Early Gassing Story

Subject: Gassing Jews--in the year 38 AD!





For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html



Here is certainly the earliest recorded incident of the gassing to death of Jews. In the year 38, the Roman viceroy of Alexandria was A. A. Flaccus. The city had a considerable population of Jews, many of whom resented Roman rule. To quell periodic uprisings, Flaccus rescinded their rights and initiated a pogrom. He then confined them to one quarter of the city, effectively creating the first Jewish ghetto in history. Once concentrated, they were sitting ducks for the local mob. Flaccus (according to the Jewish historian Philo) "allowed anyone who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war."

In a lengthy passage of his work Flaccus, Philo describes, in the best Holocaust style, the atrocities inflicted on the Jews. In the middle of his account we find this:

"Some persons even, going still great and greater lengths in the iniquity and license of their barbarity, disdained all blunter weapons, and took up the most efficacious arms of all, fire and iron, and slew many with the sword, and destroyed not a few with flames. And the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants. And when they had a scarcity of fuel, they collected faggots of green wood, and slew them by the smoke rather than by fire…" (IX, 68)

One wonders how exactly this happened—in "smoke chambers"? Open air? Enclosed chariots? In any case, the Nazis evidently had a good role model in the Romans.

For the whole account, see:
http://cornerstonepublications.org/Philo/Philo_Flaccus.html

Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor was a an exact prequel to 9-11: The reason why FDR provoked Japan into attacking the USA was to get us into the European War. Japan and Germany were allies. The Germans were kicking the hell out of the Russians and the only way FDR could save Stalin and his bolshevik friends was to get the USA into war with Japan. That would the USA into the war by the back door, and that is exactly what happened.





http://www.activistpost.com/2011/04/freedom-of-information-act-reveals.html

Friday, April 22, 2011

Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor
Alexis Bonari

September 11th is hardly the first “day of infamy” to undergo public scrutiny and accusations of government conspiracy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase on December 7th after the Japanese “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The attack, according to author and WWII Navy veteran, Robert B. Stinnett, however, had been no surprise at all for Roosevelt.

It was only at the author’s insistent calls on the Freedom of Information Act that the U.S. Navy at last released formerly hidden evidence that led Stinnett to conclude: FDR knew and had the power to avert disaster on December 7th.

Interview with Stinnett

The government’s claims that Japan’s codes had yet to be broken in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor have been met with questions and skepticism since 1945’s September issue of Life magazine. Stinnett himself, in an interview featured on The Independent Institute’s website, says that he believed the article to be an anti-Roosevelt tract at the time. After reading At Dawn We Slept by Professor Prange in 1982, however, and learning about the US Navy monitoring station at Pearl Harbor, he changed his mind. This was the beginning of Day of Deceit.

Day of Deceit

The likes of Gore Vidal and John Toland, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Infamy, have praised Stinnett’s heavily researched book, Day of Deceit. In it, he writes at length about the Roosevelt administration’s plan to provoke Japan in an “overt act of war,” a plan that he adopted in October 7, 1940.

Because the American public still ached from the appalling death toll of the First World War (and because FDR had already promised his people, “Your boys are not going to be sent into ay foreign wars”), FDR focused most of his energy on coming up with a reason for the nation to change its mind. In November 1941, all US military commanders received the order: “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” That would explain why, according to Lynne Olson’s research published in Citizens of London, Churchill and Governor John G. Winant practically danced at the news in December that America would be joining the European campaign, forgetting that over 2,000 Americans were already dead.

Cracking the Code

According to Stinnett’s research, the US Navy had in fact cracked Japanese naval codes and even intercepted eighty-three messages from Admiral Yamamoto to his warships. A message from November 25 read:

…the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow.

Even Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s competitor in the 1944 presidential elections, had heard whispers of FDR’s role in arranging the massacre. Although Dewey planned speeches to charge FDR with foreknowledge of the attack, General George Marshall (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) convinced Dewey that he would risk American security in doing so, since Japan’s navy had yet to realize their codes had been cracked. Dewey kept his silence, and nearly everyone else has since, too—until Stinnett.

Day of Deceit has received much criticism (predictably) from conventional historians and readers as well as notable acclaim from revisionists. Still others disapprove of Stinnett’s ubiquitous tone that suggests throughout the book that FDR had no choice but to arrange for the deaths of over 2,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Stinnet most notably fails to mention FDR’s refusal to meet Prime Minister Konoye for peace talks in late 1941.

Stinnett seems to have broken ground, but it is still only the surface.


Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching nurse anesthetist scholarships as well as nursing midwives scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Freedom of Information Act Reveals Files Suggesting FDR’s Role in Pearl Harbor



5 comments:


Anonymous said...

The Japanese crypto machine was a modified version of the German Enigma machine. It used much more reliable rotary telephone switches instead of the German Enigma rotors. What most people do not realize, even today, is that the entire Enigma rotor concept is insecure. A Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski, pronounced Ray EFF ski, used the branch of math called "group theory" to show how the rotor connections can be recovered, given enough data. To this day, most people believe, and report as fact, that the rotor connections were stolen. WRONG. The rotor connections were not stolen from the Germans and they did not need to be stolen from the Japanese, very difficult for any white faces to accomplish. The US Navy crypto people knew very well what Rejewski had discovered. We know the complete story of the German Enigma cipher and how it was broken but to this day the US Navy's breaking of the Japanese codes has not been made public in comparable detail. The book "Enigma" by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk (1984) has the critical German Enigma information in an appendix. The point: there is no reason to keep WWII code breaking a secret unless to cover up advanced knowledge of Pearl Harbor. See also Wikipedia Enigma article.

April 22, 2011 10:43 AM

Anonymous said...

so maybe 70years from now we will find out that bush knew and keep it to himself and the cia to go to work for oil and still never got any of it.

April 22, 2011 12:41 PM

Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/protect-act/


Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346

It’s really weird; every day there is some article about how economic collapse, or in this case totalitarian government control of the internet, or something equally bad is creeping closer and closer, but it never seems actually to get here. The process is so slow that the American people, such as remains of them, don’t even notice or care. It’s like the old story of a frog being slowly boiled to death in water over a fire; the increase in heat is so gradual that no one notices.

Wired.com reports: “Senate antipiracy legislation introduced Thursday would dramatically increase the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites dedicated to infringing activities.”



(However the regime defines “infringing activities.”)

“A major feature of the Protect IP Act, introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. The proposal is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the Protect IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.

“Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat. Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States. Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.”

[Long blah blah bah statement from Hollywood glitterati redacted. Basically, file-sharing and movie piracy hits lefty liberals in their wallets, and that’s a no-no.]

Wired.com: “The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites — a power the government is granted in either legislative version.”



(Thus providing yet another endless fountain of revenue for lawyers.)

“Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites. Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called Operation in Our Sites. It began last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 120 sites.”

Okay, cutting to the chase: “infringement” can mean whatever the government wants it to mean, For example, technically speaking, I am “infringing” on Wired.com’s copyright simply by quoting from and analyzing this article.

This law gives the government the power to seize the domain name and permanently silence any web site that “infringes,” like for example quoting an Obama speech or, like one popular weekly racial podcast, by playing musical interludes. With a little effort almost anything can be legally considered to be “infringement” on someone else’s “intellectual property” and used as yet another fig leaf to achieve political censorship of thought, which is what the Democrats have been after for the past 50 years.

Republicans, to give them what little credit is due to them, honestly don’t seem to care too much about criticism; they simply ignore it and do whatever the hell they want. Liberal Democrats hate criticism and seek to silence it, but both parties want to control and silence the internet because it is a form of lateral communication, directly between people, not top-down communication, and the internet is not filtered by the liberal news media.

The Persecution of John Demjanjuk

The Persecution of John Demjanjuk


By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on
the BBC. The lead began:

“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more
than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”

Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced
that he committed a specific crime.”

That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he
ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk
at Sobibor came — from the KGB.

First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko,
who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the
Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.

There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”

First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West
ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to
the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.

How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard
survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin,
where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?

As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the
National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office
of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a
KGB forgery.

“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which
is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and
allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”

This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being
deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka.
In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted
and sentenced to hang.

But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union
collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of
Demjanjuk’s defenders.

Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained
a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.

To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected
a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him
and sent him home to America.

Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and
appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case,
John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense
attorneys had made fools of them.

Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder
of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they
ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.

Consider the life this tormented American has lived.

Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine
imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman
Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere
between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.

It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”

Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German
blitzkrieg. Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order,
under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the
Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his
troops liberated in the march to Berlin.

In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been
conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German
economy.

Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and
practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.

He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war
and was living in the great United States of America.

Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his
mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there
turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki
to be a Nazi camp guard.

The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution
of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.

Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in
Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row
for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in
a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.

That is justice — in our world.

May 13, 2011

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743

Has Education Lost Its Soul?

Has Education Lost Its Soul?
Apr. 9 2011 - 11:01 pm | 1,100 views
By DEAN ZARRAS
“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Such are the profound words of Jesus as told by the Apostle Matthew (NIV 16:26). At least one educator in the country believes that’s precisely the problem with education today, and he’s championing that message via the small private school he founded and runs in northern Westchester County, New York.

Joseph Pagnozzi, founder and president of The Montfort Academy, has been an educator for thirty-eight years. His school is a Catholic one, teaching boys and girls of the high school grades 9-12. But although students at Montfort attend masses and study theology, Professor Pagnozzi’s school is unlike most Catholic schools, not to mention most public and private schools these days, in a significant way. Their method of instruction is known as Classical Christian Education, and centers around the Trivium, a teaching methodology dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

This stands in stark contrast to the design of much of today’s school system infrastructure, which moved away from the Trivium largely through the efforts of John Dewey in the 1930’s. Dewey’s imprint on American education institutions lives on through today. Pagnozzi’s convinced that’s a mistake. I sat down with him recently and had a fascinating talk. What follows are excerpts from a lengthy conversation, with all italics being Pagnozzi’s words except where noted.

We began discussing what became known as a “classical liberal” education, and the history thereof:

Two events in the history of civilization, of mankind, happened. The formation of city-states in ancient Sumer, Sumeria, Mesopotamia, that instead of being hunter-gatherers we came to be an organized structural society and that developed over generations, a culture. And the purpose of civility is, how do we get along decently with each other, for the benefits of all of us, in that community? How do we protect against those that want to take things that we worked hard for? How do we want to promote civility, good works, that keep the well-being of all of us?


So, culture, comes about. We’re talking about 8,000 years ago. Now, the formulation of that, the challenge of how you continue that culture, how it permeates, how you send it off to other generations, is the beginning of education.

We spoke further about the need for writing, to document a speaker’s thoughts in a way that overcome a listener’s otherwise limited memory.

But what was its [education's] purpose? Its purpose was that so this inheritance is continued, of civil society, and all the culture that that entails. So now we have to teach the writing, but it’s not for the “writing”, per se. It’s not to teach that. It’s for the ultimate purpose that they (the learner) know what civility is. Because the outsiders were still barbarians, “at the gates”, wanting to take this over. They weren’t educated yet (and the word ‘education’ in the Romance languages means to be mannerly), they didn’t understand this, they didn’t have this. To them it was just survival of the fittest, living day to day, whatever you can get.

In Western Civilization, the height of these “city states” became the empires of the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, as Pagnozzi continues,

The key to perpetuating this good stuff, was, why even bother? Why not just live day to day, why continue to educate? You educate the truth. And what is truth? Is truth in the emperor, is it in the king, is it in the tribal leaders, the head of the city state? Where is this truth, because you wouldn’t want to teach falsehoods. So the culture — the ultimate goal of the education was to perpetuate the culture, to continue the culture. But I think there’s something a priori, inherent, in human nature in that it seeks, ultimately, good, things that are good and truthful.

So Rome and Greece had it right in terms of sort of the “hard drive”, that material parts. But they were missing the ultimate purpose… what do we seek? What do we aim at? It’s not we aim at the emperor, or the material thing itself, because that wouldn’t motivate. So, what’s going to be the motivating factor?


DZ: Although it does motivate a lot of people, the purely material.

JP: Yes it does, but it ends ultimately in man’s destruction, because there’s going to be competition, and that was the point, that Greece and Rome became epicurean. They were able to provide epicurean delights, but there was something more that has to be the ultimate motivator, because the will, which is non-material, the soul which is non-material — the fact that we’re conscious now, you can’t explain where that consciousness rests, it could be the result of neurons and all that — but there’s something that had to that address that, the will, the soul. And education, if it’s going to be pure and it’s going to be effective, there has to be something that has to be infused in the learner, the young person, in terms of ultimate goodness, because that’s the inspiration.

The motivation factor is inspiration. And inspiration, the spirit, is something transcendent, immaterial, and doesn’t seem to be immediately just utilitarian or pragmatic. Because discovery and creativity are results of when the aim is above the material. The aim is ultimate good. And it provides ultimate good, obviously, for the society, for that civilization, that group.


The Greeks and Romans further developed and refined the mechanics of “classical education”, the three parts of The Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. But how then, did we make a jump, a “disruptive innovation” if you will, from the purely epicurean, and what did the West jump to?

There was something needed to bring this to the next step, so it “punctuated evolution” as Eldridge and Gould said, in terms of the next step. Those societies sort of matured, to their peak, and the barbarians were now coming in, taking over. They (the Greeks/Romans) couldn’t even protect what they had, or get the motivation or courage, because courage is an important factor of proper motivation towards higher ideals. And if you become just epicurean, or materialistic, and you are just motivated by the material, that ephemeral, short-lived reward, it’s not going to endure. And in a few generations, it could be absolved, or totally denuded.

So the next step is Christianity. This theology focused on dignity of the human soul, and the divine nature of the soul. This defines true equality. That’s the thesis presented by Christopher Dawson. And it’s a universal thing. It’s really a universal ideal that will bring the development, or the growth, of civilization to the next stage.

For a multitude of reasons, the Greek and Roman empires collapsed. They hit, as Pagnozzi called it, “a brick wall”. He continued…

So you need something to revive this. What do you revive? You revive human will, the motivation. The human soul was always there. Motivation is the reason for the soul to engage with the world, to make contact…


What is Christianity? It gives the idea that the truth is beyond us. It’s not existentialistic to each one of us, so that we become our own little gods and demi-gods. That there is one God, Creator, as even Plato and Aristole were alluding to. They were looking for that effect. Greek civilization and Roman civilization were looking for something like that, something greater. They were looking for a religious thesis, a religious theme that was pure, that was genuine, that was truth. Remember, the Greeks and Romans were trying different ideas of what God is, and it developed into a cacophony of gods.

DZ: Right, they had many gods, for all different purposes…

JP: It became so that each family had their own different god or gods. So that doesn’t work, And it’s interesting because the word ‘demonic’ means ‘away from the one’. And so these academians were fighting each other. And you can’t advance society if you have this kind of chaos, and anarchy, each man for themselves. Then we’re diverting back to the hunter-gatherers, you know, the state of nature, the survival of the fittest: Who’s the toughest, who can we take over?

Christianity, and its promise of everlasting life after death, therefore, provided the answer to this increasingly chaotic state, and provided the higher-order motivation for seeking good…

If there’s something beyond us, then we do the good. Then we go and discover cures for diseases, we build better homes, better civilizations, we utilize the material goods in a better way, not just for ourselves. It has to be beyond the selfish, the selfishness. And education has to be, ultimately, the goal has to be aimed at beyond selfishness.


So the soul, I believe, should be the target, first, for education. And if we’re afraid or less courageous to address that there is a soul in each one of us, created in the image and likeness of God, all men are created equal because there is a soul, then we’re not going to educate properly.

Can addressing the needs of the soul be achieved in a society that insists on perpetually misinterpreting our Constitution’s “Establishment Clause”, such that “separation of church and state” is the rule of the day? Is a strict separation of church and state even healthy to the respective parts?

To be continued…

The NEA Strikes Back

Unions & Racism: An Age-Old, Institutional Problem Continues Unabated


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Join GATA for Gold Rush 2011 in London in August

Join GATA for Gold Rush 2011 in London in August

Submitted by cpowell on 08:30PM ET Thursday, April 7, 2011. Section: Daily Dispatches

11:34p ET Thursday, April 7, 2011
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):

GATA's Gold Rush 21 conference in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, in August 2005 marked an upward turn in the gold market, showing the world that Western central banks were suppressing the price of the monetary metal through largely surreptitious and even fraudulent means -- but also that they would lose.

Now GATA plans to accelerate that realization by reprising Gold Rush 21 with a conference from Thursday-Saturday, August 4-6, in London, home of the London Bullion Market Association and the gold-dumping Bank of England, which now are fairly warned. The conference will review where gold has gone on GATA's watch and examine where it might go as it returns to its rightful place at the center of the world financial system.

The Gold Rush 2011 conference in London will be held at the famous Savoy Hotel on the Thames River --

http://www.fairmont.com/savoy/

-- and will feature many of the speakers from the Gold Rush 21 conference in Dawson City, plus some who have become sensations in the gold and silver world over the last few years:

-- James G. Rickards, senior managing director for market intelligence at consulting firm Omnis Inc. in McLean, Virginia.

-- London silver trader and whistleblower Andrew Maguire, whose complaint about silver market manipulation, presented by GATA to the public hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington a year ago March, sent the price of silver soaring.

-- Ben Davies, CEO of Hinde Capital, who has been making the case for gold and silver on financial news television programs throughout the world.

-- Market Force Analysis editor and GATA Board of Directors member Adrian Douglas, whose research studies have documented gold and silver market manipulation.

-- And Cheviot Asset Management Investment Director Ned Naylor-Leyland.

Speakers returning from Gold Rush 21 will include:

-- GATA Chairman Bill Murphy.

-- South African gold mining industry expert Peter George.

-- Sprott Asset Management Chairman Eric Sprott.

-- Sprott Asset Management Chief Investment Strategist John Embry.

-- GoldMoney founder James Turk.

-- Hugo Salinas Price, president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver.

-- Gold price suppression litigator Reginald H. Howe.

-- Kirkland Lake Gold CEO Brian A. Hinchcliffe.

-- Gold market analyst John Brimelow.

-- Samex Mining Corp. President Jeff Dahl.

-- And your secretary/treasurer.

Admission to the conference will be $800, which also will cover an opening night reception and some meals and refreshments during the conference. Starting in about a week, the Savoy Hotel will offer conference participants a special discounted daily room rate of £225 ($360 or so at the moment). We hope to offer some family outings in London as well.

Gold Rush 21 conference organizer Janet Lee has returned to organize the London conference.

The invitation to GATA's London conference has been posted here:

http://www.gata.org/goldrush2011-london

For more information about the conference or to register, please write to:

LondonConference@GATA.org

We'll let you know next week when room reservations at the conference rate are being offered at the Savoy.

We hope to see many of our old friends and to make many new ones in London.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

This London conference, six years to the week after Gold Rush 21, is going to be a hoot and unlike many other conferences…

*The attendees at GR 21 raved about it. One of the reasons was because it was very casual, much fun, and people got to know each other because of the confinement. The speakers and guests were around each other at lunches, dinners, etc., rather than everyone going their own direction. We will do our best to create a similar environment in London.

*The Savoy is a superb place to have our conference, with the Thames River right there.

*The price of gold was $436 in August 2005. Many of the speakers were pounding the table back then about what the prices of gold and silver were going to do and why. We knew back then that the prices of each precious metal were artificially suppressed and had to go much higher. $3,000 to $5,000 gold was my target.

*The GATA camp was right on the money and with gold a $1,000+ higher than back then, there is good reason to "Smell the Roses," and celebrate the journey.

*That said, this is no victory party. We have a ways to go before that big bash down the road. What we will do is to focus on where gold and silver go from next August forward and why, using our track record over the past six years to bolster confidence in our outlook for the future when it comes to the precious metals.

*And we will get into GATA’s continuing efforts to expose The Gold Cartel and their nefarious activities.

Many people regretted they did not make the trip to Dawson City in The Yukon, and is one of the reasons we are having this conference. I hope to see many Café members there. It will be well worth the trip … to the Belly of The Gold Cartel Beast in London.

The Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics

The Euro-US War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions of Critics


By James Petras and Robin E. Abaya

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24033

Global Research, March 30, 2011


Introduction

Many critics of the ongoing Euro-US wars in the Middle East and, now, North Africa, have based their arguments on clichés and generalizations devoid of fact. The most common line heard in regard to the current US-Euro war on Libya is that it’s “all about oil” – the goal is the seizure of Libya’s oil wells.

On the other hand Euro –U.S, government spokespeople defend the war by claiming it’s “all about saving civilian lives in the face of genocide”, calling it “humanitarian intervention”.

Following the lead of their imperial powers, most of what passes for the Left in the US and Europe, ranging from Social Democrats, Marxists, Trotskyists,Greens and other assorted progressives claim they see and support a revolutionary mass uprising of the Libyan people, and not a few have called for military intervention by the imperial powers, or the same thing, the UN, to help the “Libyan revolutionaries” defeat the Gaddafi dictatorship.

These arguments are without foundation and belie the true nature of US-UK-French imperial power, expansionist militarism, as evidenced in all the ongoing wars over the past decade (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.). What is much more revealing about the militarist intervention in Libya is that the major countries, which refused to engage in the War, operate via a very different form of global expansion based on economic and market forces. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Germany, the most dynamic capitalist countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are fundamentally opposed to the self-styled “allied” military response against the Libyan government - because Gaddafi represents no threat to their security and they already have full access to the oil and a favorable investment climate. Besides, these economically dynamic countries see no prospect for a stable, progressive or democratic Libyan government emerging from the so-called ‘rebel’ leaders, who are disparate elites competing for power and Western favor.

(1) The Six Myths about Libya: Right and Left

The principle imperial powers and their mass media mouthpieces claim they are bombing Libya for “humanitarian reasons”. Their recent past and current military interventions present a different picture: The intervention in Iraq resulted in well over a million civilian deaths, four million refugees and the systematic destruction of a complex society and its infrastructure, including its water supplies and sewage treatment, irrigation, electricity grid, factories, not to mention research centers, schools, historical archives, museums and Iraq’s extensive social welfare system.

A worse disaster followed the invasion of Afghanistan. What was trumpeted as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to liberate Afghan women and drive out the Taliban resulted in a human catastrophe for the Afghan people.
The road to imperial barbarism in Iraq began with ‘sanctions’, progressed to ‘no fly zones’, then de facto partition of the north, invasion and foreign occupation and the unleashing of sectarian warfare among the ‘liberated’ Iraqi death squads.

Equally telling, the imperial assault against Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, trotted out as the great “humanitarian war” to stop genocide, led to a 40-day aerial bombardment and destruction of Belgrade and other major cities, the imposition of a gangster terrorist regime (KLA) in Kosovo, the near-total ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanian residents from Kosovo and the construction of the largest US military base on the continent (Camp Bondsteel).

The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as ‘military’ targets. The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages. Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘restrained’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, has led directly to bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, and is pushing to overthrow the legitimate government. The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission: they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving – or as an earlier generation of American generals would claim in Vietnam, they are ‘destroying the villages in order to save them’.

(2) War for Oil or Oil for Sale?

The ‘critical’ Left’s favorite cliché is that the imperial invasion is all about “seizing control of Libya’s oil and turning it over to their multi-nationals”. This is despite the fact that US, French and British multinationals (as well as their Asian competitors) had already “taken over” millions of acres of Libyan oil fields without dropping a single bomb. For the past decade, “Big Oil” had been pumping and exporting Libyan oil and gas and reaping huge profits. Gaddafi welcomed the biggest MNC’s to exploit the oil wealth of Libya from the early 1990’s to the present day. There are more major oil companies doing business in Libya than in most oil producing regions in the world. These include: British Petroleum, with a seven-year contract on two concessions and over $1 billion dollars in planned investments. Each BP concession exploits huge geographic areas of Libya, one the size of Kuwait and the other the size of Belgium (Libyonline.com). In addition, five Japanese major corporations, including Mitsubishi and Nippon Petroleum, Italy’s Eni Gas, British Gas and the US giant Exxon Mobil signed new exploration and exploitation contracts in October 2010. The most recent oil concession signed in January 2010 mainly benefited US oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum. Other multi-nationals operating in Libya include Royal Dutch Shell, Total (France), Oil India, CNBC (China), Indonesia’s Pertamina and Norway’s Norsk Hydro (BBC News, 10/03/2005).

Despite the economic sanctions against Libya, imposed by US President Reagan in 1986, US multinational giant, Halliburton, had secured multi-billion dollar gas and oil projects since the 1980’s. During his tenure as CEO of Halliburton, former Defense Secretary Cheney led the fight against these sanctions stating, “as a nation (there is) enormous value having American businesses engaged around the world” (Halliburtonwatch.com). Officially, sanctions against Libya were only lifted under Bush in 2004. Clearly, with all the European and US imperial countries already exploiting Libya oil on a massive scale, the mantra that the “war is about oil” doesn’t hold water or oil!

(3) Gaddafi is a Terrorist

In the run-up to the current military assault on Tripoli,the US Treasury Department’s (and Israel’s special agent) Stuart Levey, authored a sanctions policy freezing $30 billion dollars in Libyan assets on the pretext that Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant (Washington Post, 3/24/11). However, seven years earlier, Cheney, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had taken Libya off the list of terrorist regimes and ordered Levey and his minions to lift the Reagan-era sanctions.

Every major European power quickly followed suite: Gaddafi was welcomed in European capitals, prime ministers visited Tripoli and Gaddafi reciprocated by unilaterally dismantling his nuclear and chemical weapons programs (BBC, 9/5/2008). Gaddafi became Washington’s partner in its campaign against a broad array of groups, political movements and individuals arbitrarily placed on the US’ “terror list”, arresting, torturing and killing Al Qaeda suspects, expelling Palestinian militants and openly criticizing Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents of Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Commission gave the Gaddafi regime a clean bill of health in 2010. In the end Gaddafi’s political ‘turnabout’, however much celebrated by the Western elite, did not save him from this massive military assault. The imposition of neo-liberal ‘reforms’, his political ‘apostasy’ and cooperation in the ‘War on Terror’ and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, only weakened the regime. Libya became vulnerable to attack and isolated from any consequential anti-imperialist allies. Gaddafi’s much ballyhooed concessions to the West set his regime up as an easy target for the militarists of Washington, London and Paris, eager for a quick ‘victory’.

(4) The Myth of the Revolutionary Masses

The Left, including the mainly electoral social democrat, green and even left-socialist parties of Europe and the US swallowed the entire mass media propaganda package demonizing the Gaddafi regime while lauding the ‘rebels’. Parroting their imperial mentors, the ‘Left’ justified their support for imperial military intervention in the name of the “revolutionary Libyan people”, the “peace-loving” masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing peoples’ militias to “liberate their country”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The center of the armed uprising is Benghazi, longtime monarchist hotbed of tribal supporters and clients of the deposed King Idris and his family. Idris, until he was overthrown by the young firebrand Col. Gaddafi, had ruled Libya with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backwater and was popular with Washington, having given the US its largest air base (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean. Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” in Benghazi (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) one finds neo-liberal expats, who first promoted the Euro-US military invasion envisioning their ride to power on the back of Western missiles .They openly favor dismantling the Libyan state oil companies currently engaged in joint ventures with foreign MNCs. Independent observers have commented on the lack of any clear reformist tendencies, let alone revolutionary organizations or democratic popular movements among the ‘rebels’.

While the US, British and French are firing missiles, loaded with depleted uranium, at the Libyan military and key civilian installations, their ‘allies’ the armed militias in Benghazi, rather than go to battle against the regime’s armed forces, are busy rounding up, arresting and often executing any suspected members of Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling these civilians as “fifth columnists”. The top leaders of these “revolutionary” masses in Benghazi include two recent defectors from what the ‘Left’ dubs Gaddafi’s “murderous regime”: Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice minister, who prosecuted dissenters up to the day before the armed uprising, Mahmoud Jebri, who was prominent in inviting multi-nationals to take over the oil fields (FT, March 23, 2011, p. 7), and Gaddafi’s former ambassador to India, Ali Aziz al-Eisawa, who jumped ship as soon as it looked like the uprising appeared to be succeeding. These self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the rebels who now staunchly support the Euro-US military intervention, were long-time supporters of the Gaddafi’s dictatorship and promoters of MNC takeovers of oil and gas fields. The heads of the “rebels” military council is Omar Hariri and General Abdul Fattah Younis, former head of the Ministry of Interior. Both men have long histories (since 1969) of repressing democratic movements within Libya. Given their unsavory background, it is not surprising that these top level military defectors to the ‘rebel’ cause have been unable to arouse their troops, mostly conscripts, to engage the loyalist forces backing Gaddafi. They too will have to take ride into Tripoli on the coattails of the Anglo-US-French armed forces.

The anti-Gaddafi force’s lack of any democratic credentials and mass support is evident in their reliance on foreign imperial armed forces to bring them to power and their subservience to imperial demands. Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Sahara Africa, as well as black Libyan citizens, is well documented in the international press. Their brutal treatment of black Libyans, falsely accused of being Gaddafi’s “mercenaries” , includes torture, mutilation and horrific executions, does not auger well for the advent of a new democratic order, or even the revival of an economy, which has been dependent on immigrant labor, let alone a unified country with national institutions and a national economy.

The self-declared leadership of the “National Transitional Council” is not democratic, nationalist or even capable of uniting the country. These are not credible leaders capable of restoring the economy and creating jobs lost as a result of their armed power grab. No one seriously envisions these ‘exiles’, tribalists, monarchists and Islamists maintaining the paternalistic social welfare and employment programs created by the Gaddafi government and which gave Libyans the highest per-capita income in Africa.

(5) Al Qaeda

The greatest geographical concentration of suspected terrorists with links to Al Qaeda just happens to be in the areas dominated by the “rebels” (see Alexander Cockburn: Counterpunch, March 24, 2011). For over a decade Gaddafi has been in the forefront of the fight against Al Qaeda, following his embrace of the Bush-Obama ‘War on Terror’ doctrine. These jihadist Libyans, having honed their skills in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, are now among the ranks of the “rebels” fighting the much more secular Libyan government. Likewise, the tribal chiefs, fundamentalist clerics and monarchists in the East have been active in a “holy war” against Gaddafi welcoming arms and air support from the Anglo-French-US “crusaders” - just like the mullahs and tribal chiefs welcomed the arms and training from the Carter-Reagan White House to overthrow a secular regime in Afghanistan. Once again, imperial intervention is based on ‘alliances’ with the most retrograde forces. The composition of the future regime (or regimes, if Libya is divided) is a big question and the prospects of a return to political stability for Big Oil to profitably exploit Libya’s resources are dubious.

(6) “Genocide” or Armed Civil War

Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at seizing power by force. Unlike the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, Gaddafi has secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the Libyan population. This support is based on the fact that almost two generations of Libyans have benefited from Gaddafi’s petroleum-financed welfare, educational, employment and housing programs, none of which existed under America’s favorite, King Idris. Since violence is inherent in any armed uprising, once one picks up the gun to seize power, they lose their claim on ‘civil rights’. In armed civil conflicts, civil rights are violated on all sides. Regardless of the Western media’s lurid portrayal of Gaddafi’s “African mercenary forces” and its more muted approval of ‘revolutionary justice’ against Gaddafi supporters and government soldiers captured in the rebel strongholds, the rules of warfare should have come into play, including the protection of non-combatants-civilians (including government supporters and officials), as well as protection of Libyan prisoners of war in the areas under NATO-rebel control.

The unsubstantiated Euro-US claim of “genocide” amplified by the mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons is contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between the two sides.

Truth is the first casualty of war, and especially of civil war. Both sides have resorted to monstrous fabrications of victories, casualties, monsters and victims.

Demons and angels aside, this conflict began as a civil war between two sets of Libyan elites: An established paternalistic, now burgeoning neo-liberal, autocracy with substantial popular backing versus a western imperialist financed and trained elite, backed by an amorphous group of regional, tribal and clerical chiefs, monarchists and neo-liberal professionals devoid of democratic and nationalist credentials – and lacking broad-based mass support.

Conclusion

If not to prevent genocide, grab the oil or promote democracy (via Patriot missiles), what then is the driving force behind the Euro-US imperial intervention?

A clue is in the selectivity of Western military intervention: In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar and Oman ruling autocrats, allied with and backed by Euro-US imperial states go about arresting, torturing and murdering unarmed urban protestors with total impunity. In Egypt and Tunisia, the US is backing a conservative junta of self-appointed civil-military elites in order to block the profound democratic and nationalist transformation of society demanded by the protesters. The ‘junta’ aims to push through neo-liberal economic “reforms” through carefully-vetted pro-Western ‘elected’ officials. While liberal critics may accuse the West of “hypocrisy” and “double standards” in bombing Gaddafi but not the Gulf butchers, in reality the imperial rulers consistently apply the same standards in each region: They defend strategic autocratic client regimes, which have allowed imperial states to build strategic air force and naval bases, run regional intelligence operations and set up logistical platforms for their ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their future planned conflict with Iran. They attack Gaddafi’s Libya precisely because Gaddafi had refused to actively contribute to Western military operations in Africa and the Middle East.

The key point is that while Libya allows the biggest US-European multi-nationals to plunder its oil wealth, it did not become a strategic geo-political-military asset of the empire. As we have written in many previous essays the driving force of US empire-building is military - and not economic. This is why billions of dollars of Western economic interests and contracts had been sacrificed in the setting up of sanctions against Iraq and Iran – with the costly result that the invasion and occupation of Iraq shut down most oil exploitation for over a decade.

The Washington-led assault on Libya, with the majority of air sorties and missiles strikes being carried out by the Obama regime, is part of a more general counter-attack in response to the most recent Arab popular pro-democracy movements. The West is backing the suppression of these pro-democracy movements throughout the Gulf; it finances the pro-imperial, pro-Israel junta in Egypt and it is intervening in Tunisia to ensure that any new regime is “correctly aligned”. It supports a despotic regime in Algeria as well as Israel’s daily assaults on Gaza. In line with this policy, the West backs the uprising of ex-Gaddafites and right-wing monarchists, confident that the ‘liberated’ Libya will once again provide military bases for the US-European military empire-builders.

In contrast, the emerging market-driven global and regional powers have refused to support this conflict, which jeopardizes their access to oil and threatens the current large-scale oil exploration contracts signed with Gaddafi. The growing economies of Germany, China, Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil rely on exploiting new markets and natural resources all over Africa and the Middle East, while the US, Britain and France spend billions pursuing wars that de-stabilize these markets, destroy infrastructure and foment long-term wars of resistance. The growing market powers recognize that the Libyan “rebels” cannot secure a quick victory or ensure a stable environment for long-term trade and investments. The “rebels”, once in power, will be political clients of their militarist imperial mentors. Clearly, imperial military intervention on behalf of regional separatists seriously threatens these emerging market economies: The US supports ethno-religious rebels in China’s Tibetan province and as well as the Uyghur separatists; Washington and London have long backed the Chechen separatists in the Russian
Caucuses. India is wary of the US military support for Pakistan, which claims Kashmir. Turkey is facing Kurdish separatists who receive arms and safe haven from their US-supplied Iraqi Kurdish counterparts.

The North African precedent of an imperial invasion of Libya on behalf of its separatist clients worries the emerging market-powers. It is also an ongoing threat to the mass-based popular Arab freedom movements. And the invasion sounds the death knell for the US economy and its fragile ‘recovery’: three ongoing, endless wars will break the budget much sooner than later. Most tragic of all, the West’s ‘humanitarian’ invasion has fatally undermined genuine efforts by Libya’s civilian democrats, socialists and nationalists to free their country from both a dictatorship and from imperial-backed reactionaries.