NWO Enforcer: NATO Threatens WW III

The New World Order has been in place for centuries. Is it not time to start calling the NWO by another name? A descriptive term that encapsulates the essence of the beast would be a Nefarious Warrior Organism. Such a phrase strips away the ridiculous notion that there is any order in the malevolent organization of the parasitic global structure, based upon perpetual and permanent warfare. This depiction more closely resembles reality, even if the master mass media refuses to acknowledge How the World Really Works. Discard any condemnation that criticism of the established order rests upon conspiratorial fantasy or pre-medieval prejudices. Explaining away or ignoring basic human nature in a “PC” culture ultimately requires the adoption of a depraved Totalitarian Collectivism system.

Students of world affairs are not strangers to the practice of lies and deception. One of the grand daddies of the Nefarious Warrior Organism, and infamous war criminal, Henry Kissinger has a new book, World Order. An excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger on the Assembly of a New World Order, spews the same poppycock that underpins the destructive policies and practices that has the world ripe for an apocalyptic conflict, needed to rescue the banksters of international finance from their derivative Ponzi scheme.

“Libya is in civil war, fundamentalist armies are building a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan’s young democracy is on the verge of paralysis. To these troubles are added a resurgence of tensions with Russia and a relationship with China divided between pledges of cooperation and public recrimination. The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis.

The international order thus faces a paradox: Its prosperity is dependent on the success of globalization, but the process produces a political reaction that often works counter to its aspirations.”

Russian Sanctions Backfire

The belief that calling for and instituting sanctions against Russia is a sound policy, illustrates the economic disconnect of the Obama administration. With the fervor for starting a new cold war, the propaganda machine is working overtime to paint a picture that ignores real economic synergism. Note the conflicting reports regarding the EU. Nine EU countries ready to block economic sanctions against Russia, quotes a diplomatic source to ITAR-TASS:

“France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and EU President Italy see no reason in the current environment for the introduction of sectorial trade and economic sanctions against Russia and at the summit, will block the measure.”

“According to the source, the US sees slapping Russia with sanctions as a way to promote its own trade agenda with Europe, a side rarely explored in mainstream media. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and Europe would create the world’s largest free trade zone, but some worry it could balloon into an “economic NATO” or could end up putting corporation interest above national.”

An article,  reports that the European Council has agreed to extend the restrictive measures for the entities in the Russian Federation. Romanian president Traian Basescu believes the EU needs to adopt tougher sanctions against Russia.

“My point of view was that unless the European Union takes tougher actions and moves on to the third stage of these sanctions, Ukraine might no longer be ready to move towards the European Union and would end up in a situation like that in the Republic of Moldova, currently facing the breakaway tendencies of the region of Transdniester, only with a greater impact for the EU, because Ukraine is a bigger country.”

This contradiction between individual national economic interests and the quest for a technocrat administered system of trade that fosters and facilitates an internationalist foreign policy under NATO and EU rule, is the actual objective of Washington and Brussels interventionism. This arrogance and self-delusion treats economic commerce as conducted in a vacuum. As The Hill article cites Putin. “Sanctions are “driving into a corner” relations between the two countries and will damage the interests of U.S. companies and “the long-term national interests of the U.S. government and people.”

Russian warns that the US campaign will have consequences as the Alliance News writes, that Moscow Blasts US Sanctions As “Primitive,” Promises Retaliation.

“Sergei Ryabkov, a deputy Foreign Minister, told the Interfax news agency that Moscow will hit back with measures that “will be felt in Washington painfully and sharply.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said US measures against a number of state corporations are “a primitive attempt at revenge because events in Ukraine are not developing according to Washington’s scenario,” and added that it reserves the right to retaliate.”

The preposterous strategy that international finance can force a country like Russia, with the world’s largest energy resources, into a capitulation dependent status is absurd. The minimal effect according to Russia’s Finance Ministry, Says Harsher Sanctions Would Cost Russia 0.3% of GDP, does not sound like much of a threat. Then consider the counter response of Russian Sanctions Retaliation Escalates: Dumps Intel/AMD And Now Foreign Cars.

The cavalier and condescending manner by which the Western central banks assist the New World Order’s goal of global dominance has fortified opposition with the emergence of theBRICS Development Bank. Use your common sense, when Putin Wants Measures to Protect BRICS Nations From U.S. Sanctions, much of the rest of the world is listening.

“In an interview published as a two-day BRICS summit got under way in Brazil on Tuesday, Putin said he would urge Brazil, China, India and South Africa to draw “substantive conclusions” from sanctions imposed on Russia over its actions in the Ukraine crisis, and said it was time to dilute the dominance of the U.S.-led West and the U.S. dollar by boosting the role of the BRICS on the global stage.”

The American press and media, especially is fueling the fires to demonize Putin’s Russia as a resurrected Stalinist Soviet belligerent. Absent in this narrative is an honest chronicle of NATO’s expansion to encircle the Russian Federation. At what point will Western journalists and academic scholars admit that the convergence of EU authoritarianism and American hegemony propagates an internationalist foreign policy, designed to isolate and destroy any opposition to this New World Order.

The lesson of these failed attempts for economic bullying a country, with real weapons of mass destruction, has the potential of starting a hot war. The essay, IMF and EU Capture of Ukraine, explains the circumstances and false justification of initiating “regime change“. This Ukraine flashpoint may well commence a tangible economic union among countries, who recognize that American sanctions are nothing more than a desperate attempt to prop up a decaying globalist economic structure.

EU antagonism towards the citizens of their member countries is growing expediently. Within this context, US sanctions hurt Europe more than America.

“The Association of European Businesses (AEB), a Moscow-based business lobby, said that new US sanctions against Russia have a more severe effect on European than on American business.

The AEB says it “regrets” the US sanctions, and warns that they will stunt economic growth “not only in Russia“.

“These sanctions are more focused on the partners of European businesses than on the partners of American companies,” the group said in a statement on Thursday.”

Obama’s State Department bears a heavy responsibility for promoting a civil war in Ukraine. Using sanctions to push Russia into accelerating a BRICS economic block will have far more adverse effects than can be envisioned by the lunatic proponents of “selective” Free Trade. The moneychanger’s financial system is imploding and their rescue plan requires a massive global crisis to bail out their “To Big to Fail” model. Mutually productive commerce will be among the first causalities of the prelude to World War III. Soon clamors for sanctions against American companies will begin, as the blame game diverts the real cause of this fabricated debacle.

Institutionalized Tyranny

What happens when an institution becomes more important than the cause for which the institution was formed? How long should people who believe in the cause remain loyal to such an institution? And at what point does loyalty to such an institution comprise an abandonment of the cause itself?

I’m afraid the majority of Americans have been institutionalized in a manner not unlike the way prisoners are institutionalized after a long period of confinement. After a point, a prisoner is so conditioned to accepting the circumstances of his confinement that, should he be released from confinement, he truly would be unable to cope. Such seems to be the mentality of a majority of us today.

Christians have been institutionalized. The reason and purpose of the church or Christian organization is no longer relevant. Generations have grown up reciting the same liturgies, regurgitating the same prayers, and rehearsing the same programs until the reason for it all doesn’t even matter. But take the institution away from them, and they would not be able to cope.

The Pharisees despised the Lord Jesus because He challenged the religious institutions that had come to govern people’s lives. I am convinced if Jesus came to America today, He would be just as despised by the vast majority of our religious leaders as He was by the Pharisees.

The Church that Jesus built in the Book of Acts owned no buildings, was indebted to no lenders, took no tax benefits from the civil government, had no denominational hierarchy, and identified itself with no ecclesiastical brand. And the Church was just as persecuted by the religious establishment as Christ was.

One of the reasons one may know that the modern church is so unlike Christ and the apostles is by the persecution that it never experiences. Just as the Pharisees were bosom buddies with the Roman Empire’s governing elite, so are our religious leaders today. Caesar was very generous in sharing the fruit of his tyrannically-extracted bounty with his allies in the Jewish Sanhedrin. And they were happy to return the favor by insisting that the Hebrew people submit to Caesar’s harsh rule over their lives.

The Pharisees also enjoyed a cozy relationship with the moneychangers. The moneychangers were descended from a long line of corrupt banking interests that dated all the way back to the Edomites. We are not talking about your friendly local banker here. These were highly organized, well-positioned money-manipulators. Jesus was so incensed with their manipulation and theft within in the Temple that he used physical violence to remove them from the property. He is recorded as doing this twice in the Gospel narratives. Note that after the second time in which it is recorded that He drove out the moneychangers (with a whip, no less), the Pharisees soon had Jesus crucified. There is no question that one of the reasons Pilate ordered Jesus to be scourged with a whip was in direct retaliation for the manner in which Jesus whipped the moneychangers. Remember, the moneychangers were from a very well-ensconced, elitist national (and even international) organization.

And lest you think all of this is irrelevant to today, the moneychangers are still very much with us. The Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and other members of the international banking elite, are the direct descendants of the moneychangers of Jesus’ day. And if you ever have an opportunity to ask one of them about it, they will proudly admit it.

Yes, the Pharisees institutionalized religion. This accomplished two things: 1) it helped enslave the people, 2) it helped make them rich. The institutionalized church is accomplishing much the same things today.

The establishment church is doing as much to enslave people as any other institution in the world. Our political institutions and educational institutions have nothing on the church for making good little subjects and serfs to the all-powerful state. And if you don’t think that a host of church leaders are not reaping the spoils from assisting our taskmasters, you’re not paying attention.

Many, if not most, of these big-name TV evangelists have as many houses and yachts and Swiss bank accounts as any big-name Hollywood actor or politician. In some cases, more. Most of these big-church pastors are bathing in luxury. Many of them take the kinds of vacations that only CEOs of the biggest corporations or presidents could afford. Do you really think that the IRS rules and regulations governing these non-profit corporations, called churches, really bother these church leaders? Get real!

No wonder all of these “successful” preachers are constantly teaching their congregations to always submit to the government. No wonder they have no interest in abandoning their 501c3 tax-exempt status. They are in the exact same position as were the Pharisees of old. And they are just as effective in helping to enslave people today as were the Pharisees.

The institution of the church–along with its programs, formalities, buildings, rituals, etc.,–has become more important than the purpose for which the church was created. Instead of preaching the liberating message of the Cross, which frees men from the fetters of sin–and that includes sinful political and financial fetters–the church is preaching a message of subjugation and enslavement. It is teaching people to submit to all kinds of oppression, including religious oppression.

Some of the most oppressed and subjugated people in the world are religious people. There are churches and Christian colleges that are every bit as tyrannical as anything coming out of East-bloc or Muslim countries. About the only thing missing is physical torture and execution. Spiritually, however, the oppression is the same.

How could real men who love the liberty they have in Christ allow themselves–and especially their wives–to be told how to dress, how to wear their hair, what kind of music to listen to, what kind of vacations to take, what restaurants they may or may not eat at, what forms of entertainment they may or may not participate in, etc., etc., ad infinitum?

I tell you the truth: many Christians in America are already slaves. To talk to them about freedom is a complete waste of time. The chains of tyranny are already clamped around their hearts. Why should it matter to them if chains are clamped around their necks? When they talk about “defending the faith,” they are talking about defending the institution. They are slaves to the institution. And the same is true for many unchurched Americans.

What is more important: liberty, or the government that is supposed to secure liberty? To a sizeable number of Americans today, it is more important to preserve the institution than the freedoms that the institution was created to protect.

Our Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [the God-given rights of life, liberty, etc.], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Did you see that: “any form of government”? ANY FORM. The form of government is only as good as its ability to secure liberty.

I hear a lot of politicians and media personalities talking about “American exceptionalism.” This is a potentially dangerous mindset. If one means that America is exceptional in our history and the manner in which our Constitution and Bill of Rights were established to protect liberty, well and good. But if it means that America has carte-blanche to do anything it wants–no matter how unconstitutional or tyrannical–because it is “exceptional,” it is a bunch of hooey.

What difference does it make if we have a 50-State Union or not? There is a bill in the California legislature that would divide that State into six states. Five counties in Western Maryland are trying to secede from Baltimore. Ten northern counties in Colorado are trying to secede from Denver. If a State refuses to secure the liberties of the people of that State, they have every right under God to separate. The State is not nearly as important as the liberties of the people within the State.

The spirit of secession is actually growing like wildfire all over the world. In recent history, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo all separated from Yugoslavia. Transnistria broke free from Moldova. Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free from Georgia. The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. And now Crimea is separating from Ukraine.

To be sure, not every country that secedes from another country is motivated purely by the love of liberty. But for those of us in America, the issue that has propelled the desire to separate from one country or one State has always been liberty. It was the love of liberty that created the United States and that created the free and independent states of Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, and West Virginia–all of which seceded from existing U.S. states.

Furthermore, what difference does it make if Washington, D.C., is our federal capital, or, if say, Helena, Montana, would become the federal capital of a mountain state confederation of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Northern Colorado, eastern Washington and Oregon, the Dakotas, Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, and Alaska? Or if Austin was the federal capital of an independent Republic of Texas? Preserving some sort of political union (especially if it is a forced and coerced union) is not nearly as important as preserving liberty.

Again, it is not the political institution that is important. What is important is the liberty that the political institution is supposed to secure.

Many great minds in this country are already philosophizing over the possibility that secession is an idea whose time has come–again. A few years ago, Walter Williams wrote, “Like a marriage that has gone bad, I believe there are enough irreconcilable differences between those who want to control and those want to be left alone that divorce is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage, where vows are broken, our human rights protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. Americans who are responsible for and support constitutional abrogation have no intention of mending their ways.

“Americans who wish to live free have two options: We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed to force America’s tyrants to respect our liberties and human rights, or we can seek a peaceful resolution of our irreconcilable differences by separating. That can be done by peopling several states, say Texas and Louisiana, control their legislatures and then issue a unilateral declaration of independence just as the Founders did in 1776. You say, ‘Williams, nobody has to go that far, just get involved in the political process and vote for the right person.’ That’s nonsense. Liberty shouldn’t require a vote. It’s a God-given or natural right.

“Some independence or secessionists movements, such as our 1776 war with England and our 1861 War Between the States, have been violent, but they need not be. In 1905, Norway seceded from Sweden, Panama seceded from Columbia (1903), and West Virginia from Virginia (1863). Nonetheless, violent secession can lead to great friendships. England is probably our greatest ally and we have fought three major wars together. There is no reason why Texiana (Texas and Louisiana) couldn’t peaceably secede, be an ally, and have strong economic ties with United States.

“The bottom line question for all of us is should we part company or continue trying to forcibly impose our wills on one another?”

See William’s column here:

Hear! Hear!

In the eyes of God, marriage is the most sacred of all unions. It is far more sacred than any political union. If our Creator has authorized the separation of a husband and wife under certain circumstances in which one party violated the sacred terms of the holy contract (and He has), who among us has the audacity to say that political unions may not be abandoned when government commits political adultery by forsaking its oath to the people?

Again, are we more interested in preserving an institution or the liberty that the institution is supposed to secure?

As an institution, the Church at large is apostate. Yet, millions of Christians continue to prop up an institution that has abandoned the purpose for which it was created. They are more interested in preserving the forms and liturgies and tapestries and buildings of the institution. And, all the while, they are being spiritually enslaved by the very institution they are helping to prop up.

And as an institution, the U.S. federal government is apostate. Yet, millions of citizens continue to make excuses for it, justify it, and condone it. They are more interested in preserving the agencies and entities and power of the institution. Yet, all the while, they are being enslaved by the very institution they are helping to prop up.

What happens when an institution becomes more important than the cause for which the institution was formed? When the institution is civil government and the cause is liberty, tyranny is what happens.

Divided We Stand: A Traditionalist Manifesto

Conservatives are generally very nice people — who never saw a culture war they couldn’t lose. That is to say, we often hear cracks about how Barack Obama and his ilk may “evolve” on issues, but conservatives exhibit that tendency, too, and their evolution goes something like this:

“Marriage is between one man and one woman, period!”

Five years later…

“I can accept civil unions, but marriage shouldn’t be redefined.”

After five years more:

“The states can do whatever they want, just keep the feds out of it.”

And 10 years further on:

“People can do what they want. How does faux marriage affect me, anyway?” (This is the point British “conservatives” have reached.)

And at an even later juncture it’s, “Why shouldn’t homosexuals have the right to ‘marry’? It’s a matter of equality.” (Just ask some “conservatives” in Sweden.)

Oh, this isn’t limited to marriage or anything else some dismiss as “social issues.” Conservatives were against Social Security (in FDR’s time) before they tolerated it before they were for it before they demanded it. And they are against socialized medicine. But should it endure for 15 years, their children will tolerate it and then accept it and then expect it — as today’s conservatives do in Western Europe.

This gets at the only consistent definition of conservatism: a desire to “conserve,” to preserve the status quo. This is why while 1950s conservatives in the US were staunchly anti-communist, conservatives in the USSRwere communist. As the status quo changes, so does the nature of the prevailing conservatism. And it is liberals, as the agents of change (without the hope), who shape tomorrow’s status quo.

Here’s how it works: the liberals come to the bargaining table demanding a change. The conservatives don’t like it, but being “reasonable” they give the other side some part of what they want. And it doesn’t matter if it amounts to 50 percent, 30, 15 or just 1 percent.

Because the libs will be back, next year, next election cycle, next decade.

Again and again and again.

And each time the cons will get conned, giving the libs a few more slices, until the left has the whole loaf and those ideological loafers, conservatives, are left with crumbs and a crumbled culture.

In a word, today’s conservatives are generally people who have assimilated into yesterday’s liberals’ culture. And every time we compromise — on civil unions, big-government programs or whatever it may be — we assimilate further. And what is the nature of this evolution?

It is nothing less than a superior culture being subsumed by an inferior one.

Now, all this perhaps sounds hopeless. Are we damned to inexorable and irrevocable movement toward the “left,” at least until the complete collapse of civilization is wrought? Well, there is an alternative to assimilation.

Separation.

There has been some talk of secession lately. But note that there is a prerequisite for political separation: cultural separation. Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Slovenia didn’t become their own nations because they suddenly thought the name Yugoslavia was no longer cool, but because of profound cultural differences. And Catalans in Spain some time back empowered parties that have called for an independence referendum this year because of cultural differences. Make the cultural differences great enough, and separation (assuming you can avoid bondage via a governmental iron fist, which is the other possibility) is a natural by-product.

But a key to increasing that cultural divide is avoiding assimilation. Did you ever hear of an Ainu (Japan’s original people) independence movement in Japan? No, because they’ve been largely absorbed by the wider culture, sort of how traditionalists get absorbed by our modernistic culture and end up having, at best, children who’ll reflect today’s liberals and be called tomorrow’s conservatives. So how can further assimilation be avoided?

We only need to look at how it’s done all over the world. And there are two ways. To illustrate the first, consider how ardent Muslims avoid being subsumed. They don’t view fellow citizens in a host nation as national brothers.

But as the “other.”

Oh, the others may occupy the same borders, but they are as alien as anyone outside them. Their culture is to be rejected not just because it’s decadent and despicable — and our liberal-created variety is certainly those things — but because it is of the other. So it is with the others’ laws, social codes, and traditions, too: they are born of an infidel, alien culture and are to be viewed with extreme suspicion if not hostility.

And this is precisely how leftists should be viewed.

For this to work, our instincts must be thus: If liberals say left, we go right. If they say down, we say up. If they scream “Change!” we shout all the louder “Tradition!” and then push for our own change — tradition’s restoration.

Note here that I’m not speaking of a cold intellectual understanding of the issues, which, don’t get me wrong, is important. But just as it is passion that makes a man fight for a woman, it is passion that makes you fight for a cause. Loathe what the liberals stand for, meet their agenda with animosity, cultivate a visceral desire to wipe it from the face of the Earth. Hate, hate, hate it with the fires of a thousand burning suns.

One drawback to this tactic for division, however, is that it constitutes a blind defiance that could conceivably reject virtue along with vice. An example of this is when elements of the black community dismiss education, Christianity and higher culture because they view embracing them as “acting white.” Yet since liberals are right only about 0.4 percent of the time (and I’m perhaps being generous), this isn’t the greatest of dangers at the moment. Nonetheless, this brings us to the ideal method for separation.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” A good example of love-driven separation is the Amish. They do try to avoid hating anyone (although I suspect they hate certain ideas), yet their love for their culture is so great that they remain a people apart. Of course, where they fall short is that they won’t fight at all, even politically. And this philosophy will not yield separation on a wide scale because the left simply won’t allow millions of people to live “off the grid.” Someone has to fund the nanny state, after all.

But the proper combination is obvious. We need sort of an Amish jihad, a deep love of the good and hatred of the evil that translates into action. But there is a prerequisite for this, and it brings us to something both the Amish and Muslim jihadists have in common.

They believe in Truth.

Sure, the Muslims may call it the will of Allah; the Amish, God’s law. But the point is that they aren’t awash in a relativism that, amounting to the Protagorean notion that “man is the measure of all things,” is unduly influenced by man. They don’t see a large number of people lobbying for some loony social innovation and figure that, with man as arbiter, they have to “get with the times.” Rooted to what they see as eternal, they don’t bend to the ephemeral.

Quite the opposite of G.W. Bush, I’m a divider — not a uniter. If this sounds bad, note that Jesus himself said He had not come to unite the world but as a sword to divide brother against brother. And while I certainly don’t claim to be God or even godly, I do know that tolerance of evil in unity’s name is a vice — and blessed division a virtue.

We can hate what is in front of us, love what is behind us, or both. But if we’re sheep and not soldiers, compromisers and not crusaders, Western civilization’s days will be behind us — and in front, perhaps, a thousand years of darkness.

A Line In The Sand Is Being Drawn Again

In March of 1836, a young man of twenty-three years of age took his sword out of its scabbard and drew a line in the sand in front of an old mission outside of San Antonio, Texas, and called on the men defending that mission who were willing to stay on the ramparts and face an opposing army more than ten times their number to signify their commitment by stepping across the line. Of course, the young man was William Barrett Travis and the old mission was the Alamo. He could not have known it then, but Travis’ line in the sand would forever become the benchmark by which all future acts of commitment would be measured. In a mystical way, but, then again, in very real way, Travis’ line in the sand is being drawn again. Oh, it may not be a line in dirt drawn by the point of a sword; it is a line in the hearts of men being drawn by the Spirit of God.

My last three columns (not including the column promoting THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS) generated more responses than any three columns I have ever written, and I have been writing this column for some fifteen years. At first, the responses were mostly negative and often vitriolic. But this past week, responses have been over 90% positive and very enthusiastic. I am confident that the manner in which these columns have brought out intense emotion and determination on both sides is a microcosm of what is happening nationally. A line in the sand for freedom is being drawn once again.

This line in the sand for freedom is separating people in a major way. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the same way that God commanded Abram to separate from his home and kin, so, too, the Spirit of God is separating people many times from their friends, their neighbors, their kinfolk, and, yes, their church families. I seem to recall that during the period of the early church, the conflict of principle forever separated the apostles Paul and Silas. And during America’s War for Independence, the conflict of principle separated Benjamin Franklin and his son William–as it did tens of thousands of others.

Perhaps not since the days of Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, et al., have Americans been forced to deal–intellectually, reasonably, emotionally, volitionally, and spiritually–with the fundamental issues of liberty as we are being forced to do today. For way too long, Americans have taken freedom for granted. For way too long, our educational and religious institutions (not to mention our homes) have not taught the fundamental principles of liberty. This negligence has brought our country to the brink of oppression and despotism. And, just as was the case in Colonial America, a line in the sand for freedom is being drawn in the hearts of men.

This internal line in the sand is being drawn irrespective of a person’s education, temperament, upbringing, intelligence, or faith. While some men seem to be content to live under the heel of governmental oppression, many others have an innate thirst for freedom that all of the armies in the world cannot quench.

In truth, the thirst for freedom is part of Natural Law. A horse is not broken without a fight; a tiger or lion will pace its cage as long as it can walk looking for an avenue of escape; a bird will fly around its cage ten thousand times looking for an opening to return to the sky. Yes, animals can be broken–and so can be some men, unfortunately. But the innate desire for freedom is born in the soul of every man.

However, the desire for comfort, ease, and material pleasure is a handsome tempter that many people find more attractive than the harsh and weather-torn face of liberty. Plus, the further liberty slips out of view, the more vague the memory of it becomes. And before we realize it, the face of liberty is only seen in the irrelevant relics of the songs and statues of history. But it is exactly at this point that the Spirit of God begins to renew in the hearts of men the Natural thirst for liberty. And that is precisely what is happening now.

All over America, and, yes, all over the world, people’s hearts are beating fast for freedom. I am receiving thousands of letters and emails from people all over the globe. Unfortunately for many of these people, they do not live in a country in which the governmental and political foundation and structure is conducive to the reclamation of liberty. But in the United States, it is not a matter of government; it is a matter of will. Do the American people yet have the will to reclaim liberty?

While it would appear that the majority of today’s Americans have allowed ignorance, materialism, and false Bible teaching regarding the principles of liberty to suppress their love of liberty, I am absolutely convinced that the spirit of liberty is swelling in the hearts of teeming millions of people. Highly educated and high school dropouts, affluent and average, Christians and unchurched, men and women, young and old: their hearts are ablaze with the love of liberty. And they are no longer content to surround themselves with those who would allow the chains of servitude to be clamped around their necks.

Are we patriots or loyalists? That question had to be answered by every man and woman in Colonial America. The same question must be answered by every American today. Are we going to bravely fight for the principles of liberty as did our patriot forebears, or are we going to be loyal to a corrupt and tyrannical system that is literally choking the life out of our freedoms? And how each of us answers that question will determine the direction and destination of our lives and futures.

The freedom to separate is a Natural right. Forced union is not a union at all; it is enslavement. The current world and U.S. maps are testimonies to the right of Natural separation. Pat Buchanan recently wrote:

“In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated, so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR.

“Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

“Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia.

“Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.

“The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia.”

Buchanan also notes that in the U.S., “Four of our 50 states–Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia–were born out of other states.”

See Pat’s column at:

Think of this, too: the most fundamental and sacred union of all is the union of a man and woman in marriage. Had Adam and Eve not fallen into sin, there would, no doubt, be no right or reason for separation. (Matthew 19:8) But with the fall of man into sin came all kinds of abuse. As a result, the Scriptures grant divorce (separation) on the grounds of both adultery (Matthew 19) and abandonment (I Corinthians 7). While never preferred, few among us would deny the right of a husband or wife to separate under certain circumstances. Because not every man is willing to be governed by the Natural and revealed laws of God, men are granted the right to separate themselves from those who would violate the fundamental principles upon which the union is based. This is true maritally, ecclesiastically, spiritually, socially, and politically.

In 1836, Will Travis drew a line in the sand to separate those who were willing to defend the liberty of Texas on the ramparts of the Alamo from those who were not. And I am convinced that God is drawing a line in the hearts of men today for the same reason: to separate those who are willing to give their lives in the defense of liberty from those who are not. And, ironically, the freedom of everyone–including the ones who are not willing to defend it–depends on the willingness of the ones who are. I guess it’s always been that way.

I know which side of the line I am on; and after the deluge of correspondence I have received over the past couple of weeks, I know I am not alone.

Vladimir Putin: Monsanto Protection Act = WAR

While I was listening to a recent interview with Graham Hancock about his new novel and his , the startling claim was made that Russian President Vladimir Putin commented that war might be a necessary result of the Monsanto Protection Act.

I was skeptical, but did a little digging around, and it turns out the story checks out…

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting last month with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.

At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.

So grave has this situation become, the MNRE reports, the full European Commission (EC) this past week instituted a two-year precautionary ban (set to begin on 1 December 2013) on these “bee killing” pesticides following the lead of Switzerland, France, Italy, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine, all of whom had previously banned these most dangerous of genetically altered organisms from being used on the continent.

Two of the most feared neonicotinoids being banned are Actara and Cruiser made by the Swiss global bio-tech seed and pesticide giant Syngenta AG which employs over 26,000 people in over 90 countries and ranks third in total global sales in the commercial agricultural seeds market.

Important to note, this report says, is that Syngenta, along with bio-tech giants Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont, now control nearly 100% of the global market for genetically modified pesticides, plants and seeds.

Also to note about Syngenta, this report continues, is that in 2012 it was criminally charged in Germany for concealing the fact that its genetically modified corn killed cattle, and settled a class-action lawsuit in the US for $105 million after it was discovered they had contaminated the drinking supply of some 52 million Americans in more than 2,000 water districts with its “gender-bending” herbicide Atrazine.

To how staggeringly frightful this situation is, the MNRE says, can be seen in the report issued this past March by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) wherein they warned our whole planet is in danger, and as we can, in part, read:

“As part of a study on impacts from the world’s most widely used class of insecticides, nicotine-like chemicals called neonicotinoids, American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has called for a ban on their use as seed treatments and for the suspension of all applications pending an independent review of the products’ effects on birds, terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife.

“It is clear that these chemicals have the potential to affect entire food chains. The environmental persistence of the neonicotinoids, their propensity for runoff and for groundwater infiltration, and their cumulative and largely irreversible mode of action in invertebrates raise significant environmental concerns,” said Cynthia Palmer, co-author of the report and Pesticides Program Manager for ABC, one of the nation’s leading bird conservation organizations.

ABC commissioned world renowned environmental toxicologist Dr. Pierre Mineau to conduct the research. The 100-page report, “The Impact of the Nation’s Most Widely Used Insecticides on Birds,” reviews 200 studies on neonicotinoids including industry research obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act. The report evaluates the toxicological risk to birds and aquatic systems and includes extensive comparisons with the older pesticides that the neonicotinoids have replaced. The assessment concludes that the neonicotinoids are lethal to birds and to the aquatic systems on which they depend.

“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” Palmer said. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid — called imidacloprid — can fatally poison a bird. And as little as 1/10th of a neonicotinoid-coated corn seed per day during egg-laying season is all that is needed to affect reproduction.”

The new report concludes that neonicotinoid contamination levels in both surface- and ground water in the United States and around the world are already beyond the threshold found to kill many aquatic invertebrates.”

Quickly following this damning report, the MRNE says, a large group of group of American beekeepers and environmentalists sued the Obama regime over the continued use of these neonicotinoids stating: “We are taking the EPA to court for its failure to protect bees from pesticides. Despite our best efforts to warn the agency about the problems posed by neonicotinoids, the EPA continued to ignore the clear warning signs of an agricultural system in trouble.”

And to how bad the world’s agricultural system has really become due to these genetically modified plants, pesticides and seeds, this report continues, can be seen by the EC’s proposal this past week, following their ban on neonicotinoids, in which they plan to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with the European Union, and as we can, in part, read:

“Europe is rushing towards the good ol days circa 1939, 40… A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”

It’s called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.”

This MRNE report points out that even though this EC action may appear draconian, it is nevertheless necessary in order to purge the continent from continued contamination of these genetically bred “seed monstrosities.”

Most perplexing in all of this, the MRNE says, and which led to Putin’s anger at the US, has been the Obama regimes efforts to protect pesticide-producer profits over the catastrophic damaging being done to the environment, and as the Guardian News Service detailed in their 2 May article titled “US rejects EU claim of insecticide as prime reason for bee colony collapse” and which, in part, says:

“The European Union voted this week for a two-year ban on a class of pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, that has been associated with the bees’ collapse. The US government report, in contrast, found multiple causes for the collapse of the honeybees.”

To the “truer” reason for the Obama regimes protection of these bio-tech giants destroying our world, the MRNE says, can be viewed in the report titled “How did Barack Obama become Monsanto’s man in Washington?” and which, in part, says:

“After his victory in the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA: At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center. As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.”

Even worse, after Russia suspended the import and use of an Monsanto genetically modified corn following a study suggesting a link to breast cancer and organ damage this past September, the Russia Today News Service reported on the Obama regimes response:

“The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week – including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.

The rider, which is officially known as the Farmer Assurance Provision, has been derided by opponents of biotech lobbying as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” as it would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.

The provision, also decried as a “biotech rider,” should have gone through the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees for review. Instead, no hearings were held, and the piece was evidently unknown to most Democrats (who hold the majority in the Senate) prior to its approval as part of HR 993, the short-term funding bill that was approved to avoid a federal government shutdown.”

On 26 March, Obama quietly signed this “Monsanto Protection Act” into law thus ensuring the American people have no recourse against this bio-tech giant as they fall ill by the tens of millions, and many millions will surely end up dying in what this MRNE report calls the greatest agricultural apocalypse in human history as over 90% of feral (wild) bee population in the US has already died out, and up to 80% of domestic bees have died out too.

Source: Political Blind Spot  

Why Is The World Economy Doomed? The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers

Why is the global economy in so much trouble?  How can so many people be so absolutely certain that the world financial system is going to crash?  Well, the truth is that when you take a look at the cold, hard numbers it is not difficult to see why the global financial pyramid scheme is destined to fail.  In the United States today, there is approximately 56 trillion dollars of total debt in our financial system, but there is only about 9 trillion dollars in our bank accounts.  So you could take every single penny out of the banks, multiply it by six, and you still would not have enough money to pay off all of our debts.  Overall, there is about 190 trillion dollars of total debt on the planet.  But global GDP is only about 70 trillion dollars.  And the total notional value of all derivatives around the globe is somewhere between 600 trillion and 1500 trillion dollars.  So we have a gigantic problem on our hands.  The global financial system is a very shaky house of cards that has been constructed on a foundation of debt, leverage and incredibly risky derivatives.  We are living in the greatest financial bubble in world history, and it isn’t going to take much to topple the entire thing.  And when it falls, it is going to be the largest financial disaster in the history of the planet.

The global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and a crisis at one major bank or in one area of the world can spread at lightning speed.  As I wrote about yesterday, the entire European banking system is leveraged 26 to 1 at this point.  A decline in asset values of just 4 percent would totally wipe out the equity of many of those banks, and once a financial panic begins we could potentially see major financial institutions start to go down like dominoes.

We got a small taste of what that is like back in 2008, and it is inevitable that it will happen again.

Anyone that would tell you that the current global financial system is sustainable does not know what they are talking about.  Just look at the numbers that I have posted below.

The following is the global financial pyramid scheme by the numbers…

-$9,283,000,000,000 – The total amount of all bank deposits in the United States.  The FDIC has just 25 billion dollars in the deposit insurance fund that is supposed to “guarantee” those deposits.  In other words, the ratio of total bank deposits to insurance fund money is more than 371 to 1.

-$10,012,800,000,000 – The total amount of mortgage debt in the United States.  As you can see, you could take every penny out of every bank account in America and it still would not cover it.

-$10,409,500,000,000 – The M2 money supply in the United States.  This is probably the most commonly used measure of the total amount of money in the U.S. economy.

-$15,094,000,000,000 – U.S. GDP.  It is a measure of all economic activity in the United States for a single year.

-$16,749,269,587,407.53 – The size of the U.S. national debt.  It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.

-$32,000,000,000,000 – The total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).

-$50,230,844,000,000 – The total amount of government debt in the world.

-$56,280,790,000,000 – The total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system.

-$61,000,000,000,000 – The combined total assets of the 50 largest banks in the world.

-$70,000,000,000,000 – The approximate size of total world GDP.

-$190,000,000,000,000 – The approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.  It has nearly doubled in size over the past decade.

-$212,525,587,000,000 – According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States.  But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.

-$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 – The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Every single day, the total amount of debt will continue to grow faster than the total amount of money until the day that this bubble bursts.

What we witnessed back in 2008 was just a little “hiccup” in the system.  It caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but global financial authorities were able to get things stabilized.

Next time it won’t be so easy.

The next wave of the economic collapse is quickly approaching.  A full-blown economic depression has already started in southern Europe.  Unemployment is at record highs and economic activity is contracting rapidly.

The major offshore banking centers in Cyprus are on the verge of collapsing.  It was just announced that they will now be closed until Tuesday, but nobody really knows for sure when they will be allowed to reopen.  And there is already talk that when they do reopen that there will be strict limits on how much money people can take out.

And now the IMF is warning that the three biggest banks in Slovenia are failing and that a billion euros will be needed to bail them out.

The dominoes are starting to tumble, and the United States won’t be immune.  In fact, the greatest financial problems that the United States has ever seen are on the horizon.

But you can just have faith that Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress know exactly what they are doing and will be able to save us from the coming financial collapse if you want.

The mainstream media will provide you with all of the positive economic news that you could possibly want.  They are giddy about the fact that the Dow keeps hitting all-time highs and they would have us all believe that we are in the midst of a robust economic recovery.  You can listen to them if you want to.

But when you are tempted to believe that everything is going to be “okay” somehow, just go back and look at the numbers there were posted above one more time.

There is no way that the global financial pyramid scheme is going to be able to hold up for too much longer.  At some point it is going to totally collapse.  When that happens, will you be ready?

 

Source: The Economic Collapse

The Saga of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks

“Defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while he was stationed there … They say he was in emotional turmoil, partly because he was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.” (Associated Press, February 3)

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnaped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

EU Signs ACTA, Global Internet Censorship Treaty

On  Jan. 26, 2012, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. They have now joined the US and seven other nations that signed the treaty last October.

This signing ceremony merely formalized the EU’s adoption of ACTA last month, during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries, reportsTechDirt.

Though initiated by the US, Japan is the official depository of the treaty.

Removal of the Three Strikes clause, in which users accused of three counts of piracy would be barred from the Internet, paved the way for the EU to adopt ACTA last month.

Related to ACTA, a chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) “would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Both ACTA and TPP were developed without public input and outside international trade groups, like the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Leaked cables published by Wikileaks in 2009 exposed early drafts of ACTA, resulting in a firestorm of controversy. Those cables, coupled with later releases, showed that ACTA negotiations began in 2006 and were controversial even to participating states. An historical summary of the treaty’s progress through December can be found here.

ACTA Violates Magna Carta and US Constitution

Like PIPA and SOPA, two domestic internet censorship bills that prompted major websites to blacken their name or website in a Jan. 18th protest, ACTA allows accusers of copyright infringement to bypass judicial review.

Please support my work by reading the full piece at Activist Post. Thanks!

The Euro Circus Continues: S&P downgrades France, Italy, Spain, 6 others

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the government debt of France, Austria, Italy and Spain, but maintained Germany’s at the coveted “AAA” level.

The cuts, which eliminated France and Austria’s triple-A status, deal a heavy blow to the currency union’s ability to fight off a worsening debt crisis. In total, S&P cut its ratings on nine eurozone countries.

France and Austria both dropped one notch to AA+. Italy was lowered by two notches to BBB+ from A, and Spain fell to A from AA-. Portugal and Cyprus also dropped two notches. The agency also cut ratings on Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The downgrades come as crucial talks on cutting Greece’s massive debt pile appeared close to collapse Friday.

Speaking on France-2 television, Finance Minister Francois Baroin confirmed that France had been lowered by one notch. That would mean a rating of AA+, the same rating the United States has had since S&P downgraded it last August.

Baroin said France had received a change to its rating “like most of the eurozone,” referring to the 17 European nations that use the euro currency.

A credit downgrade escalates the threats to Europe’s fragile financial system. It increases the costs at which the affected countries — some of which are already struggling with heavy debt loads and low growth — borrow money.
Baroin said the downgrade was “bad news” but not “a catastrophe.”

“You have to be relative, you have keep your cool,” he said. “It’s necessary not to frighten the French people about it.”

S&P had warned 15 European nations in December that they were at risk for a credit downgrade.

Earlier Friday, as rumors of a looming downgrade swirled around the financial markets, the euro hit its lowest level in more than a year and borrowing costs for European nations rose. Stock markets in Europe and the U.S. fell.

The fears of a downgrade brought a sour end to a mildly encouraging week for Europe’s heavily indebted nations and were a stark reminder that the 17-country eurozone’s debt crisis is far from over.

Earlier Friday, Italy had capped a strong week for government debt auctions, seeing its borrowing costs drop for a second day in a row as it successfully raised as much as €4.75 billion ($6.05 billion).

Spain and Italy completed successful bond auctions on Thursday, and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi noted “tentative signs of stabilization” in the region’s economy.

Credit downgrades will drive up the cost of European government debt as investors demand more compensation for holding bonds now deemed to be riskier. Higher borrowing costs puts more financial pressure on countries already contending with heavy debt burdens.

In Greece, negotiations Friday to get investors to take a voluntary cut on their Greek bond holdings appeared close to collapse, raising the specter of a potentially disastrous default by the country that kicked off Europe’s financial troubles more than two years ago.

The deal, known as the Private Sector Involvement, aims to reduce Greece’s debt by €100 billion ($127.8 billion) by swapping private creditors’ bonds with new ones of a lower value, and is a key part of a €130 billion ($166 billion) international bailout. Without it, the country could suffer a catastrophic bankruptcy that would send shock waves through the global economy.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos met Thursday and Friday with representatives of the Institute of International Finance, a global body representing the private bondholders. Finance ministry officials from the eurozone also met in Brussels Thursday night.

“Unfortunately, despite the efforts of Greece’s leadership, the proposal put forward … which involves an unprecedented 50% nominal reduction of Greece’s sovereign bonds in private investors’ hands and up to €100 billion of debt forgiveness — has not produced a constructive consolidated response by all parties, consistent with a voluntary exchange of Greek sovereign debt,” the IIF said in a statement.

“Under the circumstances, discussions with Greece and the official sector are paused for reflection on the benefits of a voluntary approach,” it said.

Friday’s Italian auction saw investors demanding an interest rate of 4.83% to lend Italy three-year money, down from an average rate of 5.62% in the previous auction and far lower than the 7.89% in November, when the country’s financial crisis was most acute.

While Italy paid a slightly higher rate for bonds maturing in 2018, which were also sold in Friday’s auction, demand was between 1.2% and 2.2% higher than what was on offer.

The results were not as strong as those of bond auctions the previous day, when Italy raised €12 billion ($15 billion) and Spain saw huge demand for its own debt sale.

“Overall, it underscores that while all the auctions in the eurozone have been battle victories, the war is a long way from being resolved (either way),” said Marc Ostwald, strategist at Monument Securities. “These euro area auctions will continue to present themselves as market risk events for a very protracted period.”

Italy’s €1.9 trillion ($2.42 trillion) in government debt and heavy borrowing needs this year have made it a focal point of the European debt crisis.
Italy has passed austerity measures and is on a structural reform course that Premier Mario Monti claims should bring down Italy’s high bond yields, which he says are no longer warranted.

Analysts have said the successful recent bond auctions were at least in part the work of the ECB, which has inundated banks with cheap loans, giving them ready cash that at least some appear to be using to buy higher-yielding short-term government bonds.

Some 523 banks took €489 billion in credit for up to three years at a current interest cost of 1%.

Source: usatoday.com

Slavoj Zizek and Freedom Flotilla

The Flotilla to Gaza was stopped in its tracks by the omnipresent Israelis and their friends in Greece and France. A part of a pattern? Probably. But first I want to heed an advice.

“I wish,” wrote G K Chesterton in his Plea for Hasty Journalism, “that at the beginning or end of all the articles we read, there were a brief note stating the situation in which the work was written. Thus we should read, `Will Australia adopt Bimetallism?’ then, in small letters, `Top of Omnibus'; or some such place in which we journalists do most of our learned research and compilation. We should see in some excited morning paper the headlines, `Battle at Ping Cho still in Progress, by an Eyewitness. Latest’. Then in the usual place would be the note, `A.B.C. shop, Strand’. The thing would throw a kind of flush of colour into our articles. Nature would creep into them as she creeps into the colour of flowers and wine.”

An avid follower of GK, I am inclined to fall in with his proposition and admit that this piece on the latest developments in the Middle East was written at dawn — in Chianti country near Siena, amid pomegranate trees in ginger blossom, pink and white roses, the tender green of olive trees meshing with the bright green of vineyards, stony path meandering among the slopes, light mist crowning the mountaintops, tiny streams at the bottom of deep and steep dales, and, at night, firefly dances above the scented chaparral. The figs are still green and hard, and yet they bulge, pregnant with sweetness. The few farms are scattered among rolling hills; here you can still pass a day without seeing a man. The human touches here are light and universally benevolent: you see clipped hedges, tended vines, freshly watered flowers.

Tuscany tugs a familiar chord in my heart, like discovering your own name spoken in a foreign tongue. It might be a twin sister to Palestine. My mountain refuge in Siena province might easily have been found somewhere between Ain Karim and Beth Jallah, or anywhere southwest of Jerusalem. The grapes of Bethlehem Cremisan are as just as good as the best Sangiovese. The churches have the same names and the same frescoes adorn their walls: the Visitation church of Ain Karim is a short hike from San Gimignano, where the Romanesque façade memorialises the memory of crusades with the Jerusalem Cross of St John’s Knights — though the church itself is now a wine shop. Just as Tuscany was once riven between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Palestine has been torn between the Fatah and Hamas.

And yet Siena fared better than has our Holy Land. Though it was repeatedly invaded and subjugated (notably by the Medici, hell-bent on global domination in 1555), it had never suffered the indignity of Cyclopic separation walls. The people of Siena have always been free to sit under their own fig trees and enjoy the fruit of their own vines, something definitely denied to the natives of the Palestinian Highlands.

This might be an appropriate place to honour the most recent attempt to liberate the Holy Land, or at the very least to remind the word of its captivity. I salute my noble friends of the Freedom Flotilla who put out to sea but were stopped by means both fair and foul.

In long-ago 1820 Lord Byron wrote the following stanzas, seemingly with the Freedom Flotilla in mind:

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,

Let him combat for that of his neighbours;

Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,

And get knock’d on the head for his labours,

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,

And is always as nobly requited;

Then battle for freedom wherever you can,

And, if not shot or hang’d, you’ll get knighted.

While their efforts have yet to earn them knighthoods, the Fates have been kind to them: they were not killed as were the brave Turks in the last year’s attempt; yes, their boats were sabotaged, but they were not dynamited as was the Sol Phryne. Moreover, their ostensible failure was as good as a victory, nay, even better for it remains a powerful exposé of the techniques of our elusive, ruthless and arbitrary enemy.

Among the Freedom Flotilla, for the first time, were Russians; they have slowly overcome the strategic collapse of 1991 and are now re-joining the struggle. The brave Russian journalist Daria Aslamova shared her frustrations with the millions of readers of the dynamic KP (Komsomolskaya Pravda), the largest-circulation newspaper in Russia. She was the only mainstream journalist on board, and she was able to report: “All the Mediterranean ports were closed in face of the Freedom Flotilla. In breach of maritime law, the boats were detained in the Greek ports. Now we see who is the real master of the Mediterranean, who is bossing the world – it is Israel.” The strong words and stronger emotions invoked by blockades will destroy Israel faster than long, uneventful jaunts to Gaza.

Another powerful illustration of the enemy’s brute strength and its critical shortsightedness was the fly-in. A few hundred Europeans had planned to visit the West Bank, to walk in the footsteps of Abraham and Christ, to see the ancient villages so reminiscent of Tuscany, to meet local people. While an Italian Ministry of Tourism would bless such an initiative, the Israelis instead prevented the majority of these visitors from even boarding their planes, let alone tour Bethlehem and Bir Zeit. And they did it all with the active collaboration of various European states and airlines. Yes, Israel robbed Palestine of one fistful of dollars, but their actions highlighted to all the less-discussed but equally strangling blockade of the West Bank.

Yet Israeli’s ability to force Europeans to say uncle does bode ill for the planned show of force in the UN this September. Not only has the US Congress threatened to stop paying its dues, the European states seem to have caught a case of cold feet. Without Europeans, passage of a pro-Palestinian resolution is unlikely – this as Europe agonizes over even the thought of upsetting Jews.

Never has Jewish stock climbed to such dizzy heights; it has surpassed its historical limits, ascending to loony peaks that bespeak the Dotcom madness of 2000. Perhaps we could create a new index of political capital (the Dow Jews?) that rates the obsequious suck-ups coming from members of the US Congress. How high can it climb? How long can it defeat the law of gravity before the inevitable crash?

The US Senate applauds Netanyahu, just as their Roman predecessors once greeted Caligula’s horse; the most famous contemporary fashion designer and the top film director are publicly fed to the lions for daring to utter disparaging words about Jews; the Greek government cooperates with Tel Aviv to permanently halt the flotilla, even as Senator Mark Kirk calls upon US Special Forces (presumably Navy Seals) to deal with brave Americans marooned on the flotilla ship “Audacity of Hope” like they once dealt with Osama bin Laden.

But the cherry on the cake belongs to Slavoj Zizek. He went “full Monty” during his recent visit to Tel Aviv at the invitation of some sincerely dissident Israelis. They expected words of encouragement, but instead he informed them that fighting anti-Semitism is more important than defending Palestinians.

The Slovenian philosopher spoke kindly of the swindler Bernie Madoff, who was “a scapegoat who was easy to blame, when in fact the real problem is the system that allowed and even pushed Madoff to commit his crimes.” Indeed, it must have been ‘the system’ that pushed poor Mr. Madoff into crime, just as it was ‘the system’ that pushed Shylock to enter into money-lending and Jack the Ripper into the business of carving.

From that rocky start it was plain sailing to his philippics against the plague of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and the world: “even the most oppressed and poor Palestinian should not be tolerated for being anti-Semitic.” No doubt the professor referred to the anti-Semitism of objecting to Jews seizing Palestinian lands. The real suffering, and the real problem, is European and American anti-Semitism, he declared. Does the professor know something we don’t? Are European and American Jews being tortured in dark dungeons while their houses are confiscated by blue-eyed Aryans? But the best was still to come.

Zizek said that “someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank”.

This must be the quote of the year.

High school teachers may well use this wonderful, historical, and geographical quote in this year’s exercises:

Q   If a black from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank, whom and in how many heartbeats would he sell into slavery for the chance to join the French unemployed or Greek workers or American strikers? 

Perhaps Zizek, as a laureate of yesterday’s Left, has invented the ultimate defence for the coming waves of IMF austerity programmers; the final answer to silence Western workers who may have the audacity to demonstrate against the strictures of international finance. They should declare that they are following the diktat of ‘the system’, and that they are not to blame; indeed, it is they who are the true victims of ‘the system’. And anyway, it’s worse in the Congo.

Here is a better question for this year’s students:

Q    If a black from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank, whom and in how many heartbeats would Slavoj Zizek sell into slavery for the chance to move into the intellectual establishment of the Right?

The answer is obvious. Zizek would sell all of Palestine, and throw in his own immortal soul for free. As for his mother, he would not only sell her, but would actually deliver her. This is one professor who knows that the best strategy for self-promotion is to whine about anti-Semitism and to defend the world’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of Madoffs.

His crass and racist rhetoric caused not the slightest ripple. His brave and sincere dissident hosts either missed it entirely, accepted it as normal, or looked the other way. Indeed, what would you expect from a black? Maybe he would sell his mother into slavery for a chance to serve his white master. The historical and international aspects of slavery have been excised; it has been reduced to something blacks bring upon themselves, or twisted into a way for blacks to get ahead. But no harm done.

The kindly professor will not be banned from the Cannes festival. His servile rhetoric will be noticed by Bernard Henri Levy and other powerful luminaries. He will get more and more invitations to speak in greater and greater venues.  Even my critique will bring him extra coverage. I cringed as Zizek’s speech approached the great lines from David Mamet (“the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all”), but he held himself back.

As long as visiting professors know on which side their bread is buttered, we shall be condemned to witnessing repetitions of the Flotilla debacle. As long as we misunderstand the importance of Palestine for the world’s future, we shall be trapped in an endless “Middle East Crisis”.

The Tragedy of American Education

Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot, a genocide denier, and a disseminator of falsehoods. He does not even realize what he is—not because he is mad but because he is an ignoramus. Having teachers like Holloway in American classrooms is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

EPIC IGNORANCE—In the second week of February Mr. Holloway gave his students an assignment on Aristotle’s “Three Points,” and instructed them in some detail on how to proceed:

The recent breakup of Yugoslavia into separate countries provides many examples of the power of this kind of rhetoric. Yugoslavia was created after the second world war [sic!] out of several smaller states, including Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzgovenia, and Slovenia. Within each state there were ethnic and religious minorities with long histories of conflict. While Yugoslavia was under the control of the Soviet Union, these conflicts were kept in check by military force. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, new political structures were necessary, and political opportunities arose for the ambitious. The leaders of various factions, understanding Aristotle’s tlree [sic!] points very well, began to mobilize their followers to war by reminding them of their historical grievances against other groups. Serbian leaders published photographs of atrocities alledgedly committed by Croatians during WWII, reviving a conflict from 50 years earlier. Individuals were inspired through this angry rhetoric to attack, rape, and kill neighbors that had lived near them all their lives, simply because of their ethnicity or religion.

Mr. Holloway’s ignorance is astounding. While causing Aristotle to turn in his grave, it prompts both laughter and tears among the living:

• Even a superficially informed Middle American is dimly aware that Yugoslavia was the product of the First World War and that Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina had not been independent states but Austro-Hungarian provinces before its creation.
• Even a casual listener of Morning Edition knows that Yugoslavia’s dictator Josip Broz Tito broke away from Stalin in 1948 and that Yugoslavia remained outside the Soviet orbit (let alone Moscow’s “military force”) until its demise in the 1990’s.
• Even an occasional reader of a quality broadsheet may recall that the collapse of Yugoslavia was simultaneous with that of the Soviet Union, and not contingent upon it.

Mr. Holloway’s teaching is the equivalent of a Belgrade high school teacher, say, telling his Serbian charges that the United States of America came into being by the merger of the Union and the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Mexican War of 1861-1865, but remained under the British yoke until President Coolidge’s New Deal in the 1940’s.

GENOCIDE DENIAL—The morally outrageous part concerns Mr. Holloway’s dismissive reference to the Ustaša-instigated holocaust in Croatia, a gruesome yet relatively little known chapter of the Second World War which killed, by conservative estimates, half a million men, women and children… “simply because of their ethnicity or religion,” to paraphrase his rhetoric. Try to imagine Mr. Holloway instructing his students as follows: “Jewish leaders published photographs of atrocities allegedly committed by Germans during WWII, reviving a conflict from 50 years earlier” and thus instigating the Jews to commit mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing of innocents. Mr. Holloway would be clearing his desk and contemplating a new career in fast food catering by now, and justifiably so.

As I noted in my keynote presentation at Yad Vashem Center’s June 2006 symposium on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, presided by Professor Yehuda Bauer, the most widely respected living authority on the grim issues of the period,

The number of victims at the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac—the only Quisling extermination outfit entrusted to the locals—is still uncertain. The lowest estimate with any pretense to seriousness—tens of thousands of victims—was made by the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, famous for saying “Thank God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew.” Tudjman’s “estimate” on Jasenovac fits in with his other assessments:

“In his book Wastelands: Historical Truths, published in 1988, Mr. Tudjman wrote that the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was 900,000—not six million. He has also asserted that not more than 70,000 Serbs died at the hands of the Ustashe—most historians say around 400,000 were killed.” (The New York Times, August 20, 1995)

Other sources provide estimates tens of times greater than Dr. Tudjman’s: “Jasenovac”—entry by Menachem Shelach in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1990, pp. 739-740—says, “Some six hundred thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and opponents of the Ustasa regime.” The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Teamestimated “that close to 600,000 … mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, were murdered at Jasenovac.”

So much for the Jewish sources. Let us look at what the contemporary German allies of the Croatian Ustaša regime had to say on the subject. Hermann Neubacher, Hitler’s foremost political expert for the Balkans, in his book Sonderaufrag Südost 1940-1945. Bericht eines fliegenden Diplomaten (Goettingen, 1957, p. 18) wrote: “The prescription for the Orthodox Serbs issued by the leader and Führer of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, was reminiscent of the religious wars of the bloodiest memory: One third must be converted to Catholicism, another third must be expelled, and the final third must die. The last part of the program has been carried out.” [I.e., one-third of cca. 1.9 million were killed.]

In a report to Himmler, SS General Ernst Frick estimated that “600 to 700,000 victims were butchered in the Balkan fashion.” General Lothar Rendulic, commanding German forces in the western Balkans in 1943-1944, estimated the number of Ustaša victims to be 500,000. In his memoirs Gekaempft, gesiegt, geschlagen (Welsermühl Verlag, Wels und Heidelberg, 1952, p.161) he recalled a memorable exchange on this issue with a Croat dignitary:

When I objected to a high official who was close to Pavelic that, in spite of the accumulated hatred, I failed to comprehend the murder of half a million Orthodox, the answer I received was characteristic of the mentality that prevailed there: Half a million, that’s too much—there weren’t more than 200,000!

Julia Gorin reminded us in The Jerusalem Post (Feb. 22, 2010) of some facts of life, and death, in the Croatian state established and controlled by the Axis powers:

Germany entrusted Croatia with running its own concentration camps, without oversight…  Archive photos of sadism that would make horror filmmakers blush survive today: Ustashas displaying an Orthodox priest’s head; an eyeless peasant woman; Serbs and Jews being pushed off a cliff; a Serb with a saw to his neck; and a smiling Ustasha holding the still-beating heart of prominent industrialist Milos Teslitch, who had been castrated, disemboweled and his ears and lips cut off. Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his 1944 book Kaputt offers this detail: “While [Croatian Fuehrer Pavelic] spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on his desk which seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters… ‘Are they Dalmatian oysters?’ I asked. [Pavelic] said smiling, ‘It is a present from my loyal Ustashas… Forty pounds of human eyes’.”

BETTER RED THAN BRAIN DEAD—The Holloway farce brings to mind my own high school education, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, four decades ago. Its diploma—obtained after a grueling final exam known as the Matura (equivalent to Germany’s Abitur, or France’s Baccalaureat)—was the graduate’s entry to university or the civil service. By the time I attended the Tenth Gymnasium, a quarter of a century of Communist neglect was in evidence everywhere. It was nevertheless a very good school. It had a solid contingent of old teachers (then still titled “professors”) inherited from the old times, who firmly believed that their role was to teach, not to interact and connect. They used the polite “vous” form when addressing people half a century their juniors, but had no qualms about telling a wanting student that he was unfit to be in class, or his parents that he was too stupid for the Gymnasium and should transfer to a vocational school instead. The grading system was unabashedly meritocratic, from 1 for “F” to 5 for “A”, and designed with no allowances for social rank or parents’ clout (race, gender, and sexuality were not an issue in those days).

In contrast to the United States, we had a clearly articulated relationship between what is taught and what is tested. The workload was heavy, and necessitated several hours of serious study every day. At the end of it all the Maturantwas a jack of all trades and a master of none, just as he was meant to be. He had a solid grounding in most areas once considered necessary for an educated, civilized person, and the assumption was that eventual excellence would be attained in his chosen field of university study.

In practical terms this meant that we all had some idea of what Leonidas did at Thermopylae and what Caesar said at the Rubicon; what was the Protagoras and who was Pythagoras; who was Attila and who was Totila; what was natural law and what was the second law of thermodynamics. Attendance at the symphony orchestra, ballet and opera matinees, every first Sunday of the month, was not obligatory but it was necessary for a good grade in music; and what started as a chore soon became a habit for at least some. Latin was on the whole easy, and making puns—I prided myself on rephrasing Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum by removing the g from “cogito”—was deemed only slightly pretentious.

Some areas of our curriculum were burdened by the veneer of the Titoist brand of Marxism—notably sociology, 20th century history, and modern philosophy—but the stamp was not deeply felt in most subjects. For the most part we had a curriculum essentially similar to the Gymnasiums of Austria-Hungary that provided the model for the Kingdom of Serbia in the 1880s and remained in force ever since. Under this system an ever-present principle, mostly implied and only rarely explicitly spelled out, was that moral and aesthetic norms are not a matter of personal choice. There were “standards” and we were supposed to conform to them, and to accept the lasting norms that antedated and transcended the rules of the current regime. In addition there was the home, and friends, where one could be free.

I have often wondered if the Communists allowed old-style schools to survive by design or by default, and on balance I give more weight to the former. For many middle-ranking apparatchiks having good schools was a personal need: they wanted their own children to be “properly educated,” and, secretly knowing the limits of their abilities, they were loath to experiment with the school system the way they had experimented—with catastrophic effect—with the economy and society. They wanted their children to assume the positions of leadership that they had come to regard as rightfully theirs, and—being largely half-educated peasants—they had enough common sense to find the answer. They intuited that the only way to forge a New Class from their offspring was to combine the usurped privilege of power with the inherited privilege of good education that develops the mind and enhances character.

My high school days came at the tail end of a period of uneasy coexistence between Us and Them, the society and the “comrades.” The schools produced young people capable of thinking for themselves, able to read between the lines of the official media, and at the same time to be unintimidated by “the West” to which they were increasingly exposed. When I took my Matura we had our dreams and we were smarting for action; four decades later we are mostly dispersed over three continents, which is a generational defeat, but we did well conventionally and financially, which is a credit to our long-dead teachers.

Even before the first shots were fired came the destructive reforms of Yugoslav education of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which were inspired more by the fashionable Western notions of egalitarianism and visceral hatred of excellence than by the old Marxist orthodoxy. The reformers of the past two decades have declared that theGymnasium was an elitist institution incapable of responding to the demands for greater equality of educational opportunity and the growing need for vocationally qualified personnel. It was to become a mass institution, and effectively abolished in the process.

By now Serbia is reintegrated into the “international community” and ready to welcome the creative input Robert E. Holloway. Going east may be an astute career move for a man of his creative sweep and talent.

Eastern Europe Versus the Open Society

Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010

Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its dark, intolerant past. Thousands of policemen in full riot gear had to divide their time between protecting a few hundred “LBGT” activists (about half of them imported from Western Europe for the occasion) and battling ten times as many young protesters in the side streets.

The parade, it should be noted, was prominently attended by the U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Mary Warlick, by the head of the European Commission Office, Vincent Degert of France, and by the head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Serbia, Dimitris Kipreos. Needless to say, none of them had attended the enthronment of the new Serbian Patriarch a week earlier. Two days later, Hillary Clinton came to Belgrade and praised the Tadic regime for staging the parade.

Mrs. Clinton et al are enjoying the fruits of one man’s two decades of hard work in Eastern Europe. George Soros can claim, more than any other individual, that his endeavors have helped turn the lands of “Real Socialism” in central and eastern Europe away from their ancestors, their cultural and spiritual roots. The process is far from over, but his Open Society Institute and its extensive network of subsidiaries east of the Trieste-Stettin line have successfully legitimized the notions that only two decades ago would have seemed bizarre, laughable or demonic to the denizens of the eastern half of Europe.

The package was first tested here in America. Through his Open Society Institute and its vast network of affiliates Soros has provided extensive financial and lobbying support here for

• Legalization of hard drugs: We should accept that “substance abuse is endemic in most societies,” he says. Thanks to his intervention the terms “medicalization” and “non-violent drug offender” have entered public discourse, and pro-drug legalization laws were passed in California and Arizona in the 90s.
• Euthanasia: In 1994 Soros—a self-professed atheist—launched his Project Death in America (PDIA) and provided $15 million in its initial funding. (It is noteworthy that his mother, a member of the pro-suicide Hemlock Society, killed herself, and that Soros mentions unsympathetically his dying father’s clinging on to life for too long.) PDIA supports physician-assisted suicide and works “to begin forming a network of doctors that will eventually reach into one-fourth of America’s hospitals” and, in a turn of phrase chillingly worthy of Orwell, lead to “the creation of innovative models of care and the development of new curricula on dying.”
• Population replacement: Soros is an enthusiastic promoter of open immigration and amnesty & special rights for immigrants. He has supported the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Forum, and dozens of others. He also promotes expansion of public welfare, and in late 1996 he created the Emma Lazarus Fund that has given millions in grants to nonprofit legal services groups that undermine provisions of the welfare legislation ending immigrant entitlements.

Soros supports programs and organizations that further abortion rights and increased access to birth control devices; advocate ever more stringent gun control; and demand abolition of the death penalty. He supports radical feminists and “gay” activists, same-sex “marriage” naturally included. OSI states innocently enough that its objectives include “the strengthening of civil society; economic reform; education at all levels; human rights; legal reform and public administration; public health; and arts and culture,” but the way it goes about these tasks is not “philanthropy” but political activism in pursuit of all the familiar causes of the radical left—and some additional, distinctly creepy ones such as “Death in America.”

Soros’s “philanthropic” activities in America have been applied on a far grander scale abroad. His many foundations say that they are “dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society.” What this means in practice? Regarding “Women’s Health” programs in Central and South-Eastern Europe, one will look in vain for breast cancer detection programs, or for prenatal or post-natal care. No, Soros’s main goal is “to improve the quality of abortion services.” Accordingly his Public Health Program has focused on the introduction of easily available abortion all over the region, and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia. Why is Soros so keen to promote more abortions? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: the region is experiencing a huge demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortions cannot be the answer either: only five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000: the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Romania and Ukraine. The only answer is that Soros wants as few little European Orthodox Christians born into this world as possible.

Soros’s Public Health Programs additionally “support initiatives focusing on the specific health needs of several marginalized communities,” such as “gays” and AIDS sufferers, and promote “harm reduction” focusing on needle/syringe exchange and supply of methadone to adicts. His outfits lobby governments to scrap “repressive drug policies.” Over the past decade and a half the Soros network has given a kick-start to previously non-existent “gay” activism in almost all of its areas of operation. The campaign for “LGBT Rights” is directed from Budapest, publishing lesbian and gay books in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia, opening Gay and Lesbian Centers in Ukraine and Rumania. Its activists routinely attack the Orthodox Church as a key culprit for alleged discrimination of “LGBTs.”

Education is a key pillar of Soros’s activities. His Leitmotif is the dictum that “no-one has a monopoly on the truth” and that “civic education” should replace the old “authoritarian” model. Even under communism Eastern Europe has preserved very high educational standards, but the Soros Foundation seeks to replace the old system with the concept of schools as “exercise grounds” for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the oppressive legacy of patriarchal past.” The purpose of education is not “acquisition of knowledge”: the teacher is to become the class “designer” and his relationship with students based on “partnership.” Soros’s reformers also insist on an active role of schools in countering the allegedly unhealthy influence of the family on students, which “still carries an imprint of nationalist, sexist, racist, and homophobic prejudices rampant in the society at large.”

“Racism” is Soros’s regular obsession, but he had a problem finding it in racially non-diverse East European countries. This has been resolved by identifying a designated victim group—gypsies (“Roma”). His protégés now come up with policy demands to “protect” this group that could have been written by Rev. Jesse Jackson:

• anti-bias training of teachers and administrators;
• integration of Romani history and culture in the textbooks at all levels;
• legally mandated arffirmative action programs for Roma;
• tax incentives for employers who employ them;
• access to low-interest credit for Roma small family businesses;
• setting aside a percentage of public tenders for Roma firms;
• legislation to fight “racism and discrimination” in housing;
• adoption of “comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation”;
• creation of mechanisms “to monitor implementation of anti-discrimination legislation and assist victims of racial discrimination in seeking remedies”;
• recognition by governments of “the Roma slavery and the Holocaust through public apology along with urgent adoption of a package of reparatory measures.”

A budding race relations industry is already in place, with the self-serving agenda of finding “discrimination” in order to keep itself in place for ever.

To make his agenda appear “normal” to the targeted population, millions of East Europeans are force-fed the daily fare of OSI agitprop by “the Soros media”—the term is by now well established in over a dozen languages—such as the B-92 media conglomerate in Serbia.

The social dynamics Soros uses to penetrate the target countries is interesting. To thousands of young East Europeans to become a “Soroshite” represents today what joining the Party represented to their parents: an alluring opportunity to have a reasonably paid job, to belong to a privileged elite, for many to travel abroad. The few chosen for the future new Nomenklatura go to Soros’s own Central European University in Budapest. In all post-communist countries Soros relies overwhelmingly on the sons and daughters of the old Communist establishment who are less likely to be tainted by any atavistic vestiges of their native soil, culture and tradition. The comparison with the janissary corps of the Ottoman Army is more apt than that with the Communist Party. The new janissaries, just like the old, have to prove their credentials by being more zealous than the Master himself.

The key ideological foundation for Soros’s beliefs is the same: that all countries are basically social arrangements, artificial, temporary and potentially dangerous. A plethora of quotes from his writings will make it clear that he thinks that owing allegiance to any of them is inherently irrational, and attaching one’s personal loyalty to it is absurd. Like Marx’s proletarian, Soros knows of no loyalty to a concrete country. He could serve any—or indeed all—of them, if they can be turned into the tools of his Wille zur Macht. In 1792, it could have been France, in 1917 Russia. Today, the United States is his host organism of choice because it is so powerful, and its media scene is open to penetration by his rabidly anti-traditionalist and deeply anti-American worldview and political agenda.

Textbooks and educational curricular reforms pushed by Soros in Eastern Europe indicate that he is trying to perform crude dumbing down of the young. Within months of coming to power in October 2000 the “reformists” within Serbia and their foreign sponsors insisted that schools—all schools, from kindergarden to universities—must be reformed and turned from “authoritarian” institutions into poligons for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the opressive legacy of patriarchal past.” They started with primary schools, with a pilot program of “educational workshops” for 7-12 year olds. The accompanying manual, sponsored by UNICEF and financed by the Open Society, denigrades the view that the purpose of education is acquisition of knowledge and insists that the teacher has to become the class “designer” and his relationship with students based on “partnership.”

The reformers devote particular attention to the more active role of schools in countering the allegedly unhealthy influence of the family on students, which “still carries an imprint of nationalist, sexist, [anti-Roma] racist, and homophobic prejudices rampant in the society at large.” The time-honored Balkan tradition of slapping childrens’ bottoms when they exceed limits is now presented in the elementary classroom as a form of criminal abuse that should be reported and acted upon. Traditional gender roles are relativized by “special projects” that entail cross-dressing and temporary adoption of opposite gender names.

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. His core belief—that traditional morality, faith, and community based on shared memories are all verboten—is at odds even with the classical “open society” liberalism of Popper and Hayek, by whom he swears. His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. His goal is a new global imperium based that will be truly totalitarian. But he is making a colossal miscalculation. He does not realize that the unassimilated and unassimilable multitudes do not want to be the tools of his will to power. Illegal aliens in America, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany and Pakistanis in Britain have their own, instinctive scenario, and it does not entail leaving Soros and his ilk in positions of power, or alive.

Icelanders egg PM as global protests condemn corruption, banksters

As proceedings begin against Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, for the banking crisis of 2008, at least two thousand Icelanders took to the streets in two days of protest this weekend.  Iceland joins over a dozen other nations protesting economic measures taken out on the public while banks and large corporations receive bailouts. Class war is on, and it’s gone global.

Mass protests were also held in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Serbia, Romania, Poland, and the U.S., according to reports from several sources. Folks around the world reject corrupt banking practices and bailouts, while social services are cut and tens of millions have been forced into joblessness and homelessness.

Dori Sigurdsson, an Icelandic blogger, reports that when Parliament returned from recess on October 1st, they were met by a loud, angry crowd who tossed eggs, bread, dairy products and keys at them. People slept outside the Parliament building the night before its return session. He’s posted videos and several images.

Dori notes, “because of the lack of help from the Goverment for the public, many are now losing their houses and cars.” In a nation of only 317,000, 12 percent (or 40,000) have lost or are about to lose their homes, he says. Icelanders condemn the injustice of large companies and their CEOs having had their debts forgiven by government, while theirs are not.

Three other officials were charged with “misconduct in the lead up to, during and following the banking crisis,” reports Ice News. Parliament voted to prosecute only Haarde for negligence, under a 100-year-old law that has never before been used.

Icelanders are also angry that only the former PM is being charged. One commenter on the Ice News article noted, “Is this not a total betrayal of the people?”  And criminal, to reasonable minds.

Eggs hit Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, who rode into power as Iceland’s most beloved political leader with a 75% approval rating. She was installed in January 2009 after a coalition of Social Democrats and Left-Greens formed to replace the Independence Party-led coalition government, headed by Haarde, which was terminated.  Should other nations terminate their corrupt governments?

The Guardian notes widespread protest across Europe “amid growing fury at austerity measures being imposed… Disruption in more than a dozen countries this week included a national strike in Spain and a cement truck driven into the Irish parliament’s gates.”  Press TV also reported on protests planned in several nations last week. (See cement truck video here.)

Even in the US, thousands recently protested in Washington, D.C. for jobs instead of wars. ANSWER Coalition’s Brian Becker told reporters that the US spends a billion dollars every two days for its military invasions. That’s much lower than the trillion dollars a year that Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculates. We do know that Congress spends 58 percent of its discretionary budget on the military.

Many economists note that unemployment in the US is two to three times higher than what the Labor Dept. reports. In July, economists put the number at 28 percent, compared to the 9.5 percent rate reported by the feds. For September, the Christian Science Monitor showed unemployment at 16.7 percent, while the feds reported 9.6 percent.

In the US where 95% of the public rejected both Wall Street bailouts (under Bush and under Obama), we learned that banksters then rewarded themselves with million dollar bonuses. The boldness of their depravity is sure to have its rebound effect. Is it time to terminate this government, too?

The Guardian also reported that a “UN agency has warned of growing social unrest because of a long ‘labour market recession’ that could last until 2015.”  2015!

Thank goodness mortgage squatters are growing in number in the US. This is even before it was discovered that “foreclosure mills” fabricated documents to seize peoples’ homes. Some of those mills do not even hold legal title, Ellen Brown reports.

Another night, another 200 eggs.

In Iceland, the Guardian noted, “Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of three MPs to join the protesters, said: ‘There is a realisation that the IMF is going to wipe out our middle classes.’” That’s true of every nation sucked into the greed of banksters, the US included.

Protesters are out again right now, Monday night, Dori told me (6 pm Eastern, 10 pm Iceland time).

“The protest is still on, and it is peaceful – but with lots of noise that can be heard in the Parliament building.”

Both images by Dori Sigurdsson, used with permission.