Opinion – Page 6 – praag.org

In the shadow of the red buffoon

South Africa has just set a new record for itself in terms of public lunacy, which is not really surprising. Ever since the ANC took over they’ve outdone themselves many times in terms of foolishness.

This time it concerns the corpulent firebrand Julius Malema who made his first speech in the House of Parliament on the 18th of June. This brand new MP shuns the idea of wearing neckties or pressed suits, and prefers to be seen in red coveralls, effectively heightening his status as laughing stock of South Africa’s new ruling elite.

Julius Malema has already been much caricatured and lampooned by cartoonists and other public figures, even in his years as leader of the ANC Youth League. Regardless of his flair for red berets and coveralls, he certainly is not a man of great talent. In fact, if this one trick pony has any talent at all, it would be to rile up the masses of unskilled, ignorant and bloodthirsty peasants, something he appears to be quite good at. While on the one hand demanding that whites should speak an African language, he prefers to give his own speeches in English, probably due to his white English speechwriter’s inability write in Sotho – Malema’s mother tongue – or any other African language.

I recall an incident in primary school during those bad old days of white rule when our entire class had to roll up at the headmaster’s office for failing a Sotho test, which was a mandatory five year subject back then. Our welted derrières put a quick end to that apathy and our Sotho language skills took a turn for the better after that. No doubt, the erstwhile government did more for nation building than Malema would like to admit. In any event, had the African people produced more literature of a Goethe, Shakespeare or Proust, I’m sure the African languages would have enjoyed a higher standing with the world’s foremost literati, effectively making Malema redundant.

It would be important to mention that one would be deluded into believing that we are dealing with some brain-dead offshoot renegade. If that had been the case, Malema never would have made it past the ANC’s Hitlerjugend in the first place. There are a few clues indicating that his band of thugs are a front for a more grandiose Communist takeover, a second revolution in the making. If the study of history has any meaning at all, we should apply it here and now. Lest we forget that the other proud paragon of Communist scheming – the exalted Nelson Mandela – was secretly contrived as long ago as 1953, known amongst the initiates as “Plan M”.

As Franklin D Roosevelt once said, nothing in the world happens by coincidence…especially not when the far left is involved, one might add.

Firstly the level of organisation that his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party has built up in only a short year or two indicates that there’s more than meets the eye. A formal political party cannot be drawn if there is no clear goal or mission statement. Therefore, regardless of whether his parliamentary circus acts have any merit, his party has a clear mission known perhaps to only a small group of insiders. The other party members only follow orders and convey hot air to the public. The way in which he adorns himself with various luxury goods, the mass-produced red berets, his wide-ranging publicity and other party political paraphernalia implies that he has some financially capable sponsors. It would therefore be a mistake to assume that Malema simply is a nobody who became a somebody by chance. He is a leader of a radical political party because someone wants him to be there.

Secondly, it appears as if he has changed his tune since his entry into main stream politics. His anti-white vitriol is now replaced with mainly anti-capitalist outbursts, only occasionally showing his true colours by inconsequentially depicting whites as racists and thus deserving of contempt. He also did some window dressing by including some white useful idiots into his ranks to hide his true intentions. Anybody with a basic understanding of Marxist theory can see how his party has secretly been shaped by intellectuals leaning towards the left. Once again these schemers from the shadows employed their favourite Commie party trick, the Hegelian dialectical principle. In short, Hegelian dialectics imply that when there are two opposing forces, a thesis and an antithesis, they need to be fused together in a mutually beneficial synthesis.

In Malema’s case, he wants to eliminate the whites (thesis). This would obviously meet up with resistance by whites, not to mention possible legal sanctions (antithesis). The synthesis would then be to include some whites by insisting that they themselves would benefit from this agreement. Uncooperative whites would be branded as capitalists, land owners, colonials or similar terms implying that they have a choice in handing over their hard-earned belongings. This obfuscates the fact that their white skin is his real eyesore. In practice, the net outcome for honky is the same: they are to be rendered powerless and open to victimisation. By slightly covering up his true intentions makes it hard to legally pin them down and thus highly treacherous.

Thirdly, his experience with black youths at his former job has left him with the understanding that they are the ideal candidates to help foment any war or revolution that one sees fit. As Lenin once said, the best revolutionary is a youth devoid of morals. All party members should work together to make the young, both male and female, anti-social and immoral. The black youths from the Eastern Cape in the 1950’s to the Sharpeville massacre, the Soweto riots and the “Comrades” in the mid 1980’s have all demonstrated the validity of Lenin’s observation. It would not surprise if their next step would be to train dim-witted young whites alongside blacks in paramilitary training camps, a peculiarity perfectly in step with Communist principles.

Not to mention the obvious red colour of his attire, which has a clear allusion to Communism. Red being the colour of blood, anger, youth, war, revolution and comradeship.

Another one of Communism’s dirty tricks is to participate in illegal activities, but also have a front organisation that is legal. One should therefore operate on two bases, one legal and one illegal. The emotionally charged speeches in parliament demonstrating his passionate involvement with his cause while the number of whites murdered on farmsteads has increased dramatically since the World Cup Soccer event of 2010. In some instances it is known that young African marauders chanted “Viva Malema” when attacking a white farmer in his home.

Strictly speaking it may not be possible to infer a direct involvement between Malema’s EFF and the killing of whites, yet there doesn’t really need to be one. The firing up of basic emotions and filling the minds of young Africans with odious ideals would suffice to give this killing spree a life of its own. Recall how during the French Revolution the level of barbarism peaked with peasants mocking and dancing in the streets with beheaded corpses…and all the while longing for the Noble Savage ideals as laid down by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was in fact the real source of this revolution.

Understanding the Hegelian dialectic is of utmost importance to grasp the workings of the shadow government, which is toiling day and night to encroach on our freedoms and dignity. Having learned from Communist Eastern Europe and Asia, the world’s elite has found ways to refine their strategy for global control. Malema is only the umpteenth pawn in their game. Where he is today, the West would follow suit.

By that same operation, it would only be prudent to use internet and various social media to counteract these forces, and we have no time to waste.

Our survival depends on it.

Discrediting SA only benefits US

The downgrading of South Africa by rating agencies Standard & Poor’s and Fitch is a bitter pill to swallow, which has possibly severe consequences for our country.

Admittedly, there are significant negatives retarding the country’s growth potential. The government, organised labour and the oft intransigent business community require a lot of introspection. However, I fail to understand which entity benefits from a downgrade.

The result of punitive downgrades can only have the effect of being hugely detrimental for the targeted country and the biggest losers are the poorer sections of the community.

Downgrades will result in the depreciation of an already weak rand, products and services become more expensive, and a general malaise ensues as investors look elsewhere.

Conspiracy theories can be noisome and a distraction from reality, but my scepticism gives rise to a very real perception of an all-pervasive American influence.

We have observed over the years that when the US isn’t maintaining its international dominance by military adventurism, it uses its financial muscle to manipulate the global economy to its own selfish advantage.

That’s why no western country dares rocking the boat by criticising Uncle Sam.

The only entity that will benefit from a downgrade of South Africa is the US and the wealthy Western bloc who control the purse strings of world finance, because we will then be paying a lot more to them servicing our current and future borrowings.

The three major rating agencies are, unsurprisingly, American companies, and experience has shown that such businesses are invariably hugely partisan to the American national interest.

One can appreciate the need for rating agencies to regulate personal credit worthiness as companies need to know their lending for goods or services is safe.

But loans to parastatals like Transnet are safeguarded by the government’s guarantees, so one has to query the necessity to downgrade such state enterprises.

Also, no one realistically expects the government to default on loans in the current financial climate.

The ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) and the World Bank should rather worry about the European countries in real financial distress, the ones that have shown a worrying tendency of a possible default, such as the aptly termed Pigs, namely Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

In such instances, a financial watch alert could be sent out to international investors.

And the rating agencies could pay more attention to their host country’s $16 trillion national deficit.

Could the reason for the rating agencies’ downgrading of Brand SA be American displeasure of our fraternity with our Brics partners and the intention to establish a Brics Bank to finance economic growth in that club of nations? Is this a warning shot across our bows? Think about it.

America tolerated Saddam Hussein until he threatened to demand payment for Iraq’s vast oil production in alternate currencies to the American dollar.

The Americans then invaded his country under false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction and took control of the Iraqi oil fields.

Similarly with Muammar Gaddafi who was an avid proponent of breaking the international dominance of the dollar by establishing an African financial bloc with a regional AU bank. And as the Afrikaans saying goes: “Kyk hoe lyk hy nou” (loosely translated as “Look where he is now”.)

This is the glaring lesson – you mess with America’s hegemony at your peril.

As part of the global village, we must honour our international commitments, but we need to insist on mutual respect from the major Western powers and the establishment of a Development Bank will go a long way to preserving our domestic sovereignty from the bullying of American surrogate financial agencies.

Imogen Larsen

The truth on interracial rape in the United States

By Lawrence Auster

Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.

To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)

In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.

The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:

In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.

What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.

The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:

Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”

No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.

Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers a traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.

The true aims of the Terror War

By Chris Floyd.

The moral insanity of the Terror War continues to spawn more violence, more extremism, more repression, more injustice, and the total subversion of the “Western values,” all of which it is ostensibly designed to defend.

A new piece by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent provides a grimly illuminating look at this insanity in action on a specific front: Syria. It’s worth reading in full, but here is an excerpt:

The Syrian war has turned into a Syrian version of the Thirty Years War in Germany four centuries ago. Too many conflicts and too many players have become involved for any peace terms to be acceptable to all.. … It has become increasingly obvious over the past year that al-Qa’ida type movements, notably Isis, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, have come to dominate or can operate freely in a great swathe of territory across northern Iraq and northern Syria. This gives Isis a vast hinterland in which it can manoeuvre and fight on both sides of what is a largely nominal Syrian-Iraqi border. …

Europeans have not yet woken up to the significance of these anarchic zones opening up on the shores of the Mediterranean in Syria and Libya. This is because the threat has been largely abstract but it is getting less so with the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels by a French jihadi who had been in Syria. US and European politicians do not want to explain why, 13 years after 9/11, when the “war on terror” was supposedly launched, thousands of al-Qa’ida militants have been able to carve out enclaves so close to Europe.

US and European politicians won’t explain it because any honest explanation would expose the emptiness at the core of all their proffered reasons for the Terror War. They can’t explain it because the Terror War system — including the increasing militarization and repression in their own countries — has now become organizing principle of Western society. Or rather, it is the latest incarnation of what has been the guiding principle of Western society since World War II: organizing society and the economy around war, either active war or the ever-present “threat” of war (assiduously exaggerated — or even manufactured — at every turn). For government and big business, the immense power and profit and control they inevitably accrued from conducting total war on a global basis was far too enticing to give up once the war was over. The full mobilization of society’s resources for war simply carried on; indeed, was expanded and amplified.

However, the war also had a life-transforming impact on many of its survivors. The savagery and loss — and the class-effacing comradeship — they had experienced during the war imbued millions of people with a burning desire to change society for the better, to do away with the poverty and injustices of the past, and build a better, more decent, more peaceful world. This spirit is evoked with remarkable power in a new book, Harry’s Last Stand, by Harry Leslie Smith, a 91-year-old WII veteran enraged to see the neoliberal extremists that have held sway in the US and Britain for more than 30 years sweeping away the progress toward a more just society that his generation tried to build on the ruins of the war. (Some of Smith’s writing can be found here and here.)

Source: Empire Burlesque

A surge that threatens to transform America

Greeting law enforcers — Illegals greeting US law enforcers

There’s a surge on the American southern border. This is a surge far different from George W. Bush’s dispatch of armed might to win the day in Iraq. This is a mass movement of immigrants that threatens to transform the nation.

Children are walking hundreds of miles across a hostile environment with little more than the clothes on their backs, accompanied by neither a parent nor other responsible adult. The numbers of these children making the treacherous journey are much higher than the Obama administration has acknowledged, according to reporting by our Stephen Dinan. The deputy Border Patrol chief, Ronald Vitiello, said in an internal memo on May 30 that border agents caught 40,000 unaccompanied children last year. They expect to apprehend 90,000 children this year, and 142,000 in 2015.

Americans are a kind and generous people, and photographs of a sea of small, frightened and hungry faces in U.S. shelters along the southern border are enough to break a million hearts. President Obama, whatever he intended, is largely responsible. Lured by lax immigration enforcement and the promise of citizenship as “dreamers,” the Obama children’s hour is changing the mission at the border from ensuring security to providing emergency assistance.

Last week, the president declared the border an “urgent humanitarian situation.” He assigned the handling of the influx of children to Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which customarily provides relief following natural disasters. This is a disaster, sure enough, but it’s a man-made disaster.

Source: Washington Times

Israel no ‘oasis of human rights and equality’

Onlangse betoging in Johannesburg teen 'Apartheid-Israel' — Recent protest in Johannesburg against ‘Apartheid-Israel’ with photo of Mandela and Arafat

by Salomé Oosthuizen, Helderkruin, Johannesburg

The letter below was sent to Business Day newspaper in response to a letter to the same newspaper written by a Ms. Shapiro of Glenhazel, Johannesburg about Israel. In her letter she says, inter alia, that Israel is “a miracle that is a rebirth” and that the country is where “black and white walk hand in hand on the streets”. She also says the country is “an oasis of human rights and human equality amidst a sea of oppression and brutality”. Her letter gives the impression that Arabs and Jews are treated equally in Israel and that Arabs are laughing and singing and are “picnicking on the grass outside her apartment”. But let me first quote her letter in full:

FAADELAH Patel queries the definition of a Jewish state (Hamas has changed, Letters, May 12).

I have spent the past two weeks in Israel so will try to explain to her just what a Jewish state is. It is the state where Jews walk their streets proudly, celebrating the miracle that is the rebirth of their country.

It is the state where every Jew stands at attention for two minutes while the sirens drone on Yom Hashoah (the day commemorating the wilful slaughter of 6-million Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust).

It is the state where every citizen stands at attention for two minutes while sirens drone on Yom Hazikaron (the day commemorating the loss of Israeli life, Arab and Jew, both on the battlefield and as a result of terrorism). It is the state where businesses close on the Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and it’s the state where religious Jews do not need to search for kosher restaurants.

But it is also much else, and herein lies the true miracle of what Israel is.

It is the state where my family and I encountered a group of Arabs celebrating a birthday, laughing, singing and dancing on a boat ride on Lake Kinneret. We were the only Jews on this trip. It is the state where, when alighting from the boat, and going into a kosher restaurant in the harbour, we were followed by many of the self-same Arabs who had shared the boat ride with us.

It is the state where the lady in the queue in front of me in the clothing shop was an Arab dressed in a burqa, buying clothes for her grandchildren, as was I. It is the state where Arabs picnic on the grass outside my apartment.

It is the state where the pharmacist on my corner is an Arab woman, and black and white walk hand in hand on the streets.

And it is the state where Jew, Muslim and Christian worship freely and without fear the G-d of their choice.

And so Ms Patel, while Israel is and will remain the state of the Jewish people, it will always, because of, not in spite of, its Jewish character, be an oasis of human rights and human equality amidst a sea of oppression and brutality.

Monessa Shapiro
Glenhazel

Following is the letter I wrote to Business Day in response to this fairy tale. My letter was not printed by Business Day. My letter was based on verifiable facts, Ms. Shapiro’s letter was based on her rose-tinted impressions after a two week visit. What can we make of this omission? Why would the truth be hidden by Business Day while a glossy, fanciful story is printed as the truth about Israel?

We leave the reasons for this to the imagination of our friends and contacts. Please send this to your friends to show how the so-called press freedom of South Africa really operates. After all, my letter was based on facts from international newspapers, including the Israeli press. Why would Business Day want to hide the truth?

Dear Sir,

I refer to your correspondent’s letter “Defining a Jewish State” (BD 15 May) where a rose-tinted narrative attempts to explain to us how pleasant life is in Israel, and how well everyone – Jew and Arab, black and white – get along with each other. The letter is so far removed from reality that it is incumbent on anyone who knows history to rebut this fanciful tale.

“Black and white walk hand in hand on the streets” says your correspondent. Perhaps she saw an instance of this, but it certainly does not represent the true picture of race relations in Israel. On May 29 2012, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was adding African “infiltrators” to his list of threats to the Jewish homeland. He said he would build the world’s biggest detention centre and deport all those within, starting with the south Sudanese. (The Economist, June 2, 2012)

Demonstrators attacked African migrants in Tel Aviv in protest against refugees and asylum-seekers, indicating an increasingly volatile mood in Israel against blacks. (The Guardian 24.5.12) Miri Regev a member of the Israeli Parliament told an angry Israeli crowd that “the Sudanese are a cancer in our body”. A car containing Africans was attacked and shops serving the refugee community were looted. “African infiltrators are threatening the identity of the Jewish state”, said the prime minister. (The Guardian 20.5.12) “Israel belongs to the white man” declared Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai. (Haaretz newspaper 3.6.12). Israel introduced a law to detain illegal immigrants for up to 3 years, according to Haaretz.

Despite the happy hand-holding, Israel remains a racially-sensitive country. In an announcement from the Prime Minister’s office at the end of July 2013, Israel said it plans to introduce DNA testing to ensure that no non-Jews from Russia enter the country. (The Times of Israel, 29.7.13). In addition, in order to get married in Israel, applicants have to prove their Jewishness and this is done by DNA testing, Rabbi Naftali Schreiber told Haaretz (11 July 2013). This is the extent of the checks undertaken by the Jewish state to make sure that no Gentiles are allowed to marry Jews in their country.

Your correspondent says Israel is a miracle rebirth, but clearly prefers to ignore the ethnic cleansing that occurred when Israel drove thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 and afterwards, and that millions of these refugees still languish in camps throughout the Arab world. This is a fact of history. If Israelis believe it’s their “divine right” to occupy Israel, then do other nations not have divine rights or even civil rights? Israel snubs its nose at the world. Despite repeated international condemnation, including a UN General Assembly resolution and a ruling by the International Court of Justice, the population of Israel’s illegal settlements (on Palestinian territory) has grown by an average of 5% annually since 2001. That compares to an average growth of just 1,8% for the population of Israeli proper. Israel refuses to dismantle these settlements.

Israel has broken or ignored more UN resolutions than any other country in UN history. It is in violation of at least 102 of these resolutions, mainly to do with invasions of neighboring countries and the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Your correspondent says she saw many “happy Arabs, laughing and having picnics on the grass outside her apartment”. This could be because Israel’s largest theme park segregates Arabs and Jews. A posting on the Arab Israeli Balad party Facebook page reveals that Arab Israelis and Jews do not share the park on the same day. Schools are the same. Haaretz newspaper refers to this phenomenon in an article entitled “Schools for Jews and Arabs : separate but definitely not equal” as “plain segregation” in the school system. (Haaretz 25.6.12). In Jerusalem there is a separate “ditch” between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods (Haaretz 13.9.13). State-built housing complexes are routinely reserved for Jews only. (Financial Times 1.5.12)

It is ironic that those whites in the forefront of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa were overwhelmingly Jewish. Joe Slovo is credited with writing the Freedom Charter. What’s good for the goose is obviously not good for the gander. Israel is certainly not an “oasis of human rights and human equality” as your correspondent states. A cursory glance at the website of any Israeli newspaper will put paid to that mirage.

Salomé Oosthuizen, Helderkruin

BNP Paribas fine: are $10 billion too much?

Forget the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings and the elaborate preparations to celebrate later this week the liberation of France by its allies. Forget “Lafayette, nous sommes ici”, which General John Pershing is supposed to have said when the American Expeditionary Force showed up for what remained of the first world war, saluting the Frenchman who fought at George Washington’s side. Relations between France and America are bad and getting worse.

For that thank the whopping fine that American authorities are thought to be about to levy on BNP Paribas’s American arm for allegedly processing transactions with countries on America’s black list, such as Sudan and Iran. The precise amount of the fines, and the conditions attached to them, is still a matter of conjecture and probably negotiation. But whether or not the total fine tops $10 billion, as the Wall Street Journal reported possible last week, it will greatly exceed the €1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) that the bank said in February it had set aside to manage the sanctions-busting fall-out. Worse, it threatens to drive a coach and horses through its balance-sheet, just as the European Central Bank is about to assess eurozone banks’ robustness in an effort to flush out the bad news and boost bank lending to the “real” economy. BNP Paribas is France’s largest and Europe’s second-largest bank.

Unsurprisingly, the va et vient of top French financial figures crossing the Atlantic has been frenetic in recent weeks. Now the matter has become overtly political. Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, did not hide his irritation when he said on France 2 television today that the fine was “unreasonable”. On Thursday evening the D-Day festivities will provide an opportunity for men with whom bucks are supposed to stop to speak about the matter face to face. Presidents Barack Obama and François Hollande are to have dinner together on Thursday, though other acrimonious subjects—France’s determination to carry on with defence sales to Russia, America’s still-remembered reluctance to intervene in Syria—will not be lacking.

Many in France, and probably elsewhere in Europe, are beginning to think that America lets its own banks off rather lightly (though JPMorgan Chase might disagree) and cracks down on foreign ones instead to appease voters’ visceral dislike of finance. American rules often differ from European ones (they do on sanctions), criminalising behaviour that would be legal in a bank’s home country. The Front National, for one, has publicly backed BNP Paribas, urging the government to “defend and protect the interests of millions of French depositors”. Such views are not confined to the far-right.

Calmer heads, Mr Fabius among them, agree that banks doing business in America should abide by American laws. But punishment for infringing them cannot be capricious: it should be roughly proportionate to the harm caused, plus an extra slug for deterrence.

The most handed over by any of the clutch of non-US banks already fined for sanctions-busting was HSBC’s $1.9 billion in 2012. BNP is looking at paying a fine several times that amount, as well as pleading guilty to a felony (as Crédit Suisse had to do when it paid a $2.6 billion fine in May for helping Americans escape US taxes) and losing, presumably temporarily, the ability to clear dollar transactions for its customers, which means losing the customers. Against all that the heads that will have to roll in New York and the official gumshoe sitting watchfully at the heart of the bank’s operations there are mere bagatelles. – The Economist

Russia needs Marine Le Pen

A hundred years ago, France was one of major world powers. Today, this is a country, to which one can dictate their conditions, on how, for instance, to build relations with Russia. The French can not agree with it – they vote for Marine Le Pen. The leader of the National Front (NF) supports the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, but her reputation in Europe is the one of a “fascist.”

Today, Europe is ruled by Angela Merkel and the man in charge of the euro printing press – ECB President Mario Draghi. They turned national governments into the “puppets manipulated by the ECB, acting on the basis of a strange mixture of ideological dogmatism and interests of creditors,” Spanish sociologist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca said. It is unlikely that the role of Merkel and Draghi would become different, the analyst said. In Europe, though, there are real forces that do not like the transformation of their countries into the Fourth Reich. One of such countries is France, where the population lives to see centrist governments – right and left ones – replacing each other, but nothing changes in their life.

Against this background, the right party National Front chaired by Marine Le Pen won the elections to the European Parliament, having gained 25 percent of the vote which was twice the vote of the ruling Socialist Party. Today, Le Pen attracts a lot of media attention in the world, because she speaks for millions of French and could only care less about the rules of tolerance and political correctness. In a Sunday interview with Der Spiegel, Marine Le Pen dared to warn German Chancellor Angela Merkel that her short-sighted policy could lead to an explosion in the European Union, which Le Pen calls “the European Soviet Union.”

The policy of the chancellor is “positive for Germany, but, unfortunately, it causes damage to other countries,” said Marine Le Pen. “I am warning you: be careful, Mrs. Merkel. If you do not notice the suffering of the peoples of Europe, soon they will hate Germany.” “The EU is a natural disaster, an anti-democratic monster. It is in a state of economic war, and hostilities between the countries grow.” From the point of view of Marine Le Pen, the introduction of the joint European currency put an end to the sovereignty of countries. “Germany is the economic heart of the EU, but Germany must never forget that France remains its political heart,” said the politician. Obviously, there is a warning message that the collapse of the EU, from within, so to speak, may come from France.

In the same interview, Marine Le Pen accused the United States and the European Union of being involved in the crisis and bloodshed in Ukraine. The EU, on American orders, paint Russia in very unpleasant colors. “I stand for the immediate federalization of Ukraine. The European Union added its own fuel to the fire, when it decided to offer closer economic partnership to the state, where about a half of the population still looks to the East.” The leader of the National Front noted that “European politicians need to realize that the United States primarily pursues its own interests in Europe to expand its own presence in the world.”

“Putin was right when, in his speech on the accession of the Crimean peninsula, he said that the land, in terms of culture and history, was closer to Russia. He was right when he called the Russians and the Ukrainians brothers. The history of Ukraine and Russia is closely intertwined, but Kiev is closer to Western Europe,” summarized the NF leader.

Western analysts were puzzled by Marine’s arrogance, they even began to analyze the prospect of her victory at the next presidential election in France. The forecasts are not in her favor yet, but the key word here is “yet.”

Le Pen said that she would try to form a eurosceptic faction at the European Parliament. It will be a faction once it collects parties from seven different countries. They can be the British UKIP of Nigel Farage, right-wing parties from the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland and Hungary. Center-left parties can join the bloc too, for example, the German party Alternative for Germany (AFD), which sensationally won seven percent of the German electorate.

Frightened by the prospect of losing control, European bureaucrats launched persecution against Marine Le Pen. Last week, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called the National Front a fascist party. The West accuses Le Pen of anti-Semitism and racial hatred for her remarks about Muslims. The invasion of Muslims in France reminds her of the Nazi occupation of Germany, she said.

Noteworthy, France does not have Muslim historical roots, and the country must somehow defend itself against the loss of Christian cultural values. This sentiment is strong among the youth. According to a survey by Ipsos-Steria, not less than 30 percent of voters under the age of 35 supported the NF in the European vote; 37 unemployed individuals voted for the NF; the percentage among workers was 45.

Criticism comes not only on the line of the renunciation of European values, but also on the line of support to “Putin’s corrupt regime.” Farage of the UK joined Le Pen in calling Putin one of the world leaders, whom he “admires most.” “They (Marin and Farage) try to impose something on Europe, from which Ukraine is trying to escape,” wrote, for example, Anne Applebaum. Namely, it goes about corruption, media manipulation, ignoring boundaries and order. “Those, who do not have democracy, stability and European values, they want them desperately. And those, who do not appreciate them and perhaps are unable to assess them, they start to reach out to arsenic. The question is whether the rest can prevent them from swallowing a deadly dose,” concludes the author.

The elections to the European Parliament are a court of higher instance. “The whole of Europe is taking a step to the right in connection with two events – the economic crisis and changes in the ethnic composition, – Nikolai Mezhevich, Professor at the Faculty of International Relations of the St. Petersburg State University told Pravda.Ru. – The right become ultra, centrist forces – center-right, leftist – center-left and so on, because the European project is not experiencing its best times from an economic point of view and from the point of view of the changing ethnic composition.”

France is rapidly losing its ethnic solidity, which creates grounds for the popularity of ultra-right movements to grow. The same happens in other countries. The victory of the National Front is a third call to European political elites. They should adjust their policies, the expert said.

According to him, “ascribing Marine Le Pen to fascists is an exaggeration and distortion.” Extreme right forces are political realists in Europe. Le Pen supports Putin because she makes French national interests her first priority, just like Putin makes Russian national interests his first priority. “They are not some abstract postmodern trends of global peace, prosperity and disarmament. Le Pen also reasonably believes that the strong France must have strong friends, among which there was the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the 20th century,” said the expert.

“The National Front of Marine Le Pen is neither a fascist, nor a far-right party. This is just a right party,” historian and publicist Andrei Fursov told Pravda.Ru. “In today’s world, it is rather left-wing socialists that could be referred to as Nazis – they became velvet supporters of the genocide of humanity, working for transnational corporations. Those, who are referred to as rightist forces, are realists. They do not want Europe to lay down under the United States or the EU bureaucrats. Marine Le Pen and others of rightist beliefs express the point of view of those who are fed up with the artificial creation of the European Union. Moreover, Le Pen clearly points at those, who can be her ally against the backdrop of weakening Europe. Russia needs this support, and the number of such leaders will grow as the Europeans continue to show more and more indignation about the American course,” Fursov said.

Lyuba Lulko
Pravda.Ru

Towards the End of U.S. Propaganda

By Thierry Meyssan.

The Anglo-Saxon Empire is based on a century of propaganda. It managed to convince us that the United States is “the land of the free” and that it engaged in wars to defend its ideals. But the current crisis over Ukraine has changed the rules of the game. Now Washington and its allies are not the only speakers. Their lies are openly challenged by the government and media of another major state, Russia. In the era of satellites and the Internet, Anglo-Saxon propaganda no longer works.

Rulers have always tried to convince their subjects of the correctness of their actions, because crowds never follow men they know to be bad. The twentieth century has seen new ways of spreading ideas unburdened by the truth. Westerners trace modern propaganda to Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels. It is a way to forget that the art of distorting the perception of things was previously developed by Anglo-Saxons.

In 1916, the United Kingdom created Wellington House in London, followed by Crewe House. Simultaneously, the United States created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Considering the First World War was between masses and no longer between armies, these organizations tried to intoxicate their own people as well as those of their allies and those of their enemies with propaganda.

Modern propaganda started with the publication in London of the Bryce Report on German war crimes, which was translated into thirty languages. According to this document, the German army had raped thousands of women in Belgium. The British Army was thus fighting against barbarism. At the end of the First World War it was discovered that the entire report was a hoax, made up of false testimony with the help of journalists.

For his part, in the United States, George Creel invented a myth that World War II was a crusade by democracies for peace to protect the rights of humanity.

Historians have shown that World War I was responding to causes as deep and as profound, the most important being the competition between major powers to expand their colonial empires.

The British and U.S. bureaus were secret organizations working on behalf of their states. Unlike Leninist propaganda, which aspired to “reveal the truth” to the ignorant masses, the Anglo-Saxons sought to deceive in order to manipulate them. To this end, Anglo-Saxon state agencies had to hide and usurp false identities.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States neglected propaganda and favoured public relations. It was no longer a matter of lying, but of holding journalists’ hands that they may see only what they are shown. During the Kosovo war, NATO appealed to Alastair Campbell, an adviser to the British Prime Minister to tell the press an uplifting dayly story. While journalists reproduced this story, the Alliance could bomb “in peace.” The story telling was less designed to lie than to distract.

However, story telling is back with a vengeance with the September 11 attacks : it consisted of focussing public attention on the attacks on New York and Washington so that people would not perceive the military coup organized that day : the transfer of the executive powers of President Bush to a secret military unit and the house arrest of all parliamentarians. This intoxication was especially the work of Benjamin Rhodes, now an adviser to Barack Obama.

In subsequent years, the White House installed a system of propaganda with key allies (the UK, Canada , Australia and of course Israel). Every day these four governments received instructions or pre-written speeches from the Office of global media to justify the war in Iraq or vilify Iran. [1]

For the rapid spread of its lies since 1989, Washington relied on CNN. Over time, the United States created a cartel of satellite information (Al- Arabiya , Al- Jazeera , BBC , CNN, France 24 , Sky) channels. In 2011, during the bombing of Tripoli , NATO surprisingly convinced Libyans that they had lost the war and that it was useless to continue resisting. But in 2012, NATO failed to replicate this model and to convince the Syrians that their government would inevitably fall. This tactic failed because the Syrians were aware of the operation carried out by international television in Libya and were able to prepare [2]. And this failure marked the end of the hegemony of the “information”cartel.

The current crisis between Washington and Moscow about Ukraine has forced the Obama administration to review its system. Indeed, Washington is now no longer the sole speaker, it must contradict the Russian government and media accessible anywhere in the world via satellite and Internet. Secretary of State John Kerry appointed a new deputy for propaganda, in the person of the former editor of Time Magazine, Richard Stengel [3]. Stengel wrote Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, a total fabrication of the the life of the black “freedom fighter”. Before taking the oath on April 15, he was already occupying his office and, on March 5, sent a “fact sheet” to major Atlanticist media on “10 counter-truths” that Putin would have pronounced on the Ukraine [4]. He reoffended on April 13 with a second sheet with “10 other counter-truths ” [5].

What strikes one in reading this prose is its ineptitude. It aims to validate the official history of a revolution in Kiev and discredit the Russian discourse on the Nazi presence in the new government. However, we know today that in fact this “revolution” was indeed a coup staged by NATO and implemented by Poland and Israel by mixing recipes for “color revolutions” and the “Arab spring”. [6] Journalists who received these files and relayed them are fully aware of the recordings of telephone conversations between the Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and Minister for Estonian Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paets, on how Washington would change the regime at the expense of the European Union, and on the true identities of the Maidan snipers. In addition, they learned later revelations of the Polish weekly Nie about the training two months before the events of the Nazi rioters at the Academy of Polish police. As to denying the presence of Nazis in the new Ukrainian government, this amounts to a claim that the night is luminous. It is not necessary to go to Kiev but just to read the writings of the current ministers or listen to their remarks to see this is the case. [7]

Ultimately, if these arguments help give the illusion of a consensus in the large Atlanticist media, they have no chance of convincing curious citizens. Instead, it is so easy with the Internet to discover the deception that this type of manipulation cannot but further undermine Washington’s credibility.

The unanimity of the Atlanticist media on September 11 helped convince international public opinion, but the work done by many journalists and citizens, of which I was the precursor, showed the physical impossibility of the official version. Thirteen years later, hundreds of millions of people have become aware of these lies. This process will only grow with the new propaganda devices manipulated by the US. In short, all those who relay the arguments of the White House , including the governments and media of NATO, destroy their own credibility.

Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes , John Kerry and Richard Stengel act only in the short term. Their propaganda convinces the masses for only a few weeks and then helps create revulsion when the people understand they are being manipulated. Unwittingly, they undermine the credibility of the state institutions of NATO who consciously relay them. They forget that the propaganda of the twentieth century could only succeed because the world was divided into blocks that did not communicate with one another, and this monolithic principle is incompatible with the new means of communication.

The crisis in Ukraine is not over, but it has already profoundly changed the world : by publicly contradicting the President of the United States, Vladimir Putin has taken a step that henceforth prevents the success of U.S. propaganda.

French intellectual, specializing in international relations in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.

Translation – Roger Lagassé – Source – Al-Watan (Syria)

[1] “Un réseau militaire d’intoxication” , Voltaire Network, 8 December 2003.

[2] “NATO preparing vast disinformation campaign”, by Thierry Meyssan, Komsomolskaya Pravda , Voltaire Network, 10 June 2012.

[3] “TIME Magazine Managing Editor becomes new US propaganda chief”, Voltaire Network , 16 April 2014.

[4] “State Department Fact Sheet on Putin’s False Claims About Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 5 March 2014.

[5] “Media Note by the U.S. Departement of State on Russian Support for Destabilization of Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 13 April 2014.

[6] “Ukraine : la Pologne avait formé les putschistes deux mois à l’avance”, by Thierry Meyssan , Réseau Voltaire, 17 April 2014 .

[7] “Who are the Nazis in the Ukrainian government ?”, By Thierry Meyssan , Voltaire Network , 2 March 2014.

How empires collapse

By Charles Hugh Smith.

This is how empires collapse: one complicit participant at a time.

Before an empire collapses, it first erodes from within. The collapse may appear sudden, but the processes of internal rot hollowed out the resilience, resolve, purpose and vitality of the empire long before its final implosion.

What are these processes of internal rot? Here are a few of the most pervasive and destructive forces of internal corrosion:

1. Each institution within the system loses sight of its original purpose of serving the populace and becomes self-serving. This erosion of common purpose serving the common good is so gradual that participants forget there was a time when the focus wasn’t on gaming the system to avoid work and accountability but serving the common good.

2. The corrupt Status Quo corrupts every individual who works within the system.Once an institution loses its original purpose and becomes self-serving, everyone within either seeks to maximize their own personal share of the swag and minimize their accountability, or they are forced out as a potentially dangerous uncorrupted insider.

The justification is always the same: everybody else is getting away with it, why shouldn’t I? Empires decline one corruptible individual at a time.

3. Self-serving institutions select sociopathic leaders whose skills are not competency or leadership but conning others into believing the institution is functioning optimally when in reality it is faltering/failing.

The late Roman Empire offers a fine example: entire Army legions in the hinterlands were listed as full-strength on the official rolls in Rome and payroll was issued accordingly, but the legions only existed on paper: corrupt officials pocketed the payroll for phantom legions.

Self-serving institutions reward con-artists in leadership roles because only con-artists can mask the internal rot with happy-story PR and get away with it.

4. The institutional memory rewards conserving the existing Status Quo and punishes innovation. Innovation necessarily entails risk, and those busy feathering their own nests (i.e. accepting money for phantom work, phantom legions, etc.) have no desire to place their share of the swag at risk just to improve sagging output and accountability.

So reforms and innovations that might salvage the institution are shelved or buried.

5. As the sunk costs of the subsystems increase, the institutional resistance to new technologies and processes increases accordingly. Those manufacturing steam locomotives in the early 20th century had an enormous amount of capital and institutional knowledge sunk in their factories. Tossing all of that out to invest in building diesel-electric locomotives that were much more efficient than the old-tech steam locomotives made little sense to those looking at sunk costs.
As a result, the steam locomotive manufacturers clung to the old ways and went out of business. The sunk costs of empire are enormous, as is the internal resistance to change.

6. Institutional memory and knowledge support “doing more of what worked in the past” even when it is clearly failing. I refer to this institutional risk-avoidance and lack of imagination as doing more of what has failed spectacularly.

Inept leadership keeps doing more of what once worked, even when it is clearly failing, in effect ignoring real-world feedback in favor of magical-thinking. The Federal Reserve is an excellent example.

7. These dynamics of eroding accountability, effectiveness and purpose lead to systemic diminishing returns. Each failing institution now needs more money to sustain its operations, as inefficiencies, corruption and incompetence reduce output while dramatically raising costs (phantom legions still get paid).

8. Incompetence is rewarded and competence punished. The classic example of this was “Good job, Brownie:” cronies and con-artists are elevated to leadership roles to reward loyalty and the ability to mask the rot with good PR. Serving the common good is set aside as sychophancy (obedient flattery) to incompetent leaders is rewarded and real competence is punished as a threat to the self-serving leadership.

9. As returns diminish and costs rise, systemic fragility increases. This can be illustrated as a rising wedge: as output declines and costs rise, the break-even point keeps edging higher, until even a modest reduction of input (revenue, energy, etc.) causes the system to break down:

A modern-day example is oil-exporting states that have bought the complicity of their citizenry with generous welfare benefits and subsidies. As their populations and welfare benefits keep rising, the revenues they need to keep the system going require an ever-higher price of oil. Should the price of oil decline, these regimes will be unable to fund their welfare. With the social contract broken, there is nothing left to stem the tide of revolt.

10. Economies of scale no longer generate returns. In the good old days, stretching out supply lines to reach lower-cost suppliers and digitizing management reaped huge gains in productivity. Now that the scale of enterprise is global, the gains from economies of scale have faltered and the high overhead costs of maintaining this vast managerial infrastructure have become a drain.

11. Redundancy is sacrificed to preserve a corrupt and failing core. Rather than demand sacrifices of the Roman Elites and the entertainment-addicted bread-and-circus masses to maintain the forces protecting the Imperial borders, late-Roman Empire leaders eliminated defense-in-depth (redundancy). This left the borders thinly defended. With no legions in reserve, an invasion could no longer be stopped without mobilizing the entire border defense, in effect leaving huge swaths of the border undefended to push back the invaders.

Phantom legions line the pockets of insiders and cronies while creating a useful illusion of stability and strength.

12. The feedback from those tasked with doing the real work of the Empire is ignored as Elites and vested interests dominate decision-making. As I noted yesterday in The Political Poison of Vested Interests, when this bottoms-up feedback is tossed out, ignored or marginalized, all decisions are necessarily unwise because they are no longer grounded in the consequences experienced by the 95% doing the real work.

This lack of feedback from the bottom 95% is captured by the expression “Let them eat cake.” (Though attributed to Marie Antoinette, there is no evidence that she actually said Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.)

The point is that decisions made with no feedback from the real-world of the bottom 95%, that is, decisions made solely in response to the demands of cronies, vested interests and various elites, are intrinsically unsound and doomed to fail catastrophically.

That’s how empires collapse: one corrupted, self-serving individual at a time, gaming one corrupted, self-serving institution or another; it no longer matters which one because they’re all equally compromised. It’s not just the border legions that are phantom; the entire stability and strength of the empire is phantom. The uncorruptible and competent are banished or punished, and the corrupt, self-serving and inept are lavished with treasure.

This is how empires collapse: one complicit participant at a time

Source: oftwominds.com

Anglican Church supports war crimes… again

Not only is Middle East “Peace Envoy”, Catholic convert and Butcher of Baghdad, Tony Blair gunning for another overthrow and mass destruction in Syria, he has recruited the son of an Archbishop to help him.

Not any old Archbishop either. Blair’s latest recruit is son of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England, who heads both the Church of England and the eighty million member Anglican Communion worldwide.

Blair has given Peter Welby “a key role” in his mega-funded Faith Foundation as “a researcher for a new website … that will analyse the role of religion in conflicts around the world.” Perhaps enjoining, as George W. Bush put it, a “Crusade” against majority Muslim countries might be an angle worth pursuing.

Twenty three year old Welby is clearly a faithful Blairite, having already hawkishly warned of President Putin’s “annexation” of the Crimea and that the British Government: “would be wise to consider reversing some defence cuts …” As a “researcher” he clearly has a bit to learn, since the Crimean referendum with a 83.1% turn out and near 97% vote to cede to Russia had clearly passed him by.

He will surely fit well in his new post since the above exhibits a splendidly Blair-type mindset and abandonment scrutiny of facts – like weapons of mass destruction that can be unleashed “in forty five minutes.”

However, it is with Syria that he follows Blair’s line to the letter. The “Peace Envoy” embraces wars of aggression as a fish takes to proverbial water – courageously always traveling with an army of armed protection officers funded by the un-consulted British tax payer.

Blair’s determination to do for Syria what he did for Iraq is a litany, but here are a random four: Legality ditched again, he declared of President Assad: “He’s got to go …” (CBS 19th April 2012.)

“We’ve got to look very carefully to what more we can do to ratchet up the pressure on Assad … “ (BBC “Today” Programme, 17th September 2012.)

There would be: “ ‘catastrophic consequences’ if the West fails to arm Syrian rebels to defeat the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.” (Daily Telegraph 19th June 2013.) Blair either missed, or is cheering on, the unspeakable atrocities being committed by the (Western paid) foreign insurgents and terrorist groups.

As this was being written he popped up on the BBC’s “Today” Programme again, loftily attempting to justify the catastrophes of Afghanistan and Iraq in his “I’d do it all again” mode and saying of Syria that the strong opposition of the British people (he didn’t mention the “No” vote in Parliament) did not “invalidate” the need for action. As Stop the War put it: “We should invade Syria whether the British public want it or not.”

The cynic might ponder on whether, for a man for whom precious human lives lost in orders of magnitude are clearly very cheap indeed, there is an element of pay-back involved.

At the beginning of November 2001, three weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan, Blair went to visit President Assad: “the first ever visit to Damascus by a British leader, to enlist support for the bombing campaign. Instead he was subjected to a recital of … Western failures in the Middle East.”

Rather than gather support for the bombing, he “was forced to listen as the Syrian President heaped criticism on the killing of Afghan civilians.”

“We cannot accept what we see on television, the killing of innocent civilians, hundreds now dying every day”, Assad told Blair, adding that: “We are always against war” – and moreover, the West also placed little value on Arab lives.

Whatever Blair’s motives, Peter Welby is firmly on side. On 31st March he wrote, in an article for the Faith Foundation’s website: “Last week I went to a presentation by Emile Hokayem hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.” In a “fascinating” talk: “Hokayem argued that engagement must be with [jihadist] rebels more favourable to Western interests …”

In a ramble about the complexities of terrorist groups in Iraq and their travels between Iraq and Syria, there is no mention that they were never there before in secular Iraq and Syria and, as mentioned previously, literally came in with Bush and Blair’s tanks, in their illegal invasion, which also left all borders wide open for all comers.

Hokayem, writes Welby unquestioningly, thought Assad’s victory “improbable”, but his money is basically on the thugs and: “peace is unlikely until one group is sufficiently dominant to take the others with it.”

No mention of countless beheadings, including children, and of the numerous, unspeakable medieval atrocities meted out by these demonic, illegal immigrants.

In fact, even the Washington Post is of the view that President Assad’s tide is turning and that: “He is in a stronger position than ever before to quell the rebellion” and indeed, to win a third term in the upcoming elections.

One man is incandescent about the appointment of Peter Welby and has written to his father in no uncertain terms.

Nicholas Wood is author of “War Crime or Just War? The Case Against Blair”, a meticulous legal compilation of just that. Wood, is also Secretary of the Blair War Crimes Foundation. He writes:

The Archbishop of Canterbury.
Canterbury Cathedral

Dear Sir,

I enclose my book on Blair, and also a letter to the Prime Minister on his criminality. Though quite why I bother to pay the postage I don’t know.

I cannot comprehend that you are someone who is supposed to think every day of moral values but not realise that Blair is a very dangerous psychopath, who, as well as causing untold devastation and misery in Iraq, wishes to extend that violence into Syria and Iran.

If you read page 570 of his autobiography you might possibly see what I mean.

Referring to Blair’s advisory position to various heads of State, including Uzbekistan, of which former Ambassador Craig Murray blew the whistle on mind numbing torture, he states:

Your son will be benefiting, indirectly, of course, from money obtained from despots who boil their victims. This, under the guise of piety.

I was brought up as a child, a long time ago, to think of Thomas A Becket as a Saint, who resisted the power of a military state, and paid the price with his life. I cannot see you doing that.

I also was brought up to worship the medieval beauty of Canterbury, it’s stones and it’s stained glass. If stones could weep, they would be weeping now.

Yours faithfully, Nicholas Wood, MA.

Page 570 of Blair’s autobiography to which Wood refers contains a phrase which should surely grab the attention of any psychiatrist:

I had a vision for Britain. All the way I had believed I could and would persuade the country it was the right choice, the modern way, bigger than Iraq, bigger than the American Alliance, bigger than any one thing; a complete vision of where we should be in the early twenty first century; about how we finally overcome the greatness of our history to discover the full potential of our future.

“Bigger than Iraq”? The nearing two million deaths since 2003? The five million orphans, million widows. five million displaced? On to Syria, Iran?

Nicholas Wood says in succinct understatement:

I suggest that such a vision should be restrained before it is emulated and allowed free rein.

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books, she has also been Senior Researcher for two Award winning documentaries on Iraq

73% of charter schools in New York are ‘segregated’

Not too many white faces here... — Not too many white faces here…

by Jason L. Riley, The Wall Street Journal

A new report on New York City public charter schools faults them for being too segregated. But what’s more important, the racial composition of a school’s student body or whether children in the school are learning?

According to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, which produced the study, just 8 percent of New York City charter schools are considered multiracial, versus a New York City average of 14.5 percent. The authors, John Kucsera and Gary Orfield, conclude that some 73 percent of the city’s charters are “apartheid schools” where fewer than 1 percent of students are white. “Charter schools take the metro’s segregation to an extreme,” they write.

Charter critics pretend that something invidious is going on, but the reality is that charter operators consciously locate in slums and ghettoes to offer poor minorities better school choices. The racial makeup reflects the neighborhood, not some racist conspiracy. Moreover, public charter schools in New York City (and elsewhere) typically outperform the surrounding traditional public schools, and some are among the highest-performing schools in the state. This belies the notion that black children must be sitting next to white children in order to learn.

The political left has a longstanding obsession with the racial makeup of schools. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision introduced the notion that “separate” was inherently “unequal.” Ever since, and despite the fact that high-quality all-black schools have proliferated, the liberals have placed racial parity above all other concerns. The Obama Justice Department is currently trying to shut down a voucher program in Louisiana by arguing that it will harm desegregation efforts.

In other words, liberal policy makers would relegate disadvantaged black kids to inferior schools for esthetic reasons. Of course, polls over the decades have consistently shown that black parents care most about having access to a quality school in their neighborhood. The racial composition of that school is a secondary concern at best.

Obama’s top 10 greatest achievements

10. He strengthened international friendship and cooperation between patriots who cling to their guns, religion and integrity.

9. The increased international awareness of government spying results from violation of human rights and privacy laws committed by the Obama administration.

8. By constantly insulting our values and stealing our liberties he made us realise how much we care for our faith and tradition. The threats to our lifestyle are forcing us to become more determined and forceful.

7. He helped humanity become aware of devaluation of Nobel Peace Prize.

6. Thanks to the overdose of gay propaganda he established a solid base on which to build gay bashing.

Side effect 1: Gushing over the openly gay couples, yet refusing comments on his own ambiguous past associations he facilitated the spread of rumours about his own sexuality.

Side effect 2: He makes Vladimir Putin look even more macho.

5. His perpetual boasting and phantasms of omnipotence shifted into a very efficient public awareness campaign against malignant narcissism. Obama helped to persuade not only mental health professionals but ordinary citizens that Narcissistic Personality Disorder should not disappear from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

4. Bowing to foreign leaders, making confusing and exceedingly arrogant statements he managed to convince millions of people around the world that we need to put the genie back into the bottle. Obama caused that entire nations have a more suspicious and hostile attitude to Islam and we will think twice before electing officials who act like servants of a foreign supremacy.

3. He proved that wussy bureaucrats make bad military leaders and are harmful to our security interests. The Commander in Chief should both earn and deserve this honourable title. By neglecting veterans and persecuting soldiers he made us aware how much we respect them and how much we owe them.

2. He excavated dangerous ideologies; reminding us they proved harmful to humanity and made us want to eradicate them. He brought to light the grotesque features of political correctness and we are less likely to fall into the trap of laxity and permissiveness.

1. As a result of his disastrous leadership we came to the realisation that an incompetent and socially irresponsible president should be dismissed like any bad manager. He reminded us that we have the right to demand accountability from our leaders, and an obligation to limit their power if the prime duty to serve and protect turns into a licence to harm.

Side effect 1: Association with Obama brought his European allies record unpopularity and riots.

Side effect 2: We love Donald Trump’s: “You are fired!”

Source: Pravda

National sovereignty inconsistent with US dollar system

From the moment that Washington launched its orchestrated coup in Kiev, Washington has been accusing Russia of “intervening in Ukraine.” This propaganda ploy succeeded. The Western presstitute media reported (nonexistent) Russian intervention to the exclusion of coverage of Washington’s obvious intervention.

Having falsely accused Russia of invading Crimea, the Obama regime now demands that Russia interfere in Crimea and prevent the referendum set for next Sunday. Unless Russia uses force to prevent the people of Crimea from exercising their right of self-determination, John Kerry declared that the Obama regime will not discuss the Ukrainian situation with Russia.

So, Kerry has given Russia the green light to send in troops to prevent Crimean self-determination.

The presstitute Western media has not noticed that out of one corner of his mouth Kerry denounces Russia for intervening and out of the other corner of his mouth Kerry demands that Russia intervene in behalf of Washington’s interest and suppress Crimean self-determination.

What is the point of such an absurd demand on Russia?

The Obama regime claims that the Crimean vote is not legal, because all of Ukraine is not voting on Crimea’s future. When Washington stole Kosovo from Serbia, Washington did not allow Serbia to vote on Kosovo secession. In the upcoming Scottish vote on whether to secede from the UK, only the Scottish are voting, not the British population. But these normal processes established in international law cannot be permitted to Crimeans, because the vote will not support Washington’s agenda.

Clearly, an Obama regime this shameless has no shame.

The neoconservative warmongers who control the Obama regime are boasting that unless Russia prevents Crimean self-determination, Washington will use sanctions to “badly damage the Russian economy.”

Sanctions are likely to backfire. Sanctions would damage economies of Washington’s NATO puppet states, making them think again about providing cover for Washington’s aggressive words and deeds. It is Europe that will pay for Washington’s aggressive actions.

Sanctions are likely to speed up the implementation of the BRICS negotiations to leave the dollar system and settle their international accounts in their own currencies. All countries with financial and economic links to the West can be intimidated, punished, and destabilized by Washington. National sovereignty is inconsistent with being part of the US dollar system.

From Washington’s standpoint, the importance of sanctions is not any economic effects.

The importance is the propaganda advantage of portraying Russia as an offending party who is punished by Washington. Not only does this propaganda put Russia in the wrong, it also portrays Russia as subservient to Washington.

The Crimean government is actually elected, whereas the Washington-installed government in Kiev is not. Here is a report on Global Research about the “democrats” who comprise the unelected government in Kiev:

During the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, Washington has established that whatever serves Washington’s agenda is legal. Laws inconsistent with Washington’s agenda are simply not applicable. They are dead letter laws. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that in violation of US law that prohibits giving financial assistance to governments whose leaders come to power via coup or other illegal means, Washington is offering its stooges in Kiev $1 billion to help the coup government get up and running.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest books are, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and How America Was Lost.