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mardi, 21 janvier 2014

Hacia el panarabismo nasserista en Egipto

por Germán Gorraiz López

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

La inesperada victoria de Mursi en las elecciones egipcias del 2012 trastocó la estrategia geopolítica de EEUU en Oriente Próximo, consistente en la pervivencia endémica en Egipto de gobiernos militares autocráticos pro-occidentales para mantener el tratado de paz de Egipto con Israel, (acuerdo Camp David, 1979), para continuar la lucha contra las milicias yihadistas en el Sinaí y en especial para asegurar el acceso la Marina de EEUU al Canal de Suez, un atajo crucial para el acceso directo a los Emiratos Árabes, Irak y Afganistán.

La ingenuidad política de Morsi quedó plasmada en el nombramiento del general Al-Sisi comandante general de las Fuerzas Armadas y ministro de Defensa (CSFA) con la esperanza de poder desinfectar el establishment militar egipcio de los virus patógenos inoculados durante la autocracia de Mubarak , ya que en su etapa anterior Al Sisi era el jefe de la temida inteligencia militar y era considerado como el miembro más “reformista” de la Junta Militar.

Sin embargo, el Consejo Supremo de las Fuerzas Armadas (CSFA), antes de transferir el poder, aprobó una declaración constitucional complementaria en la que se preservaban las principales prerrogativas del Ejército, como detentar el poder legislativo durante la Transición, una amplia autonomía para gestionar su presupuesto y la capacidad de decidir sobre la declaración de guerra, por lo que su anulación por el Presidente Morsi encendió la luz verde para la asonada militar contra el Gobierno de los Hermanos Musulmanes.

Morsi nunca controló las palancas del poder en el país y sólo tenía un control nominal sobre el ejército, las fuerzas de seguridad o los servicios de inteligencia del estado, por lo que negoció con Al Sisi la lealtad del Ejército a su persona enrocado en la defensa de su legitimidad presidencial, pero el CSFA ejecutó un golpe de mano virtual contra Morsi al no encajar su proyecto islamista en la estrategia de EEUU en Oriente Próximo, golpe que contaba con el visto bueno de EEUU al haber dejado Mursi de ser un peón útil para la estrategia geopolítica de EEUU en Oriente Próximo, formando parte de la nueva estrategia de EEUU para la zona tras el evidente fracaso del experimento de exportación del otrora régimen islamista moderado y pro-occidental de Erdogan a todos los países que componen el tablero gigante del mundo árabe-mediterráneo.

Recordar que según el periódico Al Tharir, el general Sisi tendría “fuertes lazos con funcionarios de Estados Unidos tanto a nivel diplomático como militar, pues estudió en Washington, asistió a varias conferencias militares en la ciudad y participó en ejercicios conjuntos de guerra y operaciones de inteligencia en años recientes”, pero las medidas de presión de la Administración Obama provocaron el desapego afectivo de al-Sisi tras reprochar a Obama que “Ud. abandonó a los egipcios, Ud. le dio la espalda a los egipcios y ellos no lo olvidarán”.

Recordar que el apoyo de la Junta Militar egipcia sería crucial para mantener el tratado de paz de Egipto con Israel, (acuerdo Camp David, 1979), para continuar la lucha contra las milicias yihadistas en el Sinaí y en especial para asegurar el acceso al Canal de Suez , pues Egipto otorgaba a la Marina de EE.UU. paso expedito a través del Canal de Suez para la docena de buques de guerra que atraviesan mensualmente dicho canal. Así, Israel, Arabia Saudí, Qatar y demás aliados árabes de EEUU en el Próximo Oriente (con la excepción de Erdogan), habrían presionado a Obama y a la UE a no condenar el golpe de mano contra Morsi, optando por un nuevo Mubarak como mal menor ante la amenaza del islamismo surgido de las urnas.

Sin embargo, tras la cruenta represión del ejército egipcio contra los Hermanos Musulmanes, la Administración Obama anunció la cancelación del ejercicio bienal militar conjunto con Egipto como medida de presión al gobierno interino militar para ceñirse al acuerdo del plan de transición democrático así como la posible revisión de la ayuda militar que concede a Egipto, estimada en 1.500 millones de doláres anuales, provocando un vacío occidental que fue aprovechado por Arabia Saudí y Putin para recuperar la influencia perdida en Egipto.

Así, tras el golpe de mano contra Morsi, Egipto podría recibir una inyección económica de Arabia Saudita, Kuwait y los Emiratos Árabes Unidos por un monto total de 15.000 millones de doláres como parte de la estrategia de las monarquías árabes del Golfo para anular la creciente influencia de Qatar como principal benefactor de Egipto tras la donación de 5.000 millones de doláres al régimen de Morsi.

Por otra parte, la retirada por EEUU del portaaviones USS Nimitz y el destructor USS Graveley del Mediterráneo tras cancelar “in extemis” Obama el ataque contra Siria (Operación Free Syria) fue aprovechado por Putin para reforzar su flota en el Mediterráneo con 18 buques de guerra. Así,según la agencia Itar Tass, Rusia reforzará su base naval en el puerto sirio de Tartus con el objetivo de resucitar la extinta Flota del Mediterráneo, (disuelta en 1992 tras la extinción de la URSS), cuya columna vertebral estará formada por la Flota del Mar Negro , la del Norte y la del Báltico (con el Varyag como buque insignia) y podría estar operativa en el 2.015, pero la inestabilidad del conflicto sirio, obligaría a Rusia a buscar una nueva alternativa para su base naval en suelo egipcio, (Damietta o Port Said).

Egipto sería un país lastrado por su excesivo déficit energético y por las elevadas tasas de importación de cereales en una sociedad inmersa en la cultura del subsidio (alrededor del 30 % del presupuesto del país está destinado a subvenciones), por lo que en el nuevo escenario que se dibuja, las necesidades de grano y de tecnología de Egipto podrían ser satisfechas en exclusividad por Rusia. Durante el mandato de Mursi, Egipto solicitó la ayuda técnica de Rusia para construir la central nuclear de Dabaa cerca de la costa mediterránea y desarrollar el reactor nuclear experimental de Inshas, a las afueras de El Cairo, así como la tecnología necesaria para explotar las minas de uranio del país, situadas entre el Nilo y la costa del Mar Rojo, puesto que Rusia a través de las empresas Lukoil y Avatec ya tendría una importante presencia en los campos de petróleo y gas egipcio.

Por otra parte, según la agencia Cairo Press Review, los ministros de Exteriores y de Defensa de Rusia viajarán a El Cairo la próxima semana para conversaciones con sus homólogos egipcios sobre la venta de armas y las relaciones entre ambas naciones, preludio de la posible visita del presidente ruso Vladimir Putin a Egipto para logar de al-Sisi la concesión para instalar una base naval permanente en Damietta o en Port Said, base militar que otorgaría a Rusia el papel de gendarme del Canal de Suez y que siempre le fue negada a EEUU.

Recordar que el paso del Canal de Suéz está considerado como uno de los puntos más importantes para el comercio mundial ya que transporta 2,6 millones de barriles de crudo al día (lo que representa casi 3% de la demanda mundial diaria de petróleo) y asimismo es una ruta imprescindible para la Marina de EEUU, pues hasta ahora Egipto otorgaba a la Marina de EE.UU. paso expedito a través del Canal de Suéz para los cerca de 40 de buques de guerra que atraviesan mensualmente dicho canal y que les aseguraba un atajo crucial para el acceso directo a los Emiratos Árabes, Irak y Afganistán.

En el supuesto de que su control pase a manos rusas, la geopolítica de EEUU en Oriente Próximo y Medio (Oriente PROME) quedaría totalmente hipotecada y supondría un cambio geopolítico total en el complicado puzzle de Oriente Próximo, pasando Rusia a ser elemento referente y socio estratégico de Egipto y convirtiendo a Egipto en el portaaviones continental de Rusia, rememorando la política de Jruschov cuando Egipto era el principal socio de la URSS en la región y su Presidente Nasser fue condecorado con la Estrella de Héroe de la Unión Soviética.

Por su parte, al-Sisi sería partidario de restablecer el tradicional status del ejército en la vida socio-política de Egipto pero necesita implementar cambios democráticos que le otorguen un poder presidencialista con claros tintes autocráticos, siempre bajo el lema de defender “los intereses de todos los egipcios y no solo de un grupo social o religioso” por lo que según DEBKAfile, “se espera que al-Sisi se postule como candidato a la Presidencia para las próximas elecciones Presidenciales del 2014”.

Caso de ser elegido nuevo Presidente de Egipto, el mencionado desapego de Sisi respecto a los países occidentales aunado con el previsible fracaso de la enésima ronda de conversaciones de paz palestino-israelíes y la delicada situación económica en que se encuentra Egipto ( país empobrecido de iure y subsidiado de facto), podría hacer que Sisi enarbolara la bandera de un nuevo movimiento panarabista de filiación nasserista que tras extender su efecto mimético al resto de países árabes del arco mediterráneo (Túnez, Libia, Siria, Líbano) además de Jordania e Irak, podría terminar por reeditar la Guerra de los Seis Días en el horizonte del próximo quinquenio.

Dicho enfrentamiento será aprovechada por Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña e Israel para proceder a rediseñar la cartografía del puzzle inconexo formado por dichos países y así lograr unas fronteras estratégicamente ventajosas para Israel, siguiendo el plan orquestado hace 60 años de forma conjunta por los gobiernos de Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos e Israel y que contaría con el respaldo de los principales aliados occidentales (Gran Israel). Hay que recordar que el Proyecto del Gran Israel (Eretz Israel), sería hijo del atavismo bíblico y bebería de las fuentes de Génesis 15:18, que señala que “hace 4.000 años, el título de propiedad de toda la tierra existente entre el Río Nilo de Egipto y el Río Eúfrates fue legado al patriarca hebreo Abraham y trasferida posteriormente a sus descendientes”, lo que supondría la restauración de la Declaración Balfour (1917), que dibujaba un Estado de Israel dotado de una vasta extensión cercana a las 46.000 millas cuadradas y que se extendía desde el Mediteráneo al este del Éufrates abarcando Siria, Líbano, parte noriental de Irak, parte norte de Arabia Saudí , la franja costera del Mar Rojo y la Península del Sinaí en Egipto así como Jordania, que pasaría a denominarse Palesjordán tras ser obligado a acoger a toda la población palestina de las actuales Cisjordania y Gaza tras ser obligados a una diáspora masiva (nueva nakba).

Fuente: Los restos del naufragio

Atlantische Raad: Buitengewone crisis nodig om Nieuwe Wereld Orde te redden

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Atlantische Raad: Buitengewone crisis nodig om Nieuwe Wereld Orde te redden

Hoe zal die 'buitengewone crisis', die veel massaler zal moeten zijn dan 9/11, eruit gaan zien?

De Atlantic Council, een belangrijke Westerse denktank in Washington, vindt bij monde van Harlan K. Ullman, de bedenker van de 'shock and awe' doctrine, dat er een buitengewone crisis nodig is om de door president Bush sr. aangekondigde 'Nieuwe Wereld Orde' te redden. De grootste bedreiging voor de NWO komt volgens de raad niet van landen zoals China, maar van onafhankelijk handelende burgers zoals Edward Snowden en Bradley Manning, die het publiek op de hoogte stelden van door de globalistische elite geheim gehouden informatie.

De Atlantische Raad wordt geleid door generaal Brent Scowcroft, onder de presidenten Gerald Ford en George H.W. Bush de Nationale Veiligheid Adviseur. Hij heeft ook president Obama geadviseerd.

Onafhankelijke 'spelers' grotere bedreiging dan China

In het artikel 'War on Terror is not the Only Threat' stelt Harlan Ullman dat het geostrategische systeem op de wereld 'tektonische veranderingen' ondergaat. Niet de opkomende supermacht China is het grootste probleem, maar de niet aan staten verbonden 'spelers' zoals Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning en anonieme computerhackers. Zij zouden zelfs 'de grootste bedreiging vormen voor het 365 jaar oude Westfaalse systeem,' omdat zij mensen aanmoedigen zich los te maken van de controle van de staat en zoveel mogelijk zelfstandig te worden.

'Slechts weinigen hebben dit opgemerkt, en nog minder hebben hierop geanticipeerd,' aldus Ullman, die klaagde dat de 'informatierevolutie en ogenblikkelijke wereldwijde communicatie' de totstandkoming van de 'Nieuwe Wereld Orde' zoals die door president Bush sr. in 1990 werd aangekondigd, tegenwerken.

Tegenstanders NWO moeten worden 'geëlimineerd'

'Zonder een buitengewone crisis kan er waarschijnlijk maar weinig worden gedaan om de schade die wordt veroorzaakt door falend bestuur om te keren of te beperken,' vervolgde Ullman. Feitelijk impliceerde hij daarmee dat er een nieuw, nog veel massaler '9/11' nodig is om de overheden alsnog in staat te stellen de absolute macht te grijpen, en de 'gevaren die de nieuwe, niet aan staten verbonden spelers vormen, in de hand te houden, te verminderen en te elimineren.'

De huidige voorzitter van de Killowen Group, een adviserend orgaan van (Westerse) regeringsleiders, concludeert dan ook dat individuen die zich onafhankelijk van de staat opstellen, moeten worden uitgeschakeld om de Nieuwe Wereld Orde te redden. De Atlantische Raad ziet deze NWO als een wereldwijde technocratie die wordt geleid door de almaar verdergaande samensmelting van overheden en grote concerns, en het stapsgewijs vernietigen van alle individualiteit en onafhankelijkheid, ten gunste van een groot collectief, uitmondend in een transhumanistische 'singulariteit'.

Brzezinski: wereldregering in gevaar door politiek ontwaken

Bilderberger Zbigniew Brzezinkski, medeoprichter van de Trilaterale Commissie en al decennia één van de topfiguren van de NWO-elite, hield in 2010 de Council on Foreign Relations voor dat het 'wereldwijde politieke ontwaken' in combinatie met de toenemende onderlinge strijd binnen de elite, een bedreiging vormen voor het grote einddoel: de oprichting van een (VN-)wereldregering.

Brzezinski was de grote man achter de president Carter en Obama, en is tevens de belangrijkste instigator van de huidige Amerikaanse toenadering tot Iran, en daaraan gekoppeld het stapsgewijs afbouwen en uiteindelijk geheel opheffen van het traditionele bondgenootschap met Israël.

Ullmans roep om een 'buitengewone crisis' doet tevens denken aan het 'Project for a New American Century' uit 1997, dat stelde dat er een nieuw Pearl Harbour nodig was om de Amerikaanse militaire hegemonie te handhaven en uit te breiden. Vier jaar later vonden de aanslagen op 9/11 plaats.

Elite begint grip te verliezen

Daarnaast is zijn oproep een duidelijk signaal dat de wereldelite beseft dat de verwezenlijking van hun globalistische doelen langzaam maar zeker door hun vingers begint te glippen. Het toenemende verzet van de Europeanen tegen de NWO-fascisten in Brussel is in dit opzicht een bemoediging voor iedereen die vindt dat individualiteit, zelfbeschikkingsrecht en democratie niet moeten worden opgeofferd voor een geforceerd samengevoegde, grenzenloze wereldgemeenschap, die bevolkt wordt door dan volkomen krachteloos, arm en monddood gemaakte slaven.


Xander

(1) Infowars

dimanche, 19 janvier 2014

Crusade Without the Cross: The Paradox of the Greek Left

ac1.jpg

Crusade Without the Cross:
The Paradox of the Greek Left

By Dimitris Michalopoulos

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

To Francis Parker Yockey
In memoriam

Following the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949, many of the defeated Communists fled to countries behind the Iron Curtain. Most of them were to die before they could see their homeland again. Those who survived in the exile, came back to Greece as late as 1975. For not all of them wanted  to compromise with the right-wing 1949-1974 regime of Greece. Still, do you know what was the first reaction of the defeated fighters upon reaching the countries of the Soviet bloc, late in the 1940s? When they were asked to take a bath for sanitary reasons, they declined; for they did not want the oil spread on their body by the Orthodox priests during the christening ceremony to be removed!

Such was the statement of a Greek Communist intellectual in Paris, in 1995. I was bewildered. I was then considered to be a “specialist” on the relations between Greece and the countries of the Eastern bloc and I thought I knew “everything” on the “colonies” that the Greek Communists had founded mainly in the “People’s Democracies” and in the Soviet Union. I knew that the Greek Orthodox clergy had supported either overtly or in veiled terms the Communist “rebellion” in Greece. Still from the Greek Church’s backing up the Communists to the latter’s desire not to “lose the oil of the christening” there was a big gulf. That is why upon my coming back to Greece, I started looking into the matter. The result of my research? My Paris interlocutor was right.

It is not possible to recount the history of the Marxist ideas in Greece, without taking into account the Greek Orthodox Church. And so for two reasons: a) The Modern Greek nationhood relies wholly upon the Church. As a matter of fact, Greek is considered to be every Orthodox Christian who “recognizes the spiritual jurisdiction of the [Greek] Patriarchate of Constantinople”;[1] and b) thanks precisely to the Greek Church, Materialism was disseminated in the Balkans and, further, was raised to “official”, i.e. State ideology in the Romanian countries long before the 1789 Revolution in France.[2]

Ac-elas.jpgThis story of materialistic ideas that were spread in the Balkans by the Greek Orthodox Church is a long (and very interesting) one. The roots are to be found in Byzantium itself. For from the eleventh century on, a revival of Platonism and neo-Platonism took place in Constantinople; and this revival led up to a kind of crypto-paganism. The 1453 capture of the Byzantine capital by the Ottomans put an end to this neo-platonic current; and Gennadius I Scholarius, the first Constantinopolitan Patriarch to be in office following the fall of the Byzantine Empire, directed the philosophical research of his flock towards the “beacon of Aristotle’s thought.” Still, this direction was to have very important consequences.

Ecclesiastical Preamble

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople/Istanbul was criticized prior to the 1821-1829 Greek War of Independence very mildly by the Left, viz. the Greek Enlightenment scholars and their disciples. And for good reason; for the Greek Enlightenment, thanks to the protection of the Orthodox Church, anticipated the French one by several decades. In other words, materialist doctrines were being taught throughout Greece by Greek Orthodox . . . clergymen. And as a result the Enlightenment principles became the State Ideology in Balkan countries long before they prevailed in France.

In such a contradictory evolution, two characters assumed the key role, namely Cyril Lucar (1572-1638) and Theophilus Corydaleus (1570-1646). Both were disciples of Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) at the University of Padua; and both wholeheartedly adopted Cremonini’s materialistic interpretation of Aristotle’s thought.[3] For if St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had managed to espouse the creeds of the Roman Catholic Church with Stagirite’s teaching, it was Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), professor at the Padua University from 1509 to 1512, who paved the path to the Enlightenment.

P. Pomponazzi published in 1516 his book De immortalitate animae (= On the Immortality of the Soul). He had moved at that time from the University of Padua to the one in Bologna; the impact of his book’s coming out, nonetheless, was terrible throughout Italy and even Europe. It triggered a real revolution in Christian thought; and this revolution was to culminate in 1517, i.e., merely a year later, with Luther’s Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, i.e., the famous Ninety-Five Theses.

As a matter of fact, Pomponazzi overtly disagreed in his book on the Immortality of the Soul with St Thomas Aquinas’ teaching. The latter, based on the Aristotelian intellectual production, professed that the human soul could survive separation from the body; yet Pomponazzi declared that the soul’s survival was incompatible with entelechy, i.e., the Actualizing Form, a fundamental concept in Stagirite’s thinking and teaching. The corollary was the solemnization of the belief that the human soul was tied irreversibly to the human body; and so all doors were opened to materialism.

It was C. Cremonini who crossed triumphantly the door opened by Pomponazzi. He was appointed professor at Padua University in 1591, and since the Papal jurisdiction did not encompass Padua (for it was protected by the Venetian Republic), he felt free to propagate his Aristotelian-based materialism. His enthusiastic admirers and followers saw in him Aristoteles redivivus (= Aristotle reborn), the princeps philosophorum (= Prince of the Philosophers), the genius Aristotelis (= Aristotle’s genius) and so on.[4]

The result? When Cyril Lucar, Cremonini’s student and follower, became Patriarch of Constantinople, he appointed Th. Corydaleus, also a follower of Cremonini, director of the Patriarchal Academy,[5] a prestigious institution of higher learning. Most likely it was in 1625;[6] and so Materialism came under the aegis and the virtual protection of the Greek Patriarchate, the leading one of the Orthodox Christendom. So, the Patriarchal Academy developed into the avant-garde of the European Left.[7]

That is why the “progressive mind” of the Patriarch Cyril I Lucar is nowadays enthusiastically acclaimed in Greece and in the Western countries as well. No matter that he was converted to Calvinism and even wrote a Confession of Faith clearly endorsing Protestant theses:[8] Confessio fidei reverendissimi domini Cyrilli, Patriarchae Constantinopolitani nomine et consensus Patriarcharum Alexandrini et Hierosolymitani, . . . , scripta Constantinopoli mense Martio anni 1629.[9] He was of course anathematized by an Ecclesiastical Council held in Constantinople in 1638.[10] Still, his memory remains unharmed.[11] For the Left-wing intelligentsia see in him the “Father of the Greek Enlightenment.”[12]

It is true that he founded an important printing house in 1627,[13] the first Greek one in the Levant. What is more, he was put to death by the Ottoman authorities, due mainly to accusations of the Jesuits who saw in him a bitter foe of the Roman Church. Still, the truth is that he was a Calvinist[14] and most likely a materialist.

His companion and zealous ally, Th. Corydaleus, was undoubtedly a materialist; and he did not dissimulate his ideas, though he was a Greek Orthodox clergyman. Unlike Cyril Lucar he did not suffer death at the hands of the Ottomans. Quite the contrary! He was ordained Metropolitan Bishop of Naupactus and Arta.[15] Further, he founded a school in Athens, his native city, where he continued teaching materialism shrouded in Aristotelian thought till the end of his life. He created chaos in his Metropolitan See; he became a monk in 1622 and renounced his vows in 1625; yet he was never stigmatized by the Greek Orthodox Church.[16] And the Ottoman authorities, properly “indoctrinated” by the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, ever never bothered him.

He wrote several books that enjoyed great popularity in both Greece and the Graecized Balkan countries as well up to the late eighteenth century. Needless to say that this popularity was mostly due to the high regard the Greek clergy had for them.[17] The result? The Maurokordatos family, a rich and very influential Greco-Jewish Constantinopolitan one, managed to have Sevastos Kyminitēs, their protégé and an ardent Corydaleus’ supporter,[18] appointed as head of the Bucharest Princely Academy. This Academy, along with the Patriarchal one in Constantinople, was a renowned educational institution, one of the very few in the Balkans at that time. No sooner than appointed, S. Kyminitēs began propagating materialism rooted in Aristotle’s thought. And even though he was totally disliked by his students, he enjoyed the protection of the Maurokordatos family, was a favorite with the Patriarchal Court at Constantinople and the Ottoman authorities as well. He maintained, therefore, his post until 1702, the year of his death. The corollary was that thanks to him materialism became the state Ideology in the Romanian Lands, Walachia and Moldavia,[19] then vassal countries of the Ottoman Empire.

The Left in Independent Greece

The Modern and Contemporary Greek people is a multiracial mixture. Since acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate at Constantinople was, in practice, the exclusive criterion of being regarded as Greek, it goes without saying that Modern Greeks are descendants of all the Balkan’s Christian nations – and mainly of Albanians, Slavs, and Romanians.[20] Civil strife flourished in such an ambiance; and democratic/socialist ideas thrived as well.

The first wholly democratic current, with obvious tendencies to turn actually into a socialist movement, was that of Theodōros Grivas, in Acarnania, viz. the south-western part of Mainland Greece. Thanks to his achievements during the Greek War of Independence, Grivas was a general of the Greek Army under Otho, the first King of Greece (1832-1862). Nonetheless, he had in view a radical change of Greece’s Statehood structures. In the framework of the revolution that put an end to Otho’s reign, in October 1862, he formed a “People’s Army” 4,500 strong, and declared he was “ready for a march to Athens” with the intention of proclaiming the Republic, endow Greece with a federal structure, and “rehabilitate the landless peasantry.” In short, he was in open conflict with the Provisory Government that assumed power after King Otho’s fall, and aspired only at establishing the so-called “Royal Republic” regime. Undoubtedly, Grivas had sympathizers in the main agglomerations of the country; that is why his “Popular Army”, wherein mostly landless peasants were recruited, struck terror among the wealthy social strata. Had he survived and put into effect his “march to Athens,” the course of the Modern History of Greece would be different. But in 1862 he was 65 years old and suffered from asthma; and he passed away on October 24, 1862 (Old Style).[21]

Rumors are going about him even today in Mainland Greece. He is said to have been poisoned by the British; and that he wanted to capture Athens in order to paint red the royal palace. Be that as it may, not only had the 1862 Grivas movement a clear-cut socialist character but many partisans of him proved to be ready to rise up in arms against the establishment.[22] It was on his ‘precedent’ that the communist uprising would be molded in the twentieth century.

* * *

The Greek Communist Party was founded on November 17, 1918 as the Socialist Labour Party of Greece.[23] It was renamed Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Hellados/K.K.E.) not earlier than late November, 1924.[24] From its very beginning, the K.K.E. had three key problems to cope with: a) the Macedonian Issue; b) the Trotskyite current within it; and c) the elaboration of a “revolutionary process” fit for Greece.

As for the first question, it must be kept in mind that the autochthonous population of Macedonia were Slavs; and those Slavs had often a Bulgarian national conscience. Whatever the fact of the matter, Macedonians were seeking independence; and the Greek Communists toed that very line in 1922.[25]

Such a decision, quite in accordance with the traditional/initial Marxist internationalism, was utterly disapproved by the public opinion of Greece and was abandoned at last. Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, nonetheless, the first Secretary-General of the newborn K.K.E. was put on trial and got eighteen months in prison.[26] Following his release in 1926, he was re-elected Secretary-General; yet he was at odds with the Party apparatus – already a Stalinist one. As a result he deserted the K.K.E. and founded his own Communist group,[27] baptized “Spartacus” after the journal they were publishing from 1928 on.[28]

The Greek “Spartacists” were overtly Trotskyites; and their deep disagreement with the Stalinist K.K.E. arose early in 1934. For it was then that Pouliopoulos published his book “A Democratic or a Socialist Revolution in Greece?”[29] and turned down the “revolutionary process” advocated by the K.K.E. The latter, obviously based on the Russian experience, “deserted” the workers and was seeking an alliance with the democratic bourgeois parties and, above all, the peasantry. Pouliopoulos and his Trotskyites, on the other hand, insisted on the necessity to propagate Marxism among the 100,000 “industrial proletarians,” dwelling mostly in Piraeus, the seaport of Athens.[30]

As for Piraeus, Pouliopoulos was correct: the workers there were mostly Right-wing or overtly fascists.[31] He tried, nevertheless, to indoctrinate them with Marxism’s Trotskyite variety but in vain. Meanwhile the K.K.E. concluded alliance with the Liberal Party (founded by Eleutherios Venizelos prior to World War I); yet this rapprochement accelerated the march of Greek politics towards the authoritarian government established jointly by King George II and his Prime Minister, Iōannēs Metaxas, on August 4, 1936.

Pouliopoulos, further, had a tragic end. Arrested by the Police of the authoritarian government in 1937, he declined the “offer” to leave his “homeland.” He was, therefore, imprisoned and, following the 1941 occupation of Greece by the Axis Powers, he was interned in an Italian concentration camp. At last, he was shot in 1943 by way of reprisal for a guerrilla attack against an Italian military train.[32] And an important “detail”: one of his “companions” was Andreas Papandreou,[33] who accepted the police’s offer to leave Greece, fled to the United States, became a university professor and, thanks to his American citizenship, Prime Minister of Greece in 1981.[34]

Civil Strife (1942-1949)

The authoritarian government established in August, 1936, stopped the Communist Party’s course to power. Still, the K.K.E. had one more card to play, namely the refugees who had immigrated into Greece from Turkey in the early 1920s. That was due to an agreement concluded by the two countries at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923, following the crushing defeat the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Turkish Nationalist Army. In the framework of this agreement, a compulsory exchange of populations was bilaterally agreed; as a result, ca. 1,500,000 people fled from Turkey into Greece.

If truth be told, this exchange had little, if any, relevance with the two involved countries. The crux was Macedonia and the framework, nay, the very basis of the machinations was the famous dogma of Sir Halford Mackinder. According to the latter’s doctrine if the “Slavs.” in practice the Russians, achieved to put under their control the seashore of Macedonia, they would “stand” as “world masters.”[35]

It is certain that Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the Jewish-run London School of Economics, announced his theory in 1904. Still, this announcement was all but a crystallization of ideas existing long before Sir Halford. For early in the nineteenth century the British Foreign Office already saw in the Ottoman Empire (that ruled Macedonia at that time) a “bulwark against Russian expansion.”[36] The collapse of this “bulwark”, nonetheless, was easily foreseen after the 1878 Berlin Congress. The corollary was that Greeks, under undisputable British influence, should be substituted for the autochthonous Macedonians. Such Greeks would come only from Asia Minor. That is why the 1923 Greco-Turkish “compulsory” exchange of populations was notified in advance by Eleutherios Venizelos as early as 1914.[37] The bulk of Macedonian Moslems (ca. 500,000 people overall) had emigrated into Turkey as soon as the Balkan wars were over. The Greeks, in essence the Christian Orthodox dwellers of Anatolia, were exhorted by the “heads” of their communities to leave their homeland (most likely upon advice of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul); and so in spite of the entreaties of their Turkish compatriots to stay.[38]

Therefore, the point is that the 1,500,000 people who immigrated into Greece and used to live there in unpredictable misery, were hopeful that they would soon be back in their homeland; but in 1926 their hope proved to be vain. That is why they took up the Communist ideology. The repercussions on Greek politics would be very serious.

In fact, from the early 1920s on the electoral strength of the K.K.E. was steadily rising. From 2% of the electorate in 1929, it attained 5% in 1932, 6% in 1933 and 9.5% in 1935.[39] It was one of the strongest Communist parties in Eastern Europe; and it is an irony that Greece was the sole country to escape from the Iron Curtain.

* * *

In 1941 Greece was occupied by the Axis Powers, namely Germany and Italy. Still, in that very year, on September 27, 1941, the National Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleutherōtiko Metōpo/E.A.M.) was founded, wherein the K.K.E. was the leading force.[40] On June 7, 1942, moreover, the “armed struggle” against the occupation troops began by the E.A.M.’s “military arm,” namely “People’s National Liberation Army” (Ethnikos Laïkos Apeleutherōtikos Stratos/E.L.A.S).[41] The latter was under a leadership of Arēs Velouchiōtēs, a fortune-hunter who soon proved to be a military genius. From 1943 on, the whole of Greece was ruled by E.A.M. and strictly controlled by E.L.A.S. The Right-wing guerilla forces were speedily and savagely exterminated. The only exception was Epirus, where there flourished a nationalist armed movement, the “National Troops of Greek Partisans” (Ethnikai Homades Hellēnōn Antartōn/E.O.E.A.), guided by Napoleōn Zervas, a commissioned officer of the (regular) Greek Army.

Needless to say that E.A.M./E.L.A.S. were particularly powerful in the very regions where the Th. Grivas’ socialist movement had taken place in the nineteenth century. Still, it is essential to insist on the fact that the Communist-run guerilla troops were substantially assisted by the Greek Orthodox clergy. Even two Metropolitan Bishops overtly adhered to E.A.M.,[42] whilst the rank-and-file of E.L.A.S. included priests in cassocks.[43] The behavior, on the other hand, of the E.L.A.S. troops towards the Orthodox clergy and, generally speaking, the Church was more than kind.[44] For the Communist-run E.A.M. used to see in the Church a pillar of its power.

Thanks to the “Revolution” proclaimed by Arēs Velouchiōtēs already in 1942, ten to seventeen Italian and German divisions were nailed down in Greece early in 1943.[45] So, towering were the ambitions of the Communists: they considered the “struggle” against the occupation troops as the “First Stage” of the “Socialist Revolution in Greece.” Yet they reckoned without their host; and in that very case the “host” was Stalin. In May, 1943, he actually dissolved the Comintern, because “he had never seriously endorsed the [Trotskyite] idea of the World Revolution.”[46] The “dissolution” was, moreover, a friendly gesture to Great Britain and the U.S.A.; for Stalin was already preoccupied with the reconstruction “of his devastated country.”[47]

Late in September, 1944, the Greek Government “in exile” at Cairo was informed that the dogma of Sir Halford Mackinder was again in force. For the British wanted a cordon sanitaire to be formed by the countries on the north-eastern Mediterranean seashore, in order to stop the “Russian expansion.”[48] Such a country was, of course, Greece; and Stalin speedily agreed not to send Soviet troops in the Greek parts of Macedonia and Thrace.[49] In the evening of October 9, 1944, Churchill had a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin: the agreement was “formally” concluded; and the British Prime Minister stated the following on October 27, in the House of Commons:

Upon the tangled questions of the Balkans, where there are Black Sea interests and Mediterranean interests to be considered, we were able to reach complete agreement and I do not feel that there is any immediate danger of our combined war effort be weakened by divergences of policy or doctrine, in Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria or Yugoslavia and, beyond the Balkans, Hungary. We have reached a very good working agreement about all these countries singly and in combination, in the object of . . . providing . . . for a peaceful settlement after the war is over.[50]

That meant that Greece was to be held under exclusive British control and that Yugoslavia was not going to be encompassed in the “Russian sphere of influence.” As a result, the Russophile E.A.M./E.L.A.S. were abandoned – and the tragedy of the Greek Left began.

* * *

During the operations against the occupation troops, the E.L.A.S. units were abundantly supplied by the British. And when, in October, 1944, the Germans evacuated Athens, the Communists considered the time to be ripe for the power to be seized by themselves. Early in December, 1944, therefore, a huge demonstration took place in the very center of the Greek capital; yet, contrary to what was going on so far, the Police opened fire. It was the beginning of the Civil War or, according to the Communists, the “Second Stage” of the “Revolution.” Churchill was eloquent in Parliament:

So far as has been ascertained the facts are as follows: the Greek Organization called E.A.M. had announced their intention to hold a demonstration on December 3rd. The Greek Government at first authorised this, but withdrew their permission when E.A.M. called for a general strike to begin on December 2nd. The strike in fact came into force early on December 3rd. Later in the morning the E.A.M. demonstration formed up and moved to the principle square of Athens, in spite of Government ban. On the evidence so far available I am not prepared to say who started the firing which then took place. The Police suffered one fatal casualty and had three men wounded. The latest authentic reports give the demonstration’s casualties as 11 killed and 60 wounded.[51]

Moscow remained silent, nay, indifferent.[52] What is more (and strangely enough) the battle in Athens were fought not by the well-trained units of E.L.A.S.[53] but by the latter’s Athens reserves – in fact bands of ill-equipped teenagers who were literally massacred by the British troops then occupying Athens.[54] Even today the accusations of “betrayal” against the 1944 Communist’s leadership are common. Still, the facts are not yet established. Two things are clear, nevertheless: a) the head of the Athens police force at that time, Angelos Ewert, was a British agent;[55] b) the Communist leadership that fled to the U.S.S.R. after the final defeat suffered by K.K.E. armed forces at the hands of the National Army in 1949 were never trusted by Stalin and, as a rule, met a “bad end.”[56]

In January, 1945, an agreement was reached between the British and the Communist troops. The latter laid down their arms, and were given the promise that they could develop freely political activity henceforth. Yet Churchill was determined to have “no peace without victory.”[57] A reign of terror followed;[58] A. Velouchiōtēs was murdered in 1945; and exasperated the Greek Communists triggered off the so-called “Third Stage” of their “Revolution” in 1946. In practice this was one more phase of the Civil War. It was to last until the summer of 1949. The Communist Army was defeated by the well-equipped National one and thanks to Tito’s attitude as well; for the latter, after his rupture with Stalin, overtly toed the line of the Western Powers.

All that time the Russians remained silent; and their “expansion” towards the Mediterranean Sea never took place. Simultaneously, autochthonous Macedonians, of Slavic stock, regarded as “Communists” by the Greek authorities, left their homes and fled either to Yugoslavia or in other countries of the “Iron Curtain.”[59]

Greece was once more a “Western Country.”

As an Epilogue

In April, 1967, two or three days after the military coup, at 2.00’ in the night, there was a ring at the front door. I woke up at once, though I sleep very soundly; I rushed out of my room and I went to look at what was going on.

All my family was up and about: three policemen had entered our home and were searching my father’s bookcase. Needless to say that they were silly people. What were they expecting to find out? The “dangerous” books, viz. the Marxist ones, were already carried by my Mother to the house of her own parents; and no policeman had the idea to search over there. The search, however, was about an hour long; afterwards, the policemen said good bye, and left our home.

That night I slept on my parents’ bed, between my dad and my mother, although I was 15. If truth be told, I was then and there like a baby; and my father kept patting my head, in order to calm me. The day after all our phone communications (either at home or in my father’s lawyer office) were cut off. You can imagine what it means for a barrister not to be able to make a phone call. Fortunately, we were without telephone only a year. For in 1968 we had again the ‘right’ to call up. 

It was this way that my High-School classmate and daughter of a leading Communist lawyer, answered to my entreaty. I had asked her to give an account of her experience – in her capacity as member of an influential family of the Greek Left; and she described to me the “most terrifying night” in her life. Her father was the Secretary-General of the E.A.M. in Thessaly; he was sentenced to death by a Court-Martial in the 1940s and he survived thanks to personal and family connections. Yet he was tired by his bitter experience of the “lost Communist Revolution”; and a couple of years following my classmate’s “most terrifying night”, he passed away due to a heart attack.

The military coup in question was the one brought off in Greece on April 21st, 1967. It had little (if anything) to do with Fascism. It is well-established today that its main reason lay in Mackinder’s dogma. The 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, triggered off in the first decade of June, was in view long before it started. And it was clear that, following either an Arab victory (not likely) or defeat (most possible) the Soviet “presence” in the Eastern Mediterranean would be considerably increased.[60] Meantime, Greece was in a long political crisis; and the political ascendancy of Andreas Papandreou would undoubtedly pave the way for a “mass infiltration” of “Communists”, i.e., Russophile Left-wing people into the Greek State apparatus.[61] That is why the Israelis and the “military establishment” of the United States stirred up the coup and, of course, approved of it, whilst the U.S.A. Department of State disavowed it.[62]

This is the framework wherein the tragedy of the Greek Left took place. The Greek Left knew very little about Marx and Marxism. As a rule, the E.A.M./E.L.A.S. people used to see in Communism a remedy for the traumas that Greek National Life was leaving on their psyche. The refugees from Asia Minor wanted to go back to their “homes” and were frustrated by the foiling of their expectations. The peasants wished to have a less hard life. Educated people, like the father of my classmate, were seeking for the modernization and, if possible, Europeanization of the incredibly archaic social structures of Modern and Contemporary Greek nationhood. Almost the whole of them were conservative householders and good members of Greek Orthodox Church’s congregation. They were engaged in a “Crusade” in order to cure the painful paradoxes of Modern Greece. Yet they did not realize that their “Cross” was lost in the pitiless implementation of Mackinder’s Geopolitics.

Notes

[1] Correspondance du comte Capodistria, président de la Grèce, I (Geneva : Cherbouliez, 1839), p. 265.

[2] See Dimitris Michalopoulos, “The Enlightenment, the Porte and the Greek Church: A Paradox of Balkan History”, in Seyfi Kenan (ed.), The Ottomans and Europe. Travel, Encounter and Interaction (Istanbul: ISAM, 2010), pp. 449-468

[3] Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières de Bucarest et Jassy et leurs professeurs (Salonika : Institute for Balkan Studies, 1974), p. 181.

[4] Cléobule Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique et de la libre pensée dans les Balkans. La vie et l’œuvre de Théophile Corydalée (Salonika : Institute for Balkan Studies, 19672), p. 192.

[5] Ibid., p. 22.

[6] Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity. Translated into Greek by N. K. Paparrodou (Athens: Bergadēs, 1979), p. 489.

[7] Ibid.; C. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, p. 195; cf. Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières…, p. 181.

[8] Vasileios Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou, 1453-sēmeron (= History of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1453-today), Salonika: Kyriakidēs Bros, 1987, p. 40.

[9] “Kyrillos I Loukaris” (= Cyril I Lucar), Encyclopedia Papyros-Larousse-Britannica (in Greek), vol. 37th (Athens: Papyros, 1989), p. 50.

[10] V. Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou…, p. 49.

[11]“Kyrillos I Loukaris”, Encyclopedia Papyros-Larousse-Britannica, vol. 37th, p. 50.

[12] Ibid.

[13] V. Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou…, p. 40.

[14] S. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p. 475ff.

[15] Cl. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, pp. 78-80.

[16] Ibid., p.76.

[17] Ibid., p. 103.

[18] N. Iorga, Byzance après Byzance (Bucharest : Association International d’Études du sud-est européen. Comité national roumain, 1971), pp. 212-213; Cl. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, p. 173.

[19] Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières…, pp. 363-373, 667.

[20] Dimitris Michalopoulos, Fallmerayer et les Grecs, Istanbul : Isis, 2011.

[21] Archives des Affaires étrangères (Paris [hereafter : AAE]), Mémoires et documents. Grèce, vol. 7 (1830-1862), f. 212r.; D. Michalopoulos, Vie politique en Grèce pendant les années 1862-1869 (Athens : University of Athens/Saripoleion, 1981), pp. 52-55.

[22] AAE, Correspondance politique, Grèce, vol. 85 (novembre-décembre 1862), ff. 46v., 85r., 102v.

[23] Panos Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs . Ho prōtos tou agōna (=Arēs Velouchiōtēs. The First one in the [Armed Communist] Struggle), vol. I (Athens: Kypselē, 1964), p. 121.

[24] Dēmētrēs Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos. Henas dianooumenos epanastatēs (=Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, an Intellectual Revolutionary), Athens: Glaros, 1992, p. 23.

[25] D. Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos…, p. 25ff.

[26] Ibid., pp. 27-28.

[27] Ibid., p. 30.

[28] Ibid., p. 35.

[29] Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, Dēmokratikē ē Sosialistikē epanastasē stēn Hellada, Athens, 19662.

[30] Ibid., pp. 181,191.

[31] Dimitris Michalopoulos, « La Roumanie et la Grèce dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale », Revue Roumaine d’Histoire (Bucharest), tome XLIII (2004), pp. 227- 229.

[32] D. Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos…, pp. 87-90.

[33] Andreas Papandreou, Democracy at Gunpoint. The Greek Front (Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 68, 70.

[34] Oral testimony by Aikaterinē Anastasiadou, sister of P. Pouliopoulos’ wife (1996).

[35] Orestēs E. Vidalēs, To synchrono geōpolitiko perivallon kai hē ethnikē mas politikē (= The Contemporary Geopolitical Environment and [Greek] national policy), Athens: Hellinikē Euroekdotikē, 1988, p.23ff.

[36] Theophilus C. Prousis, Lord Strangford at the Sublime Porte (1821): The Eastern Crisis (Istanbul: Isis, 2010), p. 38.

[37] Eleutherios Venizelos Papers (Athens), I/35/1, E. Venizelos to the Greek minister at Bucharest (Athens, late in 1914). Published in : Dimitris Michalopoulos, Attitudes parallèles. Éleuthérios Vénisélos et Take Ionescu dans la Grande Guerre (Athens : Historical Institute for Studies on Eleutherios Venizelos and his Era, 2008), pp. 35-36.

[38] Markos Vafeiadēs, Apomnēmoneumata (= Memoirs), vol. I (Athens : Diphros, 1984), p. 44.

[39] Sp. Linardatos, Pōs eftasame stēn 4ē Augoustou (= How did we reach on August 4th), Athens: Themelio, 1965), pp. 61, 152.

[40] Dionysēs Charitopoulos, Arēs, ho archēgos tōn ataktōn (= Ares, Leader of the Irregulars), vol. I (Athens: Exantas, 1997), p. 71.

[41] P. Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs…, vol. II (Athens : Kypselē, 1964), pp. 15-21.

[42] D. Charitopoulos, Arēs…, vol. I, 453-454; vol. II (Athens: Exantas, 2004), pp. 249, 260.

[43] Ibid., vol. I, pp. 398-400; vol. II, pp. 53-54, 249.

[44] Ibid., vol. I, p. 400; P. Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs…, vol. II, pp. 239-240.

[45] Archives of the Foreign Ministry of Greece (hereafter: AYE), Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē (= Ambassador Athanasius Politēs’ Papers), 9, A. Politēs, Greek ambassador to the Soviet Union, to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 44, Kuibyshev, February 14, 1943; and telegram No. 123, Kuibyshev, April 8, 1943.

[46] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 9, A. Politēs to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 229, Kuibyshev, May 26, 1943.

[47] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 9, A. Politēs to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 240, Kuibyshev, June 4, 1943.

[48] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, the Press Office of the Greek Government at Cairo, to A. Politēs, telegram No. 617, Cairo, October Ist, 1944.

[49] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, the Press Office of the Greek Government at Cairo, to A. Politēs, telegram No. 422, Cairo, October 2, 1944.

[50] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, “The Prime Minister’s statement on the Moscow talks… Issued by the Press Department of the British Embassy”, Moscow, Saturday, October 28, 1944.

[51] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, “Prime Minister’s answer in Parliament…to question about incidents in Athens on December 3rd.”

[52] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, A. Politēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch 1204/E, Moscow, December 4. 1944.

[53] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, Dēmētrios Pappas, Greek Ambassador in Cairo, to A. Politēs, dispatch No. 6113, Cairo, December 22, 1944.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Sp. V. Markezinēs, Synchronē Politikē Historia tēs Hellados, 1936-1975 (= Political History of Contemporary Greece, 1936-1975), vol. III (Athens: Papyros: 1944), p. 56 (note 40).

[56] N. I. Mertzos, Svarnout. To prodomeno antartiko (= Svarnout. The Betrayed Guerilla), Salonika, 19846, pp. 10-11.

[57] Sp. V. Markezinēs, Synchronē Politikē Historia tēs Hellados…, vol. II (Athens: Papyros, 1994), pp. 38-39.

[58] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 11. (A file full of Tass bulletins concerning the situation in Greece.) Oral testimonies recollected by the author of these lines as well.

[59] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 11, A.Politēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch No. 1032/C, Moscow, September 17, 1945. (According to the Tass Agency, reliable in that case.)

[60] AYE, 1967, 2.4, “The Middle East Crisis.” Memorandum signed by D. N. Karagiannēs, ref.number GMA35-1368, Athens, August 5, 1967.

[61] AYE, 1967, 5.1, Colonel Iōannēs Sorokos, military attaché of the Greek Embassy in Washington, to the Greek Ambassador to the U.S.A., No. 1312/0009, Washington, D. C., May 10, 1967.

[62] Ibid.; Alexandros Matsas, Greek Ambassador in Washington, D.C., to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch No. 1674, Washington, D.C., May 19, 1967.

Source: Ab Aeterno no. 13, October-December, 2012.

 

 


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Complicated situation around Iran and the KSA

 

Complicated situation around Iran and the KSA

The situation around Iran continues to be quite difficult, despite significant progress in the normalization of relations between the West and Iran and the achievement of an interim agreement on the Iranian nuclear program in Geneva on November 24 at a working meeting of the “six” international negotiators and a Tehran delegation. President Rouhani failed to gain the immediate trust of the USA and its allies with his major changes to the accents of Iran’s foreign policy, although the process proceeded in the right direction relatively quickly.

The fact is that much of the negative role, being played in Washington, comes from the Republicans and other conservative forces sitting in the US Congress. First, they approved a list of 19 individuals and entities that fell under sanctions for involvement in Iran’s nuclear program, which forced the Iranian delegation to leave the conference room in Geneva on December 13, since the interim agreement of November 24 provides for the non-imposition of any additional sanctions against Tehran. Then, a group of senators prepared a list of new sanctions against Iran in late December, if negotiations on the nuclear issue reached a deadlock. In response, Iranian parliamentarians prepared their list of appropriate measures that could be applied in case the U.S. toughened its position and the negotiations were derailed. Although it is clear that President Obama himself is interested in the successful completion of the Geneva process, since this would contribute to significant freezing of the Iranian nuclear program, the normalization of relations with Tehran, and allow Washington to continue on a course aimed at reformatting its policy in the Middle East, which started in October 2013.

That is when the U.S. Administration finally realized the fatality of placing its stakes on supporting those forces in the Arab world that assisted radical Islam, extremism and even terrorism, by financing and providing military assistance to organizations and groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or currents even more radical in their ideologies. Their goal is to transform the Arab world into a radical Wahhabi Caliphate. Moreover, it was only this example of a bloody war in Syria that made American strategists realize this fact, and they started developing new approaches to their policy in the region. This explains the change of attitude towards Iran, which can become a real counterweight to the aggressive policy of Saudi Arabia, even more so, since the oil dependence of the U.S. economy has been substantially reduced after the “shale revolution”, and the importance of the Wahhabi Kingdom has decreased as well, in terms of the world’s energy supplies.

At the same time, American and European companies are interested in participating in the modernization of the Iranian economy and the development of large oil and gas projects that were frozen because of the sanctions. In addition, Iran is a very large market, given its 70 million people and solvency thanks to vast oil and gas resources of this country. Their development, especially the South Pars Gas Field, will require tens of billions in investments and the latest technologies, including for the creation of facilities for liquefying gas for export. Iran’s power industry, industrial sector, telecommunications, and transport infrastructure have huge investment opportunities. In other words, this is a very tasty area for Western business, which is much more promising than the economies of the GCC countries, where labor resources are limited.

Thus, Saudi Arabia became nervous as it realized that its place as the main strategic ally of the USA in the Persian Gulf might soon be taken over by Iran. The more so, knowing that Tehran played this role in the 1970s under the Shah’s regime. Moreover, if one considers Iran’s powerful armed forces, which will surely be modernized, one can understand what Riyadh is afraid of – a complete change in the regional balance of forces, where Saudi Arabia will fall into the shadows of Iran and Iraq.

Nevertheless, instead of making steps towards Tehran, the stubborn and conservative aging leaders of the KSA started, simply saying, to “play dirty tricks” through the development of an entire network of anti-Iran intrigues. At first, the Saudis tried to push Israel into joint strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Then, when this idea had failed, Riyadh decided to put together an anti-Iran military bloc by transforming the GCC from an economic and political union of Arabian monarchies into a military alliance. At the last summit of the organization in December in Kuwait, the Saudis put forward a proposal to create a sort of a “Gulf” NATO to deter Iran. Although, as it is well known, Iran never attacked its neighbors during its modern history after the Khomeini Revolution, but only fought to repel the aggression of Iraq, started in 1980 at the instigation of Saudi Arabia, the GCC countries and the United States.

So far other members of the Council – with the exception of Bahrain, whose royal regime entirely depends on Saudi bayonets (Saudi troops were brought to the island in February 2011 to suppress actions of the Shiite majority population) – are reacting coolly to all this. Only a kind of military command was established, but there are no common armed forces. Moreover, small Arab principalities of the Gulf will hardly wish to worsen their relations with Iran, at the time when this country is coming out of Western isolation.

Moreover, Riyadh revived talks of a regional missile defense system called “ParsPRO” to repel possible missile and air strikes on the GCC from Iran. Its components, based on the purchase of the “Patriot” systems, would be placed virtually everywhere – from Kuwait to Qatar and the UAE. At that, they planned to spend up to $20 billion for just the first phase. Moreover, this was done despite the fact that in early December, the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif visited four Gulf countries and put forward a number of interesting initiatives to strengthen stability and security in the Gulf, which received positive feedback from Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Oman.

In any case, we can be sure that Tehran can overcome the remaining difficulties in the coming period and make a leap forward, despite the machinations of Saudi Arabia and the pressure of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Russia understands this, and is getting ready to expand its cooperation with Iran – a country that is a friend of the Russian Federation. It is no mere chance that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made an official visit to Tehran in mid-December, and that the capital of Iran hosted a meeting of the Joint Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation.

Viktor Titov, PhD in History, a political observer on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.

Ruzie met Israël bewijst dat Obama Iran als nieuwe bondgenoot ziet

Ruzie met Israël bewijst dat Obama Iran als nieuwe bondgenoot ziet

Oud brigadier-generaal Chen noemt Kerry's plan voor Palestijnse staat 'absurd' en 'krankzinnig'


Moshe Yaalon en John Kerry. Israëlische leiders worden onmiddellijk terecht gewezen als ze kritiek hebben, maar Iraanse leiders kunnen zeggen wat ze willen, zonder ook maar enige tegenspraak van het Witte Huis.

De ruzie die de afgelopen dagen ontstond tussen de VS en Israël, nadat de Israëlische minister van Defensie Moshe Yaalon zware kritiek had geuit op zowel de Amerikaanse minister van Defensie John Kerry als diens vredesplan, laat eens te meer zien dat president Barack Hussein Obama niet langer de Joodse staat, maar Iran als belangrijkste bondgenoot in het Midden Oosten beschouwt. De Iraanse leiders kunnen immers zonder enige veroordeling van het Witte Huis de VS blijven verketteren, zoals ook deze week weer gebeurde.

'De minister van Defensie verontschuldigt zich als de minister (Kerry) beledigd was door diens woorden,' aldus de verklaring gisterenavond van het kantoor van minister Yaalon. Die had Kerry eerder 'obsessief' en 'messiaans' genoemd, en het vredesplan wat hij heeft gepresenteerd 'het papier waarop het is geschreven niet waard'.

Zowel het Amerikaanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken als het Witte Huis reageerden woedend, en eisten een excuus, dat er na enkele uren ook kwam. Dat gebeurde echter pas nadat premier Netanyahu twee uur lang met minister Yaalon had gepraat. Tenslotte zag die geen andere uitweg dan zich te verontschuldigen.

Netanyahu vergeleek toenadering tot Iran rechtstreeks met Hitler

Eigenlijk was de ruzie al eerder begonnen, namelijk tijdens de begrafenis van de afgelopen weekend overleden oud-premier Ariel Sharon. In het bijzijn van vicepresident Joe Biden citeerde Netanyahu Sharons belofte dat hij nooit meer zou toestaan dat Israël en de Joden moeten betalen voor de fout van het Westen, dat in 1938 toenadering zocht tot Adolf Hitler, die ondertussen druk bezig was met de voorbereidingen voor de Holocaust tegen het Joodse volk.

De regering Obama beschouwde dit als een steek onder water naar de toenadering tot Iran, en het accepteren van de nucleaire aspiraties van dit land. In die zin was Netanyahu's kritiek zelfs directer als die van Yaalon.

De ontstane ruzie onderstreept dat Obama Israël geleidelijk aan heeft afgewaardeerd als belangrijke bondgenoot in het Midden Oosten, en de Joodse staat aan het inruilen is voor de islamitische republiek Iran. Dat blijkt overduidelijk uit het feit dat de leiders en andere officials in Teheran de VS in nog veel hardere bewoordingen kunnen blijven verketteren, zonder dat er ook maar één woord van kritiek uit Washington op komt.

Geen reactie op beledigingen en beschuldigingen door Rouhani

In september 2013 zette de Iraanse president Rouhani Obama publiekelijk op zijn nummer, door een uitnodiging voor een persoonlijk gesprek af te wijzen. Sindsdien gaat Rouhani op de Iraanse TV regelmatig tekeer tegen het Witte Huis, beschuldigt hij Obama van misleiding, en beweert hij dat Amerika en het Westen hebben gebogen voor de wil van Iran.

Deze week nog sprak viceminister van Buitenlandse Zaken Abbas Araghchi het Witte Huis rechtstreeks tegen, door te zeggen dat Obama niet de waarheid had gesproken toen hij zei dat Iran erin had toegestemd om delen van zijn uraniumverrijking te ontmantelen.

Iran mag zeggen wat het wil, Israël niet

Het Witte Huis reageerde hier enkel op door te zeggen dat het 'niet uitmaakt wat de Iraniërs zeggen, maar wat ze doen.' Die regel geldt duidelijk niet voor Israëlische leiders en officials. Zij worden bij veel minder hevig kritiek op Obama en zijn regering onmiddellijk keihard terecht gewezen. Een woordvoerder van het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken zei dat 'Kerry en zijn team dag en nacht werken om een veilige vrede voor Israël te waarborgen.'

Dat Kerry en zijn team hard werken is niet iets wat in Israël wordt betwijfeld. Wat men in de Joodse staat niet kan accepteren, is dat Amerika wil bepalen wat voor Israël 'veilig' is, en hoe het zich moet opstellen tegenover een nucleair Iran en de Palestijnen. De mening van Israël zelf doet daarbij nauwelijks ter zake.

Yaalon nam inhoud kritiek niet terug

Yaalon luchtte hier zijn hart over door te zeggen dat 'Kerry mij niets hoeft te vertellen over de Palestijnen. Ik leef en adem het conflict met de Palestijnen. Ik weet wat ze denken, wat ze willen en wat ze echt bedoelen. Het Amerikaanse veiligheidsplan dat ons werd voorgelegd is het papier waarop het geschreven werd niet waard.'

Met grote tegenzin moest de minister uiteindelijk zijn excuses aanbieden. Merk echter de terminologie op: '... verontschuldigt zich als de minister (Kerry) beledigd was door diens woorden.' Feitelijk bood Yaalon enkel zijn excuses aan voor het beledigen van Kerry, maar nam hij niets van de inhoud van zijn kritiek terug.

'Absurd spelletje'; Palestijnse staat 'krankzinnig'

Yaalon kreeg vandaag steun van oud brigadier-generaal Amatzia Chen, ooit lid van Sharons legendarische 101e eenheid. 'Yaalon zei duidelijk dingen. Er is hier een absurd spelletje gaande dat op een mislukking zal uitlopen. De media staan bol van politieke standpunten die zelfs niet een klein beetje overeenkomen met de realiteit.'

Chen vond het dan ook een goede zaak dat Yaalon zich heeft uitgesproken. 'Het is namelijk volkomen duidelijk dat wij geen (vredes)partner hebben. Ze proberen een land te fabriceren met een Palestijns volk - dat is een in de geschiedenis nog nooit vertoonde krankzinnigheid.'

Chen wees op de mislukking van Sharons eenzijdige terugtrekking uit Gaza in 2005. Dat leverde niet de door de Palestijnen beloofde vrede op, maar juist nog veel meer terreur. 'Zo zal het ook gaan als we Judea en Samaria evacueren. Dat moeten we zelfs niet eens overwegen.' (2)


Xander

(1) DEBKA
(2) Arutz 7

Zie ook o.a.:

14-01: Ruzie VS-Israël na zware kritiek minister Defensie op Kerry's vredesplan
14-01: VS weigert Israël details over deal Iran, dat onmanteling kernsites ontkent
13-01: Hamas: Israël volgens islamitische profetieën over 8 jaar vernietigd
09-01: Iran negeert alle afspraken Genève, bevestigt streven naar kernwapens (/ Opperleider Khamenei noemt Verenigde Staten 'satanisch')
09-01: Oude islamitische tekst bewijst dat imam Mahdi reeds aanwezig en actief is
07-01: Abbas' Fatahpartij: Vernietiging heel Israël einddoel van vredesverdrag

2013:
20-12: Hoge Palestijnse official: Ja, wij steunden volmondig de Nazi's
18-12: Iran: Genève-akkoord betekenisloos, mogelijk nog 20 jaar onderhandelen
13-12: Geen bezwaar VS en EU tegen Iraanse (kern)raketten die Israël kunnen raken
02-12: Deal met Iran: Vervult Obama islamitische profetie over wegbereider Mahdi?
26-11: 'Obama belooft Iran status als 7e wereldmacht'

Viktor Orban in Moscow

 

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Viktor Orban in Moscow

Pyotr ISKENDEROV

Ex: http://www.strategic-culture.org

 

The first EU-Serbia intergovernmental conference coming up in January is supposed to demonstrate the progress of Serbia's application to join the European Union. «Serbia must continue the reforms it has begun, the results of which will be a key indicator in assessing the integration process», stated the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs. At the same time, in a discussion on Serbia's European prospects, members of the European Parliament hailed the local elections held in Kosovo in late 2013 as «a big step forward on the path to democracy». 

The politicization of Serbia's application to join the EU is obvious. This refers to the socioeconomic requirements being made of Belgrade and recommendations to revise the parameters of cooperation with Russia in the energy field, as they do not conform to the spirit of the European Union, the Energy Charter and the Third Energy Package. 

However, how can one talk about «nonconformity» if within the EU itself the approaches of individual countries to choosing an energy policy are increasingly different? The European Union is not a monolith. A number of its member countries have already made it clear that they do not plan to uncomplainingly follow the directives of Brussels in the energy field, although they do not call their EU membership into question (at least, not yet). At the very moment when the European Parliament members in Strasbourg were starting their discussions at their winter session, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrived in Moscow for a working visit... 

Over the past two decades, relations between Russia and Hungary have seen complicated periods. There have been both actions of the Hungarian government against Russian oil and gas companies (mainly against Surgutneftegaz) and attempts by Budapest to play a «double game» on the energy field. However, in the last few years relations have been improving. Viktor Orban's working visit to Moscow in January 2013 was a momentous occasion. At that time, during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the head of the Hungarian government suggested that Russia participate in the modernization of Hungary's energy system. And now these plans are beginning to be implemented. 

According to Sergei Kirienko, the head of the state corporation Rosatom, nuclear energy is becoming an important area of bilateral Russian-Hungarian cooperation. «Negotiations with Hungary are in the active stage», stated Kirienko. This refers to Russia's participation in building two new power producing units at Hungary's Paks nuclear power plant (in addition to the existing four which were built with the help of the USSR) with a total output of 2500-3400 MW. The contract is valued at 10 billion dollars. «Over 40 percent of the work volume», according to V. Putin, «is to be done by the Hungarian side. This means that approximately three billion dollars will be allocated for supporting jobs in Hungary, and tax revenues alone will come to over a billion dollars.» 

And if one adds the agreements reached by Moscow and Budapest in late 2013 on strict adherence, regardless of possible complications, to the previously agreed-upon schedule for the construction of the Hungarian part of the South Stream gas pipeline and the start of Russian gas deliveries to Hungary in early 2017, one must acknowledge that cooperation between Russia and Hungary in the energy field is becoming a strategic partnership.

There are two main reasons for the progressive development of relations between Russia and Hungary. The first is connected with tension in the relations between Budapest and Brussels. Pressure from EU leadership on Hungary has become increasingly overt over the past few years, touching on both the state sovereignty of Hungary and the sentiments of its people. It is sufficient to recall the improvisations of German politicians with regard to the need to send paramilitary units to Hungary or the proposal discussed in the European Commission to impose sanctions on Budapest for peculiarities of Hungarian national legislation which did not please Brussels. 

In the eyes of Hungarians, all of this has significantly reduced the attractiveness, to put it mildly, of the European Commission's recommendations in other areas as well, including energy. Furthermore, why not follow the example of German business in this matter? In recent years it has been conducting an independent policy of cooperating with Russia in the energy field. This refers, in particular, to the recent withdrawal of the German energy holding RWE from the Nabucco project.

Furthermore, Russian-Hungarian cooperation has a good financial and economic basis. Russian proposals are simply more profitable, well-planned and serious than similar proposals from Western companies. This is proven by a simple fact: today Russia supplies 80% of oil and 75% of natural gas consumed in Hungary. 

As the Hungarian press acknowledges, among all the candidates for the contract, only Rosatom is prepared to provide appropriate preliminary financing for the project to develop the Paks nuclear power plant. At first the French company Areva and the Japanese-American company Westinghouse planned to take part in the tender, but Hungary never received any concrete proposals from them. The Russian corporation, on the other hand, proposed terms which serve the interests of the Hungarian side.

It must be said that Hungary's interest in developing atomic energy does not exactly suit the priorities of the European Union, where many are dreaming of a «shale revolution», which would bring Europe no less, but rather more, of an ecological threat than a nuclear plant. 

The Hungarian government's stake on the development of nuclear energy, observing, of course, all safety requirements, is an important step on a Europe-wide scale. As shown by Russia's cooperation with other countries, in particular Iran, Russian proposals fully meet safety requirements. So the energy alliance of Moscow and Budapest may serve as an example for other European countries.

samedi, 18 janvier 2014

Erdogan in Trouble but Gulen and CIA Intrigues need containing

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Turkey in crisis: Erdogan in Trouble but Gulen and CIA Intrigues need containing 

Nuray Lydia Oglu and Lee Jay Walker 

Ex: http://www.moderntokyotimes.com - Modern Tokyo Times

The grand ambitions of Recep Tayyip Erdogan are unraveling in many directions because the Prime Minister of Turkey is suffering from many internal convulsions which are rocking this nation.  Several years ago it appeared that Erdogan could continue to abuse many excesses based on the strength of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Therefore, Erdogan’s Islamist dream and “Ottoman mirror” had a powerful swagger, whereby he perceived himself to be the “new father of Turkey” providing nationals followed his conservative and Islamist agenda. Yet now, the AKP is starting to look fragile and increasingly authoritarian under Erdogan.

In saying this, it is clear that Fethullah Gulen is no savior because just like Erdogan he also wants to pull the strings. Equally important, both individuals share the Islamist dream of crushing progressive forces in Turkey. Indeed, in the past Erdogan and Gulen were playing the same tune.

Regionally, the grand designs of Erdogan have literally bitten the dust because of the meddling of Turkey. After all, only Erdogan could disillusion Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, and other nations. Also, with Erdogan being determined to overthrow the government of Syria, then not only did he turn a blind eye towards international jihadists and covert operatives; but, more alarmingly, he avidly tolerates and encourages brutal sectarian and terrorist forces against secular Syria. Therefore, the image of Turkey is suffering greatly throughout the entire region because Erdogan can’t stop meddling and upsetting regional nations.

Re-focusing on the current scandal in Turkey then clearly the Erdogan boat is rocking. Baha Gungor, Deutsche Welle, says: “Erdogan has made the same mistakes as many autocrats before him. He has come to see himself as infallible, tolerating criticism of his policies less and less. Journalists, intellectuals and politicians who see things differently have been locked up. Large swaths of the army’s former leadership were handed harsh jail sentences for allegedly planning a coup.”

Indeed, it is clear that 2013 witnessed many shortcomings for the leader of Turkey because Erdogan kept on piling on more judgments of errors. This was clearly apparent during the Taksim Square crisis because Erdogan issued harsh statements about the demonstrators. Also, excessive force against demonstrators and his unapologetic stance meant that Turkey was becoming even more divided.

Serious allegations by the end of 2013 related to money laundering, the smuggling of gold, major bribes – and other areas related to corruption – equated to a huge downturn in the domestic fortunes of Erdogan. Not only this, the ramifications for the economy is now being felt. This is clearly apparent because now the Turkish lira is fairing miserably with the US dollar and the Euro.

Yet the current internal struggle of Islamist powerbrokers between Erdogan and Gulen is alarming. After all, under the Obama administration in America it is clear that a pro-Muslim Brotherhood agenda existed whereby Egypt was going to be the grand experiment. Luckily, the masses in Egypt rose up against the Muslim Brotherhood putsch for usurping state institutions in order to turn the clock back. However, the dream is still alive and kicking and not surprisingly Gulen is based in America just like the leading Islamist in Tunisia resided in the United Kingdom prior to returning. Therefore, the erratic behaviour of Erdogan must have set off some alarm bells in Washington and it would appear that Gulen is now being readied for the next stage in the unraveling of secularism in Turkey.

It must be remembered, that Afghanistan and Iraq had secular governments prior to America and the United Kingdom meddling into their respective internal affairs. Indeed, America also welcomed Sharia law in Sudan in the early 1980s despite the outcome of this policy being detrimental for Animists and Christians in Sudan. Likewise, Sharia law and the jihadist threat followed on the coattails of America, France, the United Kingdom and several Gulf powers in Libya. In other words, a natural reality is emerging whereby Western powers are siding with the Islamist agenda. This can also be witnessed in Syria whereby the usual players in the Gulf and West are siding with sectarian and terrorist forces. The knock on effect is also the crushing of Christianity in Syria just like what happened in Iraq and Kosovo. Similarly, Coptic Christians were expendable in Egypt because of the intrigues of Washington and London. However, just like the crisis in Iraq it is clear that Saudi Arabia doesn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood too close to home just like this nation didn’t welcome the loss of Sunni power in Iraq.

Family Security Matters says: Osman Nori, the retired head of Turkish intelligence, recently alleged that the Gulen movement has served as a front for US intelligence by sheltering 130 CIA agents in its schools throughout Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.”

“This claim collaborates the testimony of Sybil Edmonds, a former FBI translator and celebrated whistleblower. Ms. Edmonds says that Gulen and his movement began to receive vast sums of money from the CIA in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when US officials realized that they could not obtain control of the massive energy resources of the newly created Russian republics because of a deep-seated suspicion of American motives.”

“The CIA, Ms. Edmonds maintains, came to view Turkey as a perfect “proxy” for US interests since it was a NATO ally that shared the same language, culture, and religion as the other Central Asian countries. But centralized control of these republics, she points out, could only be actualized by the creation of the Pan-Turkish nationalism and religion, envisioned by Gulen and his followers. And so, according to Ms. Edmonds, the CIA became Gulen’s partner in the creation of the New Islamic World Order. The money for the pasha’s schools and settlements, she says, came not from congressionally-approved funding but rather from covert CIA operations, including narcotics trafficking, nuclear black market, weapons smuggling, and terrorist activities.”

In other words, if Turkey is left to the geopolitical whims of America and the United Kingdom alongside the Islamist dreams of Gulen, then Turkey will lose its secular and modernist approach. Of course, the same applies to the initial gambit of America, the United Kingdom and Gulen utilizing Erdogan – and other Islamists in Turkey, prior to the ongoing internal struggle between Erdogan and Gulen – after the applecart began to lose balance. Therefore, is essential that secular forces wake-up in Turkey and the same applies to all independent forces, which don’t rely on Western and Islamist intrigues.

Erdogan is undermining secularism in Turkey therefore his authoritarian nature is worrying vast numbers of Turkish citizens. Yet, the intrigues of Gulen aren’t the answer and the same applies to CIA shadows and the usual role of the United Kingdom. The Russian Federation must also focus on events in Turkey because Chechen Islamists and others in the Caucasus have been given havens by Turkey and the same applies to Georgia. Likewise, the Erdogan government is undermining secular Syria by supporting sectarian and terrorist forces against the people of this nation.

Turkey like Egypt is facing an internal clash of civilization and currently the intrigues of America and the United Kingdom are favoring the Islamist agenda. Ironically, in Turkey the power play between Erdogan and Gulen is between two individuals who share much in common. It is hoped that both negative forces will devour each other in order for secular and other political forces in Turkey to return the nation back to its modernization path. Therefore, political parties who oppose Erdogan should not rush into the arms of “the Gulen shadow.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/more-dangerous-than-bin-laden-protestors-to-descend-on-gulens-mountain-fortress-in-pennsylvania#ixzz2qRaPXtVm  Family Security Matters

http://www.dw.de/opinion-erdogan-is-on-course-to-self-destruct/a-17327807 Deutsche Welle

leejay@moderntokyotimes.com

http://moderntokyotimes.com

vendredi, 17 janvier 2014

NSA : Allemagne et USA dans un tunnel

NSA : Allemagne et USA dans un tunnel

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

Le grand quotidien allemand Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) donne des détails importants, à partir de sources de première main, sur les négociations entre les USA et l’Allemagne concernant les activités d’espionnage, de surveillance et d’écoute de la NSA en Allemagne. (On connaît la position en flèche de l'Allemagne à cet égard [voir le 12 décembre 2013et le 20 décembre 2013].) Ces informations sont prises avec d’autant plus d’attention que le quotidien SZ a une réputation considérable de sérieux et une influence à mesure, largement répercutée par son tirage important. Pour ce cas précis de la crise Snowden/NSA, le SZ n’a pas l’habitude de diffuser des informations polémiques, ni de faire dans un anti-américanisme militant, par conséquent les indications qu’ils donnent doivent d’autant plus être considérées avec préoccupation par ceux qui espèrent un arrangement Allemagne-USA.

Le 14 janvier 2014, Russia Today a consacré un article aux informations du SZ, dont le titre annonce clairement l'humeur (“Les Amérticains nous mentent”). «Tuesday’s edition of Süddeutsche Zeitung daily came out with the headline ‘The Americans lied to us’. The German daily was quoting an unnamed high-ranking local official who claimed that even in the wake of the recent scandal, when it emerged that the NSA had been tapping the mobile telephone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the White House would not promise to stop listening to German politicians’ phone calls. [...]

»According to Süddeutsche and a report on public broadcaster NDR, during the negotiations the US officials were expected to give German counterparts access to the alleged listening station, believed to be on the top floor of the US embassy in Berlin, and to shed light on how long Merkel’s phone had been monitored and whether she was Germany's only key politician to be targeted. Süddeutsche has quoted a “German expert familiar with the state of the negotiations” as saying “we're getting nothing.” As a result, according to the newspaper, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) Gerhard Schindler stated that if things don't improve, he would prefer not to sign the deal at all.»

Reuters publie un article, ce même 14 janvier 2014, où le caractère abrupt des mauvaises nouvelles des négociations est démenti ou du moins édulcoré par le ministre de l'intérieur, sans pour autant donner de précisions rassurantes. Le SZ n’est pas nommé, ce qui permet d’éviter une éventuelle polémique avec le quotidien et semblerait confirmer implicitement ou indirectement au moins les difficultés de la négociation. L’agence Reuters obtient elle-même des précisions officieuses allemandes qui ne sont pas plus optimistes, tandis que les déclarations du côté US restent également très imprécises.

«A government source in Berlin told Reuters the United States remained interested in a deal but was loath to give a blanket pledge not to try to monitor government members. Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Staff at the White House said discussions with Germany so far had yielded “a better understanding of the requirements and concerns that exist on both sides”. “Such consultations will continue among our intelligence services as a part of our shared commitment to strengthen our practical cooperation in a manner that reflects the shared threats we face, the technological environment in which we operate, our close relationship with one another, and our abiding respect for the civil and political rights and privacy interests of our respective citizens,” Hayden told Reuters.

»German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Tuesday he was anything but relaxed about the matter but there was still time to make progress. “A next step will be that we look at the reforms to be announced by President Obama with regard to limiting the activities of intelligence agencies.”

A côté de ces prises de position incertaines mais qui tentent d’écarter l'impression selon laquelle SZ a donné des indications réellement significatives, des réactions officielles d’hommes politiques à propos de l’article incriminé finissent par donner à celui-ci, au contraire, toute l’apparence de sérieux et de fondement qui importe. On trouve là des indications plus justes de l’intérêt qu’il faut accorder aux nouvelles donn,ées : les négociations entre les USA et l’Allemagne, concernant les garanties demandées par les Allemands, ne progressent pas, au point que l’on peut parler d’une impasse.

«Lawmakers in Berlin reacted sharply to the Sueddeutsche report with several who are in Merkel's grand coalition warning of consequences if the talks collapse. “The Americans understand one language very well – and that's the language of business,” said Stephan Mayer, a senior lawmaker in the ranks of Merkel's conservatives. He told Reuters that if the deal fails, Germany should consider barring U.S. companies from getting public sector contracts because it could not be ruled out that U.S. contractors would engage in espionage activities. “I would want to pull out this sword that there could be economic sanctions at stake here,” Mayer said.

»Michael Hartmann, a senior Social Democrat lawmaker, also called for sanctions if the talks unravelled. “If these reports are true I can only warn the Americans that they haven't heard the explosion over here,” Hartmann told German radio. “We're not going to allow millions of Germans, right up to the chancellor, to be eavesdropped on. We have to tell the United States that U.S. companies operating in Germany and can't guarantee the security of our data will not get any contracts from us anymore.”»

Un expert allemand consulté par Reuters, Sancho Gaycken, donne l’appréciation cynique habituelle, à savoir qu’un accord de limitation et de contrôle des écoutes de surveillance et d’espionnage est impossible à atteindre en pratique technique, que tout le monde le sait, et que si même il y a accord personne n’aura aucune confiance en lui. («It's a naive to think a ‘no-spy’ deal would be possible but there's no harm raising the issue. It's not terribly surprising. Not many people really expected it would happen and even if there was a deal, would anyone really trust it?»)

L’appréciation de Gaycken n’a guère d’intérêt, comme en général celles de spécialistes dans ce genre d’affaires, lorsqu’ils prétendent donner des avis techniques d’où l’on pourrait sortir des appréciations politiques. La question n’est donc pas de savoir si un accord qui serait atteint serait éventuellement et effectivement efficace, ou si un accord éventuellement et effectivement efficace pourrait être atteint, ou si encore un accord effectif aurait la confiance de quiconque quant à sa validité. En un sens, ce que dit Gaycken est une évidence dont tous les Allemands sont évidemment informés depuis l’origine de cette affaire. Ce qu’il importe de savoir, c’est bien le but de la démarche allemande, c’est-à-dire de savoir si les dirigeants allemands considèrent comme un objectif de sécurité nationale de décréter que tout doit être fait pour assurer des mesures de défense effectives contre la NSA, – en d’autres mots, si oui ou non les activités de la NSA doivent être appréciées comme des activités “hostiles” et traitées comme telles.

Une indication à ce propos est la remarque faite par le ministre allemand des affaires étrangères, qui reflète le malaise, ou la détermination c’est selon, des dirigeants politiques allemands. La remarque renvoie l’ensemble de la problématique, et notamment les négociations entre l’Allemagne et les USA, vers le débat politique intérieur US à ce sujet, notamment le débat entre le président et le Congrès où une partie importante des parlementaires réclame des mesures décisives de “réforme“ de la NSA. Si les mesures que va annoncer Obama vis-à-vis de la NSA sont sérieuses, les Allemands devraient estimer qu’il existe une possibilité que la NSA soit effectivement contrainte, sur instruction politique, de limiter elle-même ses activités. Dans le cas contraire, si les mesures annoncées par Obama s’avéraient être de type “cosmétiques”, les négociations entre les USA et l’Allemagne devraient alors effectivement conduire à un échec. De ce point de vue, les indications données par SZ sont certainement justes, parce qu’effectivement ces seules négociations ne pourront aboutir à quelque résultat que ce soit, et il est donc logique que les négociateurs allemands n’obtiennent rien de sérieux de leurs interlocuteurs. Par conséquent, si Obama ne donne pas satisfaction (et aux critiques US de la NSA, et aux attentes des Allemands), les négociations déboucheront sur une absence d’accord et l’Allemagne reprendra complètement sa liberté.

... “Reprendre sa liberté”, pour l’Allemagne, cela signifie se juger fondée de prendre toutes les mesures défensives possibles, avec notamment des ruptures de collaboration avec les firmes US, l’établissement de nouveaux réseaux, etc. Mais ces mesures techniques, à l’efficacité discutable, ne constitueraient dans ce cas qu’une partie mineure des réactions auxquelles seraient conduits sinon contraints les dirigeants allemands, tant par leur opinion publique, que par leurs industriels, que par leurs bases politiques au niveau parlementaire, voire par leurs services de sécurité nationale si ceux-ci ont été mis dans une position où ils doivent tenter d’obtenir des résultats effectifs de protection face à la NSA. Cela signifie qu’effectivement, la NSA et ses activités seraient décisivement considérées comme “hostiles”, et cette évolution au départ technique et de communication prendrait nécessairement une dimension politique. Elle interférerait sur les relations USA-Allemagne, et sur les relations transatlantiques qui vont avec, en introduisant dans toutes les nombreuses relations de sécurité qui existent un doute et un soupçon fondamentaux, et jusqu'à des mesures de prise de distance qui auraient des allures parfois proches d'une rupture.

SZ n’a fait que nous avertir que tout le monde attend Obama, parce qu’on ne peut faire autrement qu’attendre Obama et ses décisions. Accessoirement, l'article de SZ, si les services de communication US s'en sont avisés jusqu'à le faire traduire, permet indirectement d’avertir Obama que les Allemands attendent très sérieusement des mesures concrètes contre la NSA... Cela n’est pas nécessairement, ni rassurant, ni prometteur du point de vue de la cohésion interne du bloc BAO, de l’Allemagne et des USA dans ce cas ; après tout, l’on pourrait reprendre la déclaration de Gaycken à propos de la décision d’Obama, en remplaçant le mot “deal” par le mot “decision” (“It's a naive to think a ‘no-spy’ [decision] would be possible ... It's not terribly surprising. Not many people really expected it would happen and even if there was a [decision], would anyone really trust it?»).

jeudi, 16 janvier 2014

Beppe Grillo demande le boycott des journaux qui désinforment

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Italie: Beppe Grillo demande le boycott des journaux qui désinforment

Ex: http://www.zejournal.mobi

Le comique italien Beppe Grillo (un mélange de Coluche et de …Dieudonné) dénonce depuis longtemps la presse italienne soupçonnée de mettre sous silence ou de déformer ses propos. Il a franchi un pas de plus en demandant expressément de ne plus acheter deux quotidiens La Nazione et La Repubblica.

La Nazione est le plus ancien quotidien régional d’Italie, basé à Florence et réputé proche de Matteo Renzi, maire de Florence et nouveau secrétaire du Parti Démocratique (PD, gauche). Dans un graphique reprenant les résultats électoraux les plus récents, La Nazione a purement et simplement « oublié » le Mouvement 5 Étoiles (M5S) de Beppe Grillo pourtant premier parti italien (hors coalitions) aux élections de février 2013 ! Le M5S est classé avec les « autres » y compris des mouvements qui n’ont eu aucun élu, alors qu’il est largement représenté à la Chambre comme au Sénat…

Plus subtile, La Repubblica, premier quotidien national italien et proche de la gauche, manipule l’information dans un article du 10 janvier pour induire que  le Mouvement 5 Étoiles ne tient pas ses promesses. Beppe Grillo a toujours refusé le remboursement des dépenses électorales sur l’argent public. Un article indique le contraire précisant que le M5S a perçu 600 000 euros au titre du remboursement. Il faut lire une toute petite note en bas de page pour y apprendre : « remboursements non utilisés par décision du Mouvement 5 Étoiles ». Factuellement, le journal n’a ainsi rien à se reprocher, il a livré toute l’information, mais la présentation induit évidemment (intentionnellement ?) le lecteur en erreur.

Grillo dénonce une « désinformation méthodique, chirurgicale, répétée qui dénote un comportement volontaire qui ne laisse rien au hasard. Un comportement maniaque, pathologique … celui de la désinformation ».

Heureusement, rien de tel ne pourrait arriver en France, bien entendu…

- Source : OJIM

mercredi, 15 janvier 2014

Politics behind Turkey graft probe

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Politics behind Turkey graft probe
By Omer Aslan

Ex: http://www.atimes.com

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

[As Asia Times Online was going to press, Turkey's ruling party ordered purges of police chiefs and moved to tighten control of the judiciary, as a top official said there's no chance of a truce in the struggle with prosecutors leading a corruption probe, Bloomberg reported.

The government will keep firing those leading the investigation and then seek to prosecute them for attempting a coup, Osman Can, a member of the central committee of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or Ak Party, said in a January 6 interview in Istanbul.


The government has reassigned prosecutors leading the investigations and dismissed almost 2,000 police officers since news of the 15-month secret investigations broke on December 17, Bloomberg cited Hurriyet newspaper as reporting.]

Six months after the Gezi Parki protests in Istanbul, Turkey is going through tumultuous times once again. To those observing Turkey from outside, it may seem a non-stable and highly polarized country. If lack of understanding on fine details of democracy and abuse of loopholes that exist in a democratic system is part of the answer for such turbulence and unpredictability, I argue that the main reason is the vibrancy of Turkish politics. That is to say, politics is alive in Turkey; social groups have causes to mobilize around for.

There are alternative visions of Turkish society represented by different groups as well as political parties. The dominant discourse around "old Turkey versus new Turkey" is a testimony to this feature of Turkish politics.

For this reason, it may be particularly hard to grasp Turkish politics from North America and Europe where "in the era of neoliberalism, the ruling elite has hollowed out democracy and ensured that whoever you vote for you get the same." The absence of alternative visions of American or European societies runs as "stability".

These reasons behind passionate political activity in Turkey are in fact interrelated. Groups that have different visions of Turkish society and public interest sometimes exploit the loopholes in the system either deliberately or because of a failure to grasp democracy fully. The most recent political battle between the Gulen movement and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), close allies for the past decade, exemplifies this well.

The Gulen movement
What exactly is the Gulen movement? Are they an international civil society group involved in education activities and promoting global peace and interfaith dialogue? Amid this heated controversy, members of the movement argued that they are a civil society organization. They point out that "democracy allows civil society groups to pursue their interests through democratic means. Besides, theory and practice of civil society also allow such groups to use all means of communication and interaction including media outlets for [the] public interest." Is this what the Gulen movement really does?

We may take our clues from the criticisms against the Israeli Lobby in the United States to make sense of what the Gulen movement does and why it is criticized in Turkey nowadays. The concerns John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, raised with the Israeli lobby was that it shaped American policy towards the Middle East in such a way that US policy served Israeli, not American, interests. The political clout that the lobby has had over primarily the US Congress forced US administrations to appoint pro-Israeli figures to critical positions, block anything in the United Nations that may be against Israel, and continue to support Israel in diverse ways that in the end ensured automatic American support for Israel.

The Gulen movement seeks to be Turkey's Israel Lobby. It would like Turkey's domestic and foreign policies to serve the movement's narrow interests. The movement has been so enmeshed in the international arena for the past decade that it now has its own interests independent of Turkey or the Muslim ummah, or community.

Some pillars of the movement's policies are maintaining good relations with Israel, avoiding any serious fall-out with the United States, where the movement's founder, Muhammed Fethullah Gulen, has resided since 1999 anyway, and never opting for an aggressive response when it comes to any type of assault on Muslims.

For example, it was for this reason that the movement and the AK Party were at loggerheads after the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, when Israeli commandos boarded the vessel as it tried to breach Israel's blockade of Gaza. Gulen's followers were angry with the government because the break-up in ties between Turkey and Israel that followed gave the Gulen movement a headache in its dealings in the United States.

The recent political battle between the Gulen movement and the AKP is therefore more about "political deviance" of the government than the government's decision to close prep schools, a significant number of which are owned by the movement, or financial corruption charges against some prominent members inside the AKP.

For Gulen, the AKP government has lately been too critical of the West, too supportive of popular revolts in Egypt and Syria, and continues its economic dealings with Iran. In a relatively recent interview with the Atlantic, Gulen said that he did not think Turkey is having good diplomatic relations in the region and that it protects its reputation based on love, respect, and good will and collaborate around mutually agreeable goals.

A columnist at Zaman newspaper, Huseyin Gulerce, expressed the real reason behind the split: "It was the Mavi Marmara crisis that created the first cracks ... Mr Gulen's attitude was very clear, as he always suggested that Turkey should not be adventurous in its foreign policy and stay oriented to the West, and that it should resolve its foreign policy issues through dialogue."

In domestic policy too, the Gulen movement wants the government not to violate certain parameters. They do not want the government to take the PKK - the Kurdistan Workers' Party - as its negotiating partner even to resolve the Kurdish issue.

With a different vision of Turkish society and what Turkey should do in domestic arena and international politics, the Gulen movement exploited the legal cover provided by the system to start political operations on the government.

"The rule of law" and separation of three branches of government are indivisible parts of a democratic system. Prosecutors in Turkey are given an almost untouchable status so that they may prosecute without fear any holder of political power. However, while these rights and privileges are given to prosecutors, the law gives them certain responsibilities and puts certain limits on them. It is assumed and expected that prosecutors will not abuse their power and act as a supporting cast in political operations conducted on the executive branch.

However, the judiciary is treated as if they only need to be independent in Turkey; the fact that they also are expected to remain impartial is forgotten. Betraying these expectations, prosecutors suspected of links to the Gulen movement started the recent corruption probe in Turkey. The fact that three independent probes are combined for no understandable reason and that the suspects, including well-known figures, have been taken into custody to create noise and then released one by one led to the suspicion that the probes were politically motivated.

The content of the ongoing graft probe was somehow leaked to opposition newspapers, mainly to the Gulenist media outlets in Turkey.

Besides, the subjects of the probes somehow came to be published in Today's Zaman, a Gulenist mouthpiece, some days before the operation started. Some columnists at Today's Zaman later put great effort in relating the AKP to both Al-Qaeda and Iran (at the same time!) on social media.

Here is the dilemma in a democracy: how can a democratic government protect itself when unaccountable prosecutors conduct politically motivated operations to bring down a government and to arrest the prime minister under the legal cover of principles of rule of law and independent judiciary? Can a government subject to a politically motivated judiciary operating under the cover of independence and unaccountability save itself by remaining within the remit of law?

Anything but an NGO
Any civil society organization may criticize any government for its foreign and domestic policies on various scores. Civil society organizations, nevertheless, do not raise their own agents and penetrate state organs (the police, judiciary and so forth) through them so that, regardless of the identity of the government, they will set the parameters or red lines within which government policies will have to remain.

Here we have another fine line; any public employee has the constitutional right to belong to any sect/voluntary association as long as they do not confuse their duties to the state and their membership in such an association outside their job. This means that even when a public employee thinks his sect/tariqah may benefit from the classified information he has access to, he cannot leak any documents to his "brothers".

Nor may he legally eliminate his colleagues in his department or bureau so that he may replace them with his "brothers" to control the institution. There are credible doubts as to whether Gulenists respect such distinctions.

What is more, civil society organizations are transparent entities; they are accountable; those outside such organizations more or less know who belongs and who does not. They also declare their sources of income and the amount of money that they collect.

The Gulen movement does neither; no one knows the amount of money they control, the number of private schools, prep schools, other charities, print and visual media outlets, and number of members they have. Nobody exactly knows the hierarchy within the movement, or even whether there is one, and the chain of authority in it.

In that respect, the Gulen movement is the exact opposite of a civil society organization. It is rather a ghostly presence; everyone knows it exists, you feel its influence, people talk about it, certain figures are known to have ties to it, but you do not really see the whole or can put your finger on it.

But why is this movement so different from others? After all, the tradition of tariqahs in Turkey and other Muslim countries is centuries old. Yet, the Gulen movement differs from the rest as a messianic organization. They believe that "the destiny gave them a mission".

In practice, this means that they are the God's chosen flock, and have a particular program and method on Earth that they think will make only them reach their desired end. Those who stand in their way, who oppose the sacred program/roadmap, are shirkers, and thus deserve to be crushed.

In their mind, the AKP government that defends ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi at the expense of antagonizing the junta administration in Egypt, or that protects Palestinians at the cost of eliciting Israeli fury, acts shortsightedly. Yet, the movement makes long-term projections; even if they may consciously refuse to speak against cruelties done to their fellow Muslims today, they are so sure that the movement will be so powerful in the year, say, 2150 that they will be able to appoint a governor to, say, Yakutia Republic in today's Russia.

They will not act or speak against the massacred members of the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, because the Ikhwan chose the method of defiance and opposed the junta administration instead of reconciling with it and searching for ways of dialogue.

Such a messianic zeal combined with the idea of sacred chosen-ness justifies any means and acting against anyone as long as the means serve the ultimate purpose of Earthly glory promised to this movement. It is such heterodoxy that separates the Gulen movement from the corpus of tariqahs in and outside Turkey.

Political suicide
The Gulen movement has been interested and involved in politics for a long time. However, they did not out come out in the open until recently. It appears that open political engagement in front of cameras and the public eye proved to be tough for the movement. It is therefore no surprise that Gulen's explosive curses, perceived by the wider public as against the AKP government, in a video recently released by the movement backfired.

The public outrage ran so high that perhaps for the first time since 2002 Gulen had to immediately release another video to retract and reframe what he said. The video went viral and became subject of pranks.

The recent row also widened the distance between the Gulen movement and the rest of the tariqahs in Turkey. Other tariqahs threw their open support behind the government after the battle broke out. To make things worse for the Gulen movement, the rest of the Nurcu (or Nursu)? community, with which the Gulen movement is related, took a stance against them as well.

A cursory skim of discussions on social media demonstrates the widening rift within the Nurcus now, so much so that many Nurcu groups including Said Nursi's students accuse Gulen betraying the true, non-political ideals of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the recent controversy will be that Gulen movement was stripped of its immunity from criticism. The conservatives and Islamists have now joined the Kemalists, leftists, liberals, nationalists of all hues who had already been criticizing Gulen and doubting his real intentions for a long time.

Today therefore the Gulen movement is on the table and Turkey's conservatives, Islamists of all stripes sit around the table discussing what it is that they have on the table, what is its nature, why it wants to conquer the state, which actors it cooperates with outside Turkey, how consistent Gulen's words are and how Islamic what he preaches, his methods and goals are.

Moreover, Turkey's dominant conservative public may not buy the support that the CHP - or Republican People's Party - in any case a strange bedfellow for the movement, is giving the Gulen movement.

Such an odd alliance between the CHP and the Gulen movement may be deceptive for two reasons. First, the movement will find it very hard to convince its grassroots to vote for the Kemalist CHP, which for decades had been for them the chief evil. Secondly, since all political actors will know the role of the movement in case the AKP government falls, no political party will ever trust the Gulen movement from now on.

It is unlikely that any government will forget for a moment what Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says so often these days: "The parallel state". For all these reasons, the question that begs an answer is not, as some assume, whether the Gulen movement or the AKP will win this war; the question is, why has such a powerful movement as Gulen's attempted something that is akin to political suicide?

And unfortunately also just that for the concept of civil society in this part of the world; in our region, either states control civil society organizations for exerting social control or those who claim to be civil society organizations, such as the Gulen movement, try to capture the state.

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.

Omer Aslan is a PhD candidate in political science at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, and may be contacted at aslano@bilkent.edu.tr.

(Copyright 2014 Omer Aslan)

La RDA faisait des affaires avec Pinochet!

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La RDA faisait des affaires avec Pinochet!

MUNICH – Après le coup d’Etat militaire de septembre 1973 au Chili contre le gouvernement socialiste d’Allende, la RDA communiste, inféodée alors au bloc soviétique, a manifesté bruyamment sa solidarité avec les victimes de ce putsch et a amorcé une propagande véhémente contre le régime militaire du Général Augusto Pinochet, suivie en cela par toutes les gauches et par les “bobos” de toutes catégories. Le monde soviétique et les médias occidentaux faisaient cause commune, sans jamais démontrer que le régime de Pinochet était un banc d’essai pour l’économie néo-libérale des “Chicago Boys”. La RDA accorde alors l’asile politique à plus de deux mille Chiliens et rompt toutes les relations diplomatiques avec Santiago. Mais cette hostilité, savamment mise en scène selon toutes les règles de l’art de l’agitprop, ne fut qu’un seul côté de la médaille. Un historien contemporain, Georg Dufner, d’origine chilienne mais installé en Allemagne, a examiné attentivement les documents de la STASI (la police politique est-allemande) et a consigné le fruit de ses recherches dans un essai paru dans les très sérieux et très scientifiques “Vierteljahrhefte für Zeitgeschichte”, n°4/2013 (“Cahiers trimestriels d’histoire contemporaine”). Dans ce texte, on peut apprendre que “le gouvernement de la RDA avait décidé de poursuivre son commerce extérieur avec le Chili” car ce pays andin “jouait un rôle tout particulier dans la fourniture de biens d’importation et de matières premières à la RDA”. Pour cette raison, entièrement pragmatique, “l’Etat allemand des ouvriers et paysans” a gardé les meilleures relations économiques avec la junte néo-libérale, en dépit de sa propagande officielle. Dans les années 1974 et 1975, les relations économico-commerciales entre la RDA et le régime de Pinochet ont même connu leur apogée, ce que Berlin-Est cherchait bien entendu à garder secret.

Ces faits, incontournables, montrent que les langage propagandistes et les démonisations sont des discours destinés à berner les gogos. Et que tous les gauchistes, mâles et femelles, qui nous ont bassiné les oreilles dans les années 70 à propos de Pinochet, de ses pompes et de ses oeuvres, étaient bel et bien de profonds imbéciles, des manipulés sans cervelle, dont les héritiers actuels sont encore de plus grosses andouilles, plus lourdauds encore quand ils énoncent leurs “vérités” de gauche ou leurs nouvelles “vérités”, cette fois habillées de sottises néo-libérales.

Source: “Junge Freiheit”, Berlin, n°49/2013; http://www.jungefreiheit.de . Pour le travail de l’historien Georg Dufner, voir http://www.ifz-muenchen.de ).

France and Saudi Arabia: The Union of “Misfits”

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France and Saudi Arabia: The Union of “Misfits”

While the international community summarizes the achievements of the year 2013, exerting even further efforts in reducing the risk of the armed violence spread in the Middle East (especially in Syria , as well as through the settlement of the Iranian nuclear program stand-off) , the head of the Elysee Palace decided to put a rather peculiar final chord to his political activities of the last year.

He chose not to bother himself with peaceful initiatives, especially with those that could improve the social life of the French residents, which those residents have been waiting for since the day of his inauguration. That’s a funny fact if we are to take into consideration that the siting French President represents the socialist party, which by definition should be close to the day-to-day problems of the ordinary working people. And the people decided to pay the President with the same disrespect they’ve been treated with, this fact was established by the poll conducted in late December 2013 by BFM-TV-RMC. This poll showed that Francois Holland was supported by 2% of the French population, which means that the rest 98 % didn’t show any trust for him. The results despite the “devotion to democratic principles” Francois Holland has named as his top priority were banned by Elysee Palace.

Francois Hollande decided to end the year 2013 with a trip to Saudi Arabia , thereby securing the alliance of the two»» nations “rejected” by the United State and a number of other countries. These two have ultimately failed to understand the causes and the significance of the events that occurred at the end of the year in the Middle East therefore they were not able to adapt to the new reality . Another reason for becoming “misfits” is the eagerness the Elysee Palace and Riyadh has shown in staging the chemical provocations in Damascus along with the massive support these countries have shown to the Syrian militants , allowing the spread of Wahhabi ideas not across the Midlle East alone, but in France itself .

According to many political analysts, Hollande has today become the most loyal ally of Saudi Arabia in its attempts to strengthen the so-called ” Sunni arc ” in the fight against Shiite Iran and Syria. The key role in this fight is place by Lebanon and “Hezbollah”. Currently, “the misfits” share a number of foreign policy goals. It’s the tough position the two take on the Syrian issue and the idea of Bashar Assad’s toppling. It’s the views they share on the Iranian nuclear programme, in an effort to reduce the influence Iran enjoys in the region . The blind support Elysee Palace has been showing to Riyadh, can be explained, to some extent , by the famous generosity of the Saudi royal family members and the most generous of them all the head of Saudi intelligence services – Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Foreign politicians can expect substantial cash donations and diamond offerings if they are to support the Saudis and their Wahhabism. It allows Riyadh to manipulate Washington and Paris at their own will.

So, on 29 and 30 December Hollande flew to Saudi Arabia to take a good care of the military industry people that had brought him to power in the first place. On this trip he was accompanied by four of ministers and a group of 30 entrepreneurs.

The main goal of this trip – to secure bilateral strategic cooperation, to sign contracts for supplying the Sunni forces in Lebanon with even more firearms. The same very forces that have been fighting back to back with the Syrian armed opposition in a bloody war against the regular troops that defend their own country, against Syrian officials. Another goal of Hollande’s trip is to establish a close partnership in the intelligence field.

During the negotiations Saudi Arabia consented to allocate $ 3 billion to buy French weapons that would end up in the hands of the Lebanese Army. It is noteworthy that this financial “aid” amounts for two military budgets of Lebanon , that is a former French colony, just like Syria. However, this military aid to Beirut provided by Riyadh and Elysee Palace , aimed primarily at fighting the Lebanese “Hezbollah” will be of little to no help to the international efforts of reducing the regional tension, it wouldn’t be of any use either in promoting the authority of the Lebanese “sponsors” in Lebanon itself and in the Middle East in general.

It’s not that “Hezbollah” is on the side of the common enemy of Paris and Riyadh – President Bashar al-Assad . This new supplies will only further enhance the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites. The region itself will be militarized even further at the expense of the French arms and Saudi money. The ultimate goal of such a generous “gift” is to spread the Wahhabi ideas in Lebanon, which has not fully recovered from a 15 years long civil war . After all, today in the Sunni areas of Lebanon — the largest cities of the country – Tripoli and Sidon are facing a rise of Islamist rhetoric and Al Qaeda is gaining followers there on a daily basis, writes the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akbar.

However , in addition to this transaction , the leaders of France and Saudi Arabia discussed other aspects of bilateral military cooperation, clearly not designed to administer affairs of peace and actively prepare for a regional war . This is primarily a contract for 4 billion euros to modernize the French missiles Crotale ground -to-air with the French firm Thales. Negotiations on this issue for a long time been blocked due to lack of consent on the part of the Saudi elite, but this particular visit to the CSA became a new impetus to this cooperation , especially since the main competitors of French manufacturers in this issue – the U.S. – has somewhat cooled to Saudis .

As for the cooperation of the intelligence services of the two countries and the exchange of “mutual interest to intelligence information ,” France is planing to sell Riyadh the same type of a spy satellite that was sold by Astrium and Thales Alenia Space in the United Arab Emirates last summer. With this “tool” Saudi Arabia will be able to improve significantly the “effectiveness” of its intelligence services and monitor the activities of the armed forces of the enemy in the region. French ship and machine builders (DCNS, Thales and MBDA) received an order to strengthen the kingdom’s submarine fleet, to modernize the Saudi Navy frigates that would on par with Saudi petrodollars be protecting and promoting the Wahhabi values. France has also got a contract to equip the National Guard of the kingdom, as for the project of constructing 16 nuclear reactors on the Saudi soil, this part of the deal is still being negotiated.

Francois Hollande has stated in Riyadh that Saudi Arabia was a “leading partner of France in the Middle East” with a trade turnover of 8 billion euros in 2013, 3 of which is a share of French exports. The “holiday trip” can bring the French military-industrial people, as some experts believe, a hefty income of 250 billion euros over the next 7-10 years.

However, according to a number of experts, a considerable flow of French arms to Lebanon at the expense of the Saudi royal family can not be regarded as nothing else than a direct intervention of Paris and Riyadh in the affairs of this state, despite the publicly declared position of Francois Hollande and his foreign minister — Fabius that “France seeks to ensure the regional stability and security”. The Saudi efforts at fueling the regional conflicts in Iraq and Syria , and now being “allocated” to Lebanon .

Meanwhile, Damascus believes that if regional and Western states will stop providing the financial and military aid to the armed and terrorist groups that operate in Syria and in the neighboring countries, the violence in the region, will ultimately cease, giving way to the assembly of the “Geneva-2” international conference, said Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riad Haddad to NEO.

Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator and special contributor to the  online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

 

mardi, 14 janvier 2014

1972/2014 : Idéologie «antiraciste», la grande catastrophe!

 

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1972/2014 : Idéologie «antiraciste», la grande catastrophe!

ex: http://www.polemia.com

 

« Un peu de modestie, de finesse, d’autocritique et de repentance seraient sûrement bienvenues »

 

♦ En 1972 la France était un pays indépendant, unitaire, fier de son passé et où les libertés étaient respectées. Quarante ans plus tard, l’idéologie nationale héritée de la monarchie, de la République et actualisée par le gaullisme a été remplacée par l’idéologie « antiraciste ». Les résultats sont désastreux : immigration de masse peu assimilable, société multiconflictuelle, perte du sens commun, alignement de la politique extérieure sur des intérêts étrangers, censure à répétition. Comment en est-on arrivé là ?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou fait le point pour Polémia.

 


 

1972: Alors que le président Pompidou est fragilisé par sa non-participation à la Résistance de 1940 à 1944, deux événements majeurs surviennent : le Parlement vote à l’unanimité la loi Pleven qui introduit – au nom de la lutte contre le « racisme » – le délit d’opinion dans la grande loi sur la liberté de la presse de 1881 ; les médias lancent « l’affaire Touvier », du nom de ce milicien protégé par l’Eglise catholique. Les deux piliers de l’antiracisme – pénalisation des opinions dissidentes, culpabilisation du passé français – sont ainsi posés.

 

1980: L’attentat contre la synagogue de la rue Copernic est attribué de manière purement mensongère par les médias à « l’extrême droite ». Jean Pierre-Bloch, patron de la LICRA, met en cause le « climat » : climat intellectuel pour aboutir à la neutralisation idéologique du Figaro-Magazine de Louis Pauwels, porteur d’une vraie pensée alternative ; climat politique visant la politique proche-orientale de Valéry Giscard d’Estaing jugée pas assez favorable à l’Etat d’Israël.

 

« L’antiracisme » est instrumentalisé par les socialistes et par certains milieux juifs (Le Renouveau juif d’Hajdenberg notamment) pour aboutir à l’élection de François Mitterrand en 1981.

 

1984/1985 : Fondation de SOS-Racisme, officine gouvernementale créée depuis l’Elysée par Jean-Louis Bianco, secrétaire général de la présidence, assisté d’un jeune conseiller… François Hollande en s’appuyant sur Eric Ghebali et Julien Dray de l’Union des étudiants juifs de France (UEJF) et Bernard-Henri Lévy. Les objectifs de SOS-Racisme sont à la fois idéologiques et politiques : promouvoir une société multiculturelle, culpabiliser et scinder la droite, encadrer et contrôler les populations issues du Maghreb (pour les faire « bien » voter tout en évitant une dérive pro-palestinienne).

 

1986: La mort de Malik Oussekine, un Franco-Maghrébin sous dialyse, à l’occasion des manifestations contre la loi Devaquet, débouche sur une campagne de sidération médiatique. Celle-ci contraint le gouvernement Chirac à renoncer à ses projets, notamment quant à la protection de la nationalité française. A cette occasion le lobby « antiraciste » prend la main de manière définitive sur la droite parlementaire.

 

1990: Alors qu’il existe 300 profanations de cimetière par an, la dégradation du cimetière juif de Carpentras fait l’objet d’une manipulation médiatique sans précédent. L’ensemble de la classe politique officielle défile sous le parrainage des associations « antiracistes » et d’organisations juives. Deux objectifs sont atteints : la consolidation du fossé entre le FN et le RPR/UDF ; le vote de la loi Gayssot faisant de l’analyse historique critique de la « Shoah » un délit de blasphème.

 

1993/1998 : Poursuites et condamnations de Maurice Papon pour « crime contre l’humanité ». La condamnation de Papon, haut fonctionnaire français, préfet de police du général De Gaulle (qui lui conféra le grade de commandeur de la Légion d’honneur), député RPR, ministre de R. Barre, est un acte essentiel : c’est l’extension à l’Etat français, en 1998, de la culpabilisation imposée à l’Allemagne en 1945. Cela a aussi pour conséquence le désarmement moral de l’appareil d’Etat face à l’immigration : les associations « antiracistes » empruntant volontiers la figure du juif comme bouclier pour les immigrés clandestins.

 

2001 : Première loi Taubira, loi mémorielle définissant comme crime contre l’humanité les traites négrières (occidentales seulement) et l’esclavage.

 

Années 2000/2010 : Pendant longtemps le combat « antiraciste » a été mené par les associations spécialisées (LICRA, MRAP, LDH et SOS-Racisme) bénéficiant d’importantes subventions publiques nationales et locales et recevant des dommages et intérêts de leurs procès; à partir des années 2000, certaines institutions juives prennent directement le relais. Lors de son dîner annuel, avec un parterre plus brillant que pour la Fête nationale du 14 juillet, devant les plus hautes autorités de l’Etat, de la justice, de l’économie et des médias, le CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France) fixe la feuille de route : promotion de la société multiculturelle, renforcement de la législation et de la lutte « antiraciste », notamment sur Internet, soutien indéfectible à l’Etat d’Israël et lutte contre les pays qui y sont réputés hostiles.

 

Années 2000/2010 (bis) : Adoption d’un mode opératoire comparable au CRIF par le CFCM (Conseil consultatif du culte musulman) et le CRAN (Conseil représentatif des associations noires). Prise en tenaille des Français de souche.

 

Fin des années 2000/début des années 2010 : L’UEJF prend la tête du combat judiciaire pour obtenir la mise en place d’une censure publique, voire privée, sur Internet.

 

Le lobby « antiraciste » : fabuleux pouvoir et fabuleux échec

 

Après 40 ans de grandes manœuvres « antiracistes », le bilan est désastreux.

 

Pour les libertés d’abord, avec la multiplication des lois liberticides. Dans tous les classements internationaux portant sur la liberté d’expression la France figure parmi les plus mauvais élèves : entre la 40e et la 50e place pour la liberté de la presse selon Reporters sans frontières ; en troisième position (devant la Russie pourtant si souvent vilipendée !) pour les condamnations pour atteinte à la liberté d’expression par la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme (pourtant très politiquement correcte…) ; aux premiers rangs pour les requêtes auprès des grands fournisseurs d’accès Internet.

 

Pour la concorde intérieure ensuite : la société multiculturelle est un échec manifeste. Ni l’assimilation, ni même l’intégration n’ont fonctionné. Le seul lieu (hors celui, contraint, du travail) où des gens de culture, de religion et de race différentes se retrouvent ce sont les spectacles de… Dieudonné ou les réunions de Soral. Bref, là où ils se rient du Système selon les uns, du lobby sioniste selon les autres. Fabuleux échec du lobby « antiraciste »: c’est contre lui que s’organise la seule cohabitation black-blanc-beur !

 

Pour l’indépendance nationale enfin : L’alignement de la politique française sur des intérêts étrangers est de plus en plus préoccupant ; promue par BHL, l’intervention en Libye a été un succès militaire mais une catastrophe géopolitique ; et l’aventurisme de François Hollande sur la Syrie a nui à l’image de la France.

 

Pour les institutions juives aussi : Depuis l’affaire Dreyfus la communauté juive jouissait d’un statut moral lié à celui de l’innocence injustement persécutée ; en se plaçant systématiquement du côté de la censure, les institutions juives risquent de perdre leur statut de représentants d’opprimés pour celui d’odieux persécuteurs. C’est grave et c’est prendre un double risque : se placer en opposition de l’esprit français traditionnellement frondeur ; et heurter de plein fouet la sensibilité des jeunes générations, à la fois parce que, pour elles, la seconde guerre mondiale est finie depuis 70 ans… et parce qu’elles sont viscéralement attachées aux libertés sur Internet, véritable sujet du débat. Enfin, l’immigration massive encouragée par le lobby « antiraciste » a pour conséquence la constitution de ghettos musulmans et africains qui cultivent une forte sensibilité antisioniste, voire antisémite.

 

Bien sûr, ce serait une faute que de confondre les juifs dans leur ensemble et ceux qui prétendent parler en leur nom ; on ne saurait davantage passer sous silence le remarquable engagement du côté de l’identité française et de la patrie d’hommes comme Alain Finkielkraut ou Eric Zemmour. Pour autant, il semblerait raisonnable que les dirigeants des institutions juives aient la force de procéder à leur examen de conscience : à l’égard de leur communauté comme à l’égard de la France. Un peu de modestie, de finesse, d’autocritique et de repentance seraient sûrement bienvenues.

 

Changer de paradigmes

 

Quant au peuple français dans son unité, il lui faut changer de paradigmes dominants : renvoyer le lobby « antiraciste » à ses échecs ; cesser de le subventionner ; cesser de l’écouter et supprimer ses privilèges judiciaires. Vite !

 

Jean-Yves Le Gallou
9/01/2014

 

Voir aussi :

 

L’affaire Dieudonné : l’arbre qui cache la forêt de l’offensive contre Internet
Evolution des libertés en France : Cent restrictions en quarante ans
Défendre la liberté d’expression contre la police de la pensée
« Je ne sais rien… mais je dirai (presque) tout »

Par Yves Bertrand
Conversations politiquement incorrectes
Sarkozy et Hollande, candidats officiels du CRIF
Le CRIF : la tentation du lobby
Le CRIF refuse de donner « un certificat de Cacherout » à Marine Le Pen
Le dîner du CRIF : nuisible aux libertés, à la souveraineté et à l’identité françaises

Special Ops Goes Global

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Tomgram: Nick Turse
Special Ops Goes Global
 
Ex: http://www.tomdispatch.com

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Nick Turse’s New York Times bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is just out in paperback with a new afterword.  It’s a must-buy, especially if you haven’t read the hardcover. Jonathan Schell wrote a powerful piece on it at TomDispatch, which you can read by clicking here. Late in the month, TD will be offering signed copies of the paperback in return for donations. Keep it in mind! Tom]

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So consider the actions of the U.S. Special Operations Command flattering indeed to the larger U.S. military. After all, over recent decades the Pentagon has done something that once would have been inconceivable.  It has divided the whole globe, just about every inch of it, like a giant pie, into six command slices: U.S. European Command, or EUCOM (for Europe and Russia), U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM (Asia), U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM (the Greater Middle East and part of North Africa), U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM (Latin America), and in this century, U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM (the United States, Canada, and Mexico), and starting in 2007, U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM (most of Africa).

The ambitiousness of the creeping decision to bring every inch of the planet under the watchful eyes of U.S. military commanders should take anyone’s breath away.  It’s the sort of thing that once might only have been imaginable in movies where some truly malign and evil force planned to “conquer the world” and dominate Planet Earth for an eternity.  (And don’t forget that the Pentagon’s ambitions hardly stop at Earth’s boundaries. There are also commands for the heavens, U.S. Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, into which the U.S. Space Command was merged, and, most recent of all, the Internet, where U.S. Cyber Command, or CYBERCOM rules.)

Now, unnoticed and unreported, the process is being repeated.  Since 9/11, a secret military has been gestating inside the U.S. military.  It’s called U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).  At TomDispatch, both Nick Turse and Andrew Bacevich have covered its startling growth in these years.  Now, in a new post, Turse explores the way that command’s dreams of expansion on a global scale have led it to follow in the footsteps of the larger institution that houses it.

The special ops guys are, it seems, taking their own pie-cutter to the planet and slicing and dicing it into a similar set of commands, including most recently a NORTHCOM-style command for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Once could be an anomaly or a mistake. Twice and you have a pattern, which catches a Washington urge to control planet Earth, an urge that, as the twenty-first century has already shown many times over, can only be frustrated. That this urge is playing out again in what, back in the Cold War days, used to be called “the shadows,” without publicity or attention of any sort, is notable in itself and makes Turse’s latest post all the more important. Tom

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America’s Black-Ops Blackout 
Unraveling the Secrets of the Military’s Secret Military 

By Nick Turse


“Dude, I don’t need to play these stupid games. I know what you’re trying to do.”  With that, Major Matthew Robert Bockholt hung up on me.

More than a month before, I had called U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a series of basic questions: In how many countries were U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed in 2013? Are manpower levels set to expand to 72,000 in 2014?  Is SOCOM still aiming for growth rates of 3%-5% per year?  How many training exercises did the command carry out in 2013?  Basic stuff.

And for more than a month, I waited for answers.  I called.  I left messages.  I emailed.  I waited some more.  I started to get the feeling that Special Operations Command didn’t want me to know what its Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos -- the men who operate in the hottest of hotspots and most remote locales around the world -- were doing. 

Then, at the last moment, just before my filing deadline, Special Operations Command got back to me with an answer so incongruous, confusing, and contradictory that I was glad I had given up on SOCOM and tried to figure things out for myself.

Click here to see a larger version

U.S. Special Operations Forces around the world, 2012-2013 (key below article) ©2014 TomDispatch ©Google

I started with a blank map that quickly turned into a global pincushion.  It didn’t take long before every continent but Antarctica was bristling with markers indicating special operations forces’ missions, deployments, and interactions with foreign military forces in 2012-2013.  With that, the true size and scope of the U.S. military’s secret military began to come into focus.  It was, to say the least, vast.

A review of open source information reveals that in 2012 and 2013, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) were likely deployed to -- or training, advising, or operating with the personnel of -- more than 100 foreign countries.   And that’s probably an undercount.  In 2011, then-SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that Special Operations personnel were annually sent to 120 countries around the world. They were in, that is, about 60% of the nations on the planet.  “We’re deployed in a number of locations,” was as specific as Bockholt would ever get when I talked to him in the waning days of 2013. And when SOCOM did finally get back to me with an eleventh hour answer, the number offered made almost no sense. 

Despite the lack of official cooperation, an analysis by TomDispatch reveals SOCOM to be a command on the make with an already sprawling reach. As Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven put it in SOCOM 2020, his blueprint for the future, it has ambitious aspirations to create “a Global SOF network of like-minded interagency allies and partners.”  In other words, in that future now only six years off, it wants to be everywhere.    

The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran (in which eight U.S. service members died), U.S. Special Operations Command was established in 1987.  Made up of units from all the service branches, SOCOM is tasked with carrying out Washington’s most specialized and secret missions, including assassinations, counterterrorist raids, special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, psychological operations, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

In the post-9/11 era, the command has grown steadily.  With about 33,000 personnel in 2001, it is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 in 2014.  (About half this number are called, in the jargon of the trade, “badged operators” -- SEALs, Rangers, Special Operations Aviators, Green Berets -- while the rest are support personnel.)  Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as SOCOM’s baseline budget tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.9 billion between 2001 and 2013.  If you add in supplemental funding, it had actually more than quadrupled to $10.4 billion. 

Not surprisingly, personnel deployments abroad skyrocketed from 4,900 “man-years” -- as the command puts it -- in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.  About 11,000 special operators are now working abroad at any one time and on any given day they are in 70 to 80 countries, though the New York Times reported that, according to statistics provided to them by SOCOM, during one week in March 2013 that number reached 92

The Global SOF Network

Last year, Admiral McRaven, who previously headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC -- a clandestine sub-command that specializes in tracking and killing suspected terrorists -- touted his vision for special ops globalization.  In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:

“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate...”

In translation this means that SOCOM is weaving a complex web of alliances with government agencies at home and militaries abroad to ensure that it’s at the center of every conceivable global hotspot and power center.  In fact, Special Operations Command has turned the planet into a giant battlefield, divided into many discrete fronts: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; the sub-unified command of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East SOCCENT; the European contingent SOCEUR; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea; SOCPAC, which covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; and SOCSOUTH, which conducts special ops missions in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as the globe-trotting JSOC.

Since 2002, SOCOM has also been authorized to create its own Joint Task Forces, a prerogative normally limited to larger combatant commands like CENTCOM.  These include Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines, 500-600 personnel dedicated to supporting counterterrorist operations by Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Abu Sayyaf.

A similar mouthful of an entity is the NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan/Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan, which conducts operations, according to SOCOM, “to enable the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF), and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) to provide the Afghan people a secure and stable environment and to prevent insurgent activities from threatening the authority and sovereignty of GIRoA.”  Last year, U.S.-allied Afghan President Ha­mid Karzai had a different assessment of the “U.S. special force stationed in Wardak province,” which he accused of “harassing, annoying, torturing, and even murdering innocent people.”

According to the latest statistics made available by ISAF, from October 2012 through March 2013, U.S. and allied forces were involved in 1,464 special operations in Afghanistan, including 167 with U.S. or coalition forces in the lead and 85 that were unilateral ISAF operations.  U.S. Special Operations forces are also involved in everything from mentoring lightly armed local security forces under the Village Stability Operations initiative to the training of heavily armed and well-equipped elite Afghan forces -- one of whose U.S.-trained officers defected to the insurgency in the fall.

In addition to task forces, there are also Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD) elements which, according to the military, “shape and coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and engagement in support of theater special operations command, geographic combatant command, and country team goals and objectives.”  These light footprint teams -- including SOC FWD Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen, and SOC FWD Lebanon -- offer training and support to local elite troops in foreign hotspots.  In Lebanon, for instance, this has meant counterterrorism training for Lebanese Special Ops forces, as well as assistance to the Lebanese Special Forces School to develop indigenous trainers to mentor other Lebanese military personnel.

Click here to see a larger version

Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) briefing slide by Col. Joe Osborne, showing SOC FWD elements

SOCOM’s reach and global ambitions go further still.  TomDispatch’s analysis of McRaven’s first two full years in command reveals a tremendous number of overseas operations.  In places like Somalia and Libya, elite troops have carried out clandestine commando raids.  In others, they have used airpower to hunt, target, and kill suspected militants.  Elsewhere, they have waged an information war using online propaganda.  And almost everywhere they have been at work building up and forging ever-tighter ties with foreign militaries through training missions and exercises. 

“A lot of what we will do as we go forward in this force is build partner capacity,” McRaven said at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, noting that NATO partners as well as allies in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America  “are absolutely essential to how we’re doing business.” 

In March 2013, for example, Navy SEALs conducted joint training exercises with Indonesian frogmen.  In April and May, U.S. Special Operations personnel joined members of the Malawi Defense Forces for Exercise Epic Guardian.  Over three weeks, 1,000 troops engaged in marksmanship, small unit tactics, close quarters combat training, and other activities across three countries -- Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles.

In May, American special operators took part in Spring Storm, the Estonian military’s largest annual training exercise.  That same month, members of the Peruvian and U.S. special operations forces engaged in joint training missions aimed at trading tactics and improving their ability to conduct joint operations.  In July, Green Berets from the Army’s 20th Special Forces Group spent several weeks in Trinidad and Tobago working with members of that tiny nation’s Special Naval Unit and Special Forces Operation Detachment.  That Joint Combined Exchange Training exercise, conducted as part of SOCSOUTH’s Theater Security Cooperation program, saw the Americans and their local counterparts take part in pistol and rifle instruction and small unit tactical exercises.

In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations member countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia -- as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.

Tactical training was, however, just part of the story.  In March 2013, for example, experts from the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School hosted a week-long working group with top planners from the Centro de Adiestramiento de las Fuerzas Especiales -- Mexico’s Special Warfare Center -- to aid them in developing their own special forces doctrine.

In October, members of the Norwegian Special Operations Forces traveled to SOCOM's state-of-the-art Wargame Center at its headquarters on MacDill Air Force Base in Florida to refine crisis response procedures for hostage rescue operations.  “NORSOF and Norwegian civilian leadership regularly participate in national field training exercises focused on a scenario like this,” said Norwegian Lieutenant Colonel Petter Hellesen. “What was unique about this exercise was that we were able to gather so many of the Norwegian senior leadership and action officers, civilian and military, in one room with their U.S counterparts.”

MacDill is, in fact, fast becoming a worldwide special ops hub, according to a report by the Tampa Tribune.  This past fall, SOCOM quietly started up an International Special Operations Forces Coordination Center that provides long-term residencies for senior-level black ops liaisons from around the world.  Already, representatives from 10 nations had joined the command with around 24 more slated to come on board in the next 12-18 months, per McRaven’s global vision.

In the coming years, more and more interactions between U.S. elite forces and their foreign counterparts will undoubtedly take place in Florida, but most will likely still occur -- as they do today -- overseas.  TomDispatch’s analysis of official government documents and news releases as well as press reports indicates that U.S. Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed to or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world during 2012-2013.

For years, the command has claimed that divulging the names of these countries would upset foreign allies and endanger U.S. personnel.  SOCOM’s Bockholt insisted to me that merely offering the total number would do the same.  “You understand that there is information about our military… that is contradictory to reporting,” he told me.  “There’s certain things we can’t release to the public for the safety of our service members both at home and abroad.  I’m not sure why you’d be interested in reporting that.”

In response, I asked how a mere number could jeopardize the lives of Special Ops personnel, and he responded, “When you work with the partners we work with in the different countries, each country is very particular.”  He refused to elaborate further on what this meant or how it pertained to a simple count of countries.  Why SOCOM eventually offered me a number, given these supposed dangers, was never explained.

Bringing the War Home

This year, Special Operations Command has plans to make major inroads into yet another country -- the United States.  The establishment of SOCNORTH in 2014, according to the command, is intended to help “defend North America by outpacing all threats, maintaining faith with our people, and supporting them in their times of greatest need.”  Under the auspices of U.S. Northern Command, SOCNORTH will have responsibility for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and portions of the Caribbean.

While Congressional pushback has thus far thwarted Admiral McRaven’s efforts to create a SOCOM satellite headquarters for the more than 300 special operators working in Washington, D.C. (at the cost of $10 million annually), the command has nonetheless stationed support teams and liaisons all over the capital in a bid to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway.  “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. -- from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center in 2013.  Referring to the acronyms of the many agencies with which SOCOM has forged ties, McRaven continued: “If there are three letters, and in some cases four, I have a person there. And they have had a reciprocal agreement with us. I have somebody in my headquarters at Tampa.”  Speaking at Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of agencies where SOCOM is currently embedded at 38.

“Given the importance of interagency collaboration, USSOCOM is placing greater emphasis on its presence in the National Capital Region to better support coordination and decision making with interagency partners.  Thus, USSOCOM began to consolidate its presence in the NCR [National Capitol Region] in early 2012,” McRaven told the House Armed Services Committee last year.

One unsung SOCOM partner is U.S. AID, the government agency devoted to providing civilian foreign aid to countries around the world whose mandate includes the protection of human rights, the prevention of armed conflicts, the provision of humanitarian assistance, and the fostering of “good will abroad.”  At a July 2013 conference, Beth Cole, the director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at U.S. AID, explained just how her agency was now quietly aiding the military’s secret military.

“In Yemen, for example, our mission director has SVTCs [secure video teleconferences] with SOCOM personnel on a regular basis now. That didn’t occur two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” Cole said, according to a transcript of the event.  But that was only the start.  “My office at U.S. AID supports SOF pre-deployment training in preparation for missions throughout the globe... I’m proud that my office and U.S. AID have been providing training support to several hundred Army, Navy, and Marine Special Operations personnel who have been regularly deploying to Afghanistan, and we will continue to do that.”

Cole noted that, in Afghanistan, U.S. AID personnel were sometimes working hand-in-hand on the Village Stability Operation initiative with Special Ops forces.  In certain areas, she said, “we can dual-hat some of our field program officers as LNOs [liaison officers] in those Joint Special Operations task forces and be able to execute the development work that we need to do alongside of the Special Operations Forces.”  She even suggested taking a close look at whether this melding of her civilian agency and special ops might prove to be a model for operations elsewhere in the world.

Cole also mentioned that her office would be training “a senior person” working for McRaven, the man about to “head the SOF element Lebanon” -- possibly a reference to the shadowy SOC FWD Lebanon.  U.S. AID would, she said, serve as a facilitator in that country, making “sure that he has those relationships that he needs to be able to deal with what is a very, very, very serious problem for our government and for the people of that region.”

U.S. AID is also serving as a facilitator closer to home.  Cole noted that her agency was sending advisors to SOCOM headquarters in Florida and had “arranged meetings for [special operators] with experts, done roundtables for them, immersed them in the environment that we understand before they go out to the mission area and connect them with people on the ground.”  All of this points to another emerging trend: SOCOM’s invasion of the civilian sphere.

In remarks before the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral McRaven noted that his Washington operation, the SOCOM NCR, “conducts outreach to academia, non-governmental organizations, industry, and other private sector organizations to get their perspective on complex issues affecting SOF.”  Speaking at the Wilson Center, he was even more blunt: “[W]e also have liaison officers with industry and with academia... We put some of our best and brightest in some of the academic institutions so we can understand what academia is thinking about.”

SOCOM’s Information Warfare

Not content with a global presence in the physical world, SOCOM has also taken to cyberspace where it operates the Trans Regional Web Initiative, a network of 10 propaganda websites that are run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets.  These shadowy sites -- including KhabarSouthAsia.com, Magharebia which targets North Africa, an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com, and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com -- state only in fine print that they are “sponsored by” the U.S. military.

Last June, the Senate Armed Services Committee called out the Trans Regional Web Initiative for “excessive” costs while stating that the “effectiveness of the websites is questionable and the performance metrics do not justify the expense.”  In November, SOCOM announced that it was nonetheless seeking to identify industry partners who, under the Initiative, could potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.”

Just as SOCOM is working to influence audiences abroad, it is also engaged in stringent information control at home -- at least when it comes to me.  Major Bockholt made it clear that SOCOM objected to a 2011 article of mine about U.S. Special Operations forces.  “Some of that stuff was inconsistent with actual facts,” he told me.  I asked what exactly was inconsistent.  “Some of the stuff you wrote about JSOC… I think I read some information about indiscriminate killing or things like that.”

I knew right away just the quote he was undoubtedly referring to -- a mention of the Joint Special Operations Command’s overseas kill/capture campaign as “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.”  Bockholt said that it was indeed “one quote of concern.”  The only trouble: I didn’t say it.  It was, as I stated very plainly in the piece, the assessment given by John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former counterinsurgency adviser to now-retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus.

Bockholt offered no further examples of inconsistencies.  I asked if he challenged my characterization of any information from an interview I conducted with then-SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye.  He did not.  Instead, he explained that SOCOM had issues with my work in general.  “As we look at the characterization of your writing, overall, and I know you’ve had some stuff on Vietnam [an apparent reference to my bestselling book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam] and things like that -- because of your style, we have to be very particular on how we answer your questions because of how you tend to use that information.” Bockholt then asked if I was anti-military.  I responded that I hold all subjects that I cover to a high standard.

Bockholt next took a verbal swipe at the website where I’m managing editor, TomDispatch.com.  Given Special Operations Command’s penchant for dabbling in dubious news sites, I was struck when he said that TomDispatch -- which has published original news, analysis, and commentary for more than a decade and won the 2013 Utne Media Award for “best political coverage” -- was not a “real outlet.”  It was, to me, a daring position to take when SOCOM’s shadowy Middle Eastern news site Al-Shorfa.com actually carries a disclaimer that it “cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.”

With my deadline looming, I was putting the finishing touches on this article when an email arrived from Mike Janssen of SOCOM Public Affairs.  It was -- finally -- a seemingly simple answer to what seemed like an astonishingly straightforward question asked more than a month before: What was the total number of countries in which Special Operations forces were deployed in 2013?  Janssen was concise. His answer: 80.

How, I wondered, could that be?  In the midst of McRaven’s Global SOF network initiative, could SOCOM have scaled back their deployments from 120 in 2011 to just 80 last year?  And if Special Operations forces were deployed in 92 nations during just one week in 2013, according to official statistics provided to the New York Times, how could they have been present in 12 fewer countries for the entire year?  And why, in his March 2013 posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee, would Admiral McRaven mention "annual deployments to over 100 countries?"  With minutes to spare, I called Mike Janssen for a clarification.  “I don’t have any information on that,” he told me and asked me to submit my question in writing -- precisely what I had done more than a month before in an effort to get a timely response to this straightforward and essential question.

Today, Special Operations Command finds itself at a crossroads.  It is attempting to influence populations overseas, while at home trying to keep Americans in the dark about its activities; expanding its reach, impact, and influence, while working to remain deep in the shadows; conducting operations all over the globe, while professing only to be operating in “a number of locations”; claiming worldwide deployments have markedly dropped in the last year, when evidence suggests otherwise.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Bockholt said cryptically before he hung up on me -- as if the continuing questions of a reporter trying to get answers to basic information after a month of waiting were beyond the pale.  In the meantime, whatever Special Operations Command is trying to do globally and at home, Bockholt and others at SOCOM are working to keep it as secret as possible.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, on the BBC, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback).  You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here

Key to the Map of U.S. Special Operations Forces around the world, 2012-2013

Red markers: U.S. Special Operations Forces deployment in 2013.

Blue markers: U.S. Special Operations Forces working with/training/advising/conducting operations with indigenous troops in the U.S. or a third country during 2013.

Purple markers: U.S. Special Operations Forces deployment in 2012.

Yellow markers: U.S. Special Operations Forces working with/training/advising/conducting operations with indigenous troops in the U.S. or a third country during 2012.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story.

Copyright 2013 Nick Turse

Le développement de la Chine est une déclaration de guerre aux Etats-Unis

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Le développement de la Chine est une déclaration de guerre aux Etats-Unis

Par Peter KUNTZE

La Chine a confiance en elle; elle ose des réformes et sa nouvelle direction veut consolider ses succès

Le contraste ne pourrait pas être beaucoup plus grand: d’un côté du Pacifique, la puissance qui est toujours l’hegemon, est confrontée à de fortes turbulences économiques et politiques; de l’autre côté, la superpuissance en devenir bat tous les records sur le plan économique, en dépit des prophètes de malheur, et a pleine confiance en son avenir.

Ce n’est pas étonnant: trois décennies et demie après le lancement de la politique de réformes et d’ouverture voulue par Deng Xiaoping, le successeur de Mao Zedong, ce changement de cap révolutionnaire a donné ses fruits en bien des domaines. Le pauvre Etat paysan, avec ses millions de “fourmis bleues” est devenu un pays moderne aux immeubles de prestige rutilants et a développé une industrie de la mode qui se révèle désormais sur les “catwalks” de Paris et de Milan.

Hollywood aussi s’énerve car, de fait, l’industrie américaine du cinéma a toutes les raisons de craindre l’avènement d’un sérieux concurrent installé en Extrême-Orient. Pourquoi? Wang Jianlin, l’homme qui serait le plus riche de la République Populaire de Chine, est en train de faire construire à Tsingtau (l’ancienne base et colonie allemande) les plus grands studios cinématographiques du monde. Ce projet gigantesque coûterait plus de huit milliards de dollars et serait achevé en 2017.

On pourrait énumérer encore beaucoup de nouvelles de ce genre, qui confirmeraient le développement exponentiel de la Chine actuelle. Pourtant, lorsque la nouvelle direction chinoise a accédé au pouvoir en novembre 2012, les voix se multipliaient pour annoncer le déclin prochain de la Chine, comme ces mêmes voix, d’ailleurs, l’avaient fait pour les directions précédentes. Comme le “New York Times” ou le “Spiegel”, les médias occidentaux étaient à l’unisson pour évoquer des scénarii catastrophiques: une bulle immobilière était sur le point d’éclater, qui aurait été suivie d’une bulle de crédit et, ensuite, le pays croulerait à cause de la corruption, tandis que la pollution le ravagerait et que le peuple ne tolèrerait plus les différences entre riches et pauvres. L’aspiration générale à la liberté ferait tomber la direction communiste, si des réformes rapides et de vaste ampleur n’étaient pas traduites dans le réel et si cette direction ne renonçait pas à son monopole de pouvoir.

Rien de tout cela ne s’est produit depuis que Xi Jinping (chef de l’Etat et du Parti) et Li Keqiang (premier ministre) ont pris leurs fonctions en novembre 2012 pour les conserver pendant dix ans. On ne voit pas pourquoi le chaos politique et la débâcle économique frapperaient la Chine au cours de la décennie à venir, décennie au bout de laquelle la République Populaire, selon l’OCDE, rattraperait les Etats-Unis, en tant que principale puissance économique de la planète. Le nouveau président de la Banque Mondiale, Jim Yong Kim, a prévu pour la Chine un développement positif à la mi-octobre: “La République Populaire croît de manière certes plus lente mais elle poursuit ses réformes. Le pays s’impose une gigantesque transformation: il passe du statut de pays exportateur et investisseur à une économie plus orientée vers la consommation. Sa direction envisage de s’en tenir à cette politique, en dépit des difficultés. C’est là un modèle pour d’autres”.

Deux nouvelles institutions contribueront à consolider la voie choisie par le gouvernement chinois: une première autorité, soumise au cabinet, a reçu, sur décision du Comité Central, la mission “d’éviter les conflits sociaux et de les résoudre de manière efficace”, afin de garantir la sécurité intérieure de l’Etat.

L’émergence de cette autorité vise, d’une part, à résoudre les problèmes qui se profilent derrière les nombreuses protestations et les manifestations parfois violentes qui se sont organisées dans le pays contre les excès de fonctionnaires locaux; d’autre part, à réagir contre d’autres dérapages comme l’attentat récent qui a frappé Pékin. Fin octobre, devant la Porte de la Paix Céleste, trois Ouïghours avaient foncé avec leur voiture bourrée d’essence sur une foule et entraîné deux passants avec eux dans la mort. On ne peut pas affirmer avec certitude qu’il s’agit d’un acte terroriste de facture islamiste, comme l’affirme le gouvernement. Une chose est sûre cependant: au Tibet comme dans la province du Xinjiang, peuplée d’Ouïghours, les incidents se multiplient car les habitants de ces vastes régions se sentent menacés par l’immigration sans cesse croissante de Chinois Han.

La deuxième autorité, qui verra le jour, s’appelle le “Groupe Central de Direction”, et sera soumis au Comité Central du PC chinois. Il supervisera le processus des réformes en cours et à planifier et veillera à leur “approfondissement général”.

Avec ces décisions, que le Comité Central du PC chinois a prises au début de novembre 2013 après quatre jours de délibérations, Xi Jinping et son camarade de combat, l’élégant Li Keqiang, ont imposé leur politique face à la résistance des forces orthodoxes de gauche. En effet, le texte de la résolution parle du marché qui ne tiendra plus un rôle “fondamental” mais bien un rôle “décisif” dans la répartition des ressources. Tant la propriété étatique que la propriété privée sont désormais des composantes essentielles de “l’économie socialiste de marché”.

D’importantes réformes sociales ont également été décidées. Ainsi, la politique d’un enfant par couple sera assouplie afin de mettre un terme au processus de vieillissement démographique qui freine le développement économique. Jusqu’ici les couples résidant en zone urbaine ne pouvaient avoir un deuxième enfant que si les deux parents n’avaient ni frères ni soeurs. Dorénavant, les couples chinois des villes pourront avoir un deuxième enfant si un seul des parents n’a ni frère ni soeur.

On annonce également la suppression des camps de travail où, depuis 1957, les petits délinquents et les adversaires du régime pouvaient être “rééduqués” pour une période allant jusqu’à quatre années, sans décision d’un tribunal.

L’échec du projet de reconstruction chinois, qui serait dû à des désordres intérieurs et devrait survenir au cours de ces prochaines années, est une chimère de plus colportée par les médias occidentaux. Beaucoup de Chinois profitent désormais de la politique gouvernementale. Tout visiteur étranger s’en aperçoit aisément en déambulant dans les rues des villes chinoises: ce ne sont plus que les seuls dirigeants politiques communistes qui circulent en automobile avec chauffeur. Aujourd’hui des millions de Chinois, fiers, sont au volant de leur voiture personnelle neuve de fabrication japonaise, américaine, allemande ou sud-coréenne.

De plus, plus de 90 millions de Chinois se sont rendus cette année à l’étranger. Ce ne sont pas seulement des amoureux du dépaysement mais des champions du “shopping” international. En 2012, les touristes chinois ont dépensé à l’étranger près de 102 milliards de dollars, plus que n’importe quelle autre nation au monde.

Quasiment à l’insu du reste du monde, Pékin vient d’entamer un combat sur le plan énergétique. Selon les médias chinois, le gouvernement prévoit, pour les cinq années à venir, la somme de 280 milliards d’euro pour financer des mesures visant des économies d’énergies et pour diminuer les effets négatifs de la pollution. Cette somme s’ajoute aux 220 milliards déjà investis dans les énergies renouvelables. Plus important encore: à moyen terme, la direction chinoise veut libérer le cours du yuan (la devise chinoise), le coupler éventuellement à l’or, et, ainsi, détrôner le dollar comme devise globale.

Peter KUNTZE.

(article paru dans “Junge Freiheit”, Berlin, n°49/2013; http://www.jungefreiheit.de ).

Le Royaume-Uni, “État-voyou”

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Le Royaume-Uni, “État-voyou”

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

Une opération secrète, l’Opération Tiberius, a été lancée en 2003 pour évaluer le degré de corruption et de pénétration par le crime organisé de différents organes de sécurité intérieure et de justice du Royaume-Uni. Un rapport a été établi après la conduite à bien de cette Opération Tiberius. The Independent, qui a obtenu un exemplaire du rapport, a publié plusieurs articles sur ce document (les 9 janvier 2014, 10 janvier 2014 et encore 10 janvier 2014). L’Opération Tiberius montre une pénétration systématique par la corruption, les pressions, le chantage, etc., du crime organisé dans les principaux organes de police, de la justice, du système carcéral, des impôts, des douanes, etc., bref tout ce qui forme l’appareil interne de la sécurité et de la justice courantes dans ce pays. (On signalera également un article de Russia Today, du 11 janvier 2014, reprenant nombre d’informations de The Independent en les synthétisant.)

Les informations publiées signalent notamment, en présentant les résultats de l’Opération Tiberius à partir des informations de The Independent, que cette opération a été réalisée par des voies tout à fait inhabituelles, échappant au contrôle des organismes impliqués. Tiberius semble avoir été prioritairement confiée à des services tels que le MI5 (contre-espionnage) et le MI6 (renseignement extérieur), et selon des voies et moyens secrets telles que des écoutes clandestines, des interceptions de courrier, etc. (Il est donc probable que le GCHG a été aussi impliqué dans l’enquête, pouvant alors, pour une très rares occasions, mettre en évidence l’utilité des actions de surveillance et d’espionnage clandestines ; mais c’est ironiquement, ou de façon révélatrice, pour démontrer le degré de corruption structurelle du Système dont lui-même, le GCHQ, est partie prenante d’une autre façon mais dans le même esprit... L'exception qui confirme la règle.)

«Tiberius, which was compiled from a number of covert intelligence sources including police informants, telephone intercepts, information from MI5 and MI6, as well as thousands of historical files, came to the appalling conclusion: “Quite how much more damage could be done is difficult to imagine.”»

Il semble qu'on ne trouve pas d'indication de date pour la clôture de l’Opération Tiberius mais il est manifeste qu’une telle action demande plusieurs années aussi bien pour l’ampleur du travail que pour les conditions de l’action (le secret nécessaire pour l’enquête). Dans tous cas, tout indique, bien entendu, que la situation actuelle est aussi catastrophique que celle que décrit Tiberius, et même qu’elle a empiré.

«In 2003 Operation Tiberius found that men suspected of being Britain’s most notorious criminals had compromised multiple agencies, including HM Revenue & Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service, the City of London Police and the Prison Service, as well as pillars of the criminal justice system including juries and the legal profession.

»The strategic intelligence scoping exercise – “ratified by the most senior management” at the Met – uncovered jurors being bought off or threatened to return not-guilty verdicts; corrupt individuals working for HMRC, both in the UK and overseas; and “get out of jail free cards” being bought for £50,000. The report states that the infiltration made it almost impossible for police and prosecutors to successfully pursue the organised gangs that police suspected controlled much of the criminal underworld. The author of Tiberius, which was compiled from intelligence sources including covert police informants, live telephone intercepts, briefings from the security services and thousands of historical files, came to the desperate conclusion: “Quite how much more damage could be done is difficult to imagine.”

»The fresh revelations come a day after The Independent revealed that Tiberius had concluded the Metropolitan Police suffered “endemic police corruption” at the time, and that some of Britain’s most dangerous organised crime syndicates were able to infiltrate New Scotland Yard “at will”.

»In its conclusions, the report stated: “The true assessment of the damage caused by these corrupt networks is impossible to make at this stage, until further proactive scoping has been undertaken.” “However a statement by an experienced SIO [senior investigating officer] currently attached to SO 1(3) gives some indication of the depth of the problem in east and north-east London: ‘I feel that at the current time I cannot carry out an ethical murder investigation without the fear of it being compromised.’” “The ramifications of this statement are serious and disturbing and provide a snapshot of the current threat to the criminal justice system. Additionally the fact that none of these syndicates have been seriously disrupted over the last five years provides an insight into the effectiveness of their network.»

L’Opération Tiberius ouvre un nouveau chapitre de l’évolution autodestructrice du Système, qui est l'introduction dans les structures fondamentales mêmes des pays les plus avancés du bloc BAO des mêmes évolutions de désordre et de de déstructuration-dissolution qu’on trouve dans nombre de régions sensibles, dans les systèmes de coopération transnationaux, dans les structures financières transnationales, dans l’évolution des mœurs sociétaux, etc. L’évolution de la structure de sécurité intérieure du Royaume-Uni selon-Tiberius ressemble aussi bien à l’évolution des marchés financiers dont on connaît la structure criminelle prédominantes, qu’à certaines situations déstabilisées comme celles du Moyen-Orient, où le crime organisé prend une part de plus en plus importante dans les activités terroristes. Mais dans ce cas extrême du Royaume-Uni, il s’agit de la corruption spectaculaire et dramatique des structures pérennes, l’effacement accéléré des activités dépendantes de la dimension régalienne des plus vieilles nations de notre civilisation (devenue contre-civilisation, et ceci expliquant cela), la disparition des notions de souveraineté, de légitimité et d’autorité dans ces États. Il est difficile d’envisager les conséquences de cette sorte d’évolution de complète perversion des principes sur lesquels se sont fondées ces nations, mais on aura de la difficulté à ne pas être très pessimiste.

Par ailleurs, si l’événement est considérable, il ne peut surprendre en aucune façon. Il est évident qu’on ne peut attendre rien d’autre, au niveau de ces services essentiels de l’État, lorsqu’on considère l’exemple que donnent les directions politiques, qui conduisent des politiques au nom de narrative mensongères, qui mènent des activités de sécurité nationale dans la plus complète illégalité, qui se trouvent souvent pris dans des scandales de corruption et trouvent en général pour la “retraite” politique de leurs membres les plus éminents une place dans des circuits de conférences, des positions diverses dans divers circuits humanitaires et autres, qui leur assurent des émoluments considérables dont la réelle signification ne peut être trouvée que dans la définition d’une forme spécifique de corruption. La corruption des services de sécurité intérieure britannique répond évidemment à la corruption du gouvernement britannique (Blair et la suite), à la corruption de groupes industriels comme l’est BAE avec ses liens avec l’Arabie, à la corruption de la City au travers des diverses crises qu’elles déclenchent elle-même et qui sont d’un très grand rapport financier pour elle.

Il n’empêche, l’originalité de la situation exposée par Tiberius est bien entendu qu’elle touche le fondement même de la structure étatique, celui qui doit fournir la sûreté de la vie quotidienne de la population au travers des activités de justice, de police et le reste. Disons qu’on touche là à l’ultimité du processus de déstructuration-dissolution des structures nécessaires à la vie en société, et qu’on se trouve alors dans la situation d’une impasse générale puisqu’il n’y a rien de structuré au-delà. Bien entendu, nul ne peut préciser de quelle façon les conditions de la vie sociale et de la vie nationale en seront affectées mais là aussi le pessimisme est de rigueur. Cette ultimité se résume par le fait de la compromission ultime des pays du bloc BAO les plus avancés dans la promotion du Système et des théories et consignes qui l’accompagnent, donc les pays du bloc BAO qui ont le plus souvent dénoncé les modèles rétifs ou les modèles de mauvaise réputation des “États-voyous” (“rogue state”) en prônant leur élimination, éventuellement à coup d’expéditions lointaines comme celle de la Libye. Le Royaume-Uni est en effet un de ces pays-phares, symboliquement le plus signifiant du Système avec les USA, et c’est lui qui se trouve menacé de devenir, si ce n’est déjà fait, un de ces rogue states que la bonne réputation du Système autant que son équilibre ne peuvent en aucune manière accepter. On peut même observer qu’une telle évolution implique une fragilisation extrême du pays affecté, qui constitue un élément de grande vulnérabilité pour le Système.

Qui plus est, ce même “État-voyou” de type postmoderne est en train d’accoucher d’une “structure” sécuritaire qui va se déstructurer elle-même en se morcelant d’une façon extrêmement antagoniste, avec des conséquences déstabilisantes profondes très probables. On peut s’interroger désormais à propos de ce que vont être les rapports de la police britannique, du Yard, avec le MI5 et le MI6, les premiers sachant qu’ils sont sous surveillance des seconds, les seconds estimant désormais que la police du pays est plus ou moins manipulées par le crime organisé. Ce pas en avant de plus vers le désordre incontrôlé est intéressant parce qu’on ne voit plus très bien quel autre “pas en avant” il reste à faire ; et l’on peut alors espérer qu’au-delà, c’est l’abîme.

lundi, 13 janvier 2014

Hezbollah is a stabilizing factor in the Levant unlike Saudi Arabia and Qatar

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Hezbollah is a stabilizing factor in the Levant unlike Saudi Arabia and Qatar

Murad Makhmudov and Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times - http://www.moderntokyotimes.com

Gulf and Western intrigues in the Levant are collectively creating chaos and spreading sectarianism. In Lebanon the Hezbollah movement is trying to contain these dark forces by maintaining strong relations with powerful Christian leaders like Michel Aoun. At the same time Hezbollah is supporting the rich religious mosaic in Syria. Therefore, while Gulf and Western powers alongside Turkey have tried to crush the secular government in Syria; it is clear that the Russian Federation, Iran, and Hezbollah, are not for changing.

The Syrian armed forces are multi-religious in line with the nation of Syria and clearly the only sectarian angle belongs to the enemies of this nation. Indeed, Syria took in vast numbers of Sunni Muslims fleeing Palestine and Iraq. Therefore, when outside nations were meddling throughout the region the nation of Syria was open to all refugees irrespective of religious affiliation. This reality meant that Christians fleeing Iraq, after the destabilization of this nation, fled to Syria in order to escape sectarianism and terrorism. Sadly, the intrigues of Gulf and Western powers now means that vast numbers of Syrians from all faiths are fleeing the destruction which follows in the wake of outside meddling.

Sunni Takfiri fanatics and militant Salafists are entering Syria from many nations and clearly NATO Turkey is an open conduit for the vilest of jihadists to be found on this planet. After all, the so-called Islamic jihad in Syria is just based on terrorism, sectarianism, beheading, destroying the economy and doing the bidding of outside forces. Note, so-called Islamic jihadists are not fighting NATO Turkey in the north or Israel in the south; instead, they are going to Syria to slaughter and indoctrinate. In other words, Islamic jihadists are not only “blind pawns” based on being funded by wealthy Gulf states but these hypocrites are also the enemies of the Levant because they desire to sow wars based on sectarianism.

Once more, the governments of America and the United Kingdom have helped to cleanse Christians just like they did in Iraq and Kosovo. Indeed, President Obama of America even supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt despite this movement being anti-Christian and anti-secular.  However, the masses in Egypt woke up to the dark threat of the Muslim Brotherhood and similarly the armed forces of Syria refuse to abandon their homeland.

In Syria the forces of Hezbollah are fighting for the richness of the Levant despite the mass propaganda being espoused in the media towards this movement. After all, when Sunni Takfiri Islamists take control of mainly Alawite and Christian villages then both communities flee. The same happens when the brutal Free Syrian Army (FSA) enters either mixed areas or villages belonging to various minorities. Yet, when Hezbollah assists the armed forces of Syria, then this movement only engages itself in fighting various sectarian and terrorist forces.

Hezbollah is not interested in enforcing their faith on anyone. On the contrary, it is clear that Hezbollah supports the mainly Sunni Palestinians, just like this movement is working closely with powerful Christian forces in Lebanon under the leadership of Michel Aoun. Indeed, the modern day movement of Hezbollah resembles many aspects of the secular government of Syria and this applies to supporting the religious and ethnic mosaic of the Levant. This reality highlights the clear sham of sectarianism being thrown at Hezbollah and the government of Syria.

However, in the opposite direction you have the brutal sectarianism of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are supporting many militant Salafi and Takfiri movements in various nations. Of course, in Syria both feudal Gulf powers are supporting terrorism and sectarianism openly. Also, Gulf petrodollars are doing much in the shadows throughout the world based on spreading an ideology based on supremacy and hatred. Like usual, Western powers care zilch about the Christian faith because in Saudi Arabia not one single Christian church is allowed and apostates face death.

Saudi Arabia is now trying to spread dissent in Lebanon by funding the armed forces of this nation. Despite this, many powerful regional religious leaders fully understand the evil deeds being done throughout the Levant based on the intrigues of Gulf and Western powers. Therefore, Hezbollah will continue to fight against outside nations who seek to alter the indigenous dynamics of the Levant.

leejay@moderntokyotimes.com

http://moderntokyotimes.com

IL SECOLO CINESE?

IL SECOLO CINESE?

IL SECOLO CINESE?

Ex: http://www.eurasi-rivista.org

È uscito il numero XXXII (4-2013) della rivista di studi geopolitici “Eurasia” intitolato:

 

IL SECOLO CINESE?

Ecco di seguito l’elenco degli articoli presenti in questo numero, con un breve riassunto di ciascuno di essi.

 

EDITORIALE

IL SECOLO CINESE? di Claudio Mutti

 

GEOFILOSOFIA

HEGEL E IL FONDAMENTO GEOGRAFICO DELLA STORIA MONDIALE di Davide Ragnolini*

All’interno delle «Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte» del grande filosofo tedesco la riflessione sulla base geografica della storia mondiale trova una significativa collocazione propedeutica alla stessa storia filosofica del mondo, la cui importanza non è stata ancora sufficientemente colta. Hegel poneva a fondamento dello svolgimento storico mondiale il rapporto tra i popoli e la condizione naturale nella quale questi hanno localizzazione. Secondo l’impostazione storico-idealistica di Hegel, tempo e spazio hanno nella storia e geografia universale il loro correlato fenomenico dal quale i popoli avviano la propria esistenza. Da un punto di vista filosofico il rapporto tra spirito e natura costituisce la struttura teoretica portante su cui Hegel basa l’emancipazione di un popolo dalla condizione di mero «ente naturale» a soggetto storico all’interno della storia mondiale. Dal geografo e collega Carl Ritter,il filosofo tedesco ha tratto i princìpi interpretativi per la comprensione delle possibilità di sviluppo che le differenze geografiche offrono ai popoli, la rappresentazione geologica della superficie terrestre, la sua divisione in continente euroafrasiatico ed aree insulari, e infine la contrapposizione tra terra e mare. Questi rappresentano solo alcuni dei molti aspetti della geografia hegeliana, forieri di sviluppi successivi per la teoria geopolitica. 

 

DOSSARIO: IL SECOLO CINESE?

LA REPUBBLICA POPOLARE CINESE: PROFILO E RISORSE a cura della Redazione

La Cina oggi: una panoramica dei dati essenziali e delle dinamiche in atto contribuisce alla comprensione della più grande realtà asiatica.

 

LA NUOVA VIA DELLA SETA di Qi Han

La signora Qi Han è incaricata d’Affari dell’Ambasciata della Repubblica Popolare Cinese in Italia. “Eurasia” la ringrazia per aver gentilmente concesso di pubblicare il testo del discorso da lei pronunciato in occasione del Forum Eurasiatico di Verona (17-18 ottobre 2013). 

RITORNO ALLA VIA DELLA SETA di Giuseppe Cappelluti

 Dal mito alla realtà. Dopo secoli di oblio la Via della Seta, storico ponte tra l’Occidente e la Cina, sta tornando ad essere una direttrice primaria del commercio internazionale. Lungo i suoi itinerari si è tuttavia prefigurata l’ennesima disputa tra eurasiatismo ed euro-atlantismo: da un lato il percorso attraverso Russia e Kazakistan, più rapido e stimolato dal rafforzamento dell’integrazione eurasiatica, dall’altro quello attraverso il Caucaso e il Mar Caspio voluto dall’Unione Europea.

LA CINA PER UN ORDINE MULTIPOLARE di Spartaco A. Puttini

 L’ascesa della Cina si è imposta come una realtà della quale tener conto, in tutte le dimensioni proprie della geopolitica. Ma per coglierne la portata e le conseguenze per la vita internazionale occorre collocarla in un contesto preciso: quello attualmente attraversato dalle relazioni internazionali e caratterizzato dal braccio di ferro in corso tra il tentativo statunitense di imporre al mondo il proprio “dominio a pieno spettro” e l’emergere di un equilibrio di potenza multipolare. Nelle righe che seguono cercheremo di dare sommariamente conto dell’azione politica della Cina popolare su diverse scacchiere (dall’America Latina all’Africa) evidenziandone finalità ed effetti. Di particolare rilievo risulta l’impulso dato allo sviluppo dei rapporti economici Sud-Sud con mutuo beneficio, che promettono di erodere il potere ricattatorio esercitato dalle centrali finanziarie legate all’Angloamerica nei confronti dei paesi in via di sviluppo. Si accennerà al complesso rapporto che viene a stabilirsi concretamente tra l’aspirazione cinese ad una crescita armonica e pacifica e il vincolo sistemico indotto dagli Stati Uniti con la corsa agli armamenti e con il susseguirsi di gravissimi crisi regionali che contribuiscono ad attizzare le tensioni tra le Potenze.                         

 

 LA SECONDA PORTAEREI CINESE di Andrea Fais

La crescita della potenza economica cinese ha avuto principalmente due ripercussioni internazionali. L’una, di carattere commerciale, sta già modificando le dinamiche dei flussi di capitale nel pianeta ed è quella più dibattuta dalla stampa europea ma troppo spesso accentuata, se non deformata da giudizi raramente in sintonia con la realtà dei fatti. L’altra, di carattere strategico, mantiene ritmi di trasformazione più lenti, non tanto per il ritardo con cui la Repubblica Popolare Cinese è giunta ad affrontare nel concreto i temi salienti della guerra informatica e della modernizzazione militare quanto piuttosto per l’enorme potenziale accumulato dal Pentagono nel decennio compreso tra il 1998 e il 2007. Eppure dal momento che le dimensioni commerciale e militare sono interdipendenti, all’inversione di tendenza nella prima potrebbe presto seguirne un’altra nella seconda. Il debutto della prima portaerei cinese, la Liaoning, nel settembre 2012 aveva lanciato un dado sul tavolo: la sfida a quello strapotere aeronavale statunitense che, assieme al primato internazionale del dollaro, costituisce l’architrave dell’egemonia nordamericana sul resto del mondo.

 

LA TRIADE NUCLEARE DELLA REPUBBLICA POPOLARE CINESE di Alessandro Lattanzio

L’arsenale strategico cinese è oggetto di varie congetture. Qui viene presentato un quadro sintetico delle varie stime relative all’arsenale nucleare, dovute ai più importanti enti occidentali di analisi strategica.

 

GLI ALTRI PARTITI NELLA CINA POPOLARE di Giovanni Armillotta

 Le origini, la storia e l’organizzazione dei partiti democratici. Le lotte comuni assieme ai comunisti nell’epopea della liberazione contro i giapponesi, e nella guerra civile nel periodo della dittatura del Guomindang. La collaborazione di essi col Partito Comunista Cinese nell’amministrazione del Paese e le rappresentanze dei partiti indipendenti nelle alte istituzioni statali. Paralleli col sistema partitico della nostra Italia 1945-1994. Nell’articolo è adottato il sistema di traslitterazione Pinyin di nomi e toponimi.

 

LA  QUINTA GENERAZIONE AL POTERE di Sara Nardi

Negli ultimi anni il problema dell’informazione e dei mezzi di comunicazione di massa si è fatto stringente anche in Cina. Come seconda potenza mondiale e come nazione pienamente inserita nel processo di globalizzazione economica e digitale, il colosso asiatico è ormai entrato sotto la lente d’ingrandimento della famigerata osservazione internazionale. Si tratta di una realtà complessa, che spesso risente delle contraddizioni o delle forzature che il punto di vista politico e geografico dell’osservatore reca necessariamente con sé. Tuttavia, è stato lo stesso Xi Jinping ad annunciare un piano di riforme che risolvano in modo più efficace le complicate questioni legate alla corruzione, agli intrecci impropri tra politica e stampa e alla regolamentazione della rete multimediale. Una sfida da cui dipende l’immagine della Cina nel mondo e, dunque, la sua capacità di guadagnare legittimazione e consenso internazionali.

 

HUKOU. LA RESIDENZA IN CINA di Maria Francesca Staiano

La RPC è caratterizzata da un sistema di registrazione permanente della residenza (Hukou) che esclude i residenti non regolari, soprattutto i lavoratori migranti, dal godimento delle prestazioni sociali, come l’accesso ai servizi di istruzione, di sanità, di previdenza sociale e di sicurezza sul lavoro. Ciò ha generato una divaricazione netta tra la popolazione urbana e i migranti che provengono dalle zone rurali. Il sistema dello Hukou deriva da una tradizione storica-culturale antica ed è stato modificato varie volte dal Governo cinese. Oggi, la questione dello Hukou è nell’agenda del terzo plenum del Partito Comunista della RPC e quanto mai attuale. La Cina si trova ad affrontare la sfida di un esercito di lavoratori migranti che, sostenendo l’economia cinese, pretendono gli stessi diritti dei cittadini urbani.

 

MYANMAR: UNA PARTITA ANCORA APERTA? di Stefano Vernole

Lo “sdoganamento” del Myanmar apparentemente favorisce l’intrusione occidentale nell’area del Sud-Est asiatico, ma la stabilizzazione dell’ex Birmania è funzionale agli interessi di sicurezza della Cina. La strategia geoeconomica del PCC appare ancora una volta vincente. Il secolo asiatico vedrà Pechino protagonista?

LA CINA IN ROMANIA di Luca Bistolfi

La Cina è vicina, e molto, anche in Romania. Da anni ormai, semplici cittadini, operai, imprenditori e multinazionali di servizi e infrastrutture provenienti dalla Città Proibita hanno adottato il Paese carpatico quale meta di investimenti a lunga durata. Nel bellum omnium contra omnes i romeni se ne vanno dal loro Paese e ad esser assunti sono i cinesi, sempre più a basso costo e non meno sfruttati. Un risultato, fra i tanti, è che anche le aziende italiane, andate per suonare, sono state suonate. Sempre dai cinesi. E la Romania, ancora una volta, piange.

 

IL TURISMO CINESE DEL XXI SECOLO di Ornella Colandrea

Negli ultimi tre decenni, la Repubblica Popolare Cinese ha adottato politiche e misure che, modificando fortemente la struttura socioeconomica del paese, hanno inaugurato una fase di costante crescita economica. La Cina rappresenta oggi un interessante mercato in  crescente espansione in cui il turismo costituisce uno dei fulcri centrali dell’industria nazionale. Il mercato turistico cinese rappresenta una grande opportunità per l’Europa e per il sistema di offerta italiano in particolare. L’articolo analizza i dati, i ritmi di sviluppo, le tendenze, i profili dei turisti cinesi, individuando criticità e opportunità.

 

IL TURISMO CINESE IN ITALIA di Elena Premoli

Affari, ma non solo: anche più tempo libero, voglia di esplorare il mondo, curiosità sempre crescente, desiderio di evasione, necessità di staccarsi dalla frenetica vita delle grandi megalopoli asiatiche. E, soprattutto, maggiore disponibilità economica. Sono questi alcuni fattori che stanno alla base di un fenomeno  sempre in crescita e che sta raggiungendo cifre davvero importanti. Si tratta del turismo cinese, dei viaggi interni alla Cina o all’estero che sempre più abitanti della Terra di Mezzo decidono di compiere per piacere.  Dove si posiziona il nostro Paese all’interno di questa filiera? Quali passi sono stati già compiuti, da quali sbagli è bene trarre insegnamento e quali piccole accortezze sono richieste agli operatori del settore per accogliere al meglio gli ospiti in arrivo dalla Repubblica Popolare? L’articolo offre un breve excursus sull’evoluzione del fenomeno turistico, andando alle radici della pratica del viaggiare per poi arrivare velocemente ai giorni nostri. Espone alcune cifre che definiscono un’idea generale del fenomeno e si chiude con uno sguardo particolare su quanto è possibile fare per trarre maggiori guadagni da tale tendenza, impossibile da trascurare.

LA RICEZIONE DI CARL SCHMITT IN CINA di Davide Ragnolini

La recente traduzione in cinese delle opere del giurista tedesco e la crescita delle pubblicazioni dedicategli in Cina rappresentano un elemento di novità sotto un duplice punto di vista. Da un lato contribuiscono sul piano ermeneutico ad arricchire la storia della ricezione della filosofia schmittiana del diritto sotto un più generale aspetto teoretico-dottrinale nel dibattito scientifico mondiale; dall’altro, queste pubblicazioni sono rilevanti come inedita introduzione di un autore europeo ormai classico all’interno della specificità politico-culturale della più grande nazione asiatica. Un recente saggio di Qi Zheng fornisce una panoramica su questo dibattito scientifico in Cina e al contempo ci dà la possibilità di intravedere i limiti attuali della ricezione cinese di un pensatore che, come spiega la stessa Qi Zheng, come nessun altro ha causato tante controversie in Cina.

CONTINENTI

GLOBALIZZAZIONE: DEFINIZIONE E CONSEGUENZE di Cristiano Procentese

La globalizzazione costituisce il fenomeno più rilevante degli ultimi decenni: ingrediente ormai irrinunciabile di ogni riflessione, rimane, ciononostante, un concetto ancora generico e impreciso. Tuttavia, dopo le apologetiche profezie dei sostenitori della globalizzazione, il risultato degli ultimi anni è  stato un modello di sviluppo che ha come componente intrinseca l’accentuazione delle diseguaglianze, la precarizzazione del lavoro ed il senso d’insicurezza dei cittadini. La crescita incontrollata della speculazione finanziaria, la delocalizzazione delle imprese, che diventano multinazionali o transnazionali, e l’impotenza dei governi nazionali nel gestire un fenomeno così complesso, sono le priorità cui la politica, riappropriandosi delle proprie prerogative, dovrebbe cercare di dare una risposta.

LA LETTONIA VERSO L’EURO di Giuseppe Cappelluti

Il 1 gennaio 2014 sarà una data storica per la Lettonia: il Paese baltico, infatti, diventerà il diciottesimo membro di Eurolandia. Per ragioni sia economiche sia geopolitiche (la volontà di sancire l’appartenenza all’Occidente in funzione antirussa) l’adozione dell’euro è stata uno dei principali obiettivi del governo di centrodestra, ma il Paese è tutt’altro che entusiasta. L’accettazione della Lettonia nell’Eurozona, dopo tutto, è stata vincolata all’adozione di rigide misure di austerità, e non manca chi, memori dei cinquant’anni di occupazione sovietica, teme per la propria sovranità nazionale. Alcuni economisti, d’altro canto, non vedono di buon occhio alcuni provvedimenti recentemente approvati in materia fiscale e temono che il Paese si trasformi in un ponte verso i paradisi fiscali, o peggio che diventi esso stesso un paradiso fiscale.

LE MANI SULL’ASIA CENTRALE di Giuseppe Cappelluti

La Cina è oggi uno dei maggiori interlocutori commerciali degli “stan” dell’Asia Centrale, e i suoi interessi nell’area sono in forte crescita. Emblematici delle strategie geopolitiche di Pechino verso il Centrasia sono i rapporti con Kazakhstan e Kirghizistan. Se fino a poco più di vent’anni fa la Cina era totalmente assente dagli orizzonti kazachi, la sempre più massiccia presenza cinese nell’economia dell’Aquila della Steppa, non più limitata al tradizionale settore degli idrocarburi, ne ha fatto uno dei più importanti partner commerciali e strategici. Inoltre, pur non mancando timori per un possibile boom dell’immigrazione cinese, gli interessi tra i due Paesi sono reciproci, a partire dalle questioni legate alla sicurezza e dalle nuove infrastrutture che collegheranno Cina e Russia attraverso il Kazakhstan. Il Kirghizistan, al contrario, interessa essenzialmente per la sua posizione geografica, mentre la sua futura adesione all’Unione Doganale non è propriamente una buona notizia per quello che un tempo fu il Celeste Impero. Ma nei due Paesi le mosse cinesi suscitano non pochi sospetti: legittimi interessi o espansionismo geoeconomico?

LA GUERRA CIVILE DEL TAGIKISTAN (1992-1997) di Andrea Forti

Nonostante la durata, cinque anni, e l’elevato numero di vittime (dai cinquanta ai centomila morti) la guerra civile del Tagikistan rimane, agli occhi del grande pubblico occidentale (e non solo), uno dei conflitti meno conosciuti del convulso periodo immediatamente successivo alla fine della Guerra Fredda, oscurato dai contemporanei ma ben più mediatici conflitti nella ex-Jugoslavia, in Algeria o in Somalia. La guerra civile tagica, nonostante l’oblio che ormai circonda questa drammatica pagina di storia, è di grande interesse sia per lo studio dei conflitti nati dal dissolvimento dell’Unione Sovietica che per eventuali comparazioni con conflitti attualmente in corso, come quello in Siria che oppone le forze governative alla ribellione islamista.

COMUNITÀ RELIGIOSE IN SIRIA di Vittoria Squillacioti

La Siria odierna è un paese complesso dal punto di vista etnico e religioso. Per comprendere quali siano effettivamente le differenze che caratterizzano la sua popolazione è necessario tenere presente le variabili della lingua, della confessione religiosa e dell’eventuale collocazione geografica delle diverse comunità, tre variabili che agiscono profondamente nella definizione delle diverse identità e appartenenze. Nel variegato mosaico siriano riscontriamo così la presenza dominante dei musulmani, ancorché suddivisi tra sunniti, sciiti, ismailiti, alawiti, drusi e yazidi, ma anche diverse varietà del cristianesimo ed una comunità ebraica.

ARABIA SAUDITA: ALLEANZE ESTERE E DINAMICHE INTERNE di Sara Brzuszkiewicz

In seguito al deciso rifiuto da parte dell’Arabia Saudita del seggio nel Consiglio di Sicurezza delle Nazioni Unite, per il quale era stata eletta come membro non permanente, ci si interroga sugli attuali rapporti del Regno dei Saud con storici alleati, rivali di sempre e timido dissenso interno, per scoprire che, nonostante a prima vista possa sembrare il contrario, il vento del cambiamento è ancora lontano dalla Culla dell’Islam.

IL TAGLIO DELL’ISTMO DI SUEZ di Lorenzo Salimbeni

Nel novembre del 1869 venne inaugurato il Canale di Suez. Ci era voluto quasi un decennio di massacranti lavori per portare a compimento quest’opera ciclopica, dopo che già in fase di progettazione non erano mancate le polemiche. La necessità di mettere in collegamento il Mar Mediterraneo ed il Mar Rosso era chiara a tutti, ma la modalità con cui conseguire tale obiettivo era oggetto di discussione. Vi fu chi propose di aprire un canale fra il Mar Rosso ed il delta del Nilo (come era già stato fatto all’epoca dei Faraoni e della dominazione araba dell’Egitto), chi insistette per un collegamento ferroviario Alessandria-Il Cairo-Mar Rosso e chi spinse per tagliare l’istmo di Suez, anche se si riteneva che fra i due mari vi fosse un dislivello di alcuni metri che avrebbe richiesto la costruzione di complesse chiuse. La Compagnia Universale del Canale di Suez presieduta dallo spregiudicato Ferdinand de Lesseps, il genio ingegneristico di Luigi Negrelli e l’iniziale opposizione britannica furono i soggetti più importanti nella fase iniziale dell’ambiziosa opera di scavo.

INTERVISTE

TUCCI IN ORIENTE. L’AVVENTURA DI UNA VITA. INTERVISTA A ENRICA GARZILLI (a cura di Andrea Fais)

Enrica Garzilli è, dal 1995, direttrice delle riviste accademiche “International Journal of Sanskrit Studies” e “Journal of South Asia Women Studies”. È stata quindi Research Affiliate al P.G.D.A.V. College, una delle più antiche istituzioni dell’Università di Delhi. Dal 1991 al 2011 ha vinto la Senior Fellowship presso il Center for the Study of World Religions dell’Università di Harvard (1992–94), ha compiuto quattro anni di studi post-laurea in storia, informatica e giurisprudenza, ha insegnato come Lecturer di sanscrito all’università di Harvard e servito come direttore editoriale della Harvard Oriental Series-Opera Minora, è stata Visiting Researcher alla Harvard Law School (1994–96) e docente presso le università di Macerata, Perugia e Torino. Collabora in qualità di esperta alla RSI – Radiotelevisione Svizzera e a riviste e giornali italiani.

“GLOBAL TIMES”: UNO STRUMENTO DI DIALOGO. INTERVISTA A LI HONGWEI (a cura di Andrea Fais)

Li Hongwei è caporedattore dell’edizione in lingua inglese del quotidiano di approfondimento cinese “Global Times”. Fondato nel 1993 dall’editore del “Quotidiano del Popolo”, il “Global Times” ha raggiunto una popolarità internazionale a partire dal 2009, quando fu lanciata l’edizione in lingua inglese che ha raggiunto i lettori di tutto il mondo, accreditandosi come riferimento imprescindibile per conoscere analisi e opinioni della società cinese. La presente intervista è stata rilasciata ad Andrea Fais, collaboratore di “Eurasia” e di “Global Times”.

RECENSIONI

Luciano Pignataro, La Cina contemporanea da Mao Zedong a Deng Xiaoping (1949-1980) (Andrea Fais)

Tiziano Terzani, Tutte le opere (Stefano Vernole)

Carlo Terracciano, L’Impero del Cuore del Mondo (Andrea Fais)

Massimo Cacciari, Il potere che freno (Claudio Mutti)

"Al Qaeda se extiende en Irak como un virus imparable"

Ex: http://www.elespiadigital.com

Las fuerzas policiales iraquíes y tribus locales lograron expulsar del centro de la ciudad de Ramadi a los yihadistas del Estado Islámico de Irak y el Levante y retomar así el control de la ciudad, ocupado por el grupo vinculado a Al Qaeda.

Las consecuencias del conflicto sirio parecen tener su eco directo en Irak. Miles de ciudadanos han abandonado la provincia de Anbar después de que los islamistas tomaran el control de las ciudades de Ramadi y Faluya. Estas dos localidades, estratégicas durante la invasión de EE.UU., se convirtieron en un bastión de Al Qaeda. Ahora, el Gobierno del país intenta restablecer el mando en la región.

"Las fuerzas armadas iraquíes nunca abandonarán Anbar porque nunca se marcharon, ya estaban allí desde antes", afirma Adnan al Shahmani, asesor del primer ministro del país, Nuri al Maliki.

Antes de la invasión de EE.UU., el yihadismo era casi inexistente en Irak. Dos años después de la retirada de las tropas estadounidenses del país, se muestra poderoso, mientras que Washington, por su parte, parece desentenderse totalmente del tema. Según el secretario de Estado estadounidense, John Kerry, se trata de "una lucha que pertenece a los propios iraquíes".

Un equipo de RT conversó con un miembro de Al Qaeda en Irak hace seis meses y entonces aseguraba que el destino de Siria estaba unido al de Irak. Llegó el momento, decía, de desestabilizar el Gobierno de Al Maliki.

Karlos Zurutuza, corresponsal de la agencia de noticias IPS, cree que "el vacío de poder que está surgiendo en toda la región de Oriente Medio y el norte de África está haciendo que Al Qaeda se extienda como un virus imparable".

La decisión de grupos tribales sunitas marcará el rumbo del conflicto

Paradójicamente, Irán y EE.UU. están de acuerdo en su apoyo al Gobierno de Al Maliki, mientras que los sunitas ven la realidad muy diferente. En los últimos años las tensiones sectarias han fragmentado el país. Actualmente, es difícil encontrar una identidad común en Irak. Si en 2005 tenían que decidir entre las tropas de EE.UU. o Al Qaeda, ahora vuelven a encontrarse entre la espada y la pared.    

"Los sunitas de Irak son los parias de la invasión de 2003, los parias del Gobierno a manos de Nuri al Maliki tras años de marginación sistemática. La población sunita se encuentra entre un Gobierno que les rechaza y unos agentes extranjeros extremistas dispuestos a luchar por un emirato sunita", opina Karlos Zurutuza.

Algunos expertos ya adelantaban el caos que se vive en Irak hace ya casi una década. "'En lugar de unir a Irak, tras el año 2005 habrá un conflicto tribal más grave, profundas diferencias religiosas que llevarán a Irak a más caos y a una guerra civil sangrienta'. Eso lo dijimos en 2004. El país está en ruinas", opina el analista internacional Gerald Celeste.

Así, la clave la tienen los grupos tribales. Su decisión marcará el rumbo del conflicto. Los ciudadanos iraquíes, mientras tanto, vuelven a ser las víctimas, como tras la invasión estadounidense. De nuevo, se ven obligados a desplazarse a otros lugares y a refugiarse de un conflicto ya regional.    

Desde el año 2009 Irak había reducido el número de homicidios por año de manera sustancial. En 2013, no obstante, hubo un punto de inflexión y fue el más sangriento en un lustro. Viendo la compleja situación que asola ahora a Irak, parece que se avecinan, una vez más, tiempos oscuros para el país.

dimanche, 12 janvier 2014

Germany's military strategy

Bundeswehr_Soldaten_Freiwil.jpg

Germany's military strategy

 
 
The NATO defense strategy during the Cold War must have been a real nightmare for some West-German officers. Even the former West-German chancellor Helmut Schmidt said in 2007 in an interview that he was shocked when he was informed about the NATO plans in 1969. Schmidt said that there was a belt of nuclear mines crossing West-Germany which would detonate in case of a Soviet invasion. West-Germany was seen as the future nuclear battlefield. The country formally known as “Germany” would have been turned into a giant ground zero in the center of Europe. The Germans in West and East Germany were in the nuclear death row of the Cold War. 
 
The West-German army, the Bundeswehr, was part of those plans. The NATO strategy was: In case of a Soviet aggression, the Eastern Block armies will carry out their most powerful ground attack of the so called “Iron Curtain” in central Europe on Germany. It would be almost impossible to stop the Eastern armies before the Rhine River. West-Germany was supposed to be the “death trap” for the enemy?s armies, and for the German civilians. The Bundeswehr didn't play a big strategic role in that horrible scenario, the West-German soldiers might have been killed or defeated by the overwhelming Eastern forces and by the Western nuclear response within days. 
 
Germany in 1945: After the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, the former Reich became split in Zones of Occupation  by the allied powers. In the West US-American, British and French forces established their zones, in the center the Soviet occupation zone was established, East Germany was occupied by Poland and the Soviet Union. The Reich was destroyed; huge cities as Berlin, Hamburg, Konigsberg or Dresden became just ruins. Millions of German refugees became strayed; the former most powerful nation on continental Europe was disarmed and weakened down, thus creating a vacuum of power. The allied conference of Potsdam in the summer of 1945 made clear that there is now a new confrontation: The Western block under Anglo-American leadership against the Eastern communist block under Soviet leadership. In 1949 two German states were created: In the Western Zones of Occupation the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), in Middle Germany the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). At the time when these states were founded they didn?t have any military force. 
 
Germany remained completely demilitarized and any plans for a German military were clearly forbidden by Allied regulations. Only some naval mine-sweeping units continued to exist, but they remained unarmed and under Allied control and did not serve officially as a defense force. Even the Federal Border Protection Force (Bundesgrenzschutz), a mobile and lightly armed police force of 10,000 men, was formed only in 1951 - two years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. A first proposal to integrate West German troops with soldiers of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy in a so called “European Defense Community”, in reality a Western European Army , was proposed but never realized. It was especially France who opposed any plans to rearm West Germany for a long time. “German militarism” was blamed to have caused both World Wars. Germany should never become a continental super power again. And the best “medicine” against militarism seemed to be not to permit any military forces.
 
With growing tensions between the communist Soviet Union and the liberal capitalist West, especially after the Korean War (1950-1953), this policy was to be revised. While the German Democratic Republic was already secretly rearming, the plans of a new West German force started in 1950 when former high-ranking German officers of the Wehrmacht were tasked by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to discuss the options for rearmament. The so-called “Amt Blank”, the predecessor of the later Federal Ministry of Defense (Bundesverteidigungsministerium), was formed in 1950 in Bonn. 
 
The West German “Bundeswehr” was officially established on the 200th birthday of the Prussian general Gerhard von Scharnhorst on November 12th, 1955. But the rearmament (“Wiederbewaffnung”) of West Germany was not easy at all. Huge protests raged against those plans. Not only traditional pacifists opposed to those plans, but also German neutralist politicians and intellectuals who campaigned for one united Germany were strongly against the rearmament. They saw in those plans the manifestation of the German partition. 
 
And there was another dilemma: Since the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, the allied powers put a lot of energy in the so called “denazificiation” of the Germans. The Wehrmacht was identified as one of the worst instruments of German militarism. The generals and officers of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were seen as bloodthirsty warmongers and war criminals. But all of a sudden the West asked especially for the Wehrmacht personnel. The reason for that political U-turn is easy: The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were the only military forces with a certain experience in fighting the Soviet army during World War II. From the beginning, the new Bundeswehr suffered under an “identity conflict”. While the politics went on with stigmatizing the officers of the German World War II forces, the same officers had to build the new army. 
 
During the Cold War the Bundeswehr was the front line of NATO's conventional defense in Central Europe. The West German army had strength of 495,000 soldiers. The Cold War Historian John Lewis Gaddis assesses the Bundeswehr in his book “The Cold War - a New History” as “perhaps world?s best army”. But the Bundeswehr did not take part in any combat operations during the Cold War times. The West German armed forces were during the whole Cold War an integrated part of the NATO military strategy. 
 
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Bundeswehr was reduced to 370,000 military personnel in accordance with the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany between the two German governments and the Allies (2+4 Treaty). The former East German Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) was disbanded. About 50,000 Volksarmee personnel were integrated into the Bundeswehr on October 2nd, 1990. With the reduction, a large amount of the military hardware of the Bundeswehr, as well as of the Volksarmee was disposed. Most of the armored vehicles and fighter jet aircraft (Bundesluftwaffe - due to Reunification - was the only Air Force in the world that flew both Phantoms and MIGs) were dismantled under the international disarmament procedures. 
 
The re-united Germany didn?t quit the NATO membership. The NATO “reformed” itself after the official end of the Cold War. The North Atlantic alliance began an expansion with newly autonomous Eastern European states. For the Bundeswehr, the mission changed: It was transformed more and more into a force for international missions. Hopes that Germany will become a sovereign nation with an independent security and defense plan – of course within a European defense concept – were bitterly disappointed. The “homeland defense” doesn?t play a role anymore since the end of the Cold War – in the official “defense guidelines” (Verteidigungspolitische Richtlinien, VPR) from 1992 the term “homeland defense” was not even mentioned anymore. On the first glance the military idea of the Federal Republic of Germany seemed to have turned 180 degrees: Until 1990 there was the permanent danger of having a nuclear war on German soil, after 1990 the German ministry of defense was talking about the world wide mission of the German military.
 
The recent VPR from May 18th, 2011 were named “Safeguarding National Interests – Assuming International Responsibility – Shaping Security Together”. These VPR include confessions such as: “As an active member of the international community, Germany pursues its interests and is actively striving for a better and safer world.” 
 
And: “A direct territorial threat to Germany involving conventional military means remains an unlikely event. Over the past few years the strategic security environment has continued to change. Globalization has led to power shifts between states and groups of states as well as to the rise of new regional powers. Today, risks and threats are emerging above all from failing and failed states, acts of international terrorism, terrorist regimes and dictatorships, turmoil when these break up, criminal networks, climatic and natural disasters, from migration developments, from the scarcity of or shortages in the supply of natural resources and raw materials, from epidemics and pandemics, as well as from possible threats to critical infrastructure such as information technology.”
 
The German military mission is now completely detached from the German state. The official German understanding of the NATO membership turned from a defense alliance against a real existing threat into an abstract and conception alliance of transatlantic values and even to one of “Germany?s raisons d’etat”: 
 
“The North Atlantic Alliance remains the centerpiece of our defense efforts. Alliance solidarity and making a reliable and credible contribution to the Alliance are part of Germany’s raison d’etat. (…) The commitment of the United States to the security of Europe, as it is most prominently and effectively reflected in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remains a vital interest of Germany and its European allies. It is therefore our duty and our mission to preserve the unique quality of transatlantic relations, to strengthen our ties and our exchanges and to continue to develop the partnership with the United States by performing our tasks responsibly.”
 
The German Bundeswehr is today an international operation force, ready for action, “for a better world”. Of course the terms “security interest” and “national interests” are used until today, but also here the meaning changed: 
 
“German security interests include:
-preventing, mitigating and managing crises and conflicts that endanger the security of Germany and its allies;
-advocating and implementing positions on foreign and security policy in an assertive and credible way;
-strengthening transatlantic and European security and partnership;
-advocating the universality of human rights and principles of democracy, promoting global respect for international law and reducing the gap between the rich and the poor regions of the world;
-facilitating free and unrestricted world trade as well as free access to the high seas and to natural resources.”
 
The aspect of “advocating the universality of human rights and principles of democracy” especially became more and more dominant in German debates about security interests. This vision is assisted by the German Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid: “It is in Germany’s own best interest to help make universal respect for human rights a reality. For enduring peaceful relations require stability, and there can be no long-term stability unless basic human rights are respected.”
 
Of course there is no explanation as to why the global enforcement of “human rights” should be German national security interest. But it became a type of magic mantra for German foreign politics, and the German Bundeswehr might become be more and more an armed force for those “human rights” missions. The end of the Cold War era changed the character of the Bundeswehr from a classical territorial army with a defensive character into an intervention force. Currently  there are Bundeswehr forces in Afghanistan and  Uzbekistan (ISAF), Kosovo (KFOR), in the Mediterranean Sea, at the Horn of Africa/Indian Ocean (Operation Atalanta), in Turkey (Operation Active Fence), Lebanon (UNIFIL), South Sudan (UNMISS), Sudan (UNAMID) and Mali. 
 

L’affaire Dieudonné : l’arbre qui cache la forêt de l’offensive contre Internet

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Ex: http://www.polemia.com

L’affaire Dieudonné : l’arbre qui cache la forêt de l’offensive contre Internet

« Car, si personne ne bouge, c’est la pensée (…) qui sera étouffée ».

Que Manuel Valls, qui aura passé toute la trêve des confiseurs à ostraciser Dieudonné, s’affirme, « par [s]a femme, lié de manière éternelle à la communauté juive et à Israël » et qu’il soit « fier de faire partie d’un gouvernement qui veut bâtir une amitié forte avec Israël », nul ne le contestera puisqu’il l’a maintes fois affirmé, par exemple le 22 juillet 2012 à Strasbourg. Qu’il espère supplanter Jean-Marc Ayrault à Matignon à la faveur de ses dernières gesticulations, très médiatiques mais dérisoires au regard de sa défaite contre la criminalité et de son triste bilan de la Saint-Sylvestre (trois personnes assassinées à l’arme blanche et 1067 véhicules incendiés malgré le déploiement de 53.000 gendarmes et policiers) est une évidence. Mais le ministre de l’Intérieur réussira-t-il, grâce à sa circulaire du 6 janvier, à faire interdire par les préfets les spectacles de celui qu’il qualifie de « petit entrepreneur de la haine », « raciste et antisémite », obsédé par la « haine du juif » jusqu’à faire « l’apologie de la Shoah» ?

Pas impossible si les nervis de la Ligue de défense juive provoquaient des troubles à l’ordre public susceptibles de faire annuler la tournée de Dieudonné en province. Rappelons que la LDJ est une organisation interdite aux Etats-Unis et même en Israël pour son extrémisme mais qu’elle est protégée chez nous en haut lieu et par la gens Klarsfeld qui, à l’abri de ses Légions d’honneur (Madame est Grand-Croix et Monsieur Grand Officier), doit cornaquer ce mercredi à Nantes une manifestation hostile. (CG)

Un prétexte à la « normalisation » du Web

 

Encore qu’il s’agirait, si M. Valls parvenait à ses fins, d’une scandaleuse atteinte à la liberté d’expression doublée d’une atteinte encore plus monstrueuse à la liberté du travail – en application servile de la loi nationale-socialiste sur le Berufsverbot ou disqualification professionnelle, loi jugée scélérate à l’époque –, la question est peut-être secondaire et va bien au-delà du cas du seul Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala – dont on peut penser ce qu’on veut, y compris du mal.

C’est la liberté d’expression de millions d’internautes français qui est menacée.

Le conflit s’était envenimé au fil des mois entre le journaliste Patrick Cohen, anchorman des matinales de France Inter qui avait dressé en mars une liste noire des individus nauséabonds, dont Dieudonné, à ne jamais inviter sur les antennes du service public, et l’humoriste ; ce dernier avait lancé en décembre, dans son théâtre parisien de La Main d’Or, une phrase provocatrice mais étrangement ambiguë : « Quand je l’entends parler, Patrick Cohen, j’me dis, tu vois, les chambres à gaz… Dommage. » Voulait-il dire par là « dommage que les chambres à gaz n’aient jamais existé » ou, au contraire – ce qui prouverait du moins que cet « antisémite » n’est nullement révisionniste, « dommage qu’elles n’existent plus » ?

 

Peu importe. Dès lors, la machine s’emballa et d’autant plus que, simultanément, le footeux antillais Nicolas Anelka, dont les multiples incartades verbales et le refus obstiné de chanter La Marseillaise quand il jouait d’aventure en équipe de France ne gênaient personne, célébrait d’une « quenelle », posture prétendument néo-nazie, le but qu’il venait de marquer outre-Manche pour son nouveau club de West Bromwich Albion. La photo blasphématoire, dédiée à « [son] ami Dieudonné », ayant fait le tour du monde (et des cités ethniques), le prétexte était tout trouvé pour passer aux choses sérieuses.

 

Soit, sovietico more, la « normalisation* » d’Internet, cet insupportable espace de liberté où peuvent s’étaler toutes les opinions et, plus grave, toutes les contestations des dogmes les mieux établis.

 

Une répression « légitime »

 

Car cette offensive couvait depuis plusieurs mois et, dès le 26 septembre dernier, sur le site Boulevard Voltaire, Jean-Yves Le Gallou avait accusé l’Union des étudiants juifs de France (UEJF), « bras armé du Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF) », de revêtir « l’habit du censeur » en se plaçant « en tête des tentatives de censure d’Internet : poursuites de blogs, poursuites de commentateurs, poursuites de réseaux sociaux ».

 

Comme pour donner raison au fondateur de Polémia, le CRIF publiait le 13 octobre contre la « Fachosphère du Net » une philippique de son spécialiste des médias Marc Knobel qui déplorait : « Certes, des associations antiracistes ont engagé des procédures afin de s’opposer à ces marchands de haine ; toutefois, pourquoi s’en remet-on en ce domaine au seul dévouement (sic) de ces associations ? La lutte contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme sur Internet n’incombe-t-elle pas AUSSI aux pouvoirs publics ? »

Le 17 octobre, toujours sur le site du CRIF, le même exhortait donc le gouvernement à appliquer dans toute sa rigueur la législation muselant « l’Internet de la haine », car « les restrictions à la liberté d’expression peuvent être considérées comme légitimes pour lutter contre le racisme », y compris dans les « nouveaux médias ». « Si le droit à la liberté vaut pour Internet, les restrictions à celle-ci s’appliquent également. Internet n’étant qu’un instrument et non un but en soi, il ne peut être tenu pour affranchi des lois nationales et internationales », théorisait M. Knobel.

 

Un président et un gouvernement aux ordres…

 

Message reçu. Accueillant le 16 décembre à l’Elysée Roger Cukierman, président du CRIF, à l’occasion du septantième anniversaire de ce lobby, le chef de l’Etat lui déclarait notamment: « Quand vous avez des choses à dire, Monsieur le Président, vous les dites et vous les dites librement, franchement, sincèrement, bruyamment et nous vous écoutons**. »

 

Rien d’étonnant, dans ces conditions, si, deux jours plus tard, les députés saisis d’une proposition de loi inspirée des préconisations de la pourtant très institutionnelle Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme (CNCDH) sur la nécessité d’étendre aux blogueurs la protection dont bénéficient les sources des journalistes, rejetaient ce texte ; et si, dans la foulée, la « Dieudosphère », considérée à tort ou à raison comme le fer de lance de la « Fachosphère », se retrouvait sous la mitraille qui, prenons-en le pari, ne s’arrêtera pas à cette seule cible.

« Haine sur Internet : la guerre est déclarée », triomphait donc le 3 janvier Daniel Makonnen, responsable de la communication de la LICRA, ravi de l’imminente mise au pas du Web.

 

Car, si « la Toile » s’est aussitôt enflammée devant la menace d’asservissement et d’épuration, on n’a noté du côté des humanistes homologués ni réserves ni scrupules mais au contraire une acceptation béate de la machine de guerre gouvernementale, un lâche soulagement devant le « courage » de l’équipe Ayrault qui s’apprête à faire voter un projet de loi étendant les possibilités de capter les données numériques, véritable « Patriot Act » à la française instaurant une sourcilleuse censure et incitant à la délation.

 

…et une Intelligentsia complice des éradicateurs

 

Défenseur des démocrates ukrainiens en lutte contre le tyran Poutine comme il l’avait été des honorables républicains libyens contre l’immonde Kadhafi, Bernard-Henri Lévy tresse ainsi des lauriers au petit Jdanov de la Place Beauvau, initiateur de la nouvelle « ligne générale »:

« Il y a un moment où […] il est du devoir de la parole publique de dire. Valls l’a fait, Valls a eu raison. Il n’y a rien de commun, rien, entre le travail d’un humoriste dont la liberté d’expression et donc de provocation est effectivement sacrée, et l’entreprise d’un agitateur néonazi qui fait ouvertement campagne sur des thèmes qui ne sont pas des opinions mais des délits. »

 

Cette opinion est partagée par Bertrand Delanoë qui, abandonnant la mairie de Paris dans l’espoir d’un maroquin ministériel, doit donner des gages. Dieudonné étant pour lui « quelqu’un qui fait l’apologie de crimes contre l’Humanité et qui par ses propos porte atteinte à la dignité humaine, il doit être combattu avec toutes les rigueurs de la loi ». Et surtout avec la force injuste de la loi.

 

Ce qui tombe bien puisque, tout aussi acharnée, Mme le Ministre délégué à l’Economie numérique Fleur Pellerin – Coréenne naguère adoptée par un couple français, cas également du camarade Jean-Vincent Placé, le gourou des Verts – s’est félicité de la possibilité « de faire condamner toute personne propageant des propos racistes sur les réseaux sociaux » : « Aujourd’hui, la Justice a les moyens techniques de faire appliquer les décisions et c’est ce qu’il faut faire, y compris dans le cas de Dieudonné », déclarait-elle le 31 décembre, sûre que sa collègue à la Justice Christiane Taubira, si indulgente aux FEMEN profanatrices de tant de nos églises et aux auteurs de crimes crapuleux, se montrera intransigeante à l’encontre des déviants idéologiques.

 

Un modèle démocratique : la Chine populaire !

 

Mais la palme de l’inconscience ou, si l’on préfère, du cynisme, revient sans doute à l’éthéré dandy qui sert de directeur à L’Express. Participant aux Grandes Gueules sur RMC le 3 janvier, Christophe Barbier proclamait ainsi : « Internet n’est pas un no man’s land. Internet est un champ d’impunité, mais ça se régule aussi, Internet. Entre nous, hein, les Chinois y arrivent bien. Si les dictatures y arrivent, il faut que les démocraties y arrivent aussi ! »


 

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Quatre-vingts ans après le pamphlet de Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de garde (de l’ordre établi), sortait en 2012 un documentaire politique, Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde inspiré du livre éponyme de Serge Halimi. Christophe Barbier y était durement étrillé pour sa défense de la « mondialisation heureuse » et de l’idéologie dominante. On aurait pu croire qu’après son ode, digne d’un Garde rouge, à la répression, le personnage serait durablement tricard des plateaux. Tout au contraire, il était deux jours plus tard l’invité d’honneur du 19/20 de France 3 où il exalta l’ardente obligation d’une « pédagogie mémorielle » car « on ne peut pas rire de tout », proclame celui qui se présente comme « un esprit libre ».

 

Détail savoureux : M. Barbier, normalien controversé car, recalé au concours d’entrée rue d’Ulm, il n’en aurait suivi les cours qu’en auditeur libre et ne possède d’ailleurs qu’une maîtrise d’histoire, a tourné dans Doutes, un film de son épouse, Yamini Kumar-Cohen (elle-même directrice de la communication chez Hermès), censé fustiger le… « Politiquement Correct » ! Ce qui l’autorisait évidemment à réclamer, il y a deux ans déjà dans L’Express, « un droit mondial du Web ».

 

Un tel droit, également exigé par Ariel Wizman, son confrère de Canal+, qui réclamait le 28 novembre la création d’une « police du Net », selon lui « égout de la pensée », mène, on le sait, à l’alignement déjà observé par les « médias en servitude » et heureux de l’être, mais furieux de voir leurs certitudes, leurs oukases et leur magistère battus en brèche par de simples citoyens.

 

En 1984, la suspension de la nouvelle radio NRJ, dont la puissance d’émission brouillait toutes les antennes voisines, avait jeté dans la rue trois cent mille jeunes et forcé le pouvoir socialiste à reculer. L’enjeu est aujourd’hui bien plus important. Car, si personne ne bouge, c’est la pensée, dont a si peur M. Wizman, qui sera étouffée.

 

Notes :

 

(*) « Normalisation » : tel avait été l’euphémisme choisi en août 1968 par Michel Debré, alors ministre des Affaires étrangères de Charles De Gaulle, pour qualifier l’envoi des blindés soviétiques ayant pour mission de mater le « printemps de Prague ».
(**) Souligné par nous

 

Fallujah: Obama’s Newest Headache

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Fallujah: Obama’s Newest Headache

Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR

Ex: http://www.strategic-culture.org

 
Guernica in the Spanish civil war, My Lai in the Vietnam War, Guantanamo Bay in the war on terror – these have been powerful symbols. The siege of Fallujah in May 2004 stands out in the Iraq War as the bloodiest battle that the United States fought since the Vietnam War. The US Marines suffered 40 deaths in the siege, while Iraqi civilian casualties were in the hundreds. The US forces reportedly used F-16 warplanes to blitz residential areas in Fallujah with cluster bombs. The majority of prisoners were executed…

As the US Marine Corps announced a ceasefire and withdrew in May 2004, mosques proclaimed the victory of insurgents and Fallujah’s transformation began as a sort of Islamic mini-state with Sharia law. So, in the fall of that year, in late October, the US military returned with another major offensive with aerial attacks and precision-guided missiles followed by a full-blooded assault by the Marines backed by artillery and armor in early November – Operation Phantom Fury. 

This is how CNN’s Karl Penhaul reported on November 9: «The sky over Fallujah seems to explode as U.S. Marines launch their much-trumpeted ground assault. War planes drop cluster bombs on insurgent positions and artillery batteries fire smoke rounds to conceal a Marine advance». According to Washington Post, white phosphorous grenades and artillery shells were used to create «walls of fire» in the city. Doctors later reported seeing melted corpses. No one knows the casualty figures; as of November 18 US military claimed 1200 ‘insurgents’ had been killed and 1000 captured… 

A Guardian report said over 70 percent of the city’s homes were destroyed along with sixty schools and sixty-five mosques and shrines. There has been anecdotal evidence of large increases in cancer, infant mortality, etc. among the survivors, triggering speculation that there was use of depleted uranium leading to environmental contamination. 

It is extremely important to recollect the horrendous living memory of Fallujah to understand what happened last week when the centre of the city fell into the hands of fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State in Iraq and Levant [ISIL]. Fallujah, along with the capital of Anbar province, Ramadi, was a stronghold of Sunni insurgents during the US occupation of Iraq and al-Qaeda militants largely took over both cities last week. Hundreds of ISIL fighters have entered Fallujah. 

Pundits have begun analyzing the factors behind. The dominant narrative is that the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki failed to reach out to the Sunnis and alienating them during the period since the US troops pulled out in 2011. Indeed, the latest flare-up happened after Maliki dispatched troops last week to break up an year-old Sunni protest in Ramadi to voice their grievances of political exclusion. Almost all Sunnis have turned against the government and are opposed to the Iraqi security forces, although not all have aligned themselves with the ISIL. 

Meanwhile, the turmoil in Syria in which ISIL is playing a lead role has compounded the security situation in Iraq. The ISIL has been targeting Shi’ites, which at once gives the conflict in Anbar a sectarian overtone. Also, Iraq is heading for parliamentary poll in April and there are conspiracy theories that Maliki is calibrating a confrontation with Sunnis and raising the spectre of the al-Qaeda threat that might help him rally the Shi’ite opinion to support his re-election. 

However, Maliki’s decisions are also prompted by the real fear that his Shi’ite-led government is besieged and faces the threat of being overrun Sunnis. To say he contrived the al-Qaeda takeover in Fallujah stretches credulity. The ISIL comprises hardened fighters coming in from Syria where the US’ regional allies in the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, have been inducting foreign fighters and supporting them financially and with weapons. Also to be factored in is the so-called Sahwa, the Awakening, which the US created as surrogate force to fight the al-Qaeda and was abandoned when the American troops withdrew in 2011. Most of its leaders have been assassinated. 

Suffice to say, in terms of political morality or strategy, the Barack Obama administration cannot wash its hands off the emergent situation in Fallujah. The blame for the Iraq’s unraveling as a nation should lie with the George W. Bush presidency. Bush’s forecast of ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq and Gen. David Petraeus’ brag about the Awakening sound hollow today. 

To be sure, how Obama responds to the situation in Fallujah has wider implications for the US’ regional strategies. Secretary of State John Kerry said, «We’re not contemplating putting boots on the ground. This is their [Iraqis’] fight, but we’re going to help them in their fight». 

The White House spokesman Jay Carney said Washington is «accelerating» its deliveries of military equipment to Iraq and «looking to provide an additional shipment of Hellfire missiles» in the coming months as well as ten surveillance drones in the coming weeks and another 48 later this year. Carney added that Washington is «working closely with the Iraqis to develop a holistic strategy to isolate the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups», but ultimately Iraq must handle the conflict itself. 

The point is, US fought ferociously in 2004 to keep al-Qaeda out of Fallujah and now they’ve returned and may create a base there and this is every bit the US’ fight and Maliki government is a quasi-ally of Washington. The US’ interests in the region will be seriously hurt if al-Qaeda establishes another foothold in the region. And, of course, the whole region is watching Washington’s grit to take on al-Qaeda. 

The Republican hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham blame Obama for the situation insofar as he didn’t try hard enough to reach an agreement with Maliki to keep US troops in Iraq beyond 2011. However, the criticism won’t gain traction as the domestic attitudes in the US favor the idea that despite the upheaval in the Middle East, the US will do well to seek a diplomatic and political engagement with the region rather than a military settlement. 

The choices that lie ahead for Obama can be viewed from three perspectives. First, the Fallujah situation sails into view at an awkward time – when the Obama administration proposes to maintain anywhere around ten to twelve thousand US troops in Afghanistan. That plan lacks support within the US and the Fallujah situation is a timely warning about the dangers of maintaining a large residual force in Afghanistan. 

Second, Fallujah highlights that the wars in Syria and Iraq and the dangerous slide in Lebanon have morphed. At the same time, Fallujah is not an al-Qaeda problem alone. It is a city that became irreconcilably alienated in the brutal violence of US occupation and it no longer feels it’s a part of Iraq. Thus, Fallujah calls attention to a far more fundamental question regarding the future of Iraq itself. This, again, holds some stark lessons for Afghanistan where too the US occupation hastened the fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines. A response to the crisis by accelerating weapons deliveries to the Iraqi government will not solve the problem and may even make it worse. 

A third stunning aspect is that the Fallujah situation finds the US and Iran on the same side. Their respective interests in Iraq vary but they share the profound concern that an international movement of Sunni fighters fired by Wahhabi ideology is raising the black flag of al-Qaeda along sectarian fault lines. Neither is willing to intervene and Tehran too promises military aid but shows reluctance to put ‘boots on the ground’. 

The Obama administration could be edging close to acknowledging Iran’s influence on regional issues – Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen – and this hastens regional realignments. Saudi Arabia accuses the Obama administration of strengthening Iran’s regional at the expense of Washington’s traditional allies and also alleges that Tehran is pursuing a clever strategy to undermine the US-Saudi alliance. 

Indeed, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said at a meeting with a visiting delegation of Italian lawmakers on Sunday in Tehran that the spread of radicalism in the Middle East would pose unpredictable threats to other parts of the world as well unless countered through effective international cooperation. The Intelligence Minister Seyed Mahmoud Alavi claimed that the western powers realize that international cooperation is needed to counter the «threat of terrorism by Takfiri groups». 

Significantly, a bipartisan a group of influential figures in the US foreign policy establishment addressed a letter to the US Senate on Monday urging that no new sanctions be passed against Iran, warning that it would potentially move the US closer to war. Ryan Crocker who was a former ambassador to Iraq, led the initiative.

samedi, 11 janvier 2014

Volgograd and the Conquest of Eurasia

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Volgograd and the Conquest of Eurasia: Has the House of Saud seen its Stalingrad?

 

The events in Volgograd are part of a much larger body of events and a multi-faceted struggle that has been going on for decades as part of a cold war after the Cold War—the post-Cold War cold war, if you please—that was a result of two predominately Eurocentric world wars. When George Orwell wrote his book 1984 and talked about a perpetual war between the fictional entities of Oceania and Eurasia, he may have had a general idea about the current events that are going on in mind or he may have just been thinking of the struggle between the Soviet Union and, surrounded by two great oceans, the United States of America.

So what does Volgograd have to do with the dizzying notion presented? Firstly, it is not schizophrenic to tie the events in Volgograd to either the conflict in the North Caucasus and to the fighting in Syria or to tie Syria to the decades of fighting in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. The fighting in Syria and the North Caucuses are part of a broader struggle for the mastery over Eurasia. The conflicts in the Middle East are part of this very grand narrative, which to many seems to be so far from the reality of day to day life.

 “Bandar Bush” goes to Mother Russia

For the purposes of supporting such an assertion we will have to start with the not-so-secret visit of a shadowy Saudi regime official to Moscow. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the infamous Saudi terrorist kingpin and former House of Saud envoy to Washington turned intelligence guru, last visited the Russian Federation in early-December 2013. Bandar bin Sultan was sent by King Abdullah to solicit the Russian government into abandoning the Syrians. The goal of Prince Bandar was to make a deal with the Kremlin to let Damascus be overtaken by the Saudi-supported brigades that were besieging the Syrian government forces from Syria’s countryside and border regions since 2011. Bandar met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the two held closed-door discussions about both Syria and Iran at Putin’s official residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.

The last meeting that Bandar had with Putin was a few months earlier in July 2013. That meeting was also held in Russia. The July talks between Prince Bandar and President Putin also included Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. One would also imagine that discussion about the Iranians increased with each visit too, as Bandar certainly tried to get the Russians on bad terms with their Iranian allies.

After Bandar’s first meeting with President Putin, it was widely reported that the House of Saud wanted to buy Russia off. Agence France-Presse and Reuters both cited the unnamed diplomats of the Arab petro-monarchies, their March 14 lackeys in Lebanon, and their Syrian opposition puppets as saying that Saudi Arabia offered to sign a lucrative arms contract with Moscow and give the Kremlin a guarantee that the Arab petro-sheikdoms would not threaten the Russian gas market in Europe or use Syria for a gas pipeline to Europe.

Russia knew better than to do business with the House of Saud. It had been offered a lucrative arms deal by the Saudi regime much earlier, in 2008, to make some backdoor compromises at the expense of Iran. After the compromises were made by Moscow the House of Saud put the deal on ice. If the media leaks in AFP and Reuters were not tactics or lies in the first place aimed at creating tensions between the Syrian and Russian governments, the purportedly extravagant bribes to betray Syria were wasted on the ears of Russian officials.

The House of Saud and the undemocratic club of Arab petro-monarchies that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have always talked large about money. The actions of these self portrayed lords of the Arabia Peninsula have almost never matched their words and promises. To anyone who deals with them, the House of Saud and company are known for habitually making grand promises that they will never keep, especially when it comes to money. Even when money is delivered, the full amount committed is never given and much of it is stolen by their corrupt partners and cronies. Whether it is the unfulfilled 2008 arms contract with Russia that was facilitated with the involvement of Iraqi former CIA asset Iyad Allawi or the overabundant commitments of financial and logistical aid to the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples that never materialized, the Arab petro-sheikhdoms have never done more than talk grandly and then get their propagandists to write articles about their generosity and splendor. Underneath all the grandeur and sparkles there has always been bankruptcy, insecurity, and emptiness.

A week after the first meeting with Bandar, the Kremlin responded to the media buzz about the attempted bribe by Saudi Arabia. Yury Ushakov, one of Putin’s top aides and the former Russian ambassador to the US, categorically rejected the notion that any deal was accepted or even entertained by the Kremlin. Ushakov avowed that not even bilateral cooperation was discussed between the Saudis and Russia. According to the Kremlin official, the talks between Bandar and Putin were simply about the policies of Moscow and Riyadh on Syria and the second international peace conference being planned about Syria in Geneva, Switzerland.

More Leaks: Fighting Fire with Fire?

If his objective was to get the Russians to abandon Syria, Prince Bandar left both meetings in Russia empty-handed. Nevertheless, his visit left a trail of unverifiable reports and speculation. Discretion is always needed when analyzing these accounts which are part of the information war about Syria being waged on all sides by the media. The planted story from the Saudi side about trying to buy the Russians was not the only account of what took place in the Russian-Saudi talks. There was also a purported diplomatic leak which most likely surfaced as a counter-move to the planted story about Bandar’s proposal. This leak elaborated even further on the meeting between Bandar and Putin. Threats were made according to the second leak that was published in Arabic by the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir on August 21, 2013.

According to the Lebanese newspaper, not only did Prince Bandar tell the Russians during their first July meeting that the regimes of the GCC would not threaten the Russian gas monopoly in Europe, but he made promises to the Russians that they could keep their naval facility on the Mediterranean coast of Syria and that he would give the House of Saud’s guarantee to protect the 2014 Winter Olympics being held in the North Caucasian resort city of Sochi, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, from the Chechen separatist militias under Saudi control. If Moscow cooperated with Riyadh and Washington against Damascus, the leak discloses that Bandar also stated that the same Chechen militants fighting inside Syria to topple the Syrian government would not be given a role in Syria’s political future.

When the Russians refused to betray their Syrian allies, Prince Bandar then threatened Russia with the cancellation of the second planned peace conference in Geneva and with the unleashing of the military option against the Syrians the leak imparts.

This leak, which presents a veiled Saudi threat about the intended attacks on the Winter Olympics in Sochi, led to a frenzy of speculations internationally until the end of August 2013, amid the high tensions arising from the US threats to attack Syria and the threats coming from Iran to intervene on the side of their Syrians allies against the United States. Originating from the same politically affiliated media circle in Lebanon, reports about Russian military preparations to attack Saudi Arabia in response to a war against Syria began to circulate from the newspaper Al-Ahed also, further fueling the chain of speculations.

A House of Saud Spin on the Neo-Con “Redirection”

Seymour Hersh wrote in 2007 that after the 2006 defeat of Israel in Lebanon that the US government had a new strategy called the “redirection.” According to Hersh, the “redirection” had “brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.” With the cooperation of Saudi Arabia and all the same players that helped launch Osama bin Ladin’s career in Afghanistan, the US government took “part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria.” The most important thing to note is what Hersh says next: “A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

A new House of Saud spin on the “redirection” has begun. If there is anything the House of Saud knows well, it is rounding up fanatics as tools at the service of Saudi Arabia’s patrons in Washington. They did it in Afghanistan, they did it Bosnia, they have done it in Russia’s North Caucasus, they did it in Libya, and they are doing it in both Lebanon and Syria. It does not take the British newspaper The Independent to publish an article titled “Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis” for the well-informed to realize this.

The terrorist bombings in Lebanon mark a new phase of the conflict in Syria, which is aimed at forcing Hezbollah to retreat from Syria by fighting in a civil war on its home turf. The attacks are part of the “redirection.” The House of Saud has accented this new phase through its ties to the terrorist attacks on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut on November 19, 2013. The attacks were carried out by individuals linked to the notorious Ahmed Al-Assir who waged a reckless battle against the Lebanese military from the Lebanese city of Sidon as part of an effort to ignite a sectarian civil war in Lebanon.

Al-Assir’s rise, however, was politically and logistically aided by the House of Saud and its shameless Hariri clients in Lebanon. He is also part of the same “redirection” policy and current that brought Fatah Al-Islam to Lebanon. This is why it is no surprise to see Hariri’s Future Party flag flying alongside Al-Qaeda flags in Lebanon. After Al-Assir’s failed attempt to start a sectarian Lebanese civil war, he went into hiding and it was even alleged that he was taken in by one of the GCC embassies.

In regard to the House of Saud’s roles in the bombings in Lebanon, Hezbollah would confirm that the attack on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut was linked to the House of Saud. Hezbollah’s leadership would report that the Abdullah Izzam Brigade, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda and tied to the bombings, is directly linked to the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, the Saudi agent, Majed Al-Majed, responsible for the attack would be apprehended by Lebanese security forces in late-December 2013. He had entered Lebanon after working with Al-Nusra in Syria. Fars News Agency, an Iranian media outlet, would report on January 2, 2014 that unnamed Lebanese sources had also confirmed that they had discovered that the attack was linked to Prince Bandar.

Wrath of the House of Saud Unleashed?

A lot changed between the first and second meetings that Prince Bandar and Vladimir Putin had, respectively in July 2013 and December 2013. The House of Saud expected its US patron to get the Pentagon involved in a conventional bombing campaign against Syria in the month of September. It is more than likely that Riyadh was in the dark about the nature of secret negotiations that the US and Iran were holding through the backchannel of Oman in the backdrop of what appeared to be an escalation towards open war.

Bandar’s threat to reassess the House of Saud’s ties with Washington is probably a direct result of the US government keeping the House of Saud in the dark about using Syria as a means of negotiating with the Iranian government. US officials may have instigated the House of Saud to intensify its offensive against Syria to catalyze the Iranians into making a deal to avoid an attack on Syria and a regional war. Moreover, not only did the situation between the US and Iran change, Russia would eventually sign an important energy contract for Syrian natural gas in the Mediterranean Sea. The House of Saud has been undermined heavily in multiple ways and it is beginning to assess its own expendability.

If one scratches deep enough, they will find that the same ilk that attacked the Iranian Embassy in Beirut also attacked the Russian Embassy in Damascus. Both terrorist attacks were gifts to Iran and Russia, which served as reprisals for the Iranian and Russian roles in protecting Syria from regime change and a destructive war. It should, however, be discerned if the House of Saud is genuinely lashing out at Iran and Russia or if it being manipulated to further the goals of Washington in the US negotiations with Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus.

In the same manner, the House of Saud wants to generously reward Hezbollah too for its role in protecting Syria by crippling Hezbollah domestically in Lebanon. Riyadh may possibly not want a full scale war in Lebanon like the Israelis do, but it does want to neutralize and eliminate Hezbollah from the Lebanese landscape. In this regard, Saudi Arabia has earnestly been scheming to recruit Lebanon’s President Michel Suleiman and the Lebanese military against Hezbollah and its supporters.

The Saud grant of three billion dollars to the Lebanese Armed Forces is not only blood money being given to Lebanon as a means of exonerating Saudi Arabia for its role in the terrorist bombings that have gripped the Lebanese Republic since 2013, the Saudi money is also aimed at wishfully restructuring the Lebanese military as a means of using it to neutralize Hezbollah. In line with the House of Saud’s efforts, pledges from the United Arab Emirates and reports that NATO countries are also planning on donating money and arms to the Lebanese military started.

In addition to the terrorists bombings in Lebanon and the attack on the Russian Embassy in Damascus, Russia has also been attacked. Since the Syrian conflict intensified there has been a flaring of tensions in Russia’s North Caucasus and a breakout of terrorist attacks. Russian Muslim clerics, known for their views on co-existence between Russia’s Christian and Muslim communities and anti-separatist views, have been murdered. The bombings in Volgograd are just the most recent cases and an expansion into the Volga of what is happening in the North Caucasus, but they come disturbingly close to the start of the Winter Olympics that Prince Bandar was saying would be “protected” if Moscow betrayed Syria.

Can the House of Saud Stand on its Own Feet?

It is a widely believed that you will find the US and Israelis pulling a lot of the strings if you look behind the dealings of the House of Saud. That view is being somewhat challenged now. Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UK, threatened that Saudi Arabia will go it alone against Syria and Iran in a December 2013 article. The letter, like the Saudi rejection of their UN Security Council seat, was airing the House of Saud’s rage against the realists running US foreign policy.

In this same context, it should also be noted for those that think that Saudi Arabia has zero freedom of action that Israeli leaders have stressed for many years that Tel Aviv needs to cooperate secretly with Saudi Arabia to manipulate the US against Iran. This is epitomized by the words of Israeli Brigadier-General Oded Tira: “We must clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabia so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran.”

Along similar lines, some may point out that together the House of Saud and Israel got France to delay an interim nuclear agreement between the Iranians and the P5+1 in Geneva. The House of Saud rewarded Paris through lucrative deals, which includes making sure that the grant it gives to the Lebanese military is spent on French military hardware. Saad Hariri, the main Saudi client in Lebanon, even met Francois Hollande and French officials in Saudi Arabia in context of the deal. Appeasing the House of Saud and Israel, French President Hollande has replicated France’s stonewalling of the P5+1 interim nuclear deal with Iran by trying to spoil the second Syria peace conference in Geneva by saying that there can be no political solution inside Syria if President Bashar Al-Assad stays in power.

Again, however, it has to be asked, is enraging Saudi Arabia part of a US strategy to make the Saudis exert maximum pressure on Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus so that the United States can optimize its gains in negotiations? After all, it did turn out that the US was in league with France in Geneva and that the US used the French stonewalling of an agreement with Iran to make additional demands from the Iranians during the negotiations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed that the US negotiation team had actually circulated a draft agreement that had been amended in response to France’s demands before Iran and the other world powers even had a chance to study them. The draft by the US team was passed around, in Foreign Minister Lavrov’s own words, “literally at the last moment, when we were about to leave Geneva.”

Instead of debating on the level of independence that the House of Saud possesses, it is important to ask if Saudi Arabia can act on its own and to what degree can the House of Saud act as an independent actor. This looks like a far easier question to answer. It is highly unlikely that Saudi Arabia can act on its own in most instances or even remain an intact state. This is why Israeli strategists very clearly state that Saudi Arabia is destined to fall apart. “The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia,” the Israeli Yinon Plan deems. Strategists in Washington are also aware of this and this is also why they have replicated models of a fragmented Saudi Arabia. This gives rise to another important question: if they US assess that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not a sustainable entity, will it use it until it burns out like a flame? Is this what is happening and is Saudi Arabia being sacrificed or setup to take the blame as the “fall guy” by the United States?

 Who is Hiding Behind the House of Saud?

Looking back at Lebanon, the messages from international media outlets via their headlines is that the bombings in Lebanon highlight or reflect a power struggle between the House of Saud and Tehran in Lebanon and the rest of the region. Saying nothing about the major roles of the US, Israel, and their European allies, these misleading reports by the likes of journalists like Anne Barnard casually blame everything in Syria and Lebanon on a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, erasing the entire history behind what has happened and casually sweeping all the interests behind the conflict(s) under the rug. This is dishonest and painting a twisted Orientalist narrative.

The outlets trying to make it sound like all the Middle East’s problems are gravitating around some sort of Iranian and Saudi rivalry might as well write that “the Saudis and Iranians are the sources behind the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the sources behind the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq that crippled the most advanced Arab country, the ones that are blockading medication from reaching Gaza due to their rivalry, the ones who enforced a no-fly zone over Libya, the ones that are launching killer drone attacks on Yemen, and the ones that are responsible for the billions of dollars that disappeared from the Iraqi Treasury in 2003 after Washington and London invaded that country and controlled its finances.” These outlets and reports are tacitly washing the hands of  actors like Washington, Tel Aviv, Paris, and London clean of blood by trying to construct a series of false narratives that either blame everything on a regional rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh or the premise that the Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims are fighting an eternal war that they are biologically programmed to wage against one another.

Arabs and Iranians and Shias and Sunnis are tacitly painted as un-human creatures that cannot be understood and savages to audiences. The New York Times even dishonestly implies that the Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims in Lebanon are killing one another in tit-for-tat attacks. It sneakily implies that Hezbollah and its Lebanese rivals are assassinating one another. Bernard, its reporter in Lebanon who was mentioned earlier, along with another colleague write:

In what have been seen as tit-for-tat attacks, car bombs have targeted Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of Beirut and Sunni mosques in the northern city of Tripoli.

On Friday, a powerful car bomb killed Mohamad B. Chatah, a former Lebanese finance minister who was a major figure in the Future bloc, a political group that is Hezbollah’s main Sunni rival.

The New York Times is cunningly trying to make its readers think that Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing as part of a Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict by concluding with an explanation that the slain former Lebanese finance minister belonged to “Hezbollah’s main Sunni rival” after saying that the bombings in Lebanon “have been seen as tit-for-tat attacks” between the areas that support Hezbollah and “Sunni mosques” in Tripoli

The US and Israel wish that a Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict was occurring in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East. They have been working for this. It has been them that have been manipulating Saudi Arabia to instigate sectarianism. The US and Israel have been prodding the House of Saud—which does not represent the Sunni Muslims, let alone the people of Saudi Arabia which are under its occupation—against Iran, all the while trying to conceal and justify the conflict being instigated as some sort of “natural” rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis that is being played out across the Middle East. 

It has been assessed with high confidence by outsiders concerned by the House of Saud’s inner dealings that Prince Bandar is one of the three Al-Saud princes managing Saudi Arabia’s security and foreign policy; the other two being Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the Saudi deputy foreign minister and one of King Abdullah’s point men on Syria due to his ties to Syria from his maternal side, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the interior minister. All three of them are tied to the United States more than any of their predecessors. Prince Bandar himself has a long history of working closely with the United States, which explains the endearing moniker of “Bandar Bush” that he is widely called by. “Chemical Bandar” can be added to the list too, because of the reports about his ties to the Syrian chemical weapon attacks in Ghouta.

As a US client, Saudi Arabia is a source of instability because it has been conditioned hence by Washington. Fighting the terrorist and extremist threat is now being used by the US as a point of convergence with Iran, which coincidently has authored the World Against Violence and Extremism (WAVE) motion at the United Nations. In reality, the author of the regional problems and instability has been Washington itself. In a masterstroke, the realists now at the helm of foreign policy are pushing American-Iranian rapprochement on the basis of what Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor of the US, said would be based on Tehran and Washington working together to secure Iran’s “volatile regional environment.” “Any eventual reconciliation [between the US and Iranian governments] should be based on the recognition of a mutual strategic interest in stabilizing what currently is a very volatile regional environment for Iran,” he explains. The point should not be lost either that Brzezinski is the man who worked with the Saudis to arm the Afghan Mujahedeen against the Soviets after he organized an intelligence operation to fool the Soviets into militarily entering Afghanistan in the first place.

The House of Saud did not work alone in Afghanistan during the Cold War either. It was rigorously backed by Washington. The United States was even more involved in the fighting. It is the same in Syria. If the diplomatic leak is to be believed about the meeting between Bandar and Putin, it is of merit to note that “Bandar Bush” told Putin that any “Saudi-Russian understanding” would also be part of an “American-Russian understanding.”

Has the “Redirection” Seen its Stalingrad?

Volgograd was called Stalingrad for a part of Soviet history, in honour of the Republic of Georgia’s most famous son and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It was Volgograd, back then called Stalingrad, where the Germans were stopped and the tide of war in Europe was turned against Hitler and his Axis allies in Europe. The Battle of Stalingrad was where the Nazis were defeated and it was in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where the bulk of the fighting against the Germans was conducted. Nor is it any exaggeration to credit the Soviets—Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Tartar, Georgian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Chechen, and all—for doing most of the fighting to defeat the Germans in the Second World War.

Judging by the bellicose 2013 New Years Eve speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the terrorist attacks in Volgograd will be the start of another Battle of Stalingrad of some sorts and the launch of another Russian “war on terror.” Many of the terrorists that Russia will go after are in Syria and supported by the House of Saud.

The opponents of the Resistance Bloc that Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian resistance groups form have called the battlefields in Syria the Stalingrad of Iran and its regional allies. Syria has been a Stalingrad of some sorts too, but not for the Resistance Bloc. The alliance formed by the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel has begun to unravel in its efforts to enforce regime change in Syria. The last few years have marked the beginning of a humiliating defeat for those funding extremism, separatism, and terrorism against countries like Russia, China, Iran, and Syria as a means of preventing Eurasian cohesion. Another front of this same battle is being politically waged by the US and the EU in the Ukraine in a move to prevent the Ukrainians from integrating with Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

Volgograd and the Conquest of Eurasia

While speculation has been entertained with warning in this text, most of what has been explained has not been speculative. The House of Saud has had a role in destabilizing the Russian Federation and organizing terrorist attacks inside Russia. Support or oppose the separatist movements in the North Caucasus, the point is that they have been opportunistically aided and used by the House of Saud and Washington. Despite the authenticity of the narrative about Bandar’s threats against Russia, Volgograd is about Syria and Syria is about Volgograd. Both are events taking place as part of the same struggle. The US has been trying to encroach into Syria as a means of targeting Russia and encroaching deeper in the heart of Eurasia.

When George Orwell wrote 1984 he saw the world divided into several entities at constant or “eternal” war with one another. His fictitious superstates police language, use total surveillance, and utterly manipulate mass communication to indoctrinate and deceive their peoples. Roughly speaking, Orwell’s Oceania is formed by the US and its formal and informal territories in the Western Hemisphere, which the Monroe Doctrine has essentially declared are US colonies, confederated with Britain and the settler colonies-cum-dominions of the former British Empire (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa). The Orwellian concept of Eurasia is an amalgamation of the Soviet Union with continental Europe. The entity of Eastasia on the other hand is formed around China. Southeast Asia, India, and the parts of Africa that do not fall under the influence of Oceanic South Africa are disputed territory that is constantly fought for. Although not specifically mentioned, it can be extrapolated that Southwest Asia, where Syria is located, or parts of it are probably part of this fictional disputed territory, which includes North Africa.

If we try to fit Orwellian terms onto the present set of global relations, we can say that Oceania has made its moves against Eurasia/Eastasia for control of disputed territory (in the Middle East and North Africa).

1984 is not just a novel, it is a warning from the farseeing Orwell. Nonetheless, never did he imagine that his Eurasia would make cause with or include Eastasia through a core triple alliance and coalition comprised of Russia, China, and Iran. Eurasia will finish, in one way or another, what Oceania has started. All the while, as the House of Saud and the other rulers of the Arab petro-sheikhdoms continue to compete with one another in building fancy towers, the Sword of Damocles is getting heavier over their heads.

 

2014 : année de la quenelle?

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2014 : année de la quenelle?

Le phénomène Dieudonné : le comique qui fait peur au système.

Jean Ansar
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Ainsi les nazis sont de retour. Ils ont bien changé. Si Dieudonné est le fils du ventre encore fécond de la bête immonde, la race aryenne n’est décidément plus ce qu’elle était. Franchement je n’avais pas envie de voir un spectacle de Dieudonné mais maintenant si je peux, j’irai, avant qu’il ne soit trop tard. Ce que j'ai vu sur internet, par curiosité et besoin d’information, est parfois drôle, parfois mauvais.

Le fameux geste de la quenelle est bien sûr un bras d’honneur vulgaire qui signifie « nique le système ». En faire un salut nazi, même inversé est proprement débile. Cela étant, la quenelle antisystème peut être antisioniste et même antisémite selon le lieu où elle est exécutée. Mais cet anti-sémitisme est pratiqué très majoritairement par des « nazillons »  issus de l’immigration et rares sont, dans le public, ceux qui se référent à Hitler, même s’il peut malheureusement y en avoir quelques-uns.

Mais on comprend que le systéme s’inquiète. Il est en effet clairement dénoncé par les pratiquants de la quenelle comme soumis excessivement à une influence. Il renoue pour des jeunes issus de l’immigration avec une vision assez classique de l’anti-sémitisme. Cette vision est confortée par la montée au créneau des institutions juives qui soutiennent globalement la volonté de Manuel Valls de censurer Dieudonné. Quelques voix discordantes se font entendre. On peut cependant être sûr que le scénario  de l’interdiction va renforcer ceux qui dénoncent une république soumise à une sorte de « police juive de la pensée » selon l’expression d Annie Kriegel.

C’est gros, très gros. Des militants juifs vont à chaque spectacle manifester et provoquer des incidents. Les préfets pourront donc objectivement en déduire qu’il y a risque de trouble à l’ordre public. Le spectacle sera donc annulé, mais c’est l’agressé qui sera puni, pas l’agresseur. Les spectateurs de Dieudonné, eux, n’attaquent personne.

Ce n’est pas nouveau. On refait à Dieudonné le coup d’Ordre Nouveau. Sauf que Dieudonné est aussi noir qu’Obama et Mandela et qu’il parle lui aussi au nom des reprouvés et des exclus… il n’invoque pas, il aurait du mal, la race supérieure. Il dénonce un complot contre la liberté d’expression dans notre démocratie verrouillée.

S’il est interdit légalement, grâce à des menaces de violences , il aura démontré que le complot dans son cas a été quelque chose de réel. Certains s’en inquiètent et mettent en garde contre des actions plus dangereuses  qu’efficaces auprès de l’opinion.

La quenelle a encore semble-t- il de beaux jours devant elle.

Défense européenne : les puissances ne se bâtissent pas sur du «Wishful thinking»

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Défense européenne : les puissances ne se bâtissent pas sur du «Wishful thinking»

par Philippe Migault
Ex: http://fr.rian.ru
 

Annoncé comme un évènement stratégique et diplomatique crucial, le Conseil européen qui aura lieu jeudi et vendredi prochains est censé marquer un progrès en matière de politique de défense et de sécurité européenne.

Il suffit pourtant de lire un récent document du conseil de l’Union européenne (1), pour se rendre compte que la montagne accouchera une fois encore d’une souris. Qu’il s’agisse de la phraséologie employée, des mesures proposées ou des orientations implicitement induites, tout indique qu’une fois encore l’Europe autoproclamée se prépare à une grande démonstration ostentatoire dont il ne sortira rien de concret.

Les objectifs stratégiques annoncés par Bruxelles prêtent en premier lieu à sourire. L’UE « est appelée à assumer des responsabilités accrues en matière de maintien de la paix et de la sécurité internationales (…) afin de garantir (…) la promotion de ses valeurs et intérêts », affirme le document. Jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais puisqu’il s’agit ici de défense, d’intérêts vitaux communs, de ceux qui méritent qu’on se batte voire qu’on meurt pour eux, encore faudrait-il se montrer un peu plus précis. Quels sont ces valeurs et ces intérêts ? Démocratie, paix, droits de l’homme sont cités : Logique. C’est, théoriquement, l’ADN même du projet européen. La bonne gouvernance ensuite. Voilà qui prête à sourire de la part d’une organisation persistant à appliquer à la lettre les politiques d’austérité prônées par le Fonds Monétaire International alors que ce dernier a reconnu que les résultats de ces dernières étaient inefficaces, pour ne pas dire désastreuses sur le plan économique et social. Et ensuite ? Rien. En dehors des grandes valeurs « universelles » censées faire consensus parmi 500 millions d’Européens rejetant de plus en plus le modèle de société qui leur est proposé, il n’est nulle part fait précisément mention de nos intérêts vitaux.

De défense, c’est-à-dire de guerre pour sortir du politiquement correct, il n’est d’ailleurs  guère fait mention dans ce texte, qui est bien plus une déclaration d’intention diplomatique qu’une feuille de route stratégique. Tout au plus se borne-t-on à proposer une série de mesures très générales, qui ne sont que le prolongement des politiques engagées de longue date et qui toutes relèvent du vœu pieux.

L’UE, affirme ce document doit coopérer avec les Nations Unies, l’OSCE, l’Union Africaine, l’OTAN. On enfonce des portes ouvertes : Les Etats européens de l’UE sont membres de ces entités ou coopèrent avec elles depuis leur création. En revanche alors que Bruxelles affirme vouloir « assumer ses responsabilités accrues en tant que pourvoyeur de la sécurité (…) en particulier dans son voisinage », il n’est nulle part fait mention d’un éventuel dialogue avec l’Organisation du Traité de Sécurité Collective (OTSC), visiblement inconnue au bataillon. Il est vrai que selon les récents propos de l’ancien ministre français des affaires étrangères, Hubert Védrine, la Russie n’est plus une puissance qui compte dans la mesure où elle ne conserve qu’«un pouvoir de nuisance périphérique et résiduel » et ne mérite donc guère qu’on s’y attarde que ce soit en Ukraine ou ailleurs…Cette déclaration ayant le mérite de signifier clairement que la guerre froide est terminée compte tenu de la disparition de l’ennemi principal ramené au rang de puissance régionale, encore faudrait-il savoir comment l’Europe va défendre ses intérêts –à identifier - en Afrique, au Moyen-Orient, ou en Asie-Pacifique…Or l’UE ne compte rien faire.

Avec un aplomb admirable, compte tenu de l’échec total de l’Europe de la défense jusqu’à ce jour, le document propose de « s’appuyer sur les résultats obtenus jusqu’à présent », se félicitant « des missions et opérations de gestion de crise menées dans le cadre de la PSDC » (2). L’UE claironne qu’elle est prête à renforcer ses moyens dans les Balkans occidentaux – où il n’existe plus aucune crise de haute intensité – et souligne qu’elle « déploie plus de 7 000 personnes réparties entre douze opérations civiles et quatre opérations militaires ». Le ratio, d’une opération militaire pour trois opérations civiles, atteste du très faible engagement armé européen. Quant aux effectifs évoqués ils parlent d’eux-mêmes : Entre le Mali, la République centrafricaine, l’opération Atalante, la République Démocratique du Congo (RDC) et ses forces prépositionnées, la France a presque 7 000 soldats en Afrique. Seuls nous faisons autant quantitativement, mieux qualitativement, que l’UE…Certes cette dernière a effectivement conduit des opérations de maintien de la paix dans des zones de conflit difficiles. Ce fût le cas en Ituri, province orientale de RDC, où l’UE a déployé 2 200 soldats en 2003 pour mettre fin à des massacres interethniques : 80% des effectifs étaient Français. Et tout le reste est à l’avenant : dans les faits les opérations engageant les troupes des nations européennes relèvent du trompe-l’œil. Entre des Allemands et des Suédois qui ne veulent plus se battre et n’acceptent de s’engager qu’en multipliant les caveats restreignant au strict minimum leurs règles d’engagement, le manque de moyens de la plupart des pays, Français et Britanniques, uniques nations-cadres de l’Union Européenne, se retrouvent toujours seuls aux commandes de coalitions Potemkine.

Paris et Londres ont déjà tiré toutes les conclusions de cet état de fait en matière de défense, notamment sur le plan industriel. Suite aux accords de Lancaster House, les deux pays entendent bien collaborer prioritairement sur un mode bilatéral et ne plus s’engager dans des coopérations multinationales avec des partenaires qui ne soient pas leurs égaux sur un plan financier, technologique et possédant une approche des opérations de combat similaire à la leur. Les programmes A400M et Eurofighter, menés sur un plan multilatéral entre partenaires inégaux souhaitant tous tirer les marrons du feu se sont traduits par trop de surcoûts et de délais. Il est hors de question de les reproduire.

A cette aune les propositions du document en matière de politique industrielle prêtent à sourire tant elles relèvent du « wishful thinking ». Il faut, assure le texte, « favoriser la mise en place d’une base industrielle et technologique de défense européenne plus intégrée, durable, novatrice et compétitive dans toute l’UE ». L’objectif est noble, mais il est déjà condamné. Il suffit d’en analyser les termes.

« Intégrée» ? EADS, le modèle tant vanté, vient d’annoncer qu’il comptait licencier 5 800 salariés de son pôle défense, actif qu’il n’a jamais réussi à développer à hauteur des ambitions initialement affichées. L’heure n’est plus aux fusions transnationales géantes, du Big is beautiful, l’échec du rapprochement EADS-BAE Systems le démontre. Certes les fusions permettent théoriquement de « rendre le secteur de la défense moins fragmenté (…) et (d’) éviter les doubles emplois ». Mais les entreprises préfèrent aujourd’hui mettre en place des joint-ventures ou des consortiums ad hoc correspondant à des programmes précis qu’elles gèrent de concert via des plateaux virtuels communs. Cette stratégie permet de sauvegarder l’emploi, toujours le grand perdant des fusions, ainsi que de garantir la pérennité des bureaux d’étude et leur diversité (3).

« Durable » ? S’il s’agit de « développement durable », il est toujours possible de produire des chars avec un bilan carbone moindre. S’il s’agit de faire durer, c’est-à-dire sauvegarder des entreprises dont la plupart des experts s’accordent à constater qu’elles sont trop nombreuses et provoquent des surcapacités sur la plupart des segments, ce sera difficile. Au demeurant pour maintenir le tissu industriel et créer de l’emploi, objectif affiché par le document alors que toutes les industries de défense sabrent dans leurs effectifs, il faudrait déjà que les Etats européens lancent des programmes d’armement pour que les industriels aient des contrats et embauchent…L’UE encourage ses Etats membres à investir. L’intention est louable. Mais avec quels moyens compte tenu de ceux que nous autorise notre modèle de gouvernance tant vanté ?

Quoi qu’il en soit ce débat est purement rhétorique. Car il faut savoir aussi lire entre les lignes. Les investissements dans la défense permettraient « de renforcer l’autonomie stratégique de l’Europe et, par là même, sa capacité à agir avec des partenaires ».

Notons qu’il n’est pas question un seul instant pour l’UE d’agir seule, malgré la revendication d’un objectif d’autonomie stratégique. Cela reviendrait à se comporter comme une puissance, ce qu’elle refuse par nature. Un ADN de commerçant ne sera jamais un ADN de combattant. Non, mieux vaut « agir avec des partenaires. »  Or du point de vue militaire et politique il n’y en a qu’un qui réponde aux besoins européens en termes de crédibilité militaire et de conformité politique : l’OTAN, c’est-à-dire les Etats-Unis.

Le futur conseil européen n’a donc aucunement pour ambition de parler de défense européenne. Celle-ci est vouée à l’échec tant que l’OTAN existera. Il s’agira bien davantage d’une discussion de managers gérant la crise : Alors que tout le monde rogne ses budgets de défense la question sera de savoir comment il est possible d’intervenir à l’étranger à moindres frais et comment partager le maigre gâteau du marché de l’armement européen. Rien de plus. 

Notes: 

(1) « Conclusions du conseil sur la politique de sécurité et de défense commune »

(2)  Politique de Sécurité et de Défense Commune

(3) Au demeurant les fusions transnationales relèvent du fantasme pour de simples questions de modes de gouvernance. Les groupes Français, au capital majoritairement publics, ne séduisent aucunement leurs homologues allemands, à l’actionnariat privé, souvent familial. Et aucune fusion transnationale n’a été couronnée de succès hormis, sans doute, Eurocopter, dont l’activité est autant civile que militaire.

L’opinion de l’auteur ne coïncide pas forcément avec la position de la rédaction

Philippe Migault est Directeur de recherche à l'Institut de Relations Internationales et stratégiques (IRIS). Ses principaux domaines d’expertise sont les questions diplomatiques et stratégiques, les conflits armés et industries de l'armement.

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