Think of the global economy (which exploits the resources of the land causing pollution etc) as the casino. Do people in Iraq, Africa, Papua New Guinea, Syria, etc etc etc really want an American (multinational) casino?

Sure, the pit boss will be an Iraqi (who gets paid handsomely) to provide of the image that the casino is a legitimate government, but the people know better.

Especially considering the casino is the nicest building in town (providing jobs!, they claim); yet the people keep getting poorer and the casino exploits all the local resources to exist.

Not only that, now that the casino controls the region, other foreign businesses enter casino-terrority knowing nothing about the original culture or land. And when people try to resist (push the casino out) the U.S. media calls them “terrorists” and promotes the idea that the pit boss is a democratic hero.

Sounds crazy, right? I’d agree.

This represents the map of Iraq before and after the point when you think history began. Contrary to popular belief, humanity exists all over Earth, not just in the United States…

from http://i.imgur.com/netTF.jpg

Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset.

In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs. Many of its activists are based in Iraqi Kurdistan where Mossad has a substantial presence. It does the training there, selects the targets in Iran and provides the bombs and other weapons, and MKO members do the actual killing.

It’s reasonable to presume that Mossad is more comfortable operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan with Iranian MKO assets than it was when its own agents were posing as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization, to carry out assassinations and attacks on installations and facilities in Iran.

Some of the essence of that Israeli false flag operation has been revealed by Mark Perry in an article for Foreign Policy. His report is based on information he acquired about memos buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services which were written in the last years of President George “Dubya” Bush’s administration, plus conversations he had with two currently serving U.S. intelligence officials and four retired intelligence officers who worked for the CIA or monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

According to Perry’s sources, one of whom has seen the memos, the Mossad agents who were posing as CIA agents to recruit Jundallah operatives had American passports and were “flush” with American dollars.

The memos tell the story of an investigation which debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah. The investigation apparently showed that the U.S. “had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah.”

The memos also gave details of CIA field reports on Mossad’s recruitment of Jundallah operatives, mainly in London and “under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.”

Perry’s sources confessed to being “stunned by the brazenness of Mossad’s efforts.” And one of them said:

It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn about what we thought.

I take issue with the first part of that statement. What is really amazing is not what Mossad and almost of Israel’s political and military leaders think they can get away with, but what they KNOW they can get away with because of the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress on all matters relating to policy for the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel.

And that in turn is why, generally speaking, Israel’s leaders don’t give a damn about what American administrations think, They come and go but the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress is a permanent fixture. (In private conversation with General Moshe Dayan when he was Israel’s defence minister, I once summed up Israel’s unspeakable but implicit message to the governments of the world in the following way. “We know we shouldn’t have done this but we’ve done it because we also know there’s nothing you can do about it.” Dayan didn’t comment but the look on his face said something like, “You’re right but I’m not going to say so.”)

Though Israel doesn’t usually comment on reports about Mossad’s activities, a senior government spokesman described Perry’s account of Mossad agents posing as CIA agents as “absolute nonsense.” As I was reading the denial I used a Jimmy Carter expression: “BS” (Bull Shit).

After the latest assassination of an Iranian scientist, Rick Santorum, the right-wing religious joker in the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, said this: “On occasions scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

A different view was offered by Jewish American journalist Richard Silverstein. For his weblog Tikun Olam he wrote this:

These are shameful acts by a shameful Israeli government exploiting Iranian terrorists for their own ends.  I find it disgusting that Israel can get away with such acts with impunity.

Disgusting it certainly is but there’s no mystery about why Israel can commit crimes including acts of naked state terrorism without fear of being called and held to account for them by the UN Security Council. When after the 1967 war it refused to label the Zionist state as the aggressor and require it to withdraw from the newly occupied Arab lands without conditions, it effectively created, at the insistence of the U.S., two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world minus Israel and the other exclusively for Israel. That was the birth of the double standard which is the cancer at the heart of Western foreign policy.

Now let’s pause for a moment to imagine what the response would have been if Iranian agents or assets had assassinated an Israeli scientist (just one) in the Zionist state.

Led by America, Western governments would have bellowed their condemnation of the terrorism and pledged full support for all efforts to hunt the terrorists down and bring them to justice. And they would, of course, have blamed the government of Iran even if there was not one shred of evidence of its authorization. The assassination of an Israeli scientist might even have tipped the Washington decision-making balance in favour of the mad men who want the U.S. either to attack Iran or give Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the green light to go, with or without nuclear tipped, bunker-busting bombs.

And Israel? How would it have responded? With or without a green light from President Obama it almost certainly would have bombed selected targets in Iran, even if doing so was likely to set the region on fire and do vast damage to Western interests in the region and the whole Muslim world. (As I note in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, in the chapter headed “The Liberty Affair – ‘Pure Murder’ on a ‘Great Day’,” the lesson of the cold-blooded Israeli attack on the American spy ship was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way).

Now… At the risk of inviting a charge from some and perhaps many readers that I am naive in the extreme, I have to say I am inclined to the view that the Obama administration was telling the truth when it strongly denied any American complicity in the latest Israeli/MKO assassination. The New York Times put it this way:

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity… ‘The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,’ said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, categorically denying any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.

The NYT report then quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying this:

We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbours and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behaviour, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,

That in my opinion is code for something very like: “This administration is not completely mad. We know that an attack on Iran could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world. Despite the mounting and awesome pressure we are under from Netanyahu and those who peddle his propaganda here in America, we know that the nuclear problem with Iran must be solved by jaw-jaw and not war-war.”

How catastrophic the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran could be for the region and the world has been put into words by Philip Giraldi, currently the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. The scenario he presents under the headline “What War With Iran Might Look Like” takes us all the way to World War III.

So I believe NYT reporter Scott Shane was on the right track when he wrote that the statements by U.S. officials appeared to reflect serious concern about the (Israeli/MKO) assassinations of Iranian scientists because they could “backfire” and make Iran’s leaders less willing to talk. And, I add, more willing to give in to those forces in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards in particular, who might well be saying that Iran must possess nuclear weapons for deterrence.

My guess is that U.S. officials are also concerned by the possibility that more assassinations could provoke an Iranian response which would give Israel the pretext to attack. (It’s by no means impossible that the main purpose of the assassinations is to provoke an Iranian response to give Israel the pretext for an attack).

That brings me to my own speculation about what is really going on behind closed doors in the Obama administration. At executive level it is, I think, in a state of something close to total panic about what to do to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran if Netanyahu is not bluffing.

My reading of Obama’s latest turn of the sanctions screw on Iran is that it’s his way of not only putting more pressure on the ruling mullahs. It’s also his way of saying to Netanyahu something like, “Give me more time to solve the Iranian nuclear problem by all means other than war.”

Obama needs more time not only to try to get serious and substantive talks with Iran going but also to establish beyond any doubt whether Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities are a bluff (to put pressure on the U.S.) or not. In an article for Ha’aretz under the headline “Israel and U.S. at odds over timetables and red lines for Iran,” Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel wrote:

Do Barak and Netanyahu really intend to attack on their own, or is Israel only trying to prod the West into more decisive action? That is the million-dollar question.  It has been discussed intermittently for the past three years and it seems that Washington does not have a satisfactory answer to it.

In a few days time General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel for talks with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Chief of Staff Lt. General Benny Gantz and other senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials.

Dempsey knows that when U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Netanyahu and Barak last November, they refused to give him a commitment that Israel would not attack Iran without informing America of its intention to do so.

If I am right about the panic in the Obama administration, my guess is that Dempsey will try to obtain the commitment Panetta failed to get. What if Dempsey does not succeed?

My guess is that whatever he may say in public after his meetings, Dempsey will tell the Israelis in private that if they go to war with Iran they will be on their own. The U.S., I can almost hear him saying, will not become engaged except to defend its own national interests if and as necessary “because the American people, most of them, are tired of war.” He could add “and we don’t have the money to pay for it.”

An interesting question for the coming days is something like this: What if Dempsey returns to Washington without being able to give behind-closed-doors assurance that Israel (despite what it might continue to say to the contrary in public for propaganda purposes) will not go it alone with an attack Iran?

In theory there is a card President Obama could play. He could put Israel on public notice that if it attacked Iran and if as a consequence America’s own bests interests were harmed, the U.S. would have to rethink its relationship with the “Jewish state”. A statement to that effect would imply that the days of America’s unconditional support for Israel right or wrong could be coming to an end.

But that’s not a statement Obama could make this side of November’s presidential election. So if Netanyahu is not bluffing, and if he was determined to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before November’s election, there’s nothing Obama could do to stop him, even knowing that the end game could be, as Giraldi speculated, World War III.

My own view has always been that Netanyahu is bluffing to the extent that even he is not crazy enough to order an Israeli attack on Iran without a green light from the U.S. and American cover and participation,

I hope I am right. If I am, it could be that General Dempsey will return to Washington with the news Obama wants and needs – that without a green light from the U.S, Israel will not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A miscalculation, or deliberate provocation by the West designed to maneuver the Iranians into “firing the first shot,” could have disastrous consequences far beyond the confines of the Persian Gulf.

That provocation wasn’t long in coming.

Despite an agreement reached by Iran with the P 5+1 group of nations (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany), to restart talks in Turkey over the nuclear issue, the CIA-Mossad-MEK terror campaign took a dark turn this week; a sign that the imperialist powers, spearheaded by the United States, aim to scupper negotiations even before they start.

On Tuesday, an Iranian university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was murdered after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car.

Analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site Wednesday that “my own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of the Mossad and MEK, as have been a number of previous operations I’ve reported here.”

Silverstein averred that “the method recalls another series of assassinations that occurred of Fereidoun Abbassi Davani (who was seriously wounded) and his colleague Majid Shahriari (who was killed). Today’s killing occurred two years to the day after the assassination of another scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi.”

According to Fars News Agency, the blasts which killed Roshan “also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.”

The scientist”s driver, Reza Qashqavi, who was severely injured in the blast, “died of his wounds in Resalat Hospital a few hours later,” Fars reported.

What makes Roshan’s murder especially troubling is that according to political analyst Seyyed Mohamed Marandi, the “IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] officials had met him [Ahmadi Roshan] earlier.”

Marandi charged that all of the Iranian scientists who had been targeted and then subsequently murdered in terrorist attacks “have had their names given by the IAEA to third parties,” Press TV reported.

“It is obvious that Western intelligence agencies are carrying out these attacks, or if the Israelis are carrying them out, it is with the knowledge of the Europeans and Americans. Because these agencies are very closely aligned to one another, they cooperate extensively, they exchange information,” Marandi said.

While no one has claimed authorship of the terrorist outrage, the Associated Press reported that IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz testified in closed session to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that America’s proxy, Israel, was engaged in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through a series of “unnatural acts.”

“2012 is expected to be a critical year for Iran,” Gantz told the committee, citing “the confluence of efforts to advance the nuclear program, internal leadership changes, continued international pressure and things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Roshan was the fourth scientist killed in a series of assassinations since January 2010 and follows a series of attacks on defense and nuclear facilities.

In early November, a massive bomb blast at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program.

Later that month, a huge explosion was reported at Iran’s uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. Though Iranian officials denied an attack took place, The Times reported that “satellite imagery … clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction.”

U.S. officials, as is their wont, responded in typical fashion–they blamed the victims.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said she had “no information one way or the other” about the scientist’s murder, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced Iran for their “provocative rhetoric” and issued a categorical denial that the U.S. was organizing terrorism inside the Islamic Republic.

However, in an interview with the Hebrew-language Ma’ariv daily, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said that “Washington is preparing to undertake any measure to thwart Iran’s nuclear program,” Xinhua reported.

“We’ve said and I say again that all options are open … President (Barack) Obama clearly and consistently says that he will do everything and resort to all necessary means to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and he means every word,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro’s statement, if not quite an open admission, is a sign of Washington’s boundless hypocrisy as it supposedly wages a so-called “War on Terror” while organizing terrorist attacks on governments it has targeted for regime change.

Iran, and China, Strike a Defiant Note

With a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran’s ability to sell its oil on international markets signed into law by President Obama last week, and with the European Union threatening to do the same, it was unlikely that the Iranian government, or their principle trading partner, would sit idly by and allow the West to damage their respective economies.

Although The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “a senior U.S. intelligence official” said that “the goal of U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse,” the quote was quickly yanked from their web site.

The Post claimed the earlier account was “incorrectly reported” and that “an updated version clarifies the official’s remarks,” a fallacious climb-down that revealed far more than Washington intended to say the least!

The European Union announced that a meeting of foreign ministers would be held January 23, a week earlier than originally planned, to finalize an agreement on a comprehensive oil embargo.

While the EU and some Asian oil-buying nations are caving-in to Washington’s demands, America’s geopolitical rival and largest creditor, China, has rejected calls to put the squeeze on Tehran.

With U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in Beijing this week, the Washington Post reported that the former Kissinger Associates henchman in Obama’s cabinet “is expected to press China’s leaders to reduce the country’s oil imports from Iran.”

He is unlikely to find a receptive ear, however.

China’s vice foreign minister responsible for U.S. relations, Cui Tiankai, said on Monday that “the normal trade relations and energy cooperation between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue. We should not mix issues of different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected.”

Having blasted the new sanctions regime imposed last week, China, the third largest buyer of Iranian crude, said new restrictions would not affect business in the least.

The Associated Press reported that “about 11 percent of China’s oil imports in 2011 came from Iran, or about 560,000 barrels per day, a flow that increased in the latter half of the year, according to oil industry analysts Argus Media.”

“The daily average for November was 617,000 barrels,” AP reported, “close to a third of Iran’s total oil exports of 2.2 million barrels a day, Argus said,” a sign that China is hardly intimidated by U.S. threats.

Rejecting U.S. and European claims that normal business relations with the Islamic Republic provided financial support for its nuclear program, Cui declared that “argument does not hold water.”

“According to this logic,” the vice minister said, “if the Iranians have enough money to feed their population, then they have the ability to develop nuclear programs,” Cui told reporters. “If that is the case, should we also deny Iran the opportunity to feed its population?”

Cui’s pointed remark was an obvious jab at the U.S. sanctions regime which targeted Iraq for more than a decade prior to the 2003 invasion. Sanctions, which former UN official Dennis Halliday called “genocide” back in 1999, were estimated to have caused the death of upwards of 1.7. million people, including some 500,000 children, a “price” which former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it.”

Undeterred by American threats, Press TV disclosed Sunday that “a senior Iranian lawmaker says the aim of the upcoming naval drills by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) is to prepare for the potential closure of the strategic Hormuz Strait.”

Iranian naval officials announced January 5 that they “would be holding a major military maneuver in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in February.”

“IRGC’s Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said the drills, the seventh in a series of military exercises dubbed the Great Prophet, will be different compared to previous naval maneuvers held by the IRGC,” Press TV reported.

Pointedly, the deputy head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Esmail Kowsari, said that “the military maneuver has been designed to prepare the armed forces for receiving the order to shut down the strait within the shortest time possible.”

The semiofficial Iranian news outlet also reported Sunday that the “Commander of Iran’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan announces plans to hold a massive military maneuver in the near future.”

“In line with the global developments and their own interests,” Pourdastan told Press TV, “Western countries are, today, using soft war [tactics] as the core of their strategy and it is [only] natural for us to have a defense [tactic] when the enemy starts a war.”

On Monday, Fars News Agency reported that IRGC Commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, reiterated his earlier warning that “any enemy move, even the slightest aggressions, against the Islamic Republic would be reciprocated with a destructive response and will endanger the interests of the aggressor all around the world.”

Mounting U.S.-NATO Threats

Iran’s announcement that they will hold new naval exercises, followed a report by The Daily Telegraph that the UK will deploy “the HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer,” and this “will send a significant message to the Iranians because of the firepower and world-beating technology carried by the warship.”

In November, The Guardian disclosed that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.”

In a controlled leak, Ministry of Defence officials told The Guardian that “military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.”

During the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Diego Garcia was used by the the U.S. Air Force as a launch pad for B-2 stealth bombers during the initial phase of Washington’s “shock and awe” campaign over Baghdad.

It now appears those contingency plans have moved off the drawing board with the deployment of the HMS Daring towards the Persian Gulf.

The Telegraph disclosed that the ship “has been fitted with new technology that will give it the ability to shoot down any missile in Iran’s armoury. The £1 billion destroyer, which will leave Portsmouth next Wednesday, also carries the world’s most sophisticated naval radar, capable of tracking multiple incoming threats from missiles to fighter jets.”

Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned Iran that “any blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’.”

According to the Telegraph, naval sources have said that “more British ships could be sent to the Gulf if required. The second Type 45, HMS Dauntless, will also be available to sail at short notice.”

As Global Research reported in December, the United States has significantly increased military aid to Israel in preparation for an all-out war with Iran and that “the Pentagon dispatched some 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist Israel in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system as part of a new and integrated air defense system.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Michel Chossudovsky wrote, “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.”

In a new development, Russia Today reported last week that “thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.”

“Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an undisclosed time during the next few weeks,” RT disclosed, “the Israeli military will together with America host the largest-ever joint missile drill by the two countries.”

An anonymous Israeli official told the Associated Press “the drill would test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets. Israel has deployed the ‘Arrow’ system, jointly developed and funded with the U.S., designed to intercept Iranian missiles in the stratosphere, far from Israel.”

While U.S. and Israeli officials have called the drills “routine,” RT reported that “following the installation of American troops near Iran’s neighboring Strait of Hormuz and the reinforcing of nearby nations with US weapons, Tehran authorities are considering this not a test but the start of something much bigger.”

Iranian fears are fully justified.

With the United States and NATO ringing Iran with military bases and with the U.S. beefing-up arm sales to its regional allies, including recently announced plans to sell some $30 billion of advanced F-15SA war planes to Saudi Arabia and “bunker buster” bombs to the UAE, the stage is set for a confrontation.

In this context, the murder of an Iranian scientist just as a new round of talks were announced, is a clear sign that Washington is hell-bent on imposing its control over the Persian Gulf–through aggressive war–as part of long-standing plans to ensure imperial hegemony over the energy-rich regions of of Central Asia and the Middle East.

In spite of its claims to be concerned about the “protection” of civilians and the state of “human rights” in Syria, the Western press was more concerned with demonising the Syrian governmnent than the barbarians who carried out the savage terrorist attacks in Damascus.

Attacks of this kind have terrorized countries in the Middle East for decades and have generally been attributed to terrorist groups. Attacks targeting civilians tend to bear all the hallmarks of Al-Qaida, yet, in an act of obscene cynicism, the Western press attempted to lay the blame on the Syrian government for the attacks. Le Monde carried the headline: “Attentats a Damas. L’Opposition syrienne accusent le régime, qui accuse Al-Qaida.” The headline which translates as “Attacks in Damascus. The Syrian opposition accuses the regime, who accuses Al-Qaida.” Terrorist attacks in a given country normally imply an opposition to the government of that country, yet the ludicrous conspiracy theory of a government “inside-job” is given credence in the spin of the French daily’s headline, which prioritizes the claims of the Syrian opposition.

The terrorist attacks in Damascus massacred men, women and children. Bodies were ripped to pieces. Yet Western government and “human rights” organizations and the “independent” press refused to say what any decent human being would say: that these attacks were crimes against humanity and should be unequivocally condemned.

Conspiracy theory was also the order of the day in the editorial offices of Sky News, who gave much credence to the claims of the “opposition” that the Syrian government planted the bombs themselves.

Sky News was also convinced of a diabolical plot hatched by the Assad régime so as to discredit the “peaceful pro-democracy” groups who oppose the government. So, it seems conspiracy theory has finally invaded the pages of the mainstream media.

According to Wikipedia, the term conspiracy theory “is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational.”

The idea that the Syrian government, which is facing all-out warfare from Western powers under the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is surely worthy of such adjectives as “ridiculous,” “misconceived,” “paranoid,” “unfounded,” “outlandish,” and “irrational.”

There is not a shred of evidence to support the paranoid and deranged conspiracy theory that claims the Syrian government was behind the attacks in Damascus. However, instead of sympathizing with the victims of these crimes against humanity, the Western media establishment prefers to promote wile conspiracy theories.

What has been proved, however, is that the so-called Syrian opposition are heavily armed; are targeting civilians and security forces and are backed by Western intelligence agencies.

While there is no evidence that the Syrian government is planting bombs on its own people, there is a plethora of evidence to show that the United States wants regime change in Damascus and is prepared to use all means necessary to achieve this.

Since the promulgation of the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 and the admission of general Wesley Clark to Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 that Syria was to be one of seven countries slated for US-backed regime change, all the available evidence shows that Syria has long been an object of US military aggression.

In a time of year so often associated with peace and kindness, the Western political establishment and their public relations servants in the mass media and “human rights” organizations have shown yet again what scant regard they have for human lives.

The nefarious political agenda of the West’s most prestigious “human rights” organisations can be clearly seen from the deafening silence of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Human rights and their affiliates, as their dear peaceful “pro-democracy” activists blew Syrian citizens to pieces in Damascus.

Human rights discourse has provided a lethally effective camouflage for Western imperialist strategies in the Middle East since the outbreak of the US-backed people-power coups in Tunisia and Egypt this year.

Throughout nine months of incessant bombing of civilian targets in Libya, human rights groups such as the International Federation for Human Rights, inter alia, provided the justification for NATO’s mass terror campaign against the Libyan people.

Amnesty International only admitted a paucity of the crimes committed by the putschists of Benghazi, while maintaining a hysterical chorus of neo-colonial war-mongering against the legitimate Libyan Jamahirya, repeatedly pinning crimes committed by the NATO rebels on “Gaddafi’s forces”.

The unrelenting war-mongering of globalisation’s pious “human rights” groups over the past year should provide ample proof of François-Noël Babeuf’s prescient critique of the French revolution’s droit de l’homme doctrine and the subsequent critique of human rights ideology by Karl Marx.

In his famous essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx argued that the doctrine of human rights was a creation of the property-owning class or the bourgeoisie. Abstract human rights, Marx predicted, would be used to further the interests of the capitalist class.

The callous silence of so-called human rights groups in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed in Damascus on December 23rd coupled with the paranoid conspiracy theories of the corporate media are a damning indictment of what Oscar Spengler described as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the decline of the West.

The Syrian Human Rights Network have warned the Syrian people of “mass grave” fabrications by NATO’s proxy terrorists which will be blamed as the crimes of the mass media’s new bogey-man President Baschar al-Assad.

The recourse to car-bomb terrorism by the Western-backed jihadists shows that the colour revolution strategy has been a total failure in Syria. The destabilisation of Syria is now likely to require even higher levels of mass media mendacity.

Fabricated stories of mass graves, death camps and mass killings have garnered public support for imperialist adventures in the past.

In April 1993, James Harff of the American PR firm Ruder and Finn boasted on French TV about how they managed to fool American Jews into supporting US “humanitarian” bombing in Yugoslavia stating:

At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations…. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia…. By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The PR firms “tremendous coup” cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and tore a multi-ethnic and tolerant society apart.

The media reductio ad Hitlerum process of Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad is likely to intensify in the new year as humanitarian warfare and human-rightism spreads from North Africa to the borders of Russia and China.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

The arrest could not await an opportunity to persuade the FBI of the seriousness or sanity of the matter, Bloomberg said, as the evildoer had apparently packed a marijuana bong with Christmas lights and was prepared to attempt unspeakable acts imminently. Although the materials were intentionally defective, having been provided to the terrorist on Saturday by the NYPD, a careful analysis identified a greater than one percent likelihood of an attack on a local Home Depot store with which the terrorist had previously quarreled over malfunctioning plumbing materials and staff he accused of “not knowing their elbow pipes from their assigned aisles.”

Bloomberg revealed a plot that included packing Christmas Bombs with nails in hopes of nailing returning U.S. troops to crosses. The Mayor said he would be making public the records of attempted communications between the bomber and Muslim cleric Lex Luther, who may or may not have ever reciprocated the attempted communications. Asked what motivated the terrorist to act in this moment, Bloomberg indicated that a video may have been the catalyst. In what the Mayor referred to as a “super fast moving investigation” it was apparently not yet clear what this video consisted of. The District Attorney has subpoenaed Netflix records from October and all but promised an “October surprise”.

Bloomberg responded to a series of questions on the significance of the Lex Luther connection, explaining repeatedly that no fewer than 36 blogs have tied Luther to funding from George Soros, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a plan to publicly ask His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia his views on beheading hippies and Socialists. Furthermore, Bloomberg explained, one of the top Mercedes diesel mechanics in Tribeca, an expert who has also blown up automobiles for NYPD film productions in preparation for hastily thrown together press conferences, has agreed to testify that Iran could develop nuclear weapons if left no clear alternative for actual survival.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly interrupted the flow of the press conference on Sunday to switch on a live video of a hypersonic flying bomb cruising on its way to a predetermined target. Kelly said he believed the target was Diana L. Taylor, a close acquaintance of Mayor Bloomberg. Kelly announced that New York would immediately be declaring war on Iran, which — he pointed out — hates us all for our freedoms.

Bloomberg interjected that, “Without me you would all be dead by now.”

Kelly followed up with, “If I can’t save you, nobody can.”

The press conference was repeated in every detail in Pig Latin with Bloomberg donning a Guantanamo prisoner’s orange outfit out of what he said was “solidarity with my left-leaning constituents.”

In the overland five trips I have made to Gaza since March, 2009, I have seen the disastrous effect of the brutal Israeli land and sea blockade has had on the Palestinian people.  I have seen the terrible level of destruction that the 2008-2009 Israeli attack wrecked on Gaza, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22 day attack, 5,000 were wounded and 50,000 were made homeless.  I was on the Gaza Freedom March in 2009 and I was a passenger on the US Boat to Gaza, the “Audacity of Hope” that was forbidden from sailing June, 2011 by the Greek government on behalf of the Israeli government.

As one of two American citizens on the Gaza “Freedom Waves,” I represented hundreds of thousands of Americans who are challenging Israeli and US policies concerning Palestine.  We are using a variety of methods to let Israeli government officials know that international citizen activists are not going to stop challenging their policies.  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions programs, international citizens who attempt to protect Palestinians as they farm, fish and go to school, students confronting Israeli officials as they speak around the world and flotillas and waves of boats are part of the international effort. I am very proud to be a part of this movement.

Passenger on the “Tahrir”

Passengers on the Canadian Boat to Gaza, the “Tahrir,” left Turkey in good spirits Wednesday, November 2, 2011 despite having its passenger list whittled down by the Turkish Port Authorities who allowed only 12 out of 35 passengers who had travelled to Turkey to get on the boat.  The Turks cited regulations that decreed that only 12 persons could be on a boat rated as a “pleasure craft” to depart Turkey for international waters, no matter that the vessel was rated for 50+ passengers. My fellow Americans Medea Benjamin, Robert Neiman, Paki Wieland, Tighe Barry and David Schermerhorn became our ground crew in Turkey when the passenger reduction was forced on us.  On the day we left the Turkish port of Fetiyah, they rented a third boat to attempt to transfer in international waters the 23 passengers who had not been allowed onto the boats in port.

Working with our sister ship, the “Saoirse”, from Ireland, we hit the high seas full throttle headed to Gaza continuing the previous flotillas efforts to end Israel’s illegal, immoral  naval blockade of Gaza, which, in combination with Israel’s land blockade, has made the 1.6 million people of Gaza, prisoners in a tiny land that is roughly 25 miles long and five miles wide.

Our team, on the Tahrir, consisted of five journalists, including Democracy Now’s Jihan Hafiz, six international delegates and the captain.  We bonded quickly and settled in to our various chores.  Captain George delegated crew duties, journalists set up their satellites and computer stations, cooks and medics tended to physical needs and everyone vied for computer time to reach out to the world.

Canadian Boat to Gaza organizers did an excellent job stocking the boat with food, water and medical supplies plus $30,000 of medical aid to be delivered in Gaza.   The next two days were filled with blogging, filming, battling seasickness, sleeping, eating, non-violent training and preparation for probable Israeli confrontation and imprisonment.

Arriving in Danger Zone in the Daylight

Getting into international waters without the Turkish Coast Guard turning us back was our first success.  In hopes of not being boarded by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during darkness, we slowed our speed so it would be daylight Friday morning, November 4, 2011, when we approached 100 nautical miles off Gaza’s shore and probable contact with the IDF.

Each hour brought us 10 miles closer to Gaza.  We were thankful to make it past the 70 mile mark where the Mavi Marmara was so brutally attacked in June, 2010.

Three Giant Warships Looming on the Horizon

A momentary excitement permeated the ship as the captain announced we were 50 miles offshore– until we saw the 3 giant warships looming on the horizon.

We got on the satellite phones and computers to get out our last messages.  I was on the phone with CNN and I remember them saying, “call me when something happens” and I said, “This is probably the last you’re going to hear from me as our communications will be cut….” and then they were.

17 Israeli Warships Surround and Force collision between Freedom Waves boats–Water Cannons blew out windows and almost sunk the Irish boat Saoirse

We were told by the Israeli Navy to change our course.  Organizers of both boats restated that we were sailing to “the goodness of humanity.”

Within a half an hour we were surrounded by 17 boats; gunboats, water cannon boats, zodiacs.

The IDF radioed that they wanted to inspect our boats, meanwhile two zodiacs were harassing the Saoirse by driving in circles around them, finally forcing the Irish boat to crash into the Tahrir causing damage to the Saoirse.

The Saoirse pulled away and was chased by the IDF commandos who proceeded to blow out their windows and fill the ship with water from the water cannons.  If the Saoirse’s auxiliary power had not kicked in, the boat would have sunk.

Meanwhile, the IDF blasted the Tahrir with water cannons.  Over bullhorns, IDF soldiers told us to go to the bow of the boat where they were hitting our boat with the most force with the water cannons. We tried to protect ourselves by staying behind the wheel house.

One passenger and a cameraman attempted to remain on the bow of the Tahrir but moved away as the commandoes jumped the rail.  Commandos snatched the camera and 25 masked commandos shoved their way on board screaming, “Shut Up! Sit Down,! Move! Get Up!,  Shut Up!, Move!”  over and over for the next half hour.

One Passenger Tasered by IDF

Two passengers stayed at the wheelhouse and one was tasered by the IDF commandos.  They were shoved out the wheelhouse and dragged to the benches where they were forced at gunpoint to sit.  Commandos continued to yell, “Sit! Shut up! Don’t move!”  Our male passengers were searched first with commandos pointing guns and tasers at them.  Everyone had to keep their empty hands visible at all times.

Computers, Cameras, Satellite Phones Taken

I asked if  we could go down below as it was getting dark and cold and they corralled us into the tiny galley room and “guarded” us  while other soldiers  searched our backpacks and suitcases and threw our computers, cameras,  and bags on the floor.  Computers, cameras and other electronics confiscated on the boat were never returned to us.

IDF Commandos Brainwashed into Committing Horrific, Illegal Actions

I felt sad and angry looking into the young masked eyes of the IDF soldiers who had been so successfully brainwashed into doing horrific, illegal acts for the Israeli government.  They pirated our ship, kidnapped us and tasered us and now many of them were asleep on the benches, every bit as tired as we were.

Strip Searched at Port of Ashdod

About three hours later we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod, where Israeli officials strip searched, demeaned and dehumanized us. However, nothing they did to us is comparable to what the Palestinians endure.

The officials in the Israeli Immigration and Deportation office processed us.  They told us that if we signed a document that stated we had entered Israel illegally, we would be deported the next day.  This was one of the many lies we were told by Israeli authorities. Another untruth that they told us was that after 72 hours we would be deported automatically.

Three Days in Israeli Prison

After processing at the port, we were separated again and taken in small groups to the Givon prison where once again we were strip searched.  Our packs pawed through by at least ten people and we were then handed a list of our possessions that they were going to keep.

Women’s Wing of the Prison

Five women including myself spent the next three days in our own wing of the prison.  We were locked in our cells, locked in the women’s section of the prison and then locked behind two more locked gates.  Still, the guards repeatedly counted us and checked to make sure we weren’t plotting an escape, as if we could dig our way out through the floors. Maybe they thought “the criminals” could break out with the flimsy toothbrushes we were given!  Again, only a small taste of what Gazans have felt for years.

No American Embassy Presence or Phone Call for Two Days

I didn’t get my phone call out, nor did we see any one from the American Embassy for two days, whereas a representative of the Irish Embassy to Israel met the Irish boat when they arrived at the Port of Ashdod.

When the American Embassy officials finally arrived at the prison, they recommended I sign the form saying I had entered Israel illegally.  I refused.

The Embassy officials did contact my family and continued to keep in touch with them during my stay in the Israeli prison.  However, the official later told me there wasn’t much the US Embassy could do since we were in Israel and Israel was calling the shots, despite the US giving $3 billion in military aid annually to Israel!

Inside the Prison

We were locked in our cells for hours on end and ended up having a sit down strike in the corridor demanding that we be allowed out of the cells more than once a day.  We were tormented all one night by an irate guard beating on our door and awakened many times a night so they could “count us.”  We were berated and treated like criminals the entire time.

Paying for My Own Deportation

Finally Monday night, November 7th, after almost 72 hours, the Israelis said I could “leave” if I paid for my own deportation air ticket.  I agreed so that I could get back to the U.S. and tell the story of the “Freedom Waves.”  I was taken to the notorious Ben Gurion Airport Detention Center with a fellow passenger, who flew out that night. I was locked up in the airport facility for another 14 hours until my flight left on Tuesday, November 8.

Israeli Defiance of International Law and Basic Human Decency

There is no surprise in Israel’s act of piracy in attacking two civilian boats in international waters trying to sail to Gaza, imprisoning the passengers, and stealing the cargo and personal possessions. This is yet another example of Israeli defiance of International Law and basic human decency.

In my interactions with the IDF commandos and the Israeli government officials at the Port of Ashdod, in the prison and at the airport, I was struck by the desensitized, robotic, inhumane behavior they displayed consistently—and, again, I only experienced a small taste of what Palestinians routinely face.

“Freedom Waves” to Freedom Riders

There’s another dangerous passage – this time over land – that’s about to set forth: On Tuesday, November 15th, Palestinian activists plan to board settler-only public buses in the West Bank and attempt to sit down and ride the bus, in the great tradition of the Freedom Riders that challenged segregation in the American South. These brave change-makers have called on the international community to stand in solidarity, and many actions are planned around the US where activists will protest Veolia, the French company that runs many of the settler buses and is the subject of an international boycott campaign.  If the Palestinian Freedom Riders are arrested and detained, it will be important for us to speak up and take action as well.

US Congress should be Investigated for giving $3 Billion in Military Aid Annually to Israel instead of Demanding that the State Department Investigate Citizen Activists

Because of this experience in trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, I am more resolved than ever to work to stop the US government allocation of military aid to Israel and policies supporting the Israeli government’s apartheid treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Congresspersons are now going after US citizens on the Gaza flotillas!

Who is part of a terrorist organization: International activists saying Israeli and U.S policies toward the Palestinians are unjust and illegal, or the US Congress?

I think the US Congress should be held accountable for the illegal and unlawful uses of the weaponry that the U.S. has provided to Israel – including the F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous and dense inert metal explosive bombs that killed 1,400 Palestinians, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09.

Instead, 13 Congresspersons want those of us who have challenged Israeli and US policies on Palestine investigated for terrorist links and have introduced House Resolution 3131 toward that end.

The legislation introduced in the United States Congress in October, 2011, by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), would require the State Department to “submit a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization and any actions taken by the Department of State to express gratitude to the government of Greece for preventing the Gaza flotilla from setting sail in contravention of Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, and for other purposes.”  Twelve other strong supporters of the Israel Occupation have signed onto the bill: Engel, Ros-Lehtinen, Sarbanes, Carter, Frelinghuysen, Young, Grimm, Diaz-Balart, Rothman, Roskam and Sires.  Coincidentally, these representatives, especially Ros-Lehtinen, receive big contributions of campaign funding from the right-wing Israel lobby.

Please call these Congresspersons at (202) 225-3121 and give them an earful.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

— Ephesians: 6:12

What a decade it has been for assassinations, liquidations, exterminations — for State terrorism led by the Land of the Free. Summary executions include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On 5th February 2003, General Colin Powell stated that he headed a deadly terrorist network within Iraq – just six weeks before the US headed a deadly terrorist network, in an illegal invasion, which entirely destroyed Iraq.

On 7th June 2006, at Hibhib, near Baquba, al-Zarqawi was killed by two five hundred-pound bombs, dropped by USAF F-16 jets, killing five others including his wife and child. Legality, trying in law those accused of wrong doing, is, seemingly, so yesterday.

President Saddam Hussein and some of his sovereign government were subject to a kangaroo Court, laughable had it not shamed and disgraced the word “legal” at every level.Then he was lynched.

Osama bin Laden’s alleged death, with still unaccounted for others, was another blot on legality and humanity, with his body seemingly summarily disposed of as shark food. Why observe religious and legal niceties when they may, in turn, preserve forensic, legal evidence?

Hilary Clinton and her partners in crime, were, of course, shown “watching” this gruesome slaying by illegal immigrants who had entered ally Pakistan without bothering to request permission for air space or passage. It then had to be admitted there was, in fact, no transmission from a video previously said to be screened from one of the assassins helmets. Hollywood meets Capitol Hill?

Subsequently this tasteless, part fictional scenario with Ms Clinton’s hand over her mouth, feigning personal “shock and awe” was, the gullible were informed, due to “an allergy.”

Her repellent performance on CBS shortly after Gaddafi’s death, assassination, execution, street dragging – early days for the exact sequence of another bloody illegality — was Madam Clinton for real. She near punched the air, roared with laughter and announced:

“We came, we saw, he died.”

“Did this have anything to do with your visit?” she was asked on 18th October.

“Nnn …” Then:  “I’m sure it did.”

During her brief trip she had stated: “We hope he [Col Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon …”

Arguably, not since Madeleine Albright, when US Ambassador to the United Nations (“… avowed to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”) stated that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were:  “A hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it” (60 Minutes,12th May 1996) has such abhorrent, shaming filth been spewed over the air waves.

But then, the UN was the vehicle for the silent killing fields which were the strangulating thirteen year embargo on Iraq. the silence on thirteen years of illegal, unsanctioned bombing by the US/UK. Then this last March, they endorsed UNSCR 1973, which became the completely overt mass murders  of Libyans in a seven month (and ongoing) “humanitarian” blitzkrieg.

In the UK, the newspapers did their best to vie with Clinton’s sewer rhetoric. Seldom has a bloody, illegal, apparent summary execution, assassination of a Head of State, been more tastelessly lauded.

“Bullet in the Head – That’s for Lockerbie” (The Sun.) Apart from their excursion to the literary drainage pipes, the Sun apparently neither attended the trial nor have registered the deep legal concerns surrounding the Lockerbie verdict. “End of a Tyrant” trumpeted The Independent, of whom a little more is expected. “Tyrant Showed no Mercy, Shot by Rebels”, celebrated The Mirror. “Gaddafi’s Death: Key Moments”; MSN was in trash movie mode.

“Death of a Tyrant”, is the choice of many, with The Star perhaps managing to plunge to an all time journalistic depth with “Mad Dog Put Down.”

NATO’s depraved allies in the “New Libya” are — in defiance of all decency , and of any religion, especially Islam — displaying his body, and that of his son Mutassim (37) naked to the waist, in  freezers in a meat store in Misrata, inviting souvenir photographs.

It is a pitiless, shocking re-run of the display of the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay  and Uday, also summarily executed, rather than being treated in accordance with the law, as prisoners of war, along with Hussein’s fifteen year old grandson, courtesy US troops in Mosul, northern Iraq.

Islam is specific as to rituals for the deceased: “After the soul leaves the body, eyes must be closed” (Colonel Gaddafi’s were not for considerable time, according to pictures).  “When the soul is taken, the eyesight follows.”  The washing must follow specific procedure and then body fully covered, including the head and face. Necrophilic tourism is not an option — and bodes a sinister future if indicative of the values of those now seemingly holding power, legally or otherwise.

There may be worse to come. Seizing the illegal precedent which has been set by the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s bullet ridden remains, by the body snatching killers in Afghanistan, there is talk of burying Libya’s Head of State at sea. As bin Laden, it would get rid of the evidence. Dead men don’t talk of past deals, commitments, betrayals – and disappeared ones leave no forensic evidence of seemingly a murderering mob of NATO-facilitated thugs.

Will pressure for the body to be handed over to his tribe tempt another disgraceful act?  That Tribe has issued this statement:

We call on the UN, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International, to force the [National] Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs’ bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules.

Further pressure is building from the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur, is adament:

“The Geneva conventions are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed willfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war crime, something that should be tried”, he told Al Jazeera. (21st October 2011)

One eye witness allegations of Colonel Gaddafi’s death hardly seems to meet with Geneva Convention criteria:

  …  he was being beaten, kicked, with rifle butts, boots. He looked confused … he was saying ‘help me, help me’, but his voice was really strained, he was croaking. A few of us were around him, we thought we should get him somewhere we could question him about the others. But he was then taken away in a wave of people and then there were shots.

There are more similarities between Iraq and Libya. Two leaders who took over countries crippled by colonialism and turned them into thriving, largely well developed nations, with high quality free health care, education, living standards.

In threatened crisis, US Presidents and their Administrations cower in hidden bunkers deep in mountains, British Prime Ministers and their Cabinet, and ranking officials, are not renowned as front line operators either. Indeed, the speed with which the British and American Ambassadors and their staff  left Libya at the first sign of trouble was pathetic – and nationally humiliating.

Both Saddam and his sons said they would never leave their country and would die there. They did. Colonel Gaddafi did the same. Saddam faced out “Shock and Awe”; Gaddafi, 26,000 NATO sorties and over 9,600 strike missions in seven months, 68 strikes, seemingly, round Sirte on the day he was killed near there. Whatever their failings, their courage was towering.

Saddam lost his sons and grandchild and never saw his surviving family before he died. Gaddafi lost three grandchildren and three sons, and a fourth died with him. After the deaths, the Western media sneered because he failed to appear on the air waves for a few days.

However, the rats are crawling back on to the deck of the remains of the ship. On 21st October, Britain’s replacement Defence Minister – his predecessor got in to a little local difficulty – Phillip Hammond, announced that the UK had presented a license to drill for oil request to the National Transitional Council, far less than twenty four hours after the announcement of Gaddafi’s death.

Further:

Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya.

I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, (to be) packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they  can”, he said. (Independent, 22nd October 2011.)

When the US Ambassador, Gene Cretz, ran the Stars and Stripes up over the American Embassy in Tripoli, at its re-opening ceremony on 22nd September, he remarked: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libya’s natural resources.”

There have been many reports of Predator drones over Libya these last seven months. Seems there may be even more predators on the ground.

On Sunday 23rd October, 2011, the non-elected insurgents (sorry, National Transitional Council) are to declare Libya’s “liberation.”

The day marks the centenary of an Italian pilot becoming the first to use aircraft in war, taking off from Libya to observe Turkish troops in the Turko-Italian war on 23rd October 1911.

Ironically it also marks the first meeting of the UN General Assembly — 23rd October 1946 — a body which has strayed so far from its fine, stated aspirations.

*****

UPDATE:  As I finish this, it is being announced that Colonel Gaddafi’s body will be returned to his family for burial. It is indeed, if disgustingly belatedly so, incumbent upon the “authorities” to do so. We will see.

On October 4, much more carefully-worked out than the previous vote on Libya in March 17, though in nature same as viciously deceptive, limitlessly greedy, unimaginably hypocritical and racist as before, the UN Security Council Resolution on Syria which had been also cunningly but forcibly pushed upon by US-led NATO powers was, however, thwarted down this time.

China and Russia justifiably used their veto powers to oppose another Libya-type of US/Western military intervention against another non-Western sovereign nation, this time, Syria.

But China and Russia did not use their veto powers then in March, even if they seemed to have known the US-led NATO’s hidden agenda with regard to the vote on UNSC Resolution 1973 on Libya.

At any rate, under any circumstances and no matter what had happened to their strategic considerations then in March, China and Russia didn’t oppose the Libyan resolution but instead “abstained” from that fatal UNSC vote.

Their hardly-explicable, logically-unpersuasive and, as many have argued, “morally-unjustified ” position on Libya has, as it’s been repeatedly warned, become a convenient pretext, tool and justification for another US-led NATO military intervention in a “sovereign nation’s internal affairs.”

The position China and Russia took last March seemed to have been respectfully criticized by many in the world. Also the decision seemed to have caused a considerable amount of quite worrisome reactions from around the globe.

According to most recent media reports, even then Russian Prime Minister Putin was reportedly also concerned and seemed to have differed from the position of his President. Many, probably including Putin, might have questioned with concerns, confusions and reservations particularly from many third world nations if the March decision could be strategically recoverable in the foreseeable future.

It seems, with another strategically important and maybe in a way even more extremely crucial October 4th’s decision at UNSC vote on Syria, at some corners around the world people cautiously predict the failed March decision could be possibly redeemed in a way, if the two permanent members of UN Security Council could play a more proactive, preventive and, if necessary, assertive, as they did this time, role to discourage, deter and eventually stop the US-led NATO’s another deceptive military intervention.

While the whole world seems to have helplessly, regrettably, miserably witnessed the US-led NATO’s continued (UNDISPUTEDLY!) “crimes against peace,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” for over 6 months now, the Western powers seemed to have undoubtedly, knowingly and willfully violated the March 17 UNSC resolution on Libya.

Throughout the entire Libyan ordeal, the seemingly desperate colonial powers have arbitrarily justified their indiscriminate criminal bombings (both sorties from air and strikes from sea) against Libya’s both military and civilian targets with that infamous UNSC Resolution 1973.

However, under the disguised pretexts of so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians,” after more than six months of nonstop NATO bombings and killings, in other words, the state-sponsored terrorist attacks against innocent Libyan population including a numerous number of civilian population, what sort of any constructive outcome might have been resulted after all?

A seemingly apparent answer seems as in the following: Complete destructions of Libya’s total social infrastructures (i.e., EVERYTHING!); ongoing genocidal civilian massacres till this very day (the October 9th) in areas like Sirte; repetitions of vicious racist killings of black Africans; dirty gangster-style lootings of Libya’s sovereign wealth (just like the cowboy bank robberies!); and partial military occupation against an independent, resource-rich, particularly oil-rich and socialist Libya.

Are they not?

About a two dozen independent webmedia outlets around the globe like the 4th Media (China), the Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia), CounterPunch (US), the Global Research (Canada), nsnbc (Britain), Voltairenet.org (France), Net News Global (Germany), the Mathaba (Hong Kong, London), including several Russian mainstream media outlets such as Russia Today (RT) TV, Pravda.ru and also even as in the most recent Wikileaks’ reports, have faithfully and tirelessly reported news, news analyses and breaking stories on Libya quite different from the most global, particularly Western mainstream media reports.

According to those independent media reports around the world, it’s been UNDISPUTEDLY for sure that the US-led NATO powers have clandestinely and continuously organized, operated and even coordinated throughout the illegal land invasion against Libya by employing those recruited Al Qaeda terrorists, hired mercenaries/thugs and other disgruntled Islamic fundamentalists and extremists at forefront.

Of course, as well- and -broadly exposed now through those global independent and some mainstream media outlets, too, NATO had already deployed their own military personnel through secret missions well ahead of the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions last February. These revelations have been publicized even by several Western mainstream media such as the Guardian in Britain.

According to these sources, the American, British and French “special operation forces” and their intelligence agencies like CIA, M15 and DGSE, in addition to financial, media (specifically Saudi-owned Al Arabia and Qatar-owned Al Jazeera) and military personal assistances from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other puppet Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, have all physically landed in Libyan soil well before the March 19 NATO bombings.

Presumably now as the whole world seems very much aware of, the US-led NATO’s evil, greedy and hypocritical agenda through the colonial powers’ typical “divide and conquer” strategy, mainly through the world scale of media deception against the whole global population was to occupy Libya, as simple as it is, in order for them to control not only the Libyan wealth but also the entire African continent’s, beginning with the North Africa and Middle East region.

In this US-led NATO’s extremely deceptive Libya strategy, by way of ”media war” or “information war” or even the “war propaganda” through the global scale of constant mass deception, as many like F. William Engdahl have argued (See his most recent article, “Washington targeting China’s Achilles heel“), China seems the main and the real strategic target.

Their hidden but already much-revealed agenda of imperial conquest through military invasion, devastating destructions, genocidal massacres, lootings, robberies and colonial occupation seem absolutely constitute, according to the definitions of Nuremberg Principles VI, the “crimes against peace,” “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity.”

However, as briefly mentioned above, the US-led NATO has arbitrarily claimed their military actions (such as bomings, killings, and all sorts of indiscriminate destructions) are justified by/with those ill-famous and disgustingly despicable pretexts such as the so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians” under the mandate of UNSC Resolution 1973.

But, in reality, after more than 6 months, the number of indiscriminate bombings NATO has committed against innocent Libyan population has reached up to now “25,097 Sorties and 9,335 Strike Missions” (as of October 8, 2011, check here for more information from the Stop NATO website).

See the following Wikipedia information which may partially show some numbers of Libya’s civilian casualties. Even if its information could be also hardly unbiased from Western media lies, deceptions, false witnesses and fabrications on the true Libyan situation, it seems still I believe worthy to share this with our readers:

… Estimates of deaths in the 2011 Libyan civil war vary with figures from 2,000 to 30,000 given between March 2 and September 8. … Deaths caused by Coalition forces: The Libyan official sources claimed that at least between 64 and 90 people were killed during the bombardments on the first two days of the U.N. intervention and another 150 had been wounded. The Vatican news agency confirmed that in Tripoli alone, at least 40 civilians died as a result of the bombing campaign. According to the Libyan Health office, the airstrikes killed 1,108 civilians and wounded 4,500 by July 13. (Emphasis added. Wikipedia)

Again, as noted already, the UNSC Resolution 1973 on Libya, with the pretexts of so-called “no-fly-zone” and “protection of civilians,” has been undoubtedly violated for the justification of US-led NATO’s indiscriminate bombings everywhere, particulalry the entire Libyan social infrastructures including civilian targets such as hospitals, schools, nurseries, and so on.

Let’s look at the following Nuremberg Principles VI’s definitions in regard to the above-mentioned three distinctive crimes below:
Principle VI states,

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War crimes: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Today, however, the UNSC Resolution 1973 is still being used to justify for NATO bombers to continue its criminal bombings against areas like Sirte, Wani Balid and other places wherever there are Libyan population who continue to resist NATO’s aggressions and are ready to die for their dignity, independence and right to self-determination.

Therefore it’s been genuinely, with great relief and appreciation, much praised and in a way globally celebrated when the above-mentioned strategic failure last March wasn’t repeated this time in October.

For the sake of the future humanity, the world’s great majority population seems to have appreciatively applauded and do sincerely regard, with due respect, great relief and even with some hope, the two nations’ strategic vote on Syria as a historic and courageous decision.

Many hope it could be strategically, with firmness, assertiveness and decisiveness, further utilized for a greater goodness, so that the international community of peace and justice and equality, encouraged by and together with those five BRICS nations, could deter at least and/or stop at best the imperial powers’ seemingly uncontroable madness of their ugliest pursuit of conquering the world.

In light of moral, political and global responsibilities for a better future of the entire humanity, it seems those five BRICS member nations, particularly China and Russia do need international community’s undeterred support and solidarity in order for them to take a crucial leadership role to stop and refuse the return of the old colonial dark days.

It was the US, British and French who seemed not happy at all on the October 4th with the result of Syria vote. According to a CNN report, the hawkish warmonger U.S. Ambassador to UN Susan Rice, like the other notoriously hawkish warmonger Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the United States, was “outraged.” She said the following, according to the same report: “This [October UN Security] Council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.”

She used the language like the following: “An urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.” Alas! The poor Rice! Or how badly unstable, like some sort of schizophrenic symptoms, her state of moral conscience is at the moment? When she said the above-quoted statement, she seemed to be apparently completely out of balance or normalcy. Or she seemed not to understand who’s saying what at all. She neither seemed did understand what that “urgent moral challenge” might mean. What on earth after all the one who said the “growing threat to regional peace and security” was the US Ambassador to UN?! Alas!

The neocon-like Ambassador Rice, like the former Secretary of State Condi Rice during Bush presidency and her present NATO colleagues to UN, seems fail to understand what those languages and words she herself murmured may mean, while the great majority populations around the globe seem have no problem to understand what they really meant quite easily with a normal, ordinary sense of moral conscience.

Look also how desperate, hurried, disarrayed the US-led NATO forces and their de facto puppet rebel organization the NTC are! According to a AP report from Sirte on October 9, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, too, present at the site of the failed attempt to occupy a Gadhafi stronghold, seemed to make a hollow statement when he tried to urge the NATO mercenaries to bring Sirte under NATO control. However, as a matter of fact, they’ve miserably failed to do so for more than six weeks even after their another hollow claim, the so-called “Tripoli fall.”

That’s the very reason why his empty “pledge to keep up NATO airstrikes even after Sirte fall” sounded helplessly hollow as well.

He also said “the international military action would continue as long as the remnants of the regime pose a risk to the people of Libya.”

Exactly same as Ambassador Rice, it seems the British Secretary of Defense, too, must have been suffered with some sort of similar mental illness as she does. Whose “military action” is that the so-called the “international military action” he’s talking about? Isn’t the US, British, and French “military action”? There is no such thing such as the “international military action” other than theirs alone, right? Isn’t it?

Who are the “remnants” who he said “pose a risk to the people of Libya?” The Libyan people “pose a risk to the people of Libya” themselves? What is this? As already mentioned, is he also mentally unstable? After he and his other NATO colleagues have miserably failed to complete their hidden but well-known mission for more than six months now, it seems their psychological, mental health condition must have been very much deteriorated. Otherwise how come could ever he make that type of so abnormal, strange, illogical public statement in a press conference?

That’s totally a nonsense! Who’d after all “pose a risk to the people of Libya”? Is it not the US-led NATO aggressors who’ve endlessly “posed” the gravest “risk to the people of” not only Libya but also Syria, Iran, Algeria, DPRK (North Korea), Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen and so on and so on? Who are the aggressors after all? Is the US-led NATO not the aggressor?

Listen now what he said here: “’We have a message for those who are still fighting for Gadhafi that the game is over, you have been rejected by the people of Libya,’ he told reporters Saturday in Tripoli before flying to Misrata.”

What? “The game is over”? Whose game is over? What? “Rejected by the people of Libya”? Who are the ones being really “rejected by the people of Libya” now? Then what about the people, apparently the majority population of 6 million Libyan population who are still fighting to resist in order to stop and “reject” the US-led NATO powers? Who are the ones miserably failed and lost the genocidal war against a sovereign nation now for more than six months, even with their over 35,000 times of continued bombings day and night from air and sea since March 19 when they began their imperial bombings?

As The Washington Post reported last month, the “commingling” of CIA officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors “occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations” where “congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.”

Or any “view” at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the “dark side,” a position fully-embraced by the “hope and change” administration of Barack Obama.

Awlaki’s state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurfaces many unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America’s global “War on Terror.”

But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations undertaken by Obama’s national security team which culminated in Awlaki’s death.

White House “Death Panel”

Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform that the administration would create “death panels” to deny care to the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the authentic article.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama’s Justice Department “wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting” of Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum “was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi.”

That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June 2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys “David Barron and Martin Lederman.”

Both former OLC lawyers are prominent “liberals” from prestigious universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.

Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed against the previous administration’s adaptation of the “Unitary Executive Theory” promulgated by “torture memo” authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA “black sites.”

This, of course, begs the question: if Awlaki’s murder was “legal,” why then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials following a deliberative process which can’t be shared with the public because of “national security”?

The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood up in Chile and Argentina during the “dirty war” period of the 1970s may now exist.

Reuters disclosed that Americans “are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.”

“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,” reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, “which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council. … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

According to Reuters, “targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC ‘principals,’ meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval.”

A “former official” told Hosenball that “one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to ‘protect’ the president,” i.e., provide Obama legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by “plausible deniability.”

McClatchy News reported that “broadly speaking” White House orders to kill Awlaki were based on claims that “the nation’s inherent right of self-defense [is] recognized under international law.” However, “international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned except to protect against ‘concrete, specific and imminent’ danger.”

And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted for death because “his role in AQAP had gone ‘from inspirational to operational’,” Reuters disclosed that “officials acknowledge that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.”

In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever that Awlaki posed an “imminent danger” to the United States, although there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked up and indicted at any time.

Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria that followed the attacks.

A “former military intelligence officer who worked with special operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets,” told the right-wing Washington Times: “I think it’s pretty easy to understand why they didn’t take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department for due process in an American court.”

That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline: the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a “hassle.”

Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Obama’s national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“A decade later,” McClatchy reported, “the Obama administration contends that this wartime authority remains even if it’s evolved for reasons the administration won’t fully elucidate.”

The relevant section of AUFM reads: “IN GENERAL — That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (emphasis added)

Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch but also planted the seeds of the administration’s preemptive war doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic surveillance powers.

More pertinently is the reason why the administration “won’t fully elucidate” how the Bush-era AUMF “evolved” chiefly due to the fact that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of Americans, not only in Yemen or other “War on Terror” fronts, but right here in the United States itself?

After all, it’s not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top secret presidential “findings” or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon black programs, as did the previous Bush government.

Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations.

Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times disclosed in June, handed the FBI “significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

These “news rules,” the Times averred, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

It gets worse.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI “is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.”

Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a “known or suspected terrorist,” not based on evidence gathered through a criminal investigation, but solely if officials have “particularized derogatory information,” including that derived from First Amendment protected activities, to support to support an individuals’ watch listing or placement on a “no-fly” list.

One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to do otherwise would reveal “closely held deliberations within the administration,” but did so anyway because this was clearly a sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post that “what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due process in war.”

“The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi,” Finn wrote, “or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous officials operating outside the rule of law.

As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn’t used as a rhetorical hammer against assorted “new Hitlers” or geopolitical rivals whose resources corporate America seek to “liberate.”

Dead Men Tell No Tales

As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab by the Executive Branch.

While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence “failures” leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the Awlaki killing, as with last May’s murder of former bête noire and on-again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a “clean-up” operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of Agency involvement in the plot.

As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of orchestrating, though evidence can’t be supplied because it’s “secret,” The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani Hanjour who “had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.”

In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.

And as with the 2001 attacks we were told “changed everything,” far from being a failure to “connect the dots,” intelligence and law enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

And while Awlaki wasn’t given a free pass by the administration in that botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly set the stage.

According to History Commons, “shortly before the [FBI] investigation [into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation] is closed,” in 2000, Awlaki “is beginning to associate with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation ends.”

“For instance,” History Commons avers, “on February 4, one month before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi.”

“The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-Bayoumi’s phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999.”

Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.

In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post’s Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, and the CIA’s still-redacted Inspector General’s report, he discovered that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash, one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda’s “planes operation.”

Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA’s Alec Station Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence from investigators, concluding this “information was intentionally omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the United States.”

As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led us to believe.

In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP’s “external operations” chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an investigatory perspective: that of a “fixer,” first in San Diego where he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in “settling” Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same for Hani Hanjour.

In 2002, Newsweek revealed that “some federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers, sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000 lives.”

“Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,” Newsweek disclosed, “al-Bayoumi’s wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived “in the form of cashier’s checks, purchased from Washington’s Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family.”

With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London, where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI. Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.

The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded, the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., “that no evidence could be found of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers.”

Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Saudi family “abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter–and an open safe in a master bedroom.”

Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned that “law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights–including leader Mohamed Atta–in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

“Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,” Summers and Christensen wrote, “new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.”

In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site “that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.”

Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the author of Family of Secrets, reports that this “now-revealed link” between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida “and the highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the White House’s controversial approval for multiple charter flights allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law enforcement–despite the identification of the majority of the hijackers as Saudis.”

Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki’s casual, and inexplicable, flight from the United States?

“After 9/11″ History Commons points out, “the FBI will question al-Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to remember Almihdhar at all.” Other accounts suggest that the relationship was much closer.

“The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry,” History Commons avers, “claim that Alhazmi and Almihdhar ‘were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San Diego. … Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers’.”

“Around August 2000,” History Commons reports, “al-Awlaki resigns as imam and travels to unknown ‘various countries.’ In early 2001, he will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki’s mosque there.”

Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: “Lincoln Higgie, an antiques dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he was leaving for Kuwait. ‘He came over before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened,’ recalls Higgie.”

The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, “he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area–and got a strange response.” Higgie said, “‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why’.”

Although the FBI suspected Awlaki “had some connection with the 9/11 plot,” authorities claim there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, nor can he be deported because he’s an American citizen. And when the Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure charge of “transporting prostitutes across state lines,” that plan collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.

“But on October 10, 2002,” History Commons reports, “he makes a surprise return to the U.S.” Although his name is on a terrorist watch list and he is detained by Customs’ officials when he lands in New York, they are informed by the FBI that “his name was taken off the watch list just the day before. He is released after only three hours.”

“Throughout 2002,” History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the “subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either, or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations.”

Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI admits they were “very interested” in Awlaki, they fail to stop him leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report, “We don’t know how he got out.”

Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to leave in the first place. It certainly can’t be for lack of evidence or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen, he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American intelligence agencies.

Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki’s “contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random.”

Other investigators, however, disagreed. “One detective,” the Times reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files, told staff that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that “despite, or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to leave the country.”

In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither “errors in judgement” nor “mistakes” by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.

Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been charged with providing “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of circulation.

That he wasn’t and continued to operate freely as a propagandist, despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one who had decidedly gone “off the reservation.”

Awlaki’s handling by authorities raise serious questions about just how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich global hot-spots.

As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented, Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert operations that targeted America’s geopolitical rivals even as Bin Laden’s far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States itself.

In this light, Awlaki’s “targeted killing” as with the earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues hatched by the imperialist Empire.

After all, dead men tell no tales…

But law and morality are not the same thing.

Whether lawyers serving the powerful can twist laws drafted by the powerful to serve the interests of power has absolutely no bearing on the morality of death-by-president. Indeed, when a single individual has the power to unilaterally decide who lives or dies, whether that’s permissible under some tortured reading of the Constitution and international law may not be irrelevant, but it isn’t exactly the most pertinent question.

What we ought to be talking about is whether murdering people with unmanned Predator drones based on evidence that will never see the light of day is, regardless of the target’s nationality, morally right or morally reprehensible. For those in the anti-murder camp, the answer is easy — and more relevant than whether a murder was in accordance with clause five of subsection B of the International Code on State-Sanctioned Killing.

After all, the law is crafted by the powerful to serve their interests, meaning that debating the legality of a politician blowing up anyone in the world they choose is to debate on the terms set by power. Give a team of White House lawyers enough time, and they no doubt could come up with a superficially compelling case for why the president can end life as we know it based on his inherent powers as commander-in-chief. While such an argument may be fatally flawed morally speaking, when it comes to the law, who’s really going to say they’re wrong?

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, recall, was a blatant war of aggression, the “supreme international crime,” in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Even Richard Perle, one of the chief architects of that war, admitted as much. And what has come of it? Dick Cheney goes on book tours while Bradley Manning, who instead of committing war crimes actually exposed them, rots in prison.

Such is the morality of the law: If you’re powerful enough, you’re immune, but if you’re weak, you’re prosecuted. Members of the Obama administration, then, must love the debate over the legality of their actions. It’s one they can win even if they lose.

And yet, liberal discussion is dominated by talk of the legality, not the morality, of the U.S. government murdering people without charge or trial. Instead of right and wrong, liberals narrowly debate whether the president can legally order hits on alleged terrorists who happen to be U.S. citizens. An American passport, it seems, makes the man.

How to Make Wrong Right: Call It a “War”

Taking their cue from President Obama, many on the left have come to accept the “war on terror” paradigm they rejected back when that guy from Texas was president. And that little three-letter word, “war,” lowers an already pitifully low bar for when the state may legally take human life and, by extension, raises the threshold at which good bleeding-hearts ought to let their humanity kick in. It may be wrong for a mere citizen or policeman to take out a family of four as part of a quest for vengeance against a killer, but in war that’s just “collateral damage.” It sucks that 41 innocent Yemenis had to die as part of the U.S. government’s quest to kill folks like Awlaki, but don’t get yourself too worked up about it.

It’s certainly not illegal, after all.

By focusing on the mundane rather than the moral case for or against state-sanctioned murder, progressive commentators can sleep well at night despite having a bumper sticker for a killer on their car, their consciences soothed by legalistic rationalizations for extinguishing human life that they’d never accept from a friend or family member. Some even cheer death as long as it’s carried out by the state — and a fellow Democrat.

A writer for The Washington Monthly, for instance, reacted to the assassination of Awlaki — and another American, Samir Khan, and some other foreigners whose lives aren’t even worth acknowledging — with admirably partisan enthusiasm, saying he looked “forward to conservatives explaining to the public why all of this is evidence of weakness under the Obama presidency.” The liberal Center for American progress likewise took former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to task for trying “his hardest to downplay the significance” of the killing and not heaping praise on Our Leader.

Never mind what actual experts say — Yemeni Post editor Hakim al-Masmari told al-Jazeera Awlaki’s death “will not be a blow to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from any perspective . . . because [he] did not have any real role in [the group]” — we have a ritualistic celebration of death to attend to, Mr. Bolton. This is supposed to be a happy occasion!

Even those who aren’t outright cheering the glorious new age of America extrajudicially killing Americans are more or less excusing murder with the disinterested musings of a bureaucrat. A writer for the progressive website AlterNet, for instance, reacted to the assassination by asking “Was the al-Awlaki Killing Legal?” Answer: “I don’t know — the question hinges on facts I don’t claim to possess.” Don’t worry about the rightness of killing someone based on secret evidence and a self-serving reading of the law, dear reader; ponder whether that secret evidence against the executed comports with a plausible reading of the law.

The Right to Life: Dependent on a Passport

A commentator at Mother Jones, meanwhile, reacted to the killing by declaring he was none too concerned with whether “Awlaki in particular deserved to die.” Ho hum. Just another dead guy in the war on terror. Rather — and this is more than some on the left could muster — he was troubled by the “precedent by which a U.S. president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process.” The same writer, gainfully employed at a leading liberal publication, enthusiastically cheered the premeditated killing of an unarmed non-American a few months ago, the difference being the passport held by the man being murdered.

And that pretty much sums up the state of mainstream liberalism in America these days. Even if they don’t particularly care for it, those who rightly called George W. Bush a war criminal express no moral outrage over a Democratic president’s killing of anyone he chooses; it certainly doesn’t make him a bad guy unworthy of re-election. Instead, the killings are debated in dull legal terms, if at all. And not even Obama’s more strident liberal critics question the murder of foreigners, which is at worst a “counterproductive” policy, not an evil one.

This, again, isn’t to say the law is irrelevant, or that those who prefer legalistic or utilitarian arguments against state-sponsored murder shouldn’t be welcome in decent society. Governments make rules for the rest of us to follow, so when they blatantly violate those laws, they deserve to be called on it. No question.

But the debate over the legality of extrajudicial executions is based on the terms of debate set by the executioners, which risks making murder a respectable — or banal — enterprise, acceptable to liberal sensibilities so long as one cites the proper subsections and files the appropriate paperwork on time. And the debate over the laws governing state-sponsored murder threatens to obscure the more important question of what is right.

What Is the Law?

What’s legally permissible, remember, is not the same as what’s morally permissible: Owning human beings was once the unchallenged law of the land, while those who helped fugitive slaves — not those who brutalized them — found themselves locked away in prison cells. A Southern plantation owner could win any legal challenge to his ownership of slaves by citing a dozen federal and state statutes. That didn’t make it right. And while some abolitionists did adopt legal arguments against slavery, they never forgot their most potent case against the infamous institution: the moral one.

Forget the law. Does any person, whether a saint or a statesman, have the moral right to unilaterally take the life of another? Is it just or wise to invest in one fallible human being, or even a group of them, the power to kill and the ability to do so without so much as a rubber-stamp conviction in a military tribunal — and without fear of so much as a harsh word from establishment liberal humanitarians? The answer, I’d argue, is unambiguous: no. Allowing one man or woman the right to be judge, jury, and executioner is a recipe for totalitarianism, one that eviscerates all other human rights and the moral fiber of those who would be a party to it.

Back when slavery was as legal and respectable as blowing up Pakistani tribesmen with Predator drones is now, author and dissident Henry David Thoreau published an essay on the duty of civil disobedience in which he noted that, in fact, “Law never made a man a whit more just.” Indeed, “by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

Right now, too many Americans — pundits especially — have an undue respect for statutes and precedents, leading even those on the left to speak of things such as the “laws of war,” as odd a turn of phrase as the “rules of rape.” And it’s making them agents of injustice.

Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush’s desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was  ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.

But now we have Nato’s ‘successful’ mission in Libya to help wipe the slate clean. The paper writes that ‘the deserts of North Africa … turned out to be more fertile soil for democracy than could have been imagined.’ Libya is the great cause ‘where the idea of liberal intervention could be rescued and to an extent redeemed from the terrible mistake of Iraq.’

Note that the invasion-occupation of Iraq is described as a ‘mistake’, not the supreme international crime as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials.

The horrendous murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, by British soldiers ‘was a reminder of how much the Iraq war tarnished Britain’s reputation abroad.’ The implication is that Britain’s ‘reputation’ is fundamentally decent, only occasionally ‘tarnished’.

The paper concludes:

There is a hope that Britain, with a more realistic understanding of its capability, could regain some of the ethical role in the world that it lost after its mistaken response to 9/11.

In the wake of all that has happened in the past ten years (and more), it takes a committed form of self-deception to cling to the shredded image of Britain’s ‘ethical role in the world’.

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis has laid bare the motivations and realpolitik of British foreign policy. Ethics and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observes:

A basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes. ¹

But the myth of benevolence must be maintained, even to the extent of active deception of the British public:

In every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.  (Ibid., p. 3)

In his political work, Noam Chomsky often cites a definition of terrorism from a US army manual as:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

By this definition, Chomsky points out, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States.

As for Britain, Curtis says:

The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.  ²

In Unpeople, Curtis estimates the number of deaths in the post-WW2 period for which Britain bears significant responsibility, whether directly or indirectly. He tabulates mortality estimates for all the wars and conflicts in which Britain participated or otherwise played a significant role, for example in covert operations or diplomatic support for other governments’ violence. The examples include: war in Malaya (1948-1960), war in Kenya (1952-1960), the Shah’s regime in Iran (1953-1979), Indonesian army slaughters (1965-1966), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), US aggression in Latin America (1980s), the Falklands War (1982), the bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), the bombing of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003).

As Curtis acknowledges, estimates of deaths in any conflict often vary widely and he does not pretend to be offering a ‘fully scientific analysis’. But erring on the side of caution, he arrives at a figure of around ten million deaths in the post-war period for which Britain bears ‘significant responsibility.’ Of these, Britain has ‘direct responsibility’ for between four and six million deaths. These are shocking figures, and essentially unmentionable in corporate news and debate.

The Doublespeak Of Terror/Counterterror

One of the golden rules propping up the required self-deception of the West’s fundamental goodness is that whenever violence is inflicted by the state it is only in retaliation for violence perpetrated by our enemies. This is straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Edward Herman explains:

[An] important doublespeak device for rationalizing one’s own and friendly terrorism is to describe it as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts. ³

The notion is so pervasive in news reporting that it is virtually invisible, like the oxygen breathed by the journalist; it is simply taken for granted. Even raising the topic for discussion in mainstream circles is beyond the pale.

Consider a recent report on the BBC News at Ten. On September 7, 2011, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported from outside the Houses of Parliament:

When these anti-terrorist crash barriers went up outside Parliament back in 2003, a lot of people were shocked at the time. But we’ve got used to them. They’re a part of the world we live in.

Gardner continued:

There is no clear answer as to whether we’re safer now in Britain from terrorism than we were ten years ago. We know more about the threat we’re facing but those threats have multiplied and diversified.

The mass hostage-taking and murder in Mumbai three years ago has led to joint police-SAS training and a major boost in police firepower.

Gardner granted that ‘counterterrorism is also about foreign policy’, pointing out the obvious fact that ‘Britain’s part in the Iraq invasion helped recruit countless young men to al-Qaeda’s cause, increasing the danger to Britain.’ Indeed, this was a known risk before the invasion: Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda and associated groups were ‘by far the greatest terrorist threat’ to this country and that the risk would be ‘heightened by military action against Iraq’. Gardner’s report neglected to mention this.

His news item, and an accompanying article the next day at BBC News online, was framed in the necessary traditional convention: that terrorism is what they do, while ‘we’ undertake counterterrorism.

On September 8, 2011, we wrote to the BBC’s security correspondent:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I hope you’re doing well. Thank you for your report on last night’s BBC News at Ten. You rightly referred to the attacks on Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Oslo as examples of terrorism. But you neglected to mention any examples involving US killings of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Here is but one example from 2006 in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. At least ten civilians – including four women and five children – were bound and executed with shots to the head.

Nor did you mention the Israeli offensive against Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, with the deaths of around 1,400 civilians (including 300 children), or the attack on a peaceful convoy led by the Mavi Marmara.

Why do you follow a script that says that violence conducted by officially-decreed enemies is ‘terrorism’, while violence inflicted by Western states or our allies is ‘counter-terrorism’?

I hope to hear from you, please.

Regards

David Cromwell

Not hearing anything back, we nudged Frank Gardner gently on September 12 via email and again two days later.  We then received an email from someone at the BBC called Paul Rasmussen:

Hello David

I understand you have been in touch about some BBC News reporting.  If you wish to make a complaint – you will need use the BBC complaints procedure – if you are not familiar with how to do this please let me know.

Yours,  Paul Rasmussen
(Email, September 14, 2011)

We responded the same day:

Hello Paul,

Many thanks for your email. Has Frank Gardner been in touch with you?

I asked Mr Gardner to respond to a perfectly fair challenge about a report he made on last Wednesday’s BBC News at Ten, and I hope he’ll feel able to do so.

Best wishes,

David

We received no reply. The following day, still not having heard from Gardner, we emailed the BBC correspondent again:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I know how busy you must be. But it’s now one week on, and it’s disappointing that you are seemingly reluctant to reply to a serious, polite and reasonable email from a member of the public. I’m not seeking to make an official BBC complaint about your report; I’m simply asking you to respond to a straightforward query.

If you would rather remain silent, it lends credence to the point that your reporting does have an ideological stance: namely, that the UK state and its allies cannot be charged with terrorism, only counter-terrorism.

I’d be grateful if you would at least try to respond to this charge directly, rather than meet it with silence or any attempt to divert it into the BBC complaints system [see here and here].

Regards,

David Cromwell (Email, September 15, 2011)

This was clearly too much for any self-respecting journalist to resist. A reply duly arrived that day from ‘Frank Gardner OBE’:

Dear Mr Cromwell

You rightly guess that I am too busy to answer the many people who write in with interesting and often excellent questions. The online version of my 9/11 report is attached. I believe it is fair, accurate and balanced but if you disagree then do please feel free to file a complaint to the BBC, backing it up with evidence. Im afraid that as with other members of the public I am not in a position to enter into a correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Frank Gardner OBE
BBC Security Correspondent

Gardner’s dismissive response, seemingly squeezed out of him, is poor fare indeed. There is no meaningful attempt to debate the serious point we put before him. If we were to respond in the same offhand way to polite challengers, and tried to shepherd them towards a Media Lens complaints department, we would be justly ridiculed.

Recall that the BBC – which is state-funded, managed by state-approved appointees, and overseen by a cosy club of establishment worthies – is always declaring itself to be scrupulously ‘impartial’. Fundamental criticism of the state is protected by this shield of  ‘impartiality’. How?  By taking for granted that ‘we’ in the West are, by definition, the ‘good guys’.

As we said at the start of this alert, the prevailing ideology holds that the West may be guilty of occasional ‘lapses’, but that it endeavours with a good heart to export democracy, uphold human rights and keep the global peace. This false and poisonous propaganda image – carefully cultivated and assiduously pushed by powerful interests – can never be seriously challenged by the state broadcaster and the corporate media generally. And certainly not when the state broadcaster’s ‘security correspondent’ has had an honour bestowed upon him by the same state.

If this was the old Soviet Union, or perhaps present-day Iran, there would be howls of mirth and outrage from respectable commentators in Britain. That it is happening right here, in this ‘beacon of democracy and free speech’, is apparently no cause for concern or even comment in ‘mainstream’ circles.

1. Unpeople, Vintage, 2004, p. 3
2. Web of Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p. 94
3. Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992, p. 44

In our previous article, “The Real Delusion Part I,”¹ we argued that, despite their emphases on religious skepticism and open scientific inquiry, the New Atheists² * have betrayed the spirit of the Enlightenment and have instead veered toward an obdurate and uninspiring offensive against superstition that blames most of the world’s current ills on irrational religious belief. Enlightenment thinkers assailed religious superstition because it was part and parcel of a powerful institutional framework that most found abhorrent; furthermore, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that religious toleration was a noble desideratum.³ The New Atheists, on the other hand, believe that religious toleration is potentially destructive.⁴,⁵ More importantly and dangerously, they have promulgated the idea that religious belief imperils Western society, convincing myriad people that such concerns are dire and distracting attention from other, more urgent political issues.

We also noted that human political nature could be usefully understood with the aid of two important concepts: reverse hierarchy egalitarianism and coalitional competition. Using these concepts, we traced the rise of the modern state, noting that legitimation narratives are an important component of state formation and maintenance. Although the earliest legitimation narratives were religious, growing skepticism and secularism gradually eroded the efficacy of religious narratives in the West. This led to the development of secular narratives and eventually to the neoliberal nationalist narrative that is predominant today. Finally, we argued that Harris’ contentions about the nature of Islam and its effects on believers are often erroneous, unempirical, and dangerous because they could potentially contribute to Western Islamophobia.⁶ *

In this article, we will continue our analysis of the Enlightenment and its tradition, specifically focusing on Noam Chomsky. We will first situate Chomsky historically, noting that he is profitably viewed as perhaps the most representative intellectual of the Enlightenment heritage. His radical critique of power and ideology, exposure of moral hypocrisy, and praise for intellectual integrity, represent the true spirit of the Enlightenment and will inform our criticism of modern power and the narratives it uses to cloak its machinations. This will be accomplished by focusing on three domains: the mainstream media, domestic policy, and foreign policy. We will conclude by completing our critique of the New Atheists in light of the previous analyses.

Continuing the project of the Enlightenment

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is humankind’s emergence from a self-created cocoon of immaturity and ignorance; and the Enlightenment, the age that finally began to offer the freedom needed to thus emerge.⁷ The most important obstacles to this desired freedom were powerful institutions and the narratives they propounded; the institutions because they coerced behavior and the narratives because they encumbered and enslaved reason. An important and instructive example of this spirit is found in the works of Thomas Paine, particularly in his two major treatises: The Rights of Man (1791), ⁸ and The Age of Reason (1794-1807).⁹ In The Rights of Man, Paine excoriated corrupt and tyrannical forms of government and the narratives used to justify them. Monarchy, he asserted, was an affront to reason and human dignity, and he endlessly attacked the pomp and pageantry used to mystify it. Paine believed that illegitimate forms of government were based on either superstition or power–the former government based on priestcraft and the latter on conquerors. The only legitmate government arose from the consent and reason of the governed. The age of Reason, like The Rights of Man, was a sustained attack on power and privilege, this time aimed at the “adulterous” nexus of church and state. Paine believed that the institutions of the church were iniquitous and that priests lusted power and wealth rather than human betterment. As Paine acerbically put it, “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”¹⁰ Paine also panned the doctrines of Christianity, but it is important to remember that churches wielded a significant amount of political power at the time he was writing and that his chief concern was social justice.* This concern permeates his writings and is the fount of both his bitterness and his optimism.

The legacy of the Enlightenment, then, is a healthy skepticism of power and of the narratives propounded by the powerful. It is true that Enlightenment thinkers also sought to advance scientific thinking and to dispel various kinds of superstitions, but most were satisfied with a “non-overlapping magisteria”¹¹ arrangement: science tackled empirical problems, and religion tackled existential issues.¹² (It is useful to remember that some of the most brilliant embodiments of the Enlightenment were quite religious–Newton, for example.) Viewed from this perspective, no one better encompasses the spirit of the Enlightenment than Noam Chomsky, who has tirelessly attacked powerful and unjust institutions, intellectual hypocrisy, erroneous political narratives, and the moral laziness that leads to a passive acceptance of power no matter how grievous the consequences. Perhaps Chomsky’s most general statement of the appropriate task of intellectuals is found in his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”¹³ The first and most obvious responsibility, Chomsky argues, is “to speak the truth and to expose the lies” of powerful institutions like corporations and governments; this burden is placed on “intellectuals” because Western democracies “provide” them “with the leisure, the facilities, and the training” to pierce the patina of distortion that cloaks the operations of power. The intellectual does not mock doctrines that have little influence on social injustice, or those held by official enemies (say, in many cases, Islam), but rather confronts, first and foremost, the image in the mirror.¹⁴ For a citizen of the United States, that means focusing on the policies of our own government rather than self-righteously lampooning the ignorance or stupidity of the beliefs of “official enemies or those designated as unworthy in the prevailing political culture.”¹⁵ These are responsibilities that Chomsky has taken seriously for more than 40 years, working indefatigably to dismantle the narratives and ideologies of the powerful. His work offers the modern activist a fruitful heuristic for combating the myths, lies, and distortions that obscure the machinations of powerful coalitions and the institutions they control. This critique, not the New Atheists’ criticisms of religious faith, represents the true spirit of the Enlightenment.

Once again with human political nature and coalitional conflict

In our previous article, we argued that humans possess a suite of behavioral propensities that interact with the environment to give rise to political systems [see reference 1]. We focused on two of these tendencies: egalitarianism and coalition formation. The first manifests itself in a hatred of despotism and in the formation of reverse hierarchies in order to thwart despotic upstarts;¹⁶ the second, in the creation of unified coalitions of people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” granting moral status to ingroup members that is denied to outgroup members. For this article, we will also focus on a third fundamental component of human political nature: the motivation to control.¹⁷ * According to cognitive and educational psychologist, David Geary, the motivation to control is “an evolved disposition and is implicitly focused on attempts to control social relationships and the behavior of other people, and to control the biological and physical resources that have historically covaried with survival and reproductive prospects in the local ecology.” [page 24] Put more colloquially, the motivation to control is a biological tendency to desire control over people and resources. Politically, this essentially reduces to a desire for power, although it does not always need to manifest in a reprehensible form. For example, an activist concerned with inequality desires the ability to implement policies that will alleviate America’s inequitable economic distribution; the activist desires, in other words, the power to control economic policy.

The combination of these propensities leads to nearly incessant conflict between coalitions over finite resources. (The conflict need not be violent. Much of it is ideological, for example, and amounts to arguing with friends, groups, and large coalitions about how resources should be distributed.) In complicated, industrialized states, human egalitarian tendencies are often no match for the power of integrated coalitions; however, the combination of egalitarian proclivities and the motivation to control leads to anger and moral outrage from people and coalitions that do no reap the benefits of the institutional and coalitional arrangements (for example, women or minorities who were/are discriminated against in the labor market or victims of the financial machinations of Wall Street.).¹⁸ This necessitates some form of population control. In more democratic societies, the bludgeon is not an effective instrument and some attention must be paid to popular sentiment.¹⁹ The control of this popular sentiment through propaganda (political narratives) is therefore vital for the power elite. It is vital because it 1) limits the domain of thinkable thoughts and 2) limits the domain of acceptable debate. In the United States, the power elite (which consists of the corporate community, the upper class, and the policy planning network),²⁰ although only a tiny fraction of the entire population, controls a staggering proportion of the country’s available resources. This inequitable distribution of resources requires justification: it will not do for the power elite to simply assert, “we are better than the rest of you and therefore we own a significant proportion of the country’s wealth.” In the United States, as we argued in part I, the current political narrative is the neoliberal nationalist narrative. Because the mainstream media are an important conduit* of this narrative, it is important for a politically conscious person to analyze and criticize the media. Probably the most powerful framework for such a task comes from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.²¹

Power nexus 1: The mainstream media (obscuring institutional analysis)

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky offer a compelling institutional analysis of the media. Instead of tramping down the well worn and distracting trail of liberal versus conservative analysis,* Herman and Chomsky ask a simple question: what are the media? The straight forward but illuminating answer: “…the major media–particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow–are corporations ‘selling’ privileged audiences to other businesses.”²² That is, the media are enormous, profit seeking corporations that raise revenue by selling space for advertisers. They can charge more for such space if their readership includes the proper demographics–so, in essence, they are “selling” their audience to other businesses (namely, advertisers). In a certain functional sense, the “news” is simply a lure to attract audiences, which are the primary product that the media offers on the market.

Before continuing, it seems profitable to make a few remarks on institutional analysis. Perhaps one of the more impressive accomplishments of modern propaganda is effectively to eliminate this kind of straight forward analysis from mainstream consideration. In a famous scene from the documentary Manufacturing Consent, for example, the author Tom Wolfe calls Herman and Chomsky’s observations about the operations of the media “patent nonsense,” and conflates them with a conspiratorial view of the media, complete with elites in a “beige room” deciding what can and cannot be distributed. This is stunning because Herman and Chomsky explicitly assert the opposite: there are no central control stations or informational bureaus; rather, there are institutions functioning exactly as one would expect them to function. Wolfe, like most of the population, is almost certainly unfamiliar with the style of analysis Herman and Chomsky use and probably honestly confuses it with the picture he presents in the documentary–a confusion that is common and prevents such analysis, although obvious and highly informative, from becoming common place. Since we are surrounded by powerful institutions, this dearth of institutional analysis is particularly pernicious. For those not properly acclimated to our intellectual environment, it might seem risible that a number of intellectuals (the New Atheists) assail the “irrationality” of religious belief and fulsomely praise the virtues of skeptical inquiry while utterly ignoring the functions of the institutions that dominate modern society (and therefore greatly shape the lives of people on the planet), but such protestations of open skepticism have often been coupled with unquestioning acceptance of contemporary institutional structures and in this the New Atheists have ample company. Nevertheless, if one wishes to be serious about skeptical inquiry, one should extend its reach beyond relatively obvious belief structures and into domains of real power.

Herman and Chomsky’s basic institutional framework led to their propaganda model of the media. The propaganda model is a theoretical description (Chomsky calls it “virtually just an observation”²³ ) of the forces that shape the content of the media; it also describes the type of content one would expect given the structure of those forces. According to the model, there are five basic filters that affect the content of the media: ownership, sources of funding, sourcing, flak, and fear mongering (anti-communist or anti-terrorist ideologies). Of these, the first three are the most important.

–Ownership. The media are large corporations; therefore the content is owned by large, profit seeking institutions.* Through interlocking directorates, the corporations which own the major media outlets are linked to the corporate community in general. This shapes the content of the media because it is in the interest of corporations to instill a consumerist mentality and subservience to power. And it is certainly against the interests of corporations to teach institutional skepticism.

–Sources of funding. The media “sell” audiences to other businesses. It follows that the elite media wishes to attract affluent readers and to convey a consumerist message so that businesses will desire advertising space. A newspaper, for example, that is highly critical of corporations and profit seeking in general cannot attract advertisers and is at a serious funding disadvantage. In a very real sense, the function of the “news” is not to provide trenchant analysis of the political world, but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent*; the news, in other words, is not the primary product. (This does not mean that individual journalists are conscious of this; rather, it means that the news functions as a lure for audiences.)

–Sourcing. The media require sources of information and individual reporters desire access to “privileged” insider information. This makes the media highly dependent upon official sources, like the pentagon or the central government. If a reporter writes a story critical of some aspect of foreign policy, for example, she might lose her source. Since reporters compete for sources, such a loss can be devastating. In a larger sense, each media outlet is dependent upon information from official sources because an outlet cannot possibly put reporters all over the globe. Reporters are concentrated in informational areas: the pentagon or the White House, for example.

This institutional arrangement leads to the propagation of a corporate friendly narrative in the same way that the institutional arrangement of ESPN leads to the propagation of a sports friendly narrative. Doubtless, many journalists within the framework earnestly feel that they are “free” to publish and discuss what they desire, and visible evidence of censorship is kept to a minimum (although it is certainly not non-existent²⁴ ). Overt censorship is rare precisely because it is not necessary. Individual journalists and reporters who succeed within the establishment do so because they have either 1) internalized the neoliberal nationalist narrative or 2) have not desired to directly confront it in any meaningful way. Those who challenge the framework, like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Jack Rasmus, et cetera, are weeded out well before they reach elite centers of news distribution.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious effects of the mainstream media is the creation of an illusory boundary of reasonable debate. Subjugating thought to a manufactured framework with narrow limits, this boundary determines what can and cannot be discussed, even contemplated, in the United States. If one does transcend the boundary and attempt to criticize institutional structures, one is reduced to speaking an incomprehensible language. For example, asserting that the United States is the largest purveyor of terrorism in the world is not just considered erroneous, it is considered insane–it is virtually a meaningless sentence in the English language (at least in the U.S.). Most people would react to that and other similar statements in the same manner they would react to a person asserting that the home sports’ team should pull its best player so that it can lose as many games as possible–with bemused indignation. Let us consider a concrete example.

While “cool” and “rational” pundits like Jon Stewart* bemoan the increasing polarization of media outlets in America, the real polarization between the rich and the poor continues at an alarming rate.²⁵ This was shockingly evinced in the media’s coverage of the budget battles of 2011. Representative Paul Ryan, a self-styled votary of the mythological Reagan, unveiled his budget plan on April 5 to a prodigious amount of media hype. Many fulsomely praised the unflinching “seriousness” of Ryan’s plan, which managed to manhandle reality “with both hands” and forced “everybody else to do the same.”²⁶ Meanwhile, the progressive congressional caucus also forwarded a budget (April 13) that would balance the budget while leaving in place the legacy of the New Deal. While the “People’s Budget” received praise from some notable economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who called the plan “genuinely courageous,”²⁷ it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media,²⁸* apparently lacking the “seriousness” of the Ryan plan, despite the fact that it managed to balance the federal budget within a decade (the People’s Budget projected a $30.7 billion dollar surplus in 2021²⁹ ) without eviscerating important social programs. What condemns the media more forcefully than this disparity in coverage, however, is their utter disregard for the opinions and desires of the majority of the United States’ population. While David Brooks and others continue to praise the boldness, seriousness, and courageousness of robbing the poor to fund the rich (for example, while the Ryan plan cuts $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, it offset this with $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, at least two thirds of which come from programs for those of moderate means. See analyses of the Ryan plan³⁰,³¹ ) the majority of the population believes that income should be more equally distributed (on the level of Sweden) and, in fact, believes that it is already much more evenly distributed than it is–a great success of the propaganda system no doubt.³²

It is important to note that the Ryan plan, the People’s Budget, and other proposed fiscal policies have enormous concrete effects on normal citizens. While the New Atheists deploy witty one liners about the follies of faith, write books about why god is not great, and lament the irrationality of religious belief, millions of people are unable to perceive the reality of important political policies that will, to a significant degree, determine the future state of our society. The first and most salient reason is the shameful content of the mainstream media, something that those who desire a more “rational” world should focus their energy on combating and correcting.

Power nexus 2: Domestic policy and power (in praise of mythical markets)

The media are, in a very real sense, an extension of the centers of domestic power; therefore, it is important to understand and criticize these domestic power centers. Significantly, domestic power and policy has shifted dramatically since the 1960’s, leading from the Keynesian era to the triumph of neoliberalism (or, what has been aptly dubbed ‘the Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick.³³ This shift has profoundly impacted society, drastically increasing inequality (see figure 1²⁵ ), while concomitantly decreasing investment in social programs and infrastructure. In other words, an increasingly small fraction of society (a small coalition) has appropriated more of the resources. Noam Chomsky has been a leading critic of this trend, consistently pointing out the astonishing disconnect between the narratives used to justify this pattern of appropriation (“free markets dispassionately distributing resources”) and the reality behind it. In a society where narratives often serve the function of the bludgeon, it is important to escape one’s voluntary servitude by increasing one’s knowledge of 1) economic and political reality and 2) the content of the narratives used to justify the underlying reality.

Domestically, neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a set of policies aimed at increasing profitability while stripping away the foundations of the New Deal settlement (e.g., constraining upper class incomes, pursuing full employment, increasing labor’s share of the national income, etc.³⁴ That is, these policies are designed to enrich the oligarchical power elite, who are, in Chomsky’s words, “vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.”³⁵,³⁶ These policies include liberalizing trade and finance while promoting macroeconmic stability, privatization, and deregulation.³⁷* The monetary outcome of these policies, as indicated by a plethora of data, is continually increasing inequality and economic insecurity;³⁸ psychologically, there are plausible but still controversial interpretations of data that claim these policies have led to increases in antisocial behavior, including narcissism, and in potentially serious mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.³⁹ If our general outline on human political nature is correct, the increasing prevalence of these conditions is entirely understandable. Humans desire control and some form of egalitarianism. Just as a dearth of food leads to predictable physiological responses and pain, so a dearth of control leads to predictable psychological ailments.⁴⁰,⁴¹ However, because of the power of the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the increasing popularity of libertarian philosophies, many people are ignorant of the causes of inequitable resource distribution and the many troubling symptoms it causes. It may turn out that many of us are suffering from a curable disease but are unable to discern its cause. Furthermore, there is good evidence that inequality promotes religiosity where as religiosity does not promote inequality–in other words, there is good evidence that inequality causes increases in religious belief (at least in the United States).⁴² Those who desire that religion disappear might want to pay some attention to such recalcitrant facts as they recommend a strategy much different from the currently fashionable activity of denigrating the beliefs of religious adherents.

Because the policies of neoliberalism would be repugnant to most citizens, they are justified with narratives about the efficiency and fairness of free markets.⁴³,⁴⁴ In fact, it would be difficult to find another mythical entity that provokes such effusive praise and elicits such unthinking devotion. As Chomsky points out, many miracles are imputed to the creative efficiency of free markets that were actually the result of careful social planning and federal investment: the internet, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the high tech industry in general,… the list is nearly inexhaustible. In fact, one of the vital roles of the pentagon in the United States’ economy is to fund high tech industry, a simple fact that should be known by every citizen but is safely hidden by the propaganda system. The basic argument that “free market fundamentalists” (a truly scary form of fundamentalism) make thus rests upon a false premise. Consider one representative example. In a 20/20 episode on free market health care,⁴⁵ John Stossel argues against Michael Moore’s concerns about the free market, noting that free markets have created all kinds of brilliant things like cell phones, computers, and helpful medicines. Unfortunately, Stossel does not bother to note the incredible amount of federal funding that went into creating these technologies, the patent monopolies that drug companies use to boost profits and thwart competition, or the direct investment line from the enormous corporations that produce these goods into politicians who doubtlessly return the favor with friendly policies. (Corporations aren’t investing in politicians so that they will increase competition and lower profits.)

Like most fundamentalists, free market votaries almost invariably misrepresent the ideas of their supposed ancestors. A particularly illustrative example is Adam Smith, the nearly flawless and peerless demigod who begat the notion of the ‘invisible hand,’ and supposedly showed how a laissez faire system could, as if through some form of economic alchemy, change the base metal of selfishishness into the gold of economic prosperity for all. As Chomsky has noted numerous times,⁴⁶ the phrase “invisible hand” appears exactly once in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (it appears one other time in his other works⁴⁷), and Smith does not use it to describe how selfish humans behaving for profit unknowingly but ineluctably bring prosperity to others; rather, Smith uses it to assuage fears of capital flight, arguing that people will prefer to invest in domestic markets rather than foreign markets.⁴⁸ Smith’s arguments were subtle and sophisticated, but he generally favored market policies because he believed that they would produce economic equality. He had nothing but scorn for the “masters of the mankind,” who lived by the “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”⁴⁹ Like most enlightenment thinkers, he assailed the established powers of his time: the merchants and the policies that favored them. Had he lived to see the modern corporate revolution, he undoubtedly would have execrated the corporations that eventually supplanted the merchants that he so effectively attacked.

In a country with a reasonable educational system and tolerable media content, the above would be recognized for what it is: a series of facts and truisms. Since the myths that disguise these truisms actively promote the interests of the “masters of mankind,” however, they are eagerly promulgated and the truths that they hide are relegated to the margins of scholarship. Again, those who desire to liberate the mind from the shackles of irrational mythologies, especially when those mythologies have serious repercussions, should actively attack and encourage others to attack the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the myths it promotes. To consider just one example of the seriousness of the repercussions of neoliberal policies concretely, it is worth contemplating the following: the September 11 attacks (of which more below) tragically killed 3,000 individuals. However, an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance.⁵⁰ This is an astonishing number that is absolutely preventable, unlike the deaths that result from the actions of official enemies. It may comfort us to focus on those crimes while ignoring our own, but it does not improve our society. Although, as Noam Chomsky notes in a related context, it is not surprising that we often choose to ignore these inconvenient facts “given our principled exemption from moral truisms.”⁵¹

Power nexus 3: Foreign policy and power (noble intentions)

The neoliberal nationalist narrative promotes a consistent picture of American foreign policy: it stems from “benevolent” intentions and “clear moral purpose.”⁵² Sometimes, in fact, the intentions become so altruistic that it is appropriate to assert that “America is going through a noble phase” in foreign policy, one shrouded in a “saintly glow,” and committed to ideals that might actually be injurious to American interests because of their utter beneficence.⁵³ Although the language here might be a bit hyperbolic, it is not anomalous. In a 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza, for example, we learn that America is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever,” an “abstaining superpower” that could “conquer” the world but has not interests in doing so.⁵⁴ In fact, the idea that the United States is the single greatest force “for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity” is a virtual truism.⁵⁵ Attempting to find assertions to the contrary in the mainstream commentary poses an enormous challenge. If one veers to the extreme left of mainstream debate, one might find arguments that American intervention across the globe is wrong, not because it is criminal, but because it is too costly or because America is not “winning.” More often the focus is turned toward our “kindergarten” allies and their inability to cooperate.⁵⁶ The function of the narrative is clear. It dissuades criticism, refuting counterarguments not with logic but with a simple tautology algorithm: if America intervened, it did so from noble intentions. Statements to the contrary are simply not allowed to register in the minds of most citizens; therefore, even on the rare occasions that such arguments are broadcast, they are nearly incomprehensible. A hypothetical Martian might be forgiven for wondering why a group of “free thinkers”* finds it so necessary to demolish the relics of irrational religions, while sedulously ignoring (or underplaying) the horrific brutality of American foreign policy and leaving the basic narratives that support it untouched. Again, to find a trenchant analysis of the exercise of institutional power (this time, in the realm of foreign policy) that preserves the spirit of the enlightenment, one should turn to Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, the basics of inter-state relations are simple and are captured to a first approximation by the maxim of Thucydides: “the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”⁵⁷ Because the United States has been the most powerful country on the planet since World War II, it has done what it wishes, and its victims have suffered as they must.* The important thing, then, is to understand what America wishes; or, in other words, to understand its goals and how they lead to the particular interventions it has engaged in. The most basic goal “is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S. based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance.”⁵⁸ Countries that do not cooperate with this motive are punished through the two basic weapons America has at its disposal: military might and economic leverage. The examples of Chili and Indonesia are highly informative in this respect.

In 1970, Chile (democratically) elected Salvador Allende, a nationalist and Marxist, president. American policy planners were horrified. According to a 1975 Church Commission Report,⁵⁹ Washington had spent millions of dollars campaigning against Allende in prior elections even carrying out “spoiling operations” to prevent an Allende victory.⁶⁰ In 1970, however, he won by a narrow margin and policy planners immediately scrambled to undermine his regime. Nixon feared that Allende might become another “Castro,” meaning someone who refused to take orders from Washington, an overwhelming fear of policy elites. Two basic plans were designed: a Track I strategy that relied on political sabotage and economic warfare (making the “economy scream” according to the notes of DCI Helms.⁶¹ Nixon believed this would have “one hell of an effect.”⁶² ); and a Track II strategy that involved the CIA initiating a coup to prevent Allende from taking office. Both strategies failed to prevent Allende from taking over, but the economic warfare did have a serious, deleterious effect on the country. Eventually, General Augusto Pinochet was able to organize a bloody coup and overthrew Allende on September 11th, 1973 (now sometimes called “the first 9-11.”⁶³ ). Although there is no evidence that the CIA was directly involved in this coup, they were quite aware of it, and the Nixon administration was privately delighted (this was somewhat disguised in public).The death toll of the coup was over 3,000, and the horrors of the tortures implemented during Pinochet’s regime are ghastly.⁶⁴,⁶⁵ Not unsurprisingly, little time was wasted by policy elites ruing these tragedies. Today, the Pinochet regime is often remembered for being “tough,”⁶⁶ but for creating an “economic miracle”–one orchestrated by the “Chicago Boys,” who were “inspired” votaries of Milton Friedman’s “free market” principles. As Chomsky notes, this “miracle” is more mirage than substance, as the economy under Pinochet actually floundered, and the state had to take over much of the banking system to save the falling fragments of a failing economy. This is sometimes sardonically called “the Chicago road to socialism”–an apt phrase, although one not ordinarily encountered in mainstream literature on the topic.

In Indonesia in the 50’s and 60’s, after briefly expressing tepid support for him, America worried that president Sukarno was a dangerous “neutralist” and decided to take covert action to oust him. This attempt failed, so America decided to build up the Indonesian military, hoping for a coup. In 1965, there was a bloody coup and a subsequent “purging” of “communists” in the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI).⁶⁷ Suharto ascended to power and an estimated half a million people were killed.⁶⁸ While America was not directly involved in the coup, policy elites supported it, desiring to extirpate the PKI.⁶⁹ This support went as far as providing lists of thousands of “communists” to the Indonesian military.⁷⁰ In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and overthrew the Fretilin headed government. They continued to occupy the island until 1999, when Clinton finally noticed that some bad things had happened and “informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes.”⁷¹ Although the exact number of dead in East Timor is unknown, it is estimated that at minimum 102,800 East Timorese perished; while a higher end “speculation” of the number dead due to “conflict related hunger and illness” reached 183,000 (the CAVR report, from which these numbers are taken, did not issue a maximum estimate).⁷² Staggering numbers made even more heinous because they could have been easily prevented: Without direct support from Washington, as is clear from later events, the massacres would not have happened.⁷³ * As noted by Chomsky, what is astonishing about all of this is that it has been converted into a proof that America had entered a “noble” phase of foreign policy.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, most citizens remain unaware of the horrific tragedy, another impressive achievement of the propaganda system.

What the examples in Chili and Indonesia (the cases could be multiplied ad nauseam) incontestably illustrate is that American foreign policy is not about high moral values, benevolence, altruism, or other idealistic phantasms; rather, it is about the exercise and continuation of power. In Latin America, the U.S wanted to guarantee itself access to important resources while concomitantly allowing for a continued corporate presence in the region. Allende threatened these goals; consequently, the people of Chile had to suffer while their economy “screamed.” In Southeast Asia, the goals were the same, and the people of Indonesia, regrettably, were just some of the hapless victims. The horrific invasion of South Vietnam, saving it from “internal aggression” (against U.S. military and an U.S. supported regime), and near destruction of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, follows the same pattern. Importantly, U.S. foreign policy is not the manifestation of a “national interest,” unless one conflates the small coterie of elites who control foreign policy with the American population. Indeed, foreign policy follows the same basic pattern as domestic policy: a group of elites controls and benefits from the policies, while the vast majority of the population either suffers or reaps marginal rewards (and massive consequences from “blowback.”⁷⁵ It should be sobering to recognize that these terrible crimes, with prodigious and horrendous body counts, occur with the implicit consent of American intellectuals who, although granted unknown luxury and freedom, seldom rise from the comfort of their positions in academic institutions or branches of the government to protest against them.

Terrorism: Theirs and ours (intentional ignorance)

The events of 9-11 were, in many ways, the catalyst for the development of the New Atheism. Prior to 9-11, America had enjoyed almost absolute immunity from the kind of horrifying crimes it regularly doles out around the world. On 9-11, that changed. Understandably, many people were confused and emotionally disturbed by the tragedy and looked for answers to George W. Bush’s poignant question “why do they hate us”⁷⁶ * (Although, as Chomsky notes, the question is improperly phrased. “They” do not hate “us.” They hate the crimes that are perpetrated by the government, which should not be confused with the population of America.⁷¹ ) As Chalmers Johnson notes, this is a part of the blowback phenomenon.⁷⁵ Civilians, unaware of their government’s machinations in the affairs of other countries, suffer the consequences without knowledge of the reasons. Into this vacuum, a number of intellectuals provided a simple answer: they hate us because they are “simply evil” adherents of a “kind of death cult” religion,⁷⁷ a religion of a failed civilization that despises Western freedoms and values. And the attacks, so Richard Dawkins informs us, were made possible by the alluring image of 72 virgins in a paradisaical afterworld.⁷⁸ This, Dawkins also notes, is the source of the “underlying divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated” the attacks in the first place. In light of the grisly consequences of the 9-11 attacks, these intellectuals asseverated that it was no longer morally proper or decent to remain taciturn in the face of irrational belief systems, supposedly sacred or not. A number of subsequent bestsellers were penned and published, including Harris’s The End of Faith, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God is not Great, that assailed religion and the supposedly heinous crimes it can compel believers to commit.⁷⁹,⁸⁰,⁸¹ One of the consistent themes of these books is that religion, at least the Abrahamic religions, is a barbaric relic of the middle ages and should be eschewed by rational and enlightened adults in an enlightened society (“the delusions of our ignorant ancestors,” according to Harris⁸² ). It is also implied, both implicitly and explicitly, that without religion, the horrific 9-11 attacks would not have occurred. (This is spelled out quite clearly in the rather unfortunate posters that read “Imagine a world without religion” and show the twin towers standing in front of a glistening sun.)

The New Atheists, then, systematically ignore or downplay the importance of politics. Specifically, they ignore the legitimate rage that many around the world feel because of years of suffering from American atrocities and cast blame at a more palpable (because easily known) target: religion. Harris, for example, goes so far as to say that we are at war “with precisely the vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”⁸³ (It is hard to tell if Harris is aware of the last 60 plus years of Middle Eastern history.) This trajectory of thought is often presented (in tone and rhetoric) as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a desire to use reason to slay the bogeyman of superstition and promote the values of skepticism and science. We have no disagreement with the second part of this desire. However, the most noble traditions of the Enlightenment would recommend a rather different course of action: acutely analyze political reality–the nature of the institutions and power structures that dominate the world today, the effects of foreign policy interventions, past and present, and the struggles of those who have not benefited from the “values” and “freedoms” of the West–and contextualize the behaviors of others in light of this analysis. Moral decency also offers another simple recommendation: look in the mirror before excoriating official enemies. In the political arena, this is often called “liberal masochism,” but in everyday life it is recognized as a noble virtue.

There were edifying responses to the events of 9-11, responses that followed the better spirit of the Enlightenment. Of the responses, Chomsky’s stands out for its lucidity and moral integrity*. Instead of using the tragedy to foment hatred, attack religion, or clamor for revenge, Chomsky sought to contextualize the event, noting that “we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.”⁸⁴ That is, we may imitate Nietzsche’s portrait of the powerful and ignorantly persevere, paying no attention to the myriad legitimate grievances of those we regularly victimize, or we may behave like enlightened citizens and attempt understand the causes of the almost global antipathy against the U.S., antipathy that does not justify senseless murder, but that remains, in itself, reasonable given the history of U.S. foreign policy. Germane to the topic of terrorism are many polls, pointed out by Chomsky in his initial responses, that demonstrated that the majority of Muslims were (and still are) angered by U.S. policies, especially toward Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Further concerns included the U.S. role in propping up oppressive regimes and appropriating the great wealth of the region.⁸⁵ This is a view shared by Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald, who, in testimony before the 9-11 commission, asserted that “[Al Qaeda and other ‘terrorist’ groups] identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with the people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”⁸⁶ This is a conclusion that stems back to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower was concerned about a “campaign of hatred” against the United States–a concern apparently elicited by NSC explanations that majority of Arabs believe that the U.S. is concerned with protecting its oil interests by supporting the status quo, a status quo that stultifies economic and social progress.⁸⁷ Recent psychological research supports this general outline, and indicates that coalitional commitment, not religious belief, is a strong predictor of support for suicide attacks.⁸⁸,⁸⁹, ⁹⁰ If one is committed to a coalition that is regularly victimized, it is not difficult to understand why one might desire some form of violent revenge. Suicide bombers, then, are not psychologically different from average humans nor are they “misguided missiles” who are mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.* Rather, they are committed members of a coalition they feel is existentially threatened by the actions of the U.S.. Although their actions may be barbaric, their motivations, contra Hitchens, are not. It might not be palatable, but it is true that the same basic psychological forces that lead to suicide terrorism also lead to some of the most noble behaviors humans are capable of. The goal is to guide humans to the noble path and away from the destructive.

Conclusion

The general desideratum of the Enlightenment was, we believe, a noble one. Skeptical thinking and science are undeniable virtues. It is tragic, then, that the New Atheists actually betray these virtues by expending their cognitive resources in an obstinate battle against religion–without citing or apparently consulting important scientific research on the topic–while ignoring the more powerful institutional structures and narratives that shape and will continue to shape the social life of humans on this planet for years to come. We believe that the motivation to control provides the “best guess” at the puzzle of human (political) nature and that, combined with the other sources of human political nature we covered (reverse hierarchy formation, and ingroup/outgroup propensities), it should provide a starting point for a basic analysis of political phenomena. These (psychological propensities) interact in important ways with institutional structures and political narratives and give rise to the multifarious political behavior manifested in the world. In order to create a just, moral, and decent society, one should focus on the effects of these institutions and narratives on human well-being. There is good evidence that the current structure of society does not promote human flourishing; and there is incontrovertible evidence that the current structure leads to terrible consequences across the globe. The responsibility of intellectuals, to rephrase Chomsky, is to remain as impervious as possible to the propaganda of power and to criticize the shortcomings of institutional structures. This was a consistent theme of Enlightenment authors and we should honor their legacy by continuing that task. To this end, the New Atheists represent a betrayal of the Enlightenment and Chomsky, one of its most productive offspring. The planet will remain replete with apologists for power, no matter how grievous its crimes; we should honor the few who resist this all-too-human propensity and fight to promote the always precarious inheritance of skeptical inquiry.

* “New Atheists”: The term was first used in Wired magazine⁹¹ to refer to people who are not just atheists but who believe that irrational religious belief should not be tolerated and should be impugned by science and reason. Wired specifically cited Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as examples of New Atheists. More recent members of the informal group include Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. Whether or not there is anything “new” about the New Atheism is debatable. Frederich Nietzsche, to name one example, had nearly endless scorn for religion (although for different reasons than the New Atheists adduce) and did not believe “tolerance” was an appropriate reaction. It is perhaps unfortunate to lump a number of intelligent people into one group; however, for the purposes of our articles, the lumping is not terribly unfair and makes exposition much easier. Where appropriate, we attempt to single out particular scholars. At times, we are also more interested in the cultural idea of “New Atheism” than the actual people referred to by the term.

* “Islamophobia”: Sam Harris has argued that “Islamophobia” is a concocted “psychological disorder” used by “apologists” of Islam to protect it from legitimate criticism.⁹² We do not believe–and in fact, few people who use the term do believe–that Islamophobia is a disorder. It is, rather, the result of an ugly but “natural” proclivity toward demonizing the beliefs of outgroup members. Harris also argues that it is not possible to be “Islamophobic” because Islam is a set of ideas and practices that one can attack like any other set of ideas. This ignores two important facts. First, religion is not just a set of beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a system of sacred values that is often essential to a person’s sense of identity. Attack the beliefs and practices too vitriolically and you inevitably attack “the person.” This is not always illegitimate–but it should be approached with caution and civility. (We can see a person legitimately attacking Nazism, for example, or the ideas of Jihadis–and many Muslims do.) And second, what is objectionable in Harris’ writings (what contributes to Islamophobia) is not his abstract criticism of Islam, but rather his insistence, often absent of evidence, on blaming Islam for everything from terrorism to genital mutilation. We note that the great theologian, Hans Kung, offers pointed criticisms of specific aspects of Islam while presenting a historically grounded and balanced appraisal and no reasonable scholar would accuse Kung of Islamophobia.⁹³ John Esposito has written an excellent article on Islamophobia and contends that it consists of these beliefs:

1. Islam, not just a small minority of extremists and terrorists, is the problem and threat to the West
2. The religion of Islam has no common values with the West
3. Islam and Muslims are inferior to Judaism and Christianity
4. Islam is an inherently violent religion and political ideology rather than a source of faith and spirituality
5. Muslims cannot integrate and become loyal citizens
6. Most mosques should be monitored for embedded cells
7. Islam encourages its followers to launch a global jihad against all non-Muslims but in particular against the West.⁹⁴

As with any term that can be misused (e.g., anti-Semite, racist, misogynist), one should be careful when using it.

* “…was social justice.”: We have not and do not wish to argue that it is inappropriate to pen a book about the silliness of certain religious doctrines. What we object to, instead, is the strident tone, the unempirical assertions, the intolerance, and the unfair and inflammatory attacks against a specific religion (Islam), found in the books of the New Atheists (particularly in Sam Harris’ books). The rest of our objections–the main substance of our argument–is found in part I and the end of this article.

* “motivation to control.”: This was assumed but never explicitly articulated in our previous article.

* “Because the mainstream media is an important conduit…”: We note that the mainstream media is only one part of a larger “opinion-shaping network” that includes public relations/affairs institutions, think tanks, academia, etc.

* “…liberal versus conservative analysis…”: Debates about political bias in the media are not only a complete distraction but are often astonishingly removed from empirical reality. For example, self proclaimed media watchdog and president of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, in a review of the media’s performance in assessing Barak Obama’s first 100 days, plaintively asserts the following: “None of the three broadcast networks aired a single story on whether the new president’s economic policies were driving America towards European-style socialism. Not a single network news reporter used the term “socialist” to describe how his policies are shifting economic authority to the federal government. On only four occasions was the word “socialist” used on-camera at all – all by outside sources.”⁹⁵ We have yet to confirm if Bozell’s spaceship is set to return from his long sojourn on Neptune.

* “…owned by large, profit seeking institutions.”: As of 2009 there were six major media corporations: General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS. These massive corporations own and control output in the television, publishing, film, and internet industries.⁹⁶

* “…but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent”: Chomsky, for example, makes a distinction between the elite “agenda setting” media which attract the most privileged audiences (business managers, professors, political managers, etc.) and the “mass media” proper which attract the rest of the population. As Chomsky puts it: “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that.”⁹⁷ Since 1997, when these lines were written, the awesome ability of the mass media to distract the population has substantially increased.

* “…pundits like Jon Stewart”: Despite Stewart’s facility with humor, his analysis of the media is unenlightening. The “rally to restore sanity” and other subsequent interviews illustrate the virulence of the neoliberal nationalist virus.

* “…it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media”: A google search of the terms “the Ryan plan” and “The People’s Budget” brings up 224 million and 69 million hits respectively. Thus, the Ryan plan has received 3.24 times as many linked pages as the People’s Budget. This is obviously not a a scientific survey but it is telling.

* “…and deregulation.”: We note that the precise causes of these policies are hotly debated, complex, and would take a great deal of space to explicate. See the referenced sources for more thorough analyses.

* “…group of ‘free thinkers.’”: Christopher Hitchens certainly addresses foreign policy issues, but a conversation about his political beliefs would require another article. Harris and Dawkins generally stick to more parochial concerns about the deleterious effects of religion on foreign policy (theirs, not ours). Dennet, so far as we can tell, does not bother much with politics. Many campus groups, inspired by “free thought” movements, exist and few, to our knowledge, seriously challenge current political narratives save for when they are directly related to religious issues.

* “…and its victims have suffered as they must.”: For an extensive, though partial, list of the victims one can do no better than read William Blum’s Killing Hope.⁹⁸

* “…massacres would not have happened.”: Kissinger noted somewhat cryptically that these events had taken place not willingly but “illegaly and beautifully.”⁹⁹ It is unclear which “events” in particular Kissinger is referring to. However, the illegal component rings true enough.

* “…George W. Bush’s poignant question ‘why do they hate us.’”: These plaintive questions and the jejune answers, which almost invariably support elite interests, are reminiscent of debates about Spanish policy toward the native inhabitants of the New World. Bartolome de las Casas described the treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispanolia in graphic detail:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.”¹⁰⁰

It is not difficult to understand why the indigenous people were angered by such brutal treatment–allowing for the fact that de las Casas utilized hyperbole for effect. However, rather than comprehend the obvious, apologists for the colonialists and landowning elite, such as Jaun Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the Spaniards were simply superior to the “Indians” and had no option but to declare war against them, enslave them, and, ultimately, Christianize them.¹⁰¹ If the native Hispanolians had succeeded in a stunning and brutal attack against innocent Spaniards, Sepulveda could certainly have been counted on to explain that the indigenous people practiced a barbarous type of paganism that instructed them to eat human flesh and that this superstition was both the necessary and sufficient cause of the attack. If de las Casas mentioned the brutality of the colonial project as a contributing factor, he could be dismissed as an “apologist for terror” and Sepulveda could wax about Spanish freedom and benevolence. He could even dub the attack “simply evil” and attempt an hermeneutic of the “Indian mind” to better explain their hatred of freedom. While we rightly scoff at the notion of books explicating the “Indian mind,” it is worth noting that there are many books about the “Arab mind.”¹⁰²,¹⁰³,¹⁰⁴

This is not to say that the events of 9-11 were not a terrible atrocity. They certainly were. It is only to underscore the point, using a detached, historical example, that it is important to understand the grievances that lead to terrorism rather than bloviate about how “good” we are and how “evil” they are.

* “…lucidity and moral integrity.”: This is not to compare the value of the responses, but to note that Chomsky’s response was particularly compelling and worth contemplation.

* “…mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.”: While studies on the motivations of suicide bombers can elucidate and potentially have salubrious purposes, there is something rather distasteful in the obsessive quest for fundamental motivations. As Chomsky notes, “[e]veryone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s an easy way: Stop participating in it.”¹⁰⁵ That is, as American citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the terrorism perpetrated by our government. In other words, instead of attempting to penetrate the supposedly unfathomable depths of the “terrorist mind,” perhaps we should worry about our own global atrocities. We have yet to see a book on the “Depraved soul of the American: Explaining global terrorism that emanates from Washington.” To paraphrase G.W. Bush’s favorite philosopher, we should examine the log in our own eye before we criticize the sliver in another’s.

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2. Several concerns were raised with the first article about definitions. To address those concerns, we have included an appendix that defines and/or elaborates potentially confusing terms or arguments.
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10. Ibid. Pg. 53.
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81. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton.
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91. Gary Wolf (November, 2006). The Church of the Non-Believers. Wired.
92. Sam Harris (August 13, 2010). What Obama got wrong about the Mosque. The Daily Beast.
93. Kung, H. (2007). Islam: Past, present, and future. Oxford, England: Oneworld.
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Add to that the shocking images of abuse of Iraqi detainees in the American-run detention centre in Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, and that of a battered to death Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist in a British-run detention centre in the south of Iraq, and you get the idea that these thugs and torturers felt international law did not apply to them. Apart from the immorality, inhumanity and criminality of these actions, they are totally counterproductive. A report published by the Watson institute, Brown University in the U.S., puts the effect of such inhumanity and lawlessness thus:

In Iraq, over 100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system, with many of those detained in the first years of the war processed through the Abu Ghraib prison. In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse… and death of Abu Ghraib prisoners came to public attention. Iraqi security chiefs allege that the existence of, and conditions in U.S. [run] prisons actually strengthened Al Qaeda, and they blamed the detention system for increased violence in 2010.

The Guardian (August 5, 2011) under the heading “revealed: Britain’s secret policy on overseas torture” reports that:

A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.

The government has rightly set up an inquiry to look into British complicity in torture and rendition, which would begin after a police investigation into torture is completed. One of the most admired traits in western societies is their adherence to the supremacy and universality of the rule of law. That principle has been battered by the “war on terror”. Any inquiry that is serious in restoring the reputation of the UK must be robust and serious; what better way to do that than to address the concerns of human rights groups that have worked tirelessly to bring some of these abuses to light. The previous government fought doggedly to keep these shameful actions from the British public. Witness the case of Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohammed, when the previous foreign secretary was ordered by six high court judges to release CIA information about the torture of the detainee. David Miliband took the case to appeal, where three of the country’s highest-ranking judges dismissed his appeal with the Lord Chief Justice’s remarks reported by the Independent (February 10, 2010):

He [the Lord Chief Justice] pointed out that the redacted paragraphs would not reveal information which would be of interest to a terrorist or criminal or provide “any potential material of value to a terrorist or a criminal”. The judge added: “Indeed, it seems right to emphasize that the publication of the redacted paragraphs would not and could not, of itself, do the slightest damage to the public interest.” Lord Judge said there was no secret about the treatment to which Mr. Mohamed was subjected while in the control of the U.S. authorities.

Is it surprising that human rights groups that include Amnesty, Liberty and Human Rights Watch want openness and transparency before they take part in such an inquiry? Their concerns were expressed in a letter, reported in the Guardian (August 5, 2011):

We are particularly disappointed that the issue of what material may be disclosed to the public will not be determined independently of government and, further, that there will be no meaningful participation of the former and current detainees and other interested third parties… As you know, we were keen to assist the inquiry in the vital work of establishing the truth about allegations that UK authorities were involved in the mistreatment of detainees held abroad. Our strong view, however, is that the process currently proposed does not have the credibility or transparency to achieve this.

Mr. Cameron, the alleged illegal violations of human rights of detainees did not happen under your watch. You have an opportunity to draw a line under what happened, and restore Britain’s reputation, which is extremely important in fighting terrorism, by having a credible inquiry that satisfies the objections raised by the lawyers representing these reputable and internationally respected organizations.

The universality of human rights, respect for the rule of law, and avoiding double standards in dealing with nations and individuals should become the guiding principles of America and Britain. Now, that in parallel, with good intelligence and effective policing, is the moral, smart, and effective way to fight terrorism.

Captain America offers spectator-consumers the chance to yet again sit back and be taken for a phantasmagorical ride. The new Hollywood film is another forces of good versus the forces of evil production, where the goodest good guy is a white superhero whose scrawny body is technologically transformed into the perfect muscular male. Moral, good, manly, just, brave, caring, altruistic — all in a physical package that buckles women at the knees. He might as well be God.

Is there anything realistic about the film? Is it the American propaganda tool that the Russia media venue Russia Today (RT) has portrayed it as? Look at the comments that follow this short RT Captain America video and you see that people question Russia Today‘s motives — rejecting it as a flagrant example of ugly Americana.

Here’s one example. “Can’t anyone just enjoy a movie?” said a guy, DaveSquibbSr, who seems to display some rather hysterical patriotic fervor about how the mass media lies to the people and falsely demonizes private enterprise.

Another example: “Dear RT News: Fuck You. By the way, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now are without a doubt anti-war movies. And the others mentioned contain anti-war messages too,” wrote Austionous, who lists his favorite video as Glen Beck’s patriotic cheer-lead The Real Story: Iraq.

The real story is that the Pentagon’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan — never mind Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda or any of the other sites of U.S. covert operations — has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,228,000,000,000 since 2001, and the ticker is ticking, and the United States economy and all social services are in collapse. The real story is that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi people and at least 4000 US troops have died, with scores of thousands of U.S. veterans wounded and traumatized. Remember Iraq war veteran Timothy McVeigh?

But here’s the best RT Captain America comment of all, replete with the threat of violence that differs little from the threat of violence advanced by Norwegian freedom fighter Anders Behring Brievik — label and segregate, kill the multiculturalists amongst us, and purify Europe by forcibly repatriating all Moslems.

“Anyone who points at Hollywood and accuses them of doing anything other than making entertaining movies for profit,” says acircleoflight, “needs a tattoo on their forehead that says, ‘I’m too stupid to understand fiction’. And then when we have all these people properly labelled, kill them and send their meat to a starving country. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is nonfiction. Movies based on ‘real events’ or ‘based on a true story’ are still Fiction. Its never actually what happened.” This guy or gal self-identifies as a ‘pagan’ whose “spirituality is based in logic and reason.”

And that’s a death threat against, well, against your humble correspondent. Alas, I’ll have to go into hiding now, hunker down and secure my own little heavily armed fortress in preparation for the Christian crusaders, soon to come my way, as this story gains readership.

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s what Moslem immigrants or Rwandan Hutu refugees feel like? I mean, the mass media, governments, and plenty of the common people hold these awe-fully biased and ugly stereotypes about Moslems, you know, towel-headed camel jockeys and all that, and about people of color (niggers, spicks, chinks, gooks), more generally, and every Rwandan Hutu is considered a genocidal machete-wielding savage. How did these stereotypes and mythologies of persecution become so deeply seated in the mass psychology?

What is it about multiculturalism that people find so scary? The idea that we should share? Do unto others as we want others to do unto us?

Anti-Islamic fervor is whipped up by governments, corporations and individuals to provide an excuse for state terror and rationale for weapons proliferation. Such fervor is alive and thriving in the white power economies of the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Japan (though this is changing), and, well, Norway. When stories about the twin Oslo attacks first broke, the mass media immediately launched into their private inquisition about Islamic jihadists, grounded in nothing but speculation and fear-mongering. Russia Today was no different and just as bad as the British and U.S. press.

Your correspondent, a bit too quick to speak (several friends were quite correct about this) but also caught off guard, was stupid enough to get caught up in it, and missed the chance to say, “Hey, wait, it’s a blond-haired blue-eye white man who looks more like the Viking comic book superhero THOR… This is no Osama bin Laden recruit, so please kick your Islamophobia, and stop perpetuating war against innocent people…”

Too Stupid to Understand Fiction

It seems that Norway’s self-proclaimed savior decided to launch his own personal revolution, hoping to inspire Christian Holy War against non-white immigrants who are, in somebody’s mind, soiling the blood of virile white men and defiling their (the white man’s) virgin white women. This sounds like a Neo-Nazi screed about Aryan blood purity. In fact, he has been labelled a Nazi, and saddled with all kinds of other labels, which people and organizations — who seem to have a lot in common with Breivik — have used to distance themselves from him.

Did Breivik act alone? Did he independently flee the proverbially chicken coop of Norwegian normality and privately hatch his personal ideology and revolutionary intent? Christian purity, dirty Arabs, the imminent destruction of Israel? I don’t think so. I think there are other cells, and plenty of them, or movements, and militias, spread over Europe and North America, who are quite pleased with Breivik’s as-yet simmering revolution.

I think Breivik knows perfectly well that his ideas are embraced, and that’s what gave him the sense of entitlement to do what he did. He expects to see Europe “burn”. They are also shared by plenty of North Americans. In fact, the celebrated American Islamophobe Robert Spencer was cited 64 times in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’. Spencer co-founded the hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Jihad Watch. The latter was funded (2003) by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Center for the Popular Study of Culture), a “conservative” group that set out to influence Hollywood and spread their ideas about freedom.

“Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good, barring the violence.
Some of them are great,” Italian official Mario Borghezio reportedly told British press. Borghezio is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. How does a guy like that defend civil liberties? It brings a whole new meaning to the words. “Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed,” he said. “We have to defend them.”

The xenophobic hatred of non-white people is written all over the walls of Fortress Europe and Fortress America and Fortress Canada and Fortress Israel. Who could miss it? Kill the Moslems. Kill the Libyans. Kill the Somalis. Kill the Yemenis. Kill the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Iranians. And kill every last Rwandan Hutu — the fact that they are Christian doesn’t matter, since their spirituality was void and null after they, according to the standard mythology, chopped off their own sisters’ heads. Kill the Palestinians. To justify, to win popular support, the same people who advance these racist sentiments, and generally the ones who take action on them, are the ones who secretly produce and secretly disseminate much of the supposed ‘hate’ propaganda (Kill the Christians, Kill the Americans, Kill the Jews) that is directed at their own ethnic demographic (Christians, Americans, Jews).

Hollywood plays a huge role. Films like Captain America… well, tattoo my forehead “I’m too stupid to understand fiction.”

Kill the Arabs in Sudan — another rallying cry — and arrest Omar Al-Bashir, the Arab Islamic president of Sudan: He’s committing genocide says the powerful Jewish ‘Save Darfur’ lobby, and he’s enslaving good Christians the Christians redouble. Hollywood actors and the mass media say so, it must be true. This rhetoric spews forth from think tanks and universities and ‘human rights’ agencies and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Empire operates in a curious manner. Take Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, where English professors like Dr. Eric Reeves sit in their quaint offices, surrounded by Shakespeare and Milton (and by eugenics professors like Seymour Itzkoff), worshipped by starry-eyed bleeding heart liberal elite women, and they hatch political screeds on genocide informed by intelligence operatives — you know, Central Intelligence Agency types — who are fomenting the Pentagon-backed guerrilla insurgencies on the ground in those far off places like Sudan.

Harvard University’s Samantha Power has confirmed that this is our problem from hell: America has entered the age of genocide. Of course, we don’t have anything to do with it, and poor Lady Liberty has to drag her allies with her, kicking and screaming, and stepping on the tails of her gown dragged through the mud on the rocky road to freedom. Of course, we sell ‘em the humvees, missiles, tanks and fighter-bombers to get there.

The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little recognition in the world? It was only a few days after his shooting spree in Oslo and the former nobody Anders Behring Breivik already had a huge Wikipedia entry with 164 references — and it’s expanding by the day. Obviously, he didn’t create it. Is this capitalism? Or education? No one has created a page for me. Not a single word!

I mean, Rwandan government agents like Tom Ndahiro, who spin the lies for President Paul Kagame, have labeled me a “notorious Tutsi genocide denier” and such praise for my work is not restricted to Rwandans. Canadian academic Dr. Gerald Caplan, who is often seen at the side of dictator Paul Kagame, has published articles deriding me and the other “genocide deniers who drink the each other’s putrid bath water.” (Seems Caplan forgot to have his work peer-reviewed: its rather hysterical.) Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia was a bit nonplussed by my exposure of genocide there. You’d think someone would create a Wikipedia page for me.

What’s wrong with this picture? Do I have to become an elite warrior of the Christian Knights Templar? Embrace Zionism? Steal a few million diamonds from Congo and get away with it? Plagiarize the Unibomber’s manifesto and then re-enact the Crusades by massacring a bunch of kids at summer camp? Or should I dress as a soldier and have my picture taken like King Leopold II? Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium, his crimes covered up. Is this the future historical situation of Mr. Breivik — our modern day THOR?

“The recent killings in Norway were horrific,” said British rock star Steven Morrissey (former Smiths singer). “As usual in such cases, the media give the killer exactly what he wants: worldwide fame. We aren’t told the names of the people who were killed — almost as if they are not considered to be important enough, yet the media frenzy to turn the killer into a Jack The Ripper star is… repulsive. He should be un-named, not photographed, and quietly led away.”

Does the coverage around this one Norwegian guy at all remind anyone of a guy named O.J. Simpson? Like the twin World Trade towers demolitions in New York City on September 11, 2001, did the twin Breivik attacks provide the corporate media system with the perfect topic to whip up hysteria and manufacture mass distraction? The media is now turning over every rock they can find in the hunt for clues to Breivik’s madness. Imagine if they investigated the crimes of the big mining or military or pharmaceutical corporations, or the kickbacks to government officials?

Breivik’s most favorite movie was the vaingloriousy bloody Roman war flick Gladiator. No. 2 was 300, an American comic fantasy action thriller marketed by Warner Brothers. No. 3 was independent film Dogville, with Hollywood stars James Caan, John Hurt, Lauren Bacall and, especially, Nicole Kidman — who has the townspeople killed for sexually and emotionally abusing her.

Dogville is under attack. Danish director Lars Von Trier, a self-proclaimed Nazi, stated that he’s “sorry for having made it” [the film] whose machine-gun massacre at the end might have inspired Breivik’s armed assault on the little Norwegian island Utoya. While advocates of Nazism might want to look at themselves in psychotherapy, at the very least, the film Dogville is a harsh critique on American ‘society’ and there is absolutely no reason for Von Trier to apologize for making it. Why is an independent filmmaker bullied and shamed into apology? Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino applauded Dogville; does that make Tarantino culpable in mass murder? Why isn’t director George Lucas under attack for making Star Wars now that killer robotic drone technologies are deployed against innocent people all over the world?

Why isn’t Steven Spielberg under attack — if not arrested — for his alliance with the Pentagon in the war production Saving Private Ryan, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon? The award honored Spielberg for making “a historic contribution to the national consciousness.” Stephen Speilberg also has the unprecedented distinction of producing mass hysteria about sharks through the one film — Jaws — responsible for demonizing sharks as ruthless killers and, in large part, for the ongoing decimation of shark species and the uncertain fate of our oceans. What kind of national consciousness does such cinematography contribute to? How is Cohen’s ‘national consciousness’ any different from the disease of nationalism?

William Cohen was Secretary of War under President William Jefferson Clinton at the height of the U.S. invasion of Central Africa. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Cohen has been involved at the deepest levels of secrecy and denial in, for example, intelligence, torture, and special operations.

Saving Private Ryan provokes deep psychological sentiments and emotions based in the standard constructions and discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy and freedom. “Ryan, I must be quick to point out,” Secretary of War Cohen disingenuously declared, “is not a recruitment promotional for the Pentagon. It speaks to us, however, about the importance of values, discipline, determination and sacrifice.”

Who is “US”? It doesn’t speak to me that way. It speaks to me of war, blood, private profits and deceptions that have ripped apart millions and millions of people’s lives, and for no good reason, and that have exterminated entire nations of people. How are Cohen’s important characteristics — values, discipline, determination and sacrifice — different from the patriotism and nationalism that the Pentagon uses to conscript and recruit young people to do its dirty work? Under the Nazi regime, all music had to ‘fit’ within certain standards defined as ‘good’ German music — and censorship was ruthless. How does that differ from the Pentagon’s approval or or rejection of films?

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen escorts Steven Spielberg through a military honor cordon into the Pentagon (1999).

The Pentagon routinely influences the scripts and the direction of Hollywood films. Plot-lines have been changed, history altered, and scripts modified to meet the Pentagon’s approval. If the Pentagon doesn’t like the direction, plot, themes or characters of pre-production films they won’t support them, and don’t.

In keeping with the privatization of war, the Pentagon’s interests are often served by civilian firms packed with ex-military who maintain tight ties to the war room. Professional soldiers with long service records in covert and psychological operations — Navy Seals or 10th Mountain Division Rangers or Green Berets — are often hired as consultants to enhance war films.This way, the Pentagon and U.S. officials can ‘plausibly deny’ involvement in a film’s direction or production — but the links, ideologies, patriotism and emotional hooks all satisfy the ideals of the American fighting machine.

Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine who earned three purple hearts in Vietnam, has worked in Hollywood as an actor, producer, writer, and consultant, with major credits for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. “We are fighting Islamo-fascists who will not tolerate the existence of non-Muslims — infidels — on this earth,” Dye said in a Los Angeles Times article. “These are folks who are told they cannot rest until every infidel is driven from this earth…. They aren’t people you can negotiate with.”

Dye’s consulting company is Warriors, Inc., but he works three days a week to influence mass media reportage on wars the U.S. is involved in. He is a frequent ‘independent expert’ cited in corporate media stories. Dye worked as a reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he has run his own radio program. Dye’s record in Vietnam raises questions about his involvement in illegal operations like the Phoenix Program. Later, during the Reagan administration’s terrorist covert guerrilla wars Latin America, Dye worked “reporting and training troops in guerrilla warfare techniques” in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Reagan projects in Latin America were meant to subvert democracy, institute dictatorship and further U.S. corporate interests; hundreds of thousands of people died from massacres, beheadings, dismemberment and disappearing.

Who says violence in cinematography has no connection to the real world? In Captain America we find some fascinating themes that should inspire anyone to question the motives of the corporate enterprises and the star-studded casts — Hollywood, the Pentagon, Viacom, Paramount, Walt Disney, Marvel Entertainment — that bring such phantasmagorical extravaganzas to the public’s pleasure.

Isn’t Empire the main theme of Captain America? Military superiority in a we-are-the-forces-of-good-they-are-the-forces-of-evil narrative that never threatens our sensibilities or ever makes us squirm in our fifteen-dollars-a-shot-plus-popcorn-and-soda seats? Is the film aimed at indoctrination for war and the manufacture of consent for our participation in elite military imperatives premised on private profit and power?

What about Hollywood’s presentation of ideas about the manipulation of the human body achieved by modern science through genetic engineering, pharmaceutical products, (breast implants, plastic surgery, liposuction), hormones and steroids? Are there any references to these scientific advancements?

What about the theme of patriarchal male domination and the ideologies of the sexual control of women and male supremacy? Come on, can’t anyone just sit and watch a movie?

Not Just a Soldier, a Good Man

“We’re gonna make a new breed of super-soldier,” one of the military grunts proclaims. “Stay the way you are,” the slightly mad scientist with the German accent tells the scrawny un-superized-soldier, prior to his physical transformation to glossy super-chested hero. “Not just a soldier, but a good man.”

A good man. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” the as-yet-unsuperized hero says. Could be anybody from America. The mythology is that any one of us can rise to great heights if we set our minds on it. Isn’t this the great American dream?

The soldier is a good man. The goodness projected by our Captain America savior translates directly to the commonly held belief in the goodness of the average U.S. soldier who, of course, is spreading truth and democracy around the world. This is not a guy who tortures or massacres innocent people, he is a very principled and very ethical hero — like the great white American savior Jake Sully in the blockbuster 3-D emotional sensation Avatar. The projected image of the good soldier in these films maps directly onto U.S. forces deployed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, or the heroes “defending American values” in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom. America’s soldiers are not unprincipled killers — the kind of sociopath that some people are portraying Anders Behring Breivik out to be — they are good men. Right?

Of course, Hollywood has its way with reality. Camp Lemonier is a Pentagon outpost for so-called ‘snatch-and-grab’ terrorist operations run by covert forces, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, with secret CIA torture centers. These illegal operations and covert guerrilla wars involve violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The U.S. backs bloody dictatorships and nasty warlords all across the region. Such facts are obscured by Hollywood and its propaganda films, aren’t they?

Survivors of U.S.-backed state-sponsored genocide in Ethiopia; the government of Meles Zenawi is committing massive atrocities against numerous indigenous tribes. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

We Take the Brain

The new Captain America film is packed with action adventures and high technology war weapons. Consider the film’s presentation of the secret weapons of the HYDRA — the Nazi deep science division presented as the ominous evil enemy. It sure looks a lot like the Pentagon’s billion dollar boondoggle the Northrup-Grumman Corporation B-2 bomber. Coincidence?

Well, in the film this stealth bomber has a different name altogether, and its not our name for the thing, its the Nazi’s name for it. Like the choice of the language that the Allied scientist speaks with — a decisively Germanic accent — the choice of the stealthy ‘flying wing’ resembling the Pentagon’s B-2 bomber is no coincidence, but an intentional choice based in the hidden history of allied war crimes of WW-II.

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over to the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (until 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace ‘assets’, including the Fi 103 ‘flying bomb’ (propaganda name ‘V1′), the A4 rocket (‘V2′), and the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft, the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Horten Ho IX or Go 229 V-3. The futuristic Northrup-Grumman Corporation ‘stealth’ bomber — the flying wing — unveiled in the United States (circa 1989) bears a striking similarity to the Nazi Go 229 V3. It is widely unknown that at least one complete Go 229 V-3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into U.S. hands and disappeared into supra-governmental ‘black’ programs in the secret weapons complex post WW-II.

Who ran this weapons complex? John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952-1959. Allen Dulles ran the Central Intelligence Agency, until recently known as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). The Dulles brothers had ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930′s and into the war. Most interesting was the Sullivan and Cromwell — Dulles brothers’ law firm to a guy with a mustache named Adolf — one of their clients. So began the post WW-II era in secrecy and denial, the Cult of the Atom, and the mythology of the comic strip superhero, Captain America.

“While watching the trailer for this movie I spotted a number of what-if planes and tanks,” posted a guy named ‘Nick” on a specialized military technology Internet forum. “The main one is a giant Nazi flying wing bomber that looks like an overgrown Ho-229 [sic] and it was being chased by what looks like an XP-55 Ascender. There were also some Nazi armoured cars that looked rather slick and streamlined, only on screen for a few seconds so not too sure. This should be a fun summer movie to switch off the brain and enjoy!”

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. This is yet another example of U.S. government war crimes that went unchallenged.

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists — experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) — to U.S. military and intelligence bases, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the O.S.S. — and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project Paperclip and Project 63. Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazis belonging to the elite ‘Gehlen Org’ — named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen — were exfiltrated into the CIA.

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons — primarily, at first, concerned with the atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complex in Thuringia after the Allied invasion.

Their slogan was: “We take the brain.”

Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft prototype unveiled in Britain in 2010.

Taranis, designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the B-2 ‘Spirit’ bomber aircraft each averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today). Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft ($1.27 billion today), while the total program cost (development, engineering, testing) averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars ($2.87 billion today). In 2010, Britain’s scandal-ridden BAE Systems unveiled a new unmanned stealth bomber prototype of its own, Taranis, funded by the people of Britain to the tune of 143 million pounds.

The B-2 has been deployed in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the recent illegal war against Libya, yet Hollywood films glamorize weapons of mass destruction, and they inspire young people to want to operate them, no matter the moral or ethical questions, which are never asked. Raining bombs down from the sky is as immoral as sitting in a remote office somewhere far from the actual war theatre pulling some joystick which rains UAV-deployed weaponry down on innocent men, women and children. Pakistan offers an egregious example which has only slightly scratched the surface of the impenetrable western mass media propaganda system.

The film Top Gun offers the premier example of western technological war propaganda and nationalism, completely stripped of all moral and ethical conundrums cast as another contest of good (US) versus evil (them). Captain America (Tom Cruise), to the rescue. Of course, he always gets his girl. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

The Brain Drain

The military-entertainment complex comprises a lot more than the sleek propaganda and psychological mind-melts plastered across the big screen in such films. Often there are direct ties between current or past Pentagon or intelligence officials. For example, Captain America is a Paramount Films, Viacom Industries, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Corp. production (the exact relations between these industrial giants are opaque and fluid).

One Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer director for some 19 years, who  directed the interests of the corporation, was former U.S. General Alexander Haig — the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1973), White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-74), Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces (1974-79), and secretary of state under President Reagan (1981-82). While serving MGM, Haig was also a director of the multinational defense contractor United Technologies International (UTI), the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, the maker of the Blackhawk choppers of the Pentagon’s Somalia propaganda film Black Hawk Down.

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. You see the Motion Pictures of America cited on every pre-preview trailer. For another example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993).

Directors of Viacom Corporation (the parent company of numerous other media entities) include media magnate Sumner Redstone, a 1944 Harvard University and 1947 Harvard Law School graduate who served in the “Military Intelligence Division” during World War II. ” While a student at Harvard, he was selected to join a special intelligence group whose mission was to break Japan’s high-level military and diplomatic codes. Mr. Redstone received, among other honors, two commendations from the Military Intelligence Division in recognition of his service, contribution and devotion to duty, and the Army Commendation Award. Mr. Redstone served in the Military Intelligence Division during World War II.”

Redstone’s 2010 annual compensation for Viacom was $35.3 million, while Viacom CEO received the largest annual compensation in America — $84.5 million — while Viacom’s No. 2 director received $64.7 million in 2010.

The U.S. government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, established soon after Pearl Harbor, had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts; they were also involved in interrogation operations (torture) against Japanese and German war prisoners. The Military Intelligence Division was also used to coordinate and implement various international ‘deception operations.’

The film Pearl Harbor only advanced nationalistic and patriotic sentiments meant to further indoctrinate and recruit warriors. Starring great white hope Ben Affleck, the 2001 production is rife with inaccuracies and devoid of any serious geopolitical context. The oversimplified plot was purely based on emotion and jingoisms. Even U.S. military historians agreed.

One of the great cover-ups of the World War II era was the U.S. government’s advance knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it seems that U.S. taxpayers needed to be coaxed into another blood-drenched war that would claim the lives of so many aspiring Captain Americas.

But that was not the only big World War II whitewash that Hollywood has massaged for the Pentagon and its corporate allies. While the blockbuster film Schindler’s List also helped recast the hidden history of World War II, it serves other propaganda purposes — favorable to capitalism and the elites who benefit most from it.

Schindler’s List fits neatly into the narratives about the Holocaust that have become industries unto themselves. Remember the wealth that ghetto refugees carried along with them in the film? Diamonds, easily concealed: the state of Israel was born out of the blood diamonds plundered from the Congo (Africa). While the suffering of the Jews in Europe was very real, it is their ‘victim’ status that has been used and abused to shield them against all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide being perpetrated by Israeli interests in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana — its a long list — and the Palestinian territories. (Of course, the same ‘victim’ status has been used, falsely, by the elite Tutsi dictatorship ruling Rwanda today.) But Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has played a major role in creating war propaganda that suits his personal preferences and private interests in real life. Exemplifying his deep anti-Arab sentimentality, Spielberg was boycotted by the Arab League for having secretly donated $1,000,000 to Israel in 2006 during the second War on Lebanon.

The ‘good versus evil’ dichotomy is often used to inculcate emotionally seated ideas about patriotism and nationalism, and to indoctrinate subjects and citizens, and this dichotomy was profoundly advanced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and the post-WW II Cold War propaganda.  Nuremberg and the formation of the United Nations  were nothing more than sham dress rehearsals for the victor’s justice of the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia (ICTY), Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International criminal Court. The fire-bombings of the city of Dresden and Nordhausan (Thuringia), and the atomic atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima all warranted investigation and prosecution for war crimes. Had the American and British and Belgian and French military officials and the monopoly capitalists that backed them been tried in an international court of law by a truly international League of Nations, the world would most likely be a far different place today.

Instead, the prevailing establishment narratives about genocide — born out of the Nazi Holocaust — set the stage for the evolution of deeply manipulative and hegemonic discourses that politicized the international human rights and war crimes arenas. These politicized doctrines have transformed all reasonable definitions and applications of international ‘humanitarian’ law into tools that the most powerful nations use against their ideological, political or economic enemies. Schindler’s List quite neatly fits into the political economy of genocide and the financial and political imperatives of the Holocaust industry, and it’s no surprise to find that corporate executives from Hollywood film enterprises — like Viacom director Sheri Redstone — and are deeply connected to powerful Jewish and Zionist organizations.

And the weapons procurements, productions, proliferation and profits continue to rise.

Norway is a key partner in the ongoing and illegal “War on Terror.” Norway provides a base station (on its home turf) for the U.S. Missile Defense program intelligence and reconnaissance gathering against Russia and its neighbors. Norway is the 14th largest arms importer in the world, and a major exporter, with the highest military expenditures per capita of any country in Europe.

In 2002, Norway sent 18 F-16 fighter-bombers to support the Pentagon’s illegal ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and the illegal coalition attacks against Afghanistan. Norwegian Armed Forces are involved today in covert ‘counterterrorism’ [read: terrorism] operations with U.S. and British Special Forces in Afghanistan: between 2001 and 2010, Norway had sent over 6938 soldiers who participated in the illegal International Security and Assistance Forces (ISAF) occupation of Afghanistan.

Norway is also part of the international coalition that attacked Libya, in contravention of international law, on March 17, 2011. Norway has six General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, and two Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 tactical transport aircraft, operating against Libya from an air base in Crete. By April 26, 2011, Norwegian F-16s had dropped over 200 bombs on the people of Libya.

The people of Norway are not innocent spectators to the wars their government and troops and intelligence apparatus are involved in. The anti-Arab sentiments in the country are reflected by their global position vis-a-vis the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Israel — the predominant purveyors of Empire. The Norwegian government’s recent shift to stand up against Israel’s war crimes is certainly something to watch.

Imagineering War

In 1999, the University of Southern Califonia was awarded a $42 million grant by the U.S. Army to establish the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT). The ICT “was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation.” The ICT is an Army University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The contract is managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Simulation Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC).

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for leadership, and decision-making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address.”

Sound pretty benign? Check out the page where this text appears and you will see that it revolves around U.S. military agendas. The graphics openly display soldiering and military hardware. One of the main thrusts of interactive simulations is war gaming, a billions of dollars a year industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has enlisted film studios and video game designers and it reflects the extensive overlap between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Officers from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) sector of the DoD play an integral part in developing these simulations. ICT video games Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior use the Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms. Pac Man, Game Boy and DOOM were all used by the military as training simulation programs.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. It is no anomaly that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech ‘brainstorming’ sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos — coming to an Army near you.

It doesn’t take the brawn or brains [sic] of Captain America to figure out that this Pentagon research and development institute facilitates advanced robotic and simulation warfare systems. Drones. That is, robotic killing technologies such as Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and a whole fleet of related warfare technologies.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; invested $2.3 billion more by 2005 and another $4.2 billion before 2009. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap produced several years ago, the UAV inventory of all the military services was expected to grow to 290 vehicles by 2010. How many are really out there now?

The deployment of drone technologies with bombing and strafing capabilities represents the most egregious American immorality and cowardice — the opposite of everything the Captain America supposedly stands for. There’s no courage involved in the war games environment where some G.I. Joe operates a joystick — hardly any different than masturbation — in some isolated control room far from the killing fields.

Contrary to the propaganda of assurance and accountability ever touted by the Obama administration, the drones are every day deployed to spy on, terrorize, strafe and bomb innocent civilians from Pakistan to Iraq to Darfur to the Mexican border of the U.S.

Farmers working in poppy fields in Balakh, Afghanistan. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Office of Homeland Security counter-terrorism adviser. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”

America will pursue war “in the shadows” Brennan said, “relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and quiet training of local forces to pursue terrorists… No civilians are ever hurt… And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”

“In the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” said good soldier John Brennan, lying through his teeth. According to a British investigative journalism agency, and countless witnesses on the ground, civilians are routinely killed by drones. Brennan is a veteran CIA operative with a distinguished career in deception and death for profit.

Never explained are the direct connections between drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the poppy (opium) growers who are not on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of approved growers. The opium trade is used to fund covert operations all over the world — to back our Captain Americas in their pursuit of freedom and truth.

In 2005,  Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld appeared in a Pentagon press conference with Marvel superaction heroes Spiderman and Captain America. The purpose of the Pentagon photo op was to launch a new domestic war propaganda program aimed at active duty troops dubbed “America Supports You.”

Under Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle sector has grown exponentially, exceeding its own expectations, and the military roles, uses, launch platforms, control rooms and payloads of UAVs — like government expenditures on research, development and acquisition — are out of sight. In 2005, tactical and theater level unmanned aircraft alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany and Israel are the leading producers of UAVs and related weaponry.

These are the Predators and other UAV drones being deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to bomb and strafe “insurgents” in remote Afghan villages, to patrol and surveil national borders in Israel and Texas, and to “stop genocide” in places like Sudan, where NATO alliance forces — especially the US, Canada, Britain and Israel — are deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes.

For example, instead of offering anything close to the truth about Sudan, the military-entertainment complex’s “Save Darfur” (a province in Sudan) narrative has been based on flagrant propaganda channeled from the Pentagon and intelligence operatives in Sudan, and onto the western English-language press, through mouthpieces like National Security Council operative John Prendergast or the Holocaust Memorial Museum or Smith College English professor Eric Reeves. The ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘Never Again’ sloganeering advances by these propagandists relies accusations (e.g. Reeves) of a “genocidal war against African people’s” ostensibly being committed by President Omar Al-Bashir, whose government is under a Pentagon ‘regime change’ attack.

May the Force Be with You

Today’s battle-fighting environments — often cast in jungles, like Apocalypse Now or Rambo or the post-apocalyptic Mad Max genre films or Predator — are awash in weaponry and mythologized storylines that destroy the links between state-sponsored terrorism and domestic violence, between war propaganda and our complicity in war crimes, environmental destruction and terrorism. The ugly truth is that the ‘universal American soldier‘ is indoctrinated to kill, and to kill ruthlessly, and is not some aberration who went astray of the pack and lost his sense of ‘goodness’.

We see this lone aberration soldier gone awry in the Rambo films, and it is most starkly personified by Marlon Brando’s caricature of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The film is packed with references to Central Africa, culminating in the bloody death where Kurtz (Brando) exclaims, “the Horror, the horror,” right out of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now is no anti-war film. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a Special Operations assassin with the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Captain Willard is sent up the Mekong River to deep territory to assassinate a rogue U.S. Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone ‘native’. There’s that theme of rogue U.S. commando again. In fact, MACV-SOG was responsible for covert operations, and sometimes these actually were against U.S. military — but probably against officers and soldiers who opposed the illegal Pentagon or CIA operations and had become ‘liabilities’ that needed to be ‘neutralized’.

The MACV-SOG operations supplemented a ruthless CIA ‘counterinsurgency’ program called ‘Phoenix‘ — an instrument of terror, accountable to no one, a psyop gone mad — that cut like a scalpel deep into the hearts and minds and bodies of Vietnamese civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and all reasonable codes of war. Tortures, assassinations, kidnappings, detention for years without trial or survival — ‘neutralizations’ of soldiers, fathers, mothers, supporters, innocent bystanders, friendly agents, entire families and entire villages, that occurred late at night after people went to bed. “Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.” And everything occurred behind the smiling faces and democratic assurances — standing up in front of the patriotic Western mass media for photo-ops — of intelligence and defense officials’ lies.

Hollywood cinematography introduced robotic technologies to the general public through the Hollywood Star Wars trilogies — everything from the 1970′s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man to the Schwarzennegger Terminator films. Thus we can say for certain where the language and public introduction of the new Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAV) technologies came from — language like ‘drones’, names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest.

These major Hollywood productions clearly facilitated the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold. Drones, droids and other ‘futuristic’ robotic systems employed in war zones today include sophisticated gadetry like Robotic Vehicle Trainers and these, in turn, revolve around simulation and gaming technologies.

“The robotic vehicle trainer teaches Soldiers how to operate robots like the Talon, SWORDS and PackBot,” reads the US Army RDECOM Research Laboratory description, “using a virtual environment in the ‘America’s Army’ video game.” RDECOM is the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command, another war-making agency that has a direct relationship to Hollywood.

Simulation centers create the means for remotely piloted killing machines to perpetrate atrocities (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) on innocent civilian populations in places where the Pentagon seeks to limit soldier (human) casualties.

While the text explaining what the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is supposedly about makes laudable (I’m being very sarcastic) attempts to classify their activities as civilian — there is always some civilian benefit, like the peaceful atom and the medical uses of biological weapons — there is no attempt to cover up the fact that this “university research center” is highly militarized and serves the Pentagon’s war-making agenda: it is written all over the ICT web site.

For those traumas and casualties that do occur, the survivors can try to piece themselves — and their relations with their significant others — back together and lead semi-productive lives with the support of Bill Ford — one of the ICT’s trauma recovery simulation coaches. Retired Sergeant Major and Vietnam war veteran Bill Ford is a virtual human who is “based on the personality and experiences of real soldiers and marines.”

Remember that rush of emotion that overwhelmed your body when watching the 3-D simulation of the decimation of ‘Home Tree’ in Avatar?

Hollywood, in conjunction with academic and military research institutions, has honed in on subliminal psychology and ways to more deeply impact and influence human emotion. Avatar was no progressive film, but a deeply compromised narrative with all the same old stereotypes and ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, and contrary to commonly held public beliefs, the film helps to inculcate deeply insidious messages that actually enhance the western imperial project of Empire.

That is, Avatar facilitates conquest, and resource plunder, it does not challenge it. It does not challenge the destruction of the earth, and it facilitates the ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, everywhere. Like Captain America, already is, or King Kong, Avatar became an industry unto itself — complete with Na’vi action superheroes, books, costumes, T-shirts, and other materialistic paraphernalia peddled by Toys R’ Us and other garbage producers.

Enter scientists like Jonathan Gratch, a member of the ICT research and development team, whose research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and AFOSR is the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — two of many amongst the most secretive military-intelligence entities on earth.

ICT’s Associate Director Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, but his most recent work includes “modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.” Doctors Gratch and Marsella’s accomplishments include development and implementation of the Pentagon requisitioned MRE/SASO warfare systems: the “Mission Rehearsal Exercise” [play MRE Movie Clip] and the Stability and Support Operations [play SASO Movie Clip] training prototypes.

ICT Associate Director Dr. Albert Rizzo’s latest project “has focused on the translation of the graphic assets from the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, into an exposure therapy application for combat-related PTSD with Iraq War veterans.” ICT director Randall Hill graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence before getting an advanced degrees in computer sciences (artificial intelligence).

No connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

The Marvel Universe

The Pentagon’s public web pages — for all these agencies — are awash in public relations, greenwashing (the Pentagon is the top global environmental polluter) and propaganda (read: perception management) whitewashing their true missions, agendas and record. Hollywood sets the stage by programming the minds of entertainment consumer-spectators.

While Hollywood continues to falsify the consciousness of consumer-spectators through the bombast of 3-D film extravaganzas like Captain America, the other forms of mass media — the information overload of “news” productions, advertising and military-corporate whitewashing — are sure to help finish the job.

Walt Disney Corporation purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Hollywood’s Walt Disney productions are legendary, of course, with such animation films as The Lion King, Madagascar, and Pocahontas — each with its own subliminal themes dedicated to the indoctrination of youth in service to the entrenchment of capitalist interests (values, desires, associations) at a young age.

The indoctrination of children to serve the military-entertainment complex in its operational war theaters begins at an early age. It’s not just the films. Amongst the many commodities being mass marketed by Marvel Industries are a whole line of superhero action apparel for children. You can also get your superaction hero dolls and fleece blankets and T-shirts and underwear.

That’s right, for just $16.50 you can order your superaction hero pajama tops and shorts set on line today and tuck your tiny tot into bed in his Captain America pajamas for a restful night of superhero action associations — influencing the developmental character structure at a deeply subconscious level through dreams — which translate into early childhood indoctrination for weaponry, war and patriarchy. The Lion King, for example, has a deeply anti-immigration message, this crafted over and above the more obvious racial stereotypes and patriarchal themes of male power and dominance that serve the ongoing evisceration of resources from Africa, and the depopulation that attends these. Such animation shorts are filled with mythologizing themes and images that distort the spectator-consumer’s perceptions of reality, underscoring the supposed supremacy of the white societies (the light-skinned lions) and the supposed sociopathologies of people of color (the dark-skinned lion plotting with sniveling and drooling hyenas to leave the ‘spoiled’ badlands and take the good lands).

Never mind the elderly ape with walking stick being the closest thing to a human. While the Pentagon and multinational corporations are engaged in exercises to depopulate landscapes in Africa, we have co-existent and simultaneous the production and mass consumption of racialized animation imagery of The Lion King or Madagascar — and it’s not a whole lot different with Out of Africa either, it’s just different — that inculcates the white consciousness with the un-peopled Africa. This is yet another debasing projection of savagery and bestiality onto African people — and the blotting out of indigenous tribes of East Africa in favor of the mining and tourism interests of white western capitalism, backed by the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Along with these primary western agents of disinformation come the Pentagon’s ‘humanitarian’ entourage, Hollywood actorvists like George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Don Cheadle, our Captain Americas for Sudan, and Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie and now Emile Hersch, our Captains America for Congo. Hollywood films that disinform consumer-spectators and whitewash the historical and contemporary realities of western military and multinational corporate interventions in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo are spread around the globe through the global cinema distribution complex. These films include The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur, Sudan); Hotel Rwanda; Black Hawk Down; The Last King of Scotland; King Kong and Blood Diamond.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film King Kong opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called ‘conservation’ programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting corporate species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry and Kong paraphernalia was peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong-related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine pumped articles into many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong from owner-producers NBC/Universal and Universal Studios Home Entertainment peddled the King Kong DVD and King Kong computer games.

Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics — Rwanda, the two Congos, Uganda, Central African Republic, Gabon.

One of these secretive firms, ESRI (Earth Sciences Research Institute), has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. “Now as a result of Congressional mandate,” said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, “technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that transformation.”

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the Tarzan myth, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts) makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire, but her white femininity is situated in a subordinate role, and her sexual availability is advertised most clearly when the big beast pokes at her. For the spectator-consumer, the titillating advances provoke subliminal sexual emotions.

Like Tarzan‘s Jane, Kong‘s Ann Darrow offers a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community involved in the imperial enterprise of ‘conservation’ in Africa. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980′s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there is Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist. More recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has a base in an out-of-this-world place called Walikale, in South Kivu province, Congo. The JGI has been involved with militias and land theft, and is indirectly backing extortion, war crimes and genocide in Eastern Congo.

Of course, like the place itself (Walikale), such stories appear completely off the map of establishment media reality — an so they appear as crazy as the people of color, portrayed as drooling tribal zombies, in King Kong.

Black Hawk Down

“And ah, can someone explain to me how Hollywood was dishonest with Black Hawk Down?” said DaMarlboroMan3, commenting on RT’s Captain America video. “We were there to help people and they tried to kill us and we killed a lot of them to defend ourselves. Somalia has no resources we would want unless dust becomes the next big thing on wall street.”

And, ah, DaMarlboroMan3 watches too many Hollywood movies (or smokes too much). Black Hawk Down was an outrageous war propaganda production that completely falsified the story of western occupation and plunder of Somalia. Scandalous corporate entities like Save the Children, and the deceptive spin on the Pentagon’s war machine there, were chronicled in journalist Michael Maren’s expose The Road to Hell.

The early 1990′s crises in Somalia had its roots in the invasion of Western humanitarian aid organizations that occurred steadily as big money and big relief flooded into Somalia from 1981 onward. By the mid 1980′s the aid machine had crippled the local economy and Somalia could not feed its own people.

After a furious political scramble involving Royal/Dutch Shell, Agip and other petroleum vultures, all oil concessions were granted (1989) to Conoco, Chevron, Amoco (BP) and Philips Petroleum. The Pentagon’s Operation Restore Hope was never a “humanitarian” mission: that was the cover story.

U.S. forces killed scores of thousands of Somali people — and a few Captain America wannabees were dragged through the streets to ridicule our American arrogance. The Israeli-American-Ethiopian-Ugandan mission in Somalia today is far more nasty, involving U.S. Covert Ops in war crimes qualifying the US and Israel for the International criminal Court, and the western powers are equally culpable in the massive ongoing famine. So, oil in Darfur, covert operations in Somalia? This is the new, old, ‘humanitarian’ warfare in Africa and Hollywood covers it all up.

Like the representations of the females in Avatar, in the Indiana Jones series, in The Lion King Pocahontas and the many King Kong flicks, the typical Hollywood propaganda film casts females either in weak or subservient roles, or as lusty sex-craved female fatales out to eat every good man alive. In both cases the stereotypical females are overshadowed by dominant male roles, protectors and saviors of all that is good, out to rid the world of the scourge of evil.

The White Male Savior-Slaughterer

Sigourney Weaver appears in Avatar as an older woman scientist who can hardly trot for the scenes where she appears in human form, and so she is recast as a young, nubile, sexually attractive Na’vi avatar. Weaver can’t accomplish what she wants, nor can the other non-white minorities (Latino helicopter pilot), until their dominant white male Jake Sully comes along and saves the day. The crippled Jake Sully is portrayed as an impotent soldier who, like the Six Million Dollar Man, can be made whole again through the technological transformation to an avatar. But even as a paraplegic, Jake Sully retains his white male superhero savior status and all the privileges that come with it, and this status is enhanced and reconfigured — just as Captain America is physically reconfigured — when he embodies a Na’vi, the people his occupying imperialist other-worldly corporate-dominated (earth) society has come to conquer.

Many Hollywood propaganda films promote technological utopia: science and technology are presented as a religion we should all (continue to) worship. The scrawny weakling but omnipotent moral soldier in Captain America is marvelously transformed into a spectacle of masculinity. Not only is he smart, and moral, now he is the super athletic man. In Avatar, Jake Sully goes native with the help of the futuristic technologies of the conquerors (that would be you, me, US). Here is the glorification of science, and the real-time corporate influence (aligned with Hollywood) provides the impetus behind the higher ‘moral’ purpose to save and not bomb ‘Home tree’. Weaver’s scientist character facilitates this medico-pharmaceutical-academic narrative which, translated, means biopiracy and theft of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge, intellectual property, and ways of life. Sounds a lot like genocide, but the film does not leave ANYONE with any greater awareness of the actual genocides against indigenous people’s that are happening while we sit in the theater watching the film.

The story is only slightly different in District 9. The weaponry is futuristic, to the average spectator-consumer’s eye, but the Pentagon has already created weaponry which the general public is almost totally unaware of: directed energy weapons; advanced artificial intelligence systems; nanotechnology; biological weapons; and weather as a weapon. These things don’t just appear out of the blue. District 9 is another film with a deep, dark anti-immigration message, but now the ‘illegals’ and ‘refugees’  are actual aliens from elsewhere in the universe. I saw in District 9 a depiction of a present day state, South Africa, which had fallen from black control under the unseen hand of white corporate control in the near future,” says anthropologist Dr. Enoch Page. “That white control was exemplified in that film by a white male corporate executive who superficially seemed to be a racist bungling idiot, but in exercising his racism against the aliens he got infected with their genetic material and began to morph himself into the physical form of that oppressed alien population. As the man morphs into the other he is, of course, rejected by his own who deem him crazy or at least lost in battle. Consequently, he can only gain safe haven among the oppressed and begins to assist their liberation (but only with the thought of being healed so he can return to his white wife and white life). The total completion of his metamorphosis probably will be the basis for a sequel to that film. So we are seeing in recent films venues for projecting an imagined future in which the strategy of appropriating the physical form of the oppressed becomes the vehicle for a white male hero.”

District 9 builds tension in the spectator-consumer by playing on deep-seated psychological anxieties about bodily fluids and primordial origins of existence. This tension is mapped over all the standard racial stereotyping where the whites — the forces of good — are superior, civilized, educated and rational, and they (we) must protect them (our) selves. In contradistinction, the non-whites — the mixed up crazy forces of evil fighting amongst themselves — are disgustingly irrational, violent, drug-dealing crack-addicted savages (the African warlords in the films) out to get us, or disgustingly insect-like alien prawns, whose biological material is infectious and dangerous to our society, mimicking the Africa disease narratives about ebola and malaria and HIV/AIDS spreading to the uninfected global north. “It is important [to note] that we are seeing in both these films images of formerly colonized people of color who are aiding and abetting the white invasions as fellow Americans,” says Dr. Page. “In District 9 we never see them come to the aid of the aliens. Even the raunchiest Africans engaged in the lowest of trade and behavior racially despise the aliens, while at the same time seeking to gain parts of their bodies to enhance their own sexual and physical powers. In Avatar people of color are positioned more centrally in support of the hero and defect from the cause of the invasionary force along with him but not on their own.”

Avatar went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing more than US$2.730 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in box-office receipts worldwide. It should be no surprise to find out that Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) also stars in Call of Duty: Black Ops a first-person shooter video game released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the U.K.

Talking about immigration and plunder of resources and human trafficking, note that Marvel Entertainment director Morton Handel is also a director of American Uranium Mining and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The Trump casinos in Atlantic City exploit Mongolian students, lured into the United States through a U.S. State Department affiliated program, in hopes of experiencing the American Dream, and then forced to accept horrendous working conditions, to engage in survival sex, to be subject to rat infested living conditions and drug dealers and armed gangs. This is the trafficking and slavery side of the war on immigrants, refugees and people of color.

The film Blood Diamond also stars a muscular great white male (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a seductive white female (Jennifer Connelly) who assumes a subordinate role. Here the white savior warrior is again the savior of the other protagonist subordinates [1] first, the white female; [2] second, the African negro and freed diamond mine slave (Djimon Hounsou) who found the big diamond everybody is killed for.

Blood Diamond is packed with overt and covert racial codings that further entrench white superiority and the discourses that proclaim the need for white economic, political and military deployments to rescue/save Africa. “It’s my teekit to geet out of thees God-forsaken continent,” the white South African mercenary hero (DiCaprio) tells his soon-to-be-lover girl.

Blood Diamond appeared at precisely the same time as the diamond industry was whitewashing its bloody operations through the Harvard University-sponsored development of the Kimberley Process — another faux mechanism shielding the true agents of warfare and plunder in Africa through a hegemonic protection mechanism — conquerors policing themselves — that criminalizes anyone who cuts into the profits of the big diamond cartels.

Blood Diamond ends by informing the reader that the Kimberley Process has sorted it all out, when in reality it merely rinses the blood off the diamonds sold in western luxury boutiques. The happy Hollywood ending arrives when the freed slave succeeds in testifying at some faux international court — another euphemistic ‘United Nations’ reference — and the journalist chick (Connelly) gets her story. Both of the subordinate role (white female, freed negro slave) successes relied on the supreme white warrior savior muscle male (De Caprio) who, in the end, is presented as a reformed and moral man, a good man, a martyr.

The Captain America of the savage jungles — themes of darkness portrayed in such films as King Kong — is our Hollywood hero Tarzan, another white Marvel comic action hero of stellar repute, and a popular fixture around Hollywood since the 1950′s. Of course, every Tarzan has his seductive and easily seduced sidekick, Jane.

Tarzan and the Lion Man was set in the Ituri forest in Congo. “It has the makings of a good story,” the publisher wrote, on the book jacket of the 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. “A motion picture company in the wilds of Africa, two beautiful girls, ruthless Arabs [emphasis added], a half-maniacal scientist, a tribe of gorillas that he has taught to speak English, a coward who looks like Tarzan, and Tarzan himself.”

The whole Tarzan genre set the stage for the historical and ongoing conquest of Africa — led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the French and Belgian and Israeli (Mossad) secret service, the Pentagon and the French Foreign Legion, and the rapacious multinational corporations that have long been plundering and killing on the continent.

In this 2009 AFRICOM image screen-captured from a 'Operation Lightning Thunder' video, the Pentagon forgot to expunge the white pilot.

Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa

Hotel Rwanda covers up the United State’s invasion of Central Africa. From the very first words, where the image has yet to appear and the screen is completely black, the film Hotel Rwanda sets up viewers to think a certain way about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Here is a story about good versus evil. An ominous African voice is heard, clearly the announcer on a radio program, and he is describing the Tutsis as ‘cockrrrRRROACHES.’ The voice is black and the cataclysm unfathomable, as anyone will tell you, and the black screen underscores the evil darkness of Africa. This voice of terror returns throughout the film to haunt the innocent Tutsi refugees, on screen, and the viewers gripping their seats.

The good guys are the Tutsis, the victims of genocide. They are not killers in the movie: they are never killers. At the end of the film, when a well-attired guerrilla force is shown — the “rebels” of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — they are rescuers. They are disciplined, organized. They keep a tidy United Nations camp safely behind their lines. They don’t kill Red Cross nurses, or orphaned children, in the film: they reconnect them to their families. They are good men — the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. The Hutus in the standard Rwanda genocide stories are always the bad guys, and they are all bad guys. Every Hutu is a genocidaire. These are Hollywood’s forces of evil.

“Speaking as an Englishman I am often appalled by the blatant propaganda that comes out of Fox News,” said randomsamno9, commenting on Russia Today’s Captain America video. “But on an equal level or perhaps even more so RT is pure propaganda… RT just spends all day bitching about the US rather than giving you actual news. Also ‘The Last King of Scotland‘ may have been a fictionalized account but that doesn’t change the fact that Amin was a real mass murderer rather than a fictional one.”

Oh really? Back in the late 1960′s the big imperialists were alarmed by Ugandan President Milton Obote’s socialist shift. Imagine the audacity of an African leader — who was supported by Israel — actually taking care of his people at the expense of foreign interests! In a new alliance with Sudan, Obote challenged the Israeli backing of southern Sudanese guerrillas from Uganda, armed by Israel to punish Sudan for backing Arabs in the Six-Day War (1967). Everywhere derided as a nasty dictator today, Obote was a truly great African leader who was saddled with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, these actually committed by his enemies.

Idi Amin Dada received training in Israel after Ugandan independence. As one of Obote’s generals, Amin maintained Israeli supply lines to the Sudanese rebels. Backed by Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli Defense attache, Amin’s army overthrew Obote in 1971 and restored relations with Israel (severed in 1967). In 1972 Israel refused Amin’s request for tanks, and so Amin expelled Israeli residents from Uganda, severed relations, and forged a pact with Libya. Well, we all know how Washington and the Israelis feel about Muammar Gaddafi — the supreme commander of the Islamic forces of evil, and so Israel and the west blockaded the Amin government, which overnight became a ‘dictatorship’ in western news reportage. Enter and the falsified narrative in Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.

The real mass murderer is Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past 25 years, but this is the Pentagon’s man. The Last King of Scotland deflects public attention away from the ongoing Acholi and other genocides committed by the Museveni dictatorship, and Museveni is far more bloodthirsty and ruthless than Idi Amin ever was. The early 2009 US-Israeli-Ugandan ‘Operation Lightning Thunder‘ was a massive military failure that led to thousands of civilian deaths in the border areas of South Sudan, northern Uganda and eastern Congo. But I am not even scratching the surface on the Museveni apparatus of terror in Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia or Congo. The prisons in Uganda are packed, the people starving, with high maternal death rates, after 25 years of “a model African success story”. All “development” aid to Uganda has been converted into weapons and war.

All of the documentary films about the Uganda/Sudan/Rwanda region — The Devil came on Horseback, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lost Boys of Sudan, Invisible Children — serve a one-sided and essentialized agenda: the advancement of Empire. Enter the Pentagon’s PR machinery — each year pumping thousands of “news” stories into the New York Times and Washington Post and National Public Radio — and the pictures of U.S. troops holding smiling African children orbuilding  schools in desert villages. Enter the great white actorvist hero Ben Affleck and the corporate sustained catastrophe in the Congo that his debonair Hollywood image and sleek Stars-and-Stripes privileges shield us from seeing.

Do western war superhero films like Captain America influence children? Exit the matrix, jump back to the most deadly conflict in the world: Congo. The western human rights nexus likes to shake its trigger-happy fingers at foreign armies, rogue militias and uncooperative governments, and the Pentagon and State Department, with the help of USAID, are quick to accuse them of everything and anything the US, NATO and Israel are also doing. Massacres, torture, mass rape, spreading land mines across the land, and, of course, child soldiers. Well, look at the image of the child soldiers below, a photo snapped by your soon-to-be-killed foreign correspondent in eastern Congo. There’s no mistaking the red-white-and-blue superhero graphic splashed across one soldier’s T-shirt, and the twelve year-old children with AK-47′s and cigarettes didn’t pick these fruits of western progress out of the trees of the King Kong forests nearby.

“The recruitment of young people to military service in African conflicts has provoked a unanimous moral outcry from the West,” writes Danish academic Dr. Kasper Hoffman. Child soldiering is by no means new or restricted to Africa, Hoffman notes, since children aged 16 can bear arms in U.S. military, and the West engages in a disingenuous hegemonic discourse where the use of child soldiers is always equated to disorder and moral corruption in Africans. But Hoffman found that child soldiers in Congo were heavily influenced by Hollywood superaction hero films.

The West likes to point its trigger-happy fingers at African conflicts, like the wars in Congo, where many child soldiers — called ‘kadogos‘ — joined militias of their own accord to defend their country against foreign invaders. The West use accusations of child soldiering, immorality, tribalism and irration spirit magic to demonize the highly organized and nationalist Mai Mai militias, and most all violence is blamed on the Mai Mai or the remnants of the Hutu Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that fled the illegal RPA invasion in 1994. Mai Mai do not fight with any sense of purpose or morality, according to arrogant Western agents and the corporate mass media, themselves complicit in plunder and genocide in Congo — the Mai Mai worship spirit mediums and they rip out and eat the bloody hearts of their victims and they walk backwards into battle wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads (Newsweek, 1996).

Hoffman found that Mai Mai militia members fight out of a sense of pride, nationalism and a highly ethical sense of home-defense. They have seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by the U.S.-backed Rwandan (Kagame) and Ugandan (Museveni) troops and they know very well that clandestine cells of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) are perpetrating terrorism there. The RPA/UPDF employ ruthless and unaccountable false flag operations and pseudo operations (covert psychological operations developed by British Maj. Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau insurgency on Kenya) to disguise their origins and intent.

The Global War on _____  (please fill in the blank).

Western governments and United Nations, and the human rights, development and ‘humanitarian’ industries — the merchants of death that profit off violence — all play along with Western media reports that generally whitewash reality to exonerate Rwanda and Uganda and the corporations involved in eastern Congo (Banro, Moto Gold, DHL International, OM Group). More expedient to the mass media whitewashing of war in Congo, every Congolese Mai Mai and Hutu soldier is accused of mass rape, this offering another essentialized narrative convenient for conquest, and one that is peddled by tabloids from the New York Times to Wired to the BBC, from CNN to OPRAH to Democracy Now. Even the rape of men is excluded by the international discourse which confines all discussion about war in eastern Congo to the manipulative discourse about rape of women.

“The influence of Western action films emerges clearly in the care of the self among the kadogos Mai Mai,” reports Dr. Hoffman in The Ethics of Child Soldiering. Popular culture influences the forms of violence, slang, gestures, and body language of the militia members that re-enact the attitudes and actions of ‘freedom fighter’ heroes. They aren’t just mimicking Captain America: the kadogo internalize the deeper ethical constructs of freedom and resistance and apply them to the formation of their self and strength of purpose. The Rambo (Stallone) and Commando (Schwartzenegger) films were especially important in offering a sense of purpose and ethical direction to sustain their unending struggle.

“In these films the heroes are subject to grave injustices and are made to suffer immensely before they vanquish their enemies against all odds through the use of spectacular violence,” wrote Hoffman. “The sublime qualities of the hero such as manliness, bravery, initiative, innate sense of justice, strength, speed, power, muscularity, warrior-skills, tactical abilities, etc., insure him of victory in the end.”

Of course, the heroes in these films are the white saviors, the good men, the super-ethical-anything-in-the line-of-duty-goes-soldiers, the Captains America and Captains Norway.

Breivik in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

“I grew up in the 80′s and read a lot of comics — not Captain America but i know the story line,” says CasinoHijack, another commenter on the Russia Today Captain America propaganda video. “Looking back at my old comics I saw a ton of guns, violence, and every woman superhero looks like a stripper. Now that I’m older and more aware of the world we live in I see the propaganda in those comics and how it helped getting young men to fight for something they are not truly aware of. I educate kids all the time of the negative side of comics and superheros. Now I’m their super hero.”

Super heroes, super heroines. We have become saturated by media that seeks to create super duper dumbed-down spectator entertainment warfare consumer conquerors who plead ignorance, rationalize our supposed non-participation in war, and even fight back against all who suggest that we might be more culpable than we want to believe. Kill them and feed their bodies to the starving masses in Somalia…

“The military-industrial complex, contrary to initial expectations, did not fade away with the end of the Cold War,” wrote Tim Lenoir, in the excellent research paper All But War is Simulation. “It has simply reorganized itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organized than ever before. Indeed, a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives. The military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex. The entertainment industry is both a major source of innovative ideas and technology, and the training ground for what might be called post-human warfare.”

Sadly, post-human warfare prosecuted by western military institutions and their highly armed proxy forces involve real human beings on very real battlefields. What has not evolved to match the technologies themselves are the moral and ethical standards by which these post-human battles can be seen to be inhuman, fostered by machine thinking, cold warrior killing. This is the all-too-omnipotent man that the military-entertainment complex has created — the man whose psyche is grounded in absolutes about god versus evil themselves informed by nationalistic propaganda themes based in fear, hatred, difference and the false beliefs about superiority.Nationalism, patriotism, subliminal sexuality, female sexual control, and the destruction of matriarchal power all go hand in hand, as this translates to the anchoring of authoritarian beliefs in the basic character structure of the human beings in everyday technological society.This is fascism. “‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of man (sic) in authoritarian society,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Reich, in his potent 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life…. It is the mechanistic mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa.”We can name several of the most egregious manifestations of this post-human fighting man. We saw him in Avatar — no, not Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he was the ‘good soldier’ of the Captain America variety whose goodness and humanity is projected into the consciousness of the masses by the military-entertainment complex and its video games and other industrial war-making offshoots. It is the antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the supreme destructor who takes out ‘Home Tree’ and everything else that gets in his way.

We can be sure that Quaritch will be back, more lethal than ever, along with the corporate world government Imperial earth forces — Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are already in production and, as we have seen over and over, imperialist forces never die, they only come back to finish the job. The early (white) conquistadors to arrive in the Philippines were slaughtered after the indigenous people were abused and their goodness exhausted. Ditto the first (white) Puritans to land on Turtle Island (North America) and the first (white) settlers who became the subjects of umpteen Cowboys and Indians films.

Dances with Wolves was no radical critique of western military conquest and genocide: the narratives about ‘good’ soldier / ‘bad’ soldier, ‘good’ white man / ‘bad’ white man, and whitey-goes-native all reared their ugly heads. The white hero also saves a white woman in this film — though she too first had to undergo a transformation to native. The good-versus-evil / savior-versus-savage films all entrench racial (white) superiority and they are coexistent with the overwhelming racialized propaganda about Christians versus Pagans, Christians versus Moslems, Christians versus Arabs, Israelis versus Arabs, Jews versus Arabs, Arabs versus black Africans, civilized people versus savage others, Christianity versus Islamic Fundamentalism.

So what are the real life consequences of all this warfare gaming, warfare simulation, warfare propaganda, racial propaganda, anti-immigration propaganda, technological propaganda, and weapons proliferation?

Well, most of the actual atrocities occur out of sight of the western media, because the media corporations are directly tied to the profits and perks of the power structure and the imperial project falsifies our consciousness about victims and killers. Soldiers do what they do because they can. They can get away with it because they are taught to. Their training, their education, the dynamics of the groups they are surrounded with, the messages in the mass media, the entire process of enculturation within and from a society premised on the supposed permanence and necessity of war, conquest and private profit.

The international legal term thrown around by ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines is impunity. People are not being held to account for their wrong actions. Wrong actions come from wrong thinking, wrong education, wrong messages about virulence and domination and entitlement encoded in a zillion different ways in the mainstream cultures of technological civilization. Such wrong thinking infects and grows in the minds of people increasingly isolated and disconnected from their true inner nature, their loving and compassionate selves and from the earth. Every now and then somebody is called out for their white supremacy — some Bronx Catholic Seminary principal or other — but most of the racial profiling and extrajudicial executions committed by police go unchecked by the system, unnoticed by the (white) public, and the perpetrators are often enough rewarded or celebrated.

The fears and insecurities are compounded by the many forms of class warfare and structural violence that We The People are increasingly subject to. Meanwhile the very same elites producing and disseminating the disturbing propaganda — disguised as harmless entertainment — are benefiting from the manufacture of consent and the structural violence that insures their elite economic status. More and more ordinary people, all over the world, are watching as their lives and loves are being stolen from them. We can see the contradictions that surround us, and we are many.

While presenting good versus evil narratives to justify bombing the coasts of North Africa, there is little discussion of why there are so many people, mostly people of color, seeking refuge and survival in the economically advantaged countries of North America and Europe. Refugees are presented as aliens, devoid of context or agency, people who ostensibly seek to steal our jobs and steal our land and steal our sons and daughters and steal everything that we have worked so hard to build. There is little discussion or awareness of why or how the rich First World countries got so rich or came in ‘first’.

At its roots, the film engages in class warfare against the average middle and lower class spectator-consumers of the United States, and it facilitates imperialist conquest against people everywhere else, based on a hierarchical order of ethnicity that values white people and devalues people of color by degrees and categories and labels.

On immigration and refugees and displaced peoples, the military-entertainment and their corporate ‘news’ partners inculcate emotional and irrational beliefs grounded in fear, confusion, associations, falsified history, stereotypes and simplifications. The manufacture or production of ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced peoples’, or the political economy of the misery industry that feeds on them, are never examined. These things falls under the rubric of charity and philanthropy and… with all the ‘good’ things we are doing for those people over there, the least they could do is stay put and show some appreciation.

That is: “I think RT is stretching on this one” said MarcFaust. “The REAL story is the fact that it was renamed “The First Avenger” to other parts of the world because the USA is SO fucking horrible. How dare the US do whatever it takes to quell terrorism and donate billions across the world with aid… fucking Americans!”

These films distill the context and truth of the world down to nothing of value, save to perpetuate suffering and further institutionalize injustice. It is all summed up by that moment in Avatar when the white conquerors are force-marched (very politely!) onto their aerospace weapons platforms and sent back to earth sans unobtanium. The losers look for sympathy. It’s as if they expect more privileges, even as losers.

Of course, almost every Hollywood film has some brand recognition and product placement. For example, how many products do you see advertised in the ‘anti-war’ film Across the Universe? And what about product placement and brand recognition in The Matrix? How many products do you see there? Neo gets a cell phone delivered by Fed-X. But what else? Take a hard look, and then look again, and then again. How many?

So, coming to the end of this little not-so-comic tale, we can at last examine the violence perpetrated within the dominant cultures themselves — in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Norway — the so-called thriving democracies. The psychic propaganda assault — of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racial superiority, male domination, subliminal sexuality, consumerism, individuality and desire — saturates our society with irrational emotional beliefs and psychological insecurities. Fear is a driving force, and testosterone its sidekick. These are the effects inculcated by the propaganda films of the military-entertainment complex.

When the story of the Oslo massacres first broke, mass media outlets of all stripes, including Russia Today (“Oslo-Terrorist-Norway-Jihadist“), were quick to broadcast the typical western fear-mongering propaganda about Islamic jihad.

Naturally, the global assault on our consciousness, where everything Islam is suspect, where Israel is above reproach, has not spared Norway. Not every Jew is a victim, and many are perpetrators. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist, and many are. Not every Hutu is a genocidaire; many Tutsis are. Not every Tutsi is a victim; many Hutus are.

Of course, the killing sprees perpetrated by individuals are no different then those perpetrated on the battlefield. In one case the mass murder is sanctioned by society, and in the other case society is victimized by it.

You get what you pay for. We get what we pay for. Perhaps that’s why we have more killing, more bloodshed, more conquest, more rape, more white supremacy of the Anders Breivik and Tim McVeigh variety. These men are products of the societies in which they lived. Both men apparently believed themselves to be superheroes, called to rid their societies of the scourge of evil, to assault a tyrannical federal government out of control, and both brought other innocent human lives to a definitive end.

And so we have Timothy McVeigh, who appears to be a fine example of what our society teaches people they can do. Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik — now described as an aberration, a Christian fanatic, a psycho, fascism behind a mask of morality — appears to be another. McVeigh might have been part of a government conspiracy; he claimed to be a martyr in defense of U.S. government tyranny, but he was a Gulf War veteran socialized by our permanent warfare society and he probably suffered from serious post-war traumatic stress disorder. Breivik saw himself as a martyr who would spark a revolution, “a real European hero”, “the savior of Christianity” and “the greatest defender of cultural-conservatism in Europe since 1950,” and he called for a patriarchal revival. The two men held some similar beliefs. They are very much not alone in their fanaticism. They are Captains America, by any other names.

Make Love, Not War

Why did Anders Breivik target the young people? Vulnerability, for one: they were an easy target and the most vulnerable to attack. He targeted them for political currency: they symbolized multiculturalism and waved flags calling for Palestinian liberation and truth and equality. If I had any heroes in this story, it would be these kids. They didn’t do anything wrong. Were these kids naive? I don’t think so. They stood up for what they believed is right, and good, and just. They believed in working for a better world. I guess they believed in love, and advocated for it. They had something going for them: the bluebird of consciousness.

I mean, just look at these kids — really look at them — and weep.

Some of the younger victims of the Breivik massacre in Oslo, Norway, 2011.

And if you can’t weep, then you are moving too fast, watching too many Hollywood movies, drinking too much coffee, consuming too much New York Times or Economist, chasing after some addiction or other, caught up in meaninglessness, in denial, suffering from collective amnesia or the mass psychology of fascism, and stuck.

Stuck. Are you stuck?

These could be your friends, or your kids. They are not just someone else’s kids, they are now part of our collective responsibility to wake up and stop the violence. To show compassion and tolerance, to sacrifice and to share, to organize for the betterment of all. There’s plenty of information out there on how this needs to be done. What is lacking is the courage and the initiative. What is needed is love, more love, and more love.

Gosh, I can’t think of a single Hollywood movie where love is the motivation for superheroism. We see plenty of love nonsense in the Hollywood war films, white male white female protagonists fall in love, blah blah blah, and in sit-com films like City of Angels or Beyond the Universe, films that ostensibly have nothing to do with war, blah blah blah, but where do we ever get propaganda that peddles love? Where is our U.S. Government Department of Peace? Why isn’t the Dalai Lama speaking out for state-sanctioned acts of love in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, achieved through an immediate U.S. military withdrawal?

The official explanation to these crimes is also well known; Bacrim, an acronym which stands for “Criminal Gangs”, a term created from the Colombia establishment including its omnipresent corporate media apparatus to depoliticize the constant violence unleashed against union leaders, peasants and community activists, Human Rights defenders or anyone humane enough to point at the extremely unequal and unjust structures of power and wealth which rely heavily on repression. However, no matter how much effort is put into misleading public opinion about the nature of this violence, the crimes are so systematic and their effects always turning out for the benefit of the elite that a simple class analysis debunks the façade of these “gangs” supposedly acting on their own, and expose the mutual benefit relation between armed thugs and political power in Colombia, an acute representation of present-day fascism in Latin America.

In a country overwhelmed with unemployment and poverty — nearly 70% — and 8 million people living on less than U$2 a day who daily look for their subsistence in garbage among stray dogs or selling candies at street lights and city buses, is also shockingly common and surreal to see fancy cars — Hummers, Porsches — million dollar apartments, country clubs and a whole bubble of opulence just in front of over-exploited workers, ordinary people struggling merely to make ends meet, or at worst, children, single mothers, elderly, and people with disabilities, without social security and salaries, much less higher education and decent housing. For instance, in Cartagena, a Colombian Caribbean colonial city plagued with extreme poverty, beggars, child prostitution and U$400 a night resorts, you can pretend to feel in Miami Beach or a Mediterranean paradise, and in less than five minutes away you can also visit slums which would make devastated Haiti look like suburbia. The same shockingly contrast can be experienced in all major cities in Colombia. Thus, in order to keep vast privileges of a few amidst infrahuman conditions of the majority, the elite needs to have an iron grip on political power, and once its power is contested or mildly threatened by the collective action of social movements, democratic parties and conscious individuals, a selective burst of state violence is unleashed effectively dismantling any kind of peaceful organizing by fear and demoralization. The high levels of attrition suffered by activists raising moderate democratic banners such as the right to assembly, collective bargaining, freedom of expression and reparation from political violence, are the result of decentralized state repression carried out by death squads led by high state officers⁵ who supply them with intelligence and economic resources extracted from defrauding public treasury and money laundry in the narcotics chain, where social investigators claim that most of the profit accounts for institutional economy, the banks and the state.⁶

This elaborated repressive strategy differs from the one perpetrated by the military juntas the ruled Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, among others, where public forces exercised directly the political violence against dissidents without pretentious democratic credentials, such as the ones constantly regurgitated by the Colombian establishment, making it more difficult to expose its deep dictatorial mechanisms that have disappeared more than 30000 Colombians⁷ in the last years of US backed “counterinsurgency” policies, far surpassing Pinochet’s reign of terror.

In this place where dominant class reactionism have dumped thousands of disappeared into mass graves, killed union leaders at the highest world rate, and forcefully displaced millions of peasants already surpassing Sudan figures, is easy to expect political idleness and fear from the masses amid savage neoliberal policies and primitive capital accumulation. This state of matters posits a basic question, as James Petras puts it: “How does one pursuit equitable social policies and the defense of human rights under a terrorist state aligned with death squads and financed and advised by a foreign power, which has a public policy of physically eliminating their adversaries?”⁸ Some in Colombia already found and an answer in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that constitutes the basis for all modern states:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.⁹

In the light of the exposure of the Colombian hybrid state which pits formal democracy and excessive privileges for a few against brutal repression and poverty for the majority, is also feasible to comprehend the existence of an armed conflict, beyond the official construct of terrorism. This class confrontation has resulted in a “polarization of civil war proportions between the oligarchy and the military, on one side, and the guerrilla and the peasantry, on the other,”¹⁰ , and is mostly funded by US government using taxpayers money to back a rogue state and a comprador elite that prefers to wage dirty war against its own population rather than yield some political power and moderate social reforms. Modernity hasn’t arrived in Colombia, where few can enjoy excesses and vices of promised ‘civilization’ in fancy restaurants and country clubs, and most still live in 1789.

In times when president Obama justifies his “humanitarian intervention” and escalation of the Libyan civil war by having public opinion to believe NATO and US bombs are there to protect civilians, and when the International Criminal Court applies selective justice as it rushes to levy charges against Gaddafi for alleged crimes that pale in comparison to the ones daily committed by the Colombian regime, the international community is turning a blind eye to crimes against humanity in the shameful custom of double standards and insulting those truly resisting, with their teeth, the savagery and abuse of power.

1. Euclides Montes. “Ana Fabricia Córdoba: A death foretold”. Guardian. June 13, 2011.
2. Red de Derechos Humanos del Suroccidente Colombiano ‘Francisco Isaias Fuentes’. “Atentado y amenaza en contra del líder comunitario Manuel Antonio Garcés Granja y detención arbitraria de dos testigos del atentado”. July 18, 2011.
3. Red Latinoamericana y del Caribe para la Democracia. “Alerta: asesinato de miembro de liga de mujeres desplazadas”. 22 July 2011.
4. Simon Romero. “Death-Squad Scandal Circles Closer to Colombia’s President”. New York Times. May 16 2007.
5. Garry Leech. “Exorcising the Ghost of Paramilitary Violence: Reclaiming Liberty in Libertad”. Colombia Journal. September 21, 2009.
6. Brittain, James (2010). Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia. New York: Pluto Press. 129.
7. Kelly Nicholls. “Breaking the Silence: In search of Colombia’s Disappeared”. Guardian. December 9, 2010.
8. James Brittain, op. cit., Foreword by James Petras.
9. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations. 1948.
10. James Brittain, op. cit., p 144.

This is an act of terrorism. It bears repeating because some news outlets–even supposedly reputable ones–don’t seem to think that acts like these are worthy of the label unless it’s carried out by Muslims. Of course, as we all now know, Muslims weren’t responsible for these events. In fact, they were quite clearly one of the targets.

Anders Behring Breivik hates Muslims, in particular what they have done to his “beloved Norway.” More broadly, he hates the notion of multiculturalism. We all have heard over the past several days about his virulent hatred for any kind of tolerance or inclusion, let alone the kind of anti-racism espoused by the “cultural Marxists” from whom he saves particular bile in his 1500 page manifesto. His links with far-right Islamophobes like Stop the Islamization of Europe and proto-fascist groups like the English Defence League are really the best indicator for what Breivik was trying to achieve.

Perhaps then it’s not such a surprise that among the myriad blights he profiles in this long screed is a music genre with its own history of criminalization: hip-hop.

To those unfamiliar, it may be strange to think of Norway, a country of under 5 million people and typically thought of as lily white, having any kind of hip-hop scene to speak of. More than 200,000 of these 4.8 million, however, are immigrants from Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan or Turkey, along with countless others of mixed heritage. Over the past two decades, Norway’s hip-hop scene had varied from duos like Madcon–whose members are both of African heritage–to the all-white trio Warlocks–because, as we all know, there are plenty of white kids attracted to hip-hop.

One of these kids, believe it or not, was Anders Breivik. In the mid-90s he was apparently a part of Oslo’s insurgent hip-hop community. His best friend was Pakistani, and, if his manifesto is to be believed, the two of them were among the most infamous graffiti artists in the city.

At some point, however, Breivik had a change (or loss) of heart, and now lays the blame for many of Norway’s social ills squarely at the front door of what he now calls the “ghetto/ethnic/multiculturalist lifestyle”:

I personally know of more than 50 individuals who started with hashish and marijuana as a direct result of the hip-hop mentality. Many of these went from light drugs to heavier drugs such as amphetamine and even heroin. I personally know that more than 20 individuals, from my ‘hip-hop community’, have become severe drug addicts and some of them are probably dead today.

Breivik goes on to estimate that around 40% of drug addicts in Norway have been somehow duped into it by hip-hop. It’s a ludicrous claim, bordering on the delusional, but not quite as delusional as Breivik’s overblown, almost self-congratulatory guess at how much property damage he committed as a tagger:

During my two most active years at the age of 15 and 16, I estimate that myself [and his crew] inflicted property damage (through bombing raids – “tagging”) of approximately 2 million Euro combined of which I inflicted aprox. 700 000.

It’s a familiar narrative: pop music produces drug addiction, property damage, and from there it’s only a short jump to all manner of social decay. To Breivik, the sounds of the microphone and turntable, embraced by kids of every race the world over, are little more than the soundtrack of the invading brown hordes.

Anyone, however, who takes a cursory look at Norway’s recent musical history will see a very different picture–one of much more atrocious acts than petty vandalism.

From 1992 to ‘95, probably right around the time Breivik was popping open his first Sharpie, no less than 28 Christian churches across Norway were burned in acts of arson or attempted arson. The culprits for several of these weren’t Islamic fundamentalists, but native born Norwegians Bard “Faust” Eithun and Varg Vikernes, members of the country’s rising black metal scene.

While in prison for killing a fellow musician, Vikernes became a leading figure in what is termed the “estoteric Nazism” movement, a strange mixture of Norse paganism and old-fashioned white power ideology. Eithun was convicted in 1992 of beating a gay man to death outside the Olympic Village in Lillehammer. Both have since been released.

In 2001, Benjamin Hermansen, a sixteen-year-old Ghanaian-Norwegian school student, was stabbed to death in the multiracial suburb of Holmlia; the Norwegian police called it “Norway’s first racially motivated murder.” He was killed by three members of a neo-Nazi gang known as “the Boot Boys,” who had been known to orient to the local street punk and Oi! scenes.

Neither black metal nor punk rock are to blame for these deaths or arson. In fact, the Nazi component makes up barely a fraction of either scene. And yet, according to the logic of Anders Behring Breivik, the punks and metalheads should be just as much to blame as hip-hop is for drug use and urban decay. The only reason they aren’t mentioned is that ultimately, Breivik has a lot more in common with Vikernes and the Boot Boys.

What may be most horrifying about Breivik’s notions on hip-hop is how he believes this particular “problem” can be solved:

“As for the fate of the hiphop industry; banning it altogether is not the optimal solution as it would cause overwhelming short term outcry and it would eliminate positive aspects as well. However, I believe [in] significant restrictions in the rights of media companies which will include censoring negative and destructive lifestyles. An alternative is to limit such marketing to future ‘liberal zones’. Certain positive aspects of the hiphop movement should be allowed to survive such as break dance and positive genres of the music as long as it positively influences the self confidence of European youths and only if it can be re-defined as a European tradition…”

There’s a term for this: apartheid. Perhaps that’s not so surprising considering that Breivik also calls for Israel to “finish the job” in Palestine and for the re-imposition of white rule in South Africa. Ask any Black blues musician what it was like to play in the Jim Crow south, and they’ll likely paint a picture similar to Breivik’s (final) solution.

And yet, here in the States, we’ve heard this basic line before–and not just from the fringe lunatics. We’ve heard Sarah Palin call Common a cop-killer and Don Imus claim that rap was responsible for his own hatred toward women. We’ve heard it from city councils outlawing baggy pants and police chiefs targeting backwards ballcaps.

Likewise, the kind of anti-Muslim hate spewed by Breivik has become a fixture of everyday life. The crusade against multiculturalism is one that runs the gamut from the vile protests against the Park51 community center in New York City to the speeches of David Cameron and Angela Merkel.

As ordinary Norwegians figure out a way to heal from the devastation, the stakes have never been higher. What the tragedy in Oslo and the racist rants of Anders Behring Breivik show us is that the fight for a world of true equality and justice is one that touches every aspect of our lives. If his kind have their way, then this cruel brand of white-bred repression will extend from the halls of power into our schools, our communities, and yes, even our record stores.

Norway is in a state of total shock after the 22 July car bombing in Oslo killing seven, followed by the shooting spree at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoya Island killing 69. This terrorist operation, the worst massacre in Norway’s recent history, represents a greater loss proportional to its five million people than 9/11 did to the US. Speaking of which, an initial report in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, et al attributed the attack to Islamists (resentful of Norway’s democracy, etc), “a terror group, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global Jihad”.

This was according to Dr William McCants, a “terrorism analyst at CNA, a research institute that studies terrorism”, author of a terrorist watchdog blog jihadica.com. CNA is too obscure to be found on the web, and expert McCants quickly retracted his claim. The NYT later admitted Global Jihad may not even exist (let alone CNA), but who reads the fine print in subsequent editions or checks if various “organisations” are actually fronts for something much more sinister, as long as it’s a question of “Islamists”?

Perhaps CNA is a typo, for McCants’s feint is a classic CIA media move targeting the current “enemy”, which worked in spades, dominating the world’s mainstream media coverage of the massacre. When exposed, McCants launched a new anti-Muslim angle immediately, noting that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, admires Al-Qaeda: “Just like Jihadi warriors are the plum tree of the Ummah, we will be the plum tree for Europe and for Christianity,” Breivik apparently wrote. That the world has the CIA and the McCants to thank for the creation and promotion of Al-Qaeda in the first place does not faze the zealous professor of terrorism. Even when Al-Qaeda is not guilty, it is still guilty.

Breivik is a self-styled Christian Zionist and Freemason, a “martyr” and “resistance fighter” in a “civil war” against the “Marxist-Islamist alliance” taking over Europe, according to his 1,500 page screed signed “Knights Templar Europe”, available on the internet.

He described members of Norway’s Labour Party as “traitors” like the Norwegian collaborators in WWII because of their alleged support of “multiculturalism and Islamisation” and criticism of Israel, in line with Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s recent charges against the “Quisling” Norwegian government. Breivik advocates “terror” attacks on mosques, especially during Muslim religious holidays, intended to “trigger Muslim riots” and allowing a rightwing “coup”. The holy month of Ramadan begins 1 August.

Breivik epitomises the new Euro right, which is both fanatically pro-Israel and anti-Muslim. Breivik even approves of a Caliphate for Muslims, as long as it is in the Middle East. This is similar to Hitler’s desire to push Jews out of Europe into their own Jewish state in Palestine, as Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in the 1930–40s makes clear. But Euro neo-Nazism has the startling characteristic of being pro-Jewish, and wishes not to rid Europe of Jews, but of Muslims. If this requires terrorising and even killing a few million in the process, that is a price worth paying to make Europe pure again.

How did this eerie transformation of fascism — from targeting Jews to taking them as allies against Muslims — come about? It is a combination of two factors that have been fermenting in the post-WWII period.

The origins of European Islamophobia lie in anxiety about and hatred felt by many Europeans of their own European “other”, namely European Jewry. Pre-WWII Europe feared a Jewish conspiracy to subvert Christian society. In the post-Holocaust era, this has been displaced onto Muslim immigrants, even by the traditionally anti-Jewish far right such as Le Pen’s National Front, the British National Party and Norway’s own Progress Party which are now Zionist and racist at the same time.

With the rise of a Jewish state far from Europe, which attracted many European Jews, unease about the “alien” other momentarily abated. Jews who remained in Europe had lost their former high profile as media owners, entertainers and industrial magnates, and were now mostly invisible, there no longer being Jewish ghettos in the major cities. Christianity accepted Judaism as its honoured ancestor, no longer a threat or heresy requiring proselytising and/ or restrictions on Jews. The 1950-60s saw a European flowering without either Jews or Muslims having much of a profile.

The new “Judeo-Christian” culture of the West (a concept dismissed by serious Christian and Jewish scholars) is supposedly a happy family. Though Islam and Christianity have much more in common, the rescue of millions of Jews from the Nazis created a cultural bond between the former hostile religions. Because the Jewish state in Palestine was created on the dead bodies of Muslims, this cemented the present alliance of Judaism and Christianity against Islam, a war supposedly of cultures, but one rooted in Jewish imperial conquest in Palestine and “Judeo-Christian” cultural hegemony in the West.

But as Europe’s population began to age, by the 1970s the need for cheap labour forced Europe to “import” Muslims, who are close religious cousins of Christians but maintain pre-capitalists traditions. For instance, Muslim women tend to wear veils, and thriving communities of believers need new mosques with their non-European minarets.  While these differences are hardly a threat, they are visible, and Muslims make good (cheap) electoral fodder as scapegoats for the real culprits for the mounting economic problems facing Europe – their very own Christian and Jewish elites using banking crises and neoliberalism to cut living standards.

As the empire wrestles to subdue Islam, its major politico-cultural rival after the collapse of Communism, Islamophobia, like anti-Communism has become rampant. Such bigots as Holland’s Geert Wilders are working to form a Europe-wide International Freedom Alliance, even including the US and Canada; an “Atlanticist Islamophobistan”, according to analyst Pepe Escobar. Considering that Muslims make up less than two per cent of US and Canadian populations, this leads to “the surrealist American phenomenon of Islamophobia without Muslims”.

Muslims indeed pose a threat to both the Zionised Christians like Breivik and the Zionised Jews promoting the expansion of Israel throughout Palestine. But for the rest of us, the real threat is Zionism and Israel. The inspiration behind Breivik’s horrendous deed is in the first place Israel, where the Bible says Jews should congregate to await the endtimes. Breivik: “The time has come to stop the stupid support of the Palestinians…and to start supporting our cultural cousins — Israel.”

His murders even have a kind of rabbinical blessing. In 2009 Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro of the (illegal) West Bank settlement Yitzhar published The King’s Torah, which condones killing even babies and children if they pose a threat to the nation. “It is permissible to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote. By analogy, it is fine for such as Breivik to kill innocent fellow Norwegians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, if they  threaten his vision of a pure Norway. Writes ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon, “Breivik treated his fellow countrymen in the same way that the IDF treats Palestinians.”

Breivik no doubt noted Israel’s unpunished 2009 massacre in Gaza, an action that coincided with the beginning of his plans to terrorise his fellow Norwegians. He is surely aware that plucky Israel is now fighting a rear-guard action against the growing boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement in Europe, which prompted Israel – just days before the tragedy — to pass a “herem” law, threatening to sue anyone boycotting its products.

Europe’s BDS movement is, in fact, spearheaded by Norway. Two days before Breivik’s massacre, the widely read Dagbladet tabloid quoted Labour Party youth movement leader, Eskil Pedersen, as stating that he “believes the time has come for more drastic measures against Israel, and [that he] wants the Foreign Minister to impose an economic boycott against the country.”

Two days before the massacre, Joseph Klein complained on Dershowitz’s FrontPageMag.com about “The Quislings of Norway … Norway is effectively under the occupation of anti-Semitic leftists and radical Muslims, and appears willing to help enable the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.”

Breivik was a regular poster at document.no, run by Jewish pro-Zionist Hans Rustad, which warns against “Islamisation”, violence, and other social problems Rustad assumes to be connected with Muslim immigration. According to Atzmon, such Euro blogs “are almost exclusively focused on ‘the problem of Islam’, and on Muslim migrants, all the while relentlessly propounding a propagandistic Zionist agenda”.

Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, dismissed the pro-Israeli tilt of the likes of Breivik as just skin-deep, used by them to mask their inherent racism. US President Barack Obama dismissed the tragedy as “domestic”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned the tragedy on its head and said Israel “completely identifies” with the suffering.

Netanyahu’s compatriots at the Israeli Hebrew language blog rotter.net were more honest: “Oslo criminals paid”; “It’s stupidity and evil not to desire death for those who call to boycott Israel”; “To cry about it? Come on. We Jews are not Christians. In the Jewish religion there is no obligation to love or mourn for the enemy.”

While not going that far, Ynet journalist Manfred Gerstenfeld complains about Norway’s “obsession” with Israel as opposed to, say, Russia. He exhorted the Norwegians to learn from “how Israel reacts to such events”. “How to defend oneself against [terror] is an issue that almost by nature draws in references to precedents from Israel,” he said proudly.

But it’s Israel’s criminal activity that inspired the killer. And why must we follow in Israel’s security-obsessed footsteps, making our lives a living hell so that Israel can continue to perpetrate its crimes unpunished?

Breivik boasts he is part of a shadowy network of latter-day crusader knights set up in London in 2002 with cells across Europe, clearly inspired by Israel. It is thus urgent that Western intelligence agencies investigate Israeli and Zionist operatives before this new campaign of terror takes hold.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

After being held for 76 days in isolation without access to reading material, Fidel Castro, the 26-year old leader, came into a courtroom filled with 100 soldiers. He gave a rousing defense of the need for revolution to topple the dictator and change the corrupt and brutal socio-economic system so that all could be fed, obtain education and health care, so that farmers could own land and all have a voice.

In his five-hour speech, Fidel said, “The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.”

Instead of asking for acquittal, he demanded to be with his brother and sister rebels in prison. “Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me!”

Fidel Castro considers ethics and morality to be essential for revolutions. In My Life: Fidel Castro, the 2006 interview book with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel speaks of these highest principles on numerous occasions. He asserts that “especially ethics” is what he learned most from the national liberation hero, José Martí.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, from December 2, 1956 to January 1, 1959 the revolutionaries acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. As Fidel told Ramonet, “We did not kill any prisoners,” “not even one blow” was dealt. That is “our principle.” “All revolutionary thought begins with a bit of ethics.”

I think that is also the key reason why so many millions of people the world over love and respect Che Guevara: his moral stance, his example as a just revolutionary leader. This from Socialism and Man:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love…Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible…one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

I agree with Fidel and Che. Revolutionaries must be ethical in vision and use morality in practice, both at home and in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere. As Fidel told Lee Lockwood in Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel:

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.

I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked or oppressed beyond limits of toleration. A moral person, organization, political party or government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality:

1. We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people, class or caste. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making about vital matters with relation to local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

Ethics and Sri Lanka Tamils

True solidarity activists have no choice. We must support a people under attack by aggressors wherever in the world. That is what I see as our task as anti-war activists concerning Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine…just as we did in the wars against Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia and the South Africans…

For us solidarity activists, and governments viewing themselves as progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe our task must be to press for the very lives and rights of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka where governments have systematically oppressed and repressed them for half-a-century.

As a solidarity activist—who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to change oppressive governments from terrorizing us—I denounce all perpetrators of terrorism, no matter the party or cause, and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology embracing fellowship with justice and equality.

I find that most armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with the Colombian FARC and Palestinian PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. The ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation also committed horrendous acts of terrorism.

Most of the dozens of Tamil groups that took up arms, at one time or another, considered themselves Marxists, and many looked up to Che Guevara and Cuba’s revolution as an ideal. But they nearly all became terrorists in much of their actions. Hear what Che Guevara meant about the use of violence.

There are always laggards who remain behind but our function is not to liquidate them, to crush them and force them to bow to an armed vanguard, but to educate them by leading them forward and getting them to follow us because of our example, or as Fidel called it ‘moral compulsion.’ (Speech “From somewhere in the world”)

This Sri Lanka Tamil ‘story’ is a tragedy especially for the Tamils; also for the world of humanity. Most people not directly involved, however, do not react because they don’t know what they can do. There are so many tragedies going on at the same time. Cynical brutality is constantly unleashed by major capitalist enterprises and their governments in the ‘first’ world, much of the former ‘second’ world as well as by national capitalists in the ‘third’ world. We live in what I call the Permanent War Age. Brutality—surveillance—suffering is the norm.

In those countries where there is little brutality, in comparison, and no aggressive war-making (I speak here of the governments of Cuba and other ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America—countries) the leaders see the necessity of having political ties  with some war criminal governments, such as Sri Lanka. I gather that this leads them to ignore their moral solidarity principles and abandon the oppressed Tamils.

On this July 26 day of celebration, I call upon the Cuban government, as well as all members of the ALBA alliance, to return to the moral principles expressed by Fidel and Che and do the right thing by the Tamil people. Call for an independent international investigation into the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government, and use your moral clout, your revolutionary record to demand an end to the genocide against this people.

If morality does not become integral to our struggles, I’m afraid we are headed for a worldwide moral collapse, which is already underway due to the intrinsic immorality of capitalism and its imperialism; the foundering of contemporary socialism; and the rise of fascism throughout much of the world.

In his summary of what the monster had stated behind closed doors in court, Judge Heger said he had argued that he wanted to create “the greatest loss possible to Norway’s governing Labour Party”, which he accused of failing the country on immigration and opening the door to the “Muslim colonization” of Norway and all of Europe.

There could not have been a more effective way of inflicting at a single stroke a great loss than gunning down many members of the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth wing, the Workers Youth League (AUF), which was assembled on Utoya Island.

Two days before the massacre there, and as Gilad Atzmon has researched and noted, the AUF’s leader, Eskil Pedersen, gave an interview to Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper. In it he said: “The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel but the decision of the last Congress demands that Norway impose a unilateral economic embargo on the country… I acknowledge this is a drastic measure but I think it gives a clear indication that, quite simply, we are tired of Israel’s behaviour.” (My own view is that behind closed doors all Western governments, including the one in Washington D.C. in the person of President Obama, are tired of Israel’s behaviour).

There are two things we know for sure.

One is that Breivik is fanatically anti Islam and pro Zionism.

The other is that Zionism’s propaganda machine has been set to work at full speed, day and night, eight days and nights a week, to demonize, discredit and destroy all who are calling and campaigning for Israel to be boycotted.
From the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust to the present, Zionism’s success in selling its propaganda lies as truth is the reason why the search for peace based on an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians has been, and remains, a mission impossible.

I describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as the cancer at the heart of international affairs which threatens to consume us all. It’s bad enough that Zionist propaganda has prevented a cure for it, but if now that same propaganda is inspiring Europeans in Europe to slaughter their own, the future is very, very frightening.

I don’t know the answer to my headline question but I think investigators in Norway, prosecutors and psychiatrists, must dig deep enough to find it.