I.F. Stone, court scribes and pseudo-journalism

Posted on March 13, 2012
by Matt Carr

I’m currently reading a collection of pieces by the outstanding radical journalist I.F. Stone (1907-1989), which rather amazingly, you can download for free here. Stone was a socialist and a fiercely independent journalist who was most famous for I.F. Stone’s Weekly, a newsletter which he wrote, produced and edited himself for 17 years.

Based in Washington, Stone had a close-up view of the U.S. political establishment, and he was a harsh and unrelenting critic of governmental lies, deceptions and abuses of power, and a lucid observer of the political pathologies resulting from America’s transformation into a ‘national security state’ during the Cold War.

The Best of I.F. Stone is well worth reading in full or dipping into, not only because Stone an elegant, erudite and witty writer, but also because he was a journalist, whose independence of mind put many of his fellow-professionals to shame, and whose observations about his profession are also highly relevant to the court scribes of our own era.

In an essay written in 1963 entitled About Myself, Stone once summed up his philosophy behind the Weekly in the following terms:

I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news. I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context called ‘the insignificant trifle’ – the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried conversation which illuminated the reality of the situation.

Stone frequently broke investigative scoops that other journalists missed – or preferred not to touch – despite the fact that his sources were generally in the public domain. He prided himself on his independence and believed that it gave him a very different vantage-point to the more co-opted journalists who were also based in Washington, regardless of the fact that

I made no claim to inside stuff – obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government. I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.

Stone compared his role as ‘a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy’ to journalists who worked for privately owned agencies and papers, in terms that are not exactly unfamiliar to our own times:

The reporter assigned to specific beats like the State Department of the Pentagon for a wire service of a big daily newspaper soon finds himself a captive. State and Pentagon have large press relations forces whose job it is to herd the press and shape the news. There are many ways to punish a reporter who gets out of line; if a big story breaks at 3 a.m, the press office may neglect to notify him while his rivals get the story. There are as many ways to flatter and take a reporter into camp – private-off-the-record dinners with high officials, entertainment at the service clubs.

Stone would undoubtedly have appreciated the Internet and the new powers it has given to ‘citizen-journalists’ who are not beholden to their corporate owners or employers. But he would probably not have been surprised by elite government insiders like Nick Robinson or Andrew Marr; by the likes of Alastair Campbell or Andy Coulson; by ‘hackgate’ or the Leveson Inquiry’s revelations about police ‘terror briefings’ to News International.

Stone would undoubtedly have recognized – and been appalled by – the Pentagon’s attempt to manipulate and control public opinion through ‘information operations’ on the Internet, through embedded war reporting and the granting of privileged access to on-message correspondents, or by planting sock-puppet military analysts in the mainstream media.

But if Stone was an astute observer of the ways in which governments manipulate and seek to manage the flow of information, he was also extremely critical of the reporters and editors who ‘let themselves be managed,‘ and whose attitude towards their government were often strikingly conformist as a consequence.

In this sense he would also find that very little has changed since the days when mainstream American newspapers – unlike Stone himself – failed to challenge McCarthyism. Today, too many journalists are little more than stenographers for power, and too many uncritically echo official lines and transmit messages delivered from on high or frame their reporting in accordance with the requirements of governments.

The result is a nominally ‘free’ media that – despite its global reach – is often as strikingly obedient and susceptible to manipulation as the newspapers and wire agencies of Stone’s era.

And in these conformist times, Stone is an inspirational example of that rare phenomenon: a real journalist who acted according to his principles rather than his career prospects and refused to allow himself to be managed.

____________________________

See also:
I. F. Stone: ‘All Governments Are Run by Liars’
from TakeApart
America’s first blogger has been dead since 1989.
We need more like him.


Go to a sports bar, a boomer dinner party, an Occupy Wall Street campout, a meeting of the Young Republicans of Palo Alto, lunch at Barney’s, a hipster hair salon, or to the quad of almost any journalism school in the United States of America or elsewhere. Drop the name I. F. Stone in conversation. The response will be about the same in every place: I. F. Who?

The question is something like an outrage. When I. F. Stone was alive, making history by challenging the narratives of his era’s entrenched history-makers, he was among the most controversial public figures of the time. Stone’s struggles and victories against complacency and deception deserve to be remembered, and emulated. In fact, in this day of cozy media corporate synergy and news as infotainment, it’s a borderline crime that a major motion picture is not rolling out for Oscar contention, immortalizing the exploits of a lone man who held entire governments to account for their actions.

"Stone’s gimlet eye for despots, bigots and hypocrites, big and small, was just as pointed back home in the United States of America."

At the risk of outlasting the attention spans of your interlocutors, you clarify: Born Isador Feinstein Stone in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 24, 1907; muckraking journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Camden Courier-Post and New York Post. In the early 1930s, I. F. “Izzy” Stone was one of the first public voices raised in America against the influence of an obscure and obstreperous failed German landscape painter—Adolf Hitler.

Stone’s gimlet eye for despots, bigots and hypocrites, big and small, was just as pointed back home in the United States of America. He left the New York Post in 1939 and wrote for a series of left-leaning political publications, which folded one after another. In 1953, tired of having his employers die out from under him, Stone founded his own paper.


I. F. Stone’s Weekly was, basically, a newsletter published from Stone’s kitchen table. The paper ran until ill health forced the self-described “radical journalist and scholar” to put it to bed in 1971. Although Stone’s DIY newssheet never had a circulation above 70,000, it ranked 16th in a 1999 New York University poll to determine the Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century, honored with the best of Edward R. Murrow, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, H. L. Mencken, Seymour Hersh, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and the entire New York Times.

A passion for truth, a profound distrust of authority (“All governments are run by liars” is an oft-repeated and oft-applicable quote), a fearless contempt for bullies, and indefatigable research and verification distinguished I. F. Stone’s reporting. Unfazed at being blacklisted, he led the attack on McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the U.S., and he was the first journalist to debunk the official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident (a misrepresented altercation that escalated into the Vietnam War).

Because of his complete editorial independence as a one-man operation, I. F. Stone has been called America’s first political blogger—despite the fact that the Internet wasn’t invented until long after Izzy had retired. (Explore I. F.’s full legacy at the Official Website of I. F. Stone, a thorough tribute run by his son, Jeremy J. Stone.)

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

AUGUST 30, 2011
"Democracy Now?"
by JOHN WALSH


Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time. The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown. Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.” Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies. Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Now transcript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.” But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one? It would appear so. Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions. (Emphasis mine.) I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing. There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life. It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which is more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims. But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk. What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections? Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya. Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psyops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission. That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it. But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.” It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk. But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion. One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar. It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention. Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort. Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate? That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day. But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests. Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya. There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam. Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument. Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle. With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama. In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions. And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism. Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya . It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis? Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

Libya - The return of colonialist bondage

Hakeem Babalola,
AfricaNews

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Libya's destruction, a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans.
The suffering of Libyans has just begun. For there can never be true liberation when your oppressor is the one who defines what your freedom should be. The ousting of Colonel Gaddafi, Libyan leader for 42 years, by the rebels backed western forces especially NATO is indeed a victory for the west whose fixation on Gaddafi's Libya has become worrisome.

It’s definitely not a victory for ordinary Libyans who would continue to suffer a lot of nervous strain and shock after the destruction. Neither is it a victory for the rebels who have been in excess jubilation since capturing Gaddafi’s official residence. “We are free,” they proclaimed in wild happiness.


But they have forgotten one important thing: that they are now slaves to all the countries that helped them kick out Gaddafi.


Apparently the rebels are not ordinary Libyan but a group of people who want the share of the oil with the help of foreign forces. Gaddafi’s main crime may be the fact that he refused to let the west control Libya’s resources, hence he must be eliminated by all possible means.


In their euphoria and in their haste to get rid of him, they forgot that none of the countries that backed them has the interest of Libyans at heart. Let them for once re-visit Iraq.

Gaddafi's mistake


As for Gaddafi, nothing lasts forever. The man should have known that 42 years of single-handedly ruling or administering a nation is more than too long. There is no doubting the fact that Gaddafi always means well for Libya unlike America, Britain, France, NATO, UN and other bereaved organisations claiming to love Libya more than God loves the Israelites. Ok I detest dynasty rule, and this seems to be Gaddafi`s undoing. A nation can never be the personal property of any man or group.


He should have relinquished power at a point in time and becomes the Father of the Nation or something similar. At 70 and having ruled for 42 years, Gaddafi should have embraced the uprising tactically no matter how painful it might be – at least to prevent his own legacy which the west actually wants to destroy.


But then power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. He should have known that America, Britain, France and others still consider themselves as the Alpha and Omega of this world – the owner of our earth.


And so they cannot tolerate any opposition from an Arab-African in the spirit of Gaddafi. This man should have realised he was not fighting the "rats" within his own environment but "desperate and hungry lions" outside his environment who have surreptitiously waited to devour him. Perhaps Gaddafi should have been more careful, especially when his colleagues in the African Union (AU) do not like his gut.


Gaddafi should have known that neither America nor its allies forget and forgive. He should have known that the oil in his background is enough to eliminate him by all means. He should have learnt a lesson from Iraq, a nation destroyed by Obama's predecessor on the pretence that the late Iraqi leader possessed Weapon of Mass Destruction which turned out to be a ruse.


It was simply a ploy by Mr. Bush to invade the oil rich nation. There is always an excuse to invade certain countries especially when the rulers of such countries refused to be a stooge.

Attacking a sovereign nation


I have stopped worrying each time the American or British or French government issues public propaganda justifying the need to attack Iraq or Afghanistan or Ivory Coast or Libya etc in order to protect the people.


I have stopped worrying because it is now obvious to me that this so-called "developed nations" must use ideas or statements often exaggerated or false intended for a political cause.


They need to sound as people oriented leaders to gain the much needed support otherwise they become irrelevant. They must use the empty rhetoric of politicians as an excuse to justify the partial occupation - of less powerful nations - especially Africa.


One wonders why United Nations has not ordered the attack on North Korea! And why it is so easy to bombard Libya under the pretext of protecting the civilians in that region. Even though more than 20,000 have lost their lives in the civil war, what’s coming out of people like David Cameron of Britain, Hilary Clinton of America and others is disturbing.


“I pledge support for a new era,” says Mrs Clinton, US Secretary of State. In what I consider a sinister statement, Mr Cameron says we would like to see Gaddafi punished for his crimes, adding: “We need a swift transition to a democratic and inclusive Libya,”


Inclusive Libya? Is it that necessary to include Libya in Libya’s affairs? Ah, to include the Libyan people is to further disrupt the agenda of a purpose. Let America, Britain and France take over Libya completely and divide it among themselves. For this would be the true picture of the main objective. Libyans and Africans in general aren’t capable of taking care of themselves hence the need to bombard every independent African State.


Rhapsody of Gaddafi's elimination


In February, the trouble barely started in Libya when America, France and Britain began to campaign for Gaddafi's exist. Their rhapsody of Gaddafi’s elimination was so soon then that it backfired; because discern minds wanted to know why these three countries were so fixated on Libya. Is it because like Iraq, it is an oil producing nation? Why was it so easy for these three countries to back the rebels? Did they know beforehand that Libya was to face uprising? What was behind their open support for the rebels? Why did they start freezing Libya's asset immediately the trouble started?


Can any African nation freezes Britain or US assets in any circumstance? What happened in Libya at that time was just unfolding but these nations had gone to town calling for the head of Gaddafi, saying he was killing his people. Will American or British or French government fold its arm if a group of rebels come together to topple the government?

"Oyinbo" always right mentality


I suppose it is easy for the western countries to attack or occupy African continent because they have mastered the art of colluding with African rulers. African people it seems hate their own image. Majority still probably believe that "Oyinbo" is always right.


This mental slavery is reoccurring in different forms: it may be the process of "protecting the people of Africa" from their dictators (as if there are no dictators elsewhere) whenever it pleases the western countries to destroy any African nation of their choice. Can't they leave African people to fight for ourselves? Or are we forever tied to their apron?


Destroy and build doctrine


It is interesting how easy our so-called intellectuals often blame their own rulers without asking the occupiers to leave Africa alone. Sad as it is, it's amusing many African intellectuals are yet to understand the game – the game of destroy and build. Let them go read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. That book reveals America’s brutal tactics in dealing with whomever or whatever nation it wants to deal with.


Africa has to be destroyed to enrich the western nations who are always the benefactor of such destruction.


Thereafter they would send their businessmen to get the contract to rebuild. The notorious International Monetary Fund (IMF) would offer to loan in order to further enslave the "protected civilians" even the country at large. Of course with the collaboration of the locals – governments included – whose thinking faculty is all about money.


How long will it take Africans to realise that no other nation or continent – no matter how powerful or rich – would sincerely volunteer to help Africa develop, or help build Africa? Each man to his own problem! It’s only Africans that can genuinely build Africa if we want. I salute Germany, Russia, China and others who have been diplomatic cautious and not aggressive in this regard.


Probing NATO forces


There has always been a double standard policy by the international organisations. Why is NATO spear-heading/spear-headed the attack on Libya while creating the impression that the rebels are acting on their own in the attacks in Tripoli? I agree with South Africa's deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe who has called for probe against possible human rights violations committed by NATO forces in Libya.


Reports have it that NATO conducted 46 strikes sorties in area around Tripoli. The question is whether the (court) will have the wherewithal to unearth that information and bring those who are responsible to book, including the NATO commanders on the ground.


NATO says target is not to kill Gaddafi and that it’s not coordinating with National Transition Council. Oh, really? Did NATO back the rebels with intelligence, logistics, ammunitions, training and aerial cover or not? Is this a violation of the letter and spirit of the UN charter or not? NATO nations clearly contravened UN arms embargo on Libya

Disappointing United Nations


As for the United Nations, the organisation has achieved very little in terms of solving conflicts around the world. It is hard to see what is united in United Nations. Why is the organisation always sending what it calls “Humanitarian Aid” only after the damaged might have been done?


I think the UN should cultivate the habit of preventing conflicts – by all means possible rather than sending aids. The United Nations seems to be failing in its responsibility to inspire peace among nations. The presence of UN since its inception in 1945 should have made the world a living place to live. Unfortunately, nations have been divided more than united. Perhaps this organisation needs to change tactics.


The UN resolution should be to protect and not to take side. On what principle did the UN back the rebels? Malam El-Rufai of Nigeria puts it succinctly: The swiftness at which the UN passes resolutions that water the grounds for the West's intervention in any country is directly proportional to the oil reserves in that country, as well as history of past grudges. The United Nations must not be seen as a partial or stooge of certain powerful countries.


Where is the African Union & Arab League?


African Union? The AU is becoming embarrassment. It’s supposed to be the mouth piece of Africa but has since become useless since the destruction started in Libya. The organisation is so much in slumber that foreign organisations like European Union had to take charge, dictating the pace of the uprising.


AU has further tarnished its image and disgraced the whole of Africa by not being the one in charge of an affair concerning its member state. It doesn’t matter its tactical approach, saying it will not “explicitly recognised the rebels”. Whatever that means! Arab League on the other hand is quick to say it is in “full solidarity with the rebels”. The position of these two important organisations added to the impunity with which the western countries violate Libya’s sovereignty.

Libyan rebels as stooges


My heartfelt sympathy goes to the Libyan people. Sure, people are always the victims in this circumstance. How can the rebels claim victory when it’s obvious the western countries fought the war? The rebels should have done it alone without the help of outsiders. By so doing they committed the same crime they accused Gaddafi of. The rebels like their foreign counterparts are misleading the people by claiming they’re fighting people's fight. I don't believe this.


The rebels are definitely fighting for their own share of the resources. Any insurgence that allows foreigners to attack own country cannot come clean of doing it for the same people they kill. How would they tell these nations to leave after they had helped them win the war? These "hegemonic" nations have come to stay and position themselves for contracts. Of course this is normal after spending a lot to help win the war. It’s the name of the game.

Period


Lindsay German says Libya won’t be able to get rid of pro-west government. Ms German, Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, London, adds that “rebels will form western imposed government”. The rebels in their murky acceleration for revenge or getting rid of Gaddafi disregarded post war trauma on the people and therefore committed the same crime they accused Gaddafi of. The rebels know quite alright that accepting the west to help fight Gaddafi’s forces would have adverse effect on Libya and its people. Yet no one cares.

Gaddafi and the western press


Gaddafi may not be as bad as being painted by the western press whose bias reporting about the uprising is alarming. Accordingly, every atrocity committed during the uprising is done by Gaddafi’s forces while the rebels are considered innocent. It is Gaddafi and not the rebels that destroyed Libya. It is Gaddafi forces that killed civilians and not the rebels.


Personally despite Gaddafi’s shortcomings, I prefer him to other African rulers who often cringe before America and Britain. For instance, I would choose Gaddafi’s eccentric and dictatorship over Hosni Mubarak and Olusegun Obasanjo’s conventional and “democratic” rule.


When you report in a war that one side is killing its people then the discerning minds of course would like to know what happens to the other side. Is the other side fighting to embrace? The way the international media reported and reporting the happenings in Libya is one-sided which is regrettable.


Gaddafi is not as bad as is being painted by the west. He is much better than many African rulers who are in the good book of America and co. Mubarak who is now facing charges of corruption and murder in a country he once ruled for example enjoyed America’s backing and patronage for more than thirty years until the last moment. However if there’s evidence that Gaddafi killed his own people randomly, then of course he will have to face the charges


National Transitional Council


What is the principle behind the National Transitional Council when in fact many former aids of Gaddafi who had defected may constitute NTC? I predict that NTC will soon run into trouble. And I predict that whatever they do to Gaddafi is what they too will get. But before then, let them be cautious in dealing with the west.


The west obviously is concerned with their own interest. For instance, they have started telling us that Pro-revolt foreign states will get contract to re-build Libya, meaning China, Germany and Russia to lose out because they did not support the revolt. We are told that NTC needs 300 billion euro to rebuild Libya. The money of course would go back the west whose citizens will get most of the contracts. Most importantly, the National Transitional Council should ask itself when last America or Britain or France invited African forces to help them deal with their internal problems!


True liberation


True freedom will come only if each African country can confront its own tyrants without the help of outsiders whose aim would always to turn Africa into a “burning volcano and a fire under the feet of invaders”. For me, the rebels’ proclamation of freedom simply because the west helped them destroy their country is false freedom never to be celebrated. It is bondage in freedom. Libya will now be ruled by their oppressors pretending to be friends. Iraq and Afghanistan are two examples.


Libya like Iraq will never be the same and that is the crux of the matter. Libya’s destruction is a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans. Sure Gaddafi has made mistakes but neither a monster nor a mad dog as being painted by several American presidents.


As for me even with his non-conformity, he is not as bad as most jejune African leaders who conform to code of conduct. Gaddafi usually speaks his mind at the UN General Assembly meeting unlike other African representatives who just nod their heads in agreement with the so-called superpowers. Such “being-my-self” attitude is enough to mark him out as the enemy.


Attacking a sovereign nation is the hallmark of destroy and build principle employed by the west especially America to pave way for a stooge government in the African region. It is unfortunate that the international journalists allow themselves to be used in this regard.


I consider NATO’s involvement; even UN as double standard. I believe passionately that the west cannot and will never give Africa and its people true freedom. It is Africans that can liberate themselves without outside help. How long will it take? That is what I don’t know.

Libya And The World We Live In

"Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?"
– Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011

By William Blum

September 01, 2011

A few hours later NATO hit a target in Tripoli, killing Gaddafi's 29-year-old son Saif al-Arab, three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, all under twelve years of age, and several friends and neighbors.

In his TV address, Gaddafi had appealed to the NATO nations for a cease-fire and negotiations after six weeks of bombings and cruise missile attacks against his country.

Well, let's see if we can derive some understanding of the complex Libyan turmoil.

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like "humanitarian".

If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn't want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how many protesters they shoot dead in their Freedom Square, the Triumvirate will simply not overthrow them.

If the Triumvirate decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate's imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate's oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.

If the Triumvirate wants to punish Gaddafi and his sons it will arrange with the Triumvirate's friends at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for them.

If the Triumvirate doesn't want to punish the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan it will simply not ask the ICC to issue arrest warrants for them. Ever since the Court first formed in 1998, the United States has refused to ratify it and has done its best to denigrate it and throw barriers in its way because Washington is concerned that American officials might one day be indicted for their many war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bill Richardson, as US ambassador to the UN, said to the world in 1998 that the United States should be exempt from the court's prosecution because it has "special global responsibilities". But this doesn't stop the United States from using the Court when it suits the purposes of American foreign policy.

If the Triumvirate wants to support a rebel military force to overthrow the government of Libya then it does not matter how fanatically religious, al-Qaeda-related,1 executing-beheading-torturing, monarchist, or factionally split various groups of that rebel force are at times, the Triumvirate will support it, as it did certain forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope that after victory the Libyan force will not turn out as jihadist as it did in Afghanistan, or as fratricidal as in Iraq. One potential source of conflict within the rebels, and within the country if ruled by them, is that a constitutional declaration made by the rebel council states that, while guaranteeing democracy and the rights of non-Muslims, "Islam is the religion of the state and the principle source of legislation in Islamic Jurisprudence."

Adding to the list of the rebels' charming qualities we have the Amnesty International report that the rebels have been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them "foreign mercenaries" but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers. Reported Reuters (August 29): "On Saturday, reporters saw the putrefying bodies of 22 men of African origin on a Tripoli beach. Volunteers who had come to bury them said they were mercenaries whom rebels had shot dead." To complete this portrait of the West's newest darlings we have this report from The Independent of London (August 27): "The killings were pitiless. They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came."

If the Triumvirate's propaganda is clever enough and deceptive enough and paints a graphic picture of Gaddafi-initiated high tragedy in Libya, many American and European progressives will insist that though they never, ever support imperialism they're making an exception this time because ...

The Libyan people are being saved from a "massacre", both actual and potential. This massacre, however, seems to have been grossly exaggerated by the Triumvirate, al Jazeera TV, and that station's owner, the government of Qatar; and nothing approaching reputable evidence of a massacre has been offered, neither a mass grave or anything else; the massacre stories appear to be on a par with the Viagra-rape stories spread by al Jazeera (the Fox News of the Libyan uprising). Qatar, it should be noted, has played an active military role in the civil war on the side of NATO. It should be further noted that the main massacre in Libya has been six months of daily Triumvirate bombing, killing an unknown number of people and ruining much of the infrastructure. Michigan U. Prof. Juan Cole, the quintessential true-believer in the good intentions of American foreign policy who nevertheless manages to have a regular voice in progressive media, recently wrote that "Qaddafi was not a man to compromise ... his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to." Is that clear, class? We all know of course that Sarkozy, Obama, and Cameron made compromises without end in their devastation of Libya; they didn't, for example, use any nuclear weapons.
The United Nations gave its approval for military intervention; i.e., the leading members of the Triumvirate gave their approval, after Russia and China cowardly abstained instead of exercising their veto power; (perhaps hoping to receive the same courtesy from the US, UK and France when Russia or China is the aggressor nation).
The people of Libya are being "liberated", whatever in the world that means, now or in the future. Gaddafi is a "dictator" they insist. That may indeed be the proper term to use for the man, but it must still be asked: Is he a relatively benevolent dictator or is he the other kind so favored by Washington? It must also be asked: Since the United States has habitually supported dictators for the entire past century, why not this one?

The Triumvirate, and its fawning media, would have the world believe that what's happened in Libya is just another example of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising by non-violent protestors against a dictator for the proverbial freedom and democracy, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt, which sandwich Libya. But there are several reasons to question this analysis in favor of seeing the Libyan rebels' uprising as a planned and violent attempt to take power in behalf of their own political movement, however heterogeneous that movement might appear to be in its early stage. For example:

They soon began flying the flag of the monarchy that Gaddafi had overthrown
They were an armed and violent rebellion almost from the beginning; within a few days, we could read of "citizens armed with weapons seized from army bases"3 and of "the policemen who had participated in the clash were caught and hanged by protesters"4 Their revolt took place not in the capital but in the heart of the country's oil region; they then began oil production and declared that foreign countries would be rewarded oil-wise in relation to how much each country aided their cause

They soon set up a Central Bank, a rather bizarre thing for a protest movement
International support came quickly, even beforehand, from Qatar and al Jazeera to the CIA and French intelligence
The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to discuss.

Not very long ago, Iraq and Libya were the two most modern and secular states in the Mideast/North Africa world with perhaps the highest standards of living in the region. Then the United States of America came along and saw fit to make a basket case of each one. The desire to get rid of Gaddafi had been building for years; the Libyan leader had never been a reliable pawn; then the Arab Spring provided the excellent opportunity and cover. As to Why? Take your pick of the following:

Gaddafi's plans to conduct Libya's trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US's dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.) For further discussion see here.
A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US."5
An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.
Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d'être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact.

Gaddafi's role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the Triumvirate. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations.

The claim by Gaddafi's son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign6 could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the "no fly zone" and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi's influence.
Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes.

In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya. He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. The Triumvirate will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands.

The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it's vital that powerful "enemies" be named and maintained.

For yet more reasons, see the article "Why Regime Change in Libya?" by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, and the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks — Wikileaks reference 07TRIPOLI967 11-15-07 (includes a complaint about Libyan "resource nationalism")

A word from the man the world's mightiest military powers have been trying to kill

"Recollections of My Life", written by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, April 8, 2011, excerpts:

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us ... I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. ... In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy". They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip.

The state of our beloved capitalist system, early 21st century

I pay attention to the fat content of my food, so I was pleased to find a can of Pam canola oil cooking spray that had 0 grams fat per serving. Great, can't do better than zero fat, can you? I used it often for a few months ... until one day I took a closer look at the "Nutrition Facts" ... Yes, it said 0 grams fat per serving. A serving. How big was that? Let's see ... "Serving Size about 1/4 second spray" ... Hmmm, how does one press down on a button for 1/4 second? Is it humanly possible? Even the manufacturer had to say "about". I had been taken. My hat is off to you Capitalist Robber Barons — You're good!

The Dow Jones industrial average of blue-chip stocks fell 635 points on Monday August 8.

On Tuesday it rose by 430 points.

Wednesday, the market, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fall again; this time by 520 points.

And on Thursday ... yes, it rose once again, by 423 points.

The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions.

Upon such marvels of mankind countless people build careers, others wager their life savings, philanthropic foundations and universities risk much of their endowments, and conservative sages deliver sermons to the world on the wisdom and sacredness of the free market.

Main Street is the climax of civilization.
That this Ford car might stand in front of
the Bon Ton store, Hannibal invaded Rome
and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.
– Sinclair Lewis, "Main Street", 1920

Do the economic fundamentals really change dramatically overnight? Or is our economic system as psycho as our foreign policy? The Washington Post's senior economic columnist, Steven Pearlstein, wrote on August 14th of the four days described above: "I suppose there are some schnooks who actually believe that those wild swings in stock prices last week represented sober and serious concerns by thoughtful, sophisticated investors about the Treasury debt downgrade or European sovereign debt or a slowdown in global growth. But surely such perceptions don't radically change each afternoon between 2 and 4:30, when the market averages last week were gyrating out of control."

Last month "Pope Benedict XVI denounced the profit-at-all-cost mentality that he says is behind Europe's economic crisis" as he arrived in hard-hit Spain. "The economy doesn't function with market self-regulation but needs an ethical reason to work for mankind," he declared. "Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good."8

"I am a Marxist," said the Dalai Lama last year. Marxism has "moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits."

"I don't believe in anything," said Barack Obama. "At least not really strongly." (No, I made that one up.)

Perhaps the worst outcome of the United States "winning the Cold War" is that countless progressive people think there's no alternative to the capitalist system. Seventy years of anti-communist education and media stamped in people's minds a lasting association between socialism and what the Soviet Union called communism. Socialism meant a dictatorship, it meant Stalinist repression, a suffocating "command economy", no freedom of enterprise, no freedom to change jobs, few avenues for personal expression, and other similar truths and untruths. This is a set of beliefs clung to even amongst many Americans opposed to US foreign policy. No matter how bad the economy is, Americans think, the only alternative available is something called "communism", and they know how awful that is.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA has endorsed Barack Obama for re-election.

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
– Frederic Bastiat, (1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author

Notes

For example, see: The Telegraph (London), August 30, 2011: "Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime." There is a plethora of other reports detailing the ties between the rebels and radical Islamist groups.
Washington Post, August 31, 2011
McClatchy Newspapers, February 20, 2011
Wikipedia, Timeline of the 2011 Libyan civil war, February 19, 2011
The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007
The Guardian (London), March 16, 2011
Reuters, January 21, 2009
Associated Press, August 11, 2011
Agence France Presse, May 21, 2010
"Yikes! Look who just endorsed Obama for 4 more years", WorldNetDaily, August 3 2011

Libya and the shameless rewriting of history

The repackaging of NATO’s reckless intervention as a clever war for liberty would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth beam with pride.

By Brendan O’Neill
Spiked

September 01, 2011 "Spiked" -- Not since Winston Smith found himself in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, rewriting old newspaper articles on behalf of Big Brother, has there been such an overnight perversion of history as there has been in relation to NATO’s intervention in Libya. Now that the rebels have taken Tripoli, NATO’s bombing campaign is being presented to us as an adroit intervention, which was designed to achieve precisely the glorious scenes we’re watching on our TV screens. In truth, it was an incoherent act of clueless militarism, which is only now being repackaged, in true Minitrue fashion, as an initiative that ‘played an indispensable role in the liberation of Tripoli’.

Normally it takes a few years for history to be rewritten; with Libya it happened in days. No sooner had rebel soldiers arrived at Gaddafi’s compound than the NATO campaign launched in March was being rewritten as a cogent assault. Commentators desperate to resuscitate the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and NATO leaders determined to crib some benefits from their Libya venture, took to their lecterns to tell us that their aims had been achieved and they had ‘salvaged the principle of liberal interventionism from the geopolitical dustbin’. In order to sustain these bizarre claims, they’ve had to put the real truth about NATO’s campaign into a memory hole and invent a whole new ‘truth’.

Over the past few days every aspect of NATO’s bombing campaign has been, as Winston Smith might put it, ‘falsified’. Since everybody now seems to have forgotten the events of just five months ago, it is worth reminding ourselves of the true character of NATO’s intervention in Libya. It was incoherent from the get-go, overseen by a continually fraying and deeply divided Western ‘alliance’ and with no serious war aim beyond being seen to bomb an evil dictator. It was cowardly, where all alliance members wanted to appear to be Doing Something while actually doing as little as possible. This was especially true of the US, which stayed firmly on the backseat of the anti-Gaddafi alliance. And it was reckless, revealing that military action detached from strategy, unanchored by end goals, can easily spin out of control.

Yet now, courtesy of the Ministry of Truthers, these deep moral flaws and political failings are being reinterpreted as brilliant stratagems. So the determination of Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama to present their bombing of Libya, not as a Western initiative but rather as a UN-approved act of uber-multilateralism, is now depicted as a brilliant, oh-so-sly decision that massively aided the rebellion by giving the impression that it was more an organic uprising than a power play aided by ‘evil’ Western outsiders. Commentators write about the West’s adoption of ‘humility’ as a ‘strategic device’. They claim the downplaying of America’s role in the setting up of the anti-Gaddafi alliance in March was designed to enhance the likelihood of success. As one observer now claims, ‘It suited everyone for America to appear to take a backseat. It suited the uprising.’

Here, the profound crisis of identity of the West, its increasing inability to project any kind of mission into the international sphere, is refashioned as the knowing adoption of ‘humility’, designed to boost Western influence in tyranny-ruled lands. In truth, the West-in-denial nature of the anti-Gaddafi alliance, where NATO presented its campaign as a non-American, non-gung-ho initiative, spoke to the corrosion of American authority in international affairs and to the post-Iraq moral paralysis of that entity once known as ‘the West’. So in March, it was reported that Washington was being distanced from the alliance and that Cameron was desperately seeking Arab League backing, in order to make sure ‘this did not look like a Western initiative’. It was shamefacedness about what the West is seen to represent today, and a recognition that American authority is now way more divisive than it was during the Cold War, which gave rise to this orgy of Western sheepishness.

Yet now, the moral hollowness and political incoherence of Western institutions revealed during the formation of the anti-Gaddafi alliance are being presented as clever disguises, designed to boost the fortunes of the rebels. Indeed, since the rebels took Tripoli, some observers have even started claiming that we’re witnessing the emergence of a ‘new era in US foreign policy’, a new ‘model for intervention’. According to Fareed Zakaria of CNN, it might have looked as if Obama’s approach was ‘too multilateral and lacked cohesiveness’, what with his decision to withdraw his fighter planes just 48 hours after the intervention started in March, but actually that was all part of a brilliant new strategy called ‘leading from behind’. Others sing the praises of ‘Obama’s light-footprint approach’, claiming that his strategy of ‘limited engagement’ has now produced a ‘nuanced victory’ in Libya. Here, disarray is repackaged as deftness, and a ‘model’ is retrospectively projected on to the mayhem that reigned during the creation and launch of NATO’s mission.

Likewise, the risk-aversion and commitment-phobia of the venture are being rehashed as superb strategies. So America’s insistence that its involvement in Libya would be ‘time-limited and scope-limited’, and Britain and France’s refusal to entertain the idea of posting troops in Libya, are apparently not signs of their almost pathological unwillingness to do anything that might incur a high moral or existential cost, but rather reflect their discovery, through careful analysis, of the fact that ‘intervention lite’ is the best way to shape world affairs. We’re told that the taking of Tripoli is a success for the new ‘model for intervention’, where the focus is, in the words of one commentator, ‘strike from the skies but keep Western boots off the ground, [as a way of] doing the right thing and ridding the world of a horrible dictator’.

Where the Ministry of Truth’s topsy-turvy slogan was ‘Ignorance is strength’, the Libya lobby’s rallying cry could be: ‘Cowardice is courage.’ In refashioning the risk-aversion of Western powers as a coherent strategy, a choice made by governments that have forensically worked out the best way to reshape nations, these Minitrue cheerleaders of NATO overlook the profound paralysis of the West and its armies today. The ‘no boots’ rule in relation to Libya sprang, not from clever strategic vision, but from the pusillanimous nature of modern governments, which are keen to intervene in foreign states’ affairs (for the perceived PR benefit of appearing tough) yet which want to avoid devoting life, limb or even much time to such interventions. The no-boots rule really speaks to a deep, conflictual trend in modern politics: our rulers, lacking any meaningful legitimacy at home, feel the urge to seek political purpose in foreign theatres – yet their very lack of legitimacy, their moral disarray, means that their foreign ventures are cautious, fearful things.

The part of the NATO campaign that has received the most thorough Minitrue makeover is the bombing of recent days. These raids are being reimagined as the final and decisive acts of a West determined to get rid of Gaddafi and install a new government. NATO’s ‘meticulously targeted’ assaults have created a ‘pathway’ for the rebels, we’re told. In truth, NATO’s latest outburst is best seen, not as the creator of new opportunities for the rebels, but rather as an opportunist stab by NATO forces to make political mileage from the disintegration of the Gaddafi regime. The decisive event in Libya in recent weeks has been the further corrosion of Gaddafi’s authority – and NATO is responding to that rather than having consciously brought it about.

Far from dealing a fatal blow to Gaddafi or providing a golden opportunity to the rebels, NATO’s bombing has been primarily reactive – to the internal combustion of Gaddafi’s writ. That is why this military venture has lasted six months, despite the fact that it consists of massive Western forces rallied against the isolated has-been Gaddafi: because NATO has adopted the role of observing and reacting to events rather than determining them. Thus only when it became clear even to faraway military observers that Gaddafi’s authority was beyond repair did NATO decide to up the ante. The recent bombs were less about achieving ‘pathways’ for a rebel takeover and more an attempt by NATO leaders to derive some political benefits from the slow-burning chaos in Libya, through firing PR missiles at a country whose authoritarian government had disintegrated.

The Ministry of Truthers are repackaging a reckless, strategy-free campaign launched by a deeply divided NATO as the principled act of super-clever men who have now liberated Libya. You’d never know from this Minitrue makeover that this apparently brilliant mission came close to collapse many times, as everyone from Obama to Berlusconi wondered out loud if it should be called off. What we’re witnessing is the shameless projection of active decision-making on to what was in fact a passive, decadent venture driven by PR imperatives rather than political vision. What really happened in Libya is that Gaddafi’s regime fell apart – yet now everyone is reading history backwards and locating this falling apart in the decisions made and actions taken by Western leaders. It’s not hard to see why they’re indulging in this falsification of history: it allows Cameron to pose as ‘brave but not bombastic’, and it allows laptop bombardiers to claim they were right about the wonderfulness of Western intervention. For these self-serving reasons, the buffoonish entry of cowardly NATO forces into a conflict involving a ridiculous dictator is hysterically talked up as a modern-day Normandy.

There’s one difference between the rewriting of the Libya venture and what went on in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Our history-warpers haven’t actually physically destroyed all the evidence showing that the bombing of Libya was in fact a reckless and vain military venture (and there’s mountains of such evidence). They don’t have to. Their powers of self-delusion are so strong, and the critical climate surrounding ‘humanitarian intervention’ so weak, that they simply need to magic up a few flimsy myths and, hey presto, the past is forgotten.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.

Dr. Denise Horn: Foreign Funding as a Strategy for Manipulation

Sujata Tuladhar
TUFTS Fletcher
Date: March 10, 2008

“Powerful states do engage in exploitation of NGO networks and are very specific about it,” stated Dr. Denise Horn, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Northeastern University.

At a talk entitled “NGO Funding and the Manipulation of Civil Society within Transitional States” organized by the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at The Fletcher School on February 19th, Dr. Horn discussed the development of a new international trend in which hegemonic states use funding for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a tool to control social agenda. The event was co-sponsored by Global Women, a student group at The Fletcher School that invites speakers and sponsors a mentoring program.

Using case studies from Moldova and Estonia, Dr. Horn established three main findings. First, she described how foreign countries help establish the rules for civil society. They can delineate the boundaries of the issues they identify as being important. An outstanding example is that of the United States, which through NGO funding, has significantly contributed to the emergence of a particular notion of democracy and the process of democratization. Only aspects of democracy valuable to US foreign policy have been funded. “Because the US has a lot of power and a lot of money to invest in democracy programs and policy, they get to determine what democracy looks like and what policies are democratic.”

Her second finding is that “foreign donors frame the debate within civil society and domestic politics by focusing on particular issues and funding local NGOs willing to support those targeted issues.” For instance, US-funded programs focus on free and fair elections, promote multi-party participation, encourage women in political parties and free market reforms as part of the process of democratization. NGOs who do not subscribe to these means of democratization are not funded, thus reducing their voice in political discourse.

Through analysis of the ‘requests for proposals’ published by donors and the proposals written in response to them, Dr. Horn also found that “because foreign funding can shape the language of the projects that develop, it shapes the way individuals perceive themselves vis-à-vis civil society and the state through the programs and social campaigns that are implemented by local NGOs.”

For instance, Moldova received heavy funding for programs dealing with human trafficking. The US approaches trafficking as an economic problem alone and thus fails to address the social and economic underpinning of the issue. Therefore, resulting programs focused on providing women with economic skills without understanding why women participate in trafficking in the first place. Similarly, in Estonia, US funding concentrated on domestic violence. As a result, people claiming to be victims or perpetrators of domestic abuse rose significantly.

Dr. Horn went on to elaborate that the decision of donor states such as the US to engage in funding NGOs is, in fact, a strategy to fulfill their respective national interests. Through funding NGOs, they shape what kind of civil society networks emerge, which will in turn serve their foreign policies. For instance, the US encourages countries to democratize because it believes that states that believe in the American notion of democracy are more responsive to US foreign policy. Most often, civil society is leveraged for such interventions because it serves as a less threatening approach.

How far this strategy has reached and whether or not other big states are also following similar strategies is a question yet to be answered. However, with a growing number of research studies like the one Dr. Horn pursues, there is bound to be a growing pool of knowledge on this issue soon.

Ukraine: The Clockwork Orange Revolution

via David Morrison
April 2011

“Well, I think any election [in Ukraine], if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence.” (President Bush, White House, 2 December 2004)

The elections in Ukraine last autumn were almost universally portrayed in our media as a David and Goliath contest between the new, squeaky clean, people’s champion, Viktor Yushchenko, and the corrupt state apparatus backed by Moscow, which was a relic of the Soviet era. Happily, so the story goes, the people’s champion prevailed, and democracy has finally come to Ukraine, and brought joy to George Bush’s heart. The story bears only a passing resemblance to reality.

Few journalists challenged that view, and those who did, for example, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in an article entitled Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat on 26 November 2004, came in for dog’s abuse.

OSCE Watch

Another proponent of an alternative view has been John Laughland, who writes for the Spectator and the Guardian, and is associated with the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

(The Group takes its name from the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, whereby the states in Europe, and the US and Canada, agreed that the then frontiers in Europe should stand. The Agreement was the product of what was called the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which acquired a permanent secretariat in 1992 and became the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).)

According to the Group’s website, http://www.oscewatch.org/, “its purpose is educational - to provide original research information to a broad range of people interested in human rights issues in the OSCE area” and “it does not receive funding from any government”. Certainly, there is a lot of interesting information on the Group’s website about the states that have emerged from the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia, information which is sadly lacking in our media. Generally speaking, the latter present the break up of the Soviet bloc and of Yugoslavia as a triumph of democracy over tyranny with barely a mention of the economic misery into which large swathes of the population were catapulted, while a few people became filthy rich by acquiring state assets for a pittance.

The Group had monitors on the ground in the Ukraine last autumn, and provided a continuous commentary on its website on the presidential electoral processes there. These involved a first round on 31 October, in which 24 candidates stood, and the then Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich narrowly beat Viktor Yushchenko (by 40.1% to 39.2%), and a run off second round on 21 November between Yanukovich and Yushchenko, in which, according to the Central Election Commission, Yanukovich again beat Yushchenko (by 49.5% to 46.6%). However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court after accusations of widespread electoral fraud, and a re-run was ordered, which took place on 26 December. This time a new Central Election Commission declared Yushchenko the winner (by 52.0% to 44.2%), and he was inaugurated on 23 January as the successor to Leonid Kuchma as the President of Ukraine.

The Group has now produced a report entitled Ukraine's Clockwork Orange Revolution. It is well worth reading. The following are a few of the points it makes.

West’s favourite

Yushchenko became the West’s favourite despite the fact that he was as much part of the old guard as his rival Yanukovich. Yushchenko himself was Prime Minister from December 1999 until April 2001, when he was voted out of office by the Ukrainian parliament.

He began his career in the agricultural division of the Soviet state banking system, Gosbank. In 1989, he became Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian division of the Agro-Industrial Bank (Agroprombank), which after independence became the independent Bank Ukraina. If he didn’t enrich himself at that point when he had the chance, he showed unique self-restraint.

Since his election, he has appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent ally in his Our Ukraine movement, as Prime Minister. She is a billionaire with vast interests in gas distribution: it is unlikely that she acquired this in a few years merely by hard work. She is wanted in Moscow under an Interpol warrant for, allegedly, bribing and blackmailing energy executives.

So the notion that Yushchenko and his associates are clean, in contrast to his opponent, is simply unsustainable.

One fact about Yushchenko has received very little attention in our media, namely, that he is married to a US citizen of Ukrainian descent, who worked for the Reagan administration. Her name is Yekaterina Chumachenko. In the 1980s, she worked as assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, then in different capacities in the White House Office of Public Affairs and the Department of the Treasury. From 1994-99 she was head of the Ukrainian representation at Barents Group LLC, which acted as a consultant to the National Bank of Ukraine, when Yushchenko was chairman. It was at this time that she met Yushchenko. Conceivably, this may have something to do with him being selected by the US as the candidate to support, despite his questionable past.

Yushchenko poisoned?

The most bizarre incident that occurred during the election campaign was Yushchenko’s allegation that he had been poisoned by dioxin-related substances, which left his face pock marked and disfigured. This, he claimed, took place in September during a meeting with Colonel General Ihor Smeshko, head of the Ukrainian security services, a meeting to which he had gone voluntarily and with the foreknowledge of his aides. This was presented in the West as the ultimate example of the Ukrainian state apparatus acting on behalf of his opponent. But the story doesn’t stand up: it makes no sense for the security services to poison him at a time when he was known to be in their company. In any case, if they wanted rid of him, why didn’t they employ some more reliable means, like putting a bullet in his head?

An alternative explanation for Yushchenko’s condition is offered by Chad Nagle in an article for Counterpunch entitled Booze, Salo and Mare's Milk... Did Yushchenko Poison Himself? . He claims that his medical records show that over the past ten years he has had a variety of intestinal problems, which were severely aggravated by booze at his meeting with Colonel Smeshko last September, and that he invented the poisoning allegation to cover up his serious health problems, lest the public revelation of them lessen his chances of election. Nagle also claims that, back in September last year, the clinic that treated Yushchenko (Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Vienna, Austria, which now publicly supports the dioxin story) described the poison rumours as "fallacious" and diagnosed Yushchenko with “severe pancreatitis, severe intestinal ulcers, gastritis, proctitis, peripheral paresis and a viral skin condition”.

Strategic orientation

The Western media gave the impression that there was a clear distinction between Yushchenko and Yanukovich on Ukraine’s strategic orientation, that the former saw its future in the EU, while the latter was wedded to a close and enduring alliance with Russia. But, according to BHHRG, no such clear distinction was evident in the electoral campaign in Ukraine.

Furthermore, the impression was given that Yushchenko stood for “economic reform”, which is the normal code word for free market economics, including privatisation of state assets. In fact, formally at least, there was very little difference between their economic programmes: Yushchenko fought on a rather populist platform promising more jobs, an increase in pensions and wages and an improved infrastructure for the country.

Yushchenko also undertook to withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq, if elected. Numbering 1,650, they are the sixth largest national contingent there (17 of them have been killed). And it now looks as if the withdrawal is actually going to happen: the BBC reported on 2 March that Yushchenko has announced a schedule for their departure beginning this month and ending in October. They serve under Polish command and Polish troops are also due to be withdrawn sometime this year.

Money from America

Another impression given by Western media was that Yanukovich had a near monopoly in the domestic media, even though it is almost all privately owned, a significant amount by allies of Yushchenko. According to the BHHRG, this was a gross exaggeration, and in the third election the opposite was the case – Yushchenko had a near monopoly.

Western media portrayed Yanukovich as Vladimir Putin’s man and implied that he received lots of assistance, including finance, from Russia. The BHHRG is of the opinion that although Yanukovich got the nod from Putin, he got very little else. One thing is certain: he got nowhere like the assistance that Yushchenko got from the West, including from the US taxpayer, through monies donated to local NGOs which supported his campaign. The total amount will never be known, but it probably runs into tens of millions of US dollars.

Money from the West funded the exit polls after the second election, which, by purporting to show that Yushchenko had won by a distance, were the trigger for the agitation which eventually led to the re-run of the election and Yushchenko’s final victory. President Clinton’s favourite pollster, Dick Morris, boasted after the event that he had provided advice on how to conduct the exit polls (Washington Post, 2 January 2005).

Foreign money funded the supposedly spontaneous “tent city” in Kiev, complete with concert stage and plasma screens, and paid for the rock bands to entertain the crowds. According to the BHHRG who had a representative on the spot throughout, the crowds were a fraction of the size – hundreds of thousands – reported in the Western media.

Ron Paul is a maverick Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Texas, and a member of the House International Relations Committee, with a particular interest in how US tax dollars are spent, since he believes in no, or at least very low, taxes. He told the Committee on 7 December 2004:

“We do not know exactly how many millions - or tens of millions - of dollars the United States government spent on the presidential election in Ukraine. We do know that much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that through a series of cut-out non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - both American and Ukrainian - millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.”

He went on to give specific examples of US tax dollars funding NGOs in the Ukraine that supported Yushchenko.

Needless to say, the US doesn’t allow this kind of foreign interference in its own elections – foreign funding of domestic elections is illegal in the US.

Clearly, when President Bush asserted that any election in Ukraine “ought to be free from any foreign influence”, he didn’t mean American influence.

This reminds me of a remark by Paul Wolfowitz a few months after the US invaded Iraq:

“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.” (New York Times, 22 July 2003)

Obviously, Americans aren’t foreigners, no matter where they are in the world.

Second election fraudulent?

But was the second election on 21 November fraudulent? Was Yushchenko cheated out of a victory, as the exit polls seemed to indicate? It’s impossible to say for certain, but it is certainly not unknown for exit polls to be wrong, even those carried out by impartial and expert polling organisations. They were wrong in Ohio last November: had they been accepted as definitive on that occasion, John Kerry, and not George Bush, would now be President of the US. Overall, President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, even though exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry.

Two exit polls were done in the Ukraine, giving quite different results. In its report, the BHHRG casts some doubt on the expertise with which one of them was carried out.

But wasn’t there widespread evidence of fraud, and didn’t the Supreme Court accept this evidence as compelling in ruling that the election be re-run? Well, no. The BHHRG report reproduces the Supreme Court ruling. It doesn’t mention fraud, but focuses on procedural violations, including violations that occurred in the pre-election period, for instance, in the drawing up of the election lists, composition of the election commissions, absentee voting and the media campaign.

Different electoral rules

But didn’t the fact that Yushchenko won the re-run on 26 December prove that the election on 21 November was fraudulent? Again, no. The momentum was clearly with Yushchenko once the election of 21 November was declared invalid. Furthermore, before the re-run on 26 December, the electoral rules were changed and so was the composition of the Central Election Commission.

On 7 December, in response to the outcry about the alleged misuse of absentee voting, parliament announced a package of reforms that amended the election law to limit absentee and home voting, which was restricted to ‘Group 1’ invalids and thereby excluded people infirm due to old age. Strange that none of the supposedly impartial outside observers complained about this disenfranchisement of the elderly, nor about the fact that the next day parliament approved a new Central Election Commission on which Yushchenko’s representatives formed an absolute majority and from which all pro-Yanukovich nominees were excluded.

US interference

The true story of the Ukrainian presidential elections is one of mass interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation by Western governments, especially the US. This type of interference began in Serbia in 2000, and was tried unsuccessfully in Belarus the following year. It was successful in Georgia in 2003, and now in Ukraine in 2004.

The notion that the US has a principled commitment to bringing representative government to every state in the world is an absurdity. The US has a principled commitment to bringing to power, and keeping in power, in every state in the world, governments that do its bidding, and it will interfere in any democratic process anywhere, anytime, in order to bring that about, if it serves its purpose to do so.

When he was running for election in 2000, it was possible to imagine that a Bush presidency would bring about a shift in US foreign policy towards less foreign intervention. His criticism of the Clinton era, as expressed by his foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, was that Clinton had engaged in intervention, which were not justifiable in terms of US national interests. Whatever substance there was to that stance, it disappeared after the events of 9/11: foreign intervention is now on the agenda with a vengeance: even though it was US foreign intervention in the Muslim world which triggered the events of 9/11, the US response has been to interfere a great deal more.

There are very few voices in the US who suggest that a more sensible response would be to interfere much less. One of them is Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA man who wrote Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror published last year. Another is the aforementioned Representative Ron Paul, who is a thoroughgoing isolationist and opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the opening lines of a remarkable speech he delivered in the House of Representatives on 26 January 2005:

“America's policy of foreign intervention, while still debated in the early 20th century, is today accepted as conventional wisdom by both political parties. But what if the overall policy is a colossal mistake, a major error in judgment? Not just bad judgment regarding when and where to impose ourselves, but the entire premise that we have a moral right to meddle in the affairs of others?

“Think of the untold harm done by years of fighting - hundreds of thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilian casualties, and unbelievable human and economic costs. What if it was all needlessly borne by the American people?

“If we do conclude that grave foreign policy errors have been made, a very serious question must be asked: What would it take to change our policy to one more compatible with a true republic's goal of peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations? Is it not possible that Washington's admonition to avoid entangling alliances is sound advice even today?”

EXPOSED: Indy “Newspaper” Funded by US Government

Deep network uncovered as fake “indy” rag is forced to disclose funding.
August 11, 2011
landdestroyer



by Tony Cartalucci

Bangkok, Thailand August 11, 2011 – After initially trying to downplay, obfuscate, and deny accusations that the Thai “independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper” Prachatai was in fact a US-funded propaganda front, a series of reports from Land Destroyer provided irrefutable evidence taken directly from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy website. Additional backpedaling, lying, and obfuscating prompted a follow-up report on Prachatai featuring several unlisted funding sources the duplicitous organization most likely thought were well buried.

Perhaps fearing a third onslaught, or in a desperate attempt to salvage its sagging legitimacy, just this week Prachatai has made a seemingly complete disclosure of their US government and US corporate foundation funding laying to rest its own supporter’s erroneous assumptions and defense that the organization was “just barely getting by.” In fact, they are doing quite well and receive millions of baht consistently year to year from the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and more recently USAID. In fact, an overwhelming 77% of Prachatai’s nearly 8 million baht in funding during 2011 has come directly from Uncle Sam – overt funding that would cut the legs of legitimacy out from under any alleged “news organization.”

Still, Prachatai’s utter contempt for both journalism and their readerships’ intelligence is best encapsulated in a cautionary reminder posted directly before their full financial disclosure which claims, “it is important to state here that none of our foreign donors has ever put up any demands connected to the funds they provided, nor did they ever interfere with our reporting.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such overt duplicity from an organization that has just spent the last 2 months trying to laugh-off, ignore, or otherwise belittle very legitimate concerns regarding its lack of transparency.

The nature of Prachatai’s political narrative is confrontational, directed at Thailand’s establishment, especially Thailand’s traditional institutions which exist independently of the Soros-funded networks of which Prachatai is now irrefutably exposed to be a part. Prachatai’s goal is to undermine the Thai establishment’s legitimacy while concurrently building up the legitimacy of the “international community,” global “civil society,” and to promote globalist talking points. A visit to Prachatai’s homepage reveals links running off to Soros-funded “Open Democracy,” Soros and Ford Foundation funded “Global Voices,” the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand’s globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand’s foreign-funded “civil society” movement both in and out of the country.

This is analogous to other US-funded organizations, opposition groups, and NGOs around the world including those of the recent US-funded “Arab Spring” which were all admittedly organized, trained, funded, and equipped (in some cases armed) years in advance by the United States government for the expressed purpose of initiating regime change throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. In fact, the New York Times itself would confirm this, stating that, “a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The New York Times would go on to explain that “the Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.”

The Funding

Digging into Prachatai’s globalist funding exposes further the inner workings of the Wall Street-London global corporatocracy and how they disingenuously promote their agenda through NGOs, “civil society,” and by perverting the noble ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Prachatai, like its counterparts throughout the world, is a disingenuous and complicit helping hand, pleading ignorance and literally saying “so what?” when the subject of just who funds them is brought up.

Image: Taken from Heinrich Böll Foundation’s 2009 Annual Report, globalist criminal bankster George Soros’ ubiquity within socially engineered movements is confirmed once again. Here he is listed under “Prominent Guests and Partners of the Foundation.” (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai, in their latest disclosure, breaks their funding down year-to-year. One name that is ubiquitous is George Soros and his Open Society Institute which has funded Prachatai millions of baht over the years, beginning in 2005 and continuing until today under the Soros-connected Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). HBF is a shameless promoter of supranational governance, pushing the verified fraud that is the “climate change agenda,” and even helped Soros’ Global Voices in networking and training Arab bloggers in 2009 to prepare them for the upcoming “Arab Spring.” HBF’s 32 page 2009 annual report is a globalist progress report that includes funding and supporting fake progressive-liberal projects and outright worldwide sedition.

Image: From IMS’s 2010 Annual Report, Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange pops in on a George Soros, ICFJ, IMS orgy of disinformation. Soros’ various funded revolutions have used Assange’s handy work as a rhetorical springboard to get into motion, therefore it is only right that Assange be given yet another stage upon which to promote the ongoing hoax that is Wikileaks. Anti-establishment, Julian Assange is not. (click image to enlarge)
….

Prachatai’s 2009-2010 funding included 1.79 million baht from the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), yet another Soros-funded globalist organization which also includes the US State Department and Soros-infested International Media Support (IMS) as donors. IMS literally trains foreigners to report the news according to Western standards & values, or in other words, according to the Western narrative. It is not surprising to see IMS active in every nation the US State Department is feverishly attempting to create unrest via its National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House organizations, including Belarus, China, Iran, Ukraine, and across the Middle East. In one truly surreal scene taken from IMS’s 2010 annual report, Wikileaks fraud Julian Assange appears via video link on a stage littered with the logos of IMS, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the Fortune 500 corporate-fascist infested “International Center for Journalists” which suspiciously includes Bank of America’s marketing officer and PR firm representatives from McKinsey & Co. and Edelman (a proud corporate sponsor of the Egyptian revolutions) on its board of directors.

Another name that seems quite active throughout Prachatai’s 8 year existence is the Rockefeller Foundation which initially bought the organization its computers and whose partner, the “Community Organization Development Institute (CODI),” funded Prachatai 1.89 million baht in 2004. CODI also boasts UN support as well as a partnership with the eugenicists at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There is also the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) which has funded Prachatai over half a million baht over the course of two consecutive years. FGHR is nothing more than a funding arm for the Sigrid Trust who also funds the International Crisis Group, an unelected US think-tank that meddles directly in the internal affairs of other nations. In fact, ICG member Mohammed ElBaradei literally led the US-funded Egyptian revolution, a true testament to the disingenuous nature of both these “democratic awakenings” and the dubious personalities attempting to wrestle control away from embattled regimes around the world.

We finally make our way to by far Prachatai’s number one patron, certainly not its own readership – not by a long shot – but rather the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most notorious, duplicitous organization in America, on par with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as it literally works in tandem with the CIA’s activities (along with USAID who is also funding Prachatai via their SAPAN project) in subverting governments and overthrowing entire nations for US corporate-financier interests.

NED has funded Prachatai 1.5 million baht 3 years consecutively, including this year, along with USAID who has funded Prachatai an additional 2 million baht under the guise of the SAPAN Project which presumes to teach Thais how to conduct local government.


Image: NED-funded Freedom House nominates Thailand’s NED-funded Prachatai for the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards earlier this year, thus illustrating the contrived circus that is the collective propaganda outfit’s legitimacy. (click on image to enlarge)
….

And while Freedom House is not listed by Prachatai as a contributing, as it itself is also funded by NED, it is surely worthy of honorable mention. Freedom House contributes a steady stream of rhetorical support and nominations for various contrived awards like this years’ “Deutsche Welle Blog Award” while Prachatai reciprocates by loyally copying and pasting any “helpful” Freedom House reports targeting Thailand or neighboring Asian nations.

NED & Freedom House are run by Warmongering Imperialists

Despite Prachatai’s own “who cares?” attitude regarding especially their NED funding, in reality there exists an immense disparity between the stated goal of NED, that is, “supporting freedom around the world,” and the backgrounds and stated agendas of those populating NED’s board of directors. The same could easily be said of Freedom House and its board of directors.

Upon that board of directors, who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” we should find Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.

Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.

We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.

The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.

A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”

An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.

The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.

Conclusion

Organizations like Prachatai that take money from these confessed, ill-intentioned, meddling, neo-imperialist dens of degeneracy, are either knowing accomplices or remiss beyond explanation. In either case, their legitimacy was not compromised the moment they decided to hide their funding, nor after they fully admitted the compromised nature of their paid-for “journalism” when pressured with persistent irrefutable evidence. Instead, Prachtai’s legitimacy was entirely lost the monument they decided to accept foreign funding in the first place – which as their own disclosure accounts for, was on day-one of their operations.

Image: While immature minds succumb to a Pavlovian giggle at the mere mention of the “New World Order,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, formally of the US State Department, has written an entire book about the inevitable global governance she has dedicated her life to ushering in.
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It is undeniable that a global oligarchy of incredibly wealthy and powerful corporate-financier interests are moving to consolidate power on a global scale, as imperialists have done throughout human history. They are destabilizing and destroying the old world, nation by nation, and replacing it with a new world of their own design, their “civil society.” However, we see the means and ends to which these megalomaniacs gravitate toward. These are means and ends that are entirely abhorrent, self-serving and encapsulated in horrifying dystopian nomenclatures such as “planetary regimes” (current White House Science Adviser John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 1977), or as recent US State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it, the “New World Order.”

Image: A graphical representation of the global corporate-financiers’ emerging “international order.” From the left policy is created by unelected corporate-funded think tanks, where funding arms, contrived international NGOs, and local street fronts like Prachatai carry it out. What is produced is a global, homogenous “civil society” that answers directly to the corporate-financiers that created it. (click image to enlarge)
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The nefarious, sycophantic helping-hands making this nightmare possible are foreign-funded traitors like Prachatai helping destabilize the old world and eagerly promoting the corporate-fascist funded, globally homogeneous “civil society.” They are traitors not just to the Thai people and the Thai nation, but traitors to humanity, traitors willfully helping usher in global governance under the dominion of autocrats who openly plot a global scientific dictatorship. Prachatai most certainly looked at NED’s board of directors during the last two months the Land Destroyer Report has been pressuring them to disclose their full funding and they most certainly know who the absolute degenerate scum is that funds them and what their warmongering agenda is. Yet they press on, indifferent, even elated over rubbing their duplicity in the face of their own readership.

Their financial disclosure begins with a brief history of Prachatai which includes sniveling accounts of police raiding their office, their director being arrested, and their foreign-funded propaganda website being systematically blocked by the Thai government, as if they are the victims of some gross injustice. They act as if anyone should be allowed to take foreign money, masquerade as journalists, intentionally mislead people, and undermine their own nation on behalf of a foreign government. As mentioned before, Prachatai, according to their own financial disclosure, year-to-year is anywhere between 77% and 100% funded by the US government and/or US corporate-funded foundations. This behavior here in Thailand, and around the world, by the helping hands of the globalist corporate-financier agenda is unacceptable.

Stand up to these paid-for liars. Expose their treachery and their disingenuous abuse of liberal and progressive ideals. Stand up against their horrific exploitation of human rights and representative governance to promote their paymasters’ agenda. The world does face tyranny and its name is globalization. Globalization can be seen in full effect across the deserts of Iraq, throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, and now along the shores of Libya and in the streets of Syria’s border cities. That is the globalist future fake-progressives like Prachatai are the harbingers of.

There will be no liberal singing tomorrows in Prachatai’s Thailand, just as there are no singing tomorrows in Egypt where the paymasters, like John McCain of the International Republican Institute, instrumental in funding and training the Egyptian protesters, now squat upon the Egyptian economy with Fortune 500 corporate-fascists prepared to sink their parasitic probosces into their “newly liberated” markets. That is the future of globalization. That is the future Prachatai is trying to sell Thailand, and just like with their funding, they will deny the truth until the very bitter end.

Notes: 1 US Dollar is equal to approximately 30 Thai Baht/baht. Prachatai also has done a “project” for the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” another NED-funded NGO front that most recently took part in a Bangkok demonstration for Malaysia’s NED-funded Bersih movement.

________________
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Anatomy of Globalist-Funded Sedition
And the true path to freedom.
by Tony Cartalucci

Editor's Addition: James Woolsey, formally of the Freedom House, is now on the "leadership council" of the Neo-Con warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracies along with fellow Freedom House members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, and Paula Dobriansky. Woolsey recently signed off on the Neo-Con war propaganda film Iranium - propaganda so absurd it calls into question the sanity of those that created it. This represents further evidence illustrating how disingenuous "democracy advocates" like Freedom House are and why those receiving their funding & support are cause for alarm.

Bangkok, Thailand July 12, 2011 - While we are told by the self-proclaimed arbiters of humanity the merits of "human rights," "transparency," and "open society," these arbiters themselves are the poorest examples of such values. People indeed do have the right to know who is behind their government, the organizations that support it, and the corporations that fund them, not just in the nations and governments targeted by these nefarious arbiters, but the arbiters themselves. To this end, we hack off one tentacle of the growing Anglo-American planetary regime and dissect it - because indeed, people have a right to know the truth.

Thailand's Prachatai, as described by their US government granters at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), allegedly provides the Thai public with "a credible and respected source of independent news reporting and editorial commentary." It is also supposed to "foster a higher level of public participation and community involvement in Thai political affairs."

However a quick visit to Prachatai's website reveals links running off to Soros-funded "Open Democracy," Soros and Ford Foundation funded "Global Voices," the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand's globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand's foreign-funded "civil society" movement both in and out of the country. These include Bangkok Pundit, New Mandala of the Australian National University, and Asia Sentinel which frequently features the writings of Giles Ungpakorn, Marxist color revolution leader, author of the "Red Siam Manifesto," and brother of Prachatai founder Jon Ungpakorn. In all, Prachatai is yet another propaganda outlet serving the globalist agenda.

A 2007 cached version of Prachatai's "About Us" page did in fact mention some of their funding - however, they have since taken this down and now entirely obfuscate their finances, year to year from their own readership in a display of grotesque hypocrisy even as they demand "transparency" and "openness" from the Thai government. The 2007 cached version is as follows:

Prachatai (www.prachatai.com or www.prachathai.com ) is an independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper established in June 2004 to provide reliable and relevant news and information to the Thai public during an era of serious curbs on the freedom and independence of Thai news media.

Prachathai was established by a group of concerned Thais who include a senior member of the Press Council of Thailand, a well-known lecturer in Journalism, two members of the Thai Senate, a number of senior journalists, and a number of Thai NGO leaders.

Prachatai has a 19-member Board and a 7-member Management Committee which consists of 4 Board representatives and 3 senior staff. Since January 2006 Prachatai also been registered as a Thai non-profit foundation, named The Foundation for Community educational Media.

On September 6th 2004, Prachatai began its daily publication on the web with a staff of one editor and five reporters. At present Prachathai has a staff of 14: a Manager, Editor, Network Co-ordinator, 6 central office reporters, 3 regional reporters, a web manager, and a finance officer.

Prachatai run the program by received funding support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (www.thaihealth.or.th/en), the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) (www.codi.or.th), the Open Society Institution (www.soros.org/initiatives/bpsai/about) and The Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org/iandr/SouthEastAsia) Regional Office in Bangkok supported the purchase of US$ 5,000 worth of computer equipment.

Prachatai Objectives

1. To provide the Thai public with access to reliable news and information relevant to developing and strengthening the democratic functions of Thai civil society.
2. To focus news coverage on the problems, concerns, activities and accomplishments of local communities and civil society movements and organisations.
3. To strive for freedom and independence of Thai news media.
4. To promote active public participation in Thai news media.

Prachatai Policies

1. To present news and information as professionally as possible with strict adherence to high ethical standards of journalism.
2. To establish mutual co-operation with civil society networks and organisations and particularly with community media such as community radio stations.
3. To recruit civil society leaders in various fields of work and experience as writers for Prachatai.
4. To promote active reader participation in Prachatai as volunteer news sources, writers, commentators, contributors to the Prachatai Community Section etc.
5. Not to accept paid advertising.

Contact to Prachatai:

Mr.Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Editor
E-mail: chuwat@prachatai.com
Send e-mail to Editorial Team at editor@prachatai.com

Ms.Supapan Palangsak, Network Co-ordinator
E-mail: netcord@prachatai.com

Ms.Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Manager
E-mail: chiranuch@prachatai.com

Mr. Jon Ungphakorn General Secretary of Prachatai and the Foundation for Community educational Media
E-mail: ungjon@prachatai.com

Mailing Address: 3/16 Soi Kerdsap, Bangkhunnon, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700 Thailand Telephone: 66-2-8860427 to 8
Facsimile: 66-2-4340906
E-mail: fcem@prachatai.com
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Interestingly enough, Rockefeller Foundation's regional office, who Prachatai cites as donating to them $5,000 for computer equipment, works in tandem with another globalist Fortune 500-funded NGO called "Ashoka" who features vulgar degenerate Sombat Boonngamanong as yet another key figure within Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" color revolution movement. These are foreign corporations and governments facilitating protests, even violence on the streets of a foreign nation - an act of war as pointed out by US Representative Ron Paul.


Photo: Thailand's "progressive hero" Sombat Boonngamanong thrives on negative attention. While foreign-funded, corporate-serving organizations like "Youth Leader" expound the virtues of Sombat and his contributions to Thailand via the UN and Fortune 500-funded organizations like Ashoka, his recent support of globalist-stooge billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front appears more opportunistic than virtuous.
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To illustrate the depth these contrived organizations go through to lend themselves badly needed, otherwise non-existent legitimacy, yet another contrived, globalist corporate-financier funded organization, "Youth Leader" wrote a reality-defying biography of degenerate foreign-subsidized meddler Sombat Boonngamanong calling him "one of the most respected leaders’ and cultural activist in Thailand." Of course, "Youth Leader" makes no mention of how the Thai "red shirt" movement is a street-front for globalist-backed Thaksin Shinawatra. Such convenient omissions allows statements like "most respected" to go unchallenged by a readership overwhelmed by slanted, biased, flowery depictions they emotionally want to be true.

Other organizations not listed by Prachatai that have funded their activities over the years include the Sigrid Rausing Trust (who also funds the International Crisis Group) via the Global Human Rights Fund (2008) and the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prachatai receives rhetorical support from these organizations as well as from Freedom House and a myriad of contrived, corporate-funded organizations that shower the seditious website with various "awards" year to year in yet another example of how the global elite lend themselves otherwise nonexistent legitimacy.

While some may claim receiving such funds from organizations with names like "Freedom House" and "National Endowment for Democracy" is entirely innocuous and that these foreign interests are truly dedicated to worthwhile causes, any thorough examination of these organizations reveals otherwise.

NED & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists

We begin with the board of directors of NED, who, judging by their supposed mission to support "freedom around the world," should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their "entry into the complex China market easy." Surely Bohn's ability to manipulate China's political landscape through NED's various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears "conflict of interests" is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.

Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as "Vice President of Congressional Relations" as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil's ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.

We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED's board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this "think tank" are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses." As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.

The "Statement of Principles," signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Of course by "international order" they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House's Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.

A PNAC "Statment on Post-War Iraq" regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House's Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring "Which Path to Persia?" report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC's latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America "hostage" and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to "help the Libyan opposition."

An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses' Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.

The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause. It is also safe to say that the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.

Globalist "Freedom" vs. Real Freedom

Organizations like Prachatai are knowingly or unknowingly carrying along the agenda of modern day imperialists. While they propose they are there to keep the Thai government "in check" for the Thai people, in reality they are doing so for the global corportocracy to which they clearly owe their existence to. When Thaksin Shinawatra was in office, Prachatai's US funding was meant to keep him from becoming a nationalist autocratic strongman. With him removed and fully in the service of the global corporatocracy, Prachatai's job has now become undermining the current government and making way for an indebted Thaksin to return to power and pay back his Western patrons. While Thailand will be free of any Thai autocrat, they will be subservant to the various unelected authors and signatories within PNAC calling for American global hegemony. Ironically, the "freedom" Prachatai believes it is bringing to Thailand through the nihilistic destruction of Thailand's traditional institutions will usher in the very colonialism those institutions had warded off for centuries - Thailand being the only Southeast Asian nation to escape European colonization.

Image: Illustrating how large the actual globalist machine is and how small both Thaksin Shinawatra and Prachatai are in comparison. Either is entirely replaceable at any given moment. And while Prachatai was initially receiving money to keep Thaksin in order and now being used to undermine the current Thai establishment, it is being done so not for the Thai people's benefit, but for a globalist empire attempting to prevent any strong nationalist entity from controlling land, resources, and people they presume dominion over. (click image to enlarge)
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Reading the "Rebuilding of America's Defenses" and the various documents promoted by PNAC and now FPI and even throughout the CFR, Brookings Institution and others, we can see clearly the proposal and pursuit of an international order presumably led by Anglo-American interests with their system of "liberal democracy" imposed upon the collective population of the world. They are building a global homogeneous network they refer to as "civil society" to slowly take over the roles various national governments carry out today. When these networks reach critical mass, or when an opportunity to remove a nationalist government presents itself, governments are toppled, stooges installed, and "civil society" groomed until it reaches full maturity. In turn this "civil society" then interfaces with the myriad of contrived "international institutions" like the UN, IMF, World Bank, the fraudulent International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization.

Image: Illustrated are the policy think-tanks funded by the largest, most powerful corporations on earth and representing their collective interests. They are the unelected authors of human destiny. Their funding arms channel money into propaganda, contrived international arbiters, illegitimate "international institutions" like the International Criminal Court, and of course the various armies of dupes, propagandists, and street fronts that operate within any given nation. (click image to enlarge)
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In the United States we can see the total pervasion of the global corporatocracy in everyday life. Laws and regulations are dictated by unelected policy wonks within organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which are then rubber-stamped by feckless, corporate-serving politicians and enforced by an omnipresent, ever growing national security force. We are then expected to believe, somehow, that these very same organizations are "exporting" freedom, democracy, and human rights abroad. Indeed they are not. What is being built in Thailand, as is being built in Malaysia, across the US-backed destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, and along Russia's western border with Belarus, is the modern day equivalent of Britain's or even Rome's imperial networks.

Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by "integrating" them into their own Roman "international order."

From HistoryWorld.net:

'His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.'

Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72

Indeed the alleged freedom proposed to us by the likes of NED and Freedom House and the myriad of foreign-funded dupes carrying out their agenda, is nothing more than features of our own enslavement. As Egyptians rallied to "free" themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and let in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group. Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the "Arab Spring," took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly "freed" Cairo. Their agenda is "economic liberalization" and the total integration of Egypt's once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy.

Conclusion

True freedom comes from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and economic and political independence as a community, as a state or province, and as a sovereign nation. Those peddling the allure of regional integration and global community are nothing more than the very same agents that peddled Roman culture to young British tribesmen. For all the promise the Roman Empire proclaimed, it festered into a despotic global regime which eventually collapsed in on itself leaving much of the world in a feudal dark age for centuries. The promise of globalization is no different, with cracks already beginning to show, it is disingenuous in both its intentions and its final outcome. We will not be one world living harmoniously, we will be one world under the thumb of a degenerate self-anointed elite.

If you are not self-sufficient and truly independent, you are not free, no matter how many paper ballots you stuff in a box, no matter how many marches you attend, and no matter how many Freedom House wires you cut & paste onto your foreign-funded "independent media" website. As long as you depend on these corporations, you belong to them, just as you did as a child dependent on your parents. The real revolution, and the real political awakening will occur when the people realize they do not need politicians or their contrived systems to lead and manage them, and begin using their own two hands to work from the land beneath them their own existence.