In-depth coverage – Page 6

Rape now almost as common in Sweden as in South Africa

As a result of immigration and government cover-ups, rape statistics in Sweden have shot through the roof. Sweden is the only industrial country that gets anywhere near South Africa, the so-called “rape capital of the world”.

According to international rape statistics per capita, South Africa is right at the top, while Sweden comes in at number six, after three Southern African countries (Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland), as well as Bermuda. How come Sweden, renowned for its social welfare system and hard-core feminism, could top the charts in Europe when it comes to female violation, just like politically correct South Africa has shown the world what sexual tyranny looks like?

Foreigners (the red bar) commit most rapes in Sweden, yet the government refuses to acknowledge the fact

According to this Swedish graph, rape is disproportionately committed by immigrants. UN figures, as reported by the left-wing Swedish daily Aftonbladet, show that the incidence of rape in Sweden steadily rose per 100 000 population members from 2004 to 2008:

2008: 53.2

2007: 46.6

2006: 40.6

2005: 36.8

2004: 25.1

Last year, in 2013, Sweden’s rate was even higher at 63 per 100 000.

As Aftonbladet puts it: “Only in the small African country of Lesotho were more rapes reported than here,” ironically forgetting about the “heavyweight champion” in this domain, South Africa.

However, the Swedish academic and government elite refuse to acknowledge the obvious, namely that rape is fuelled by immigration. Here is what professor Niklas Långström, an expert on sex crimes at the Karolinska Institute, has to say:

“The high figure does not necessarily mean that Swedes are actually at greater risk of being raped than others. The reason is that the propensity to report a rape may be higher here than in other countries.”

‘It’s the drink’

Professor Långström also blames a greater propensity to consume alcohol among Swedish men for the rise in rape statistics.

“We consume more alcohol and it is seen more in outdoor environments than before. This increases the risk situations. Say that two to three percent of the male population would be willing to commit sex offences in certain circumstances. Now they are exposed to more opportunities than in the past,” he says.

Government officials also regard the rise in sex crimes as a statistical anomaly due to “better reporting”.

Mass surveillance destroys the economy

Privacy is a prerequisite for a prosperous economy. Four ways that mass surveillance hurts the US economy.

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada – Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D. – noted last month:

Privacy is Essential to … Prosperity and Well-Being

• Innovation, creativity and the resultant prosperity of a society requires freedom;

• Privacy is the essence of freedom: Without privacy, individual human rights, property rights and civil liberties – the conceptual engines of innovation and creativity, could not exist in a meaningful manner;

• Surveillance is the antithesis of privacy: A negative consequence of surveillance is the usurpation of a person’s limited cognitive bandwidth, away from innovation and creativity.

The Financial Post reported in February: “Big Brother culture will have adverse effect on creativity, productivity“.

Christopher Lingle – visiting professor of economics at ESEADE, Universidad Francisco Marroquín – agrees that creativity is a key to economic prosperity.

Edward Snowden said last year:

The success of economies in developed nations relies increasingly on their creative output, and if that success is to continue we must remember that creativity is the product of curiosity, which in turn is the product of privacy.

Silicon Valley is currently one of the largest drivers of the U.S. economy. Do you think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could have tinkered so creatively in their garages if the government had been watching everything they do?

Everyone who has every done anything creative knows that you need a little privacy to try different things before you’re ready to go public with it. If your bench model, rough sketch or initial melody is being dissected in real time by an intrusive audience … you’re not going to be very creative.

Moreover, surveillance hampers the free flow of information as many people begin to watch what they say. The free flow of information is a core requisite for a fast-moving economy … especially an information economy, as opposed to economies focused on resource-extraction or manufacturing.

As quoted above, the White House states:

Assuring the free flow of information [is] essential to American and global economic prosperity, security, and the promotion of universal rights.

Mass surveillance makes people more reluctant to share information … and thus hurts the economy.

Top computer and internet experts say that NSA spying breaks the functionality of our computers and of the Internet. It reduces functionality and reduces security by – for example – creating backdoors that malicious hackers can get through.

Remember, American and British spy agencies have intentionally weakened security for many decades. And it’s getting worse and worse. For example, they plan to use automated programs to infect millions of computers.

How much time and productivity have we lost in battling viruses let in because of the spies tinkering? How much have we lost because “their” computer programs conflict with “our” programs?

Microsoft’s general counsel labels government snooping an “advanced persistent threat,” a term generally used to describe teams of hackers that coordinate cyberattacks for foreign governments. It is well-known among IT and security professionals that hacking decreases employee productivity. While they’re usually referring to hacking by private parties, the same is likely true for hacking by government agencies, as well.

And the spy agencies are already collecting millions of webcam images from our computers. THAT’S got to tie up our system resources … so we can’t get our work done as fast.

Moreover, the Snowden documents show that the American and British spy agencies launched attacks to disrupt the computer networks of “hacktivists” and others they don’t like, and tracked supporters of groups such as Wikileaks.

Given that the spy agencies are spying on everyone, capturing millions of screenshots, intercepting laptop shipments, creating fake versions of popular websites to inject malware on people’s computers, launching offensive cyber-warfare operations against folks they don’t like, and that they may view journalism, government criticism or even thinking for one’s self as terrorism – and tend to re-label “dissidents” as “terrorists” – it’s not unreasonable to assume that all of us are being adversely effected to one degree or another by spy agency operations.

Bill Binney – the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, a 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, the senior technical director within the agency, who managed thousands of NSA employees – tells Washington’s Blog:

The other costs involve weakening systems (operating systems/firewalls/encryption). When they do that, this weakens the systems for all to find. Hackers around the world as well as governments too.

These costs are hard to count. For example, we hear of hackers getting customer data over and over again. Is that because of what our government has done?

Or, how about all the attacks on systems in government? Are these because of weakened systems?

Trust is KEY for a prosperous economy. It’s hard to trust when your government, your internet service provider and your favorite websites are all spying on you.

The destruction of privacy by the NSA directly harms internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire U.S. economy (Facebook lost 11 millions users as of April mainly due to privacy concerns … and that was before the Snowden revelations). If people don’t trust the companies to keep their data private, they’ll use foreign companies.

American tech companies – including Verizon, Cisco, IBM and others – are getting hammered for their cooperating with the NSA and lack of privacy protection. The costs to the U.S. economy have been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And see this and this.

And destruction of trust in government and other institutions is destroying our economy.

A top cyber security consultant notes:

If privacy is not protected while performing mass surveillance for national security purposes, then the people’s level of trust in the government decreases.

And as we noted in 2002:

Personal freedom and liberty – and freedom from the arbitrary exercise of government power – are strongly correlated with a healthy economy, but America is descending into tyranny.

Authoritarian actions by the government interfere with the free market, and thus harm prosperity.

U.S. News and World Report notes:

The Fraser Institute’s latest Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report is out, and the news is not good for the United States. Ranked among the five freest countries in the world from 1975 through 2002, the United States has since dropped to 18th place.

The Cato institute notes:

The United States has plummeted to 18th place in the ranked list, trailing such countries as Estonia, Taiwan, and Qatar.

So lawlessness infringement of our liberty is destroying our prosperity.

Put another way, lack of privacy kills the ability to creatively criticize bad government policy … and to demand enforcement of the rule of law. Indeed, 5,000 years of history shows that mass surveillance is always carried out to crush dissent. In other words, mass surveillance is the opposite of the principle of the rule of law (in distinction to the rule of men) upon which America was founded.

Free speech and checks and balances on the power of government officials are two of the main elements of justice in any society. And a strong rule of law is – in turn – the main determinant of GDP growth.

Source: Washington’s blog

From the pages of Orwell and 1984

By Wayne Madsen.

«Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible». These are the words from «1984», George Orwell’s fictional novel and eerily correct prognostication of future events from geopolitics to the loss of privacy and the rise of the surveillance state. Oceania fictionally represented the British Isles, North and South America, southern Africa, and Australasia. In Orwell’s world, Eurasia was comprised of Russia and Europe while another power, Eastasia, included China, Korea, and Japan.

Today, a modified form of the dystopian future world map of Orwell is becoming reality as Russia and China increasingly cooperate economically, politically, and militarily to ensure that the forces of Oceania – centered in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris – do not overrun Eurasia.

At last month’s third annual International Security Conference in Moscow, a conclave sponsored by the Russian Defense Ministry, Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov stated that Western-financed and organized «color revolutions», such as those employed twice in Ukraine and once in Georgia, represent a form of irregular warfare against Eurasia. Gerasimov’s statement about North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, which resemble Orwell’s Oceania, launching irregular warfare against Eurasia could have been torn from the pages of «1984». Gerasimov cited information warfare, economic sanctions, and support for «proxy criminal organizations» and extremist groups as part of the West’s irregular warfare construct directed against Eurasia.

Gerasimov also said that color revolutions were part and parcel of Western military strategy against Eurasia since the non-military tactics employed were often followed by military force to bring about regime change. This is now the case with the Ukrainian government’s NATO-supported military offensive against federalists in eastern Ukraine, as well as in NATO support for Islamist rebels battling against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Military intervention, including air attacks, was also employed by NATO after the Islamist uprising in eastern Libya that eventually forced Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from power.

Gerasimov’s comments about color revolutions was supported by none other than Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a non-profit think tank that often reflects the views of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department. Cordesman said color revolutions sponsored by the West were a new form of warfare against Russia and China.

Belarusian Defense Minister Yury Zhadobin cited the «godfather» of George Soros- and CIA-financed themed uprisings and revolutions, Gene Sharp, the director of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston as the prime motivator of the uprisings witnessed in Europe and the Middle East. The armed forces of Russia, China, and Belarus now consider the West’s support for regime change through color revolutions as being part of the military doctrines of the United States and NATO. The military planners in Moscow, Beijing, and Minsk also view Western private military contractors – mercenaries — such as the former Blackwater, now Academi, as being part of the West’s regime change scenario after the outbreak of color revolutions.

The reasons for the West’s color revolution and regime change project for Eurasia are clear. With Russia and China at the forefront of developing new Eurasian energy schemes involving natural gas and new transportation routes evoking memories of the old Silk Road, the West feels threatened by the emergence in Eurasia of a dynamic new market that could not only rival but eclipse the European Union and Washington’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The emergence of a new Eurasian identity has alarmed the political leaders of de facto Oceania. Eurasia places economic development and respect for traditions over what many in Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and other countries of the region see as a Western «culture» that emphasizes pop culture, homosexuality, destruction of social safety nets, disrespect for religion, destruction of the traditional family unit, and unbridled vulture capitalism that promotes draconian austerity.

The Moscow security conference met at about the same time that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) held in Shanghai. There, Xi emphasized that Asia has entered the 21st century at that the Cold War mentality should be abandoned. Observers from Japan and the United States looked on as Asian delegates roundly rejected President Barack Obama’s Cold War military «pivot to Asia» and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s revanchist imperial military buildup in east Asia. In many respects, the United States Pacific forces and Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea represent the militaristic «Eastasia» of «1984», an entity that was allied for a period of time with Oceania.

Not only was the «Power of Siberia» natural gas pipeline, which will begin pumping natural gas from Siberia to China in 2018, agreed upon in Shanghai but there are plans to restore the old Silk Road as a major trans-Eurasian highway that will link China to Europe via the trans-Siberian highway and Europe’s E-30 highway. Eventually, an A-class motor highway will link Amsterdam with Beijing via the Asian Highway Network. This network of modern highways will restore the ancient Silk Road of Asia and move goods and passengers throughout Eurasia and, in the process, build new infrastructures in the remotest parts of the Eurasian heartland. This prospect has the banking houses of Europe and America concerned since they will be locked out of the financial sweepstakes.

Eurasia’s leaders, from Putin and Xi, to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are well aware that the color revolutions that have wracked Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have been financed by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Foundation and that Soros’s hedge fund empire is nothing more than a front for the international House of Rothschild banking cartel. NATO and the Obama administration, which represent the interests of Soros and the Rothschilds, will stop at nothing to destroy the Eurasian initiative. The «Euromaidan» overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected a union with the European Union and appeared ready to forge ties with Eurasia, was part of the West’s (or «Oceania’s) first indirect military aggression against Eurasia.

Some Eurasian leaders are aware that the West is trying to derail the developing Eurasian Union. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed transforming CICA into a new Organization for Security and Development in Asia (OSDA), which would be the closest thing to a Eurasian counterpart to NATO. Stressing Eurasia’s rejection of Western «values», Nazarbayev stressed that OSDA would be built upon Asian «tradition and values». Nazarbayev appeared to be speaking for a number of Eurasian leaders in rejecting the lewd permissiveness of Western culture as witnessed by «Pussy Riot’s» and FEMEN’s displays of vulgarity and gratuitous nudity in places of religious worship in Russia, Ukraine, and other countries.

There is a new competitor to America’s version of Oceania now emerging in Orwell’s Eurasia. Halford John Mackinder’s «Heartland Theory», which was espoused in his book «The Geographical Pivot of History», postulated that the power that controlled Eurasia’s heartland between the Volga and Yangtze and the Arctic Sea and Himalayas would control the destiny of the world. If the Eurasian Union becomes a successful political and economic union, the United States, Britain, Western Europe, and Japan will be confined to a economically anemic and socially decadent coastal «Rimland» where the few remaining assets will be fought over by the hungry jackals of the banking houses of Wall Street, City of London, and Frankfurt. The outbreak of wars in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq are but the first shots of the impending war between «Oceania» and «Eurasia».

Asset management faces a revolution

A recent report from KPMG claims the next 15 years could produce something of a revolution.

In the paper, titled “Investing in the Future”, KPMG describes how the world of investment management is likely to change by 2030.

The investment management industry is still in its infancy compared to other financial services sectors.

It has grown on the back of the baby boomers over the last 30 years. But healthy margins often breed complacency, and because of the growth story, there has generally been a lack of innovation.

The KPMG report highlights four megatrends that it believes will shape the sector over the next decade and a half – demographics, environment, technology and social values, and behaviour and ethics.

The younger client base wants immediate and personalised information and traditional models have become obsolete.

KPMG also believes that investors will “increasingly value outcomes and certainty over returns”. This could extend to retirement products offering more than just cash-based payouts.

“For most, retirement planning is about securing lifestyle expectations rather than simply cash accumulation,” the report states. “On that basis, options to secure holidays, cars and healthcare during retirement may be as attractive as putting aside cash.”

Technology has increased competition and investment managers will not only have to manage their products accordingly but how clients engage with them.

“Personalised information and education about the choices available will become as important – if not more so – than the underlying product,” the report argues.

Part of this will be the desire for investment managers to have a more direct relationship with their clients.

“We also believe that investment managers can play a much broader, deeper role in clients’ lives and the industry value chain,” KPMG states.

“However, it will require a very different business model; one which requires providers to be much more engaging and relevant to a broader range of customers. This will mean understanding clients far better than today and creating a new value proposition based around education, outcomes (not just returns), flexibility and personalised solutions.

“While relatively small in both number and scale at this stage, there are emerging models leveraging a combination of technology, data and social networks to bring fresh propositions to market which play to the evolving megatrends,” it says. “These could have the potential to cause waves in the industry.”

The biggest challenge is establishing a trusted brand, something that is critical in any financial services business. But while this is a short-term concern, it is also potentially a longer term opportunity.

Companies might look to form strategic partnerships with established providers. Already there are examples in China of social network brands linking up with asset managers to distribute their products.

“This potentially provides opportunities for non-traditional new entrants,” the report argues. “It may seem a little clichéd but could the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple be the next powerhouses in investment management? After all, they are the top three in the Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies list in 2014.”

These companies already have ubiquitous brands, business models designed around understanding personal needs, huge existing client bases, and the proven ability to use the data that they capture to deliver personalised services. This could be exactly what the industry needs.

Class-based affirmative action?

The US Supreme Court in April upheld Michigan’s ban on race-based affirmative action in university admissions.

Indeed, affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed: voters have banned it at universities in at least eight states, and four more look likely to follow suit.

The Economist has argued against race-based admissions policies. Instead, we encourage selection procedures that offer modest preferences to economically disadvantaged students. This is the plan set out in “Place, Not Race”, a new book from Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown Law School.

She proposes a race-blind, class-based type of affirmative action whereby students who have thrived in poor schools or rough neighbourhoods are given special consideration. Some worry that this may lead colleges to accept ill-prepared applicants, who may then drop out (a problem that has plagued some universities with race-based preferences). But new research suggests that these concerns may be unjustified.

In an article published in the latest issue of the Economics of Education Review, Sigal Alon of Tel Aviv University and Ofer Malamud of University of Chicago write about the promising results of a colour-blind, class-based affirmative-action programme in Israel. In the early 2000s, four of Israel’s most selective universities began giving preferential treatment to poorer students, as indicated by an applicant’s neighbourhood and high school. Based largely on these two factors, an applicant is scored on an index of socioeconomic disadvantage; those who meet a pre-determined threshold are eligible for special consideration, but not guaranteed admission. After analysing the academic outcomes of more than 5,000 students, the authors found three particularly noteworthy results.

First, those who met the threshold were more likely than average students to have come from deprived neighbourhoods, to be of Asian, African or Arabic origin, to have immigrated and to be poor. Second, the policy had a significant impact on admissions; applicants who met the threshold were 13% more likely to have been accepted to one of the four elite institutions than those who fell just short of the required number of points. Third, the students who were likely to have been admitted in part because of their disadvantaged backgrounds did not fall behind; they had the same average GPA and graduation rate as their peers who were ineligible for the programme. The researchers concluded that the programme works. It has increased the diversity of the student bodies at top universities by helping the poor without increasing the risk of admitting unqualified applicants. Students admitted through the programme “are not falling behind academically, even at the most selective majors,” the authors found.

Israel is a unique—and uniquely small—country with its own social complications, and there is no guarantee that a programme that works there would work in America. But the study offers some hope for those who seek to create more diverse student bodies and perhaps improve social mobility without explicitly privileging groups based on race.

Source: The Economist

Narcissists nail job interviews

We all remember from Greek myths about the guy Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, how unpleasant and hard such people are to deal with, especially at work – they believe they are the center of the universe, and actually, manage to convince others in this. However, one new piece of research suggests that narcissists are much better at job interviews.

A new study from the University of British Columbia in Canada shows narcissists to be the best performers in job interviews – and more successful “than equally qualified candidates who act more modestly,” The Telegraph reports.
“A job interview is one of the few social situations where narcissistic behaviors such as boasting actually create a positive impression,” said Del Paulhus, Psychology Professor at the University of British Columbia and the study’s lead author. “Normally, people are put off by such behavior, especially over repeated exposure.” While people hate such behavior in real life, this works in an interview when one has to promote oneself and boast around in a confident manner – “narcissists tended to talk about themselves, make eye contact, joke around and ask the interviewers more questions. As a result, the study found that people rated narcissists as more attractive candidates for the position,” said the study published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
“They are very comfortable with self-promoting, and the job application situation is one where you really do have to self-promote. People who are natural self-promoters are going to have an advantage and modest people will be at a disadvantage,” Paulhus told CBC.
The study involved videotaping 72 applicants, half of them of Asian heritage (to have various cross-cultural backgrounds) simulating a job interview. After this, a team of expert and non-expert HRs, were asked to rate their performance and say which of the applicants they were most likely to hire.
Before participants were placed in the job interview scenarios, researchers measured their levels of narcissism using a standard questionnaire called the narcissistic personality inventory questionnaire.
The experts observed that narcissists tended to talk about themselves, make eye contact, joke around and ask the interviewers more questions.
Interestingly, the findings also showed that job seekers of Japanese, Chinese and Korean heritage, cultures with traditional modesty, exhibited lower levels of narcissism and were less likely to be “definitely hired.”
People of European descent were most likely to be hired and most likely to demonstrate bragging or other narcissistic traits – no matter if they were men or women.
“People from Western cultures seem to be more predisposed to telling how good they are, while people from more modest cultures like East Asia seem to be very uncomfortable. They were raised to feel uncomfortable by bragging,” Paulhus said.
When narcissists were interviewed by someone who knew more than they did, they become even bigger braggarts.
“Narcissists actually increased their self-promotion in the face of an expert interviewer,” Paulhus said.
Thus, the study has substantive implications for human resources and managers, as well as for job candidates
Paulhus said that employers must learn to look beyond self-presentation in evaluating job candidates, as well as selecting interviewers who can focus on what they want from an employee, rather than exterior qualities, Forbes reported. For job applicants, the message is different — a little self-promotion is the number one must-learn skill.
“If you’re a naturally modest person, you might want to try to be a narcissist for the day and maybe practice self-promoting. Even though you feel uncomfortable with it, you’ve got to do it for this one situation,” he said.

Source: Voice of Russia

RIP Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela Muntz, the main bully in The Simpsons.

By Brian Goldfarb.

Ben Cohen has written a most perceptive remembrance of Nelson Mandela on 5 December, the day he died, in The Algemeiner. Before quoting some of that, I’d like to add my own memories of Mandela.

Early on, Cohen remembers where he was when Mandela walked free from prison. Well, we watched it on television at home, and then listened on the radio. I remember being astounded when the radio commentator expressed surprise, not to say astonishment, when Mandela got out of his car and walked out of the prison gates.

I am old enough to have been a student with a poster remembering the Sharpeville Massacre (those reading this aged less than 30 may need to Google that) on my wall, as well as other anti-apartheid posters thereon. Indeed, the Sharpeville massacre was the final straw in creating my own personal boycott of South African goods (from then – in 1960, two years before I became a university student – until 1991, when Mandela was released from prison), and I can remember when Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to jail for “treason”. Just imagine it, being called a traitor for demanding equal treatment, indeed freedom, for your people: difficult for those under 40, perhaps even for those under 50 (sorry, I’m trying not to be a reverse ageist here, but you have to have been there, in the 60s and 70s to understand this): we saw it unfold and wondered at the stupidity of the Afrikaaner South Africans – not difficult, they did appear to have a problem in coming to terms with the modern world.

I remember thinking, when the apartheid regime (the real one: the one at the tip of the African continent) sentenced him to life imprisonment that maybe, just maybe, they had avoided the obvious risk of creating a martyr. It turned out that that they had, instead, created the only avenue of escape from the corner they were painting themselves into, even it did take 27 painful years to become a reality.

I also remember Steve Biko, effectively beaten to death, who might otherwise have been one of the contenders for the succession to Mandela as President. And I also remember that other far right whites killed another likely (and potentially great) successor to Mandela: Chris Hani, leaving only, sadly, mediocre people to succeed Mandela.

But I also remember that many of Mandela’s comrades were Jews: I remember Joe Slovo, who survived to become Housing Minister in the Rainbow Nation, before succumbing to cancer; I remember Ruth First, his wife, assassinated by BOSS (the South African Bureau of State Security) with a parcel bomb when she had been exiled to Mozambique; I remember Benjamin Pogrund, anti-apartheid fighter who, having made aliyah, now rejects the equation of Israel=apartheid; and I remember Arthur Goldreich, of whom Cohen says:

“[Mandela] recalls that he learned about guerilla warfare not from Fidel Castro, but from Arthur Goldreich, a South African Jew who fought with the Palmach during Israel’s War of Independence.” Further, Mandela “relates the anecdote that the only airline willing to fly his friend, Walter Sisulu, to Europe without a passport was Israel’s own El Al.”

Of course, many of these Jews were Stalinists (such as Joe Slovo and the viciously anti-Israel Ronnie Kasrils). To understand their position (if it’s possible to do that), I would remind readers of the book by Colin Shindler “Israel & The Left“, mentioned in my report on London’s Jewish Book Week, 2012, on this blog.

On the other hand, there are those non-Stalinists Jews, such as Albie Sachs, who lost an arm and an eye to the struggle, and the Jewish lawyers who took Mandela on as an articled clerk, when this just wasn’t done. This enabled Mandela to complete his qualifications and become an accredited lawyer of the South African system. Just as we all know that there are anti-Zionist Jews (would we condemn all Haredi Jews just because of Naturei Kartura? I hope not), similarly, we shouldn’t condemn all anti-apartheid South African Jews because of those who were and are anti-Zionist (and by implication, cast doubts on Mandela’s own philo-semitism and support for Israel).

Furthermore, for anyone who still wants to believe that Mandela was an anti-Zionist, Cohen goes on to say (re Mandela autobiography) that

“the ultimate smoking gun — the equation of Israel’s democracy with apartheid — doesn’t exist.”

There is more. Cohen goes on to note that:

“Mandela once wrote that Jews, in his experience, were far more sensitive about race because of their own history. Now, it is absolutely true that there are parallels between the oppression suffered by South African blacks under racist white rulers, and Jews living under hostile non-Jewish rulers. The notorious Group Areas Act, which restricted black residency rights, brings to mind the enforced separation of Jews into the “Pale of Settlement” by the Russian Empress Catherine in 1791. Many of the other apartheid regulations, like the ban on sexual relationships between whites and blacks, carried echoes of the Nazi Nuremburg Laws of 1935.”

Indeed, whatever their political orientation, Jews are noted for their respect for human rights, both for themselves and their fellow Jews and, just as importantly, for others, having their own flouted so often. Why else create Israel as parliamentary democracy?

All this culminates in Cohen noting that:

“Mandela’s diagnosis was that Africans should be the sovereigns of their own destiny. Similarly, the founders of Zionism wanted nothing less for the Jews.”

That is, Nelson Mandela was not only did not oppose Zionism and the idea of self-determination for Jews (i.e., a state of their own), he also recognised that South African Jews had played a great part in the fight for equality in South Africa, out of a conviction that, as the American Declaration of Independence has it, “All [people] are created equal”.

Source: Blog

NATO acting out a deliberate charade in Europe

by Diana Johnstone.

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. He could under-react, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

Or he could over-react, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.

In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course. Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found. Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias. The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.

Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry pontificated. “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.

It Was All Planned at Yalta

In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945. The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves. The center of discussion was the “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with the West. The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West.

Conspiracy against Russia? Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear.

Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference. Forbes reported at the time on the “stark difference” between the Russian and Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with the EU but over its likely impact.” In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports could only swell the deficit. Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”.

The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.”

As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.

In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself. Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong. What went wrong first was that Yanukovych got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union. He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.

Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel

Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West. The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.

It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics. So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter too much.

It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Hapsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.

The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.” Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder. In any case, he was never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.

It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia. In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position. The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s role as bridge. This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev. A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.

But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.

Plan A and Plan B

U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue. Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.

As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called “promoting democracy”). This investment is not “for oil”, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.

What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, “Fuck the EU”. But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions. The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party has been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate. Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but “Yats”. And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.

Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea. Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move to prevent this.

But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy. If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster. On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective. Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media. Suddenly, we are told that the “freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian expansionism”. Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States. But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge. Never mind “communism”; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that. The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.

The Protection Racket Returns

But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to “save Europe”, which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe. Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies. The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union. This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.

Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended. So has the EU. With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes. The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states. Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained. Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.

Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat. Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony. The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.

Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine. This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.

To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on “defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia’s natural gas sales – stigmatized as a “way of exercising political pressure”, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent. Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.

From D-Day to Dooms Day

Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade. French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future. In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.

Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue. The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army. If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.

Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis. He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him. But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the “old” Europeans. Apparently abandoning all Europe’s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.

Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference? All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions.

Source: Counterpunch

‘Freemasons planted seeds of Apartheid’

On the grounds of Parliament, close to Tuynhuys in the heart of Cape Town, the Lodge De Goede Hoop is hidden behind a parking lot filled with expensive ministerial cars.

It is an old, white, plastered building, writes City Press.

Only the Freemason symbol on the window and the Star of David above the large wooden doors show that this is not just another parliamentary building.

There are many conspiracy theories, alleged links with murders, and those who believe the Freemasons “planted the seeds” of Apartheid.

The building was inaugurated as the first masonic temple in South Africa in 1803 and is still used daily by its members.

This week, City Press took a tour of the temple with the newly appointed Grand Master of the SA Freemasons, Geoff Edwards.

On a table in the foyer are a square and a pair of compasses – well-known masonic symbols. On the wall is an engraved list of the names of former masters and the wall beside the front door is adorned with a framed photograph of Watty Watson, former DA chief whip and retiring Grand Master.

“People say we’re on parliamentary grounds, but that’s not true. Actually, Parliament is on our grounds,” he says.

The first Freemason lodge was formed in Cape Town in 1772 and the temple was built about 30 years later.

The Cape government of the time and the Freemasons were so intertwined that the Cape Parliament used the masonic banquet hall as a venue from 1854 to 1884 until the old House of Assembly was completed.

Others say that from the organisation’s inception in the 14th century, it has been the secret hand that is quietly ruling the world.

Not true, according to Edwards, taking us into the meditation chamber with its sinister statue of a dead man with a dagger, a book and an hourglass, and the words “know thyself”.

Two artificial human skulls add a chilling edge to the room. “People say the Freemasons have ruled the world over the centuries, but the truth is that many rulers were simply masons,” he says.

“Like many other organisations, we have been attacked aggressively in the past. During World War 2, Hitler tried to wipe out the Freemasons.

The most fascinating room in the Lodge De Goede Hoop is undoubtedly the middle chamber. With only two small windows letting in a sliver of light, the room is dark even in the middle of the day. Here, ceremonies are held at night in the pitch dark to remind members just how fleeting their lives are.

The organisation is open to all races, but does not accept women as members. There are female lodges in some parts of the world, but they are not recognised by the Freemasons’ constitution.

“In our lodge we have members of Parliament from three different political parties and they all get on tremendously well together,” he boasts.

Source: City Press

False Flag Attacks

By Professor Daniele Ganser, University of Basel

As evidence has accumulated that the official story of 9/11 is false, the dwindling number of defenders of the official conspiracy theory have been reduced to two arguments. One is that no government would attack its own people or stand aside while terrorists did so. The other argument is that if such a thing had happened, someone would have talked.

Professor Daniele Ganser of the University of Basel in Switzerland demonstrates that there is no basis in history for either of these two arguments. He provides details of two officially acknowledged government conspiracies to murder citizens for political reasons.

One is Operation Gladio, officially exposed by Italian Judge Felice Casson and Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. This conspiracy involved the CIA, NATO, and Italian intelligence. The conspirators set off bombs in public places in European cities, killing and maiming citizens. The series of attacks were officially blamed on communists and discredited the Italian Communist Party, thus terminating its rise in polls and elections.

Nonconformity and freethinking now a mental illness

Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness?

Well shockingly it is according to the latest addition of the DSM-IV, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). This publication has identified a new mental illness known as “oppositional defiant disorder”or ODD. The official Defintion it as an“ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” such as argumentativeness, the questioning of authority, general defiance and negativity as well as getting annoyed particularly easily. But is this really a mental illness or just individuality.

Psychiatrists often refer to the DSM-IV as a diagnostic tool for a variety of mental illnesses. However with each issue naming new mental illnesses are we to therefore deduce that as a population we are getting sicker, or is it misdirected advice that then leads to incorrect labels on non existent mental issues. Authors of the DSM-IV say that it is simply a result of them being better able to identify these illnesses today, althought they have faced criticism for many quarters for simply looking for conditions where none actually exist.

For example some of the ‘new mental illnesses’ identified by the DSM-IV includearrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior .Of course previously we merely thought of these as “personality traits,” but if we are to believe this influential publication they are now “diseases” – all of which now have associated treatments.

We now live in a culture of over-diagnosing and over-medicating illustrated by the fact that according to the DSM-IV, the figures for the number of different mental illnesses recorded by them has rocketed from 130 to 357 in the last 50 years – with the majority of these affecting children.

Whilst the publication has been an important diagnostic tool for the much of the psychiatric industry, it has also been responsible for major social changes. It is partly responsible for the huge rise in ADD, bipolar disorder, and depression in children, as they describe certain behaviour in children as symptoms rather than merely as character traits. A Washington Post article stated that “if Mozart were born today, he would be diagnosed with ADD … and medicated into barren normality.”

The DSM-IV state the diagnosis guidelines for identifying various oppositional or defiant disorders are for children, but that adults can just as easily suffer from the disease. So should any freethinking citizen consider themselves as mentally ill?

The Soviet Union has used new “mental illnesses” for political repression in the past and the people who refused to accept the beliefs of the Communist Party were said to have developed a new type of schizophrenia – they suffered from the ‘delusion of believing communism was wrong’. These people who refused to toe the line were isolated, even forcefully medicated, and many suffered brutal repressive “therapy” to bring them back to sanity!

The last edition of the DSM-IV identified the symptoms of various ‘mental illnesses’ in children – there then followed a large spike in the number of children in the diagnosis and related medication of those children. This is happening in vast numbers and children in some states have even passed Laws that can enable protective agencies to forcibly medicate these misunderstood children. These laws also mean that if there is resistance from parents or legal guardians of these children refuse to cooperate this is regarded as a punishable offence.

This is a frightening development and is shockingly widespread – we are teaching our children that if they think for themselves or display any originality or non- conformity then they will be labelled and ‘controlled’ with dangerous medication. When we will even see the long term effects of these drugs?

Spokespeople for the DSM-IV claim that their only desire is to improve diagnostics, however they have been shown to be very influential in this dangerous practice of labelling freethinking and nonconformity as various mental illnesses could have a lot of potential for abuse, misdiagnosing, mistreating and unnecessarily medicating huge swathes of the population.

Source: naturalcuresnotmedicine.com

Americans turn anti-War

The American people are now overwhelmingly opposed to more war in Ukraine, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows:

Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington ….

In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines.

A Pew poll from December found a majority of Americans – more than ever before in Pew’s 50-year history of polling this question – think the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.”

A Pew/USA Today poll conducted over the weekend found that Americans oppose – by a 2-1 margin – any U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

A YouGov poll conducted last month found that only 14 percent of Americans said the U.S. has “any responsibility” to get involved in Ukraine, and only 18 percent think the U.S. “has any responsibility to protect Ukraine if Russia were to invade.”

Huffington Post reports:

Americans are more likely than not to say that the United States has no responsibility to get involved in Ukraine even under extreme circumstances, the new survey shows ….

Pluralities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreed that the U.S. does not have a responsibility to protect Ukraine.

Support for a war against Syria is less than one-sixth the approval level Americans had for the Iraq war in 2003 (Americans would rather have a root canal or a colonoscopy than bomb Syria).

A USA Today/Pew Poll from January shows that Americans now believe by a 50%-38% margin that war against Iraq was stupid.

Support even for the Afghanistan war has collapsed. For example, only 35% of all Americans support the Afghanistan war, according to a 2011 CNN poll.

Most Americans are now strongly opposed to intervention in any Arab country.

The warmongers, however, are desperate to drum up business.

Obama has also declared a war on inequality. But given that income inequality has increased more under Obama than under Bush, and that bad policy enacted on a bipartisan basis is making inequality worse and worse, we may be in real trouble.

Of course, neither mainstream political party represents the interests of the people … as revealed by polls.

Source: washingtonsblog.com

The new SA colonials have arrived

Without as much as a whisper the South African government allowed at least 400.000 Chinese to swamp the country during the past six years. Chinese migrants, mainly from the overpopulated Fujian province in China, have been shipped off to South Africa at an alarming rate. Spreading all over the country, even in the remotest parts, between 6 000 and 12 000 “Chinese shops” sprang up.

New York also began to witness an influx of Fuzhounese Chinese-Americans. Fuzhou is the capitol city of the Fujian province of China, located in the southeast. Fuzhounese immigrants were attracted by promises of opportunity in New York (other destinations of interest were Japan, Australia, and Europe). Many undocumented immigrants came to New York as well, brought to the United States through human smuggling practices that had become widespread in the towns outside Fuzhou.

Today there are over 400.000 Chinese-Americans living in New York.

Emigrants who traveled to New York lived both in Fuzhou itself and in smaller villages outside of Fuzhou. The quantity of Fuzhounese immigrants measure into the tens of thousands. Fuzhounese immigrants in New York now outnumber Cantonese immigrants. Parts of the Lower East Side Chinatown and Sunset Park Chinatown are coming to be described as “Little Fuzhou” to acknowledge the growing Fuzhounese population.

Since the arrival of Fuzhounese people in Manhattan, Chinatown has expanded dramatically. Parts of the Lower East Side that originally belonged to Little Italy were now being assimilated into the ever-growing “Little Fuzhou”

Prof Colin McCarthy, retired from the University of Stellenbosch, first noted the “Chinese colonization” in South Africa. Says Prof McCarthy: “All the evidence indicates that the project to set up such an extensive network of Chinese shops, all following the same pattern and targeting the same market, was well researched, well planned, well organized and well financed”.

The young, unemployed couples from Fujian province settled into the network – pushing up cheap Chinese plastic, products and clothing into a lucrative retail chain far bigger than Pick ‘n Pay, Pep Stores or Edgars. To make matters worse: most of the Chinese shops are not registered and do not pay any taxes in South Africa’ not even import or export duties – in fact, China puts its clothing exports to South Africa to R11,3 billion in 2010; whilst South Africa’s failing statistics put the Chinese clothing imports at only R6,7 billion! It means that in one single year R4,6 billion worth of Chinese clothing entered South Africa illegally.

A South African Revenue Services employee spilled the beans on a small Chinese shop in a rural area where, when raided by SARS, R1,2 million was found under the counter.

Janet Wilhelm of the HSRC observes: “It is amazing how so many people can enter a country seemingly unnoticed!” She quotes the SAPS Aliens Investigation Unit as saying “Many Chinese travel to South Africa via Mbabane, Maputo and Maseru from where they enter South Africa with false identity documents by road”.

Patrick Chong, chairman of the Chinese Association of South Africa, says: “Many would enter on tourist or student visas then simply stay”.

Researches of Noseweek followed the Chen family where one pioneer settled illegally in South Africa, spreading within four years to 172 members of the family scattered across Lesotho trading Chinese products.

The South African ANC government officially proclaimed Chinese as “honorary blacks”, making them exempt from affirmative action, quotas and Black Economic Empowerment.

It is ironic that while populists like Malema and Shivangu walk about claiming “land and minerals for the South African people”, the ANC government has allowed at least 400 000 additional Indians and Pakistanis, at least 400 000 Chinese and at least 10 million illegal’s from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola and now also Zambia into the country.

Source: southafricatoday.net

I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

By Neil Clark.

Iraq mourning millions of their dead — Iraq mourning a million of their dead

I’m confused. A few weeks ago we were told in the West that people occupying government buildings in Ukraine was a very good thing. These people, we were told by our political leaders and elite media commentators, were ‘pro-democracy protestors’.

The US government warned the Ukrainian authorities against using force against these ’pro-democracy protestors’ even if, according to the pictures we saw, some of them were neo-Nazis who were throwing Molotov cocktails and other things at the police and smashing up statues and setting fire to buildings.

Now, just a few weeks later, we’re told that people occupying government buildings in Ukraine are not ‘pro-democracy protestors’ but ’terrorists’ or ’militants’.

Why was the occupation of government buildings in Ukraine a very good thing in January, but it is a very bad thing in April? Why was the use of force by the authorities against protestors completely unacceptable in January, but acceptable now? I repeat: I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

The anti-government protestors in Ukraine during the winter received visits from several prominent Western politicians, including US Senator John McCain, and Victoria Nuland, from the US State Department, who handed out cookies. But there have been very large anti-government protests in many Western European countries in recent weeks, which have received no such support, either from such figures or from elite Western media commentators. Nor have protestors received free cookies from officials at the US State Department.

Surely if they were so keen on anti-government street protests in Europe, and regarded them as the truest form of ’democracy’, McCain and Nuland would also be showing solidarity with street protestors in Madrid, Rome, Athens and Paris? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

A few weeks ago I saw an interview with the US Secretary of State John Kerry who said, “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.” But I seem to recall the US doing just that on more than one occasion in the past 20 years or so.

Have I misremembered the ’Iraq has WMDs claim’? Was I dreaming back in 2002 and early 2003 when politicians and neocon pundits came on TV every day to tell us plebs that we had to go to war with Iraq because of the threat posed by Saddam’s deadly arsenal? Why is having a democratic vote in Crimea on whether to rejoin Russia deemed worse than the brutal, murderous invasion of Iraq – an invasion which has led to the deaths of up to 1 million people? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

We were also told by very serious-looking Western politicians and media ’experts’ that the Crimea referendum wasn’t valid because it was held under “military occupation.” But I’ve just been watching coverage of elections in Afghanistan, held under military occupation, which have been hailed by leading western figures, such as NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen as a “historic moment for Afghanistan”and a great success for “democracy.” Why is the Crimean vote dismissed, but the Afghanistan vote celebrated? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

Syria too is rather baffling. We were and are told that radical Islamic terror groups pose the greatest threat to our peace, security and our ’way of life’ in the West. That Al-Qaeda and other such groups need to be destroyed: that we needed to have a relentless ’War on Terror’ against them. Yet in Syria, our leaders have been siding with such radical groups in their war against a secular government which respects the rights of religious minorities, including Christians.

When the bombs of Al-Qaeda or their affiliates go off in Syria and innocent people are killed there is no condemnation from our leaders: their only condemnation has been of the secular Syrian government which is fighting radical Islamists and which our leaders and elite media commentators are desperate to have toppled. I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

Then there’s gay rights. We are told that Russia is a very bad and backward country because it has passed a law against promoting homosexuality to minors. Yet our leaders who boycotted the Winter Olympics in Sochi because of this law visit Gulf states where homosexuals can be imprisoned or even executed, and warmly embrace the rulers there, making no mention of the issue of gay rights.

Surely the imprisonment or execution of gay people is far worse than a law which forbids promotion of homosexuality to minors? Why, if they are genuinely concerned about gay rights, do our leaders attack Russia and not countries that imprison or execute gay people? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

We are told in lots of newspaper articles that the Hungarian ultra-nationalist party Jobbik is very bad and that its rise is a cause of great concern, even though it is not even in the government, or likely to be. But neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists do hold positions in the new government of Ukraine, which our leaders in the West enthusiastically support and neo-Nazis and the far-right played a key role in the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected government in February, a ‘revolution’ cheered on by the West. Why are ultra-nationalists and far-right groups unacceptable in Hungary but very acceptable in Ukraine? I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

We are told that Russia is an aggressive, imperialist power and that NATO’s concerns are about opposing the Russian ‘threat’. But I looked at the map the other day and while I could see lots of countries close to (and bordering) Russia that were members of NATO, the US-led military alliance whose members have bombed and attacked many countries in the last 15 years, I could not see any countries close to America that were part of a Russian-military alliance, or any Russian military bases or missiles situated in foreign countries bordering or close to the US. Yet Russia, we are told, is the ‘aggressive one’. I’m confused. Can anyone help me?

Source: RT