They Throw Us Out of Our Homes But We Get Ice Cream

Pete Dolack

If there were any doubt that gentrification has come to my corner of Brooklyn, that was put to rest last weekend with the appearance of an ice cream truck. An ice cream truck painted with the logo and red color of The Economist. Yes, it was just as this reads. Free scoops of ice cream were being given out as a young woman with a clipboard was attempting to get people to sign up for subscriptions to The Economist.

Not that there had been any reason to harbor illusions about gentrification — the glass-walled, high-priced high rises sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm are merely the most obvious of multiple signs. The neighborhood where I live, Greenpoint, is notable as a Polish enclave, although a sliver along the East River was mainly populated by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and artists two decades ago. In short, a place for people needing a (relatively) cheap (by New York City standards) place to live and which still possessed a working waterfront.

Not really the sort of folks who might be expected to read one of the two main flagships of the British finance industry. To watch, or participate in, an art parade, sure. That is the sort of procession one used to see. Or Mr. Softee, a local franchise with ice cream trucks (of the traditional sort) that played a jingle, over and over again, that had a way of getting inside your head, although not necessarily in a good way. One summer a Mr. Softee truck seemed permanently stationed on my block, leading me to write a poem on the uses of Mr. Softee’s ice cream other than eating and even as a talisman against an invasion of space aliens. As I said, the jingle has a way of getting inside your head.

But no matter how bizarre the sight of an Economist ice cream truck, there is nothing actually funny about gentrification. Not even a Financial Times ice cream truck in pink (although perhaps a little too close to the color of Pepto-Bismol for comfort there) would be funny. Systematic evictions, the wholescale removal of peoples, the wiping out of alternative cultures and the imposition of the soul-deadening dullness of consumerist corporate monoculture has become a global phenomenon.

Rent laws don’t help if your home can be torn down

This has accelerated to where not simply buildings are being emptied out, but entire complexes. In Silicon Valley, a San Jose apartment complex with 216 units is being demolished to make way for a luxury high-rise. The hundreds of residents there are protected from higher rents by local rent-control laws. But that law has a rather big loophole — the rent-controlled buildings can be torn down, and the residents kicked into the street with no recourse and no right to a replacement apartment. The San Francisco Bay Area as a whole lost more than 50 percent of its affordable housing between 2000 and 2013.

Gentrification literally kills — symbolized by the tragic death of Alex Nieto in San Francisco’s Mission District. A story brought to a wider audience in an essay by Rebecca Solnit, Mr. Nieto was a long-time resident of the Mission who was shot by police for being Latino in a local park — targeted because gentrifying techies, new to the neighborhood, decided Mr. Nieto was a threat and called the police, a tragic ending that was set in motion when a techie thought it amusing that his dog was menacing Mr. Nieto as he ate on a bench.

The Mission, as is well known, has long been a Latin American enclave. What is happening there, and in so many other neighborhoods in so many other cities, is no accident. Gentrification is a deliberate process. Gentrification frequently means the replacement of a people, particularly the poor members of a people, with others of a lighter skin complexion. A corporatized, sanitized and usurped version of the culture of the replaced people is left behind as a draw for the “adventurous” who move in and as a product to be exploited by chain-store mangers who wish to cater to the newcomers.

Gentrification is part of the process whereby people are expected, and socialized, to become passive consumers. Instead of community spaces, indoors and outdoors, where we can explore our own creativity, breath new life into traditional cultural forms, create new cultural traditions and build social scenes unmediated by money and commercial interests, a mass culture is substituted, a corporate-created and -controlled commercial product spoon-fed to consumers carefully designed to avoid challenging the dominant ideas imposed by corporate elites.

Dictatorships of favored industries

There are interests at work here. The technology industry has a stranglehold on San Francisco, for example, its techies with their frat-boy culture rapidly bidding up housing prices and making the city unaffordable for those who made it the culturally distinct place it has long been. New York City is a dictatorship of the real estate and financial industries; the process of gentrification there has progressed through a mayor who snarls and can’t be bothered to hide his hatred for most of the people who live there (Rudy Giuliani), a mayor who covered himself with a technocratic veneer (Michael Bloomberg) and a mayor fond of empty talk but who is the Barack Obama of New York(Bill de Blasio). They follow in the footsteps of Ed Koch, who showed his humanitarian streak when he declared, “If you can’t afford New York, move!”

Despite the reasoning of a federal judge who two years ago overturned a San Francisco ordinance designed to slow down speculation in housing that accelerates exorbitant rises in rents, those rents do not rise without human intervention. Not a single county in the U.S. has enough affordable housing for all its low-income residents, according to a report issued by the Urban Institute, which also reports that only 28 adequate and affordable units are available for every 100 renter households in the U.S. with incomes at or below 30 percent of their local median income.

The trend of rents taking up a bigger portion of income, although accelerating in recent years, is a long-term trend — one study found that rents have risen close to double the rate of inflation since 1938, and the prices of new houses at an even higher rate. Gentrification and the rising rents that accompany it are found around the world, from Vancouver to London to Berlin to Istanbul to Melbourne.

Just as markets are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the biggest industrialists and financiers, allowing the “market” to determine housing policies means that the richest developers will decide who gets to live where. The vision of former New York City Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg (enforced through policies kept in place by Mayor de Blasio) is of Manhattan and adjoining areas of Brooklyn becoming a gated city for the wealthy, with the rest of us allowed in to work and then leave. The most profitable projects for developers are luxury housing for millionaires and billionaires — interests coincide. Even when a local government makes a tepid attempt, under public pressure, to ameliorate the harshness of housing conditions, such as with San Francisco, it is swamped by the tidal pull of market forces.

This global phenomenon derives from a top-down global system, capitalism, under which housing is a commodity for private profit instead of a basic human right. A free scoop of ice cream really doesn’t compensate losing the ability to keep a roof over your head.

Is it True That “Russia is Aggressive”?

Rick Sterling

Recently I went on a 15 day visit to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives. The group visited Moscow, the Crimean peninsula, Krasnodar (southern Russia) and St. Petersburg. In each location we met many locals and heard diverse viewpoints. CCI has a long history promoting friendship and trying to overcome false assumptions between citizens of the USA and Russia. The founder Sharon Tennison has focused on making people-people connections including the business community, Rotary clubs, etc.. This delegation was organized because of concern about escalating international tensions and the danger of a drift toward world threatening military conflict.

We were in Russia in late June as they were commemorating the 75^thanniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. They call it the Great Patriotic War where 27 million Soviet citizens died. In Russia it’s a very sober occasion in which they pay tribute to the fallen, acknowledge the heroes and underscore the horrors of war. Virtually everyone in Russia lost family members in World War 2 and there seems to be a deep understanding of what war and invasion mean.

It is alarming to see the constant drumbeat in Western media that Russia is aggressive, Russia invaded Crimea, Russia is a threat. Hardly a day goes by that the NY Times does not have an editorial or news story with the assertion or insinuation that Russia is “aggressive”.

Today’s op-ed by Andrew Foxall is an example. The “thinktank “ director bemoans the British departure from the European Union and suggests that Russian President Putin may be behind it :

“Mr. Putin has spent the past 16 years trying to destabilize the West….. After Brexit, the union has lost not only one of its most capable members, but also one of its two nuclear powers and one of its two seats at the United Nations Security Council… …..Mr. Putin checked the European Union’s expansion when he invaded Ukraine in 2014. The Continent’s security order is now in a perilous plight: If Mr. Putin senses weakness, he will be tempted into further aggression.”

It is now common to hear the claim that Russia “invaded” Ukraine and is “occupying” Crimea.

The US and allies have imposed sanctions because of the Crimean decision to separate from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Tourist cruise ships no longer stop at Crimean ports and international airlines are prohibited from flying directly to the international airport at the Crimean capital, Simferopol. Students from Crimean universities cannot transfer their academic credits to universities internationally.

Despite the sanctions and problems, Crimea appears to be doing reasonably well. In the past two years, the airport has been rebuilt and modernized. The streets of Balaclava, Sevastopol, Simferopol and Yalta are busy and bright. No doubt things could be much better and residents want the sanctions lifted, but there were no evident signs of shortages or poverty. On the contrary, kids were enjoying ice cream, parks were full and streets busy late into the night. The famous Artek Youth Camp near Yalta is being refurbished with new dormitories, state of the art swimming pool and gymnasium. Right now they are handling 3,000 youth in the camp at one time with 30,000 kids from all over Russia this year.

A 12 mile bridge connecting Crimea to southern Russia is now half complete. A impressive video showing the design is here.

After 22 years as part of independent Ukraine following the breakup of the Soviet Union, what drove the people of Crimea to overwhelmingly support a referendum calling for ‘re-unification’ with Russia? Was this the result of intimidation or an ‘occupation’ by Russia?

We received a very strong sense from talking with many different people in Crimea that they are happy with their decision. The impetus was not aggression from Russia; the impetus came from the violence and ultra-nationalism of the foreign backed coup in Ukraine.

Protests against Ukraine’s Yanukovych government began in November 2013 in the “Maidan” (central square) in Kiev. Protesters included right wing nationalist and Nazi sympathizers hostile to the Yanukovych government. A significant faction glorified the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

The US was deeply involved in promoting the “Maidan” protests and strategizing how to bring in a new government. Assistant Secy of State Victoria Nuland demanded the Yanukovych government do nothing to stop or prevent the increasing vandalism, attacks and intimidation. With thugs in the street increasingly clashing with police, the US pressed the Ukrainian government to break economic ties with Russia as a condition for closer relations with Europe and loans from the International Monetary Fund.

On the surface, the US was encouraging Ukraine to strengthen ties with the European Union but in reality Nuland’s goals were about the US, NATO and undermining Russia. This was dramatically revealed in a secretly recorded phone call between Nuland and the US Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should and should not be in the coup government two weeks before the coup happened. As they conspired over the phone, Nuland expressed her displeasure with the EU’s reluctance to push the coup …. “Fuck the EU” said the woman who six weeks earlier spoke glowingly of Ukraine’s “European aspirations”.

Prior to the coup, Nuland spoke of the high US “investment” in promoting “democracy” in Ukraine. In a December 2013 speech she said

“Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals…” (approx 7:30 into the recording / US-Ukraine Foundation, 13 December 2013).

In mid December hundreds of Crimeans traveled to Kiev in buses to join peaceful protests in opposition to the Maidan protests seen on television. They stayed in Kiev through January and into February until the violence exploded on February 18 (2014). Altogether, 82 persons were killed including 13 police and 1100 injured. At that point, the Crimeans decided peaceful protest was useless and to return home. The bus caravan departed Kiev on Feb 20 but was stopped at night near the town of Korsun. The buses were torched and the Crimean travelers brutalized, beaten and seven killed. When news of this reached Crimea, it was yet another cause for alarm. A video titled “The Crimes of Euromaidan Nazis” documents the events and includes interviews with numerous passengers. These atrocities against unarmed Crimeans were done on a public highway with no intervention from local Ukrainian police.

On Feb 21 the existing government came to a compromise agreement. But that did not appease the most violent protesters or their supporters. A parliamentarian was beaten in broad daylight and threats issued. President Yanukovych fled for his life and a new government, led by Victoria Nuland’s choice Arseniy Yatsenyuk, took charge. The US and western allies quickly recognized the new government while Russia objected it was an illegal coup. In the first days of the new government a bill was passed to make Ukrainian the sole official language of the country.

Indeed there was aggression and violence in Ukraine but it was not from Russia. Rather, evidence indicated the violence was from the forces which led the coup. This was revealed in an intercepted phone conversation between British representative to the European Union, Catherine Ashton, and the Estonian Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet. Paet reported that he had been to Kiev and “there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.”   Instead of probing into the facts behind this dramatic information, Ashton said “Oh gosh …. We will need to look into that” and quickly moved on.

Crimeans we spoke with described their shock and outrage at the events. In just four months they witnessed violent Maidan protests, the overthrow of the elected government, beatings and killings of citizens returning from Kiev, and then the removal of Russian as an official language.

In response, local leaders recommended a Crimea wide referendum with the option to officially re-unite with the country that Crimea had been part of for over two centuries. A referendum was held on March 16. Turnout was 89% with 96% voting in favor of the “reunification of Crimea with Russia”.

With the violent overthrow of the Kiev government and clear proof of US involvement in the coup it seems highly inaccurate to say that Russia “invaded” or is “occupying” Crimea. On the contrary, it seems to be the USA and allies which are “aggressive”.

The same reversal of reality is going on with the expansion of NATO. In recent weeks NATO has placed armed forces in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO military expenses are already 13 times greater than that of Russia yet NATO plans to increase military spending even more. Meanwhile the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and is busy building and installing ABM sites in Alaska and now eastern Europe. With a serious face they have previously claimed these sites are being installed because of the danger of “Iranian missiles” but only a fool could take that seriously. There is the additional risk that the same sites could be converted from anti ballistic missiles to contain nuclear warheads.

Are NATO and the US preparing for war? The public should be asking hard questions to our political and military leaders as they waster our tax dollars and risk global conflagration.

When the audio recording of Nuland and Pyatt discussing how to “midwife” the Kiev coup was revealed, the State Dept spokesperson was grilled about it. She responded “That’s what diplomats do”.

Enough of the nonsense that “Russia is aggressive” when the evidence indicates it’s the USA and allies who are destabilizing other countries, escalating a new arms buildup and promoting conflict instead of diplomacy.

Aprés Nice: Why We Need an Antiwar Movement

Ron Jacobs

The recent attack in France by individuals or groups unknown but assumed to be Islamic State was particularly disconcerting. The truck barreling into holiday festivities and killing dozens was like a scene from a JG Ballard novel describing the atrocities of modern life; or maybe a page from Robert Anton Wilson’s vision of the future in his Illuminatus Trilogy. Or maybe just another “bring on the apocalypse” moment from a religiously-inspired group intent on some kind of earthly gain. Whoever was responsible, the fact that something as common as a traffic accident is now another tool in the terror toolbox has to make folks a bit uneasy. Then again, Palestinians have been dealing with bulldozers knocking down their homes and killing residents and their supporters for years. That was never called terrorism in the mainstream media.

As Counterpunch Editor Jeffrey St. Clair pointed out in a Facebook post after the truck attack in France, both presumptive presidential candidates seem to think unleashing further terrorism and calling it war is the best answer to the Nice incident. He quotes Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to prove his case:

Trump: Asked by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly if NATO troops should now launch a ground and air offensive against unspecified terrorist targets. “I would say that would be just fine,” Trump reportedly replied. He said “I would, I would” when asked if he would seek a formal declaration of military action from the US Congress. “This is war,” Trump continued. “If you look at it, this is war. Coming from all different parts. And frankly it’s war, and we’re dealing with people without uniforms. In the old days, we would have uniforms. You would know who you’re fighting.”

Hillary: “I think it is clear we are at war with these terrorist groups and what they represent. It is a different kind of war and we need to be smart about how we wage it and win it. So I think we need to look at all possible approaches to doing just that.” Asked who, precisely, the US was at war against, Clinton said: We’re at war against radical jihadists who use Islam to recruit and radicalize others in order to pursue their evil agenda. It is not so important what we call these people as what we do about them.”

In other words, bomb the hell out of people who look like what we say terrorists look like and let god sort them out. Same old approach with the same likely results—war and more war.

Millions of folks around the world are opposed to being in the crossfire between imperial militaries and the enemies they have created and continue to create. Of course, millions of others want their national military brand to bomb and kill more in what is obviously a vain effort to kill all of their enemies. That is why those of us in the former demographic need to get off our asses. Over a dozen years of an official “Global War on Terror” has done nothing but expand the interchangeable elements of war and terror, with their never-ending body counts. The politicians’ answer seems to be to never leave countries their militaries have occupied and expand that presence under various guises in other nations, too.

So, despite a promise to bring all US troops home from Afghanistan by 2016, almost 10,000 regular troops and an unpublicized number of Special Forces (death squads) and mercenaries remain there. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the numbers of US forces grows monthly in a conflict that should never have started and should certainly be over, at least as far as the United States military is concerned. The nature of US involvement in Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bahrain and other nations in the Middle East and South Asia remains unclear. However, there is definitely military involvement.

One of the primary elements missing from the world polity the past nine years—especially in the United States—is the antiwar movement. Its nonappearance in political discussions across the spectrum is a damning indictment of the popular movements, especially those on the Left. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter, from the Fight for 15 to the Sanders campaign, any role played by antiwar forces has mostly gone unnoticed. What this means in the greater political landscape is that wars and the Pentagon go unchallenged, ultimately creating a dynamic where they become the phenomena like that described in George Orwell’s 1984. In other words, simultaneously omnipresent and unreal, like a phantasm that kills like an unseen hand of some god while making profits for men and women without faces.

Antiwar movements make those faces real. They also make the killing real, throwing the bloodshed, destruction and burning of flesh into an otherwise apathetic (or unwilling to know) public’s face, with the intention of stirring their sense of morality in order to end that killing. Antiwar movements force politicians and generals to get off the pedestals they have placed themselves on and answer for the crimes they commit in our name. Antiwar movements force a public that idolizes its military to confront what their men and women in uniform are actually called to do.   Antiwar movements demand an accounting of the billions spent on perpetrating unending death and destruction.

Unless we revive an antiwar movement in the United States, none of this will occur in the present time. It is war that is destroying our economic being and our future. Ultimately, it will be our refusal to oppose and work to end war that will destroy our souls.

Two Terrors of the French Revolution

Mark Twain

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Toppling Lumumba: Canada’s Dark Role in the Congo

Yves Engler

56 years ago today the United Nations launched a peacekeeping force that contributed to one of the worst post-independence imperial crimes in Africa. The Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC) delivered a major blow to Congolese aspirations by undermining elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Canada played a significant role in ONUC and Lumumba’s assassination, which should be studied by progressives demanding Ottawa increase its participation in UN “peacekeeping”.

After seven decades of brutal rule, Belgium organized a hasty independence in the hopes of maintaining control over the Congo’s vast natural resources. When Lumumba was elected to pursue a genuine de-colonization, Brussels instigated a secessionist movement in the eastern part of country. In response, the Congolese Prime Minister asked the UN for a peacekeeping force to protect the territorial integrity of the newly independent country. Washington, however, saw the UN mission as a way to undermine Lumumba.

Siding with Washington, Ottawa promoted ONUC and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s controversial anti-Lumumba position. 1,900 Canadian troops participated in the UN mission between 1960 and 1964, making this country’s military one of its more active members. There were almost always more Canadian officers at ONUC headquarters then those of any other nationality and the Canadians were concentrated in militarily important logistical positions including chief operations officer and chief signals officer.

Canada’s strategic role wasn’t simply by chance. Ottawa pushed to have Canada’s intelligence gathering signals detachments oversee UN intelligence and for Quebec Colonel Jean Berthiaume to remain at UN headquarters to “maintain both Canadian and Western influence.” (A report from the Canadian Directorate of Military Intelligence noted, “Lumumba’s immediate advisers… have referred to Lt. Col. Berthiaume as an ‘imperialist tool’.”)

To bolster the power of ONUC, Ottawa joined Washington in channelling its development assistance to the Congo through the UN. Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah complained that this was “applying a restriction to Congo which does not apply to any other African state.” Ottawa rejected Nkrumah’s request to channel Congolese aid through independent African countries.

Unlike many ONUC participants, Canada aggressively backed Hammarskjold’s controversial anti-Lumumba position. External Affairs Minister Howard Green told the House of Commons: “The Canadian government will continue its firm support for the United Nations effort in the Congo and for Mr. Hammarskjold, who in the face of the greatest difficulty has served the high principles and purposes of the charter with courage, determination and endless patience.”

Ottawa supported Hammarskjold even as he sided with the Belgian-backed secessionists against the central government. On August 12 1960 the UN Secretary General traveled to Katanga and telegraphed secessionist leader Moise Tchombe to discuss “deploying United Nations troops to Katanga.” Not even Belgium officially recognized Katanga’s independence, provoking Issaka Soure to note that, “[Hammarskjold’s visit] sent a very bad signal by implicitly implying that the rebellious province could somehow be regarded as sovereign to the point that the UN chief administrator could deal with it directly.”

The UN head also worked to undermine Lumumba within the central government. When President Joseph Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as prime minister — a move of debatable legality and opposed by the vast majority of the country’s parliament — Hammarskjold publicly endorsed the dismissal of a politician who a short time earlier had received the most votes in the country’s election.

Lumumba attempted to respond to his dismissal with a nationwide broadcast, but UN forces blocked him from accessing the main radio station. ONUC also undermined Lumumba in other ways. Through their control of the airport ONUC prevented his forces from flying into the capital from other parts of the country and closed the airport to Soviet weapons and transportation equipment when Lumumba turned to Russia for assistance. In addition, according to The Cold War “[the Secretary General’s special representative Andrew] Cordier provided $1 million — money supplied to the United Nations by the US government — to [military commander Joseph] Mobutu in early September to pay off restive and hungry Congolese soldiers and keep them loyal to Kasavubu during his attempt to oust Lumumba as prime minister.”

To get a sense of Hammarskjold’s antipathy towards the Congolese leader, he privately told officials in Washington that Lumumba must be “broken” and only then would the Katanga problem “solve itself.” For his part, Cordier asserted “[Ghanaian president Kwame] Nkrumah is the Mussolini of Africa while Lumumba is its little Hitler.”

(Echoing this thinking, in a conversation with External Affairs Minister Howard Green, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker called Lumumba a “major threat to Western interests” and said he was “coming around to the conclusion” that an independent Western oriented Katanga offered “the best solution to the current crisis.”)

In response to Hammarskjold’s efforts to undermine his leadership, Lumumba broke off relations with the UN Secretary General. He also called for the withdrawal of all white peacekeepers, which Hammarskjold rejected as a threat to UN authority.

A number of ONUC nations ultimately took up Lumumba’s protests. When the Congolese prime minister was overthrown and ONUC helped consolidate the coup, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Guinea, Morocco and Indonesia formally asked Hammarskjold to withdraw all of their troops.

Canadian officials took a different position. They celebrated ONUC’s role in Lumumba’s overthrow. A week after Lumumba was pushed out prominent Canadian diplomat Escott Reid, then ambassador to Germany, noted in an internal letter, “already the United Nations has demonstrated in the Congo that it can in Africa act as the executive agent of the free world.” The “free world” was complicit in the murder of one of Africa’s most important independence leaders. In fact, the top Canadian in ONUC directly enabled his killing.

After Lumumba escaped house arrest and fled Leopoldville for his power base in the Eastern Orientale province, Colonel Jean Berthiaume assisted Lumumba’s political enemies by helping recapture him. The UN Chief of Staff, who was kept in place by Ottawa, tracked the deposed prime minister and informed Joseph Mobutu of Lumumba’s whereabouts. Three decades later the Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, born Berthiaume told an interviewer: “I called Mobutu. I said, ‘Colonel, you have a problem, you were trying to retrieve your prisoner, Mr. Lumumba. I know where he is, and I know where he will be tomorrow. He said, what do I do? It’s simple, Colonel, with the help of the UN you have just created the core of your para commandos — we have just trained 30 of these guys — highly selected Moroccans trained as paratroopers. They all jumped — no one refused. To be on the safe side, I put our [Canadian] captain, Mario Coté, in the plane, to make sure there was no underhandedness. In any case, it’s simple, you take a Dakota [plane], send your paratroopers and arrest Lumumba in that small village — there is a runway and all that is needed. That’s all you’ll need to do, Colonel. He arrested him, like that, and I never regretted it.”

Ghanaian peacekeepers near where Lumumba was captured took quite a different attitude towards the elected prime minister’s safety. After Mobutu’s forces captured Lumumba they requested permission to intervene and place Lumumba under UN protection. Unfortunately, the Secretary-General denied their request. Not long thereafter Lumumba was executed by firing squad and his body was dissolved in acid.

In 1999 Belgium launched a parliamentary inquiry into its role in Lumumba’s assassination. Following Belgium’s lead, the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs should investigate Canada’s role in the Congolese independence leader’s demise and any lessons ONUC might hold regarding this country’s participation in future UN missions.

Life After Wartime

Christy Rodgers

Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching
Burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive

–Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime“

You haven’t been to war until you’ve learned to flinch at the sound of a traffic helicopter overhead, as your body waits for the pop of machine gun fire spattered on the crowds below.

You haven’t been to war until you fear having your back to the street as you turn your key in the lock of your own front door, because of how easy it would be to take you out from behind as you stand there.

You haven’t been to war until you look into the shit-filled toilet bowl before you flush and imagine a hand holding the back of your neck and forcing your head down into the filthy bowl. Holding it there until your lungs burst, and you gasp for air and swallow shit and piss instead. Until your fingers curl periodically with the sensation that someone is about to pull your nails out with a pair of pliers.

You haven’t been to war until you transpose any loud sound in your dreams to a pounding on your door as the troops storm in to drag you from your bed and fling you into a waiting van.

You haven’t been to war until you wait, behind the thud of distant fireworks at the ballpark, to hear the scream of the diving planes, the shriek of the guided missiles, the rumble and roar of the tanks as they roll in.

You haven’t been to war until you look around guardedly in a crowded street and know without a shadow of a doubt that anyone you see, anyone, could be about to kill you.

And because you haven’t been to war, you cower at the images on the TV screen and you say to everyone you know (all of whom, who haven’t been to war either, will nod supportively and say, yes, of course, that’s true): the police, the soldiers, they have to do whatever they must to protect us. Who are we to judge them? We are not in their place.

But if you have been to war, all of this is waiting for you, all day every day, lurking in the silence of the suburban streets where your neighbors are invisible hostiles, or the clangorous city streets where no one looks anyone else in the eye, where the suit on his phone bumps into you and moves on past without breaking his stride, in the plastic-coated food, and the gas-soaked pavement and the cheesy, piped-in music everywhere – so one day you flip out, you say no more terror, no more dread, no more waiting for the ax to fall. Not enough to go for a drive and blast the car stereo till your gut shakes. Not enough to drink yourself stupid and beat the wife or girlfriend bloody when the rage takes hold.

You plan your operation; you assemble your weaponry (so easy, that part!). Then you head for the highway, for the demonstration, for the shopping mall. You know what to do, because we gave you the best training in the world. We built you, we sent you out there. Ambush. That’s how we roll. Catch the enemy by surprise.

And because we taught you what justice is: it’s kill the other guy, the one who wants to kill you. It’s as simple as that, the justice we taught you, our military justice. You don’t have to ask why he wants to kill you, what made him that way. Just take him out. Make him pay for making you afraid for your life. It’s him or you. If you learned nothing else during your stint, you learned that.

You know it’s a hopeless mission, and you will probably die in the attempt. But what kind of life can you have anyway, now that the war is everywhere?

Others will come after you, and finish what you started.

Venezuela in Crisis: Too Much US intervention, Too Little Socialism

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Lisa Sullivan was worried: her neighbor was “up and waiting in line since 2 am, searching, unsuccessfully, to buy food for her large family.” The U. S. native living in Venezuela for decades is concerned too about Venezuela’s worsening economic and political crisis.

Most Venezuelans have experienced major social gains courtesy of the Bolivarian Revolution, which according to its leader Hugo Chávez, president from 1999 until 2013, was a socialist revolution. Oil exports fueled these gains and currently low oil prices are shaking the foundations of Venezuela’s social democracy.

Now as before U. S. intervention is on full display. The U. S. Senate in April passed a bill renewing economic sanctions against Venezuelan leaders originally imposed in 2014. The House of Representatives followed suit on July 6. President Obama will be signing the bill. In an executive order he declared Venezuela to be a threat to U. S. national security.

The State Department on July 7 alerted U.S. travelers to “violent crime” in Venezuela and warned that “political rallies and demonstrations can occur with little notice.” Venezuela’s government denounced the “illegitimate sanctions” as “imperial pretensions.”

The U.S. government backed an unsuccessful coup against the Chávez government in 2002 and since has distributed tens of millions of dollars to opposition groups. After three years, it still withholds recognition of Nicolas Maduro as Venezuela’s president. These actions speak of a U. S. goal of regime change.

A document attributed to Admiral Kurt Tidd of the U.S. Southern Command and circulated in early 2016 testifies to a military component of U. S. plans. Citing the “the defeat in the [parliamentary] elections and internal decomposition of the populist regime,” the text refers to “the successful impact of our policies [against Venezuela] launched under phase one of this operation.”

A divided rightwing opposition did score a decisive electoral victory in December 2015 as it gained a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. Maduro’s election by a narrow margin in 2013 advertised his vulnerability. He will likely be facing a recall vote in the coming months.

Solidly opposed to the Bolivarian government, Venezuela’s business class holds court over the economy, which has been devastated through inflation that mounted over three years and is now at astronomical levels. Shortages of essential items are causing major distress.

Businesses and merchants depend on imported goods and materials. After 15 years of the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela still has to import 70 percent of its food. The government facilitates imports by selling dollars to importers at low exchange rates. Many of them profit by selling imported products at inflated prices through the black-market.

Meanwhile goods people need for survival don’t arrive at stores serving poor people, especially markets selling government – subsidized food and household supplies. Importers and wholesalers are accused of hoarding for the sake of profitable sales later on.

Nevertheless, the “majority of Venezuelans” support neither the opposition nor the Maduro government, according to Lisa Sullivan. But, she says, “This doesn’t mean that [they] are not fans of chavismo.” She has seen “a whole generation of my neighbors and friends gain access to dignified housing, free education, stable jobs with honorable wages, and free health care.”

Analysts attribute the government’s defeat in the 2015 parliamentary elections to Bolivarian voters withholding their votes, not to their having backed the opposition. They objected to governmental corruption, divisions within Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and disregard by officials of problems at the grassroots.

Journalist Tamara Pearson suggests that despite “food shortages, inflation, and queues … millions of people” have “defied right-wing and general expectations, and even perhaps the expectations of the Maduro government, and have become stronger and better organized.”

Whether or not Venezuela’s military remains loyal to the socialist government will help determine its fate. President Chávez, a former army officer, counted on allegiance from the military. As reported by analyst Milton D’León, Chávez instituted “a dizzying increase in arms spending, the creation of military schools and universities, greater presence in political decisions, higher salaries for officials, and privileges of all kinds.”

Maduro’s 30-member cabinet includes 10 active or retired military leaders. His government has created a “socialist military economic zone” that hosts businesses whose activities contribute to the military’s economic development. D’León warns of danger for “working people [from] the growing role of the military … whether it is supporting Maduro, or spilling over to support a ‘transition’ by striking a deal with the right-wing [and] imperialism.”

Marxist analyst Edgar Meléndez sees a constricted future for the Bolivarian government mainly because its socialist project stagnated. He points out that the socialist state accounts for 96.6 U.S. dollars out of every $100 gained through exports. Yet these resources eventually “drain” to the private sector. Thus “private accumulation is prioritized over resources the state produces. This is opposite to the interests of working people.”

He condemns “mono-production of petroleum accounting for 94 percent of Venezuela’s 2014 exports.” That and “a parasitic bourgeoisie” are “two of the most noxious characteristics of the Venezuelan economic model … This situation, within the framework of capitalism itself, is a brake on the development of productive forces in our country.”

Lisa Sullivan is a witness to one striking failure of Venezuela’s version of socialism. Her neighbors are now growing food, she reports. That would be in response to the nation’s over-reliance on imported foods, never remedied by Bolivarian leaders. In terms of socialist development, food sovereignty typifies wealth produced for all through work. The government apparently lacked the vision or capacity to move beyond the short-term, capitalist way of doing things. It remains stuck in generating wealth almost exclusively through the extraction of oil.

Keeping Alive The Ghost Of Osama Bin Laden

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

A dubious website, the SITE Intelligence Group, has quoted Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama Bin Laden, as threatening revenge against the U.S. for assassinating his father.

The SITE Intelligence Group referred to an audio message of Hamza posted online where he said:

“We will continue striking you and targeting you in your country and abroad in response to your oppression of the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and the rest of the Muslim lands that did not survive your oppression.

“As for the revenge by the Islamic nation for Sheikh Osama, may Allah have mercy on him, it is not revenge for Osama the person but it is revenge for those who defended Islam.

What is SITE Intelligence Group?

According to Wikipedia, Bethesda, Maryland-based SITE Intelligence Group was known as the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute from 2002 to 2008. SITE is led by the Israeli analyst Rita Katz.

Her group relies on government contracts and corporate clients and she is among the most controversial of the cyberspace monitors. While some experts praise her research as solid, some of her targets view her as a vigilante. Several Islamic groups and charities, for example, sued for defamation after she claimed they were terrorist fronts, even though they were not charged with a crime, the New York Times reported on September 23, 2004.

On 30 May 2008, The Daily Telegraph published an article reporting that SITE had wrongly identified footage from the post-apocalyptic computer game Fallout 3 as being created by terrorists considering a nuclear attack against the West.

According to the official website of the SITE Intelligence Group, Rita Katz is the Executive Director and founder of the SITE Intelligence Group, a non-governmental counterterrorism organization.

Katz has testified before Congress and in terrorism trials, and had personally briefed government officials at the White House, as well as investigators in the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security. Born in Iraq and a graduate of Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, Katz is fluent in Arabic.

This is not the first time the SITE Intelligence Group has released Hamza’s statement. On August 16, 2015 the group referred to Hamza’s video message where he called for lone wolf attacks in the US and in countries that are its allies.

Al-Qaeda hopes to renew its popularity by “reviving the brand” of Bin Laden, SITE Group’s Executive Director Rita Katz said.

Hamza, now in his mid-twenties, was at his father’s side in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks and spent time with him in Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion pushed much of al Qaeda’s senior leadership there, according to the Brookings Institution.

“Hamza provides a new face for al Qaeda, one that directly connects to the group’s founder. He is an articulate and dangerous enemy,” says Bruce Riedel of Brookings.

Osama bin Laden had 23 children. Hamza is the youngest son of Osama and Khairiah Sabar. His mother and two other wives were living at the Abbottabad compound when US forces launched “Operation Geronimo” in which Osama Bin Laden was allegedly killed. Hamza, believed to be in his mid-20s, was not at the residence at the time.

Was Osama Bin Laden really buried at sea?

The Huffington Post reported in March 2012 that Osama Bin Laden was apparently buried in the waters of the north Arabian Sea, but internal emails from intelligence service Stratfor, obtained by hacker group Anonymous and posted by WikiLeaks suggest otherwise.

According to official accounts, he was wrapped in a sheet and “eased” off the decks of the U.S.S Carl Vinson just hours after he was killed on May 2 in a United States-led operation, in accordance with Muslim tradition.

But a leaked email from Stratfor vice president for intelligence Fred Burton, sent on May 2, 2011, at 5.26am states: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.” A subsequent email on the same day at 5.51am states: “Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane. Than onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.”

US forces said Bin Laden was killed in the siege at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, just after 1am local time.

At 6.26am Burton wrote: “If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi’s ashes. We would want to photograph, DNA, fingerprint, etc. “His body is a crime scene and I don’t see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen.”

The reference to Eichmann regards the cremation of the Nazi’s body following his capture, trial and execution, in order to prevent any memorial or shrine being built.

Stratfor CEO George Friedman appears to agree, noting: “Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him which I doubt happened.”

John Hudson of The Atlantic Wire on March 6, 2012 that there are so many dubious aspects of the Stratfor story it’s hard to know where to begin.

Anyway, the CIA and Pentagon are loath to officially comment on the story but a government official tells us, “There is no truth whatsoever to the allegations made in the article.” Later in an update to the story a Pentagon spokesman, in an e-mail to The Atlantic Wire, was quoted as denying the accusation that bin Laden was cremated:

“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed for Osama bin Laden. His body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag and a military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased body eased into the sea. Any allegations otherwise are simply false.”

Conspiracy theories

According to Wikipedia, the death of Osama bin Laden gave rise to various conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and rumors. These include the ideas that bin Laden had been dead for years, or is still alive. Doubts about bin Laden’s death were fueled by the U.S. military’s supposed disposal of his body at sea, the decision to not release any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden’s death to the public the contradicting accounts of the incident (with the official story on the raid appearing to change or directly contradict previous assertions), and the 25-minute blackout during the raid on bin Laden’s compound during which a live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the U.S. special forces was cut off.

On May 1, 2011, an image purporting to show a dead bin Laden was broadcast on Pakistani television. Though the story was picked up by much of the British press, as well the Associated Press, it was swiftly removed from websites after it was exposed as a fake on Twitter. On May 4, the Obama administration announced it would not release any images of Bin Laden’s dead body.

Retired General Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), stated in an interview with CNN that he believed bin Laden had died many years ago, and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. Furthermore, he thinks the American government knew about bin Laden’s death for years, “They must have known that he had died some years ago so they were waiting. They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment and it couldn’t be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year’s election as he runs for the presidential and for the White House and I think it is a very appropriate time to come out, bring this out of the closet.”

How Government Officials Deceive Themselves, To Deceive The Public

Eric Zuesse

Especially the foreign services and the military of any country are being paid like lawyers are standardly paid: they’re paid to make the case for their employer. They’re ‘mercenaries’ wielding words not (merely) arms, who become the more effective to the extent that they can deceive themselves to believe the propaganda (or, in the military case, the justifiability of their killings) that they’re selling to the public. Let’s therefore look at some of these ‘mercenaries’, in a video about U.S. policy toward China, so that we can tell, from their vocal inflections, and also from their facial expressions while they are saying blatantly false things, whether we think that they believe the lies that they are spouting, while they’re spouting them to us:

In the video, which is titled “World War 3 Between America and China — Full Documentary”, appears a former U.S. diplomat to China and to Taiwan, John J. Tkacik Jr., saying, at 9:55, that, “the real reason I think why America has a commitment to Taiwan is because Taiwan is a democracy.”

How, then, can the U.S. government ‘justify’ its longstanding alliance with the Saud family who are the dictators over — and who despotically claim to own — Saudi Arabia, and who champion head-chopping of any dissidents there (and who financed the 9/11 jihadists in the U.S.)? And that’s only one contrary example of our ‘democracies’.

But that official’s lie didn’t stop there. He continued: “It is in fact the most vibrant and dynamic democracy in east Asia. And it’s a democracy that came to fruition under the pressure of the U.S. government primarily the Congress, after forty years of very tight authoritarian rule by a regime that came from mainland China.”

He neatly avoided mentioning that, though “the real reason I think why America has a commitment to Taiwan is because Taiwan is a democracy,” the U.S. was equally allied with Taiwan back under the Chiang Kai-shek “regime” (as Tkacik himself called it), which stole from China “many national treasures and much of China’s gold reserves and foreign currency reserves”, as even the CIA-edited wikipedia allows to be said there.

So: if ‘democracy’ is “the real reason” why America is “committed” to Taiwan, why was America committed to Taiwan during the dictatorial period, 1949-1996, before “the first direct presidential election” took place there?

Obviously, the official is lying.

Furthermore, he is attributing the dictatorial regime to the fact that it “came from mainland China.” He’s indirectly attributing its dictatorship to the communist Mao Zedong. But the reality is that Chiang, and the original U.S. dictator there, Chen Yi, were enemies of Mao, not his allies, and that this is why the U.S. is “committed” to Taiwan — notwithstanding that the U.S. regime in Taiwan was long a dictatorship, which moreover had stolen so much from Mao’s regime on the mainland. (And, even today, the U.S. regime, which stole Taiwan from the Japanese regime, which had stolen it from the previous, royal, Chinese regime, refuses to allow today’s Chinese government to negotiate a re-unification of Taiwan with the country of which it had always been a part, which is China.)

As even the wikipedia article notes, Chen-Yi was set-up as being Taiwan’s dictator by U.S. forces, on 25 October 1945, when the island was freed from the Japanese regime, which was legendarily barbaric, and, “during this time [of Japanese rule], over 2,000 women were forced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japanese troops, now euphemistically called ‘comfort women’.” So: the U.S. established a new fascist dictatorship, to replace the fascist dictatorship that had previously existed there.

The next person to be interviewed in this video is James Liley, former head of the CIA in Asia, who says (11:15) that after World War II, “We were looking for a strong, unified, democratic, China.” Oh, really? “Well, we got two-thirds of it. Strong and unified, not democratic.” He was referring there to the post-Mao regime on the mainland — not to the regime we installed in Taiwan. So, this conquest of Japan gave the U.S. the right to dictate to Mao’s successors, by backing brigands who had stolen from their country? “Now we’re calling China a responsible stakeholder.” Oh, it’s for the U.S. dictatorship to judge who is ‘responsible’, and who isn’t? “We’ve got half of it; we’ve got a stakeholder, but not a responsible one yet.”

People like this are dictators to foreign countries. That’s what America’s fighting forces are serving — U.S. dictators to foreign countries.

Lilley continues: “U.S. feels that we have an obligation, legal, moral, to Taiwan, that we cannot stand idly by and let this be taken over by an authoritarian communist-influenced power. This cannot be.” (He ignores the fact that Britain’s Margaret Thatcher did essentially this in regard to Hong Kong, and that the end-result was peacful, and productive, both for Hong Kong, and for China. By contrast, as the remainder of this video explains, America’s resistance against doing the same thing in itscolony, Taiwan, is now increasingly posing a danger of nuclear war — which would be disastrous foreverybody.)

Isn’t it wonderful to have such a benefactor to the world, as today’s U.S.? Look at our other beneficiaries: Iraq. Libya. Syria. Guatemala. El Salvador. Chile. Argentina. Brazil, South Africa. Honduras. Palestine. Etc. Those people are much better off than are the ‘communist-influenced’ capitalists on China’s mainland? Really?

Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama phrased the matter, to graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014:

“the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm. Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.”

There, the aspiring global dictator is telling America’s future military leaders: The U.S. is the only“indispensable” nation; all others are “dispensable,” and the enemies you’ll be fighting against are the dispensable nations now rising to compete economically against us, and which even “seek a greater say in global forums.” Mustn’t allow that, must we?

It’s just the latest version of the old American “gunboat diplomacy.” (Only, this time, with the modern danger of nuclear war, being thrown in.)

This is today’s American ‘democracy’, in macro; it’s this ‘democracy’, in micro. At either end, it’s today’s Sparta; not really today’s Athens (which it pretends to be).

Do its propagandists know they’re lying? Or do they hide it even from themselves?

An interesting fact about the interviewees that were cited here, Tkacik and Liley, is that they’re both retired. Why, then, do they still keep up the lying front (especially since they’re now feeding myths that could produce a nuclear war)? They’re no longer on the U.S. government payroll. But they do receive income as ‘experts’, based upon their past official positions. How much credibility would they now have if they said: “Oh, it was just lying — that’s what I did for a living”? They’re never really free. They’re always like horses that are harnessed to a carriage of frauds. They’ve simply got to keep pulling this carriage, until they die.