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The new propaganda is liberal. The new slavery is digital.

10/31/2013

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http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-new-propaganda-is-liberal-the-new-slavery-is-digital
 
By John Pilger -  14 March 2013

What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her 'Triumph of the Will' cast Hitler's spell.

She told me that the "messages" of her films were dep endent not on "orders from above," but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said.

Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. "Choice" is ubiquitous. Phones are "platforms" that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it.
Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne heads-down,
relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My
needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.

Edward Said described this wired state in 'Culture and Imperialism' as taking  imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.

Today's "message" of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behaviour, this is extremism. When Hugo Chavez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School and the "human rights" organisations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpinits propaganda. The historian Norman Pollack calls this "liberal fascism." He wrote, "All is normality on display. For [Nazi] goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the
bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work [in the White House], planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."

Whereas a generation ago, dissent and biting satire were allowed in the "mainstream," today their counterfeits are acceptable and a fake moral zeitgeist rules. "Identity" is all, mutating feminism and declaring class obsolete. Just as collateral damage covers for mass murder, "austerity" has become an acceptable lie. Beneath the veneer of umerism, a quarter of Greater Manchester is reported to be living in "extreme poverty."

The militarist violence perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of nameless men,
women and children by "our" governments is never a crime against humanity. Interviewing Tony Blair 10 years on from his criminal invasion of Iraq, the
BBC's Kirsty Wark gifted him a moment he could only dream of. She allowed Blair
to agonise over his "difficult" decision rather than call him to account for the
monumental lies and bloodbath he launched. One is reminded of Albert Speer.

Hollywood has returned to its cold war role, led by liberals. Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning 'Argo' is the first feature film so integrated into the propaganda system that its subliminal warning of Iran's "threat" is offered as Obama is preparing, yet again, to attack Iran. That Affleck's "true story" of good-guys-vs-bad-Muslims is as much a fabrication as Obama's justification for his war plans is lost in PR-managed plaudits. As the independent critic Andrew O'Hehir points out, 'Argo' is "a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology." That is, it debases the art of film-making to reflect an image of the power it serves.

The true story is that, for 34 years, the US foreign policy elite have seethed with revenge for the loss of the shah of Iran, their beloved tyrant, and his CIA-designed state of torture. When Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran in 1979,
they found a trove of incriminating documents, which revealed that an Israeli spy network was operating inside the US, stealing top scientific and military secrets. Today, the duplicitous Zionist ally - not Iran - is the one and only nuclear threat in the Middle East.

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, famed for his Watergate reporting, disclosed that more than 400 journalists and executives of mostly liberal US media organizations had worked for the CIA in the past 25 years. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time, and the big TV broadcasters. These days, such a formal nefarious workforce is quite unnecessary. In 2010, the New York Times made no secret of its collusion with
the White House in censoring the WikiLeaks war logs. The CIA has an "entertainment industry liaison office" that helps producers and directors remake its image from that of a lawless gang that assassinates, overthrows governments and runs drugs. As Obama's CIA commits multiple murder by drone, Affleck lauds the "clandestine service... that is making sacrifices on behalf of Americans every day... I want to thank them very much." The 2010 Oscar-winner
Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty', a torture-apology, was all but licensed by the Pentagon.

The US market share of cinema box-office takings in Britain often reaches 80 percent, and the small UK share is mainly for US co-productions. Films from Europe and the rest of the world account for a tiny fraction of those we are allowed to see. In my own film-making career, I have never known a time when dissenting voices in the visual arts are so few and silent.

For all the hand-wringing induced by the Leveson inquiry, the "Murdoch mold" remains intact. Phone-hacking was always a distraction, a misdemeanor compared to the media-wide drumbeat for criminal wars. According to Gallup, 99 percent of Americans believe Iran is a threat to them, just as the majority believed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. "Propaganda always wins," said Leni Riefenstahl, "if you allow it."


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Five Years a Zionist Lackey, Fifteen Minutes an American President

10/31/2013

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http://www.voltairenet.org/article180539.html
 
Obama at the UN General Assembly

Five Years a Zionist Lackey, Fifteen Minutes an American President

 by James Petras


Obama’s rhetorical exercise in ‘peace talk’ at the United Nations General Assembly
impressed few delegations and even fewer Americans: Far more eloquent are his
five years of wars, military interventions, cyber-spying, drone murders,
military coups and the merciless prosecution of patriotic truth tellers. If his
‘peace message’ fell flat, the explicit affirmations of imperial prerogatives,
threats of military interventions and over two dozen (25) references to Israel
as a ‘strategic ally’, confirmed the suspicions and fears that Obama was
preparing for even more deadly wars.

Voltaire Network| New York (United States)| 11 October 2013 
 
Playing the ‘War Card’ in the Face of Massive Opposition


Obama’s UN speech took place at a time when his war policies have
hit rock bottom both at home and abroad [1]. After suffering at least two major diplomatic defeats and a
string of negative polls, which revealed that a strong majority of Americans
rejected his entire approach to foreign policy, Obama made an overture to Iran.
Up to that point few delegates or citizens were impressed or entertained by his
‘new vision for US diplomacy’. According to many experts, it was vintage Obama,
the con-man: talking peace while preparing new wars.


Nothing in the past six years warranted any hope that Obama would
respond to new overtures for peace emanating from Iran, Syria or Palestine; his
habitual obedience to Israel would push for new wars on behalf of the Jewish
State. At no point did Obama even acknowledge the sharp and outraged criticism
by leading heads of state regarding his policy of cyber colonialism (massive
spying) and his pursuit of imperial wars.

Obama’s Double Discourse: Talking Peace While Making War

At his 2009 inauguration, Barak Obama proclaimed, “We are going to
have to take a new approach with a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness
to talk.” And then he proceeded to launch more wars, armed interventions,
clandestine operations and assassination campaigns in more countries than any US
President in the last fifty years.

Obama’s record over the past five years reads:

(1) Continued war, slaughter and military bases in Iraq.

(2) A 40,000 plus US “troop surge” in Afghanistan

(3) An unprovoked assault against Libya, devastating the country,
reducing oil production by 90%, throwing millions into chaos and poverty. and
allowing a multitude of terrorist groups to divide the country and distribute
its huge arsenal of weapons.

(4) Over 400 un-manned aerial drone attacks, murdering over 4,000
civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia.

(5) Cross-border ground and air attacks in Pakistan and
counter-insurgency warfare that forcing over 1.5 million refugees to flee the
war zones.

(6) The arming and financing of‘African Union’ mercenaries to
invade and occupy Somalia, sending hundreds of thousands of Somalis into refugee
camps.

(7) Unconditional support for Israel, including the ‘sale’ of
advanced weapons and an annual $3 billion dollars ‘aid’package to a racist
regime intent on more land grabs in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem,
as well as the displacing, killing, arresting and torturing of thousands of
Palestinians and Bedouins.

(8) The sending of the US Naval armada to the Persian Gulf while
imposing even more brutal economic sanctions drafted by Israeli-Firsters in
order to strangle the Iranian economy and starve its over 70 million citizens
into submission.

(9) Maintaining the notorious Guantanamo torture camp where
hundreds of prisoners languish without trail (despite early promises to close it).

(10) Arming and training Islamist terrorists and ‘pro-Western’
mercenaries to invade Syria, killing over 100,000 Syrians and driving over one
million refugees from their homes. Obama’s plans to bomb Syria are on hold, as
of October 2013, thanks to Russian President Putin’s peace  initiative.

(11) Engaging in grotesque global cyber-spying and the massive
theft of highly confidential military, economic and political communications
within allied nations (from Germany to Brazil) at the highest
levels.

(12) Unleashing a violent destabilization campaign in democratic
Venezuela, following the defeat of the US candidate; Obama was the only leader
in the world to refuse to recognize the election.

Altogether, Obama’s five years in office have been marked by his
relentless pursuit of imperial power through arms and domination; This has come
at enormous economic cost to the American people in the form of huge fiscal
deficits and significant overseas and domestic political losses.

As a result, Obama’s rising tide of militarism has had the opposite
effect of provoking a countercurrent of peace initiatives to challenge the
assumptions and prerogatives of the war-mongers in the White House. The dynamics
of this immense clash between the global war and peace forces will be played out
in the next several months.

The Dynamics of Obama’s Foreign Policy

Obama’s future policy reflects the interplay between a highly
militarized past and the tremendous current pressure for peace and diplomacy.
The changes emerging from these powerful conflicting forces will have a decisive
impact on the global configuration of power, as well as on the trajectory of the
US economy for the foreseeable future.

We have proceeded by outlining in telegraphic form the principle
events and policies defining Obama’s embrace of a militarist policy over the
past five years. We will now proceed to highlight the current countervailing
forces and events pressuring the White House to adopt a diplomatic and peaceful
resolution of conflicts. We will identify the leading pro-war power
configuration acting as an obstacle to peace. In the final section we will spell
out the policy resulting from these conflicting forces.

The Dynamics of Peace against the Legacy of War

By the early fall 2013, powerful tendencies emerged which seemed to
undermine or, at least, neutralize Washington’s drive to new and more deadly
wars. Eight major events constrained Washington’s empire builders to temporarily
rethink their immediate steps to war.

These include: (1) President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for Syria to
destroy its chemical weapons, under UN supervision, denying the US its current
pretext for bombing Damascus. The subsequent UN Security Council resolution,
which was unanimously approved, did not contain the ‘war clause’ (Chapter 7) -
thereby removing Washington’s pretext to bomb Syria for ‘non-compliance’ to the
tight time-table for disarming its chemical arsenal.

(2) Iran’s President Rohani’s calls for peace and reconciliation,
his offer to start prompt and consequential negotiations regarding Iran’s
nuclear program has isolated Israel and its Zionist agents in the international
arena and forced Obama to reciprocate, resulting in a move toward US-Iranian
negotiations.

(3) Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff’s, powerful denunciation of
US cyber spying against her government, economy and citizens before the General
Assembly resonated with the vast majority of political leaders. Coming from the
most powerful economy in Latin America, the sixth largest economy in the world
and a leading member of the BRICs, Rousseff’s rejection of US cyber-colonialism
and its IT and telecommunication corporations and her call for national
development, control and ownership of these communication networks, set a clear
anti-colonial tone to the proceedings. Washington’s response, its affirmation of
its ‘right’ to spy on allies and their private citizens, as well as foes, has
isolated Washington and found few supporters for such global cyber-imperial
pretensions. To accommodate Brazil, Washington will be forced to enter into
negotiations and acknowledge (if not comply with) Brazil’s demands.

(4) US domestic public opinion, in the run-up to Putin’s diplomatic
solution of the Syrian crisis, was overwhelmingly opposed to Obama’s moves to
bomb Syria. By a margin of two to one, the American electorate opposed any new
war; and Congress was prepared to heed its constituents, as letters were running
nine to one against war. In other words, Obama lacked domestic support for
attacking Syria and was under strong pressure to accept Putin’s diplomatic
solution. The mass involvement of American citizens, at least temporarily,
pushed back the war-mongers among Israel’s wealthy and influential backers in
Washington.

(5) Obama’s militarist foreign policy faces pressure from the
Congressional deadlock over the budget and debt ceilings. Lacking a federal
budget and with government offices closing, the White House has been forced to
lay-off millions of military and civilian employees. Obama is not in a position
to launch a costly new war, even if his Zionist patrons are “storming” Congress
and clambering for one. The ‘fiscal crisis of the state’, which exploded in
September 2013, is turning into a powerful political antidote to the policy of
serial wars Obama undertook during his first five years in office. The
debt-ceiling crisis and its aftermath further weaken the White House’s capacity
and willingness to pursue an extended war agenda in the Middle East. Congress’s
refusal to raise the debt ceiling, without budget reductions, could foreshadow a
crisis in financial markets spreading to the world economy and leading to
profound recession. The White House has its hands full trying to stabilize the
domestic economy and placate Wall Street, thus weakening its willingness to
engage in a new war.

One caveat: It is possible that, facing political divisions and an
economic crisis, political adventurers and pro-Israel advisers might convince
Obama to launch a war to ‘unify the country’and ‘divert attention’ from his
domestic debacle. A military distraction, of course, could backfire; it could be
seen as a partisan ploy and deepen domestic divisions, especially if a US attack
on Iran or Syria led to a wider war.

(6) The Snowden revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA)
global spying have weakened the White House’s ties to its allies and heightened
antagonism with its adversaries. Trust and co-operation, especially with regard
to intelligence, have been weakened in Asia, Latin America and, to a lesser
degree, in Europe. Several countries are discontinuing the use of US-IT
companies which had collaborated with the NSA. By losing access to the
communications of top officials in targeted countries, these revelations may
have undermined Washington’s global reach. Obama and Kerry’s outrageous
justifications for spying on their allies and private citizens and their defense
of intervention in cyber space have stirred up powerful political currents of
anti-imperialism among major trade partners. At the UN General Assembly Bolivian
President Evo Morales asserted, ‘The US is mistaken if it thinks it is the owner
of the world’. His attack on US military imperialism, “…terrorism is combatted
through social policy not with military bases”… resonated among the vast
majority of UN delegates. In stark contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
bellicose speech received a hostile reception among those heads of state who
didn’t simply walk out in disgust.

The Snowden disclosures of cyber-imperialism has seriously weakened
the US capacity for war by exposing its intelligence operations and discrediting
the war mongers associated with the NSA, making war planning more difficult.

The domestic and foreign forces, as well as world conditions for
peace, would be overwhelming in any normal imperial system. But there is a
‘special factor’, a powerful ‘undertow’, which opposes the forces for peace,
i.e. Israel and its US-based billionaire funded, 300,000 member-strong national
and local Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) deeply embedded in government and
civil society.

Against the Winds of Peace: The Zionist Power Configuration

On September 29, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu landed in
New York, as part of an Israeli campaign to undermine world-wide support for a
peaceful resolution of the war against Syria and the US-Iranian conflict. On
September 30, Netayanhu met with President Obama and addressed the United
Nations General Assembly the next day. Israel and Netanyahu represent the
biggest and most powerful obstacle to the growing“tide of peace”. Given its
status as a pariah state and the global community’s negative view of Israel and
its bullying Prime Minister, Netanyahu has to rely almost exclusively on the US
to maintain its monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region, its vast stockpile of
chemical weapons and its military supremacy in the Middle East. The White House
and the US Congress are crucial institutions backing Israel’s ambition for
uncontested hegemony in the Middle East. And the Zionist Power Configuration is
decisive in setting US policy throughout the region.

The ZPC operates on several levels: (1) dozens of Zionist
billionaires and millionaires fund Washington-based propaganda mills (so-called
‘think tanks’), an army of pro-Israel Middle East‘experts’ and Ivy League
publicists, the 52 major American Zionist organizations and their 300,00 zealous
militants. They pour tens of millions of dollars into electoral campaigns
throughout the country, rewarding compliant politicians who support any
legislation or resolution submitted by Zionist politicos and lobbyists (while
brutally punishing any congressional‘dissenters)’.

(2) Dozens of Zionist zealots occupy key positions within the
Administration, especially as appointees dealing with the Middle East and
Treasury, ensuring that US policymakers impose economic sanctions on Israel’s
enemies and pursue wars in Israel’s interests. They unconditionally back Israel
in of its attacks on its neighbors and block any sanctioning vote in the UN.
They make sure that Israel receives the most advanced weapons and the US
Treasury pays its annual $3 billion-plus dollar tribute to the Jewish State.

(3) The Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations
and their militants ensure local and national support for Israel, even at the
expense of domestic US interests and priorities. The zealots actively intervene
to ban, censor or threaten the employment of any critic of Israel or the ZPC –
extending to the most mundane local level of harassment. They successfully limit
the content and participants in the mass media, world affairs forums and
university programs with their threats and bullying.

The mass media are controlled by pro-Israel moguls, news reporters
and commentators who mold public perception of Israel claiming it to be a
‘bastion of democracy’ while labelling Iran a“terrorist Islamist dictatorship”.
Media analyst Steve Lendman describes, in his article entitled, “Israel Launches
Anti-Rohani Media Blitz”, Netanyahu’s repeated lies on questions pertaining to
Iran’s nuclear program and how the major US news media parrot Israel’s bellicose
propaganda. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and
Bloomberg back Netanyahu’s demand for harsh economic sanctions and threats of
aggression against Iran. The Daily Alert , mouthpiece of the 52 Presidents of
the Major American Jewish Organization, reproduces and circulates scores of
libelous polemical diatribes denigrating President Rohani, and slavishly praise
each and every bellicose eruption out from the mouths of Israeli politicians and
generals. For example, leading Zionist propagandist, Jeffrey Goldberg calls
President Rohani a“dishonest war monger” dismissing his peace overtures because
he is not “ready to shut down his country’s nuclear program”. Aaron David
Miller, another one of Israel’s Washington intellectuals, echoes Netanyahu’s
“concerns about wily Iranian mullahs bearing gifts” while demanding that the US
government “take care of Israel’s concerns”. The Zionist demand that the US
“secure Israel’s concerns” is a no brainer because the Jewish state is
determined to strip Iran of its sovereignty, surrender its entire medical and
civilian nuclear program and submit to Israeli regional hegemony...

The US and British press reported that the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has launched their own ‘full- scale invasion’ of the
US Congress, sending over 300 full-time lobbyists to sabotage any form of
rapprochement between the US and Iran. Just prior to the UN General Assembly
meeting, AIPAC militants were writing legislation for the US Congress, which
imposed new additional sanctions to further undermine Iranian oil exports; their
efforts secured “bi-partisan”support of over 300 members of Congress. While
President Obama faces a divided Congress, the Israel-Firsters from AIPAC easily
secure a near unanimous vote to scupper any diplomatic dialog between Washington
and Teheran. These new extremist sanctions were dictated by the Israeli Foreign
Office and are designed to sabotage any White House negotiations.

While some mainstream newspapers, like the Financial Times,
describe the “suspicions in Congress which raise the bar for a deal”, they fail
to mention the extraordinary intervention and influence of AIPAC in sowing these
“suspicions” – and authoring all anti-Iran legislation over the past two years!
The mass media covers up the central role of the ZPC in opposing a US dialogue
with Iran, and in subverting the push for peace favored by the vast majority of
war-weary and economically-battered Americans. Even ‘progressive and leftist’
weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies are silent on the overwhelming role of the
ZPC. Leading left journalists systematically skirt around any in- depth
discussion of the AIPAC and the 52 pro-Israel Jewish organizations in
manipulating the US Congress, the mass media and the Executive branch.

Any writer who attends US legislative committee hearings on the
Middle East or observes Congressional debates, or interviews Congressional
staff-members and lobbyists, or reads AIPAC reports, can compile ample public
documentation of the major role that Israel, through it US Zionist organizations
and agents, plays in dictating US-Iran relations. Nothing illustrates the
extreme power the ZPC exercises over US policy toward Iran than the thundering
silence of ‘progressives’ over the central ZPC role in policymaking. Is it
simply cowardice or fear of being slandered as an‘anti-Semite’? Or is it fear of
being excluded or blacklisted by major media and publications? Or is it
complicity: Being ‘critical of privileges and power’while selectively excluding
mention of Zionist access and influence?

So we have the situation in the US today where the Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu dictates the ‘negotiating terms’ to the Presidents of the 52
Major American Jewish Organizations. According to Netanyahu’s dictates, the
Islamic Republic of Iran must stop all uranium enrichment – including that for
medical, research and energy use, close the enrichment facilities at Qom, remove
all enriched uranium and halt the production of plutonium. Having set these
ridiculous, sovereignty-killing conditions on Iran and having the unconditional
support of the entire ZPC, Netanyahu proceeds to sabotage the peaceful,
diplomatic process via the lap-puppies in the US Congress. As one Washington
pundit noted the Obama regime“is very conscious of the fact that Israeli views
on Iran have a large influence (sic) on opinion in the US Congress”.

No country on any continent would or could accept the terms
dictated by Israel and its Fifth Column in the US –terms that undermine national
sovereignty. In fact, all countries with nuclear power facilities and advanced
medical and research institutions engage in some or all of these activities. By
setting these extremist terms, Netanyahu is in effect dooming the negotiations
from the start and setting the stage for war, the so-called “military option”
that both he and Obama agree would follow from a collapse in negotiations.

In a rational democratic world, most experts would argue that the
new alignment of forces for peace, including the vast and growing domestic
opposition to new wars and world public opinion in favor of President Rohani’s
overtures for negotiations, the US could easily ignore Israel’s war mongering.
But a more realistic and reflective analysis, however, would argue that the
negotiations will only proceed with great difficulty, especially in the face of
ZPC sabotage in adding new sanctions rather than a good-faith act of cutting or
reducing the current sanctions.

The Israeli-ZPC ‘war offensive’ went into high gear precisely at
the moment when world public opinion, the UN and even the White House
enthusiastically welcomed the peace overtures from newly elected Iranian
President Rohani.

The purpose was to sabotage any dialogue with Iran before they even
began. The ZPC took the following measures:

1. AIPAC and its clients in the US Congress have circulated new
harsh sanctions and rapidly signed up dozens of Congressional supporters. The
entire Zionist apparatus, led by the ‘52 Presidents of the Major Jewish American
Organizations’, backed the latest and most severe sanctions against the Iranian
oil industry. They followed Netanyahu’s dictate to make the Iranian economy
collapse. The purpose of the ZPC is to create the worst possible conditions for
negotiations – undermining the ‘goodwill’ following Obama’s gestures (the phone
conversation with Rohani) and sure to provoke widespread opposition among the
sanction-weary Iranian population against a US-Iran dialogue.

2. The notorious Israeli spy outfit, Mossad, was most probably
involved in the brutal assassination of Iran’s official in charge of
cyber-defense, Mojtaba Ahmadi. Most experts agree that, since 2007, Israel’s
intelligence agency has been behind the horrific assassinations of five Iranian
nuclear engineers and scientists, as well as the head of their ballistic missile
program. The timing of the current Mossad outrage is designed to further poison
the climate for US-Iranian negotiations, even though the victim this time is not
directly linked to Iran’s nuclear program.

3. Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly was pure corrosive
vitriol, character assassination and fabrication. He made constant reference to
Iran’s ‘nuclear weapons program’, although on-site reports from the
International Atomic Energy Agency and sixteen US intelligence agencies have
repeatedly shown that no such program exists. Nevertheless, thanks to the power
and influence of the ZPC, Netanyahu’s venomous message was relayed by all the
major media and picked up and repeated by influential pro-Israel think tanks,
academics and pundits. Netanyahu unleashed the Zionist pro-war propaganda
machine to energize Jewish powerbrokers to ‘put the squeeze’on the White House.
The effect was immediate: Obama rushed out to parrot Netanyahu’s lies that Iran
had a nuclear weapons program. Secretary of State Kerry obediently pledged to
keep ‘the military option’ for dealing with Iran‘on the table’ – in other words,
the threat of a unilateral attack. UN Ambassador Samantha Power demanded the
newly elected President Rohani make immediate concessions in order to prove his
“seriousness”.

Conclusion: World Peace or Zionist War ?

Recent political and diplomatic changes provide the world community
with a measure of optimism regarding the prospects for peace. Under intense
pressure from US public opinion, Obama temporarily went along with Russian
President Putin’s diplomatic approach over chemical weapons in Syria.

The UN General Assembly’s favorable response to Iranian President
Rohani’s call for dialogue has compelled Obama to openly consider direct
negotiations with Teheran over its nuclear program.

World public opinion, favorable interlocutors in Iran, bold
diplomatic initiatives from Russia, and cooperative behavior from Damascus, all
events pointing to a peaceful resolution of current Middle East conflicts, face
a formidable enemy embedded in the very centers of power in the United States,
the ZPC, which acts on behalf of the ultra-militarist Israeli state.

Over the years, the ZPC has successfully pushed for crippling
sanctions and wars against a number of Israel’s regional opponents. Leading
Zionists in the Bush regime fabricated the myth of Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of
mass destruction’ leading the US to invade, occupy and destroy Iraq, despite
massive opposition from the US public on the eve of the invasion. Zionists in US
Treasury and in the White House slapped broad economic sanctions on Iraq, Iran
and Syria - preventing the biggest US oil companies from investing and trading
with these resource-rich nations, which cost ‘Big Oil’ close to $500 billion in
lost revenues. An empirical study of congressional committees, legislative
debates, resolutions and voting behavior demonstrates that the ZPC co-authored
the sanction legislation and administrators, linked to the ZPC, implemented the
measures.

The popular notion that ‘Big Oil’ was responsible for these wars
and sanctions, as part of some scheme to take over the oil production facilities
of Iraq and Iran, lacks empirical basis. The ZPC defeated ‘Big Oil’: Exon, Mobil
and Chevron were no match for the ZPC when it came to penetrating Congress,
authoring legislation, mobilizing billionaires to fund Congressional campaigns,
organizing thousands of zealous militants or influencing the mass media -
including the Wall Street Journal. The governments of billions of poor people in
Africa, Asia and Latin America can only dream of the annual $3 billion dollar
tribute that the ZPC secures for Israel from the American tax-payers for the
past 30-plus years.

The UN Security Council and its Human Rights Commission are
powerless to sanction Israel for its war crimes because the ZPC guarantees a US
veto of any resolution. Despite the opposition of the entire Muslim world, the
ZPC ensures that Washington will continue to support Israel’s colonial expansion
and land grabs in the occupied Palestinian territory, and its bombing of Gaza,
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Sudan. In other words, the ZPC has successfully
undermined the interests of the biggest US multi-national corporations, the
position of the UN Security Council and the needs of billions of poor in the
Third World. The ZPC induces the US to start prolonged brutal wars costing the
US economy over a trillion dollars and totally destroying six sovereign
countries (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia). Today Israel and
the ZPC set the terms for US-Iran negotiations - dooming them to failure. The
mass media echo Netanyahu’s scurrilous (and infantile) characterization of
President Rohani as‘untrustworthy’, and a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. And US
Secretary of State John Kerry parrots Netanyahu’s lies about Iran’s nuclear arms
program. Shortly after his talk with Rohani, US President Obama dutifully made
his report of the entire conversation to Netanyahu – seeking Israel’s approval.
Obama then met with his Israeli ‘handlers’ and pledged fealty to the interests
of Israel, bleating out that ‘military option (to attack Iran) is still on the
table’. For the one hundred and ninety-first time (over the past year) President
Obama pledged the US’ unconditional support to defend Israel. Like a broken
record (or broken political hack), Obama repeated that “Israel must (sic)
reserve the right to take military action against Iran it if feels threatened by
Iran”.

The Zionist propaganda apparatus has set the terms for the US
government with regard to Iran. Tel Aviv orders and the ZPC demands that Obama
‘negotiate’ under Israeli terms. Iran, the ZPC insists, must provide detailed
information on its military bases and defenses, end its legal enrichment of
uranium for civilian use, turn over its existing stockpiles, end the production
of plutonium at the Arak facility, dismantle the underground research facilities
at Fordow and cease the conversion of first generation centrifuges to more
efficient second generation ones.

President Obama might then permit the Iranians to enrich uranium to
about 3.5 percent, operate a few primitive centrifuges and maintain a tiny stock
of enriched uranium – for medical purposes…. These are condition which Israel
and the ZPC know that no free and independent country or national leader would
ever accept. The Zionists seek to sabotage diplomacy in order to push the US
into another Gulf war which they believe will establish Israel as the
un-challenged regional hegemon.

It is essential for the peace camp in the United States to expose
the role of the ZPC in dictating the US negotiating terms with Iran and publicly
repudiate its control over the US Congress and the White House. Otherwise the
majority of Americans who favor peace and diplomacy will have no influence in
shaping US-Iran relations. The problem is that the majority of anti-war
Americans and the international community cannot match the billionaire Jewish
Zionists in buying and controlling the members of the US Congress. AIPAC has no
rival among Christians, Muslims or even anti-Zionist Jews. The pro- peace Pope
Francis from his pulpit in the Vatican cannot match the power of the Presidents
of the 52 Major Jewish American Organizations whose militants can literally
“storm Washington” and push the US into war!

Until the 99% of non-Zionist Americans (off all ethnicities and
persuasions) organize as a coherent force to push back the tiny 1% - Israel’s
Fifth Column - all the hopes for peace wakened by President Putin initiative on
Syria and President Rohani’s diplomatic opening at the United Nation, will
collapse. Worse, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will again lead an American
President, Obama, by the nose, from sabotaged diplomacy into another costly Gulf
War, one in which thousands of US soldiers (not a single Zionist among them) and
tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Iranians will perish!

James Petras
 
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The Sparks of Rebellion

10/15/2013

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_sparks_of_rebellion_20130930


The Sparks of Rebellion

Posted on Sep 30,  2013 -  By Chris  Hedges

Photo by
Poster Boy NYC (CC-BY) 





I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries
about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of
revolt.

Vladimir Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral
constraints and, like Karl Marx, in the inevitable emergence of the worker’s state.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order, something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes, and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Pyotr Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society. Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly toward the end of her life in echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike, the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But now, with the decimation of the U.S. manufacturing base, along with the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion. 
 
We must develop a revolutionary theory that is not reliant on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. Most manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and, of those that remain, few are unionized. Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses. Monsanto and its Faustian counterparts on Wall Street rule. They are steadily poisoning our lives and rendering us powerless. The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt, to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our struggle different from revolutionary struggles in
industrial societies in the past. Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement. This is why the fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class. Bakunin, unlike Marx, considered déclassé intellectuals essential for successful revolt. 

It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in
cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied
for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” Anatole France commented acidly.

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. 
 
“History teaches that we have the power to transform the nation,” Kevin Zeese said when I interviewed him. Zeese, who with
Dr. Margaret Flowers founded PopularResistance.org and helped plan the 
occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., continued: “We put forward a strategic framework that would allow people to work together in a common direction to end the rule of money. We need to be a nationally networked movement of many local, regional and issue-focused groups so we can unite into one mass movement. Research shows that nonviolent mass movements win. Fringe movements fail. By ‘mass’ we mean with an objective that is supported by a large majority and 1 percent to 5 percent of the population actively working for transformation.” 

Zeese said this mass resistance must work on two tracks. It must attempt to stop the machine while at the same time building alternative structures of economic democracy and participatory democratic institutions. It is vital, he said, to sever ourselves from the corporate economy. Money, he said, has to be raised for grass-roots movements since most  foundations that give grants are linked to the Democratic Party. Radical student and environmental groups especially need funds to build national networks, as does the
public banking initiative. This initiative is essential to the movement. It will never find support among legislative bodies, for public banks would free people from the tyranny of commercial banks and Wall Street.

The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt. The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable. It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of the U.S. population, perhaps more, to
perpetual poverty, and as unemployment benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away, as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state, right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one. 

The corporate state, unnerved by the Occupy movement, has moved to close any public space to movements that
might reignite encampments. For example, New York City police arrested members of Veterans for Peace on Oct. 7, 2012, when they stayed beyond the 10 p.m. official closing time at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The police, who in some
cases apologized to the veterans as they handcuffed them, were open about the motive of authorities: Officers told those being taken to jail they should blame the Occupy movement for the arrests.

The state has, at the same time, heavily infiltrated movements in order to discredit, isolate and push out their most
  competent leaders. It has used its vast surveillance capacities to monitor all forms of electronic communications, as well as personal relationships between activists, giving the state the ability to paralyze planned actions before they can begin. It has mounted a public relations campaign to demonize anyone who resists, branding environmental activists as “ecoterrorists,” charging activists under draconian terrorism laws, hunting down whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who shine a light on the inner secrets of power and condemning them as traitors and threats to national security. The state has attempted—and in this effort some in the 
Black Bloc proved unwittingly useful—to paint the
movement as violent and directionless. 

Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens. Most of the citizenry detests Wall Street and big banks. It does not want more wars. It needs jobs. It is disgusted with the subservience of elected officials to corporate power. It wants universal health care. It worries that if the fossil fuel industry is not stopped, there will be no future for our children. And the state is using all its power to stymie any movement that expresses these concerns. Documents released under the
Freedom of Information Act show Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Protective Service, the Park Service and most likely the NSA and the CIA (the latter two have refused to respond to FOIA requests) worked with police across the country to infiltrate and destroy the encampments. There were 7,765 arrests of people in the movement. Occupy, at its peak, had about 350,000 people—or about 0.1 percent of the U.S. population. 
 
“Look how afraid the power structure was of a mere 1/10th of 1 percent of the population,” Zeese said. “What happens when the movement grows to 1 percent—not a far reach—or the 5 percent that some research shows is the tipping point where no government, dictatorship or democracy can withstand the pressure from below?”

The state cannot allow workers at Wal-Mart, or any other nonunionized service center, to have access to an infrastructure or resources that might permit prolonged strikes and boycotts. And the movement now is about nuts and bolts. It is about food trucks, medical tents, communications vans and musicians and artists willing to articulate and sustain the struggle. We will have to build what unions and radical parties supplied in the past. 

The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine. But the state, to protect itself, lies. Politicians, corporations, the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and our ridiculous television pundits speak as if we can continue to build a society based on limitless growth, profligate consumption and fossil fuel. They feed the collective mania for hope at the expense of truth. Their public vision is self-delusional, a form of collective psychosis. The corporate state, meanwhile, is preparing privately for the world it knows is actually coming. It is cementing into place a police state, one that includes the complete evisceration of our most basic civil liberties and the militarization of the internal security apparatus, as well as wholesale surveillance of the citizenry.

The most pressing issue facing us right now is the most prosaic. Protesters attempting to block the Keystone XL pipeline can endure only for so long if they have nothing to eat but stale bagels. They need adequate food. They need a system of
communication to get their message out to alternative media that will amplify it. They need rudimentary medical care. All of these elements were vital to the Occupy movement. And these elements, when they came together, allowed the
building of a movement that threatened the elite. The encampments also carried  within them internal sources of disintegration. Many did not adequately control some groups. Many were hijacked or burdened by those who drained the political work of the movement. Many found that consensus, which worked well in small groups, created paralysis in groups of several hundred or a few thousand. And many failed to anticipate the numbing exhaustion that crushed activists. But
these encampments did provide what was most crucial to the movement, something unions or the old Communist Party once provided to militants in the past. They provided the logistics to sustain resistance. And the destruction of the
encampments, more than anything else, was a move by the state to deny to us the infrastructure needed to resist.

Infrastructure alone, however, will not be enough. The resistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel
units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play“Major Barbara,” said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist
tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.

Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is
happening around us. It honors mystery. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.” 
 
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has
vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after
Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can
fight.

An earlier version of this column incorrectly attributed the sentence “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” The author of the quotation was Anatole France. 



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