaign, those caribou “will come up against the pipe, nice warm pipe, they'll make love, and you'll have more caribou.”

Soon after moving into the White House, Bush once again made opening the refuge to drilling a priority for a Republican administration. In 2001, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources asked Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, who had infamously described the Arctic Refuge coastal plain as a “flat white nothingness,” for information on caribou calving and oil drilling there and she, in turn, queried the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on the subject.

In a May 24, 2001, memorandum, the refuge manager wrote to his supervisor at the FWS: “During the period for which there are adequate records, Porcupine herd calving concentrations have occurred within the 1002 [coastal plain] area 27 out of 30 years.” That July, however, in a letter responding to questions about the dangers of opening the Arctic Refuge from Senator Frank Murkowski, Norton responded, “Concentrated calving occurred primarily outside of the 1002 Area in 11 of the last 18 years.” When questioned about this, her spokesperson insisted that the problem had been a typographic error, not an urge to mislead Congress. And so it’s gone ever since.

Recently, during a Senate hearing on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Refuge, biologist and former research professor at the University of Alaska Matthew Cronin testified that caribou had not been “significantly impacted” by the oil fields in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay area. When Senator Al Franken asked if he received funding from the oil companies -- ExxonMobil and BP Exploration -- for his research, Cronin responded with a “yes.” Lois Epstein, Arctic Program Director of the Wilderness Society, who also testified, promised that she will submit a report challenging Cronin’s research, so that the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee can make a “responsible decision” on the refuge.

At that hearing, the boosters of drilling also touted two other false claims made regularly during the Bush years:

* that drilling in the refuge will involve only a very small “footprint,” just 2,000 acres, even though the entire 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain would, in fact, be opened to oil and gas leasing, as well as a sprawling network of pipelines, roads, and year-round production infrastructure;

* that advances in technology make “modern” Arctic drilling environmentally safe, even though there have been “450 spills each year during 1996-2008” and “nearly one spill per day” between October 2012 and October 2017 in the existing Prudhoe Bay oil fields, as Epstein pointed out in her written testimony to that Senate committee. She also wrote that earlier this year, BP suffered a “production well blowout due to thawing permafrost,” thanks to rapid Arctic warming.

Already, the opening of the refuge is deeply enmeshed in the congressional tax “reform” process, as Senate Republicans are hoping to raise $1 billion over the next decade from the anticipated oil lease sales in the refuge to help defray their $2 trillion tax reform “giveaway” to the rich.

Last month, during my visit to Alaska -- a significant part of the state’s budget comes from oil revenues -- I witnessed much euphoria about protected public lands finally being “opened for business.” There’s nothing new about this. There was a similar euphoria over the Rampart Dam and Arctic Gas Pipeline, mega-projects that were, in the end, defeated by conservationists and indigenous activists. The world is better off today because of their foresight and hard work, and the planet richer in the diversity of life thanks to it.

I also witnessed voices of resistance getting louder as conservationists and indigenous activists girded themselves for what will be the battle of a lifetime. “Congress must take drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge off the table,” Bernadette Demientieff wrote. “It’s up to all of us to protect this sacred place for generations to come.”

Opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the crown jewel of that vast transnational nursery, to a world of harm at a time when the “sixth mass extinction” in our planet’s history is already underway could prove to be one of the crimes of the century -- of any century, in fact.

TomDispatch regular Subhankar Banerjee is the author of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land and editor of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. He is Lannan chair and professor of art and ecology at the University of New Mexico. An exhibition of his Arctic work, “Long Environmentalism in the Near North: Activism, Photographs, Writing,” is on display at the University of New Mexico Art Museum through March 3, 2018.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Subhankar Banerjee