Showing posts with label Destabilization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Destabilization. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
'The Baby And The Baath Water' - A Multi-Media History Of The West's Involvement In Syria & The Region Via The CIA Infiltrated Baath Party
THE BABY AND THE BAATH WATERAdam Curtis
Thursday, 16 June 2011
What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military dictators. An old way of running the world is still desperately trying to cling to power, but the underlying feeling in the west is that somehow Assad's archaic and cruel military rule will inevitably collapse and Syrians will move forward into a democratic age.
That may, or may not, happen, but what is extraordinary is that we have been here before.
Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.
What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today.
I thought I would tell that story.
In 1968 a CIA agent called Miles Copeland (Ed. Conspiracy Buffs Note: His son is Stewart Copeland drummer for the well-known band "The Police".) wrote a book called 'The Game of Nations' that revealed what went on in 1947.
Back then Copeland was part of a mangement consulting team in Washington who were working out how America should contain the threat of communism in the Middle East, now the old European Empires had gone. This was before the CIA existed, and Copeland describes how they got together an odd group of diplomats, secret agents left over from the war, advertising men from Madison Avenue, and "pipe-smoking owls" (which is what intellectuals were called in those days).
Copeland describes an impassioned lecturer telling this group that their aim should be to change the leadership in the countries in the Middle East:
"Politicians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt seem to have been elected into power, but what elections! The winners were all candidates of foreign powers, old land-owners who tell their tenants and villagers how to vote, or rich crooks who can buy their votes. But peoples of these countries are intelligent, and they have a natural bent for politics. If there is a part of the world which is crying for the democratic process the Arab World is it."They decided to start with Syria. Compared to what was to come, it was all very sweet and innocent...
In Full
Author Adam Curtis also produced the excellent three part documentary "The Power Of Nightmares" for the BBC.
The documentary explains the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood, now much in the news due to the Egyptian revolt earlier this year, al-Qaeda, the Neoconservatives of the United States and elsewhere, and their common philosophical roots derived from a grossly dysfunctional 'reading' of Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss' works and teachings. There was an Egyptian national in Leo Strauss' lecture hall, and he returned home to Egypt with the same world view and vision as Elliot Abrahms Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, and other public figures who now have the ear of the American political Right and all to often, the confidences of sitting US presidents.
From the introduction:
This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today.The documentary is available at Internet Archive at two links:
From the introduction to Part 1:"Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."
The documentary presented in a player-on-page with a number of video formats available for download here.
Here is the link to the landing page for an ISO file ready to burn to DVD.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
You Have 'Killer Eyes'!
Apparently, there IS NO Libyan military and never has been.
For that matter... Libya never was a 'nation' either.
Serbian daily 'Alo' carries an image of Serbian mercenaries in Libya
According to a Maltese blog Malta CC, Serbian military pilots reportedly took part in the bombing of protesters in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi.This claim was made public after two Libyan pilots fled to Malta, refusing to bomb their fellow citizens participating in the Libya uprising. Serbian daily Alo reminded readers that Muammar al-Gaddafi had hired Serbian pilots before: in the 90s, in combat operations against radical Islamists, but also in actions against civilians, in support of the ground forces.In the same article, Alo revealed that Serbian mercenaries were allegedly killing protesters in the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi:
Serbian mercenaries earn tens of thousands dollars for this job… They come from Serbia, but Bosnian and Croatian agencies are involved in recruiting for this kind of work…”Serbian legionnaires” are veterans of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. In addition to former members of the military and police units, the bulk of these forces are the former [”Red Berets“]… Gaddafi pays them as much as they demand! A good number of them had great-paying jobs in various African countries, but this was an offer not to be rejected. It can be expected that in the near future a lot of our contractors go with Gaddafi, who has great confidence in Serbian soldiers.It appears that Serbian netizens are not too surprised by these allegations and revelations...
From the comments:
Paja 1408, a Serbian military officer, recalls: "Hey, gentlemen, what is strange about it? I know personally, when I was in military schools, there were also Libyans, Iraqis, Zambians, Palestinians… I know that they were in Russian [military] schools also. Gaddafi's military experts appreciated the school in Yugoslavia… He knew to recruit the best ones to join the Libyan army...Read More @ Global Voices
Also, for perspective, see this posting by John Pilger @ Antiwar.com about WHY people like Muammar al-Gadaffi rise to power in the first place.
External corporate powers NEED their resources and slave labor (and as seen above, use the brutalized disenfranchised labor of others so vanquished to continue their economic conquests):
Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins.
In the aftermath of World War Two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of "Western civilisation," found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods.
Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became "US foreign policy."
As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu, and Pinochet to dominate by proxy.
In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In "Operation Cyclone," the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy.
The victims of this Western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims.
The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a "priority UK market," according to Britain’s official arms "procurers," join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.
The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day.
The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism. [In Full @ Antiwar.com]
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