When the dark lord of the Anglo-American empire, Zbigniew Brzezinski, stated that the United States should retaliate against Russia as a result of the latter ruining the former’s credibility in the Middle East (which the U.S. needed no help in doing), the world got a glimpse into just how far the ruling elite is willing to take the world’s population in its quest for total hegemony.
After all, Brzezinski is no mere talking head or media mouthpiece. He is the architect of al-Qaeda and controller of much of the American geopolitical strategy. When he states that retaliation must be part of U.S. strategy, there is a very real possibility that it will be.
Indeed, in order to understand much of the U.S. geopolitical strategy at work today, it might serve us well to consult the work Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
The book, written in 1997, seemed to lament the fact that the public would not support such blatant imperialism unless they truly viewed the crusade to be in their own immediate self-interest. Only fours year later, the public would receive such a “sudden threat or challenge” to their “sense of domestic well-being” in theform of the 9/11 attacks.
In regards to Russia, Brzezinski clearly laid out his desire to see a fractured Russia, a nation that was drastically smaller in size and much weaker in terms of its governmental structure. In other words, a Russia incapable of opposing Anglo-American hegemony.
Brzezinski wrote,
Given the enormous size and diversity of the country, a decentralized political system, based on the free market, would be more likely to unleash the creative potential of both the Russian people and the country’s vast natural resources. In turn, such a more decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.[2]
Brzezinski makes it clear that the strategy towards Russia is one that involves the breakup of the country into three parts, loosely confederated, partially beholden to NATO-dominated Europe, and blended with the other powers of Asia.
He writes,
A loosely confederated Russia—composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic—would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with Europe, with the new states of Central Asia, and with the Orient, which would thereby accelerate Russia’s own development. Each of the three confederated entities would also be more able to tap local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow’s heavy bureaucratic hand.[3]
Likewise, Brzezinski sees China and the greater Asian region uniting under a loosely confederal system, effectively forming the world into a realm of what is, essentially, three main trading blocks, full of impotent states and third world fiefdoms.[4]
Clearly, Russia is not going to allow itself to be destroyed and broken up into three parts for the benefit of the hegemony of world oligarchs. Yet Brzezinski’s desire are clearly the goals of the ruling elite and a plan to make them a reality is already in motion.
In order to accomplish such a task, it would require an enormous battle politically, economically, and militarily. Unfortunately for the world, it appears the ruling elite is prepared to do just that.
[1] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books. 1997. Pp. 40-41
[2] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books. 1997. Pp. 202.
[3] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books. 1997. Pp. 202-203.
[4] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books. 1997.
By Niles Williamson
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is meeting today at the headquarters of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany with two dozen US military commanders and European diplomats to discuss how to escalate their economic and military campaign against Russia. They will assess the impact of current economic sanctions, as well as NATO’s strategy of exploiting the crisis in eastern Ukraine to deploy ever-greater numbers of troops and military equipment to Eastern Europe, threatening Russia with war.
A US defense official told Reuters that the main purpose of the meeting was to “assess and strategize on how the United States and key allies should think about heightened tensions with Russia over the past year.” The official also said Carter was open to providing the Ukrainian regime with lethal weapons, a proposal which had been put forward earlier in the year.
Most provocatively, a report published by the Associated Press yesterday reports that the Pentagon has been actively considering the use of nuclear missiles against military targets inside Russia, in response to what it alleges are violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Russia denies US claims that it has violated the INF by flight-testing ground-launched cruise missiles with a prohibited range.
Three options being considered by the Pentagon are the placement of anti-missile defenses in Europe aimed at shooting Russian missiles out of the sky; a “counterforce” option that would involve pre-emptive non-nuclear strikes on Russia military sites; and finally, “countervailing strike capabilities,” involving the pre-emptive deployment of nuclear missiles against targets inside Russia.
The AP states: “The options go so far as one implied—but not stated explicitly—that would improve the ability of US nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory.” In other words, the US is actively preparing nuclear war against Russia.
Robert Scher, one of Carter’s nuclear policy aides, told Congress in April that the deployment of “counterforce” measures would mean “we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia.”
According to other Pentagon officials, this option would entail the deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles throughout Europe.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Joe Skewers told AP, “All the options under consideration are designed to ensure that Russia gains no significant military advantage from their violation.”
The criminality and recklessness of the foreign policy of Washington and its NATO allies is staggering. A pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russian forces, many of them near populated areas, could claim millions of lives in seconds and lead to a nuclear war that would obliterate humanity. Even assuming that the US officials threatening Russia do not actually want such an outcome, however, and that they are only trying to intimidate Moscow, there is a sinister objective logic to such threats.
Nuclear warmongering by US officials immensely heightens the danger of all-out war erupting accidentally, amid escalating military tensions and strategic uncertainty. NATO forces are deploying for military exercises all around Russia, from the Arctic and Baltic Seas to Eastern Europe and the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Regional militaries are all on hair-trigger alerts.
US officials threatening Russia cannot know how the Kremlin will react to such threats. With Moscow concerned about the danger of a sudden NATO strike, Russia is ever more likely to respond to perceived signs of NATO military action by launching its missiles, fearing that otherwise the missiles will be destroyed on the ground. The danger of miscalculations and miscommunications leading to all-out war is immensely heightened.
The statements of Scher and Carter confirm warnings made last year by the WSWS, that NATO’s decision to back a fascist-led putsch in Kiev in February, and to blame Russia without any evidence for shooting down flight MH17, posed the risk of war. “Are you ready for war—including possibly nuclear war—between the United States, Europe, and Russia? That is the question that everyone should be asking him- or herself in light of the developments since the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17,” the WSWS wrote .
In March, Putin stated that he had placed Russian forces, including its nuclear forces, on alert in the aftermath of the Kiev putsch, fearing a NATO attack on Russia. Now the threat of war arising from US policy has been confirmed directly by statements of the US military.
These threats have developed largely behind the backs of the world working class. Workers in the United States, Europe and worldwide have time and again shown their hostility to US wars in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Yet nearly 15 years after these wars began, the world stands on the brink of an even bloodier and more devastating conflict, and the media and ruling elites the world over are hiding the risk of nuclear war.
US President Barack Obama is expected to escalate pressure on Russia at the G7 summit this weekend, pressing European leaders to maintain economic sanctions put in place in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year. The latest outbreak in violence in Ukraine this week, which the US blames on Russia, is to serve as a pretext for continuing the sanctions.
Speaking to Parliament on Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warned of a “colossal threat of the resumption of large-scale hostilities by Russian and terrorist forces.” He claimed without proof that 9,000 Russian soldiers are deployed in rebel-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine.
“Ukraine’s military should be ready for a new offensive by the enemy, as well as a full-scale invasion along the entire border with the Russian Federation,” Poroshenko said. “We must be really prepared for this.” He said the Ukrainian army had at least 50,000 soldiers stationed in the east, prepared to defend the country.
Poroshenko’s remarks came a day after renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine between Kiev forces and Russian-backed separatists resulted in dozens of casualties. This week’s fighting marked the largest breach to date of the cease-fire signed in February.
Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday that Russia believed the previous day’s hostilities had been provoked by Kiev to influence upcoming discussions at the G7 summit this weekend and the EU summit in Brussels at the end of the month. “These provocative actions are organized by Ukraine’s military forces, and we are concerned with that,” he stated.
Each side blamed the other for initiating fighting in Marinka, approximately nine miles west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. Yuriy Biryukov, an adviser to Poroshenko, reported on Thursday that five Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the fighting, and another 39 wounded. Eduard Basurin, deputy defense minister and spokesman for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), told Interfax that 16 rebel fighters and five civilians had been killed.
Ukrainian forces also fired artillery at the rebel-held city of Donetsk on Wednesday. Shells landed in the southwest districts of Kirovsky and Petrovsky, killing 6 people and wounding at least 90 others. The city’s Sokol market was severely damaged, with several rows of shops burned to the ground.
Responding to Wednesday’s developments, members of the fascistic Right Sector militia have been called to mobilize for battle. Andrey Stempitsky, commander of the militia’s paramilitary battalion, posted a message on Facebook calling on those who went home during the cease-fire to “return to their combat units.” He warned that the Right Sector would “wage war, ignoring the truce devotees.
In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.
In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever. A transcript of our conversation which has been edited for clarity and length can be found below.
Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?
It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.
That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.
There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.
All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry. That is [true for the] left and right. But what’s going to take it’s place, that has not been articulated. Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.
Is there a revolutionary consciousness building in America?
Well, it is definitely building. But until there is an ideological framework that large numbers of people embrace to challenge the old ideological framework, nothing is going to happen. Some things can happen; you can have sporadic uprisings as you had in Ferguson or you had in Baltimore. But until they are infused with that kind of political vision, they are reactive, in essence.
So you have, every 28 hours, a person of color, usually a poor person of color, being killed with lethal force — and, of course, in most of these cases they are unarmed. So people march in the streets and people protest; and yet the killings don’t stop. Even when they are captured on video. I mean we have videos of people being murdered by the police and the police walk away. This is symptomatic of a state that is ossified and can no longer respond rationally to what is happening to the citizenry, because it exclusively serves the interest of corporate power.
We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.
What do you think is the most likely way that the people will respond to living in these conditions?
That is the big unknown. When it will come is unknown. What is it that will trigger it is unknown. You could go back and look at past uprisings, some of which I covered — I covered all the revolutions in Eastern Europe; I covered the two Palestinian uprisings; I covered the street demonstrations that eventually brought down Slobodan Milosevic — and it’s usually something banal.
As a reporter, you know that it’s there; but you never know what will ignite it. So you have Lenin, six weeks before the revolution, in exile in Switzerland, getting up and saying, We who are old will never live to see the revolution. Even the purported leaders of the opposition never know when it’s coming. Nor do they know what will trigger it.
What kind of person engages in revolutionary activity? Is there a specific type?
There are different types, but they have certain characteristics in common. That’s why I quote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when he talks about “sublime madness.”
I think that sublime madness — James Baldwin writes it’s not so much that [revolutionaries] have a vision, it’s that they are possessed by it. I think that’s right. They are often difficult, eccentric personalities by nature, because they are stepping out front to confront a system of power [in a way that is] almost a kind of a form of suicide. But in moments of extremity, these rebels are absolutely key; and that you can’t pull off seismic change without them.
You’ve said that we don’t know where the change will comefrom,and that it could just as easily take a right-wing, reactionary form as a leftist one. Is there anything lefties can do to influence the outcome? Or is it out of anyone’s control?
There’s so many events as societies disintegrate that you can’t predict. They play such a large part in shaping how a society goes that there is a lot of it that is not in your control.
For example, if you compare the breakdown of Yugoslavia with the breakdown of Czechoslovakia — and I covered both of those stories — Yugoslavia was actually the Eastern European country best-equipped to integrate itself into Europe. But Yugoslavia went bad. When the economy broke down and Yugoslavia was hit with horrific hyperinflation, it vomited up these terrifying figures in the same way that Weimar vomited up the Nazi party. Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces.
If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.
In terms of a left-wing populism having to build itself back up from scratch, do you see the broad coalition against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a hint of what that might look like? Or would you not go that far?
No, I would.
I think that if you look at what’s happened after Occupy, it’s either spawned or built alliances with a series of movements; whether it’s #BlackLivesMatter, whether it’s the Fight for $15 campaign, whether it’s challenging the TPP. I think they are all interconnected and, often times — at least when I’m with those activists — there is a political consciousness that I find quite mature.
Are you optimistic about the future?
I covered war for 20 years; we didn’t use terms like pessimist or optimist, because if you were overly optimistic, it could get you killed. You really tried to read the landscape as astutely as you could and then take calculated risks based on the reality around you, or at least on the reality insofar as you could interpret it. I kind of bring that mentality out of war zones.
If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us.
Yet you rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is; and then we let it go. The Buddhists call it karma, but faith is the belief that it goes somewhere. By standing up, you keep alive another narrative. It’s one of the ironic points of life. That, for me, is what provides hope; and if you are not there, there is no hope at all.
Three other former Iraq military contractors receive 30-year prison terms
This combination made from file photo shows convicted former Blackwater guards, from left, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough. (Photo: AP)
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on Monday sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison for his role in a 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians, which left 14 dead and wounded 17 others.
The Associated Press reports that the three other Blackwater employees—Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard—were sentenced to 30 years and one day each on charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.
Earlier:
Four former Blackwater guards face sentencing Monday for their role in the deaths of 14 Iraqi civilians during a 2007 massacre called “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday.”
The men, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough, and Nicholas Slatten, were convicted in October 2014 after years of legal battles. “Slatten faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for first-degree murder before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth,” the Washington Post reports; the other three men face the possibility of dozens of years behind bars.
While defense lawyers have argued that the men were acting in self-defense, federal prosecutors wrote that the men’s “crimes here were so horrendous—the massacre and maiming of innocents so heinous—that they outweigh any factors that the defendants may argue form a basis for leniency.”
In an interview with Democracy Now! last year, Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestsellingBlackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, described the deadly traffic square shooting that left 17 people killed:
[Blackwater guards] were responding—they were a unit called Raven 23. They were the elite Praetorian Guard of the U.S. occupation. They were guarding Paul Bremer, who was the original sort of proconsul in Iraq, the “viceroy,” as he liked to call himself. They were responding to an incident that had occurred on the opposite end of Baghdad from where their base was located. They roll out. They end up hitting a crowded intersection at Nisour Square. What often would happen in Iraq is that mercenary contractors would start throwing frozen water bottles at cars, trying to force them off the street, and then eventually escalate up to shooting at vehicles. These guys basically tried to take over this traffic circle, the Blackwater guys, so that they could speed around and continue on to their destination.
A small white car with a young Iraqi medical student and his mother didn’t stop fast enough for the Blackwater convoy, and they decided to escalate it all the way up to assassinating those individuals. And I say “assassinating,” because they shot to kill these people, and then they blew their car up. And then, that started this massive shooting spree that went on for—it was sustained for minutes. And at the end of it, 17 Iraqis were killed, including a nine-year-old boy named Ali Kinani, whose story we’ve told on the show before, and some 20 others were wounded in the attacks. And it was—you know, it became known as Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday.”
And Blackwater… in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, said that they had been fired upon. They had their allies in the media. A senior producer at CNN was quick to get on TV and say, “Oh, no, no, this wasn’t a massacre. You know, this was a firefight, and Blackwater was shot at.” Clearly, this jury saw what the Iraqi eyewitnesses have always contended, and that is that this was an unprovoked massacre of Iraqi civilians, none of whom were posing a threat, except not stopping fast enough for the mercenaries helping to occupy their country.
As Common Dreams previously reported, “the incident became a flashpoint of outrage over the atrocities that U.S. forces—particularly mercenaries—inflict on occupied civilian populations in Iraq.”
The Post reports Monday: “Defendants said that the case is the first in which the U.S. government prosecuted its own security contractors for the firearms violation, which involve weapons given them by the government to do their jobs in a war zone.”
Scahill wrote following the guilty convictions that they marked yet another instance in which high-ranking individuals failed to be the targets for accountability.
“Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. [Blackwater founder Erik] Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries.
“None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors,” Scahill wrote.
On why I painted physician, author, and peace activist Alice Rothchild
Portrait of Alice Rothschild by Robert Shetterly. (Credit: AmericansWhoTelltheTruth.org)
Editor’s note: The artist’s essay that follows accompanies the ‘online unveiling’—exclusive to Common Dreams—of Shetterly’s latest painting in his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” portrait series, presenting citizens throughout U.S. history who have courageously engaged in the social, environmental, or economic issues of their time. This painting of Alice Rothschild—a physician, author, filmmaker, and peace activist—is his latest portrait of those who dedicated their lives to equality, freedom and justice. Posters of this portrait and others are now available at the artist’s website.
I found that for many, publicly stating that Jews could be victimizers as well as victims, and that Palestinians are equally human and deeply hurting, is unthinkable and a betrayal of Jewish loyalty and identity. This Jewish denial combined with the increasing brutality of the Israeli occupation is made possible by keeping Palestinians invisible as fellow human beings. —Dr. Alice Rothchild
For making statements like the quote above, Alice Rothchild has been called a self-hating Jew. When non-Jews express similar thoughts, they are often called anti-Semitic. Both epithets are meant to intimidate the speakers from naming the brutal truth of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the truth of the history that lead to that occupation. Unless we name those truths, we are being complicit not only with the destruction of Palestine but also of Israel.
The reality of anti-Semitism’s long and sinister history should not forbid criticism of Israel’s illegal or unjust policies. Dr. Rothchild emphasizes that for Israel to insist on its right to perpetrate injustice against the Palestinians is to encourage the very anti-Semitism and hatred that endangers Israel.
Dr. Rothchild approaches the Israel/ Palestine conflict with compassion for both sides, knowing that both peoples have suffered great trauma, and also knowing that truth and justice are the the only means to ultimately heal the trauma and make peace possible.
She wants human rights for both sides and the freedom to live lives based in justice, not fear: “We believe that for Israelis to be safe and secure, Palestinians need to be safe and secure, that to be ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘pro-Israeli’ is an artificial distinction.”
Alice feels compelled to speak out as a human being who cares about justice anywhere, as a Jewish person, and as an American because the US has for so long enabled the occupation.
Alice Rothchild was born in Boston in 1948, the same year as the founding of Israel, a time celebrated by Jewish people all over the world—their return to the Promised Land. 1948 is, however, commemorated as the Nakba by Palestinians. Nakba means catastrophe, forced exile from their Promised land. Alice was raised in an Orthodox, Zionist family. Her mother Sylvia wrote a book of oral histories of survivors of the Holocaust. As a child Alice’s family took her to Israel to experience the jubilant energy of the Jewish state. No one suggested to her that the triumph of Israel had a dark side.
Alice studied psychology at Bryn Mawr in the late 1960s and then went on to the School of Medicine at Boston University. At both schools she participated in anti-Vietnam War protests and then became active in feminism and health care reform. While she became a board certified obstetrician-gynecologist on the staff of Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) she held an appointment at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. She also spent much of her time helping to establish reproductive clinics for poor and underserved women.
It wasn’t until 1997 that Dr. Rothchild began to study the origins of the Israel/Palestine issue, the role of US foreign policy in perpetrating it, how AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) was using money and intimidation to attempt to control US politics towards Israel, and how different the Palestinian narrative of this history was from the version reported by the mainstream American media. A major question for her was trying to understand how a people, the Jews, revered for their sense of justice and their sacrifices for upholding issues of justice could so systematically deny justice to the Palestinians. She says, “Jewish Israelis are often immigrants and have had the experience of oppression, ghettos, and racial hatred at the hands of dominant anti-Semitic societies. How have these Israelis moved to a place where they are able to do some of the same terrible things that were done to them?”
To answer questions like that Dr. Rothchild has written two books: Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Israeli and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience and On the Brink, written in the summer of 2014 while she was in the West Bank during the events leading up to a devastating Israeli attack on Gaza. She has also produced the documentaryVoices Across the Divide. Her goal in the books and the film is not to condemn but to understand, to look unflinchingly at the behavior of the Israeli government and compassionately seek its roots in fear and trauma.
Why is this issue important to the ‘Americans Who Tell the Truth’ project? So much of US history and its accumulation of power is tangled up with exploitation and racism. It’s very disturbing to see these same injustices being supported by the US in Israel, where we seem willing yet again to trade our ideals for “interests.” Some of those interests are about hegemony, some about economics. Much of the 3.2 billion dollars given every year to Israel constitutes some form of corporate welfare to US weapons manufacturers.
US taxpayer money is allocated with the understanding that it will be used to buy US weapons. And to keep this gravy train rolling along, American war industries lobby the U.S. government as tirelessly as AIPAC to continue policies that lead to huge profits.
But our involvement represents an opportunity. Because the US interests and economy are so intertwined with Israel’s, the US is in a uniquely powerful position to influence Israel’s policy toward Palestine. Dr. Rothchild’s work with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement through Jewish Voice for Peace and American Jews for a Just Peace is about harnessing the power of American citizens to affect U.S. policy.
I traveled last spring—and will return next month—to the West Bank to work on art projects in a refugee camp in Nablus and a small Palestinian agricultural village in the Jordan Valley scheduled for demolition by the Israelis. Once there, one cannot help but see the ugly face of the occupation: the mammoth indignity of the separation Wall, the steady encroachment of the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, the appropriation of Palestinian water and resources, the omnipresent military checkpoints, the house demolitions, the constant humiliations. All of this being done with the help of U.S. weapons and equipment. But most of all is the overriding clarity that there is not now nor has there ever been any desire for or possibility of a Palestinian state. When Netanyahu said recently that he had no intention of allowing a two state solution, many people in the US were shocked. But, in fact, that has been the policy all along. The “peace process” has been a mirage manipulated by the Israelis to defuse criticism. And the U.S. has played magician’s assistant in pretending the mirage was real.
Dr. Alice Rothchild is one of the people who have courageously and eloquently insisted on putting our ideals before our interests. When power and control are more important than justice and compassion, we lose all right to the moral high ground. Without Dr. Rothchild, we might not be able to even identify where that high ground is. ‘Americans Who Tell the Truth’ is very proud to include her courageous voice in it’s project.
The quote on her portrait says: “Where are the protests from political organizations, the cries of horror from U.S. ministers as well as rabbis and mainstream Jewish community groups who cry ‘Never again!’ Surely history will teach us that Israel cannot claim a special moral dispensation because of past suffering, and then behave immorally. Misusing the term anti-Semitism to characterize criticism of Israeli behavior ultimately renders the term meaningless.”
For many of us, sugar provides an instant feeling of warmth and comfort. We identify it as an essential component of great tasting foods, and of blissful culinary gratification. Its presence is unavoidable, even in foods that promise higher levels of nutritional value. In many corners of the globe, the human desire for sugar seems unquenchable. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find an addiction more commonplace than the one we experience for sugar. But it’s an addiction that could be killing us in record numbers.
The documentary titled The Secrets of Sugar examines this addiction and its perilous impact on the well-being of our global society. Extensive research has pinpointed sugar’s culpability in a number of our most common and life-threatening ailments, including high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and even Alzheimer’s disease.
The weight loss craze which began taking shape in the 1980’s originated as an attack against fat. Yet, even in a climate where the public enjoys unprecedented access to low or no-fat foods, the rates of damaging disease remain alarmingly high. “Which is worse: the sugar or the fat? The sugar, a thousand times over,” asserts Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist who serves as one of the film’s key interview subjects. In his view, sugar is a poison and serves as a recipe of destruction for people of all ages. As a leading crusader against the dangers of sugar, Dr. Lustig faces an uphill battle in altering existing practices within the food industry and educating an unsuspecting public who falls prey to their tactics.
According to the observations presented in The Secrets of Sugar, these tactics include ambiguous or misleading nutrition labels, fuzzy science, and the mounting of an advertising campaign unmatched in scale even by the likes of the tobacco industry.
Without a change in public consciousness, the prevalence of sugar in our daily diets threatens to heighten disease epidemics to an even greater degree, and may eventually lead to the bankruptcy of the entire healthcare system within the United States and Canada. By exploring an issue that too often remains obscured, The Secrets of Sugar seeks to ignite a movement among its viewers to rectify this disturbing trend before it’s too late.
By Chris Hedges
A man takes a picture of a woman at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January. (AP / John Locher)
This column is adapted from a talk Chris Hedges gave Friday night at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia—The scourge of male violence against women will not end if we dismantle the forces of global capitalism. The scourge of male violence exists independently of capitalism, empire and colonialism. It is a separate evil. The fight to end male violence against women, part of a global struggle by women, must take primacy in our own struggle. Women and girls, especially those who are poor and of color, cannot take part in a liberation movement until they are liberated. They cannot offer to us their wisdom, their leadership and their passion until they are freed from physical coercion and violent domination. This is why the fight to end male violence across the globe is not only fundamental to our movement but will define its success or failure. We cannot stand up for some of the oppressed and ignore others who are oppressed. None of us is free until all of us are free.
On Friday night at Simon Fraser University—where my stance on prostitution, expressed in a March 8 Truthdig column titled “The Whoredom of the Left,” had seen the organizers of a conference on resource extraction attempt to ban me from the gathering, an action they revoked after protests from radical feminists—I confronted the sickness of a predatory society. A meeting between me and students arranged by the university had been canceled. Protesters gathered outside the hall. Some people stormed out of the lecture room, slamming the doors after them, when I attacked the trafficking of prostituted women and girls. A male tribal leader named Toghestiy stood after the talk and called for the room to be “cleansed” of evil—this after Audrey Siegl, a Musqueam Nation woman, emotionally laid out what she and other women face at the hands of male predators—and one of the conference organizers, English professor Stephen Collis, seized the microphone at the end of the evening to denounce me as “vindictive.” It was a commercial for the moral bankruptcy of academia.
Moral collapse always accompanies civilizations in decline, from Caligula’s Rome to the decadence at the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Dying cultures always become hypersexualized and depraved. The primacy of personal pleasure obtained at the expense of others is the defining characteristic of a civilization in its death throes.
Edward Said defined sexual exploitation as a fundamental feature of Orientalism, which he said was a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Orientalism, Said wrote, views “itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. … [The local] women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.” Moreover, he went on, “[w]hen women’s sexuality is surrendered, the nation is more or less conquered.” The sexual conquest of indigenous women, Said pointed out, correlates with the conquest of the land itself.
Sexual violence directed at Asian women by white men—and any Asian woman can tell you how unrelenting and commonplace such violence and sexualized racism are—is a direct result of Western imperialism, just as sexual violence against aboriginal women is a direct result of white colonialism. And the same behavior is found in war and on the outskirts of the massive extraction industries that often spawn wars, such as those I reported on in Congo.
This sexualized racism, however, is hardly limited to wars or extraction sites. It is the driving force behind the millions of First World male sexual tourists who go to the developing world, as well as those who seek out poor women of color who are trafficked to and thrown into sexual bondage in the industrialized world.
Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? These vast predatory enterprises hold up the possibility of personal wealth, personal advancement and personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. They create a huge, permanent divide between the exploiters and the exploited, one that is rarely crossed. And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them.
The sexual abuse of poor girls and women expands the divide between the predators and the prey, the exploiters and the exploited. And in every war zone, as in every boomtown that rises up around extraction industries, you find widespread sexual exploitation by bands of men. This is happening in the towns rising up around fracking in North Dakota.
The only groups that wars produce in greater numbers than prostituted girls and women are killers, refugees and corpses. I was with U.S. Marine Corps units that were soon to be shipped to the Philippines, where their members would visit bars to pick up prostituted Filipina women they referred to LBFMs—Little Brown Fucking Machines, a phrase coined by the U.S. occupation troops that arrived in the Philippines in 1898.
Downtown San Salvador when I was in El Salvador during the war there was filled with streetwalkers, massage parlors, brothels and nightclubs where girls and women, driven into the urban slums because of the fighting in their rural communities, bereft of their homes and safety, often cut off from their families, were being pimped out to the gangsters and warlords. I saw the same explosion of prostitution when I reported from Syria, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Nairobi, Congo—where Congolese armed forces routinely raped and tortured girls and women near Anvil Mining’s Dikulushi copper mine—and when I was in Djibouti, where girls and women, refugees from the fighting across the border in Ethiopia, were herded by traffickers into a poor neighborhood that was an outdoor market for human flesh.
Sexual slavery—and not incidentally pornography—is always one of war’s most lucrative industries. This is not accidental. For war, like destroying the planet for plunder, is also a predatory endeavor. It is a denial of the sacred. It is a turning away from reverence. Human beings, like the Earth itself, become objects to destroy or be gratified by, or both. They become mere commodities that have no intrinsic value beyond monetary worth. The pillage of the Earth, like war, is about lust, power and domination. The violence, plunder, destruction, forced labor, torture, slavery and, yes, prostitution are all part of unfettered capitalism, a single evil. And we will stand united or divided against this evil. To ignore parts of this evil, to say that some forms of predatory behavior are acceptable and others are not, will render us powerless in its face. The goal of the imperialists and corporate oligarchs is to keep the oppressed divided. And they are doing a good job.
We must start any fight against capitalism or environmental degradation by heeding the suffering and plaintive cries of the oppressed, especially those of women and girls who are subjugated by male violence. While capitalism exploits racism and gender inequality for its own ends, while imperialism and colonialism are designed to reduce women in indigenous cultures to sexual slaves, racism and gender inequality exist independently from capitalism. And if not consciously named and fought they will exist even if capitalism is destroyed.
This struggle for the liberation of women, which goes beyond the goal of dismantling corporate capitalism, asks important and perhaps different questions about the role of government and use of law, as radical feminists such as Lee Lakeman have pointed out. Women who engage in the struggle for liberty across the globe need laws and effective policing to stop from being blackmailed, bullied and denied access to cash and to resources that sustain life, especially as they are disproportionately left with the care of the sick, the young, the old and the destitute. It is male violence against women that is the primary force used to crush the global collective revolt of women. And male violence against feminists, who seek a more peaceful, egalitarian and sustaining world, is pervasive. To challenge prostitution, to challenge objectification, to challenge hypersexualization of women is to often be threatened with rape. To challenge mining, to stand up to protect water, to assist a truth teller, if you are a woman, is often to be threatened with not only economic destitution but violence leading to prostitution. We must as activists end that objectification of women and end male violence. If we do not, we will never have access to the ideas and leadership of women, and in particular women of color, which is essential to creating an inclusive vision for a better future. So while we must decry violence and exploitation against all of the oppressed, we must also recognize that male violence against women—including prostitution and its promoter, pornography—is a specific and separate global force. It is a tool of capitalism, it is often a product of imperialism and colonialism, but it exists outside capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. And it is a force that men in general, including, sadly, most men on the left, refuse to acknowledge, much less fight. This is why the struggle for women’s liberty is absolutely crucial to our movement. Without that freedom we will fail.
Abuse and especially sexual abuse of women are commonplace in war zones. I interviewed Muslim girls and women who were forced into Serbian brothels and rape camps, usually after their fathers, husbands and brothers had been executed. And in preparing a Truthdig column headlined “Recalled to Life” I spoke with a woman who was prostituted on the streets of Camden, N.J.—according to the Census Bureau the poorest city in the United States, a city where I spent many weeks with the cartoonist Joe Sacco doing research for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”
“They’d suck your dick for a hit of crack,” Christine Pagano said of prostituted women on Camden’s streets, adding that the men refused to wear condoms. “Camden was like nothing I had ever seen before. The poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money. I would get out of cars, I would walk five feet up the road and get held up. And they would take all my money. The first time it happened to me I cried an hour. You degrade yourself. You get out of the car. And some guy pulls a gun on you.”
“I gave up on everything at that point, I wanted to die,” she said. “I didn’t care anymore. All the guilt and the shame and leaving my son, not talking to my son, not talking to my family.”
“The last time was the most brutal,” she said. “It was on Pine Street near the Off Broadway [Lounge]. There’s weeds on the side. I never took tricks off the street. They had to be in cars. But I was sick. I was tired.”
A man on the street had offered her $20 to perform oral sex. But once they were in the weeds he pulled out a knife. He told her if she screamed he would kill her. When she offered some resistance he stabbed her.
“He was trying to stab me in my vagina,” she said. He stabbed her thigh. “It’s kind of bad because I actually never ended up doing anything about it [the wound]. It ended up turning into a big infection.”
“He made me hold his phone that had porn on it,” she said. “He never really pulled his pants all the way down. And at this point I’m bleeding pretty badly. I’m lying on glass outside of this bar. I had like little bits of glass in my back. I remember being really scared. Then it just got to the point where I was just numb. I asked him if he could stop at one point so I could smoke a cigarette. He let me. I got him to put the knife down because I was being good and listening to him. He stabbed the knife in the dirt. He said, ‘Just so you know I can pick it up at any point.’ I think in his head he thought that I was scared enough. In my head I was trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get outta there. And it occurred to me one of the things he kept asking me to do was lick his butt. And he was getting off on this. The last time he turned around and asked me to do this I pushed him. I had myself set up to get up.”
She ran naked into the street. The commotion attracted the police. A passerby gave her his shirt to cover up. At 5 feet 5 inches tall she weighed only 86 pounds. Her skin was gray. Her feet were so swollen she was wearing size 12 men’s slippers.
The years I spent as a war correspondent did not leave me untouched. I lost to violence many of those I worked with, including Kurt Schork, with whom I covered the wars in Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo. I was captured and taken prisoner in Basra during the Shiite uprising following the Gulf War and ended up in the hands of Iraqi secret police. I know a little of what it is like to be helpless and physically abused. And after Saddam Hussein drove the Kurds out of northern Iraq, my translator, a young woman, disappeared in the chaotic flight of the Kurds. It took me weeks to find her. And when I did she was being pimped out, numb with trauma. The experience of hearing her sobs would cure anyone of the notion that selling your body for sex is like trading a commodity on the stock market.
Imagine what it would be like for your mouth, your vagina and your rectum to be penetrated every day, over and over, by strange men who called you “bitch,” “slut,” “cunt” and “whore,” who slapped and hit you, and then to be beaten by a pimp. This is not sex. And it is not sex work. It is gang rape.
Before I arrived in Vancouver, some of the conference organizers issued a public message commenting on my condemnation of prostitution, saying that prostitution was “complex and multifaceted.” The note went on to assure participants in the conference that the Institute of the Humanities at the university did not “take sides in this difficult and extremely contentious debate.”
But there is nothing complex or multifaceted about prostitution, not when you strip it down to its brutal physical act. It turns you into a piece of meat. It does not matter if it occurs in an alley or a hotel room. And the inevitable diseases, emotional trauma and physical injuries that arise for the women, along with a shortened life expectancy, are well documented in study after study.
Prostitution fits perfectly into the paradigm of global capitalism. The physical scars, diseases and short lives of the miners I lived with at the Siglo XX tin mine in Bolivia—most of whom died in middle age from silicosis—are yet another manifestation of the predatory nature of capitalism. No one chooses to die of silicosis or black lung disease. No one chooses to sell his or her body on the street. You go into the mines, just as you go into prostitution, because global capitalism does not offer you a choice.
“In Canada young women and girls of Native descent are forced into street prostitution in numbers far disproportionate to white women,” I was told by Summer Rain Bentham, aSquamish Nation woman who lived and worked on the streets of the impoverished Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and who courageously rose from her seat in the lecture hall and joined me at the podium in solidarity after the talk. “Our lives are deemed less valuable because the Western world has decided that we are worthless. These racist views create a hierarchy based on race even within prostitution itself for women. This means some women are indoors in strip clubs or ‘agencies’—sometimes she might be educated, and in some cases she might actually believe she has [an] option other than prostitution. This racist hierarchy leaves aboriginal women on the bottom in this case in survival prostitution with no choices, experiencing a level of violence that is hard to fathom or comprehend. Violence that will never leave her and that is perpetuated by men not only because we are women, but because we are Native women. It is men’s privilege, power and entitlement in the world that keeps women entrenched in prostitution. It is men who benefit from Native women continuing to be at the bottom. Prostitution is not what most women who have ever been prostituted or women who have never faced being prostituted would choose to do. Prostitution is not what we want for any women or girl.”
We are called to build a world where all people have the opportunity to choose security, safety and well-being over jobs that leave them traumatized, sick, maimed and even destroyed. I don’t see the point of this fight if that is not our goal.
Sexual violence and sexual submission cannot be set apart from unfettered capitalism and the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, however much the traffickers, pimps, brothel and massage parlor owners, johns and their apologists might like for them to be. They are integral pieces of a world where wholesale industrial slaughter has killed hundreds of innocents in Gaza and more than a million innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the mentally ill are thrown onto streets, where a country like the United States warehouses 2.3 million people, mostly poor people of color, 25 percent of the world’s prison population, in cages for decades, where life for the working poor is one long emergency. It is all one world. It is all one system. And this system, in its entirety, must be overthrown and destroyed if we are to have any hope of enduring as a species.
It is not accidental that many of the Abu Ghraib images that were released resemble stills from porn films. There is a shot of a naked man kneeling in front of another man as if performing oral sex. There is a photo of a naked man on a leash held by a female American soldier. There are photos of naked men in chains. There are photos of naked men stacked one on top of the other in a pile on the floor as if in a prison gangbang. And there are hundreds more classified photos that purportedly show forced masturbation by Iraqi prisoners and the rape of prisoners, including young boys, by U.S. soldiers, many of whom were schooled in these torture techniques in our vast system of mass incarceration.
The sexualized images reflect the racism, callousness and perversion that run like a raging undercurrent through our predatory culture. It is the language of absolute control, total domination, racial hatred, slavery and humiliating submission. It is a world without pity. It is about reducing human beings to commodities, to objects. And it is part of a cultural malaise that will kill us as assuredly as the continued exploitation of the Alberta tar sands.
The object of corporate culture, neoliberal ideology, imperialism and colonialism is to strip people of their human attributes. Our identity as distinct human beings must be removed. Our history and our dignity must be obliterated. The goal is to turn every form of life into a commodity to exploit. And girls and women are high on the list. In my book “Empire of Illusion” I devote a chapter, the longest chapter in the book, to pornography, which is in essence filmed prostitution. In porn a woman is not a person but a toy, a pleasure doll. She exists to gratify whatever desire a male might have. She has no other purpose. Her real name vanishes. She adopts a cheap and vulgar stage name. She becomes a slave. She is filmed being degraded and physically abused. She is filmed being tortured—with the majority of those tortured in movies being Asian women. These movies are sold to customers. The customers are aroused by the illusion that they too can dominate and abuse women. Absolute power over another, as I saw repeatedly in wartime, almost always expresses itself through sexual sadism.
Capitalism, along with imperialism and colonialism, its natural extension, is perpetuated by racist stereotypes. This dehumanization is expressed in the film “American Sniper,” in which Iraqis, including women and children, are turned into one-dimensional, evil human bombs that deserve to be gunned down by the film’s hero. Those who set out to destroy another people and their land must dehumanize those who live on, nurture and love that land. This dehumanization is used to justify domination. Imperialism, like colonialism, depends on racial stereotypes, including sexualized racism and the forced prostitution of women of color, to annihilate the culture, dignity and finally resistance of indigenous populations. This is true in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Indigenous traditions and values are portrayed as primitive and worthless. The oppressed are turned into subhumans, people whose lives do not really matter, who stand in the way of the glories of Western civilization and progress, people who deserve to be eradicated.
And you can see this racism on display in porn. Black men are primitive animals, brawny and illiterate studs with vast sexual prowess. Black women are filled with raw, animalistic lust. Latin women are hot and racy. Asian women are meek, sexually submissive geishas. Porn, as Gail Dines writes, is a “new minstrel show.” It speaks in the racist cant that is the staple of the dominant white culture.
What is done to girls and women through prostitution is a version of what is done to all of those who do not sign on to the demented project of global capitalism. And if we have any chance of fighting back, we will have to stand up for all the oppressed, all of those who have become prey. To fail to do this will be to commit moral and finally political suicide. To turn our backs on some of the oppressed is to fracture our power. It is to obliterate our moral authority. It is to fail to see that the entire system of predatory exploitation seeks to swallow and devour us all. To be a radical is to stand with all who are turned into objects, especially girls and women whom the global community, and much of the left, has abandoned.
Andrea Dworkin understood:
Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.
The Europeans and Euro-Americans who conquered, exploited and murdered indigenous communities were not only making war on a people and the Earth but on a competing ethic. The traditions of premodern indigenous societies, the communal structure of their societies, had to be destroyed in order for colonialists and global capitalists to implant the negative ethic of capitalism. In indigenous societies, hoarding at the expense of others was despised. In these societies all ate or none ate. Those who were respected were those who shared what they had with the less fortunate and who spoke in the language of the sacred. These older, indigenous cultures held fast to the concept of reverence. It is the capacity to honor the sacred, including the sacredness of all life—and as a vegan I include animals—that capitalism, colonialism and imperialism seek to eradicate. We need to listen to women, and especially indigenous women, as we seek to recover this older ethic.
“They treat Mother Earth like they treat women … ,” Lisa Brunner, the program specialist for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, has said. “They think they can own us, buy us, sell us, trade us, rent us, poison us, rape us, destroy us, use us as entertainment and kill us. I’m happy to see that we are talking about the level of violence that is occurring against Mother Earth because it equates to us [women]. What happens to her happens to us. … We are the creators of life. We carry that water that creates life just as Mother Earth carries the water that maintains our life. So I’m happy to see our men standing here but remind you that when you stand for one, you must stand for the other.”
The Earth is littered with the physical remains of past empires and civilizations, ruins that cry out to us about human folly and hubris. We seem condemned as a species to drive ourselves into extinction, although this moment appears to be the denouement to the whole, sad show of settled, civilized life that began some 5,000 years ago. There is nothing left on the planet to seize. We are spending down the last remnants of our natural capital, including our forests, fossil fuel, air and water.
This time, collapse will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth.
The ethic peddled by capitalist and imperialist elites, the cult of the self, the banishing of empathy, the belief that violence can be used to make the world conform, require the destruction of the communal and the destruction of the sacred. This corrupt ethic, if not broken, will mean the end of not only human society but the human species. The elites who orchestrate this pillage, like elites who pillaged parts of the globe in the past, probably believe they can outrun their own destructiveness. They think that their wealth, privilege and gated communities will save them. Or maybe they do not think about the future at all. But the death march they have begun, the relentless contamination of air, soil and water, the physical collapse of communities and the eventual exhaustion of coal and fossil fuels themselves will not spare them or their families, although they may be able to hold out a little longer in their privileged enclaves than the rest of us. They too will succumb to the poisoning of the natural elements, the climate dislocations and freakish weather caused by global warming, the spread of new deadly viruses, the food riots and huge migrations that have begun as the desperate flee from flooded or drought-stricken pockets of the Earth.
The predatory structures of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism will have to be destroyed. The Earth, and those forms of life that inhabit the Earth, will have to be revered and protected. This means inculcating a very different vision of human society. It means rebuilding a world where domination and ceaseless exploitation are sins and where empathy, especially for the weak and for the vulnerable, including our planet, is held up as the highest virtue. It means recovering the capacity for awe and reverence for the sources that sustain life. Once we stand up for this ethic of life, once we include all people, including girls and women, as an integral part of this ethic, we can build a resistance movement that can challenge the corporate forces that if left in power will extinguish us all.
Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson has been reciting his talking points to justify extending and expanding the token Canadian military mission to the middle east: the Islamic State is “committing acts of genocide.” Canada’s expanded mission to Iraq and Syria will “strip ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] of its power to …launch terrorists operations in Canada”. Extending our mission is a matter of “moral clarity.” We need to learn the lessons of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.
All need cross-examination. Learning from the past is an uncommonly sensible idea from this government. What are the lessons of past Western interventions?
Afghanistan. Today’s mess began several decades ago when the U.S. — understanding almost nothing about the country — began arming local militias against the Soviet Union. Among those armed was Osama Bin Laden along with various competing warlords guilty of unspeakable atrocities, who soon turned on the U.S. and each other. Out of this recklessness sprung al-Qaeda, the Taliban, 9/11 and the appalling protracted international conflict that followed. Canada was there for a dozen years. Today the country remains mired in misogyny, corruption, instability, heroin and violence.
Iran. Decades earlier, understanding little about the country beyond its oil riches, the U.S. and U.K. overthrew an elected government and substituted the harsh authoritarianism of the Shah. The eventual consequence was the Khomeini revolution and rule by the mullahs. We may complacently remember Argo; Iranians remember the coup and may never again trust the West.
Iraq. In 2003, George W. Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq on the basis of several different lies and no serious understanding. Saddam Hussein was overthrown; the country fell apart. Regional, ethnic and religious conflicts became the order of the day. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The winners have been the Islamic State and Iran. Today the country remains ungovernable, chaotic, on the verge of dissolution.
Libya. As a kind of Arab Spring broke out, the West intervened against Moammar Gadhafi, an erstwhile ally. Understanding little about the complexities of the country, Western countries enabled his capture and murder. Who took over? A cacophony of competing gangs and militias. What happened to Gadhafi’s vast arsenal? It’s been redistributed across upper Africa and the Middle East, probably some to the Islamic State itself. The country is in turmoil, anarchy, wracked by violence.
Now add Syria, at least as complex, thorny and impenetrable as any of the others.
Lesson learned? We’re living them. They’re in the headlines every day. The consequences expected of military intrusions are rarely achieved. On the contrary: overwhelmingly, when the west has intervened in foreign lands with little understanding of local conditions and no strategy or plan beyond military force — we should add here Vietnam and Cambodia, though they aren’t Muslim like all the others — the result has been increased violence and chaos there and increased danger to ourselves as shown by al-Qaeda, 9/11 and the Islamic State.
Mr. Nicholson speaks of moral clarity. He’s right. Canada’s mission involves collaboration with war criminals, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers and deadly fanatics of various kinds. How else to describe the rulers of Syria and Iran, our tacit allies against IS? Or the Iraqi militias — also allies — described by the United Nations as guilty of war crimes and perhaps crimes against humanity? Or Kurd fighters from an organization listed as terrorist by NATO? We’re already tight with Saudi Arabia, which can teach IS lessons about serious beheadings.
The truth is many of our allies are hardly better than IS itself. That’s what’s morally clear. We throw around accusations of genocide against ISIS when we ourselves collaborate with war criminals and terrorists. Is it moral to send our troops into Syria when we haven’t been invited by its government, a clear violation of international law despite the government’s flimsy rationalizations? (Ask Putin about the Ukraine.)
Is it moral to pretend the expanded mission is risk-free, as Jason Kenney shockingly does? Ask the family of the late Sgt. Andrew Doiron.
If IS is the genocidal menace the government is now claiming, is it moral to send only a token force? Shouldn’t we be sending the entire Canadian armed forces? Allied air strikes, including the few by Canada, will by themselves never finish off IS. It needs boots on Iraqi and Syrian soil — but not our boots, that’s for sure. Thank goodness Iranian soldiers are already there.
Finally, exactly how will our intervention — or any western intervention — “strip ISIL of its power to …launch terrorists operations in Canada,” as Mr. Nicholson and his government claim? We can say for sure that sending a few of our soldiers into a war zone directly threatens the health of some Canadians. It’s less clear how it keeps a single Canadian in Canada safer. IS is in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Nigeria. After all our efforts, al-Qaeda thrives as well. Is the aim of our mission to kill every last one of them? And if we don’t, exactly how are we making us safer at home?
The Harper Government has not offered a single credible answer to any of these questions. So what are the lessons learned? That extending and expanding Canada’s mission is nothing but dangerous political posturing. That would make it an immoral adventure by any measure.
Yemen’s government collapsed in the face of an offensive by rebels known as Houthis, prompting airstrikes led by Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The Gulf’s main Sunni Muslim power says the Houthis are tools of its Shiite rival Iran, another OPEC member, and has vowed to do what’s necessary to halt their advance.
“While thousands of barrels of oil from Yemen will not be noticed, millions from Saudi Arabia will matter,” said John Vautrain, who has more than 30 years of experience in the energy industry and is the head of Vautrain & Co., a consultant in Singapore. “Saudi Arabia has been concerned about unrest spreading from Yemen.”
Yemen produced about 133,000 barrels a day of oil in 2013, making it the 39th biggest producer, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Output peaked at more than 440,000 barrels a day in 2001, the Energy Department’s statistical arm said on its website.
Brent, the benchmark grade for more than half the world’s crude, gained 4.8 percent to $59.19 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. West Texas Intermediate futures, the U.S. marker, advanced 4.5 percent to $51.43 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Yemen is located on Bab el-Mandeb, the fourth-biggest shipping chokepoint in the world by volume, which is 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, according to the EIA. It’s located between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea, and connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
In 2013, 3.8 million barrels a day of crude and oil products flowed through Bab el-Mandeb, EIA data show. More than half of the shipments moved to the Suez Canal and SUMED Pipeline, which link Egypt’s ports of Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea and Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean.
“There is a possibility that pirates could use the general instability as cover to mount attacks in the southern Red Sea around and north of Bab el-Mandeb,” the Baltic and International Maritime Council, which represents owners and operators in 130 countries, said by e-mail.
The oil terminal at Aden on Yemen’s south coast is operating as normal, Harbor Master Shekib Abdelwahed said by phone Thursday. The European Union Naval Force isn’t aware of any disruption to shipping in the Gulf of Aden or Bab el-Mandeb, said Jacqui Sherriff, a spokeswoman for the combined naval units.
Closure of the waterway may keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal and the SUMED Pipeline, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa, adding to transit time and cost, according to the EIA. Ships carrying oil from Europe and North Africa to Asian market wouldn’t be able to take the most direct route, it said on its website.
“As the situation in Yemen has dramatically escalated, it’s seen primarily as a threat to international shipping and oil transport,” Theodore Karasik, an independent geopolitical analyst, said from Dubai. “There’s concern that the more ungovernable Yemen becomes, the more it could become a base for piracy in the Red Sea area.”
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait responded to a request from Yemen’s President Abdurabuh Mansur Hadi, according to a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The strikes are a “very dangerous development” and contradict international law, al-Jazeera reported, citing the Iranian foreign ministry. The attacks will haunt Saudi Arabia as the war won’t be contained in one area, the state-run Fars news agency cited Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, as saying.
Saudi Arabia led OPEC’s decision in November to resist calls to reduce its output target of 30 million barrels a day, a resolution that Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said was “not in line with what we wanted.” OPEC’s decision, combined with the highest rate of U.S. production in more than 30 years, caused a supply glut that drove benchmark oil prices to six-year lows.
In Yemen, Iran and Saudi Arabia are “fighting a proxy war and they will continue to fight a proxy war,” Vautrain said.
The Houthis, who follow the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, say they operate independently of Iran and represent only their group’s interests.
To contact the reporters on this story: Sharon Cho in Singapore at ccho28@bloomberg.net; Ben Sharples in Melbourne at bsharples@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pratish Narayanan atpnarayanan9@bloomberg.net Stephen Cunningham
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