Jardiner le monde

DE LA MONDIALISATION A LA CIVILISATION

Devoir jardiner le monde

Michel Lhomme
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Quelle différence entre le droit coutumier des peuples menacés et le droit de la mondialisation fondé sur le droit occidental ? Dans le droit romain, l'homme est propriétaire de la terre. Chez les Amérindiens ou les Mélanésiens, la terre est propriétaire des hommes.

Dans toutes les communautés naturelles menacées aujourd'hui par la mondialisation, que ce soit en Amérique du Sud, chez les Papous ou à Wallis, la prétendue propriété de la terre est le cœur du problème. La propriété de la terre est-elle individuelle ou collective ? Doit-on jouir de la terre ensemble ou solitairement ?  Le modèle de la mondialisation économique prône la ''maison'', le home sweet home, el dulce hogar, le silence du privé. De la propriété collective de la terre surgit l'indivision. Dans le conflit mapuche du Chili , par toutes les soustractions de terrain opérées durant le conflit entre droit coutumier et droit néocolonial, les familles ne disposent plus que de micro-terres, à peine quelques arpents sur lesquels elles tentent de subsister. Souvent, elles n'y parviennent pas ou tout juste. Un chef mapuche tenait de son grand-père une bonne quantité de terres : c'est à peine si aujourd'hui, il lui reste un hectare ! Et pourtant, de cet unique hectare qui lui reste, le reste de la communauté l'envie : les autres n'ont carrément plus rien !

Elles sont en effet devenues rares les familles mapuches qui, après trois générations conservent encore une bonne quantité de terres, une quantité disons significative qui irait au-delà de la bicoque et du petit jardin. Mais le problème foncier n'est pas qu'une question d'appauvrissement.

En fait, la plus grande partie des sociétés du monde tirent leur origine des terres agricoles. Or, les communautés orientées vers la terre se font de plus en plus rares et elles perdent en général leurs ''propriétés''. En fait, les vieilles communautés agricoles d'autrefois n'ont rien à voir avec les grandes fermes de la Beauce ou de la Haute Marne. On touche là à un autre usage de la terre, quelque chose de profondément différent du monde du commerce agricole ou de l'agro industrie. Ainsi, la France, terre paysanne par excellence a vu petit à petit disparaître ces petites fermettes et ces vieux métayers. Le monde agricole n'est plus, la paysannerie indienne si chère à Gandhi s'estompe et meurt peu à peu à coups de suicides de paysans surendettés. Partout où une civilisation meurt,  c'est que la culture agricole s'éteint. De fait, il y a deux caractéristiques globales essentielles à la mondialisation : les nouvelles technologies et l'urbanisation. C'est la fin du monde paysan et des traditions paysannes, c'est le règne des mégapoles africaines.

Du coup, dans les derniers groupements paysans ou traditionnels, la terre cultivée depuis des siècles ne nourrit même plus son petit monde. Les réformes agraires des années 60-80 tentèrent dans de nombreuses régions du globe de solutionner le problème foncier mais elles échouèrent toutes dans l'imposition d'un modèle néo-marxiste de collectivisation forcée, un modèle coopératif importé en rupture avec la coutume. 

Dans toutes les sociétés modernes, contrairement aux illusions communistes des anthropologues du début du vingtième siècle, la propriété collective des moyens de production - quelque chose de foncièrement différent en fait du communautarisme et du solidarisme traditionnel ou spontané - dynamita le foncier et fit de la terre nouvellement et arbitrairement distribuée les derniers lopins d'une survie programmée. De fait, les réformateurs agraires propulsèrent leurs réformes par la violence systémique, menant au nom de la lutte des classes et de l'égalité fictive une guérilla armée avec l'objectif inavoué mais bien réel de déplacer les populations récalcitrantes au son martial des chants révolutionnaires ou des discours simplificateurs. Ce qui n'était pas authentiquement révolutionnaire c'est-à-dire collectivisateur, mondialisateur, internationaliste devait quitter ses terres pour rejoindre les bidonvilles de la grande ville. Ainsi, les guérilleros travaillèrent aussi à leur manière pour la mondialisation heureuse en coupant les peuples de leurs traditions, en les déracinant de leurs terres ancestrales, en les urbanisant de force. Ce ne fut pas tout à fait dans les mouvements guérilleros la terre pour tous mais la lutte des sans terres pour que la terre puisse revenir à l'appareil organisateur de la subversion. La violence était encadrée et disciplinée vers l'expropriation forcée avec un évident sens stratégique du déplacement collectif et de la spoliation matérialiste.

Aujourd'hui, au Pérou, en Bolivie en Colombie comme au Chili, on assiste à une fusion culturelle étrange et singulière : la fusion de l'agricole et de l'urbain dans une pratique économique libérale et individualiste qui reconnaît sans illusion aucune le règne mercantile de la pure utilité et de la raison économique. Montagnes, vallées, rivières et torrents sont cadastrées tandis que les blocs de béton armé assaillent les littoraux avec le brouillard de Lima comme triste  horizon.

Or, la terre est propriétaire des hommes. La terre sublime les hommes. La nature n'est pas matérialiste parce que créatrice, elle transcende le sol pour la contemplation. Elle le modèle et le transforme en de sublimes jardins. Le jardin est l'origine de la civilisation, le premier artefact mondialisé de l'inutile, de l'esthétique et du sacré.

Dès lors, le grand défi peut-être de l'humanité mondialisée est de rejardiner le monde.

 

War Porn

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Watching the Same Movie About American War for 75 Years

 

Ex: http://www.tomdispatch.com

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a small reminder that, in return for a donation of $100 or more to this site, you can choose between signed, personalized copies of two top-notch cultural histories of American war in our time: Christian Appy’s superb new book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, and my own The End of Victory Culture. Just check out our donation page for details and for other book possibilities as well, including my new book Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. And remember that your donations really do keep this site rolling along! Tom]

Yes, they’ve become “the greatest generation” (a phrase that’s always reminded me of an ad line for a soft drink), but they didn’t feel that way at the time. As Susan Faludi pointed out in her classic book Stiffed and as I experienced as a boy, the men who came home from World War II were often remarkably silent about their wartime experiences -- at least with their children. My father, who had been the operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had a couple of pat stories he would fall back on, if pressed, but normally only spoke of the war when angry. I can, for instance, remember him blowing up and forbidding my mother and me from using a nearby grocery store because, he claimed, its owners had been “war profiteers.” On rare occasions, he might pull out of the closet an old duffel bag filled with war souvenirs, including a Nazi armband (undoubtedly traded with someone who had been on the European front) and several glorious orange or white silk maps of Burma, assumedly meant to take up no space in a commando’s kitbag. These were thrilling moments of my childhood, though again my dad had little to say about what we looked at.

Otherwise, his war was a kind of black hole in family life.  But for boys like me, that mattered less than you might expect for a simple reason: we already knew what our fathers had experienced at war. We had seen it at the movies, often with those fathers sitting silently beside us.  We had seen John Wayne die on Iwo Jima and war hero Audie Murphy (playing himself) gun down the Germans.  We had been with Doolittle’s Raiders over Tokyo for more than 30 seconds, had won back Burma, landed on Omaha beach, and fought island by island across the Pacific toward Japan. And of course, as our “victory culture” assured us we would, we had won.

It’s hard to emphasize just how formative those war movies were for so many of us, especially if you add in the cheap, all-green sets of World War II toy soldiers with which we reenacted movie versions of our fathers’ war on our floors and, of course, the sticks, and later toy guns, with which we so gloriously shot down “Japs” and “Nazis” in any park or backyard.  A whole generation of young Americans would go off to Vietnam stoked on John Wayne & Co. -- on a version of war, that is, that our fathers never told us hadn’t happened.

Ron Kovic, who came back from Vietnam in a wheelchair and wrote the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, recalled the experience vividly: "I think a lot of us went to Vietnam with movie images of John Wayne in our minds. On a reconnaissance patrol, I remember once imagining that I was John Wayne."

Today, former diplomat and whistleblower Peter Van Buren explores the way American war movies, from World War II to today, have produced a remarkably uniform vision of how American war works, one that, in its modern form, is undoubtedly once again lending a helping hand to our latest conflicts. In May 2011, Van Buren arrived at TomDispatch, just back from a 12-month State Department assignment in Iraq embedded with the U.S. military. In his first piece for this site, he reported on the heroic balderdash that embedded reporters -- think, for instance, of Brian Williams -- delivered to the American people about the U.S. military.  It was, he wrote then, a kind of “war pornography.” (“Let me tell you that nobody laughed harder at the turgid prose reporters used to describe their lives than the soldiers themselves.”) So think of today’s piece, almost four years later, as a reprise on that theme with an embedded Hollywood stepping in to take the place of all the Brian Williamses of our world. Tom

War Porn 
Hollywood and War from World War II to American Sniper 
By Peter Van Buren

In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don't get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates. In the meantime, Americans are clearly finding it difficult to remain emotionally roiled up about our confusing wars in Syria and Iraq, the sputtering one in Afghanistan, and various raids, drone attacks, and minor conflicts elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand).American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

There’s Only One War Movie

Wandering around YouTube recently, I stumbled across some good old government-issue propaganda.  It was a video clearly meant to stir American emotions and prepare us for a long struggle against a determined, brutal, and barbaric enemy whose way of life is a challenge to the most basic American values. Here's some of what I learned: our enemy is engaged in a crusade against the West; wants to establish a world government and make all of us bow down before it; fights fanatically, beheads prisoners, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of its followers in inhuman suicide attacks.  Though its weapons are modern, its thinking and beliefs are 2,000 years out of date and inscrutable to us.

Of course, you knew there was a trick coming, right? This little U.S. government-produced film wasn’t about the militants of the Islamic State. Made by the U.S. Navy in 1943, its subject was “Our Enemy the Japanese.” Substitute “radical Islam” for “emperor worship,” though, and it still makes a certain propagandistic sense. While the basics may be largely the same (us versus them, good versus evil), modern times do demand something slicker than the video equivalent of an old newsreel. The age of the Internet, with its short attention spans and heightened expectations of cheap thrills, calls for a higher class of war porn, but as with that 1943 film, it remains remarkable how familiar what’s being produced remains.

Like propaganda films and sexual pornography, Hollywood movies about America at war have changed remarkably little over the years. Here's the basic formula, from John Wayne in the World War II-era Sands of Iwo Jima to today's American Sniper:

*American soldiers are good, the enemy bad. Nearly every war movie is going to have a scene in which Americans label the enemy as “savages,” “barbarians,” or “bloodthirsty fanatics,” typically following a “sneak attack” or a suicide bombing. Our country’s goal is to liberate; the enemy's, to conquer. Such a framework prepares us to accept things that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster. Racism naturally gets a bye; as they once were “Japs” (not Japanese), they are now “hajjis” and “ragheads” (not Muslims or Iraqis). It’s beyond question that the ends justify just about any means we might use, from the nuclear obliteration of two cities of almost no military significance to the grimmest sort of torture. In this way, the war film long ago became a moral free-fire zone for its American characters.

*American soldiers believe in God and Country, in “something bigger than themselves,” in something “worth dying for,” but without ever becoming blindly attached to it. The enemy, on the other hand, is blindly devoted to a religion, political faith, or dictator, and it goes without saying (though it’s said) that his God -- whether an emperor, Communism, or Allah -- is evil. As one critic put it back in 2007 with just a tad of hyperbole, “In every movie Hollywood makes, every time an Arab utters the word Allah… something blows up.”

*War films spend no significant time on why those savages might be so intent on going after us. The purpose of American killing, however, is nearly always clearly defined. It's to “save American lives,” those over there and those who won’t die because we don't have to fight them over here. Saving such lives explains American war: in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, for example, the main character defuses roadside bombs to make Iraq safer for other American soldiers. In the recent World War II-themed Fury, Brad Pitt similarly mows down ranks of Germans to save his comrades. Even torture is justified, as in Zero Dark Thirty, in the cause of saving our lives from their nightmarish schemes. In American Sniper, shooter Chris Kyle focuses on the many American lives he’s saved by shooting Iraqis; his PTSD is, in fact, caused by his having “failed” to have saved even more. Hey, when an American kills in war, he's the one who suffers the most, not that mutilated kid or his grieving mother -- I got nightmares, man! I still see their faces!

*Our soldiers are human beings with emotionally engaging backstories, sweet gals waiting at home, and promising lives ahead of them that might be cut tragically short by an enemy from the gates of hell. The bad guys lack such backstories. They are anonymous fanatics with neither a past worth mentioning nor a future worth imagining. This is usually pretty blunt stuff. Kyle’s nemesis in American Sniper, for instance, wears all black. Thanks to that, you know he’s an insta-villain without the need for further information. And speaking of lack of a backstory, he improbably appears in the film both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in Sadr City, a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad, apparently so super-bad that his desire to kill Americans overcomes even Iraq's mad sectarianism.

*It is fashionable for our soldiers, having a kind of depth the enemy lacks, to express some regrets, a dollop of introspection, before (or after) they kill. In American Sniper, while back in the U.S. on leave, the protagonist expresses doubts about what he calls his “work.” (No such thoughts are in the book on which the film is based.) Of course, he then goes back to Iraq for three more tours and over two more hours of screen time to amass his 160 “confirmed kills.”

*Another staple of such films is the training montage. Can a young recruit make it? Often he is the Fat Kid who trims down to his killing weight, or the Skinny Kid who muscles up, or the Quiet Kid who emerges bloodthirsty. (This has been a trope of sexual porn films, too: the geeky looking guy, mocked by beautiful women, who turns out to be a superstar in bed.) The link, up front or implied, between sexuality, manhood, and war is a staple of the form. As part of the curious PTSD recovery plan he develops, for example, Kyle volunteers to teach a paraplegic vet in a wheelchair to snipe. After his first decent shot rings home, the man shouts, “I feel like I got my balls back!”

*Our soldiers, anguished souls that they are, have no responsibility for what they do once they’ve been thrown into our wars.  No baby-killers need apply in support of America's post-Vietnam, guilt-free mantra, “Hate the war, love the warrior.” In the film First Blood, for example, John Rambo is a Vietnam veteran who returns home a broken man. He finds his war buddy dead from Agent Orange-induced cancer and is persecuted by the very Americans whose freedom he believed he had fought for. Because he was screwed over in The 'Nam, the film gives him a free pass for his homicidal acts, including a two-hour murderous rampage through a Washington State town. The audience is meant to see Rambo as a noble, sympathetic character. He returns for more personal redemption in later films to rescue American prisoners of war left behind in Southeast Asia.

*For war films, ambiguity is a dirty word. Americans always win, even when they lose in an era in which, out in the world, the losses are piling up. And a win is a win, even when its essence is one-sided bullying as in Heartbreak Ridge, the only movie to come out of the ludicrous invasion of Grenada. And a loss is still a win in Black Hawk Down, set amid the disaster of Somalia, which ends with scenes of tired warriors who did the right thing. Argo -- consider it honorary war porn --reduces the debacle of years of U.S. meddling in Iran to a high-fiving hostage rescue. All it takes these days to turn a loss into a win is to zoom in tight enough to ignore defeat. In American Sniper, the disastrous occupation of Iraq is shoved offstage so that more Iraqis can die in Kyle’s sniper scope. In Lone Survivor, a small American “victory” is somehow dredged out of hopeless Afghanistan because an Afghan man takes a break from being droned to save the life of a SEAL.

In sum: gritty, brave, selfless men, stoic women waiting at home, noble wounded warriors, just causes, and the necessity of saving American lives. Against such a lineup, the savage enemy is a crew of sitting ducks who deserve to die. Everything else is just music, narration, and special effects. War pornos, like their oversexed cousins, are all the same movie.

A Fantasy That Can Change Reality

But it's just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can't gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can't bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It's just entertainment. So what?

So what do you, or the typical 18-year-old considering military service, actually know about war on entering that movie theater? Don’t underestimate the degree to which such films can help create broad perceptions of what war’s all about and what kind of people fight it. Those lurid on-screen images, updated and reused so repetitively for so many decades, do help create a self-reinforcing, common understanding of what happens “over there,” particularly since what we are shown mirrors what most of us want to believe anyway.

No form of porn is about reality, of course, but that doesn’t mean it can’t create realities all its own. War films have the ability to bring home emotionally a glorious fantasy of America at war, no matter how grim or gritty any of these films may look. War porn can make a young man willing to die before he’s 20. Take my word for it: as a diplomat in Iraq I met young people in uniform suffering from the effects of all this. Such films also make it easier for politicians to sweet talk the public into supporting conflict after conflict, even as sons and daughters continue to return home damaged or dead and despite the country’s near-complete record of geopolitical failures since September 2001. Funny thing: American Sniper was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture as Washington went back to war in Iraq in what you'd have thought would be an unpopular struggle.

Learning From the Exceptions

You can see a lot of war porn and stop with just your toes in the water, thinking you've gone swimming. But eventually you should go into the deep water of the “exceptions,” because only there can you confront the real monsters.

There are indeed exceptions to war porn, but don’t fool yourself, size matters. How many people have seen American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, or Zero Dark Thirty? By comparison, how many saw the anti-war Iraq War film Battle for Haditha, a lightly fictionalized, deeply unsettling drama about an American massacre of innocent men, women, and children in retaliation for a roadside bomb blast?

Timing matters, too, when it comes to the few mainstream exceptions. John Wayne’s The Green Berets, a pro-Vietnam War film, came out in 1968 as that conflict was nearing its bloody peak and resistance at home was growing. (The Green Berets gets a porn bonus star, as the grizzled Wayne persuades a lefty journalist to alter his negative views on the war.) Platoon, with its message of waste and absurdity, had to wait until 1986, more than a decade after the war ended.

In propaganda terms, think of this as controlling the narrative. One version of events dominates all others and creates a reality others can only scramble to refute. The exceptions do, however, reveal much about what we don’t normally see of the true nature of American war. They are uncomfortable for any of us to watch, as well as for military recruiters, parents sending a child off to war, and politicians trolling for public support for the next crusade.

War is not a two-hour-and-12-minute hard-on. War is what happens when the rules break down and, as fear displaces reason, nothing too terrible is a surprise. The real secret of war for those who experience it isn't the visceral knowledge that people can be filthy and horrible, but that you, too, can be filthy and horrible. You don't see much of that on the big screen.

The Long Con

Of course, there are elements of “nothing new” here. The Romans undoubtedly had their version of war porn that involved mocking the Gauls as sub-humans. Yet in twenty-first-century America, where wars are undeclared and Washington dependent on volunteers for its new foreign legion, the need to keep the public engaged and filled with fear over our enemies is perhaps more acute than ever.

So here’s a question: if the core propaganda messages the U.S. government promoted during World War II are nearly identical to those pushed out today about the Islamic State, and if Hollywood’s war films, themselves a particularly high-class form of propaganda, have promoted the same false images of Americans in conflict from 1941 to the present day, what does that tell us? Is it that our varied enemies across nearly three-quarters of a century of conflict are always unbelievably alike, or is it that when America needs a villain, it always goes to the same script?

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book,We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A Tom Dispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His latest book isGhosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Peter Van Buren

La droite est plus activement liberticide que la gauche

François Billot de Lochner, président de la Fondation de service politique, répond à Présent. Extraits

« Un renforcement du contrôle de l’Etat sur internet a été voté à l’Assemblée nationale, sous couvert de lutte contre le terrorisme. 1984 de George Orwell, c’est maintenant ?

Nous nous en approchons dangereusement. La liberté d’expression est fortement malmenée depuis un demi-siècle dans notre pays : l’accélération de la dictature politico-médiatique prend des proportions telles que nos mentalités anesthésiées risquent de se réveiller trop tard.

Un projet de loi similaire avait été présenté par l’UMP en 2010. Finalement, droite et gauche, même combat dans la répression de la liberté d’expression ?

Oui… et non ! Le combat est le même, mais la droite est plus activement liberticide que la gauche : c’est effrayant, mais c’est ainsi. La loi Pompidou-Pleven de 1972 restreint considérablement la liberté d’expression, dans une indifférence générale, et la loi Chirac-Raffarin de 2004 est un véritable outil au service de la dictature de la pensée. Ce n’est pas moi qui le dis mais Laurent Joffrin, rédacteur en chef du Nouvel Observateur, qui écrit dans un éditorial retentissant, juste avant le vote de la loi, que la France va se doter d’un outil unique au monde, mis à part dans les pays de dictature…

Vous proposez, parmi vos trente mesures pour sauver la France, d’abroger les lois de 1972 (Pleven) et de 2004 (création de la Halde), ainsi que toutes les lois mémorielles (Gayssot, Taubira…). Qui oserait le proposer dans son programme, alors que les associations antiracistes (CRAN, MRAP, LICRA), le CRIF et les médias le dénonceront à tous coups ?

Un parti courageux, ou un candidat très courageux… Il ne faut jamais désespérer des hommes ! Prenons par exemple la loi liberticide de 2004 : il suffit de la lire pour comprendre à quel point elle abîme la liberté d’expression. Un grand débat sur ce sujet avant 2017 est nécessaire et salutaire : je l’ouvre, et ne compte pas baisser la garde sur ce sujet pendant les deux ans à venir. Les partis politiques et les candidats s’en rendront très vite compte. Et s’ils restent liberticides, je communiquerai haut et fort sur le sujet ! »

L'opposition démocratique en Russie

L’OPPOSITION DÉMOCRATIQUE EN RUSSIE

Ce n’est pas celle que vous croyez !

Ivan Blot
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Lorsque vous lisez ou écoutez les médias occidentaux, vous avez l’impression qu’il y a en Russie une forte opposition au président Poutine qui est incarnée par des noms qui reviennent en boucle : Navalny, Oudaltsov, et autrefois Nemtsov. Pourtant, cette impression ne cadre pas du tout avec d’autres informations. 

Le président Poutine, selon des instituts de sondage indépendants comme Levada, bénéficie d’un soutien de l’ordre de 85% de la population : du jamais vu, à comparer avec le soutien de 18% en France pour le président Hollande. On ne parle pas de déstabilisation du régime français alors qu’on évoque souvent ce thème pour la Russie !

De plus, les personnalités évoquées par les médias occidentaux font des scores très faibles aux élections. Le malheureux Nemtsov, assassiné peut-être par une filière islamiste, a fait dans sa ville natale de Sotchi, 18% des voix seulement. Serguei Oudaltsov n’a pas fait de score électoral significatif et se consacre plutôt à des manifestations de rue. Quant à Alexei Navalny, ancien étudiant de l’université de Yale aux Etats Unis, il obtint un maximum de voix de 30% dans une élection municipale à Moscou. Le parti libéral Yabloko fait des scores très faibles.

Curieusement, on ne parle guère de la vraie opposition qui a des parlementaires et une forte base électorale. Le plus grand parti d’opposition à Poutine reste le parti communiste, ce que l’on se garde bien de dire car le citoyen occidental moyen pourrait préférer Poutine à un retour du communisme. De plus, ce parti communiste se veut patriote ce qui est fort mal vu en Occident. En 2011, le parti de Poutine, Russie Unie, a obtenu 238 sièges avec plus de 32 millions de voix. Le parti communiste de Ziouganov obtint 19% des suffrages soit 12,5 millions de voix et 92 sièges. Russie Juste, que l’on considère comme socialiste modéré obtint 64 sièges et plus de 8 millions de voix. Le parti libéral démocrate de Jirinovski, ultra nationaliste, a eu 11,6% et 7,6 millions de voix donc 64 sièges. Iabloko, le parti libéral adoré en Occident a eu moins de 4% des voix donc aucun député à la Douma d’Etat (Assemblée Nationale).

C’est donc étonnant de voir nos médias si assoiffés d’opposition à Poutine ne jamais citer les grands partis d’opposition et leurs chefs Ziouganov (communiste) Mironov (social-démocrate) Jirinovski (ultra nationaliste) au profit de quelques personnalités artificiellement lancées dans les médias. On dirait que le monde occidental ignore la représentation démocratique au profit des opposants de rue ultra minoritaires.

Aux élections présidentielles, on retrouve les mêmes tendances. En 2012, Poutine obtint 63,6% des voix dès le premier tour. Son principal opposant communiste Ziouganov obtint 17,1%, puis le milliardaire libéral Prokhorov obtint presque 8% et le nationaliste Jirinovski 6% environ. Russie Juste, social-démocrate n’a eu que 4% à peine. La participation électorale fut des deux tiers.

On refuse de voir la réalité : les électeurs russes sont en majorité poutiniens et l’opposition reste dominée par le parti communiste de Russie. De plus, la plupart des partis représentés au parlement donc représentant effectivement une fraction populaire importante, sont patriotes. D’autres sondages évoqués dans la brochure de club de Valdaï de 2013 sur l’identité nationale révèlent que 81% des Russes se disent patriotes ou très patriotes. Les élites occidentales trouvent commodes de se prononcer contre Poutine mais en réalité elles s’opposent à l’immense majorité de la société civile russe qui défend les valeurs traditionnelles et le patriotisme. Ces élites ont d’ailleurs des problèmes croissants avec leur propre opinion publique : en France, en Angleterre, en Italie, et plus récemment en Allemagne, on observe une montée du patriotisme et des valeurs conservatrices surtout chez les jeunes. Ces élites devraient plutôt s’interroger sur leur défaveur croissante dans le public plutôt que de rêver sur une déstabilisation de la Russie parfaitement invraisemblable dans l’état de la sociologie politique de la Russie. 

Si l’on considère que la démocratie est un régime « par le peuple et pour le peuple » comme c’est écrit dans l’article deux de la constitution française, la Russie est bien plus démocratique aujourd’hui que la plupart des régimes d’Occident (sauf la Suisse). Les valeurs des élites politiques russes et du peuple russe sont les mêmes : valeurs traditionnelles, notamment chrétiennes et patriotisme. Par contre, en Occident, il y a un fossé croissant entre le peuple et les élites politiques comme je l’ai montré dans mon livre « l’oligarchie au pouvoir ». En France, MM. Bréchon et Tchernia, du CNRS ont montré que seulement 35% de la population fait confiance au gouvernement et au parlement ; Les partis ont le score catastrophique de 18% de confiance et le président Hollande n’a guère plus de soutien. Curieuse démocratie que la France où les citoyens donnent au régime la note de satisfaction de 3,9 sur 10, chiffre qui ne fait que baisser depuis une vingtaine d’années. Ce chiffre est de 8 sur 10 en Suisse, pays où les citoyens sont consultés fréquemment par référendums.

La Russie est actuellement attachée à son président qui a une légitimité démocratique réelle que beaucoup de présidents de pays occidentaux pourraient lui envier. C’est peut-être la source d’une jalousie maladive ! Mais l’opposition démocratique représentée au parlement défend elle aussi des valeurs traditionnelles et patriotiques, ce qui est inadmissibles pour des médias occidentaux formés aux valeurs de mai 68, hostiles à la famille, aux traditions, aux racines historiques et chrétiennes et détestant le sentiment patriotique lui-même. Donc ces médias se raccrochent à des opposants de rue très minoritaires dans l’électorat, adulés par les élites politiques occidentales mais peu reconnues au sein du peuple russe. En fait l’hystérie antirusse n’est pas seulement tournée contre Poutine mais aussi contre l’opposition démocratique représentée au parlement russe. C’est pour cela que l’on fait silence sur cette opposition.

Cette attitude est un aveu : en réalité les manipulateurs de l’opinion en Occident se méfient de tous les peuples, et cette méfiance leur est d’ailleurs justement retournée : 38% seulement des citoyens en France (études de Bréchon et Tchernia déjà citées) disent faire confiance aux médias pour dire la vérité !

Il ne fait donc pas s’attendre à une déstabilisation de la Russie mais plutôt à une déstabilisation en Europe occidentale où les dirigeants ont d’ores et déjà perdu beaucoup de leur légitimité populaire !

 

La Russie répond à l’appel du Venezuela

La Russie répond à l’appel du Venezuela

Auteur : Oscar Fortin

Ex: http://zejournal.mobi

Le président Obama doit se mordre les doigts d’avoir ouvert toutes grandes les portes à la présence militaire russe en Amérique latine et dans les Antilles. Par son décret, véritable déclaration de guerre contre le Venezuela, il aura incité ce dernier à faire appel aux bons offices de la Russie et de sa technologie militaire pour assurer sa défense. S’il s’agit pour le Venezuela d’un appui de grande importance, c’est pour la Russie, à n’en pas douter, une opportunité tout à fait inattendue. Une occasion en or pour Poutine de donner la pareille à Washington qui se fait si présent politiquement et militairement en Ukraine, dans les Balkans, la Mer noire et la Méditerranée.

La nouvelle du jour qui va interpeller très fortement les bien-pensants des politiques guerrières étasuniennes est que la Russie et le Venezuela vont se joindre aux manœuvres militaires défensives planifiées pour cette fin de semaine (14 et 15 mars) dans tout le Venezuela. Le ministre de la Défense, Serguéi Shoigu, a accepté l’invitation de son collègue vénézuélien, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, pour que la Russie participe aux exercices militaires des forces de défense antiaérienne et aux manœuvres de tir de lance-roquettes multiple russe BM-30 Smerch. À ceci s’ajoute l’entrée amicale de navires russes dans les ports du Venezuela.

Cette participation de la Russie à la défense du Venezuela contre les menaces d’invasion militaire de la part des États-Unis ne sera pas sans rappeler à Obama sa propre participation militaire en Ukraine et dans la majorité des pays frontaliers à la Russie. Il sera mal placé pour se plaindre du fait qu’un pays ami, la Russie, apporte son soutien à un autre pays ami, le Venezuela, lequel est menacé d’invasion par son pire ennemi, les États-Unis.

Nous ne sommes évidemment plus en 1962, lors de la crise des missiles à Cuba où la menace nucléaire était à 90 kilomètres des frontières étasuniennes. Au Venezuela, il n’y a pas d’armes nucléaires et les frontières des deux pays sont séparées par des milliers de kilomètres. De plus, l’Amérique latine d’aujourd’hui n’est plus celle des années 1960. De nombreux peuples sont parvenus à vaincre les résistances oligarchiques et impériales pour conquérir démocratiquement les pouvoirs de l’État et les mettre au service du bien commun. De nombreux organismes régionaux se sont développés. Leur présence devient une caution de l’indépendance et d’intégration des peuples de l’Amérique latine. C’est le cas, entre autres, d’UNASUR, de MERCOSUR, de l’ALBA, de CELAC.

De toute évidence, l’Oncle SAM s’acharne à ne pas reconnaître ces changements et continue de vivre comme si l’Amérique latine était toujours sa Cour arrière dont il peut disposer à volonté. Tôt ou tard, il faudra qu’il change son attitude et ses politiques. Ce ne sont plus ces peuples qui doivent changer leurs politiques et leur régime de gouvernance, mais c’est plutôt lui qui doit procéder à ce changement. Ce sont maintenant les peuples qui lui tordent le bras pour qu’il change ses vieilles habitudes impériales en celles de partenaire respectueux et respectables.

- Source : Oscar Fortin

Le Vénézuela «extraordinaire menace pour les Etats-Unis»

par Jean-Paul Baquiast

Ex: http://www.europesolidaire.eu

En préambule d'un décret imposant un régime de sanctions (interdiction d'accès au territoire, gel des avoirs bancaires) à 7 responsables vénézueliens impliqués dans la répression violente de manifestations ayant eu lieu récemment et dirigées contre le président Maduro, Barack Obama a publié une déclaration estimant que le Venezuela était responsable «d'une inhabituelle et extraordinaire menace pour la sécurité nationale et la politique extérieure des États-Unis».

 

Le Vénézuela est ainsi assimilé à la Syrie, l'Iran ou la Birmanie, sans mentionner la Russie. Barack Obama a ajouté qu'il déclarait « l'urgence nationale pour faire face à cette menace.»

Le président Nicolas Maduro a vivement réagi à la décision américaine. «Le président Barack Obama [...] a décidé de se charger personnellement de renverser mon gouvernement et d'intervenir au Venezuela pour en prendre le contrôle», a-t-il affirmé, au cours d'un discours télévisé de deux heures. En réponse, il a décidé de nommer ministre de l'Intérieur le chef des services de renseignements sanctionné par les Américains. Le plus haut responsable diplomatique à Washington a également été rappelé.

Nous avions indiqué ici, dans un article du 11 février, que tout laissait penser qu'un coup d'Etat contre le président Maduro, successeur de Hugo Chavez et aussi détesté à Washington aujourd'hui que ne l'était ce dernier de son vivant, était sans doute en préparation.

Effectivement, peu après, le 13 février, le maire de Caracas, et figure de l'opposition Antonio Ledezma avait été arrêté par les services de renseignement, soupçonné d'avoir encouragé un coup d'Etat dans le pays. Nous ne pouvons évidemment nous prononcer sur ce point. Néanmoins il est connu de tous que les Etats-Unis, directement ou par personnes interposées, ont l'habitude de faire tomber les régimes qui s'opposent à eux en provoquant de tels pronunciamientos.

Il est clair que la nouvelle déclaration de Barack Obama contre le Vénézuéla, ressemblant beaucoup à une déclaration de guerre, ne pourra qu'être interprétée à Caracas et dans les autres capitales, ainsi qu'au sein du BRICS, comme préparant une intervention militaire. Ainsi pourrait disparaître un gouvernement dont le grand tort est d'être non aligné sur Washington et allié de la Russie, sans compter le fait que le Vénézuela dispose d'importantes réserves de pétrole sur lesquelles les grandes compagnies pétrolières américaines aimeraient bien mettre la main.

L'affaire ne sera pas cependant aussi facile qu'Obama semblait le penser. On apprend ce jour 12 mars que la Russie va se joindre aux manœuvres militaires défensives planifiées pour cette fin de semaine (14 et 15 mars) dans tout le Venezuela. Le ministre de la Défense, Serguéi Shoigu, a accepté l'invitation de son collègue vénézuélien, Vladimir Padrino Lopez. La Russie participera aux exercices militaires des forces de défense antiaérienne et aux manœuvres de tir de lance-roquettes multiple russe BM-30 Smerch. À ceci s'ajoutera l'escale de navires russes dans les ports du Venezuela.

L'Amérique ne pourra évidemment pas comparer cela à la crise des missiles de 1962 l'ayant opposée à Cuba et indirectement à l'URSS. Mais nous pouvons être certain que l'accusation sera lancée. Il serait pertinent alors de rappeler à Obama sa propre participation militaire, directement ou via l'Otan, en Ukraine et dans la majorité des pays frontaliers à la Russie, à des manoeuvres militaires plus qu'agressives.

Jean Paul Baquiast

Europe: la leçon islandaise

EUROPE : LA LEÇON ISLANDAISE

Ils ne veulent pas de cette Europe-là!

Jean Bonnevey
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Alors que, pour cause de petite stratégie politicienne pour éviter le naufrage des départementales, les partis systémiques se rattachent à l’Europe, certains européens, eux, ne perdent pas le nord.

L’Islande a annoncé jeudi avoir retiré sa candidature à l’Union européenne, deux ans après l’arrivée au pouvoir d’un gouvernement eurosceptique de centre-droit qui promettait de mettre un terme au processus lancé en 2009. Comme quoi, on peut tenir ses promesses électorales et se passer de l'UE.

Cette décision est l’application simple du programme de la coalition de centre droit arrivée au pouvoir en 2013, qui promettait de mettre fin au processus d’adhésion. « Les intérêts de l’Islande sont mieux servis en dehors de l’Union européenne », a justifié le ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Il avait fallu des circonstances très particulières pour que Reykjavik dépose sa candidature en 2009, le premier gouvernement de gauche de l’histoire du pays, une grave crise financière qui avait ébranlé la confiance des citoyens dans leurs institutions nationales et la chute de la valeur de la couronne, qui avait suscité l’envie d’adopter l’euro…envie vite passée depuis. Plus de six ans après, l'effondrement d'un secteur financier hypertrophié qui avait plongé l'île dans la récession, la principale préoccupation d'une majorité d'Islandais n'est pas l'UE, mais les emprunts contractés durant les années de "boom" économique qu'ils ont du mal à rembourser.

Les sociaux-démocrates islandais n’ont jamais réussi à expliquer à l’opinion comment ils allaient combler le fossé entre Bruxelles et Reykjavik sur les quotas de pêche. Ce sujet épineux n’aura même pas été abordé lors des négociations entre juin 2011 et janvier 2013.

L’Europe déteste les spécificités qui font les nations

L’adhésion aurait soviétisée la principale ressource du pays. "Le gouvernement n'a pas l'intention d'organiser un référendum", a précisé le ministère des Affaires étrangères. Et mieux, "si le processus doit être repris à l'avenir, le gouvernement actuel considère important de ne pas progresser sans en référer préalablement à la Nation".

Même si une majorité des électeurs aurait souhaité un référendum, il semble difficile d'imaginer ce qui pourrait les amener à voter "oui" un jour, alors que le pays bénéficie déjà de nombreux avantages grâce à ses liens avec l'UE, sans souffrir des inconvénients. L'Islande est ainsi membre de l'Association européenne de libre échange (AELE) et applique la convention de Schengen qui permet la libre circulation des personnes. Cela permet au pays d'exporter ses produits de la mer vers le continent sans barrière tarifaire, alors même qu'il est engagé dans une "guerre du maquereau" avec l'UE. Depuis que l'Islande a relevé son quota de pêche en 2010, au motif que le réchauffement climatique aurait fait migrer l'espèce vers le nord, le conflit n'a pas pu être résolu malgré une multitude de réunions. Laisser Bruxelles décider du quota de pêche islandais paraît impensable sur l'île.

L'espace Schengen stimule une autre industrie importante pour le pays, le tourisme, crucial pour les entrées de devises. On peut donc être eurosceptique, européen  et hors de l'Union l’assumer et s’en bien porter. Gageons que Manuel Valls parlera peu de l'Islande avant le premier tour de la municipale.

The HIV/AIDS Hypothesis

 

 

Fallacies in Modern Medicine: The HIV/AIDS Hypothesis

By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

This commentary was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 20, Number 1, Pages 18-19, Spring 2015.

Modern medicine has spawned great things like antibiotics, open heart surgery, and corneal transplants. And then there is antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS.

A civic-minded, healthy person volunteers to donate blood but, tested for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), is found to be HIV-positive. This would-be donor will be put on a treatment regimen that follows the (285-page) Guidelines for the Use of Antiretroviral Agents in HIV-1-Infected Adults and Adolescents [1] and will be thrust into a medical world peppered with acronyms like CD4, ART, HIV RNA, HIV Ag/Ab, NRTI, NNRTI, PI, INSTI, PrEP, and P4P4P.

Adhering to these government-issued guidelines, a “health care provider” will start this healthy blood donor on antiretroviral therapy (ART). For the last two decades the standard for treating HIV infection is a three-drug protocol—“2 nukes and a third drug.” The “2 nukes” are nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI) and DNA chain terminators, like AZT (azidothymidine – Retrovir, which is also a NRTI). The “third drug” is a non-NRTI (NNRTI), a protease inhibitor (PI) or an integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI). [2]

These drugs are toxic. With prolonged use they can cause cardiovascular disease, liver damage, premature aging (due to damage of mitochondria), lactic acidosis, gallstones (especially with protease inhibitors), cognitive impairment, and cancer. The majority of people who take them experience unpleasant side effects, like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

AZT, the most powerful “nuke” in the ART arsenal actually killed some 150,000 “HIV-positive” people when it started being used in 1987 to the mid-1990s, after which, if the drug was used, dosage was lowered. [3] When an HIV-positive person on long-term ART gets cardiovascular disease or cancer, providers blame the virus for helping cause these diseases. Substantial evidence, however, supports the opposite conclusion: it is the antiretroviral treatment itself that causes cancer, liver damage, cardiovascular and other diseases in these patients. [3] They are iatrogenic diseases.

The orthodox view holds that HIV causes AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)—one or more of an assemblage of now 26 diseases. Reinforcing this alleged fact in the public’s mind, the human immunodeficiency virus is no longer just called HIV, it is now “HIV/AIDS.”

A new development in HIV care, called preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP), promotes universal coverage with antiretroviral drugs to prevent HIV infections, based on the tenet that prevention is the best “treatment.” Given their unpleasant side effects, however, many people stop taking their antiretroviral drugs. An answer for that in the HIV/AIDS-care world is addressed by its P4P4P acronym (pay for performance for patients). With P4P4P, now under study, patients are given financial incentives to encourage them to keep taking the drugs. [2]

Could the hypothesis that the multi-billion-dollar HIV/AIDS medical-pharmaceutical establishment bases its actions on be wrong? In 1987, Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who isolated the first cancer gene, and in 1970 mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses, published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of retroviruses in disease and the HIV/AIDS hypothesis in particular [4]. Then, in 1988, he published one in Science titled “HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS.” [5] As a result, Dr. Duesberg became a pariah in the retroviral HIV/AIDS establishment, which branded him a “rebel” and a “maverick.” Colleague David Baltimore labeled him “irresponsible and pernicious,” and Robert Gallo declared his work to be “absolute and total nonsense.”

Skeptics of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis are chastised and subjected to ad hominem attacks. Anyone who questions this hypothesis is now branded an “AIDS denier,” which is analogous to being called a Holocaust denier. Nevertheless, non-orthodox scholars have been questioning the HIV/AIDS paradigm for thirty years; and now, in the 21^st century, as Rebecca Culshaw puts it, “there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is wrong.” [6]

A key feature of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is that the virus is sexually transmitted. But only 1 in 1,000 acts of unprotected intercourse transmits HIV, and only 1 in 275 Americans is HIV-positive!  Drug-free prostitutes do not become HIV-positive, despite their occupation. [3,7]

HIV is said to cause immunodeficiency by killing T cell lymphocytes. But T cells grown in test tubes infected with HIV do not die. They thrive. And they produce large quantities of the virus that laboratories use to detect antibodies to HIV in a person’s blood. HIV infects less than 1 in every 500 T cells in the body and thus is hard to find. The HIV test detects antibodies to it, not the virus itself. For these and other reasons a growing body of evidence shows that the HIV theory of AIDS is untenable. [7]

A positive HIV test does not necessarily mean one is infected with this virus. Flu vaccines, hepatitis B vaccine, and tuberculosis are a few of the more than 70 things that can cause a false-positive HIV test. In healthy individuals, pregnancy and African ancestry conduce to testing HIV positive. In some people a positive test may simply indicate (without any virus) that one’s immune system has become damaged, from heavy recreational drug use, malnutrition, or some other reason. [8]

If HIV does not cause AIDS, then what does? The classic paper on AIDS causation, published in 2003 by Duesberg et al., implicates recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy, and malnutrition. [9]

If the theory is wrong, how can it persist? In a review of The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of the HIV/AIDS Theory by Henry Bauer, the late Joel Kaufman writes:

“One of the most difficult things to write is a refutation of a massive fraud, especially a health fraud, in the face of research cartels, media control, and knowledge monopolies by financial powerhouses… The obstacles to dumping the dogma are clearly highlighted as Dr. Bauer discusses the near impossibility of having so many organizations recant, partly because of the record number of lawsuits that would arise.” [10]

Henry Bauer, professor emeritus of chemistry and science studies and former dean of the Virginia Tech College of Arts and Sciences, also presents a concisely reasoned refutation of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis in a 28-page online study, “The Case Against HIV,” with 51 pages of references—now 896 of them, which he continually updates. [3]

In a review of Harvey Bialy’s book, Review of Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter Duesberg, my colleague Gerald Pollack, professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, writes:

“The book reminds us that although over $100 billion has been spent on AIDS research, not a single AIDS patient has been cured—a colossal failure with tragic consequences. It explains in too-clear terms the reasons why AIDS research focuses so single-mindedly on this lone hypothesis to the exclusion of all others: egos, prestige, and money. Mainstream virologists have assumed the power of the purse, and their self-interests (sometimes financial), propel them to suppress challenges. This is not an unusual story: challenges to mainstream views are consistently suppressed by mainstream scientists who have a stake in maintaining the status quo. It’s not just Semmelweis and Galileo, but is happening broadly in today’s scientific arena.” [11]

Adhering to the erroneous hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS, the U.S. government spends billions of dollars annually on HIV/AIDS programs and research—$29.7 Billion for fiscal year 2014. It is a waste of money. It fleeces taxpayers and enriches the HIV/AIDS medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies that make antiretroviral drugs. The annual cost of HIV care averages $25,000-$30,000 per patient, of which 67-70 percent is spent on antiretroviral drugs. [2]

The tide is beginning to turn, as evidenced in the Sept 24, 2014, publication by Patricia Goodson of the Department of Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M University. She notes that “the scientific establishment worldwide insistently refuses to re-examine the HIV-AIDS hypothesis,” even while it is becoming increasingly “more difficult to accept.” She writes:

“This paper represents a call to reflect upon our public health practice vis-à-vis HIV-AIDS… The debate between orthodox and unorthodox scientists comprises much more than an intellectual pursuit or a scientific skirmish: it is a matter of life-and-death. It is a matter of justice. Millions of lives, worldwide, have been and will be significantly affected by an HIV or AIDS diagnosis. If we – the public health work force – lose sight of the social justice implication and the magnitude of the effect, we lose ‘the very purpose of our mission.’” [12]

Despite its long-term, widespread acceptance, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is proving to be a substantial fallacy of modern medicine.

REFERENCES

1. These Guidelines are available at: http://aidsinfo.nih.gov/contentfiles/lvguidelines/adultandadolescentgl.pdf . Accessed Dec 15, 2014.
2. “10 Changes in HIV Care That Are Revolutionizing the Field,” John Bartlett (December 2, 2013) Available at: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/814712 . Accessed Dec 15, 2014.
3. The Case Against HIV, collated by Henry Bauer. Available at: http://thecaseagainsthiv.net/ . Accessed December 15, 2014
4. Duesberg PH. Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality. Cancer Research. 1987;47:1199-1220.
5. Duesberg PH. HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS. 1988;241:514-517. Available at: http://www.duesberg.com/papers/ch2.html   Accessed Dec 15, 2014.
6. Culshaw R. Science Sold Out: Does HIV Really Cause AIDS?, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 2007.
7. Bauer H. The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, Jefferson, NC: McFarland; 2007.
8. Duesberg PH. Inventing the AIDS Virus, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing; 1996.
9. Duesberg PH, Koehnlein C, Rasnick D. The Chemical Basis of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy, and Malnutrition. J Biosci 2003;28:384-412. Available at: http://www.duesberg.com/papers/chemical-bases.html. Accessed Dec 15, 2014.
10. Kauffman JM. Review of The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of the HIV/AIDS Theory, by Henry H. Bauer, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2007. J Am Phys Surg. 2007;12:121-122.
11. Pollack G. Statement on HIV/AIDS at: http://www.aras.ab.ca/aidsquotes.htm Accessed Dec 15, 2014.
12. Goodson P. Questioning the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent. Frontiers in Public Health. 2014; 2[Article 154]: 1-11. Available at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00154/full . Accessed Dec 15, 2014.

The Best of Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a retired cardiac surgeon and Emeritus Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com . His web site is www.donaldmiller.com.

Previous article by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD: More Dangerous Than Measles

Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East

 

Ex: http://www.tomdispatch.com

Talk of an oil glut and a potential further price drop seems to be growing. The cost of a barrel of crude now sits at just under $60, only a little more than half what it was at its most recent peak in June 2014. Meanwhile, under a barrel of woes, economies like China's have slowed and in the process demand for oil has sagged globally. And yet, despite the cancellation of some future plans for exploration and drilling for extreme (and so extremely expensive) forms of fossil fuels, startling numbers of barrels of crude are still pouring onto troubled waters.  For this, a thanks should go to the prodigious efforts of "Saudi America" (all that energetic hydraulic fracking, among other things), while the actual Saudis, the original ones, are still pumping away.  We could, in other words, have arrived not at "peak oil" but at "peak oil demand" for at least a significant period of time to come.  At Bloomberg View, columnist A. Gary Shilling has even suggested that the price of crude could ultimately simply collapse under the weight of all that production and a global economic slowdown, settling in at $10-$20 a barrel (a level last seen in the 1990s).

And here's the saddest part of this story: no matter what happens, the great game over energy and the resource conflicts and wars that go with it show little sign of slowing down.  One thing is guaranteed: no matter how low the price falls, the scramble for sources of oil and the demand for yet more of them won't stop.  Even in this country, as the price of oil has dropped, the push for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring expensive-to-extract and especially carbon-dirty Canadian "tar sands" to market on the U.S. Gulf Coast has only grown more fervent, while the Obama administration has just opened the country's southern Atlantic coastal waters to future exploration and drilling.  In the oil heartlands of the planet, Iraq and Kurdistan typically continue to fight over who will get the (reduced) revenues from the oil fields around the city of Kirkuk to stanch various financial crises.  In the meantime, other oil disputes only heat up.

Among them is one that has gotten remarkably little attention even as it has grown more intense and swept up ever more countries.  This is the quarter-century-old struggle over natural gas deposits off the coast of Gaza as well as elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.  That never-ending conflict provides a remarkable and grim lens through which to view so many recent aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and long-time TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz offers a panoramic look at it here for the first time.

By the way, following the news that 2014 set a global heat record, those of us freezing on the East Coast of the U.S. this winter might be surprised to learn that the first month of 2015 proved to be the second hottest January on record.  And when you're on such a record-setting pace, why stop struggling to extract yet more fossil fuels? Tom

The Great Game in the Holy Land
How Gazan Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of An International Power Struggle

By Michael Schwartz

Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.

Amid the many fossil-fueled conflicts in the region, one of them, packed with threats, large and small, has been largely overlooked, and Israel is at its epicenter. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when Israeli and Palestinian leaders began sparring over rumored natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. In the ensuing decades, it has grown into a many-fronted conflict involving several armies and three navies. In the process, it has already inflicted mindboggling misery on tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it threatens to add future layers of misery to the lives of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. Eventually, it might even immiserate Israelis.

Resource wars are, of course, nothing new. Virtually the entire history of Western colonialism and post-World War II globalization has been animated by the effort to find and market the raw materials needed to build or maintain industrial capitalism. This includes Israel's expansion into, and appropriation of, Palestinian lands. But fossil fuels only moved to center stage in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the 1990s, and that initially circumscribed conflict only spread to include Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, and Russia after 2010.

The Poisonous History of Gazan Natural Gas

Back in 1993, when Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and create a sovereign state, nobody was thinking much about Gaza's coastline. As a result, Israel agreed that the newly created PA would fully control its territorial waters, even though the Israeli navy was still patrolling the area. Rumored natural gas deposits there mattered little to anyone, because prices were then so low and supplies so plentiful. No wonder that the Palestinians took their time recruiting British Gas (BG) -- a major player in the global natural gas sweepstakes -- to find out what was actually there. Only in 2000 did the two parties even sign a modest contract to develop those by-then confirmed fields.

BG promised to finance and manage their development, bear all the costs, and operate the resulting facilities in exchange for 90% of the revenues, an exploitative but typical "profit-sharing" agreement. With an already functioning natural gas industry, Egypt agreed to be the on-shore hub and transit point for the gas. The Palestinians were to receive 10% of the revenues (estimated at about a billion dollars in total) and were guaranteed access to enough gas to meet their needs.

Had this process moved a little faster, the contract might have been implemented as written. In 2000, however, with a rapidly expanding economy, meager fossil fuels, and terrible relations with its oil-rich neighbors, Israel found itself facing a chronic energy shortage. Instead of attempting to answer its problem with an aggressive but feasible effort to develop renewable sources of energy, Prime Minister Ehud Barak initiated the era of Eastern Mediterranean fossil fuel conflicts. He brought Israel's naval control of Gazan coastal waters to bear and nixed the deal with BG. Instead, he demanded that Israel, not Egypt, receive the Gaza gas and that it also control all the revenues destined for the Palestinians -- to prevent the money from being used to "fund terror."

With this, the Oslo Accords were officially doomed. By declaring Palestinian control over gas revenues unacceptable, the Israeli government committed itself to not accepting even the most limited kind of Palestinian budgetary autonomy, let alone full sovereignty. Since no Palestinian government or organization would agree to this, a future filled with armed conflict was assured.

The Israeli veto led to the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sought to broker an agreement that would satisfy both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. The result: a 2007 proposal that would have delivered the gas to Israel, not Egypt, at below-market prices, with the same 10% cut of the revenues eventually reaching the PA. However, those funds were first to be delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York for future distribution, which was meant to guarantee that they would not be used for attacks on Israel.

This arrangement still did not satisfy the Israelis, who pointed to the recent victory of the militant Hamas party in Gaza elections as a deal-breaker. Though Hamas had agreed to let the Federal Reserve supervise all spending, the Israeli government, now led by Ehud Olmert, insisted that no "royalties be paid to the Palestinians." Instead, the Israelis would deliver the equivalent of those funds "in goods and services."

This offer the Palestinian government refused. Soon after, Olmert imposed a draconian blockade on Gaza, which Israel's defense minister termed a form of "'economic warfare' that would generate a political crisis, leading to a popular uprising against Hamas." With Egyptian cooperation, Israel then seized control of all commerce in and out of Gaza, severely limiting even food imports and eliminating its fishing industry. As Olmert advisor Dov Weisglass summed up this agenda, the Israeli government was putting the Palestinians "on a diet" (which, according to the Red Cross, soon produced "chronic malnutrition," especially among Gazan children).

When the Palestinians still refused to accept Israel's terms, the Olmert government decided to unilaterally extract the gas, something that, they believed, could only occur once Hamas had been displaced or disarmed. As former Israel Defense Forces commander and current Foreign Minister Moshe Ya'alon explained, "Hamas... hasconfirmed its capability to bomb Israel's strategic gas and electricity installations... It is clear that, without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement."

Following this logic, Operation Cast Lead was launched in the winter of 2008. According to Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, it was intended to subject Gaza to a "shoah" (the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster). Yoav Galant, the commanding general of the Operation, said that it was designed to "send Gaza decades into the past." As Israeli parliamentarian Tzachi Hanegbi explained, the specific military goal was "to topple the Hamas terror regime and take over all the areas from which rockets are fired on Israel."

Operation Cast Lead did indeed "send Gaza decades into the past." Amnesty International reported that the 22-day offensive killed 1,400 Palestinians, "including some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians, and large areas of Gaza had been razed to the ground, leaving many thousands homeless and the already dire economy in ruins." The only problem: Operation Cast Lead did not achieve its goal of "transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel."

More Sources of Gas Equal More Resource Wars

In 2009, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inherited the stalemate around Gaza's gas deposits and an Israeli energy crisis that only grew more severe when the Arab Spring in Egypt interrupted and then obliterated 40% of the country's gas supplies. Rising energy prices soon contributed to the largest protests involving Jewish Israelis in decades.

As it happened, however, the Netanyahu regime also inherited a potentially permanent solution to the problem. An immense field of recoverable natural gas was discovered in the Levantine Basin, a mainly offshore formation under the eastern Mediterranean. Israeli officials immediately asserted that "most" of the newly confirmed gas reserves lay "within Israeli territory." In doing so, they ignored contrary claims by Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, and the Palestinians.

In some other world, this immense gas field might have been effectively exploited by the five claimants jointly, and a production plan might even have been put in place to ameliorate the environmental impact of releasing a future 130 trillion cubic feet of gas into the planet's atmosphere. However, as Pierre Terzian, editor of the oil industry journal Petrostrategies, observed, "All the elements of danger are there... This is a region where resorting to violent action is not something unusual."

In the three years that followed the discovery, Terzian's warning seemed ever more prescient. Lebanon became the first hot spot. In early 2011, the Israeli government announced the unilateral development of two fields, about 10% of that Levantine Basin gas, which lay in disputed offshore waters near the Israeli-Lebanese border. Lebanese Energy Minister Gebran Bassil immediately threatened a military confrontation, asserting that his country would "not allow Israel or any company working for Israeli interests to take any amount of our gas that is falling in our zone." Hezbollah, the most aggressive political faction in Lebanon, promised rocket attacks if "a single meter" of natural gas was extracted from the disputed fields.

Israel's Resource Minister accepted the challenge, asserting that "[t]hese areas are within the economic waters of Israel... We will not hesitate to use our force and strength to protect not only the rule of law but the international maritime law."

Oil industry journalist Terzian offered this analysis of the realities of the confrontation:

"In practical terms... nobody is going to invest with Lebanon in disputed waters. There are no Lebanese companies there capable of carrying out the drilling, and there is no military force that could protect them. But on the other side, things are different. You have Israeli companies that have the ability to operate in offshore areas, and they could take the risk under the protection of the Israeli military."

Sure enough, Israel continued its exploration and drilling in the two disputed fields, deploying drones to guard the facilities. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government invested major resources in preparing for possible future military confrontations in the area. For one thing, with lavish U.S. funding, it developed the "Iron Dome" anti-missile defense system designed in part to intercept Hezbollah and Hamas rockets aimed at Israeli energy facilities. It also expanded the Israeli navy, focusing on its ability to deter or repel threats to offshore energy facilities. Finally, starting in 2011 it launched airstrikes in Syria designed, according to U.S. officials, "to prevent any transfer of advanced... antiaircraft, surface-to-surface and shore-to-ship missiles" to Hezbollah.

Nonetheless, Hezbollah continued to stockpile rockets capable of demolishing Israeli facilities. And in 2013, Lebanon made a move of its own. It began negotiating with Russia. The goal was to get that country's gas firms to develop Lebanese offshore claims, while the formidable Russian navy would lend a hand with the "long-running territorial dispute with Israel."

By the beginning of 2015, a state of mutual deterrence appeared to be setting in. Although Israel had succeeded in bringing online the smaller of the two fields it set out to develop, drilling in the larger one was indefinitely stalled "in light of the security situation." U.S. contractor Noble Energy, hired by the Israelis, was unwilling to invest the necessary $6 billion in facilities that would be vulnerable to Hezbollah attack, and potentially in the gun sights of the Russian navy. On the Lebanese side, despite an increased Russian naval presence in the region, no work had begun.

Meanwhile, in Syria, where violence was rife and the country in a state of armed collapse, another kind of stalemate went into effect. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, facing a ferocious threat from various groups of jihadists, survived in part by negotiating massive military support from Russia in exchange for a 25-year contract to develop Syria's claims to that Levantine gas field. Included in the deal was a major expansion of the Russian naval base at the port city of Tartus, ensuring a far larger Russian naval presence in the Levantine Basin.

While the presence of the Russians apparently deterred the Israelis from attempting to develop any Syrian-claimed gas deposits, there was no Russian presence in Syria proper. So Israel contracted with the U.S.-based Genie Energy Corporation to locate and develop oil fields in the Golan Heights, Syrian territory occupied by the Israelis since 1967. Facing a potential violation of international law, the Netanyahu government invoked, as the basis for its acts, an Israeli court ruling that the exploitation of natural resources in occupied territories was legal. At the same time, to prepare for the inevitable battle with whichever faction or factions emerged triumphant from the Syrian civil war, it began shoring up the Israeli military presence in the Golan Heights.

And then there was Cyprus, the only Levantine claimant not at war with Israel. Greek Cypriots had long been in chronic conflict with Turkish Cypriots, so it was hardly surprising that the Levantine natural gas discovery triggered three years of deadlocked negotiations on the island over what to do. In 2014, the Greek Cypriots signed an exploration contract with Noble Energy, Israel's chief contractor. The Turkish Cypriots trumped this move by signing a contract with Turkey to explore all Cypriot claims "as far as Egyptian waters." Emulating Israel and Russia, the Turkish government promptly moved three navy vessels into the area to physically block any intervention by other claimants.

As a result, four years of maneuvering around the newly discovered Levantine Basin deposits have produced little energy, but brought new and powerful claimants into the mix, launched a significant military build-up in the region, and heightened tensions immeasurably.

Gaza Again -- and Again

Remember the Iron Dome system, developed in part to stop Hezbollah rockets aimed at Israel's northern gas fields? Over time, it was put in place near the border with Gaza to stop Hamas rockets, and was tested during Operation Returning Echo, the fourth Israeli military attempt to bring Hamas to heel and eliminate any Palestinian "capability to bomb Israel's strategic gas and electricity installations."

Launched in March 2012, it replicated on a reduced scale the devastation of Operation Cast Lead, while the Iron Dome achieved a 90% "kill rate" against Hamas rockets. Even this, however, while a useful adjunct to the vast shelter system built to protect Israeli civilians, was not enough to ensure the protection of the country's exposed oil facilities. Even one direct hit there could damage or demolish such fragile and flammable structures.

The failure of Operation Returning Echo to settle anything triggered another round of negotiations, which once again stalled over the Palestinian rejection of Israel's demand to control all fuel and revenues destined for Gaza and the West Bank. The new Palestinian Unity government then followed the lead of the Lebanese, Syrians, and Turkish Cypriots, and in late 2013 signed an "exploration concession" with Gazprom, the huge Russian natural gas company. As with Lebanon and Syria, the Russian Navy loomed as a potential deterrent to Israeli interference.

Meanwhile, in 2013, a new round of energy blackouts caused "chaos" across Israel, triggering a draconian 47% increase in electricity prices. In response, the Netanyahu government considered a proposal to begin extracting domestic shale oil, but the potential contamination of water resources caused a backlash movement that frustrated this effort. In a country filled with start-up high-tech firms, the exploitation of renewable energy sources was still not being given serious attention. Instead, the government once again turned to Gaza.

With Gazprom's move to develop the Palestinian-claimed gas deposits on the horizon, the Israelis launched their fifth military effort to force Palestinian acquiescence, Operation Protective Edge. It had two major hydrocarbon-related goals: to deter Palestinian-Russian plans and to finally eliminate the Gazan rocket systems. The first goal was apparently met when Gazprom postponed (perhaps permanently) its development deal. The second, however, failed when the two-pronged land and air attack -- despite unprecedented devastation in Gaza -- failed to destroy Hamas's rocket stockpiles or its tunnel-based assembly system; nor did the Iron Dome achieve the sort of near-perfect interception rate needed to protect proposed energy installations.

There Is No Denouement

After 25 years and five failed Israeli military efforts, Gaza's natural gas is still underwater and, after four years, the same can be said for almost all of the Levantine gas. But things are not the same. In energy terms, Israel is ever more desperate, even as it has been building up its military, including its navy, in significant ways. The other claimants have, in turn, found larger and more powerful partners to help reinforce their economic and military claims. All of this undoubtedly means that the first quarter-century of crisis over eastern Mediterranean natural gas has been nothing but prelude. Ahead lies the possibility of bigger gas wars with the devastation they are likely to bring.

Michael Schwartz, an emeritus distinguished teaching professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, is a TomDispatch regular and the author of the award-winning books Radical Protest and Social Structure andThe Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz). His TomDispatch book, War Without End, focused on how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq. His email address is [e-mail].

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Copyright 2015 Michael Schwartz

Rencontre militante: Anjou/Touraine