Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Foreign policy (Page 2 of 3)

Military escalation

13.02.2024 /

On 2 February less than a handful of Norwegian dailies briefly reported the signing of an agreement between the USA and the Norwegian government, according to which Norway grants the USA 8 new military bases, in addition to the four granted in 2021. All the dailies used the same wording, including the non-word “omforent”, which no normal person outside law-enforcement circles would ever use. (The word merely means “agreed upon” – nothing wrong about that. What is wrong is that the word is never used by journalists. So these dailies are citing their government source verbatim.)

Indeed, since 2 February, there has been no public debate about this dramatic turn of events in any news medium. No anti-war protests. Nothing. The “left” – whatever is left of it – has been silent. The national assembly will obediently ratify the agreement.

Yet, according to the deal, the USA will store weapons and equipment in locations to which Norwegian inspectors have no right of access. Norwegian authorities will not be apprised of what is stored there, i.e. will not be informed if the USA stores nuclear weapons on Norwegian soil. The USA may attack Russia from Norway, if they find it serves their interests.

Norway has, de facto, handed itself over to the USA (not even NATO).

The idiots – pardon my French – who have been bamboozled into this hare-brained, treasonous agreement will have imagined that they are gratefully accepting US protection against the big bad bear on the other side of our northernmost border (with whom we have, by the way, until now had amicable relations. That will of course change: In future Russia will, for all practical purposes, no longer be bordering little old Norway, but the USA.)

The Norwegian public has heard, day in and day out, relentlessly and from all channels, that Russia wishes to engulf us, that all arguments to the contrary are Putin’s talking points, and that everything Biden and the New York Times say is God’s solemn truth. The ground has been carefully prepared in advance and resistance to the agreement is inconceivable because my compatriots are — alas — sleep-walking.

It is true that Norway’s long North Atlantic coastline is attractive to players in the current geopolitical contest, including our neighbour Russia.

It is also true that an arrest warrant was issued the other day against one of my favourite authors, the Russian Boris Akunin, who emigrated from Russia in 2014 and who calls Putin a Caligula. Apparently Akunin has urged Ukrainians to bomb Russian cities. If he returns to Russia, he will probably be put behind bars for years. Obviously, I strongly disapprove of keeping dissidents behind bars!! And Akunin is certainly not the only one.

On the other hand, what is our “protector” other than the most trigger-happy country in the world;
a country that specialises in murderous regime changes;
a country whose raison d’être is to wage disastrous wars;
a country that leaves a trail of failed states wherever it turns its attention;
a country that is blissfully indifferent to the plight of a greater part of its own population.

Using Europe as its now (already) enfeebled hostage, the USA wishes to see Russia reduced to the palaeolithic condition in which the country found itself under the rule of the US puppet Yeltsin.

How many vicious Latin American (e.g. Pinochet), African (e.g. Mobuto), East Asian (e.g. Suharto) and Middle Eastern (e.g. the Shah) dictators must the USA support? How many failed states must it create, and how many torture victims and corpses must it leave in its wake before my confounded compatriots understand the nature of US foreign policy since WWII? CIA-supported coups and/or military interventions and/or paralysing economic sanctions have targeted and sometimes utterly destroyed countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, Ghana, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Vietnam, Yemen. How many more countries must suffer the deadly attention of the CIA and US enforced sanctions before my disoriented compatriots as well as Five-Eye citizens realise what “rule of Law” actually means? Most recently:

  • The USA probably forced the non-confidence vote against Pakistan’s Imran Khan in 2022, and happily sees him imprisoned after Khan “leaked” the cypher exposing the source of his ouster. (Of course the USA denies any wrongdoing, as always.)
  • The USA is still making a determined effort to prevent developing countries from developing (via its instruments: the IMF, WTO and the World Bank).
  • The USA is leading a propaganda campaign that has strangled all Western mainstream media, thus ensuring that bewildered citizens have no idea of what is going on.
  • The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found there are plausible grounds to suspect Israel is committing a genocide that the USA is actively supporting.
  • The USA has vowed to support Ukraine with “all it takes”. We see that the outcome so far is a dramatic depletion of the Ukrainian male population and a 23 % reduction in Ukrainian territory.

My stunned compatriots have definitely forgotten about Laos and Cambodia. They have possibly not even learnt in school why North Korea became what it is? Even the RAND Corporation points out that “operations… such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere—were disappointments or outright failures”. I put to you that failures on that scale are simply indefensible.

I fear that when my discombobulated compatriots belatedly discover that the USA cares not a hoot for “international Law”, for “freedom”, or for “democracy”, it will be too late.

A conversation

25.12.2023 /

I recommend a conversation between 3 analysts about some objectives underlying the wars in Palestine and Ukraine.

1) John Mearsheimer is a prominent political scientist best known internationally for his theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve or maintain regional hegemony.

(2) Alexander Mercouris har proved himself an extraordinarily prescient expert on the Ukraine issue, for which he has taken a particular interest for a decade or so. His acumen and determination in finding relevant information is astounding.

(3) Glenn Diesen is a young professor of political science who has had the courage to contradict the mainstream narrative regarding the Ukraine war and has written several interesting books.

In their conversation they try to understand why Israel and the USA are making such grave strategic mistakes in Gaza. They try to predict that war’s outcome. In the second half of the conversation they compare the Palestine issue with the debacle of Ukraine. Here they do not entirely agree as Alexander has noticed a few worrying signs.

Mary had a little lamb

24.11.2023 /

I used to love The Guardian. You could find discussions about just about anything there, views right left and centre, philosophical musings, analyses of books, films and even a magnificent series in which Andras Schiff presented each and every one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. It was a site that continued where school education left off, a newspaper that kept us informed and on our toes. You would, not least, also find plenty of articles analysing USA’s miscellaneous wars and implanted dictators.

Alas, The Guardian I knew is no more. But the Guardian is not alone in abdicating as a joyfully dissenting source of analysis. Everywhere I turn to look – Le Monde, the New York Times, El Pais – all once proud publishers of the Wikileaks documents that exposed US crimes against humanity in Iraq – are now servile minions. Since dissent is no longer recognised, as such, but is redefined as “conspiracy theory”, I shall refrain from suggesting whose minions those formerly great newspapers have become.

To my knowledge, not one of them has mentioned even the abstract of the Schulenburg report, item 3 of which reads:

Contrary to Western interpretations, Ukraine and Russia agreed at the time [March 2022] that the planned NATO expansion was the reason for the war. They therefore focused their peace negotiations on Ukraine’s neutrality and its renunciation of NATO membership. In return, Ukraine would have retained its territorial integrity except for Crimea.

https://michael-von-der-schulenburg.com/how-the-chance-was-lost-for-a-peace-settlement-of-the-ukraine-war/

The report quotes the Washington Post, from April 5 2022:

For some in NATO, it’s better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at too high a price for Kiev and the rest of Europe. Zelensky, [they] said, should “keep fighting until Russia is completely defeated.”

https://michael-von-der-schulenburg.com/how-the-chance-was-lost-for-a-peace-settlement-of-the-ukraine-war/

Looking back, the hubris of the USA and the European NATO states has been mind-boggling. Not only has the war NOT saved Ukraine; it has NOT weakened Russia, which was, of course, the purpose of extending NATO to Ukrainian soil.

That the mainstream press is too pusillanimous now to disclose that there actually was a peace settlement ready to be signed by both parties at the very outset of the war, would have shocked me two years ago. No more. If you follow Glenn Greenwald’s tireless razor-sharp analysis of how civil liberties in the USA have been eroded year by year by decade, you will know not only that Dog does what Master commands: (As a dog owner, I can tell you a lot about how to make your dog happily obey you.) Glenn Greenwald also tells you how and why legions of intelligent, highly educated journalists are bamboozled into systematically peddling untruths.

What Glenn Greenwald does not tell you is how that same Dog versus Master relationship applies also here in Europe. Take, for instance, the UK, where the Guardian, presumably at somebody’s orders, recently removed – physically erased, stamped out – Bin Laden’s historic 2002 “Letter to America”, which in the wake of the ongoing genocide, has attracted enormous interest.

It is true that the letter seems disagreeably dogmatic and religiously authoritarian. I had to resort to self-discipline to even get past the first paragraphs. But once you do get through them, you are served a whole litany of accusations against our way of life that are thought-provoking. I put to you that “thought” is healthy, i.e. not “bad”, noxious or harmful…. (I find I need to stress the point under the assumption that the Guardian now appears to disapprove of “thought”.)

Although Bin Laden’s Letter to America (or here) is anything but an enjoyable read, much of his criticism of the USA is distressingly on the mark. It should have been published on the first page of every Western newspaper as soon as it was addressed to the US population in 2002. Had US voters been able to read that letter back then, they might have demanded a change to their country’s destructive foreign policy, hence also to the growing (and well-deserved) hatred against the West.

Allow me to quote an old nursery rhyme:

Mary had a little lamb,
Little lamb, little lamb.
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
Everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?
Mary so, Mary so?
Why does the lamb love Mary so?”
The eager children cry.

“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,
Lamb, you know, lamb, you know,
Mary loves the lamb, you know,”
The teacher did reply.

It’s actually a US American nursery rhyme. I sometimes find myself humming to myself.

Everywhere the US went,
the US went, the US went
Everywhere the US went,
doom was sure to go.

In any case, it is safe to say that I no longer seek wisdom from any of the above-mentioned formerly outstanding newspapers, although I am sure they still provide interesting reviews about films and books. Somehow, in view of what sort of future is in store for us, I no longer care for their reviews.

I do, still, however care very much about the mess superpowers are making of the world. At the moment, the USA is still the hegemon, albeit a hegemon in its death-throes, hence all the more desperate and very dangerous. You may not agree with me that US hegemony is in its “death throes”. If so, I can only hope that you are mistaken and that I am not, because nothing good ever seems to come of US interventions.

It is quite possible, even probable, that if and when the USA is incapacitated, I shall be more critical of China and Russia. Obviously, they, too, want to exploit foreign lands for natural resources and cheep labour, but so far they are making a point of promising far better returns for the countries in which they “invest” than the collective west ever did.

I think the moral of this story is multi-polar: If there are three or more Masters, Dog can at all times obey the one who gives the most juicy reward.

This is not the time to make babies

03.09.2023 /

The Norwegian bellicose foreign minister Huitfelt has just been exposed in what appears to be a case of serious corruption. Her husband made some strikingly lucrative investments after she became a Cabinet member. I have seen no proof that decisions she has made as a foreign minister has contributed to their joint wealth. Yet, there is no doubting that her decisions as a foreign minister contributed to an abrupt hike in the value of stock in the arms industry, in which he invested. We all assume that, at the very least, his investments were based on information that was not immediately available to the general public, information she certainly possessed.

You should see her puckered cocker spaniel face as she denies he received the information from her, denies having the slightest idea, even, that he had invested a big lump of their money in stock that would prove extremely valuable just a few days later. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this sort of thing is called insider trading.

When Bill Clinton earnestly looked into the eyes of the US-American public and stated, enunciating slowly and very clearly, that he had never had sex with … etc., I thought he looked like a playful, slightly abashed dog, never mind what kind of dog. When our blond foreign minister is caught being bad, she definitely looks like a cocker spaniel. I hasten to add that cocker spaniels are anything but as angelic as they look. They can be very, very (and joyfully) naughty. Moreover, they can be very strong.

So what do we do about it? Well, the Norwegian papers are pondering whether she is telling the truth. The truth!!! Since when do politicians tell the truth? I add, for the record, that Foreign Minister Huitfeldt famously expressed, a couple of years ago, her confidence that the British authorities were adhering, and would continue to so, to international Human-rights treaties in their ongoing persecution of Julian Assange, something the British authorities notoriously failed to do, then as now, as Huitfeldt well knew. So much for “the truth.

“Should she be dismissed?”, a few of our dailies ask timorously. “No,” she replies earnestly. “I want to repair my mistake.” A heading reads: “I am deeply sorry that I made a mistake”, with sub-headings to the tune of “- that I did not check the rules.” Rules? In this country, every child older than 5 years knows that insider trading is against the rules, is bad, is evil, is the stuff that Hell is made of. (We were, after all, a deeply religious country until fairly recently.) But she, poor dear, was not aware of “the rules”!

Anybody who reads the international news, knows there is corruption everywhere. Corruption is the stuff the “accelerating ecological breakdown” is made of. But Norway has come a long way by marketing itself as a country that is almost devoid of corruption, that is “peaceful”, that is benign in every sense.

Huitfeldt and her husband were caught, if not not prosecuted. My question now is: What about our prime minister? Regardless of what political views Norwegians have, he is generally regarded as an earnest and relatively devout Christian, a “good man”. But he is also said to be enormously rich. What do we know about the source of his wealth? And what about his friend and political comrade, the warlord Jens Stoltenberg? Has he invested in the “industrial military complex”? For the record, some of that military industrial complex sits right here in Norway

We have just had a period of deluge here in Norway. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes, many of them permanently. In June, we had a drought that nearly halved the grain harvest. The August deluge ruined much of what was left. France and Spain have seen their harvests crippled by drought year after year. Will Europe be able to even feed itself in coming years? We are in for a long run of droughts and deluges, unprepared as we are to replace Russian gas, and unprepared to meet, not to mention prevent, the climate disasters that have been forecast for decades. The only thing we are prepared for is war. War is always the solution of choice when the powers-that-be have made a mess of thing: War to divert attention from real and, in this case, existential threat.

The Norwegian foreign minister may be suffering some humiliating moments, but she will be fine in the long run, and wealthy, as opposed to those of us who work for median or less wages. I must remind you that median income is “the amount of income that divides a population into two equal groups, half having an income above that amount, and half having an income below that amount” (source: Wikipedia” as at 1/9/2023.) I should add that in Norway, the income of 60% of the population is less than the “average”.

What do you do when you see that you will not be able to pay the rent at the end of the month? I, for one, have not been in that situation for very many years, but I remember. So I know that what you do is to eat cheap and unhealthy food, freeze in winter, have your teeth and those of your children pulled rather than pay regular visits to the dentist, and when your bronchitis makes you too miserable, you splurge on a baby elephant.

We all divert attention away from real – “existential” – threats. The powers-that-be do so by tricking us into hating “the enemy”. As individuals, we trick ourselves into purchasing what we definitely cannot afford.

Let me tell you a secret. When I was as desperately poor as I hope none of my readers will ever be, I almost took a bank loan – in those days, bank loans were thrown at you – to buy a glass piano. Would you believe it? A glass piano! I wasn’t even a half-decent pianist, but an instrument of glass would surely have been the most beautiful object imaginable. Or so I thought, because I had limited recourse to beauty.

Fortunately, I took to my senses. After all, I knew I would someday become an academic of sorts, if not a good pianist, and would be able to lead a “normal” life.

And now, as an academic, I have learnt that foreign affairs are just as business affairs. Please take note, because this is important:

If you are a businessman, your job is to beat your competitors, preferably to take over their customers and suppliers.

  • If you are a nation, your business is to beat competing nations, take over their trade and trading partners.

If you are a businessman you should prevent your employees from unioniising You do so either by firing them or by offering attractive conditions, wages etc.

  • If you are a nation, you should prevent your population from revolting. You do so either by subjecting it to police terror or by providing decent living conditions.

What I’m saying is that neither business nor foreign affairs are based on lofty ideals.

In short, this is definitely not the time to bring babies into the world.

John Mearsheimer

18.08.2023 /

Mr. Mearsheimer, who is a prominent expert on international relations, cf. Britannica, has been relatively uncommunicative since 2022, after the war he had warned about ever since 2014, started. Maybe he did not want to tell us “I told you so”. Or was his case perhaps one of not being allowed to tell us?

Like Jeffrey Sachs, Patrick Lawrence, Chris Hedges and other noted independent journalists, he has been forced to turn to the alternative media.

Here I merely wish to direct your attention to the Aaron Maté of the Greyzone’s interview with him on July 30 2023: The interview bears the title
“John Mearsheimer: Ukraine war is a long-term danger“.

John Mearsheimer was right in 2014. He was right in early 2022. I think he may be right now. So I think we should listen to him. (There is a transcript of the text under the video link.)

Quoting Kissinger

15.08.2023 /

To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous. To be a friend of the United States is fatal”

Henry Kissinger

Indeed. In the wake of the Ukraine debacle, many of us are beginning to understand the statement. Here in Europe, all states, including Ukraine, are seeing an unprecedented rise in the cost of living due, mainly, to the sanctions regime, which is hitting us harder than it is hitting Russia.

Meanwhile, US hawks are starting to panic. True, the Ukraine war has consolidated NATO in a big way, and entrenched Russophobia in the West. But as several mainstream foreign policy commentators have warned, the US is loosing its grip on much of the rest of the world. Third world countries no longer take kindly to US and European bullying, financially or otherwise. They resent coercive methods aimed at ensuring support for the US in its conflict with Russia/China. They resent an intricate network of sanctions. In short: The Ukraine debacle is turning into a tectonic shift, as fault lines spread in new and unexpected directions. All of which will not be news to you, I am sure.

Moreover, African states have long suspected that what was denominated “aid” by Western Powers wasn’t really aid at all, rather the opposite.

Again I urge you to listen to (or read) a discussion between three economists about the causes of third world debt here and here. Only if we understand how deliberately imposed financial impediments are hampering development in third-world countries, can we understand the growing anger.

Niger, however is not tied to the dollar, but to the CFA frank, a freak frank as it were. See in this article from Greyzone, under the last sub-heading “ECOWAS as a neocolonial weapon”, how CFA has a stranglehold on Nigerien economy.

What interests me today, however, is how the US is responding to this growing resentment and assertiveness on the part of third-world countries.

There is, for instance, ongoing US pressure

Meanwhile:

There is growing awareness, in alternative media, of USA’s noxious interference in other countries’ affairs. Mainstream media’s grip is starting to slip a little even in the West. We are seeing a mushrooming of alternative online media that are challenging the virulently belligerent pro-US narrative. Even film makers are starting to grumble, e.g. David Bradbury with his “Road to War“.

What particularly raises concerns in the West, in spite of the Russo/Sino-phobia that is so eagerly fanned by mainstream media, is the massive, ongoing military build-up, and its seemingly inevitable corollary: nuclear war. People, for instance in Australia, are beginning to ponder the following question: If the mainstream media in the USA and EU hate Russia and China that much, do we not have more to fear from the USA and EU than from Russia and China?

And if protecting a “rules-based” order is so costly, in terms of the dent made in tax paying households’ economies and, not least, for our environment and hence future generations, is the “rules-based order” really worth fighting for?

… quite apart from the fact that the said order is anything but rules-based. It is based, inter alia, on diplomacy which is a euphemism for coercion. I hasten to add, that while tact and good manners – the essence of diplomacy, we were told – certainly are assets in the upper echelons of the Corps Diplomatique, they are not indispensable. Bribes, however, are indispensable and threats, and the means to effectuate them. Besides, diplomacy relies not only on well-dressed patricians: Anyone who has seen a reasonably decent Hollywood spy film, will know that part of the game is carried out by professional killers and their ilk.

So yes: to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous. To be a friend of the United States is fatal

Five minutes of foreign policy

01.08.2023 /

What’s going on in Niger? I wonder. My next thought is: How strange the press is! Today, I’ve checked AP, Reuters and Al Jazeera – these are the most common sources that feed local papers in the West about situations in places to which a news outlet may not be able to send its own correspondents. Naturally, I have also checked my own country’s national broadcasting company, and the one daily paper I tend to follow.

They all say the same thing: The army has deposed the president of Niger, who is now a prisoner in his palace. The new president is a general. In other words a coup. There is some uncertainty as to whether the French are planning military intervention. There is universal condemnation of the coup. Some countries are evacuating their citizens from Niger. Most countries are suspending aid to Niger and even contemplating sanctions.

Period.

What they don’t explain is: Why has there been a military coup in Niger? Well, yes, of course the military is dissatisfied, but why?

By the way, in case you were wondering, the demonym for Niger is Nigerien, as opposed to Nigerian. Hear the pronunciation here. And you might look up the pronunciation of Niger, while you’re at it. No, I did not know it, not until just now, which just goes to show, not only how ignorant I am, but also how forlornly anonymous Niger is.

So how come many sources fail to explain why western leaders are worried about an imprisoned president whose name they probably don’t even remember? After all, he’s imprisoned in a palace. Julian Assange’s plight in Belmarsh Prison is far, far worse.

Take a look at this LA Times article of 31 July, for instance: Not a word – NOT ONE WORD – about the uranium deposits tersely mentioned in Britannica:

Niger’s known reserves of uranium rank among the most important in the world, and the country is one of the world’s top 10 leading producers of uranium.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Niger/Economy

 Or the oil deposits.

There were intensive exploration activities on the Agadem block between 2008 and 2017, when the CNPC drilled 166 exploration wells, enabling the discovery of 106 new oil deposits containing 2P recoverable reserves of 815m barrels. The petroleum is high quality with an API gravity of 30 degrees and a very low sulphur content.

https://african.business/2021/11/energy-resources/niger-an-attractive-nation-with-an-emerging-oil-industry

CNPC, by the way is China. China has found that Niger’s oil reserves are so important that they are building a pipeline to export 90,000 barrels pr day.

The Niger–Benin pipeline, measuring 1950km and connecting the Agadem block in eastern Niger to the Beninese side of Sèmé, will be the longest pipeline in Africa. The construction work began on 5 July 2021.

Ibid

The Nigerians must be filthy rich. Actually, uranium isn’t all that expensive, but still.

So I can just imagine why there has been a coup. I guess you can too. And I can just imagine why France already has at least 1,500 troops and a drone base in Niger, and why the US has at least 1,100 troops and two drone bases in Niger. Why, surely everybody understands that it’s the most natural thing in the world for the US to protect people from themselves here there and everywhere, and for French troops to be just casually hanging around in former colonies. After all, the US and France are democracies, i.e. rule-of-law and can-do-no-harm-countries, as opposed, of course, to China and Russia that are both do-no-good-countries.

All for now.

Addendum on 2 August 2023:
An article by Vijay Prashad and Kambale Musavuli answers my questions.

Rødt

21.04.2023 /

Rødt is the name of a Norwegian left-wing political party. It is the only political party that still advocates leaving NATO. The party maintains that NATO is not a defence alliance, but an alliance of nations vindicating US global hegemony. The party avers that NATO not so much solves as creates problems.

It is the only political party that has been, until now, opposed to Norway’s sending weapons to Ukraine – on the grounds that more weapons will not solve the underlying issues that lead to the war.

However, Rødt is at a crossroads. As we should all know by now, the mainstream media is anything but free, and its Manichean approach to the Ukraine war has been so consistent that few can resist what is, in point of fact, a NATO narrative. Who can fail to shudder, for instance, at a barrage such as the one in Guardian on 4 April 2022 regarding the Bucha massacre?

Now there have been some doubts about that massacre. For one thing the timeline seems dubious. Quite another matter is that the press and hence also the general public always immediately assume that if an atrocity has been committed, it must have been committed by the Russians or Jihadists.

Alas, even the last Norwegian holdout against NATO propaganda is folding. This weekend, a national Rødt conference may possibly decide to approve sending weapons to Ukraine.

In the event, this will have no practical consequences for Ukraine or the war. Norway sends weapons to Ukraine, with or without the approval of a relatively small political party. But it will have consequences for Norway, in that there will no longer be any Norwegian political opposition to the NATO narrative.

That would be very unfortunate.

Defence of self or of hegemony

11.04.2023 /

Have you heard of “perception management”? Simply put, it means persuasion on the basis not of facts but of lies (or suppression of facts).

During the 1980s, Reagan decided to “kick the Vietnam syndrome“, a condition from which the US public was suffering, sick to the heart of the horror and shame of the Vietnam war, so that future presidents would find it very difficult to pursue the nation’s foreign policy goal of maintaining global hegemony.

In Reagan’s case, the challenge was to convince the US public to support US martial activities in Central America. As Robert Parry subsequently wrote (in 2014):

In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others – depending on the U.S. government’s needs.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/30/endless-war-and-victory-perception-management

Various tactics were used, one of them being:

to weed out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration attacked New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime’s massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job.

Ibid

During its wars, the US Government found new ways of limiting television viewers’ insight:

One solution involved imposing strict control over the movements of journalists. The government could no longer afford to allow – as it had in Vietnam – enterprising reporters to run around the battlefield, going wherever they wanted and speaking with whomever they pleased.

https://theconversation.com/how-the-pentagon-tried-to-cure-america-of-its-vietnam-syndrome-83682

An important group targeted by perception management consisted of the many who were saddened and shocked by revelations of crimes against humanity. We have therefore been seeing, with increasing frequency, the waging of what Joseph Darda calls “humanitarian wars”. In his paper Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Narrative: Human Rights, the Nayirah Testimony, and the Gulf War, he quotes George Bush, who in 1990 was preparing for yet another war:

With a war on the horizon, Bush took the proclamation [his own presidential proclamation designating December 10 as Human Rights Day] as an opportunity to situate the looming Gulf War in a human rights context. “In a world where human rights are routinely denied in too many lands,” he observed, “nowhere is that situation more tragic and more urgent today than in Kuwait.” Listing the atrocities reportedly committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, Bush concluded, “As long as such assaults occur, as long as inhumane regimes deny basic human rights, our work is not done.” The Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait was not merely a threat to Kuwaiti sovereignty but also, Bush alleged, a threat to the sanctity of human rights everywhere. Americans could not feel secure in their own liberal rights until these rights were restored to the citizens of this small, oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf. Thus, the United States’ intervention in the Middle East was not really a war but, as Bush continually stressed that fall and winter, a unified “stand in defense of peace and freedom.”

https://josephdarda.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/darda-kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome-narrative-human-rights-the-nayirah-testimony-and-the-gulf-war.pdf

Next, I quote someone who appreciated George Bush’s appeal to humanitarianism. On the face of it, he sounds like a humane fellow. Only the name of the source, (hoover.org) gives us pause:

The Bush administration made its case for military action, and, after considerable debate, the American people, through their representatives in Congress, gave approval. The administration also made its case to the United Nations, highlighting the damage that inaction would inflict on prospects for peace in the long term.

Although the dangers of careless military activism are easy to imagine, the cost of passivity is more difficult to discern. In the 1990s, the Vietnam syndrome helped delay and limit U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. Those delays and limits extended murderous Serbian repression and actually accelerated ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Failure to intervene militarily often permits humanitarian crises to continue and leads to more dangerous conflicts.

https://www.hoover.org/research/kicking-vietnam-syndrome

I have previously written about the bombing to kingdom come of Libya, a vicious NATO operation performed allegedly to protect demonstrators. This was definitely a case of successful perception management, since the public hardly raised an eyebrow at the devastation in NATO’s wake.

Of course, one very important reason to go to war is “self defence”. For some years now, the USA has been spreading its network of military bases in the Far East – obviously for “self-defence” (in case the humanitarian plight of the Uighurs fails to capture sufficient public sympathy). I quote Glenn Greenwald, mocking the self-defence rationale:

I was looking at a video earlier today of George Bush and others saying that the reason we had to go fight in Iraq and invade Iraq is that we’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here. And I saw a video earlier today of California Democrat Adam Schiff saying exactly the same thing about the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Namely, the reason we must fight Russia over in Ukraine is that, if we don’t, we’ll have to fight them over here. Presumably, the Russian army is on the verge of attacking the American homeland right after it gets done trying to hold a town or two for more than three months in Ukraine, confident that it can conquer the American homeland, despite spending 1/15 in its military of what the United States spends.

https://rumble.com/GGreenwald (Sorry, I failed to take a note of the post)

More recently, “freedom and democracy” has supplanted humanitarian justification of destabilisation activities – bellicose or otherwise. During the Euromaidan Protests, Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator Chris Murphy visited Kiev to “show solidarity” to the demonstrators. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra right‐​wing Svoboda Party, and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleg Tyagnibok.

John McCain — repeat: a US Senator — enthusiastically addressed the protesters — Ukrainian protesters in Ukraine, not in the USA:

Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.

We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause (bold text is my highlighting)

He told CNN:

What we’re trying to do is try to bring about a peaceful transition here, that would stop the violence and give the Ukrainian people what they unfortunately have not had, with different revolutions that have taken place – a real society. This is a grassroots revolution here – it’s been peaceful except when the government tried to crack down on them, and the government hasn’t tried that since.

I’m praising their ability and their desire to demonstrate peacefully for change that I think they deserve.

Ibid (bold text is my highlighting)

Now, there is every reason to question how “peaceful” this so-called “peaceful transition” was. After all, quite a few protesters and some police officers were killed. We have been told that they were killed by officers defending (the Democratically elected) president Yanukovich. Apparently, the story is being compellingly disputed by Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski. Read the abstract of his paper and/or download it here.

However, his peer-reviewed paper has been ignored by mainstream media (which has proven its stalwart ignorance of late). It is truly quite fascinating. No less fascinating is the story of its suppression and the suppression of another of his papers, that of the 2014 Odessa massacre.

To conclude, for now, my exploration of applied perception management in Western foreign policy matters, I bring to your attention an investigative journalist’s address on March 24 this year, to the UN security council about the OPCW examination of the dreadful deaths by mysterious means in Douma, Syria, in April 2018.

So! The final OPCW report appears to have been a cover-up. For what? Why? What/who killed the victims in Douma?

There are still nearly 1000 US troops in Syria. What are they doing there? Who is currently controlling Syrian oil? What are the effects on the Syrian population of US sanctions?

Every day, to this day, Syrian civilians are being killed or maimed by land mines. And the nearly 20 Israeli attacks on Syria over the past year have not helped.

The regime change attempt in Syria was motivated and presented to the public as defence of human and civil rights. I put to you, though I cannot provide documentation — because investigative journalism is now becoming illegal in a growing number of “Democratic” countries — that the regime change attempt was largely orchestrated by the USA for reasons that are totally non-humanitarian. The result was death and devastation.

As usual.

Meanwhile, the arms race is on, full speed. And the engines of perception management are running at maximum capacity.

Please do not bring any more children into this world. I put to you that bringing children into the world now is turning into an act of parental egoism, the victims of which will be those same children.

Libya again

29.03.2023 /
NATO Killed Civilians in Libya. It’s Time to Admit It.

Why, you may be asking, am I writing about Libya when everybody else is writing about Iraq?

  • Well, for one thing, for that very reason; because everybody else is writing about Iraq.
  • Secondly, while the US demolition of Iraq happened 20 years ago, that of Libya is more recent and therefore more indicative of the current foreign policy outlook in Western countries.
  • Thirdly: While the war against Iraq met with considerable resistance in some of the Western press, the war against Libya met almost none. The press had been house-trained: no mainstream outlet peed on expensive carpets, so the general public was basically in the dark about the lies that legitimised the bombings.
  • Finally, I have been appraised of information that I have not previously known about.

And that brings me straight to the rather surreal aspect of this ignominious war, which some countries, not least my own, waged against a country that was, from the 1990s on, one where even you or I might have wanted to live.

Libyan Government revenue greatly exceeded expenditure in the 2000s. This surplus revenue was invested in a sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), which was conservatively valued at $53 billion in June 2010.11 The United Nations Human Development Report 2010—a United Nations aggregate measure of health, education and income—ranked Libya as the 53rd most advanced country in the world for human development and as the most advanced country in Africa.

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report (HC 119)

My final point, that of information that has only recently been brought to my attention, is no more and no less than the above reference:

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (i.e. the UK H of C)
report on
Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options
Third Report of Session 2016–17

This report is a pretty damning document: For one thing, it explains, there was basically no truth in the claim that Gaddafi was planning to kill the protesters in Benghazi – on the contrary:

Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence. (etc.) (§ 32)

… émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene. In the course of his 40-year dictatorship Muammar Gaddafi had acquired many enemies in the Middle East and North Africa, who were similarly prepared to exaggerate the threat to civilians. (etc) (§ 35)

An Amnesty International investigation in June 2011 could not corroborate allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops. However, it uncovered evidence that rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence. The investigation concluded that much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge. (§ 36)

Ibid

Another matter was that Western intervention “shifted the military balance in the Libyan civil war in favour of the rebels”, ” turned a blind eye to the supply of weapons to the rebels” and, in short:

The combination of coalition airpower with the supply of arms, intelligence and personnel to the rebels guaranteed the military defeat of the Gaddafi regime. On 20 March 2011, for example, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces retreated some 40 miles from Benghazi following attacks by French aircraft. If the primary object of the coalition intervention was the urgent need to protect civilians in Benghazi, then this objective was achieved in less than 24 hours.

Ibid

Etc, etc. Read the report if you are at all in doubt about the cynicism of the entire operation, the purpose of which was, from the very start, to orchestrate regime change, not “to protect civilians”. I really cannot fathom how the House of Commons has been allowed to publish it, if not to humiliate the French:

A further insight into French motivations was provided in a freedom of information disclosure by the United States State Department in December 2015. On 2 April 2011,Sidney Blumenthal, adviser and unofficial intelligence analyst to the then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reported this conversation with French intelligence officers to the Secretary of State:

According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.

The sum of four of the five factors identified by Sidney Blumenthal equated to the French national interest. The fifth factor was President Sarkozy’s political self-interest.

Ibid

What did we, readers of the mainstream press, know about Libya in 2011, when France’s President Sarkozy started insisting on mililtary intervention in Libya? Did we know about Libya’s reserves of oil? Did we know about the vast network of underground pipelines and aqueducts, built under his rule which brought high-quality fresh water from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara, and which, from 1991, supplied much-needed irrigation and drinking water to populous cities and farming areas in Libya’s north? This was the so-called “Great Mande-Made_River“.

Gone now. Alas, all gone.

Did the mainstream media tell us that the United Nations Human Development Report (UNDP) 2010 – a “United Nations aggregate measure of health, education and income”– ranked Libya as the 53rd most advanced country in the world for human development and as the most advanced country in Africa? A country with a free national health service, free education and free electricity?

Did the mainstream media tell us about what emerged from Hillary Clinton’s 1700 emails released by Wikileaks about her role in the US engagement in Libya?

Unlike the Iraq war, the US and NATO crimes against humanity in Libya went practically unnoticed. The NATO countries’ intervention lasted less than a year, and since no ground forces were involved (at least not officially), no lives were lost on “our side”.

Although, the consequences of the war were disastrous for Libya, for Africa as a whole, and, indirectly, for Europe, (but not – I repeat NOT – for the USA) mainstream media has not taken pains to inform the public about the real facts.

Like the Iraq war, the war on Libya in 2011 was based on lies, the most important of which was that Gaddafi was preparing genocide against the people of Benghazi. The annihilation of Libya was officially undertaken for “the protection of civilians”.

Protection of civilians, my foot.

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