Category: Opinion

Let my people go!

The peoples of Europe are suppressed. Don’t fool yourself that living in the EU is good. It is not. The living standard of the average German has fallen in the last 15 years. The living standards of the Greeks, the Spanish and many others have been smashed. The EU is an instrument for the exploitation of the average people to the benefit of the few. And this is why Oligarchs want you to be in the EU: To institutionalize your suffering and exploitation.

For me, as a German with strong liberal views, it is hard to say this, but it is true: The hope for a better Europe today comes from the East.

If Ukraine goes to the West, it will go into the sunset of a declining part of the world.

If you go East, you will go into the sunrise of a rich and prosperous commonwealth.

I wished we in Germany would have the choice.

Make your choice wisely.

Dr. Bernhard Seitz, Stuttgart, Germany

‘Russian Invasion’

How long is screaming ‘Wolf!’ having an impact of the Western Populations? – Until Full Spectrum Dominance has been attained?

by Peter Koenig

Interestingly, most of us who are seeking the truth are primarily attempting to undo the lies – lies umpteen times repeated, lies about Russian invasions, first proclaimed by Poroshenko, Ukraine’s oligarch leader (sic), lies of Russia not respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty, demonization against President Putin, Malaysian airliners downed by Russia – and-so-on. The latest accusation is that JP Morgan and four other Wall Street banks have been hacked. And the culprit is…. Of, course Russia, according to the presstitute MSM.

It doesn’t matter whether what Poroshenko said and is repeated the world over was based on a translation error (according to the German Tagesschau, the German mainstream TV news) – or whether it is just a conventional lie continuously repeated until it becomes the truth à la Goebbels – the western bought propaganda machine takes full advantage of this hundreds of years old simple strategy of deception.

The interesting part, however, is that hardly anyone on that very occasion is presenting the counter-weight, so to speak, namely to what extent Kiev is assisted by US paid mercenaries, CIA military and strategic advisers and their equipment, all paid for in one way or another by the State Department, CIA, or NATO. And these are facts. Not inventions for deception.

There is enough proof about who caused the 22 February 2014 coup (Maidan) – Madame Nuland, Kerry’s assistant, bragged about it at the Washington Press club – remember the US$ 5 billion investment in Ukraine’s regime change that cannot be let go down the drain because of the f….ing Europeans. She was caught hot-handed or hot-voiced on the phone with the US Ambassador in Kiev.

Ever since that infamous coup, the US / NATO and the EU have had their dirty hands in Kiev’s Nazi killer junta – otherwise the Kiev thugs would have never had either the courage or the military knowledge to advance to the Donbas area of Ukraine, where they were literally ordered to kill their brothers. Some of them with some conscience defected early on; then they were accompanied under threats of life by CIA ‘advisers’. Eventually they defected by the thousands because of lack of food and ammunition and the resulting low-low morale.

It is actually irrelevant whether Russia has troops and armory in East Ukraine. In fact it would be well justified for Russia to defend her countrymen from savage slaughter, as many Donbas citizens are originally Russians. But – they don’t, as Mr. Putin is too smart to spoil his diplomatic assets on a war that is already lost by Kiev.

Be this as it may, why do we, truth seekers, at a time of Obama’s lie exclamations and countless media repetitions not present more frequently the US / NATO invasion in Ukraine and their assistance to the Kiev murderers, rather than always being on the defensive, undoing lies in defense of Russia?

The truth of what the US-NATO killing machine, its vassal EU states and its paid mercenaries are up to in Ukraine, and that they won’t let go regardless of what Obama mutters to tranquilize the world — the truth is in one way or another Washington is committed to its financial and corporate elite to achieve Full Spectrum Dominance, meaning complete subjugation of the world to Washington’s masters, the military-security industrial complex and the war financing monetary system – FED-Wall Street-IMF, the latter being a mere extension of the US Treasury.

The Endgame means encircling Russia and China with more NATO bases, including in Ukraine and Moldova, as close as possible to Moscow’s doorsteps; and, foreseen by 2015, with 60% of the US naval fleet in the South China Sea.

We should not be detracted by the day-to-day details and lies, by the fires that flare up here and there, though all horrible, killing thousands of people; we should not be confused by ‘who is doing what?’ – But rather focus on the Big Picture, the intentions behind the US / NATO killing machine, not so much by denying the obvious lies, but rather by describing actual facts and the long-term strategy behind them.

Obama screamed again ‘wolf’ today, literally shouting – ‘Russia has invaded Ukraine, Russia’s military and equipment are in Ukraine, Russia is funding the separatists’ — then adds, ‘but it’s not in the cards for America to intervene now.’

Don’t be fooled. Obama and his masters won’t go away. He says the same about American intervention in Syria – it’s not the right time, while arming and bombing (as a disguise) at the same time ISIS, created and funded in 2007 by Washington under successively different names to further confuse the public at large. At that time they came out of Turkey as Syrian Freedom Fighters, later they converted into the Al’Nusra Front of rebels, and now they are the ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also called the Islamic State of the Levant.

This will do until the public needs to be again confused with a new group of Islamic terrorists to justify continuous wars on terror – to feed continuously the fat profit accounts of the eternal war lords. But only, if we the people let them confuse and deceive and divide us.

At the same time, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, encourages his EU puppets to intervene and sending their troops into Ukraine, and imposing still more ‘sanctions’ on Russia. Let Europe take the hit if there is war. Not for nothing are NATO bases spiked throughout Europe, convenient targets for Russian missiles. – One could wonder – are the Europeans blind or just don’t care – or their leaders (sic) bought to the point where they hope to just disappear to America’s paradise when Russian rockets hit their countries’ NATO bases – and let their people smolder under nuclear dust?

We the 99.99% have all the powers to stop these US instigated murderous aggressions, by rejecting the continuously lying and deceiving propaganda machine, by rejecting and refusing to listen to the corporate presstitute media.

A few weeks ago there was hope that German Chancellor Merkel would see the light, would abandon the bandwagon of the ‘sanctioners’, because not only did she get a lot of pressure from German industrialists, but also the German people are worried about their energy supply – especially this coming winter. Germany depends by up to 40% on Russia for their energy supplies.

Unfortunately we were wrong. Madame Merkel bent over backwards to please Obama. The naked emperor convinced her not to leave his sinking ship. – What does he have up his imaginary sleeve? Anything he may have discovered by eavesdropping on her cellphone conversations? – So strong to sway her away from reason to the detriment of all of Europe? – These latest sanctions are backlashing on the EU, especially the farmers, a multiple times harder than they hit Russia. European agriculture and mostly small farmers, are losing billions of euros worth on stalled exports to Russia of meat, vegetables, fruit and other food stuff, because Russia retaliated by blocking imports from the EU. Russia is now establishing new trade routes with Latin America.

On 18 September Obama will meet at the White House with Poroshenko, to be sure he stays in line and doesn’t sway Putin’s way, because corrupt oligarchs tend to be not very reliable. Obama may promise him premature entry to NATO and all the fake fiat dollars that come with it.

It would not be a surprise if Obama were also to receive Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the ‘new’ ISIS caliphate, to assure him of America’s continuous support, if he lets him bomb them, the ISIS troops that is, ever so often, just for show and to confuse the public mind – and, of course, as a disguise to bomb Syria to eventually topple Baschar al-Assad for – regime change.

Obama may also promise the ISIS a key role in the new Syrian government – provided he succeeds in regime change (for now unlikely) – similar as he did to the ‘rebels’ and other Islamic fractions of Libya. What Obama needs are not well-organized new regimes, but civil wars, fighting sections of societies to keep populations dying, and those still alive on their toes, fighting for their daily survival and fleeing across borders into refugee camps of other lands, thereby swallowing up neighboring countries resources and creating anger in the local population – the old divide to rein tactic.

The Big Picture is important. The people need to see it, the End Game – what is expecting them, if they – we, the 99.99% – are not taking actions to prevent Full Spectrum Dominance from succeeding.

Peter Koenig is an economist and former World Bank staff. He worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, the Voice of Russia and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.

What the Russian ambassador to the US thinks of NATO

By David Swanson.

The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, spoke at the University of Virginia on Tuesday evening, in an event organized by the Center for Politics, which no doubt has video of the proceedings. Kislyak was once ambassador to Belgium and to NATO.

Kislyak spoke to a packed auditorium and took, I think, well over an hour of questions. He spoke frankly, and the questions he was asked by students, professors, and other participants were polite and for the most part far more intelligent than he would have been asked on, for example, Meet the Press.

He told the audience that Russia had known there were no WMDs in Iraq, and had known that attacking Iraq would bring “great difficulties” to that country. “And look what is happening today,” he said. He made the same comment about Libya. He spoke of the U.S. and Russia working together to successfully remove chemical weapons from the Syrian government. But he warned against attacking Syria now.

There will be no new Cold War, Kislyak said, but there is now a greater divide in some ways than during the Cold War. Back then, he said, the U.S. Congress sent delegations over to meet with legislators, and the Supreme Court likewise. Now there is no contact. It’s easy in the U.S. to be anti-Russian, he said, and hard to defend Russia. He complained about U.S. economic sanctions against Russia intended to “suffocate” Russian agriculture.

Asked about “annexing” Crimea, Kislyak rejected that characterization, pointed to the armed overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and insisted that Kiev must stop bombing its own people and instead talk about federalism within Ukraine.

There were remarkably few questions put to the ambassador that seemed informed by U.S. television “news.” One was from a politics professor who insisted that Kislyak assign blame to Russia over Ukraine. Kislyak didn’t.

I always sit in the back, thinking I might leave, but Kislyak was only taking questions from the front. So I moved up and was finally called on for the last question of the evening. For an hour and a half, Kislyak had addressed war and peace and Russian-U.S. relations, but he’d never blamed the U.S. for anything in Ukraine any more than Russia. No one had uttered the word “NATO.”

So I pointed out the upcoming NATO protests. I recalled the history of Russia being told that NATO would not expand eastward. I asked Kislyak whether NATO ought to be disbanded.

The ambassador said that he had been the first Russian to “present his credentials” to NATO, and that he had “overestimated” NATO’s ability to work with Russia. He’d been disappointed by NATO actions in Serbia, he said, and Libya, by the expansion eastward, by NATO pressure on Ukraine and Poland, and by the pretense that Russia might be about to attack Poland.

“We were promised,” Kislyak said, that NATO would not expand eastward at all upon the reunification of Germany. “And now look.” NATO has declared that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, Kislyak pointed out, and NATO says this even while a majority of the people in Ukraine say they’re opposed.

The ambassador used the word “disappointed” a few times.

“We’ll have to take measures to assure our defense,” he said, “but we would have preferred to build on a situation with decreased presence and decreased readiness.”

Why the world needs a new reserve currency

It is symbolic that the recent BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, took place exactly seven decades after the Bretton Woods Conference that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The upshot of the BRICS meeting was the announcement of the New Development Bank, which will mobilize resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects, and a Contingent Reserve Arrangement to provide liquidity through currency swaps.

The Bretton Woods Conference marked one of history’s greatest examples of international economic cooperation. And while no one can say yet whether the BRICS’ initiatives will succeed, they represent a major challenge to the Bretton Woods institutions, which should respond. Rethinking the role of the US dollar in the international monetary system is a case in point.

One key feature of the Bretton Woods system was that countries would tie their exchange rates to the US dollar. While the system was effectively eliminated in 1971, the US dollar’s central role in the international monetary system has remained intact – a reality that many countries are increasingly unwilling to accept.

Dissatisfaction with the dollar’s role as the dominant global reserve currency is not new. In the 1960s, French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously condemned the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar’s status bestowed upon the United States.

The issue is not merely one of fairness. According to the Belgian economist Robert Triffin, an international monetary system based on a national currency is inherently unstable, owing to the resulting tensions among the inevitably divergent interests of the issuing country and the international system as a whole.

Triffin issued his warning more than 50 years ago, but it has recently gained traction, as China’s rise has made the world increasingly disinclined to tolerate the instability caused by a dollar-denominated system. The solution, however, lies not in replacing the dollar with the renminbi, but in strengthening the role of the world’s only truly global currency: the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.

Following the creation of SDRs in 1969, IMF members committed to make them “the principle reserve asset in the international monetary system,” as stated in the Articles of Agreement. But the peculiar way in which SDRs were adopted limited their usefulness.

For starters, the separation of the IMF’s SDR account from its general account made it impossible to use SDRs to finance IMF lending. Furthermore, though countries accrue interest on their holdings of SDRs, they have to pay interest on the allocations they receive. In other words, SDRs are both an asset and a liability, functioning like a guaranteed credit line for the holder – a sort of unconditional overdraft facility.

Nonetheless, SDRs have proved to be useful. After initial allocations in 1970-1972, more were issued to increase global liquidity during major international crises: in 1979-1981, in 1997, and, in particular, in 2009, when the largest issue – the equivalent of $250 billion – was made.

While developed countries, including the US and the United Kingdom, have drawn on their allocations, the major users have been developing and, in particular, low-income countries. In fact, this is the only way in which developing countries (China aside) share in the creation of international money.

Several estimates indicate that, given the additional demand for reserves, the world could absorb annual allocations of $200-300 billion or even more. This has prompted many – including People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan; the United Nations-backed Stiglitz Commission; the Palais-Royal Initiative, led by former IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus; and the Triffin International Foundation – to call for changes to the international monetary system.

In 1979, the IMF economist Jacques Polak, who had been part of the Dutch delegation at the Bretton Woods conference, outlined a plan for doing just that. His recommendations include, first and foremost, making all of the IMF’s operations in SDRs, which would require ending the separation of the IMF’s SDR and general accounts.

The simplest way to fulfill this vision would be to allocate SDRs as a full reserve asset, which countries could either use or deposit in their IMF accounts. The IMF would use those deposits to finance its lending operations, rather than having to rely on quota allocations or “arrangements to borrow” from members.

Other provisions could be added. To address developing countries’ high currency demands, while enhancing their role in the creation of international money, a formula could be created to give them a larger share in SDR allocations than they now receive.

The private use of SDRs could also be encouraged, though that would likely be met with strong opposition from countries currently issuing international reserve currencies, especially the US. Keeping SDRs as pure “central bank money” would eliminate such opposition, enabling them to complement and stabilize the current system, rather than upend it.

Just as the Bretton Woods framework restored order to the global economy after WWII, a new monetary framework, underpinned by a truly international currency, could strengthen much-needed economic and financial stability. Everyone – even the US – would benefit from that.

By José Antonio Ocampo, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and former Finance Minister of Colombia, is Professor and Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University.

Permission to steal everything

By Dmitry Orlov.

There is a convoy of 280 gleaming white trucks moving through Russia toward Ukraine loaded with humanitarian aid for the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk. This isn’t much, considering that well over a million people have been cut off from food, water, electricity and (soon) heat because of indiscriminate artillery bombardment by the Ukrainian military. But it’s a start. But it seems like a rocky start; first, NATO’s mouthpiece Rasmussen tries to characterize this humanitarian mission as a clandestine invasion. Then the Ukrainians start imposing various conditions. Let’s consider these separately.

When was the last time Russia, or, for that matter, USSR, mount a clandestine invasion? If you said “Crimea,” then you need to understand that

1. Russian troops have been in Crimea continuously for the past 231 years;
2. they were there under an international treaty; and
3. their troop levels never exceeded the levels this treaty stipulates.

If Russia wanted to invade Ukraine, it simply would. The Ukrainian troops would surrender or run away, but then what? Nobody has an answer to that question, not even the Russians. Aid—yes, invasion—no thanks. The policy of letting Ukraine “stew in its own juices until the meat falls off the bone” (as I put it back in mid-March) is working quite well, with the added bonus that the EU and the US are now at each others’ throats over their self-imposed sanctions. But it will take time, and this means that the population of Novorossiya, where Donetsk and Lugansk are located, and which ended up as part of Ukraine thanks to Lenin, has to be fed and heated through the next winter. Hence the humanitarian mission, which will be, if all goes well, the first of many.

The various Ukrainian conditions have to do with something quite different than countering the threat of a clandestine invasion. First they asked that the convoy pass through Kharkov instead of rolling straight toward Donetsk, making for a big detour. Then they demanded that the goods be offloaded at the border and loaded onto Ukrainian trucks, but they couldn’t come up with enough trucks. Then they demanded that the Russian trucks cary Ukrainian license plates and that each truck carry a Ukrainian representative. Next it will be something else.

You may be confused at what might be behind all of these fairly ridiculous conditions and stalling tactics, so let me explain. The Ukrainians are doing their best to figure out how they can steal the goods from the convoy. Until they can find a way to do that, nothing will move, because nothing ever moves in Ukraine until everybody gets their piece of the action. During their two-decade-plus experiment with Western-style “freedom and democracy,” by which I mean oligarchy and prostitution, Ukraine has bred a subspecies of survivors adept at answering just one question: “Where’s my piece of it?”

Take Arseny Yatsenyuk, the US State Department-assigned Ukrainian Prime Minister. He recently announced that Ukraine was out of money, unable even to pay its soldiers (this, by the way, is disingenuous, because Ukraine hasn’t been paying or feeding its soldiers) and that therefore he is resigning. Ukraine got a couple billion dollars from Russia as a door prize for joining Moscow’s Customs Union, under President Yanukovich, who was subsequently overthrown. Where’s that money? Om-nom-nom, burp! Then, after the coup, the West gave Ukraine some loan guarantees and a few additional billions. Om-nom-nom, burp! So, with nothing left to steal, Yatsenyuk announces his resignation and heads for the airport, on his way to a warm sunny place where he can squander his ill-gotten funds on hookers and blow. His CIA minders had to retrieve him from the airport and frog-march him back to his office. He is not allowed to resign. He can’t live the American Dream just yet—not until some brainless stooge gets to mutter the words “mission accomplished” and the CIA operatives head home, at which point the Ukrainians go back to trying to turn tricks at the Kremlin.

With regard to the convoy, getting the cargo off-loaded and put on Ukrainian trucks would have made stealing it easy, but that couldn’t happen due to lack of trucks. (Remember, Ukrainian officials have been selling off government property and pocketing the proceeds for two decades now, so that very little is now left.) Forcing the trucks to carry Ukrainian license plates is a small concession, since these probably require a bribe (nothing happens there without a bribe) but perhaps they are looking for opportunities to waylay a few of these trucks and break them up for spare parts. Getting a Ukrainian representative on board each truck is another small concession: he will need to be fed, pacified with vodka and given walking-around money. But the main problem—how to steal a substantial portion, ideally all, of the humanitarian aid going to Novorossiya—remains unsolved, and until it is solved there will be deadlock. This makes it difficult to cooperate with Ukrainian officials, who don’t seem to have any trace of human values left and function on a strictly biological level, but the Russians are trying.

How does a country sink to this level of degeneracy in just a couple of decades? Recently, Prof. Savelyev, who is an expert on, among other things, human evolution, ventured to explain. Human evolution, he said in an interview, has been primarily the evolution of the brain. In the short time that Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been in existence, its brain size increased dramatically. Although it is possible to declare that intelligence is of direct survival value, there is a more reasoned explanation for the pressure to increase brain size.

Most of the size gains have been in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain that does not have a strictly defined function but is implicated in modulating social behavior. Indeed, people with a lobotomized prefrontal cortex go on to function more or less normally (but do sometimes exhibit a startling lack of ethical or moral sense). But a lobotomy is by no means necessary to produce individuals with stunted morals and ethics: there is a critical learning period for developing a conception of the common good, the ability to cooperate with others in absence of selfish motivations, and a morality not directly grounded in biological self-interest. A social environment such as that which has prevailed in Ukraine during its period of “independence,” during which theft and prostitution were prized above all, is not conducive to developing any of these. A case can be made that such an environment exerts the opposite evolutionary pressure: if all desirable women are prostitutes and the only economic opportunities involve theft, then biological survival requires theft. This makes a large prefrontal cortex redundant, and those who have a smaller one perhaps make more efficient criminals. The result is a population dominated by people free of any human values, who pursue strictly biological goals of resource accumulation and reproduction.

My book The Five Stages of Collapse includes an extensive case study devoted to the Ik, a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in northern Uganda, which, when they were observed by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in the 1970s, exhibited just such a level of cultural degeneracy. They had reached the fifth stage of collapse: cultural collapse. Turnbull’s prescription was to destroy them as a people by breaking up their society and resettling them. Prof. Savelyev has something eerily similar to say: human evolution advances through appalling acts of violence in which the males of culturally degenerate populations, which have lost their human values and conceptions of the common good, are destroyed outright. History is replete with examples of such exterminations (among numerous other ones), and although we may regard them with horror, others may regard them with pride. For instance, Prof. Savelyev points out, the French are still quite proud of their revolutionary invention, the guilliotine. To them it was a civilized, efficient way to neatly solve the problem—by neatly slicing off the heads that contained the faulty circuitry.

According to Savelyev, the Ukrainian flag shouldn’t be a field of sunflowers under a blue sky. A sausage impaled on a fork would be much more appropriate. After all, that is what they are fighting for. There is no point in shaming them, for stealing or for lying, for shame requires one of those prefrontal cortex functions: a conscience. To them, telling the truth is a surprising new requirement, they didn’t sign up for it, and they don’t understand why it’s necessary. All they have to do is lie well: “Donetsk is surrounded! We are about to prevail!” they tell you. Sure they are. Ask the rebels where they are going, and they will tell you matter-of-factly: “We are going all the way to Kiev.” Perhaps the French can send an aid convoy of their own, to Kiev, to coincide with the rebels’ arrival. It could include a few guilliotines. In the meantime, I hope that Uncle Sam is having lots of fun playing with his Ukrainian mail order bride; after all, they have plenty in common.

Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and a writer on subjects related to something he has called “permanent crisis”. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com

Washington has placed the world on the road to war

Does the world have a death wish?

by Paul Craig Roberts

Update: A fabricated report was spread by the UK Guardian newspaper and BBC that a Russian armored convoy entered Ukraine and was destroyed by the Ukrainian military. The German media including Die Welt picked up the false report and spread the hysteria. Once again we have confirmation that the Western media is corrupt and unreliable.

The drums for war are being loudly beaten in Washington, European capitals, and the presstitute Western media. A headline in the Asia Times is “NATO Is Desperate For War.”  This time the target is Russia, a major nuclear power.

The deadly consequences of such a war would extend beyond Russia, Europe, and the US to the entire world. The Western use of lies to demonize Russia endangers life on earth and reveals the West to be both reckless and irresponsible. Yet, few voices are raised against this recklessness and irresponsibility.

Ron Unz brings to our attention the important voice of a distinguished Dutch journalist, Karel Van Wolferen. Wolferen  and Unz himself are important offsets to what Unz regards, correctly in my opinion, as “the utter corruption and unreliability of the mainstream American media.”

Wolferen’s article is long but very important. Readers will see analysis akin to my own.

Wolferen shows how the Washington hegemon has captured Europe within an Atlanticist ideology that forecloses any independent thinking or foreign policy on the part of Europeans who are reduced to a state of vassalage. Wolferen concludes that as Washington drives Europe toward war, “Europeans cannot bring themselves to believe in the dysfunction and utter irresponsibility of the American state.”

With no internal checks on Washington’s recklessness from allies, the media, and US Senators, the only brake on Washington’s drive to war is Russian, Chinese, Indian, and South American diplomacy. If this diplomacy fails, Fukushima, as bad as it is, becomes a mere raindrop in the ocean.

The slaughter by Washington, Washington’s Kiev stooges and Washington’s EU vassals of civilians in the former Russian territories that comprise the southern and eastern borders of present-day Ukraine is not only largely unreported in the Western media, but also denied or blamed on Russia.

The crimes that Washington is perpetrating while blaming Russia have aroused a high level of anger among the Russian people. Such anger is dangerous as it could force Putin, who continues to emphasize non-confrontation , to turn away from diplomacy to violence.

Egor Prosvirnin, the chief editor of a Russian news site, shows us the extent of the anger in Russia caused by the dangerous mixture of Washington’s broken promises with the vicious propaganda war against Russia and the German government’s complicity.

Prosvirnin expresses anger that is white hot: “Germans have failed their test. When Evil has returned again to Europe, you do not even attempt to resist it, and immediately fall prostrate at its feet like a slave.” As Russians see it, all of Europe is a slave to the evil emanating from Washington.

Why did Merkel allow Washington to force Germany into a conflict with Russia that has produced enormous Russian anger toward Germany? What accounts for Merkel’s total failure as a leader?

The Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes have set the world on the path to the final war.
How is it possible for their evil to go unrecognized?

The two murderous states are the US and Israel. By tolerating their endless slaughters and endless lies, the world prepares its own demise.

The only hope for life and truth is that the world unite against these two criminal governments, isolate them diplomatically and economically, and make it impossible for their government officials to travel abroad without being arrested and placed on trial.

Why does the world need Washington and Israel? Unless the world has a death wish, the world does not need Washington and Israel.

The West on the wrong path

The politics of escalation does not have a realistic goal

By Gabor Steingart.

Every war is accompanied by a kind of mental mobilization: war fever. Even smart people are not immune to controlled bouts of this fever. “This war in all its atrociousness is still a great and wonderful thing. It is an experience worth having“ rejoiced Max Weber in 1914 when the lights went out in Europe. Thomas Mann felt a “cleansing, liberation, and a tremendous amount of hope“.

Even when thousands already lay dead on the Belgian battle fields, the war fever did not subside. Exactly 100 years ago, 93 painters, writers, and scientists composed the “Call to the world of culture.“ Max Liebermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, and others encouraged their countrymen to engage in cruelty towards their neighbor: “Without German militarism, German culture would have been swept from the face of the earth a long time ago. The German armed forces and the German people are one. This awareness makes 70 million Germans brothers without prejudice to education, status, or party.“

We interrupt our own train of thought: “History is not repeating itself!” But can we be so sure about that these days? In view of the war events in the Crimean and eastern Ukraine, the heads of states and governments of the West suddenly have no more questions and all the answers. The US Congress is openly discussing arming Ukraine. The former security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recommends arming the citizens there for house-to-house and street combat. The German Chancellor, as it is her habit, is much less clear but no less ominous: “We are ready to take severe measures.“

German journalism has switched from level-headed to agitated in a matter of weeks. The spectrum of opinions has been narrowed to the field of vision of a sniper scope.

Newspapers we thought to be all about thoughts and ideas now march in lock-step with politicians in their calls for sanctions against Russia’s President Putin. Even the headlines betray an aggressive tension as is usually characteristic of hooligans when they ‘support’ their respective teams.

The Tagesspiegel: “Enough talk!“ The FAZ: “Show strength“. The Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Now or never.“ The Spiegel calls for an “End to cowardice“: “Putin’s web of lies, propaganda, and deception has been exposed. The wreckage of MH 17 is also the result of a crashed diplomacy.“

Every reflexive string of accusations results in the same outcome: in no time allegations and counter-allegations become so entangled that the facts become almost completely obscured.

Who deceived who first?

Did it all start with the Russian invasion of the Crimean or did the West first promote the destabilization of the Ukraine? Does Russia want to expand into the West or NATO into the East? Or did maybe two world-powers meet at the same door in the middle of the night, driven by very similar intentions towards a defenseless third that now pays for the resulting quagmire with the first phases of a civil war?

If at this point you are still waiting for an answer as to whose fault it is, you might as well just stop reading. You will not miss anything. We are not trying to unearth this hidden truth. We don’t know how it started. We don’t know how it will end. And we are sitting right here, in the middle of it. At least Peter Sloterdijk has a few words of consolation for us: “To live in the world means to live in uncertainty.“

Our purpose is to wipe off some of the foam that has formed on the debating mouths, to steal words from the mouths of both the rabble-rousers and the roused, and put new words there instead. One word that has become disused of late is this: realism.

The politics of escalation show that Europe sorely misses a realistic goal. It’s a different thing in the US. Threats and posturing are simply part of the election preparations. When Hillary Clinton compares Putin with Hitler, she does so only to appeal to the Republican vote, i.e. people who do not own a passport. For many of them, Hitler is the only foreigner they know, which is why Adolf Putin is a very welcome fictitious campaign effigy. In this respect, Clinton and Obama have a realistic goal: to appeal to the people, to win elections, to win another Democratic presidency.

Angela Merkel can hardly claim these mitigating circumstances for herself. Geography forces every German Chancellor to be a bit more serious. As neighbors of Russia, as part of the European community bound in destiny, as recipient of energy and supplier of this and that, we Germans have a clearly more vital interest in stability and communication. We cannot afford to look at Russia through the eyes of the American Tea Party.

Every mistake starts with a mistake in thinking. And we are making this mistake if we believe that only the other party profits from our economic relationship and thus will suffer when this relationship stops. If economic ties were maintained for mutual profit, then severing them will lead to mutual loss. Punishment and self-punishment are the same thing in this case.

Even the idea that economic pressure and political isolation would bring Russia to its knees was not really thought all the way through. Even if we could succeed: what good would Russia be on its knees? How can you want to live together in the European house with a humiliated people whose elected leadership is treated like a pariah and whose citizens you might have to support in the coming winter.

Of course, the current situation requires a strong stance, but more than anything a strong stance against ourselves. Germans have neither wanted nor caused these realities, but they are now our realities. Just consider what Willy Brandt had to listen to when his fate as mayor of Berlin placed him in the shadow of the wall. What sanctions and punishments were suggested to him. But he decided to forgo this festival of outrage. He never turned the screw of retribution.

When he was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace he shed light on what went on around him in the hectic days when the wall was built: “There is still another aspect – that of impotence disguised by verbalism: taking a stand on legal positions which cannot become a reality and planning counter-measures for contingencies that always differ from the one at hand. At critical times we were left to our own devices; the verbalists had nothing to offer.“

The verbalists are back and their headquarters are in Washington D.C. But nobody is forcing us to kowtow to their orders. Following this lead – even if calculatingly and somewhat reluctantly as in the case of Merkel – does not protect the German people, but may well endanger it. This fact remains a fact even if it was not the American but the Russians who were responsible for the original damage in the Crimean and in eastern Ukraine.

Willy Brandt decided clearly differently than Merkel in the present, and that in a clearly more intense situation. As he recalls, he had awoken on the morning of August 13, 1961 “wide awake and at the same time numb“. He had stopped over in Hanover on a trip when he received reports from Berlin about work being done on the large wall separating the city. It was a Sunday morning and the humiliation could hardly be greater for a sitting mayor.

The Soviets had presented him with a fait accompli. The Americans had not informed him even though they had probably received some information from Moscow. Brandt remembers that an “impotent rage“ had risen in him. But what did he do? He reined in his feelings of impotence and displayed his great talent as reality-based politician which would garner him a stint as Chancellor and finally also the Nobel Prize for Peace.

With the advice from Egon Bahr, he accepted the new situation, knowing that no amount of outrage from the rest of the world would bring this wall down again for a while. He even ordered the West-Berlin police to use batons and water cannons against demonstrators at the wall in order not to slip from the catastrophe of division into the much greater catastrophe of war. He strove for the paradox which Bahr put as follows later: “We acknowledged the Status Quo in order to change it.“

And they managed to accomplish this change. Brandt and Bahr made the specific interests of the West Berlin population for who they were now responsible (from June 1962 onwards this also included this author) into the measure of their politics.

In Bonn they negotiated the Berlin subvention, an eight-percent tax-free subvention on payroll and income tax. In the vernacular it was called the “fear premium“. They also negotiated a travel permit treaty with East Berlin which made the wall permeable again two years after it was put up. Between Christmas 1963 and New Year’s 1964, 700 000 inhabitants of Berlin visited their relatives in the east of the city. Every tear of joy turned into a vote for Brandt a short while later.

The voters realized that here was someone who wanted to affect the way they lived every day, not just generate a headline for the next morning. In an almost completely hopeless situation, this SPD man fought for western values – in this case the values of freedom of movement – without bullhorns, without sanctions, without the threat of violence. The elite in Washington started hearing words that had never been heard in politics before: Compassion. Change through rapprochement. Dialog. Reconciliation of interests. And this in the middle of the Cold War, when the world powers were supposed to attack each other with venom, when the script contained only threats and protestations; set ultimatums, enforce sea blockades, conduct representative wars, this is how the Cold War was supposed to be run.

A German foreign policy striving for reconciliation – in the beginning only the foreign policy of Berlin – not only appeared courageous but also very strange.

The Americans – Kennedy, Johnson, then Nixon – followed the German; it kicked off a process which is unparalleled in the history of enemy nations. Finally, there was a meeting in Helsinki in order to set down the rules. The Soviet Union was guaranteed “non-interference into their internal affairs“ which filled party boss Leonid Brezhnev with satisfaction and made Franz Josef Strauß’s blood boil. In return, the Moscow Communist Party leadership had to guarantee the West (and thus their own civil societies) “respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including that of thought, conscience, religion or belief“.

In this way “non-interference“ was bought through “involvement“. Communism had received an eternal guarantee for its territory, but within its borders universal human rights suddenly began to brew. Joachim Gauck remembers: “The word that allowed my generation to go on was Helsinki.“

It is not too late for the duo Merkel/Steinmeier to use the concepts and ideas of this time. It does not make sense to just follow the strategically idea-less Obama. Everyone can see how he and Putin are driving like in a dream directly towards a sign which reads: Dead End.

“The test for politics is not how something starts but how it ends“, so Henry Kissinger, also a Peace Nobel Prize winner. After the occupation of the Crimean by Russia he stated: we should want reconciliation, not dominance. Demonizing Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for the lack thereof. He advises condensing conflicts, i.e. to make them smaller, shrink them, and then distill them into a solution.

At the moment (and for a long time before that) America is doing the opposite. All conflicts are escalated. The attack of a terror group named Al Qaida is turned into a global campaign against Islam. Iraq is bombed using dubious justifications. Then the US Air Force flies on to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The relationship to the Islamic world can safely be considered damaged.

If the West had judged the then US government which marched into Iraq without a resolution by the UN and without proof of the existence of “WMDs“ by the same standards as today Putin, then George W. Bush would have immediately been banned from entering the EU. The foreign investments of Warren Buffett should have been frozen, the export of vehicles of the brands GM, Ford, and Chrysler banned.

The American tendency to verbal and then also military escalation, the isolation, demonization, and attacking of enemies has not proven effective. The last successful major military action the US conducted was the Normandy landing. Everything else – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – was a clear failure. Moving NATO units towards the Polish border and thinking about arming Ukraine is a continuation of a lack of diplomacy by the military means.

This policy of running your head against the wall – and doing so exactly where the wall is the thickest – just gives you a head ache and not much else. And this considering that the wall has a huge door in the relationship of Europe to Russia. And the key to this door is labeled “reconciliation of interests“.

The first step is what Brandt called “compassion“, i.e. the ability to see the world through the eyes of the others. We should stop accusing the 143 million Russian that they look at the world differently than John McCain.

What is needed is help in modernizing the country, no sanctions which will further decrease the dearth of wealth and damage the bond of relationships. Economic relationships are also relationships. International cooperation is akin to tenderness between nations because everyone feels better afterwards.

It is well-known that Russia is an energy super-power and at the same time a developing industrial nation. The policy of reconciliation and mutual interests should attack here. Development aid in return for territorial guarantees; Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even had the right words to describe this: modernization partnership. He just has to dust it off and use it as an aspirational word. Russia should be integrated, not isolated. Small steps in that direction are better than the great nonsense of exclusionary politics.

Brandt and Bahr have never reached for the tool of economic sanctions. They knew why: there are no recorded cases in which countries under sanctions apologized for their behavior and were obedient ever after. On the contrary: collective movements start in support of the sanctioned, as is the case today in Russia. The country was hardly ever more unified behind their president than now. This could almost lead you to think that the rabble-rousers of the West are on the payroll of the Russian secret service.

One more comment about the tone of the debate. The annexation of the Crimean was in violation of international law. The support of separatists in eastern Ukraine also does not mesh with our ideas of the state sovereignty. The boundaries of states are inviolable.

But every act requires context. And the German context is that we are a society on probation which may not act as if violations of international law started with the events in the Crimean.

Germany has waged war against its eastern neighbor twice in the past 100 years. The German soul, which we generally claim to be on the romantic side, showed its cruel side.

Of course, we who came later can continue to proclaim our outrage against the ruthless Putin and appeal to international law against him, but the way things are this outrage should come with a slight blush of embarrassment. Or to use the words of Willy Brandt: “Claims to absolutes threaten man.“

In the end, even the men who had succumbed to war fever in 1914 had to realize this. After the end of the war, the penitent issued a second call, this time to understanding between nations: “The civilized world became a war camp and battle field. It is time that a great tide of love replaces the devastating wave of hatred.“

We should try to avoid the detour via the battle fields in the 21st century. History does not have to repeat itself. Maybe we can find a shortcut.

Gabor Steingart is the publisher of Germany’s leading financial newspaper Handelsblatt.

‘Idiot’ Afrikaners and clever Jews

by Johan de Wet

I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
Let’s make lots of money
You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains
Let’s make lots of money – The Petshop Boys

Afrikaans columnist Manfred Delport has just alerted me to the latest Boerehaat shriek by one Richard Poplak from the Daily Maverick which he calls a “linkse haatblad” (leftist hate site). No, Manfred, said Daily Maverick is not so much leftist, as Jewish. OK, so usually the two go together. Outside Israel, one can almost count the number of right-wing Jews on one hand.

I know I am sticking my neck out in daring to point to the ethnic composition of the Daily Maverick’s set of Boerehaat screamers. Voltaire said that if you want to know who your oppressors are, you should think about the people you are not allowed to criticise. Until this latest spate of child-killing by the Israelis, the J-word was about as taboo in South Africa as the K-word. But in an astonishing twist of fate, the word “apartheid” which so many Jews in South Africa, in Britain and in the USA worked so hard to turn into a stigma attached to South Africa and to Afrikaners has now come back to haunt them, with “Apartheid Israel” being flavour of the month.

Even Chomsky has said that apartheid as practised in Israel is actually worse than apartheid in South Africa. He recently repeated this statement in a phone interview with PressTV:

“Hospitals have been attacked repeatedly. Each one is a war crime. In fact, for Israel to fire one bullet across the border is also a crime. Trials for war crimes only apply to the defeated. Within the occupied territories, Israel’s policies are much worse than apartheid, if you mean by apartheid South African-style apartheid. And it is a kind of gift to Israel to compare it to South Africa.”

 

Although Johannesburg Jews pretend otherwise, the Afrikaner government actually built Baragwanath hospital in Soweto, they never once bombed it! Imagine, after one of Joe Slovo and Umkhonto we Sizwe’s terrorist attacks in the 1980’s, we had to send the Mirages over Soweto to bomb black civilians there in retribution, like Israel is doing at present. This is the stuff of fantasy, Jewish fantasy. Read Nadine Gordimer’s trashy little novella, July’s People, where she foresees the shooting down of civilian aeroplanes, Malaysian Airlines-style, full of screaming white people in South Africa’s glorious anti-white revolution sometime in the future.

The Daily Maverick is the latest in a long line of leftist Jewish publications, starting with Ruth First’s Guardian and the Rand Daily Mail in its more extremist moments, which was partially resurrected in the form of the Weekly Mail founded by two Jews, Irwin Manoim and Anton Harber. These days its successor, the Mail & Guardian, is slightly more of a mainstream newspaper, hence the need for the Daily Maverick where “Jewish genii” may vent their hatred for everything South African and especially Afrikaans.

Afrikaners in their naivete still remember the days when Israel was an ally of previous Afrikaner governments and are completely unaware of the sustained Jewish onslaught on them. Richard Poplak is a self-proclaimed Jewish genius whose mommy has been telling him since his Bar Mitzvah that he would one day receive the Nobel prize for literature, just like Nadine Gordimer.

If there are two things I understand about Jewish identity in Johannesburg and probably Cape Town, they are: (1) Every Jew is also an American. (2) Every Jew abhors Afrikaans, Afrikaners, boeremusiek, volkspele, boerewors, biltong, rugby, Steve Hofmeyr, the architecture of Gerard Moerdijk, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, the paintings of Pierneef and just about everything else you can think of. In fact, academic Jews give each other PhDs for denouncing the Afrikaans language and culture as racist, backward, fascist and so on.

In Blade Nzimande’s quest for “more South African PhDs”, he should just hand all 80 000 Jews in the country a title; after all, they already congratulate each other on their utter brilliance all the time. It might also save us from the embarassing episodes when we discover that black politicians, praised almost as lavishly by Jews as those of their own ilk, such as Pallo Jordan, turn out to have fake PhDs.

And, of course, within the “chosen people” ideology of Jews, Afrikaners are congenitally stupid. Hence Richard Poplak’s rant about the two female students in which he makes two main points: He, Richard Poplak, is a genius. After all, he has heard of something called “conceptual art”. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! And, secondly, Afrikaans students are in need of re-education. As he puts it:

I propose an art gallery of South African stupidity, a building devoted to the enactment of racial stereotypes that remind us of our foetal id, of the miasma we swim in every day in our tentative and botched way of becoming a different, properly reconciled country.

“South African stupidity” is code for Afrikaans culture and the incomplete re-education of Afrikaners, all of whom have not yet accepted vicarious Jewish domination through Malema-like “Marxist-Leninist” radicalism and fervent white guilt. The father of Jewish-South African radicalism, Joe Slovo, envisaged a world in which a committee of Jews within the South African Communist Party would rule the country while their Zulu and Xhosa impis cheer their “liberators”. Like the NAACP in the USA, for most of its existence the ANC has been a Jewish front organisation controlled by the more kosher Communist Party. Mandela’s “autobiography” was written by an American Jew, Richard Stengel. An interesting article is currently doing the rounds, The role of Jews in South Africa since 1948. Nothing much of this is new: Jews openly brag about their role in the downfall of Afrikaner power in South Africa in various books and articles.

Apparently there is something like a Black-Jewish Entrepreneurs Network which proudly proclaims that Jews and blacks will “develop the country together”. The rest of us are not needed. In fact, if one reads between the lines, white South Africans and especially Afrikaners, have no future in the land of braaivleis and sunny skies.

Blacks have the numbers, Jews have the money. It is a beautiful synergy in South Africa, where every black leader or politician is for sale. Hence the motto above from the Petshop Boys:

I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
Let’s make lots of money
You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains
Let’s make lots of money

After Brian Joffe’s takeover of Adcock Ingram and Clencore’s acquisition of Xstrata’s coal empire, there are few areas of the South African economy left that are not in some way controlled by Jews, including Gill Marcus at the helm of our central bank and Rob Davies as minister of trade and industry. It is almost comical how the South African Reserve Bank has now become a purveyor of Mandela coins, to be on-sold by Jewish coin merchants. According to Niall Ferguson’s book on the Rothschild family, Mayer Amschel Rothschild set off on conquering Europe’s banking capitals by trading in collector’s coins. Old habits die hard.

The Russian Pravda recently carried a surprising comment in its delectably Russified English:

The victim of the humanitarian imperialism could be a Boer (a Palestinian in our times) or any people convinced of a barbarian conduct (see the pamphlets of the NYT against ‘homophobe’ Uganda these last weeks).

Jews were first welcomed into the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) in the 1890s as refugees from Lithuania. In an amazing turn of the tables, Johannesburg’s powerful Jewish elite is now dictating what “South African” identity should be (and even whom may still be tolerated in the country).

Hence Pravda’s comparison between Boers and Palestinians, harking back to nineteenth-century imperialism – itself partly driven by London Jewish banking interests such as those of the Rothschilds – has a flavour of history repeating itself. The 20th-century tragedy of the Russian nation who lost tens of millions of people in Stalin’s purges, may be traced back to Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement to St. Petersburg and Moscow where radical Jews were in the forefront of the Bolshevik revolution.

There is something like a Jewish “echo chamber”, nicely revealed by the recent comment by an American Jew, Yochanan Gordon, that if it takes Palestinian genocide to ensure “a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel”, then so be it. Jews must fantasize among themselves about simply exterminating the 1,8 million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, thereby claiming another chunk of the Holy Land for themselves. Arguably, South African Jews are already seeing a post-Afrikaner South Africa where our people will be simply gone, either driven out or worse.

The most positive future that Jews foresee for us is “becoming Coloureds”: “White and black must make Coloured,” as Nadine Gordimer put it in an interview with the BBC. Presumably we will then all live in a kind of Gaza strip on the Cape Flats, addicted to alcohol supplied by Jewish liquor stores and drugs supplied by Jewish druglords. Rumour has it that the drug trade in DA-run Cape Town is already controlled by Jews. A Muslim politician from Cape Town once said, privately: “We are ruled by Zionists in Cape Town.” According to journalist Garth van Onselen, the liberal DA has a large number of Jewish donors who were once alarmed by an anti-Israel position taken by the party, which was promptly “corrected”.

It is an enduring source of amazement to many that a group as endogamous as Jews should always advocate multiculturalism and race-mixing for others, from Afrikaners to Swedes. As Barbara Lerner Spectre of the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden famously put it:

I think there’s a resurgence of antisemitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural, and I think we’re gonna be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.

From their confident tone, you may surmise that everyone writing in the Daily Maverick is a “natural born leader”, spearheading the “huge transformaton” that we all “have to make”. While the Daily Maverick, Africa Check, Section 27 and other Jewish-dominated groups and NGOs regularly vituperate Afrikaner public figures, remaining pockets of Afrikaans at universities, as well as our politically incorrect behaviour, there is a deathly silence about South Africa’s so-called white genocide, the atrocities committed against farmers, elderly Afrikaners and children. Where Jews take cognisance of such ethnic violence at all, it is to exonerate the perpetrators thereof, minimise the statistical relevance of such murders or blame the victims by suggesting that they are mere “racists” deserving of their fate.

However, in Europe there is now a counter-current. The left-wing intellectuals who used to be enthralled with Jewish ideas, praying at the altar of Frankfurt School cultural Marxism, have become very critical of Israel. Reacting to Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo said: “Israeli Zionist bastards have nothing to do with the Jews [bastardi israeliani sionisti che non hanno niente a che fare con gli ebrei].”

In France, ex-Marxist thinker Alain Soral is now spearheading the critique of globalism and internationalist, multicultural Jewish ideas. He collaborates with comedian Dieudonné whose shows have on occasion been banned by the French government due to pressure from organised French Jewry.

Many French people are now openly mocking Jews, a bit like Jews in South Africa have for a long time mocked Afrikaners as “boorish, boerewors-eating, brandy-drinking, rugby-watching” idiots, to quote a phrase from a controversy some years ago. A self-confessed Jewish radical, Glen Moss, recently described rugby as “boorish, the preserve of Afrikaans-speaking apartheid-supporting racists with both spectators and players prone to violent behaviour”.

As far as I am aware, there has never been a riot by rugby spectators in South Africa or behaviour akin to “soccer hooliganism”, unlike in many other countries and unlike among South African blacks who riot all the time, including sometimes at soccer matches. According to South African History Online,

13 January 1991: At least forty soccer spectators of a friendly match between Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs died and 100 were injured as they fled fighting between rival team supporters at the Oppenheimer stadium near Orkney, Western Transvaal (now North West Province).

Jews’ sense of their own genius and talent has been known for a long time. I came upon the following amazing quote by French author Céline via The New York Review of Books where Céline satirizes in a conversation between himself and another character the Jewish control of the media and the mindless promotion of Jewish artists, thinkers and politicians. Admittedly Céline was a hard-core anti-Semite whose wife has forbidden the republication of his pamphlets from the 1930s but, given the Zeitgeist of Boerehaat emanating from Daily Maverick and others, it is perhaps time, as The New York Review of Books puts it in its headline, “to uncover Céline”:

“Ferdinand, you have become quite the fanatic, thus you are always chattering on, but I’m warning you and I’m putting you on your guard, that the Jews are very intelligent…they are the ones in France who read the books, who gather information, who man the information pipeline, they are armed with knowledge , and occupy all of the high positions, all of the rackets are in their hands, they know how to make themselves popular, in addition they do good, to the little people, the forty hour week, that’s their security…and then there’s the vacations… You are going to get yourself put into prison… You are going to wind up getting cut to pieces, beyond doubt…”

“Intelligent, how?…” I retaliated. “They are racist, they have all the money, they have seized all the levers of control, they have latched unto all the positions of command… Is that how they’re intelligent?… There’s nothing of brilliance to that!… They do stay on track admirably, as they eliminate, dissuade, pursue, and hound down, all of those who might rival them, or cause them the least little bit of umbrage… It’s their crusade against us, a crusade unto the death… That’s the stuff of their intelligence!… All of the interesting jobs, they’ve put into their pockets…monopolizing, they expel outright or with little ado anyone who is not properly Jewish…filthy Jewish… Judaized… pro-Jewbie…ass-reamed Jewish… This is the great technique of the cuckoo… To put it bluntly, in order to cast a better light on things, if Einstein weren’t Jewish, if Bergson weren’t circumcised, if Proust had been only a Breton, if Freud didn’t bear the mark, people wouldn’t be saying very much about any one of them…these are not at all amongst those geniuses who will have brought enlightenment unto the world!… I can bloody well guarantee that… The least little fart by a Jew is called a boom! one of the admirable discoveries of our age my friend, instantaneously! through the automatic effect of the world Jewish apparatus…millions of little bells go off… That pathetic fart is raised up like some sort of miracle! and at top speed!… It is due to that that the painting of Cézanne, Modi, Picasso and all the others…the films of Monsieur Benhur, the music of Tartinowsky all suddenly become a big deal…An enormous favorable pre-judgment, world-wide, precedes and forms the prelude for every Jewish intention… The Jews, all of the critics in the universe, all of the artistic circles…all of the news media!… All of the world’s Jewish agencies set about spitting forth claps of Thunder, to the very least murmur, the very least quiver of Hymie creativity…and the Jewish supremacist publicity in the spoken media provides an admirable echo… Every trumpet sounds from one end of every continent to the other, heralding, intoning, resounding, buzzing with the marvelous Hosanna! to the sublime messenger from Heaven! Yet another incomparable Jew at the palette! on the screen! at the violin! in politics! infinitely more brilliant! without contest more renovating, than all of the geniuses of the past (and all Aryans of course). The grotesque goyim are quickly caught-up into a whirlwind of epilepsy, they rejoice as a choir of cuckolds, they violently join into the chorus, with all the force of their stupidity, and they have themselves completely consumed within! …it’s the triumph of a new Jewish idol!… In order to pack them in, it is enough to offer them a little more Jewish shit in which to wallow… They are no longer particular…They have lost all of their instinct… They don’t know the difference between the living and the dead…the ‘organic’ and the diffuse, a cardboard box and the pure juice, the bladder rather than the lantern, the false and the authentic… They no longer know at all… They have sucked up far too much garbage over too many centuries and epochs, to wind up with anything of authenticity… They would rather treat themselves to falsifications… They mistake bleach for spring water…and they find it most preferable! infinitely superior. They are geared towards the counterfeit. By consequence, of course, misfortune, shit! for the indigenous person who through some sort of original gift, some little bit of music all his own…one little whispers attempt! he immediately becomes hateful, suspect, perfectly shameful to his racial brethren. It’s the law in a conquered country that nothing must ever be allowed to disturb the torpor of the enslaved masses… Everyone must fall back down as soon as possible…into the ruminations of drunkards… It is they, the racial brethren, who are most strictly charged methodically to obstruct, to denigrate, and to stifle. No sooner does one of the indigenous people arouse himself…than the others of the same race rise up against him, with lynching being not far off… In penal colonies, the dirtiest deeds are performed by the convicts themselves…amongst themselves, a thousand times as cruel as the most atrocious slave galley…

The New York Times Book Review provides a link in a footnote to Trifles for a massacre by Céline where I got this quotation from.

Among the many delights of Afrikaans culture is the fact that it is truly indigenous and free of political correctness. For a long time we have enjoyed a truly astonishing degree of freedom of speech in Afrikaans. That is, until recently, when Adriaan Basson took control of the Beeld newspaper in Johannesburg. Is it any coincidence that there are apparently now “lecturing sessions” to the Beeld journalists by Anton Harber, founder of the Weekly Mail? Basson is on a crusade against “Nazism” and “anti-Semitism” at the rural University of Potchefstroom which in more than a century has never known such a campaign.

Besides a small number of so-called Boerejode, Jews in South Africa have never taken an interest in Afrikaans and considered the language beneath them. The reference for most Jews is America, beaming out to them from across the Atlantic. When Jews talk about “history”, they automatically refer to American history, especially over the last century since they have been so intimately connected with that country. The “sixties” means “sixties America” and have nothing to do with us. Their authors are mostly American (Jewish) authors, feminists, anti-racists, and the like.

Reviewing Poplak’s outobiography, another Johannesburg Jew, David Dyzenhaus, writes:

Like Poplak, I am a former South African and a Jew from Johannesburg. However, I was born in 1957 and grew up with a rather heightened awareness of the politics of apartheid. My mother was what would be called today a human rights activist. My father, who had survived the Warsaw ghetto and the destruction of Warsaw, had no tolerance for nationalism of any kind, whether that of the Afrikaners or of the black liberation movements.

Both Poplak and Dyzenhaus now live in Canada, not being able to stomach life out here in our “transformed” utopia. Why on earth does Poplak take an interest in what happens in a women’s residence at the University of Pretoria? Except that in some sense he knows that those students represent the “target population”?

Apart from the times when they may “trash” or vilify us, Afrikaners do not really exist for Johannesburg’s all-conquering Jews. We are more or less part of the local fauna, like Impala grazing in the Kruger National Park and that you gaze at from afar through a pair of binoculars.

The upshot of Jewish disdain has been that Afrikaans has been largely and blissfully free of Jewish influence, “authentic” and not false, as Céline would say. However, suddenly over the last few months, more and more Jewish “commentators” are now being published in the Afrikaans newspapers in translation. We are now being told what to think, how to behave if we have any desire to “fit into” the South Africa busily being socially engineered by Jews according to their American model. What Richard Poplak is saying is essentially the same as the “huge transformation” Barbara Lerner Spectre has in mind for Swedes and Europeans. We have to become “a properly reconciled country”, which I suppose means that we have to accept the dominance of Jews and their coterie of quasi-communist, radicalized, politically correct blacks reciting Karl Marx (or Andrea Dworkin) to us. Every Zulu chief in South Africa has now become a feminist to boot, soon to be spotted at the Cape Town Gay Pride.

Those two Afrikaans girls at Tukkies have now been expelled from their residence. The Jews and their lackeys have been lenient this time. Soon we might be treated to more Soviet punishments for our lack of ideological purity. But now those two hapless students will have to find other accommodation, in regularly burgled flats in Hatfield, near the university. I live in Pretoria and speak to students, so I know. They will also suffer the sexual taunts of the indolent black youths who lurk around the university campus and make it a point of reminding all young white girls that they have now been “liberated” into sexual relations with whites, sometimes of the forced kind called rape. This is what the Jewish genii of the Daily Maverick call “our non-racial, non-sexist South Africa”.

All of that is “common cause” as they say in the law courts. What concerns me is the future. Whatever we may think of Palestinians or Muslims generally – although South African Muslims have always behaved in an exemplary way – the lack of respect for non-Jewish life displayed by Israel, readily acclaimed by Johannesburg Jews, does not portend well for us here. Come to the think of it, Jewish terrorists like Joe Slovo or Ronnie Kasrils displayed a similar contempt for the lives of our civilians – black and white – when they were using car bombs in our streets or bombs in supermarkets or restaurants to “persuade” us of the well-foundedness of their Marxist doctrine.

Pravda’s analogy between Boers and Palestinians may still prove to be prophetic.

Johan de Wet is a businessman from Pretoria

The folly of ‘land reform’

Despite the wholesale attack on agriculture and white farmers in South Africa threatening food security, The Times (Johannesburg) believes “land reform” or land grab is a worthy goal, seemingly blind to what a much milder form of the same policy has achieved in Zimbabwe.

Some 70% of farms in Gauteng are either standing idle or are being used as weekend party destinations for the wealthy black elite who use taxpayers’ money to buy up agricultural land.

This is no tiny matter, as the unfolding and alarming situation is strangely not reflected in the analysis, policies and goals of the main “representative” political parties.

After 20 years of democracy and never-ending Anglo-American attemps to stir racial animosity through their myriad of foreign-funded NGO’s – most advocating land grab – blacks are quitting rural areas in droves for the lure of city life.

Established commercial farmers are under pressure, often being forced to contend with deadly political slogans, drought, high input costs, competition from cheap imports and an unsympathetic government who simply ignore the scourge of farm murders. There were about 66 000 commercial farms in this country in 1994; today the number has dwindled to 44 000.

Thousands of white crosses dot the countryside, where farmers have had their weapons confiscated to face a low-intensity war waged against them.

Yet the role of farmers in ensuring our food security and providing employment cannot be overstated.

This year’s bumper maize crop, for example, is causing the price of the staple to drop, putting downward pressure on food prices against the backdrop of inflationary pressure, a weakening currency and a struggling economy.

Despite the abject failure of instilling land-grab fever, The Times chillingly argues that “it goes without saying that the land redistribution process needs to be ramped up”.

How? By arming not only small groups of terrorists against farmers but also whole brigades who will complete a Pol Pot-style ethnic cleansing or genocide?

The editorial continues unashamedly that “reforms to deal with the deep inequalities that persist in our rural areas need to be urgently effected”.

Really? When most inhabitants don’t care for farming and are actually abandoning land, what inequalities might those be?

Clearly cheap slogans and “representativity” have already lost much of their value in the face of reality.

“Land reform” – which envisages the expropriation of half of all commercial farmland without compensation on behalf of farmworkers – is not only unworkable and will destroy what is left of agriculture and food security. It is also deadly.

It would make far more sense to abandon this folly and to stop dreaming up grand imperial schemes to steal agricultural land and engineer famines. Stalinist planning really does not have the same allure any more, despite American attempts to restore the Cold War.

The Anglo-American NGO’s and their paid flunkeys need to pack their bags and leave.

When genocide is permissible by Yochanan Gordon

In this controversial text first published by Times of Israel, an American Jew argues that genocide of the Palestinians would be justified if that were the price of ‘restoring quiet’ in Israel

Judging by the numbers of casualties on both sides in this almost one-month old war one would be led to the conclusion that Israel has resorted to disproportionate means in fighting a far less- capable enemy. That is as far as what meets the eye. But, it’s now obvious that the US and the UN are completely out of touch with the nature of this foe and are therefore not qualified to dictate or enforce the rules of this war – because when it comes to terror there is much more than meets the eye.

Yochanan Gordon
Yochanan Gordon

I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that the nature of warfare has undergone a major shift over the years. Where wars were usually waged to defeat the opposing side, today it seems – and judging by the number of foul calls it would indicate – that today’s wars are fought to a draw. I mean, whoever heard of a timeout in war? An NBA Basketball game allows six timeouts for each team during the course of a game, but last I checked this is a war! We are at war with an enemy whose charter calls for the annihilation of our people. Nothing, then, can be considered disproportionate when we are fighting for our very right to live.

The sad reality is that Israel gets it, but its hands are being tied by world leaders who over the past six years have insisted they are such good friends with the Jewish state, that they know more regarding its interests than even they do. But there’s going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings – because this is life or death.

Most of the reports coming from Gazan officials and leaders since the start of this operation have been either largely exaggerated or patently false. The truth is, it’s not their fault, falsehood and deceit is part of the very fabric of who they are and that will never change. Still however, despite their propensity to lie, when your enemy tells you that they are bent on your destruction you believe them. Similarly, when Khaled Meshal declares that no physical damage to Gaza will dampen their morale or weaken their resolve – they have to be believed. Our sage Gedalia the son of Achikam was given intelligence that Yishmael Ben Nesanyah was plotting to kill him. However, in his piety or rather naiveté Gedalia dismissed the report as a random act of gossip and paid no attention to it. To this day, the day following Rosh Hashana is commemorated as a fast day in the memory of Gedalia who was killed in cold blood on the second day of Rosh Hashana during the meal. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over. History is there to teach us lessons and the lesson here is that when your enemy swears to destroy you – you take him seriously.

Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life. What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?

News anchors such as those from CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera have not missed an opportunity to point out the majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives as a result of this war. But anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian. If you’ll counter, that Hamas has been seen abusing civilians who have attempted to leave their homes in response to Israeli warnings to leave – well then, your beginning to come to terms with the nature of this enemy which should automatically cause the rules of standard warfare to be suspended.

Everyone agrees that Israel has the right to defend itself as well as the right to exercise that right. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has declared it, Obama and Kerry have clearly stated that no one could be expected to sit idle as thousands of rockets rain down on the heads of its citizens, placing them in clear and present danger. It seems then that the only point of contention is regarding the measure of punishment meted out in this situation.

I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

What happened in Argentina

Vulture funds buy insolvent debts for a song and later try to cash in on them by force. Billionaire Paul Singer has made it his specialty. Today he is intent on consolidating his fortune at the expense of the Argentinian people, while already setting his sights on Spain

By Jérome Duval, Fatima Fafatale.

The vulture fund NML Capital that, together with others, has Argentina on the edge of suspending payments, is already devouring the rotting flesh of the Spanish market. Elliott Management, the opportunistic fund of the serial U.S. speculator Paul Singer, has already pocketed a billion euros of Bankia’s failed credit and 300 million euros of Santander. It is estimated that it has paid hardly 50 million for both these portfolios, according to Auraree.com.

In March 2013, the Spanish financial press informed that Elliott had acquired from the Santander Group a portfolio of 300 million euros of defaulting credit of Santander Consumer Finance with a discount approaching 96%. The price that was paid was laughable: about 12 million euros, according to Cinco Dias.

Elliott had acquired from the Santander Group a portfolio of 300 million euros as defaulting consumer credit of Santander Consumer Finance.

In August of the same year, 2013, Bankia, the nationalised entity that most benefited from the rescue of the Spanish banks, which had considerably raised the public debt, informed that three portfolios of bad credit had been sold for a total debt volume of 1,353.9 million euros. In the relevant communication to the CNMV (National Stock Market Commission), it was not mentioned to whom the loans had been sold to or at what price. Despite the evident lack of transparency, the financial press has put names and numbers to the operation, which it is estimated “may have a discount of 95%”. The buyers of the three portfolios were the vulture fund Cerberus, which is advised by José Maria Aznar Jr, the son of the former President, Elliott and the Norwegian recovery business, Lindorff. “The portfolio was valued at 1,354 million but only forked out 68,” according to Finanzas.com. We have been in contact with Bankia for confirmation from the other side and its response has been that “for confidentiality” they never give the number and “the buyers who do not want to be identified”.

A few months later, it emerged that Elliott bought the household debt recovery firm Gesif to convert it into his operational base for the Spanish market. Its director-general was Melania Sebastián, who was in charge of information management at the Banca Comercial de Caja Madrid, who will continue with the moneylenders of Gesif. It is worth noting how a former director of Caja Madrid acts as the intermediary between the nationalised Bankia and Elliott’s vulture fund.

What happened in Argentina

The vulture funds make money taking advantage of countries in difficulties, like Argentina during the crisis of 2001, to buy debts cheap. Later they wait for an opportune moment to oblige them to buy them back at a much higher price with court orders, including deferred interests and judicial costs.

This is how they speculate on public debts, endangering the social spending that benefits the great majority of the population. These vultures went for lawsuits after having refused to form a part of the 93% of creditors who accepted the exchange with the government. Now the New York district judge, Thomas Griesa, has prioritised the payment of the vulture funds, which opens the door to an avalanche of demands that could result in the suspension of payments in Argentina on July 30. As Julio C. Gambina puts it so well, “nobody precisely knows where the demands of the creditors could reach of the unpayable debt”, but we know that the cost for the Argentinean people could be catastrophic.

Who are behind these vulture funds? NML Capital is a subsidiary of the inversion fund, Elliott Management Corporation, registered in the fiscal paradise Cayman Islands. It is the empire of Paul Singer, the multimillionaire champion of the gay rights and neo-conservative aggression.

Elliott speculates, among other things, with public debts, violating the sovereignty of the states and its peoples. But he also speculates with private debts and in 2011 came to possess two million dollars of Lehman Brothers.

Singer was the major financier of the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 2004; he also contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012 and to that of the New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. Moreover, he is the major private financier of the New York police. As one of the principal financiers of the Republican Party, he plays an important part in the U.S. politics and, therefore, also in international politics.

The foundation that bears his name, The Paul E. Singer Foundation, praises him for his philanthropy, his leadership in the expansion of free trade, his contribution to U.S. national security and the “future of Israel”. Moreover, Singer is president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

The frigate is not for handing over or for sale

Regarding the Argentinean case, NML is the principal financier of the organisation, American Task Force Argentina (AFTA), a lobby that influences the Congress and the U.S. justice, harming Argentina. To give ourselves an idea of the power of these vultures, NML could even embargo the Argentinean frigate, Liberty, in Ghana in October 2012, demanding the Argentinean state for about $370 million for unpaid bonds.

Enough of vultures: Argentina united for a national cause

What is happening in Argentina is emblematic of what Greece is starting to feel where vultures like Dart Management operate, with its headquarters in Cayman Island and which also operates in Latin American countries. In 1999, NML achieved, through a ruling in the United States, the payment from Peru of $58 million for a debt that the fund had bought for $11 million. It also did business with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Source: voltairenet.org

HRW, apologists for murder

By Norman Finkelstein.

It takes considerable talent to describe Hamas’s firing of primitive “rockets” that to date have indirectly killed one person (she died of a heart attack) as a “war crime,” while describing Israel’s killing to date of 120 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians and innocent children, and its systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, as mere “collective punishment.”

But it’s what one has come to expect from Human Rights Watch. In 2008 HRW issued a report entitled Flooding South Lebanon: Israel’s use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon during the 2006 war. It was – in HRW’s words – “the most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war,” while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecedented. Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped during the final three days “when Israel knew a settlement was imminent” (HRW), the U.N. ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect. But, although finding that Israel committed “extensive violations” of the laws of war, HRW did not go beyond stating that Israel’s massive resort to cluster munitions was “in some locations possibly a war crime,” even as the evidence HRW itself assembled conclusively showed that Israel was targeting civilian population centers.

HRW now says that targeting the civilian homes of Hamas militants constitutes mere collective punishment. So, let’s see. Israel prides itself on having a citizen army. Virtually every civilian dwelling in Israel contains a family member who is either in the army or the reserves. If Hamas had precision missiles, issued an official warning that henceforth it would be targeting every civilian dwelling in Israel, and then proceeded to do just that, would HRW call it mere “collective punishment”?

A crying shame that Colonel De Kock has not been pardoned

It is widely known that no power in the world has been able to combat large scale and well organised terror, which carries the express or tacit approval of the majority of the people of that country, by legal means.

The Conflict of the Past:  A Factual Review

by Johan van der Merwe, former police commissioner of South Africa

More than two decades after political negotiations were started and the ANC, as well as other revolutionary organisations, ceased the armed struggle, there is still large scale confusion and ignorance regarding the nature of the violence that raged in South Africa from 1960 to 1990.

Also read Johan van der Merwe’s open letter to Helen Zille of the DA in Afrikaans.

The TRC, which unquestionably consisted overwhelmingly of ANC-supporters and sympathisers, laid the foundation for a propaganda onslaught in which the SABC and certain members of the media merrily took part.

One example of the manner in which this propaganda campaign was conducted is the Special Assignment program about the conflict of the past, presented by the SABC on 18 November 2008.

This program was presented in such a one-sided and distorted fashion that the Foundation for Equality before the Law found it necessary to lay a complaint with the Independent Broadcasting Complaints Commission.  After conducting a trial, they found:

“Taking all these facts into consideration, the Tribunal is of the view that one-sided impressions were created in the programme, which is to the detriment of the security force officers.  This does not mean that we are of the opinion that these officers were innocent of any atrocities.  They (or some of them) admitted to such atrocities.  What we find is that there was not sufficient balance in presenting this particular programme, because a lasting impression is created in the mind of the reasonable viewer, firstly, that the security officers were the only people who committed atrocities during the armed struggle, and, secondly, that they then tried to prevent victims from giving evidence against them at the TRC hearings.  In finding thus, it is not our intention to interfere with the editorial prerogative of the presenter.  The presenter is free to take a particular angle or line and to emphasize aspects that he or she considers to be more important than others.  However, when the presenter is dealing with controversial issues of public importance, he or she should treat all parties involved in the issue fairly, and see to it that balance is obtained in presenting different viewpoints. If this is not done, the broadcast can deteriorate into propaganda, a situation that cannot be allowed in any democracy.”

Examples of this type of propaganda appear in our media daily and it is sad that certain Afrikaans newspapers, either due to ignorance or because of journalists with dubious motives, often take the lead.

It is also a pity that Mr FW de Klerk and other former Ministers of the National Party do not feel obliged to rectify these skewed and distorted reports regarding the conflict of the past.

The following facts are lost sight of, consciously disregarded or maliciously distorted.

For more than three decades the RSA was subjected to a fierce struggle filled with deeds of terror through which the ANC and other revolutionary organisations attempted to take over the Government.

Car bombs, landmines, limpet mines and other explosive devices exploded on a regular basis and defenceless people – women and children – were killed or horribly maimed and the community faced a constant threat. Limpet mines in Wimpy Restaurants and explosive devices in refuse containers or terror attacks, in which persons might be mowed down indiscriminately, irrespective of whether they were women or children, were a real daily threat. The Church Street Bomb-explosion and the attack on the St James Church were characteristic of the reckless and barbaric way in which the revolutionary groups conducted the struggle. Pressure was mounted on the police from all sides, especially on the Security Branch, to safeguard the community at large from these attacks.

Members of the South African Police Force were regarded as ‘hard targets” and attacks on members and their families became a frequent event. Black members of the force, especially those living in black townships, lived under constant threat. In some areas black policemen had to be housed in tents in secure areas in order to safeguard them against attack from the ANC. From 1973 to 1990 more than 346 members of the force were killed in the revolutionary onslaught.

Where the slightest suspicion existed that someone had given information to the police or cooperated with the police in any way, that person was branded a collaborator and collaborators were burned alive using the most inhuman and barbaric method known as the ‘necklace method’. During the period 1 September 1984 to 31 March 1993, 505 persons, exclusively members of the black community, were burned alive by the necklace method. 36 persons, whom they were able to rescue in time, were severely burnt. During the same period, 710 persons, once again solely members of the black community, were burnt alive while 320 received serious burns. This all but destroyed the ability of the police to obtain information from the black community or to get people to give evidence against members of Umkhonto we Sizwe or other revolutionary organisations. As a result the legal processes available to the police became impotent. Even the declaration of a state of emergency and emergency regulations were not enough to stop the terror. On the 26th of September 1992 the previous Government and the ANC entered into an agreement or so-called “RECORD OF UNDERSTANDING” in terms of which 176 prisoners were released. One of the stipulations of this Agreement determined that:

“The two parties agreed that all prisoners whose imprisonment is related to the conflict of the past, and whose release could make a contribution to reconciliation, should be released.”

With the exception of Barend Strydom, the so-called “White Wolf”, all of the other prisoners were released at the insistence of the ANC. These included persons who were serving long sentences for “necklace murders”. In so doing, the ANC clearly confirmed that the ‘necklace murder” was indeed a tool of the revolutionary struggle and was carried out to further their aims. The abhorrent deeds committed by some of these prisoners far exceeded anything that Eugene de Kock was involved with.

Members of the police force were deployed in both South West Africa (Namibia) and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in order to stem the revolutionary onslaught. The training of the police had to be drastically adapted to enable them to meet this task. This training also conflicted with classic policing methods where minimum force may be used and where the main objective is to bring charges against a suspect and to bring him before the court. Police work became a life or death struggle which hinged on the extermination of the enemy. The policeman was compelled to kill or be killed.

The revolutionary struggle was seen as an East-West struggle both internally and externally and the Soviet Union’s involvement and support for the ANC added the element of Soviet expansionism.

Members of the police force, particularly members of the Security Branch, were regularly exposed to the carnage and violence which resulted from this conflict. It was a regular tactic of the ANC to set up mines and explosive devices in such a way that the first explosion drew the police to the scene while the second mine or explosive device would explode some while afterwards with the aim of harming the police. Several members of the police force were brutally killed in this fashion.

Members of the Security Branch were often at scenes where motorcar-bombs, landmines, limpet mines or other explosive devices had been detonated and their colleagues as well as defenceless people, including women and children, were blown apart and body-parts flung over a wide area, and had to help gather up the body-parts. This inevitably left an indelible impression on the minds of policemen on the scene which, in many cases, led to a hardening in their attitude towards members of revolutionary groups and their supporters.

Vociferous statements by politicians that the ANC had to be wiped out roots and all, ambiguous instructions and the covert manner in which they were given created the impression that everything possible had to be done to wipe out the ANC. Due to all of these factors, it was impossible for the Security Branch to combat the ANC threat with the legal means at their disposal. The desperate situation which prevailed led to desperate measures. In these circumstances Mr PW Botha and other members of his cabinet themselves authorised or tacitly approved actions which fell outside the usual letter of the law. This inevitably led to members of the Security Branch, who were at the forefront of the struggle against terror, taking the law into their own hands.

It is widely known that no power in the world has been able to combat large scale and well organised terror, which carries the express or tacit approval of the majority of the people of that country, by legal means. There are several examples to support this view and, without exception, powers who became involved in such revolutionary struggles had to resort to unconventional means to combat them. The war that Britain fought in Malaya is a case in point! South Africa was no exception since the police had to protect the population against the terror attacks of revolutionary organisations while the majority of the black population supported them, whether voluntarily or as a result of severe intimidation.

From the very beginning the TRC process was characterised by a one-sided approach in which members of the Security Branch were often harshly discriminated against. To qualify for amnesty, former members of the Security Branch had to meet the following requirements:

  • They had to prove that the unlawful acts in which they were involved were associated with a political objective and committed in the conflict of the past
  • That the acts were committed in the course and scope of their duties and within the scope of their express or implied authority and
  • They had to make a full disclosure.

These provisions of The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act made a mockery of the closing passages of the Interim Constitution which expressly determines that amnesty shall be granted in respect of any action or omission associated with a political objective and committed in the conflict of the past.. It is clear that Mr de Klerk and former ministers of the National Party, who were involved in drafting these provisions, did not have the foggiest idea of the conditions under which the security forces carried out these deeds or else they didn’t really care.

The findings of the various amnesty committees were divergent and there were many shortcomings as Judge Andrew Wilson, Advocates Chris de Jager and Francis Bosman, as well as Mr Wynand Malan, who served on the amnesty committees, will immediately concede. The minority decision, delivered by Mr Wynand Malan in the Maponya case, serves as an excellent example of how some members of the amnesty committees erred in their judgement. Mr Malan’s minority judgement in the Maponya case can be found at: http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/decisions/2001/ac21272b.htm). A striking pattern also becomes noticeable when one looks at the composition of those amnesty commissions where amnesty was denied to ex-members of the security branch and minority judgements were passed.

Most probably the greatest shortcoming in the whole process was that no provision was ever made for some or other form of administrative revision. That meant that, where an amnesty committee reached an incorrect conclusion and amnesty was denied, the person who was denied amnesty had to approach the Supreme Court for an administrative revision. The legal costs in such cases can be enormous and amount to a million rand or more, which made it unaffordable to most ex-members of the Security Branch. Besides, the grounds on which a revision could be applied for were far more restrictive than in ordinary criminal cases.

It was indeed a glaring injustice which ex-members of the Security Branch were subjected to !

In the Motherwell amnesty trial, where amnesty was refused to the late Col Gideon Nieuwoudt and other former members of the Security Branch, Advocate Louis Visser and Mr Jan Wagener agreed to represent Brig du Toit and Col Nieuwoudt  in their application for revision  on a contingency basis.

The application for a revision was heard by a Full Bench of Judges of the Cape Supreme Court on 23 November 2001. Judge Jeanette Traverso-Coetzee acted as presiding judge and was assisted by Judges Dennis Davies and Jerome Ngwenya. All three judges unanimously adjudged  the findings of the amnesty committee in the case of Brig. du Toit and W/O Ras to be incorrect and set them aside. Judge Davis was of the opinion that the amnesty committee was correct in refusing Col Nieuwoudt’s application for amnesty. The other two judges, however, disagreed with him and set aside the findings in the case of Col Nieuwoudt as well. The Court ordered that a new amnesty hearing be held.

In the subsequent amnesty trial, amnesty was granted to Brig. du Toit and W/O Ras but amnesty was refused in the case of Col Nieuwoudt. According to Adv Visser and Mr Wagener, the Amnesty Committee once again erred in their finding and they would once again recommended an application for  revision.. However, Col Nieuwoudt passed away shortly thereafter. This means that such a process could carry on indefinitely.

In the case of the PEBCO 3, where Col Deon Nieuwoudt, Capt Sakkie van Zyl and Sgt Johannes Koole were refused amnesty and subsequently charged with murder, application for revision was already made more than three years ago. This application has been delayed for more than three years by the Department of Justice who fail to give their answer. As a result the trial has been indefinitely postponed.

On the 25th of July 1993, defenceless churchgoers, including women and children, were attacked in St James’s Church, Cape Town, with AK 47 rifles and 11 were cold-bloodedly killed and several others were wounded. Dr Allan Boesak made the following comment regarding this incident:

“We are horrified and deeply distressed by the savage attack on the congregation at St James’s Church, Kenilworth, yesterday evening. Not only is this a monstrous crime against humanity, but also a shameful desecration of a place of prayer and worship.

This is the latest in a series of barbaric and vicious armed attacks that have taken place since the announcement of significant agreements at the World Trade Centre. This tragedy can only strengthen our belief that there are dark forces at work, determined to wreck all efforts to build peace and democracy in our country.

We wish to express our deepest and most sincere sympathies with the families of the deceased in their grief. From the bottom of our hearts we wish them the strength and courage to endure a tragedy that goes beyond the personal and must affect our country as a whole.

We call on the security forces to launch an immediate and urgent investigation into this terrible crime and to bring its perpetrators to justice. For the sake of all South Africans, it is absolutely crucial that the sinister forces behind these horrifying attacks are brought to book before they can do any more damage.”

Issued by Allan Boesak, Chairperson.

During the amnesty hearing of the APLA members involved, the following finding was made:

“APLA has publicly accepted responsibility for this attack and in its submission to the TRC it stated:

“It should therefore not surprise anyone that targets like the St James Church, King Williams Town Golf Club, Heildeberg Tavern etc. were selected. The leadership of the APLA takes full responsibility for all these operations. The APLA forces who carried out these operations followed the directives from their commanders and those directives were from the highest echelons of the military leadership. We do not therefore regret that such operations took place and there is therefore nothing to ask forgiveness for.”

Mr Letlapa Mphahlele, the President of the PAC and the man responsible for giving the orders for these attacks, was initially prosecuted and appeared in court for these murders but the case was postponed and has since faded away.

It is striking that, while persons like Mr Jacques Pauw and other like-minded people insist vehemently at every opportunity that former members of the Security Branch must be prosecuted, they make no mention of cases like that of Mr Letlapa Mphahlele and the NEC of the ANC.

There is great confusion regarding the number of NEC members who applied for amnesty. Initially there were 37 members, which subsequently increased but, as a result of mal-administration on the part of the TRC, became so entangled that it is difficult to determine what the a actual number is. Nevertheless, they were all refused amnesty. In their application for amnesty, members of the NEC expressed themselves as follows:

……””””We, the applicants, having at various times between 1 March 1960 and 10 May 1994, as indicated below, been members and leaders of the African National Congress (hereinafter referred to as the ANC) elected and/or appointed to serve in various structures including its highest organ, the NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, do hereby make the following declaration:

During the said period, the ANC played the foremost role in the leadership of the struggle of the masses of our people for the end of the hateful system of apartheid, appropriately dubbed a crime against humanity by the international community.

In the course of our people’s struggle, with the intent to induce the apartheid government of the National Party to abandon apartheid with its concomitant violent repression, and with the intent to achieve, bring about and promote fundamental political, social and economic changes in the Republic, the ANC inter alia, established its military wing, UMKHONTO WE SIZWE, through which it prosecuted an armed struggle.

At all material times UMKHONTO WE SIZWE operated under (the) political authority, direction and leadership of the ANC.

Due to its peculiar circumstances, and the attacks mounted upon it by its adversary, the apartheid government, the ANC established various organs at various times such as the RC, PMC and a security organ NAT which at all material times also operated under its authority, direction and leadership.

Due to the circumstances which prevailed in the townships in the early 1990’s as a result of third force activities, the leadership of the ANC established and in some instances encouraged the establishment of SELF DEFENCE UNITS  (SDU’s) which played a critical role in the defence of defenceless communities.

In the event, and to the extent that any of the activities of the above mentioned institutions and structures, including the SDU’s, could in any manner whatsoever be regarded as the kind of acts or omissions or offences envisaged in the PROMOTION OF NATIONAL UNITY AND RECONCILIATION ACT, we collectively take full responsibility therefore (sic) applying for amnesty in respect thereof……….””””.

One of the most shocking incidents of terror in South African history occurred on 20 May 1983. A motor car loaded with powerful explosives was detonated at around four o’clock in the afternoon right in front of a Nedbank Square building. (Commonly known as Nedbank Square Maritime House). Altogether 19 people died, including 12 civilians and 7 members of the army. In total 219 people were either severely injured or maimed, of which 217 were civilians and 2 were army members. In his book “The Long Walk to Freedom”, Mr Mandela expressed his regret over the incident but, at the same time, stated that the ANC accepted that incidents of this nature would occur during the armed struggle.

Various members of the NEC were not in the country when these attacks were at their fiercest levels and, as such, escaped prosecution.

During 1996, Col de Kock was found guilty in the Supreme Court in Pretoria and was sentenced to life plus 80 years imprisonment for the five murders that took place at Nelspruit. In total he received two life sentences plus 212 years imprisonment on six other counts of murder (including that of Japie Maponya), various counts of attempted murder and other charges.

With the exception of the murders that took place at Nelspruit, the various amnesty committees found that all the other incidents were committed with a political objective and were, in fact, connected to the conflict of the past. He was refused amnesty on two of these counts as it was felt he had not made a full disclosure. Application for a revision of these cases would unquestionably have succeeded. However, even Adv Hattingh, who appeared on behalf of Col de Kock in all of his amnesty hearings, conceded that there was no possibility of a successful revision in the Nelspruit case. It would therefore not have benefited him to apply for a revision.

Sometimes the impression is created that Eugene de Kock is in a fix while the generals are scot-free – but this stems from ignorance of the facts. In the Nelspruit case, Col de Kock tried to implicate General Krappies Engelberecht but, during the criminal and amnesty hearings, conclusive evidence was presented to the effect that his assertions were unfounded.

In the Rapport of 10 January 2010, Jacques Pauw insisted, inter alia, that Gen Engelbrecht be brought to trial. It is not clear whether this stems from malice or from an inability to grasp the evidence given during the criminal and amnesty hearings.

There isn’t a shred of evidence on which Gen Engelbrecht can be prosecuted and we challenge Mr Pauw to demonstrate on what grounds he believes Gen Engelbrecht could be charged.

There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the generals was implicated in any of the murders which Col de Kock was found guilty of. In the Maponya case General le Roux was still a colonel and was refused amnesty along with Col de Kock.

However, as Mr Malan ably demonstrated in his minority finding, amnesty was wrongly denied in the Maponya case. Mr Pauw and any of his like-minded colleagues can quite safely read Mr Malan’s finding and perhaps get someone with a legal background to explain it to them.

Apparently the principle of equality before the law had to give way before the harsh manner in which prosecution of former members of the Security Branch was insisted upon. As any advocate experienced in criminal law will confirm, on the basis of common purpose there exists, purely from what can be seen, damning evidence to prosecute all those members of the NEC who were not granted amnesty. It is striking, however, that no one seems to insist that equality before the law should be maintained.

Lately the possible pardoning of Col de Eugene de Kock has been severely criticised and persons, who presumably haven’t the vaguest idea what Afrikaner character is all about, loudly condemned the move on behalf of the Afrikaner. They have even less insight into the disgusting and objectionable conditions Col de Kock was exposed to during his career in the police.

On various occasions he was decorated with medals for gallantry. During the negotiation process the members of the Vlakplaas Unit became an embarrassment for Mr de Klerk and his cabinet who were more concerned about winning favour with the ANC at that stage. As a result they had to get rid of the unit.  Members of the unit were treated like lepers and this undoubtedly caused much bitterness within their ranks.

While negotiations regarding amnesty were in progress and a general amnesty for all was being strongly considered, Judge Goldstone began to investigate cases against Col de Kock and other members of the Security Branch, which were associated with a political objective and committed in  the conflict of the past. Gen Johan van der Merwe approached Mr de Klerk and objected to this and called for the investigation to be stopped – but. Mr de Klerk wouldn’t hear of it indicating that it would give the impression that he was trying to cover up the atrocities of the Security Branch.

Members of the South African Police were expressly forbidden by Mr de Klerk to investigate similar charges against members of the ANC. Had the principal of equality before the law been adhered to, and law and justice prevailed, the investigation of all such cases would have been put on hold until there was clarity surrounding the matter of amnesty. Had this been the case, Col de Kock would, without doubt, have received a lighter sentence because he could only have been prosecuted for the Nelspruit incident and on the theft charges.  The judge would also have had the advantage of knowing material facts uncovered during the amnesty process, which would definitely have set the hearings in a different light.

In a letter to Rapport on 10 January 2010 Mr Koos van der Merwe, well known member of Parliament and one of the few remaining political leaders of the old dispensation who has     the courage of his convictions and who has the backbone to state his case in public, said as follows:

Die Redakteur

Rapport

Deur epos: rapport@rapport.co.za

Geagte redaksie

Na aanleiding van Jacques Pauw se ope brief aan president Zuma in Rapport van 10 deser, skryf ek hiermee ook ‘n ope brief aan die president. Mnr Pauw pleit emosioneel daarvoor dat president Zuma moet woordhou om “elkeen van die polisiemanne wat gemoor het, aan die pen te laat ry”. Mnr Pauw het die saak teen die polisie gestel en ek wil graag help om die saak teen ANC-moordenaars te stel. Audi alteram partem. Ek reageer nie op die Eugene de Kok-saga nie en stem met Rapport se mening daaroor saam.

Geagte president Zuma

Ek aanvaar dat u kennis geneem het van mnr Jacques Pauw se beroep op u in Rapport van 10 deser om woord te hou deur “elkeen van die polisiemanne wat gemoor het, aan die pen te laat ry”. U sou hierdie belofte in Februarie 1990 aan hom in Harare gemaak het.

Sou u aan mnr Pauw se oproep gehoor gee en opdrag gee dat vervolgings teen die polisie van die ou Suid-Afrika ingestel word, is die vraag of u dan ook al die ANC-lede wat moord en ander wreedhede gepleeg het, “aan die pen gaan laat ry”. Mnr Pauw is klaarblyklik nie gepla met die moorde en wreedhede wat die ANC gepleeg het nie.

As ons dan na 16 jaar nog nie die hoofstuk oor ons apartheidsverlede wil afsluit nie, dan kan u sekerlik in alle billikheid nie net een kant vervolg en die ander met moord laat wegkom nie. Vergun my asseblief die geleentheid om kortliks besonderhede van ANC-moorde en wreedhede te gee, wat tans nog ongestraf is.

Amnesty International(Sien Amnesty International 2 December 1992: All Index: AFR 53/27/92) het in 1992 ‘n 24 bladsy verdoemende verslag teen die ANC uitgebring en  bevind onder andere  –

“For a dozen years or more, prisoners of the ANC were subjected to torture, ill-treatment and executions. These abuses took place at military and prison camps run by the ANC in several African countries, notably Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda…”

Volgens Amnesty was die slagoffers hoofsaaklik lede van MK. Die ANC se verduideliking van die wreedhede is dat hulle agente van die Suid-Afrikaanse regering was. Die waarheid is dat baie van hulle inderdaad bona fide MK-lede was wat bloot oor toestande gekla en vrae oor ANC-beleid geopper het. “In either case,” bevind Amnesty, “torture and execution of prisoners cannot be justified”.

Amnesty beskryf die aaklige omstandighede van die ANC-aangehoudenes in die ANC-kampe. Aangehoudenes kon hulself en hul klere slegs eenkeer in ‘n aantal weke was. Net een drom water is gebruik en is van sel tot sel aangestuur sodat meeste selle ‘n drom “water” gekry het wat dik van die vuil was. Daar was geen kans om komberse te was nie, wat spoedig met luise besmet was. Sommige aangehoudenes het gekla dat hulle slegs een koppie drinkwater per dag gekry het. Siektes, soos malaria en maagkoors, het uitgebreek en daar was geen geneesheer beskikbaar nie en eerstehulp-personeel was in die algemeen onsimpatiek en het selfs aangehoudenes aangerand. Marteling en wrede aanrandings het algemeen voorgekom.

Aangesien mnr Pauw ‘n aantal voorbeelde genoem het, doen ek dieselfde.

  • MK-lede wat in Angola aangehou was, het verskeie kere in opstand gekom. In 1984 is ‘n opstand in die Pango-kamp onderdruk; die opstandelinge is aan bome vasgemaak; aangerand; geslaan en gesmelte plastiek is op hul naakte liggame gedrup. Sewe is aangekla en deur ‘n ANC-sekuriteitsbeamte verhoor; sonder regverteenwoordiging; is skuldig bevind en doodgeskiet.
  • In Nova Instalacao-kamp is aangehoudenes in donker, klam selle aangehou sonder komberse of matrasse en moes op betonvloere slaap. Toilette was geblokkeer en urine en ontlasting het in die selle ingevloei. Kos was bitter skaars, siektes volop en mediese hulp onverkrygbaar. Selby Msimang en Ben Thibane het gesterf.
  • Marteling het veral ook in die Revolutionary Council-gebou in Lusaka plaasgevind met knuppels, draad, tuinslange, doringdraad, staalpype, fietskettings, lippe is met brandende sigarette gebrand, testikels is met tange geknyp en elektriese skokke is toegedien. Soms is voetsole geslaan en sommige is in watergevulde selle aangehou. Sommige gevangenes is gedwing om op rooimier-neste te sit.
  • Thabo Twala is in Maart 1990 in “Sun City”-kamp in Lusaka doodgeslaan.
  • Senior MK-bevelvoerder Thami Zulu is in November 1989 dood nadat hy 14 maande lank aangehou is.
  • Mzwai Piliso, ‘n ANC-sekuriteitshoof, het erken dat gevangenes aangerand en op die voetsole geslaan is.
  • Amnesty se verslag bevat volle besonderhede van die ANC-wreedhede.

Daar is ook die boek MBOKODO van Mwezi Twala en Ed Benard wat in 1994 verkyn het. Twala is self in ANC-kampe aangehou en vertel van sy onmenslike ondervindings.

President Mandela het in 1991 ‘n Kommissie van Ondersoek aangestel om die beweerde wanpraktyke te ondersoek. Die Kommissie bevind dat daar wyd verspreide martelings en mishandling was en dat die gebeure nie versinsels van ANC-vyande is nie. Die Kommissie se beperkte mandaat het verhoed dat bevindings oor moord en “verdwynings” gemaak kon word. Sommige getuies is wreed aangetas, gebroke en hul lewens is verwoes deur armoede, onderbroke skoolgaan en ongeskiktheid.

Die Kommissie maak die belangrike aanbeveling dat ‘n werklik onafhanklike ondersoek ingestel word om die moorde en “verdwynings” te ondersoek, wat natuurlik nog nooit gebeur het nie.

Die Kommissie het ‘n vertroulike lys name aan president Mandela gegee van persone wat na bewering skuldig aan die wandade was, maar sê die lys moenie tot die genoemdes beperk word nie. Die ANC het nie die name bekend gemaak nie.

Geagte president, dan is daar die voorlegging wat mnr FW de Klerk in 1996 aan die WVK gemaak het waarin hy onder andere sê 505 mense is wreed met die sogenaamde halssnoer-metode om die lewens gebring.

Ek doen met eerbied aan die hand, mnr die president, dat as u sou besluit om mnr Pauw se advies te volg, u dan almal wat oortree het, laat vervolg. Ook die ANC-skuldiges.

U sien, niemand is nog ooit oor die moorde en wreedhede in die ANC-kampe vervolg nie. Niemand is ook nog ooit vir die onbeskryflik aaklige halssnoer-moorde vervolg nie.

Ten slotte, mnr die president, anders as mnr Pauw, doen ek ‘n beroep op u om die boek oor die verlede te sluit. Laat ons eerder die item “versoening” die ereplek heel bo aan ons sakelys gee.

Die uwe

JH VAN DER MERWE LP

The audi alteram partem rule, which is the foundation  of natural  justice, has never been applied to members of the Security Branch. This rule has been replaced by the rule: “The Law is determined by those who make the loudest noise and who talk and write the most and fill the empty spaces in, especially Afrikaans, newspapers” – and they are, without exception, those who for some or other reason have a grudge against the former Security Branch – people like messers Max du Preez, Jazques Pauw and other like-minded people who, in the past, leaned towards the ANC.  The time has come when the people of South Africa must take note of what really happened in the past and that past events be viewed with more emapthy and understanding for the sacrifices made by members of the Security Branch at great personal cost to themselves and their families. Should equality before the law be upheld and everybody to whom annesty was refused in the past be prosecuted and should any sense of law and justice remain, it should start with the members of the NEC of the ANC. The real issue is whether, by doing this, expression is given to the final paragraph of the Interem Constitution, which also forms the foundation for the present Constitution. A quotation from the closing paragraphs of the Interim Constitution reads as follows:

The adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear guilt and revenge.

These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu  but  not  for victimization.

In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past.

Apart from the fact that the one-sided prosecution of former members of the Security Branch will be a gross violation of the principle of equality before the law,  perhaps the most important principle of the Constitution, it will also be in glaring contrast to the provisions and essence of the concluding paragraph of the Interim Constitution and will once again flare up the hatred and discord of the past.  Is this the kind of justice and  future that some persons and members of the media envisaged for South Africa?

Seen as a whole and taking into account everything that has happened, it is a crying shame that Col de Kock hasn’t yet been pardoned.

Gaza’s torment, Israel’s crimes

By Noam Chomsky

At 3am Gaza time, July 9, in the midst of Israel’s latest exercise in savagery, I received a phone call from a young Palestinian journalist in Gaza. In the background, I could hear his infant child wailing, amidst the sounds of explosions and jet planes, targeting any civilian who moves, and homes as well. He just saw a friend of his in a car clearly marked “press” blown away. And he heard shrieks next door after an explosion but can’t go outside or he’ll be a likely target. This is a quiet neighborhood, no military targets – except Palestinians who are fair game for Israel’s high tech US-supplied military machine. He said that 70% of the ambulances have been destroyed, and that by then over 70 had been killed, and of the 300 or so wounded, about 2/3 women and children. Few Hamas activists have been hit – or rocket launching sites. Just the usual victims.

It is important to understand what life is like in Gaza when Israel’s behavior is “restrained,” in between the regular manufactured crises like this one. A good sense is given in a report to UNRWA by Mads Gilbert, the courageous and expert Norwegian physician who has worked extensively in Gaza, also throughout the vicious and murderous Cast Lead operation. In every respect, the situation is disastrous. Just keeping to children, Gilbert reports: “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage. Prevalence of anaemia in children <2yrs in Gaza is at 72.8%, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3%, 31.4%, 31.45% respectively.” And it gets worse as the report proceeds.

When Israel is on “good behavior,” more than two Palestinian children are killed every week, a pattern that goes back over 14 years. The underlying cause is the criminal occupation and the programs to reduce Palestinian life to bare survival in Gaza, while Palestinians are restricted to unviable cantons in the West Bank and Israel takes over what it wants, all in gross violation of international law and explicit Security Council resolutions, not to speak of minimal decency. And it will continue as long as it is supported by Washington and tolerated by Europe – to our everlasting shame.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse in conversation with Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher and political commentator. Chomsky is Emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT. Jan Nederveen Pieterse is professor of Global Studies and Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara.