The Healing Power Of Meditation

William T. Hathaway

I suffered a brain injury at birth. An EEG test showed chaotic, abnormal brain waves, and in school I had attention deficit disorder. I couldn't concentrate and my thoughts were cloudy. My grades were mediocre, and I flunked out of my first university. I wanted to become a writer, but my writing was disorganized and unclear. In despair I took marijuana and other drugs, but they made my thoughts even foggier.

Then I started Transcendental Meditation. My thoughts became clearer, and I didn't want drugs anymore. I could concentrate. And I could write. One of my essays gained me entrance to a much better university, Columbia in New York City, and this time my grades were so good I received a scholarship. My first novel won a Rinehart Foundation Award, and I became a professor of creative writing. I've now published eight books and many shorter pieces.

My EEG now shows normal, orderly brain waves with no sign of damage. TM healed my birth injury and gave me access to my talent and mental abilities. Without meditation, this change would not have occurred.

How did it happen? Physiologists have discovered that during Transcendental Meditation nourishing blood flow to the brain increases by 20%. Our brain waves become more coherent, synchronizing and coordinating across both hemispheres, an indication of more integrated mental functioning. The whole brain becomes more activated, and that gives us access to more of our potential. In the blood stream arginine vasopressin, a hormone that improves memory and learning ability, increases, as do serotonin and melatonin, hormones that indicate relaxation and well being. Adrenalin, cortisol, blood lactate, and blood pressure decrease, indicating lessened anxiety. TM produces mental and physical rest that is twice as deep as in sleep, although we're fully awake. This rejuvenating state enables the body's self-healing mechanism to repair the damage from traumatic events and illnesses. With these blockages gone we are more able to develop our full capabilities.

For more information on the effects of TM on attention deficit disorder: http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/schools.html.
Research on the physiological changes:http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/TMResearch/TMResearchSummary/SummaryContinued/index.cfm - physiology.

Howling in Donetsk

Pepe Escobar

I’ve just been to the struggling Donetsk People’s Republic. Now I’m back in the splendid arrogance and insolence of NATOstan.

Quite a few people – in Donbass, in Moscow, and now in Europe – have asked me what struck me most about this visit.

I could start by paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg in Howl – “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

But these were the Cold War mid-1950s. Now we’re in early 21st century Cold War 2.0.

Thus what I saw were the ghastly side effects of the worst minds of my – and a subsequent – generation corroded by (war) madness.

I saw refugees on the Russian side of the border, mostly your average middle-class European family whose kids, when they first came to the shelter,  would duck under tables when they heard a plane in the sky.

I saw the Dylan of Donetsk holed up in his lonely room in a veterans’ home turned refugee shelter fighting the blues and the hopelessness by singing songs of love and heroism.

I saw whole families holed up in fully decorated Soviet-era bomb shelters too afraid to go out even by daylight, traumatized by the bombings orchestrated by Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operations”.

I saw a modern, hard-working industrial city at least half-empty and partially destroyed but not bent, able to survive by their guts and guile with a little help from Russian humanitarian convoys.

I saw beautiful girls hangin’ out by Lenin’s statue in a central square lamenting their only shot at fun was family parties in each other’s houses because nightlife was dead and “we’re at war”.

I saw virtually the whole neighborhood of Oktyabrski near the airport bombed out like Grozny and practically deserted except for a few lonely babushkas with nowhere to go and too proud to relinquish their family photos of World War II heroes.

I saw checkpoints like I was back in Baghdad during the Petraeus surge.

I saw the main trauma doctor at the key Donetsk hospital confirm there has been no Red Cross and no international humanitarian help to the people of Donetsk.

I saw Stanislava, one of DPR’s finest and an expert sniper, in charge of our security, cry when she laid a flower on the ground of a fierce battle in which her squad was under heavy fire, with twenty seriously wounded and one dead, and she was hit by shrapnel and survived.

I saw orthodox churches fully destroyed by Kiev’s bombing.

I saw the Russian flag still on top of the anti-Maidan building which is now the House of Government of the DPR.

I saw the gleaming Donbass arena, the home of Shaktar Donetsk and a UFO in a war-torn city, deserted and without a single soul in the fan area.

I saw Donetsk’s railway station bombed by Kiev’s goons.

I saw a homeless man screaming “Robert Plant!” and “Jimmy Page!” as I found out he was still in love with Led Zeppelin and kept his vinyl copies.

I saw a row of books which never surrendered behind the cracked windows of bombed out Oktyabrski.

I saw the fresh graves where the DPR buries their resistance heroes.

I saw the top of the hill at Saur-mogila which the DPR resistance lost and then reconquered, with a lone red-white-blue flag now waving in the wind.

I saw the Superman rising from the destruction at Saur-mogila – the fallen statue in a monument to World War II heroes, which seventy years ago was fighting fascism and now has been hit, but not destroyed, by fascists.

I saw the Debaltsevo cauldron in the distance and then I could fully appreciate, geographically, how DPR tactics surrounded and squeezed the demoralized Kiev fighters.

I saw the DPR’s military practicing their drills by the roadside from Donetsk to Lugansk.

I saw the DPR’s Foreign Minister hopeful there would be a political solution instead of war while admitting personally he dreams of a DPR as an independent nation.

I saw two badass Cossack commanders tell me in a horse-breeding farm in holy Cossack land that the real war has not even started.

I did not see the totally destroyed Donetsk airport because the DPR’s military were too concerned about our safety and would not grant us a permit while the airport was being hit – in defiance of Minsk 2; but I saw the destruction and the pile of Ukrainian army bodies on the mobile phone of a Serbian DPR resistance fighter.

I did not see, as Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe international observers also didn’t, the rows and rows of Russian tanks and soldiers that the current Dr. Strangelove in charge of NATO, General Breedhate, sees everyday in his exalted dreams invading Ukraine over and over again.

And I did not see the arrogance, the ignorance, the shamelessness and the lies distorting those manicured faces in Kiev, Washington and Brussels while they insist, over and over again, that the entire population of Donbass, traumatized babushkas and children of all ages included, are nothing but “terra-rists”.

After all, they are Western “civilization”-enabled cowards who would never dare to show their manicured faces to the people of Donbass.

So this is my gift to them.

Just a howl of anger and unbounded contempt.

Surviving Climate Disaster in Africa’s Sahel

Thomas C. Mountain

For over 30 years the great Sahel Desert region in Africa has been a harbinger of the coming climate disaster our planet is facing and surviving such has become a national priority here in Eritrea on the eastern end of the Sahel.

Remember Michael Jackson and the great Ethiopian drought and famine of the early 1980’s? That was just the beginning. In 2003 and 2004 we here in Eritrea next door to Ethiopia suffered the first two year drought in history, followed in 2008 and 2009 by another back to back drought. Including the failure of the rains in 2013 Eritrea suffered 5 years of drought in a single decade.

This isn’t climate change, this is climate disaster and science tells us that the world should be preparing for even worse things to come. Thanks to the mainly western countries contribution to rising CO2 levels heating up the planet droughts will test the very ability of our species to survive, something we here in Eritrea know all to well.

After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government here initiated a major water conservation plan that along with reforestation and soil conservation is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted.

What this means is that everywhere possible micro dams, dams and major water reservoirs are being constructed to capture the rains that do fall and use them to irrigate our fields, beginning to break the age old dependence on rain fed agriculture.

Disastrous drought interrupted by record breaking floods is what is being foretold by scientists and the only way to survive these man made disasters is recognizing what needs to be done and then busting ass to see it gets accomplished.

This may explain why Eritrea’s President is away from his office for weeks at a time overseeing the construction of major water reservoirs around the country. And all this hard work being lead from the very top has paid off for when the rains failed in 2013 we here in Eritrea had enough to eat while in much of the rest of the Sahel hundreds of thousands starved to death.

Water conservation is critical but so is reforestation and soil conservation, for without trees to help absorb the water and hold the soil in place and terraces to catch the soil the floods wash away our water reservoirs will fill with silt and undo all our hard work. As a result our school children spend a month every summer planting trees and communities alongside the national service army regularly schedule work days to build stone wall terraces to trap the soil run off.

Colonialism and deforestation go hand in hand everywhere for forests are the natural sanctuary for rebels fighting their colonial masters so whether in Haiti or Eritrea cutting down trees became a weapon against insurgency by our western colonializers.

When the Italians began to colonize Eritrea in the 1880’s over 30% of our country was forested. By the time Eritrea won its independence on\ the battle field in 1991 less then 2% of our forests remained. This man made environmental holocaust left Eritrea very little in the way of reserves to survive the CO2 driven climate disasters we have since faced and forced our leaders to sacrifice a lot of other development projects that would have raised the standard of living for our people in our need to prepare for worse disasters to come.

Some years back the Eritrean President was ridiculed in the western media for calling for ten years of grain reserves being kept in storage, but today his plan is making all to much sense. Only time will tell if all our hard work will be enough to prevent the worse climate disasters foretold from wreaking havoc on this country but what choice do we have?

Hopefully Eritrea’s efforts will provide a role model for other countries around the world and help prevent untold suffering by our brothers and sisters internationally.

A Season in Hell (or Longer)

Adam Warren

Et le printemps m’a apporté l’affreux rire de l’idiot.
And the spring brought me the terrible laughter of the idiot. 

Rimbaud’s crisis is that of oppositions. Materialism v the imaginary/poetic. The so-called moral and civilised v the (again, so-called) immoral and barbarous. The industrious v the poetically languid. Oppositions which ultimately tear apart in the poet’s experience of his world along the fault line between a scientific/capitalist/imperialist West and an East which constitutes both an imaginary ‘elsewhere’ and a very real place suffering the ravages of European imperialism.

As the spring approaches, we find ourselves faced with a world set on a similar (and potentially disastrous) course for rupture along increasingly volatile fault lines. Divisions, again, largely between an overbearing, imperialist West and a much broader geographical and ideological ‘elsewhere’. As we try to make some sense of the unfolding situation, a few parallels between Rimbaud’s crisis and our own.

Le monde marche! Pourquoi ne tournerait-il pas?
The world marches [forward]! Why might it not turn?

The European/Western mindset is still largely defined by what might be termed an obsessive teleology. Perhaps the result of a haphazard marrying of Aristotle’s idea of ‘the good’ as ‘that to which everyhing aims’, and a Christian sort of ‘kingdom come’ eschatology. In any case, the West is still clearly driven by the sense that this mess is all leading somewhere. And that they are still the agents that should be leading us there.

Of course, as is all too tragically clear, this warped and obsessive sense of self has only succeeded in leading the West (and the rest of the world unwillingly with it) into chaos. From the horrors of European imperialism to the ongoing disasters of a seemingly unflagging US exceptionalism.

Rimbaud’s typically ironic pronouncement reveals something of the disastrous continuity of this obsessive mindset. It points also to a possible alternative. A world that ‘turn[s]‘ rather than ‘march[ing]‘ endlessly towards some absolutist end. For Rimbaud, it was perhaps a reference to an ‘Eastern’ cyclical conception of things, as opposed to the doggedly linear/teleological orientation of the West. For us, this alternative might well be the conception of a more ‘multipolar’ world being proposed today by newer emerging powers. A new perspective, however, that is meeting increasingly violent opposition from the current hegemonic order. An opposition that lies behind the major tensions currently threatening to rupture along the world’s geopolitical fault lines, form Ukraine and the Middle East to the Americas.

Les blancs débarquent. Le canon!
The whitemen disembark. Cannon-fire!

Sadly, little has changed here. And, with increasing signs of the US and NATO getting into belligerent mode, there appears to be little hope for change in the near future. Leaving us in the short term with the prospect of an even more war-torn world.

Rimbaud, out of an apparently instinctive disgust for this sort of civilisational, militarist arrogance, chose to set himself in oppositon to it, largely through associating himself with the oppressed and maligned ‘other’ that was the victim of European imperialism. For him this was to a certain extent an imaginary/poeticised ‘East’ that he had inherited from his predecessor, Charles Baudelaire. An East which, again, like Baudelaire, he infused with the imaginary languor of an anti-industrious dandyism. Which in itself constituted a stand, if somewhat self-indulgent, against the industriousness of the modern capitalist/industrialised West.

It was also a stand, however, that he made through deconstructing the essentially racist ideology of imperialism and turning it against the imperialists themselves, revealing them to be the truly ‘barbarous’ and ‘uncivilised’.

Depressingly, the old imperialist, civilisational (and ultimately racist) rhetoric is making an ugly come back in the West, revealing, yet again, that Empire has changed little since the ravages of its ninteenth century power. Nor, clearly, have the motivations of those driving it.

Et je redoute l’hiver parce que c’est la saison du comfort!
And I dread the winter because it’s the season of comfort!

Today’s Western imperialism, like capitalism in its current neo-liberal form, rests fundamentally on its ability to maintain a false sense of consumerist comfort back home. Whatever misery this imaginary comfort is founded on is to be concealed at all costs, whether that suffering is being inflicted abroad or closer to home. To this end, the powers that be have cynically learnt that an absolute control of the media, by one means or another, is paramount. An end they have largely succeeded in reaching.

Rimbaud’s statement is again full of his characteristic irony. At the same time acerbic and oxymoronic, it conveys something of that ‘terrible laughter’ with which we started. A laughter, and a deeply critical voice, that cut through the hypocrisy of a nineteenth century bourgeois society founded on the horrors of imperialism. As it cuts through the same hypocrisy of our own.

A “Good Day” for NATO?

Gregory Elich

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) proclaims its “commitment to maintaining international peace and security.” Mainstream media rarely, if ever, look beyond Western self-justifications and bland assurances of moral superiority, and little thought is given to what NATO’s wars of aggression might look like to those on the receiving end.

During the first two weeks of August, 1999, I was a member of a delegation travelling throughout Yugoslavia, documenting NATO war crimes. One of our stops was at Surdulica, a small town which then had a population of about 13,000. We initially met with management of Zastava Pes, an automotive electrical parts factory that had at one time employed about 500 workers. In better days, annual exports from the plant amounted to $8 million. Western-imposed sanctions had stopped export contracts and prevented the import of materials, forcing a 70 percent reduction in the workforce and a decline in the local economy.

Staff at Zastava Pes told us that bombs and missiles had routinely rained down upon their town.

We were first taken to a sanatorium, located atop a heavily wooded hill overlooking the town. The sanatorium consisted of a Lung Disease Hospital, which also housed refugees, and a second building that served as a retirement home.

Shortly after midnight on the morning of May 31, 1999, NATO planes launched four missiles at the sanatorium complex, killing at least 19 people. It was not possible to ascertain the precise number of victims because numerous body parts could not be matched to the 19 bodies. Another 38 people were wounded. We were told that the force of the explosions had been so powerful that body parts were thrown as far as one kilometer away. Following the attack, body parts were hanging in the trees, and blood dripped from the branches. By the time of our visit, the area had largely been cleaned up, but we could still see torn clothing scattered high among the branches of the tall trees.

Although only one missile struck the nursing home, it caused enormous damage. We walked around to the back, on the building’s southwestern side. A section of the second floor had collapsed, and the entire side of the building was extensively damaged, with mounds of rubble at the base of the building. On the northeast side of the complex, the building that housed refugees and patients bore a gaping hole in its façade, from which a river of rubble had poured like blood from a wound. We clambered up the mound of rubble and made our way into the building. Debris littered the hallways and in several rooms we found scorched mattresses, clothes and damaged personal belongings jumbled together in disarray. Bricks and chunks of concrete were strewn among the rubble, and a loaf of bread rested against a child’s shirt. In another room, teenage magazines and a child’s textbook were mixed among the wreckage. In the center of the room was a child’s teddy bear.

Rear of nursing home in Surdulica. Photo: Gregory Elich.

According to the on-site investigation report of June 3, it took three days to dig the bodies from the rubble. The yard outside the Special Lung Hospital “was covered with parts of human bodies, torn heads, arms and hands as well as bodies partly covered with rubble material, dust, broken bricks” and debris from the building. “A torn-off head of a man, approximately 70-years-old, was found outdoors. North from this head, there was another body covered with debris and a torn arm.” Three bodies were a short distance away, including one with a partially damaged head. “Brain tissue…could be seen on some parts of the building ruins,” the report continued.

As refugees from Croatia, nineteen-year-old Milena Malobabich, her mother, and two brothers stayed in the sanatorium. The entire family was killed in the attack. During the air raid, panic-stricken, Milena ran from the building, clutching a notebook in which she had written poetry. The examiner of Milena’s body noted: “The brain tissue is completely missing, and there is only dust and sand in the cranial cavity.” Blood had flowed from behind the right ear. Milena’s ribs were crushed, and her abdomen and left leg were lacerated. Her notebook was found near her body; on one page she had written in large letters, “I love you, Dejane!” The brain that composed poetry and cherished a man named Dejane was scattered in pieces throughout the yard.

We next visited a residential neighborhood that was completely wiped out by NATO missiles. As we had seen in other towns, a remarkable reconstruction effort was underway. Responsibility for national reconstruction was assigned to the Directorate for National Recovery, which was formed just ten days into the war. An energetic program was soon launched, and destroyed neighborhoods were cleared of debris and construction of new homes began even as NATO continued its attacks.

By the time of our visit, every trace of rubble had been removed from this neighborhood, and the earth smoothed over. A bulldozer and grader were parked nearby, and construction of two new homes had begun. Surviving residents approached and talked to us, showing us photographs they had taken in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. The level of destruction shown in the photographs was appalling, a jumbled riot of debris where several homes once stood.

We visited a second neighborhood obliterated by NATO missiles. Here too, reconstruction was underway. Smashed automobiles and partially roofless homes bordering the area were the only physical reminders of the tragedy.

In the first neighborhood, a man named Dragan told us that the homes were hit as a result of errant missiles. “They were trying to hit the water supply plant nearby, with two missiles.” Another survivor, Zoran Savich told us that sirens sounded every day, and the town was bombed on multiple occasions. Four months had passed since his neighborhood had been hit, but Dragan’s son was still so terrified that he fled into the basement every time he heard the sound of an airplane overhead. Quite a long distance away was another of NATO’s targets, an army barracks that was abandoned during the war. I climbed atop a large mound of dirt to view the barracks from afar, and saw that it too was damaged. NATO sprayed its bombs and missiles liberally around Surdulica. The destruction of an empty barracks was of doubtful military utility. The targeting of a water supply plant was cruel, but there were no words to adequately characterize the destruction of entire neighborhoods, as we had repeatedly witnessed in our travels. By the end of the war, NATO had destroyed about fifty homes in Surdulica and damaged around 600 more.

One of the bombed homes belonged to Radica Rastich. In a deposition, her neighbor Borica Novkovich recalled, “The sound was like a huge blow on the head. Everything turned over and rolled down the hill. Radica was screaming, screaming, when we came to help her. She was taken from the house all twisted and bent over. She was shaking and shaking; her hands were pressed tight over her ears.” Another survivor, Perica Jovanovich, stated, “I’ll never forget the strange voice of the bomb. When the plane is flying and drops the bomb the noise changes. It’s awful. It’s like the static on the radio but so loud, and then there is this awful crash and pressure and everything moves and boils up.”

It was a clear day on April 27 when the first neighborhood was bombed. On Jovan Jovanovich Zmaj Street, children were happily playing outside when NATO warplanes made their approach. Hearing the wail of air raid sirens, the children ran into the home of Aleksandar Milich, where they took refuge in the strongest basement in the neighborhood. It was not long before two NATO missiles sailed into that very house. The sound of the blast was deafening, and smoke and dust filled the air. Every home in the area was destroyed, and survivors were screaming as they struggled to escape from under the rubble.

Stojanche Petkovich reported that after hearing the first explosion, he rushed into the Milich home. He was in the upper cellar and about to descend into the lower cellar when the next missile hit the house, hurling him against a wall. “I covered my mouth with my hand to prevent the dust to enter, because there was a cloud of smoke and dust in there. When I recovered a bit after the second explosion, I called out to those from the second basement, but no one answered me. I could see that the ceiling in that part of the basement had collapsed.” Moments later, Petkovich heard blocks falling and looked up to see “the ceiling above my head coming down on me. The concrete ceiling was now down, pinning my right lower leg. I was watching the other end of the ceiling also coming down on me, and I saw the iron bars in it stretching. Then everything stopped.” It took two hours to pull Petkovich out, the lone survivor from the Milich home. Blood was spattered all around where the cellar had once been, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air. Every victim was decapitated and dismembered. “Bits of them were all over the road,” one man was reported as saying. “We found the head of a child in a garden and many limbs in the mud.”

When 65-year-old Vojislav Milich heard the air raid sirens that day, he ran to his home. He was about 100 meters away when he saw the two missiles exploding on his home. “When the smoke vanished, I saw just ruins of my house. It had been razed to the ground, completely torn down. I presumed that all of the members of my family and all of the people from the neighborhood got killed, which unfortunately proved to be true.”

The morning after the attack, I read the news on a Yugoslav internet site. There was a photograph of the back of an ambulance, its doors thrown open. Inside were piled chunks of shapeless human flesh, still smoking – remains of the eleven victims, the youngest of whom was only four years old.

Four hours after the attack, the British Ministry of Defense announced that it had been a good day for NATO.

Muslim vs. White Mass Murderers

Matt Peppe

In the early months of 2015, there have been two separate mass murders inside France that have generated headlines worldwide for their brutality and disregard for human life. In early January, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one police officer on their way out. Last week, in an act of mass murder with more than 12 times the number of victims, 27-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided the plane he was flying straight into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board. Yet it is only the former murderous act that has been described by politicians and portrayed in the media as an existential threat and an example of terrorism.

The coverage of the Kouachi brothers downplayed their humanity by describing them as calculating, rational, indifferent killing machines. A New York Times article, titled “From Amateur to Ruthless Jihadist in France,” describes “two jihadists in black, sheathed in body armor” who “gave a global audience a ruthless demonstration in terrorism.” The “hardened killer(s)” were said to walk “with military precision,” and “nonchalantly” take a phone call.

The article explains how French security services were unable to prevent the attacks: “The brothers appeared so nonthreatening that surveillance was dropped in the middle of last year.” Yet they had a long history of being monitored by French authorities, evidenced by the “thousands of pages of legal documents obtained by The New York Times, including minutes of interrogations, summaries of phone taps, intercepted jailhouse letters.”

It is seen as a failure of the security services, who presumably should not have let the brothers out of their surveillance dragnet. Their “steadily deepening radicalism .. occurred virtually under the noses of French authorities, who twice had Cherif in their grasp.”

There is no blame attributed to the French socioeconomic system, which relegates most of France’s Arab population to a permanent underclass of unemployment and poverty. As racial minorities in a country that holds few opportunities for people with their background, the brothers worked dead-end jobs like delivering pizzas and fish mongering. They were not able to get jobs at French investment banks or in the fashion industry. Certainly this must have produced adverse mental health effects.

There is no discussion of whether destitution and marginalization contributed to the Kouachi brothers’ decision to use violence against people who, to them, apparently represented a source of their humiliation.

Neither is there blame on French foreign policy, which has been complicit in arming and funding Al Qaeda for many years in Libya, Syria and other countries. France’s support for violent extremism abroad and its potential to create blowback at home is likewise disregarded in media analysis.The murderous Germanwings pilot received a very different portrait in The New York Times. The title of a profile on Lubitz reads like a eulogy: “Andreas Lubitz, Who Loved to Fly, Ended Up on a Mysterious and Deadly Course.”

He has a name and a passion. And unlike the “ruthless jihadists,” who chose their path as criminals, Lubitz “ended up on a mysterious course” as if he was a passenger on the journey, rather than the instigator who drove 149 people intentionally to their death.

In describing the “mystery” behind Lubitz, the Times says that “the focus has turned to what had driven him to such an act – and to whether the airline industry and regulators do enough to screen pilots for psychological problems.” As was the case with Newton elementary school killer Adam Lanza, the problem is understood as one of “missed chances,” in the workplace or by social services, not the police and security officials.

CNN wrote that Lanza “was an isolated young man with deteriorating mental health and a fascination for mass violence whose problems were not ignored but misunderstood and mistreated.” Lubitz had reportedly been treated by psychotherapists for “suicidal tendencies” and possibly suffered from depression.

For white young men like Lubitz and Lanza, the problem was a failure of society – parents, teachers, employers, government regulators – to recognize and treat mental health problems. Implicitly they are people deserving help, not security threats deserving surveillance and monitoring. The mental health of the killers is understood to be a cause – if not the primary cause – behind their actions. They were victimized by their mental health, whereas the Kouachi brothers were rational actors responsible for their actions.

Near the bottom of the New York Times article, a surviving Charlie Hebdo journalist is quoted as saying that one of the brothers told her “We don’t kill women.” One of the brothers also reportedly told a salesman “We don’t shoot civilians.” They clearly did kill civilians, but unlike either Lubitz or Lanza, they did spare lives rather than kill indiscriminately. Yet only the Kouachis are described as “hardened killers.”

Why such different treatments of the massacres and the killers responsible for them? Simply put, the massacre by the Kouachi brothers can be attributed to “Islamic extremism” while the massacre by Lubitz cannot. Surely the passengers who “shrieked in terror” would not have considered themselves any less terrorized than employees of Charlie Hebdo witnessing the masked attackers with Kalashnikovs.

The Paris attacks were described by CNN, BBC, New York Times, NBC, and virtually every major Western news outlet as terrorism. But the Germanwings plane crash has not been called terrorism at all. USA Today reported that the FBI “has found no connection of anyone aboard to terrorism.” CNN reported that Lubitz “was not known to be on any terrorism list, and his religion was not immediately known.”

In other words, it was not immediately know whether Lubitz was a Muslim, and, by extension, whether he was a terrorist. This connection between religion and terrorism, used in the same sentence in the CNN article, demonstrates how terrorism in common usage is understood to be about who a person is rather than what he does. Two Muslim brothers of North African heritage are terrorists when then murder 12 people, while a white German is not a terrorist when he murders 149.

Terrorism is perceived as the most heinous type of crime. Terrorists are thought to be irredeemable, subhuman creatures who do not even qualify as legitimate members of society with rights. But there is no commonly accepted definition of a terrorist, so any terrorist label is completely arbitrary. Unsurprisingly, there is a racial and cultural bias for using such a label.

Media portrayals of mass murderers are a representation of the society’s attitudes towards the subjects they cover. That Muslims and Arabs engender an irrational fear is nothing new. As Edward Said explains in Orientalism, this has a long history.

“For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril’ lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life,” Said writes.

This danger still manifests itself in the disproportionate reaction of Western nations and its people to crimes that can be attributed to Islam and Arabs. Even if, as is the case with the Kouachi brothers, they were born and raised in France, never having stepped foot in their parents’ native country of Algeria. But “Frenchness” is still widely understood to be the exclusive domain of the country’s Catholic population.

As Joseph Massad notes in The Electronic Intifada, French colonialists killed millions of people in Vietnam, Algeria and Madagascar, practicing inhuman forms of savagery and torture in the process. In this context, the Kouachi brothers and their accomplice should be compared.

“Despite the horrific magnitude of the three men’s deeds, their crimes remain numerically modest and pale in comparison to with the far more cruel French Catholic and ‘laic‘ monstrosities that have reached genocidal proportions across the globe,” Massad writes. “Had the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly lived, however, they would have still needed many more lessons in cruelty and violent intolerance before they could become fully assimilated into true Catholic and laic Frenchness.”

After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, more than a million people marched in Paris with 40 heads of state “in the most striking show of solidarity in the West against the threat of Islamic extremism since the Sept. 11attacks,” according to the New York Times.

The marchers, “people of all races, ages and political stripes swarmed central Paris beneath a bright blue sky, calling for peace and an end to violent extremism.” This in the same city where six months earlier French authorities banned marches demanding an end to Israel’s massacres in Gaza, where nearly 2,200 people were killed by drone strikes, tank and naval shelling, artillery fire, and F16 bombings.

In an farcical piece of irony, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered and presided over the military assault was standing in the first row of world leaders demonstrating their “unity in outrage” during the staged march.

The framing of the Charlie Hebdo narrative as an assault by Islam against Western civilization misrepresents the violence as uniquely Islamic and uniquely evil. Any comparison of the media coverage of mass murderers must recognized that race and ethnicity drive the way those crimes are understood and portrayed. To American and European whites, Islam has always been perceived as a force that needs to be subdued and controlled, usually through violence. It is no surprise that crimes by “Islamists” are depicted by Western media through this lens, in ways that equivalent or more serious crimes by whites are not.

Cancer, Cola, Fries and Lies

Colin Todhunter

Benetton, Nike, Lacoste and a hundred other brand names, the holy scriptures of the shopping mall. Shop till you drop then shop some more. Burger respite provided, courtesy of ‘we clear forests in the Amazon for your delight’ and ‘we bring you more for less’ because ‘taste-free is us’, ‘quality-free is us’ and ‘trade union free is us’.

“Cancer with your cola, sir?” Is there a choice? Perhaps not if you are in the US where certain colas use syrup derived from crops containing genetically modified organisms. But you won’t know it because the GMO industry has spent tens of millions of dollars ensuring that the public remain blissfully ignorant of foods with GMOs. Labelling is out, duplicity is in.

During the 1980s, my hometown was described as the first post-industrial city. It lost much of its industry and it lost it quickly. Unemployment skyrocketed and people were forced to claim welfare. But they had to ‘prove’ they were ‘looking for work’ in order to get their unemployment benefits. Looking for work that no longer existed and had been outsourced abroad. The lies and futility of advanced capitalism.

In the 1960s, the city had undergone a slum clearance programme and had shifted whole neighbourhoods to newly built towns and housing projects beyond the city boundaries. There were already huge tracts of land lying empty as a result. With factories closing down in the 80s, even more land was freed up. Part of this land has now been covered with low density housing and trendy part empty debt-bubble apartment blocks, but large areas have been grassed over and ‘landscaped’ – the trendy euphemism for windswept urban wasteland.

Today, unemployment remains high and people are still being disciplined to look for jobs that have either long disappeared over the horizon to cheap labour economies, have been automated or, in these harsh economic times, are being slashed under the lie of ‘austerity’. Poverty means prosperity and misery equates with happiness. The bankruptcy of thought that says we must mortgage the present for a tomorrow that will never come and hammered home with the time-work discipline mentality of the Industrial Revolution. The devil finds work for idle hands, you know – but not for the criminal idle rich of course.

As if things couldn’t get much worse for those thrown on the scrapheap as their jobs were outsourced under yet another lie – this time ‘efficiency’, just about every aspect of society encourages the individual to indulge in an acquisitive materialism whose message is relentless. The thinking is that ‘you’ – the unemployed, the working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse by the British Establishment on the blood-soaked battlefields of World War I – must aspire to live like a multi-millionaire footballer, even though you never will or can because we threw you overboard years ago. This was never intended by to be a ‘land fit for heroes’ of the working class variety (or for their offspring).

What lost opportunities. Those grassed-over wastelands could have been transformed into arable fields worked by local people to feed local people. What a lost opportunity for people to relearn the skills and cottage industries that industrial capitalism stole from local communities. Just imagine self-sufficient communities and localised economies specialising in developing their own wind and solar power, growing their own uncontaminated food using organic methods, making their own clothes and creating their own buildings.

A return to genuine community using modern technology to make life easier. Clean energy powered public transport, modern telecommunications used for the public good and self-education, rather than just used to bolster consumerism via online shopping or to enhance state control of the population.

Self-sufficient communities, not controlled by, reliant on or paying the price for Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Retail and Big Banking and the destructive meddling and military escapades carried out across the globe on their behalf. Not reliant on those industries that are from Europe to India in the process of colonising the world and stripping away ‘the local’, traditional agriculture, land rights, human rights, dignity and self sufficiency under yet another lie, this time ‘progress’.

And in many of those urban wastelands of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, what we are left with are jobless people who, as Thatcher once encouraged us all to be, became good free market entrepreneurs by turning to the illegal drugs economy to make a living from supplying their wares to dull the misery of the masses.

The outlook is bleak. Many young people in these areas now growing up won’t have a job, a job of any meaningful form at least. They will be following in the footsteps of their fathers who did not have a job. They too will be stigmatised due to no fault of their own. And yet the moribund system’s mantra of endless growth based on consumerism and the need to engage in meaningless forms of work that the system demands necessary remains the Holy Grail, which is implicit within every mind-warp commercial, every politician’s cynical utterance and every highly-paid mainstream media political commentator’s solution for saving the nation.

It is implicit in every bourgeois judgement, innuendo, condemnation and insinuation directed towards a person who does not have a job or does not display the appropriate trappings of conspicuous consumption. To be called a ‘chav’ in Britain is to bear the brunt of such a tirade of negative evaluation. Chav represents a media-fuelled demonisation of sections of the working class who were three decades ago sacrificed on the altar of Margaret Thatcher’s treachery. The ‘undeserving poor’ that since Victorian times have hurt the unscrupulous, hypocritical sensibilities of England’s middle and upper classes who have led and supported more unimaginable butchery on the global battlefields of Empire than any number of working class people who have fallen foul of ‘Middle England’s’ sanctimonious bleatings about decency and morality.

But there is an alternative and it mirrors environmentalist Barry Commoner once stated aims of substituting green energy for fossil and nuclear fuels, substituting electric motors for the internal combustion engine, substituting organic farming for the chemical variety and using more metal, glass, wood and paper – recyclables, renewables and durables – instead of petrochemical products. And it also involves communal ownership of land and capital to serve the public good, rather than elite interests.

If there is to be a ‘saviour of the nation’ (of any nation) then this is where it begins. If there is to be some hope for urban wastelands then this is where it lies. And if there is to be an alternative to capitalism and oligarchy, this is where it is to be found. But as A.L. Morton’s classic text ‘A People’s History of England’ indicates, at no point whatsoever will it be handed on a plate courtesy of the bloodsuckers that are bleeding us all dry.

In the absence of this, what might be the alternative? Perhaps a thousand cities of the damned from blissfully unaware of ‘awareness’ and all sleepwalking to what could already be the genetically programmed Mac-mantra: “Fries with your cola, sir?”

A “Climate Movement Across the Movements”

Patrick Bond

Tunis, Tunisia.

Looming ahead in eight months’ time is another Conference of Polluters, or COP (technically, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). The last twenty did zilch to save us from climate catastrophe. Judging by early rough drafts of the Paris COP21 agreement recently leaked, another UN fiasco is inevitable.

The ‘Coalition Climat21’ strategy meeting for Paris was held in Tunis on March 23-24, just before the World Social Forum. I had a momentary sense this could be a breakthrough gathering, if indeed fusions were now ripe to move local versions of ‘Blockadia’ – i.e. hundreds of courageous physical resistances to CO2 and methane emissions sources – towards a genuine global political project. The diverse climate activists present seemed ready for progressive ideology, analysis, strategy, tactics and alliances. Between 150 and 400 people jammed a university auditorium over the course of the two days, mixing French, English and Arabic.

It was far more promising than the last time people gathered for a European COP, in 2009 at Copenhagen, when the naivety of ‘Seal the Deal’ rhetoric from mainstream climate organisations proved debilitating. That was a narrative akin to drawing lemmings towards – and over – a cliff: first up the hill of raised expectations placed on UN negotiators, before crashing down into a despondency void lasting several years. Recall that leaders of the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China did a backroom deal that sabotaged a binding emissions follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol. In ‘Hopenhagen,’ even phrases like ‘System change not climate change’ were co-opted, as green capital educated by NGO allies agreed that a definition of ‘system’ (e.g. from fossil fuels to nuclear) could be sufficiently malleable to meet their rhetorical needs.

That precedent notwithstanding, the phrase “A climate movement across the movements” used here seemed to justify an urgent unity of diverse climate activists, along with heightened attempts to draw in those who should be using climate in their own specific sectoral work. The two beautiful words ‘Climate Justice’ are on many lips but I suspect the cause of unity may either erase them from the final phraseology or water them down to nebulousness.

Unity – without clarity, responsibility and accountability?

Over the last nine months, since an August gathering in Paris, a great deal of coalition building has occurred in France and indeed across Europe. The proximate goal is to use awareness of the Paris COP21 to generate events around the world in national capitals on both November 28-29^th – just before the summit begins – and on December 12, as it climaxes. There was consensus that later events should be more robust than the first, and that momentum should carry this movement into 2016. (The December 2016 COP22 will be in Morocco.

The initial signs here were upbeat. Christophe Aguiton, one of Attac’s founders, opened the event: “In the room are Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), Climate Action Network (CAN), international unions, the faith community, and the newer actors in the global movement, especially 350.org and Avaaz. We have had a massive New York City march and some other inspiring recent experiences in the Basque country and with the Belgium Climate Express.”

But, he went on, there are some serious problems ahead that must be soberly faced:

* there is no CJ movement in most countries;

* grounded local CJ organisations are lacking;

* we need not just resistances but alternatives; and

* there are some important ideological divisions.

Still, he explained, “We won’t talk content because in the same room, there are some who are moderate, some who are radical – so we will stress mobilisation, because we all agree, without mobilisation we won’t save the climate.” For more than 15 years, I’ve known Aguiton as one of the most persuasive, committed radicals in Europe. And in New York last September, I remember the ‘c’ word being used quite freely, partly prompted by the launch of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. So to me, the tone here suddenly sounded bland.

This unity-seeking-minus-politics was reminiscent of a process four years in South Africa known as ‘C17’, a collection of 17 civil society organisations that did local preparatory work before the UN’s 2011 Durban climate summit, the ‘COP17.’ Actually, fewer than a half-dozen representatives really pitched in throughout, and the big moderate organisations expected to mobilise financial resources, media attention and bodies ultimately did none of these. South Africa’s Big Green groups and trade unions failed to take C17 ownership, to commit resources and to add the institutional muscle needed.

I watched that process fairly closely, and with growing despondency. The first choice for a university counter-summit venue close by the Durban International Convention Centre was found to be unavailable at the last moment, so my Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal became an instant host for the ‘People’s Space.’ Thousands came but the messaging was vapid and virtually no impact was made on the COP or on South Africa’s own reactionary emissions policy. The final rally of 10,000 activists midway through the COP17 gave UN elites and local politicians a legitimating platform. Nor did we use the event to build a South African climate justice movement worthy of the name.

So my own assessment of the ‘state failure, market failure and critic failure’ in Durban strongly emphasised the problem of excessive unity, without ideological clarity, institutional responsibility or political accountability.

At COP21, radicals outside and only moderates left standing inside

Maybe it will be different in France, because their movements are mobilising impressively, with projects like November 27-29 mass actions aimed at municipalities; a Brussels-Paris activist train; a ‘run for life’ with 1000 people running 4km each from northern Sweden to Paris; the ‘Alternatiba’ alternatives project with 200 participating villages from the Basque country up to Brussels which will culminate on September 26-27; and getting warmed up, on May 30-31, an anticipated 1000 local climate initiatives around the country.

Yet the local context sounds as difficult in 2015 as it was in South Africa in 2011. As Malika Peyraut from Friends of the Earth-France pointed out, national climate policy is “inconsistent and unambitious” and the country’s politics are increasingly chaotic, what with the rise of the far right to 25% support in municipal elections. Worse, French society will be distracted by regional elections from December 6-12, and with national elections in 2017, “there is a high risk of co-optation,” she warned.

No politicians should have their faces near these mobilisations, suggested Mariana Paoli of Christian Aid (reporting from a working group), as COP21 protesters needed to avoid the celebrity-chasing character of the big New York march. Al Gore’s name came up as one whose own corporate messaging was out of tune. But Avaaz’s Iain Keith asked, “Hypothetically, what if the president of Vanuatu came to the march – should we refuse him?” Vanuatu is probably the first nation that will sink beneath the waves, and the recent Cyclone Pam catastrophe made this a twister question. Without a real answer, Paoli replied: “What we are trying to avoid is politicians capturing the successes of movement mobilisation.”

Behind that excellent principle lies a practical reality: there are noreliable state allies of climate justice at present and indeed there really are no high-profile progressives working within the COPs. It’s a huge problem for UN reformers because it leaves them without a policy jam-maker inside to accompany activist tree-shaking outside. The UN head of the COP process is an oft-compromised carbon trader, Christiana Figueres. Although once there were heroic delegates badgering the COP process, they are all gone now:

* Lumumba Di-Aping led the G77 countries at the Copenhagen COP15 – where in a dramatic accusation aimed at the Global North, he named climate a coming holocaust requiring millions of coffins for Africa – and so was lauded outside and despised inside, but then was redeployed to constructing the new state of South Sudan;

* President Mohamed Nasheed from the Maldives – also a high-profile critic at Copenhagen – was first a victim of US State Department’s cables (revealed by Wikileaks) which documented how his government agreed to a February 2010 $50 million bribe to support the Copenhagen Accord (just as Washington and the EU agreed that the “Alliance of Small Island States countries ‘could be our best allies’ given their need for financing”) and was then couped by rightwingers in 2012 and, earlier this month, was illegitimately jailed for a dozen years;

* Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon was booted from his country’s delegation after the 2010 Cancun COP16, where, solo, he had bravely tried to block the awful deal there, and not even the Latin American governments most hated by Washington – Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua – supported him thanks to Northern bullying;

* in any case a jungle road-building controversy (TIPNIS) soon divided Evo Morales’ supporters, and in 2013 the COP’s progressive leadership void grew wide after the death of Hugo Chavez and the battle by Rafael Correa against green-indigenous-feminist critics for his decision that year to drill for oil in the Yasuni Amazon (after having once proposed an innovative climate debt downpayment to avoid its extraction); and

* Filippino Climate Commissioner Yeb Saño had a dramatic 2013 role in Warsaw condemning COP19 inaction after his hometown was demolished by Super Typhoon Haiyan, but he was evicted by a more conservative environment ministry (apparently under Washington’s thumb) just before the Lima COP in 2014.

If you are serious about climate justice, the message from these COP experiences is unmistakeable: going inside is suicide.

Framing for Failure

It is for this reason that the original protest narrative suggestions that CAN’s Mark Raven proposed here were generally seen as too reformist. Acknowledging the obvious – “People losing faith in the broken system, corporations sabotaging change” and “We need a just transition” – his network then offered these as favoured headline memes: “Showdown in 2015 leads to a vision of just transition to fossil-free world” and “Paris is where the world decides to end fossil fuel age.”

Yet with no real prospects of reform, the more militant activists were dissatisfied. Nnimmo Bassey from Oilwatch International was adamant, “We need not merely a just transition, but an immediate transition: keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sands in the land and the fracking shale gas under the grass.” That, after all, is what grassroots activists are mobilising for.

Added Nicola Bullard: “This narrative is too optimistic especially in terms of what will surely be seen as a failed COP21.” Bullard was a core Focus on the Global South activist in the 2007 Bali COP13 when Climate Justice Now! was formed based on five principles:

* reduced consumption;

* huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation;

* leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy;

* rights-based resource conservation that enforces indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and

* sustainable family farming, fishing and peoples’ food sovereignty.

Just as valid today, these principles were further fleshed out at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia, to include emissions cut targets – 45% below 1990 levels in the advanced capitalist economies by 2020 – plus a climate tribunal and the decommissioning of destructive carbon markets which have proven incapable of fair, rational and non-corrupt trading. Dating to well before the CJN! split from CAN in Bali, that latter fantasy – letting bankers determine the fate of the planet by privatising the air – remains one of the main dividing lines between the two ideologies: climate justice or climate action.

New York as a positive example

A unity project is by no means impossible, and these are extremely talented organisers. The world was left with the impression of vibrant climate mobilisation in far more difficult conditions last September 21, after all. Cindi Weisner from Grassroots Global Justice Alliance reflected on the New York march, reminding of how broad-front building entailed surprising trust emerging between groups – leftists at the base, big unions, Big Green – whose leaders in prior years would not have even greeted each other.

From Avaaz, Keith reminded us of the impressive New York numbers: 400,000 people on the streets including 50,000 students; 1574 organisations involved including 80 unions; another 300,000 people at 2650 events around the world; three tweets/second and 8.8 million FB impressions with 700,000 likes/shares. The next day’s Flood Wall Street action was surely the most dynamic moment, what with the financial core of fossil capitalism under the spotlight of several thousand protesters.

But with corporate and UN summits following the big New York march and without escalation afterwards, the elites’ spin was dominant and ridiculously misleading. Barack Obama told the heads of state who gathered two days later: “Our citizens keep marching. We have to answer the call.” Needless to say the UN summit’s answer was null and void from the standpoint of respecting a minimal scientific insistence on emissions cuts.

The necessity of a radical narrative

Since the same will occur in Paris, concrete actions against the emitters themselves were suggested, including more projects like the Dutch ‘Climate Games’ which saw a coal line and port supply chain disrupted last year. There are coming protests over coal in Germany’s Rhineland and we will likely see direct actions at Paris events such as Solution 21, a corporate ‘false solutions’ event where geoengineering, Carbon Capture and Storage, and carbon trading will be promoted.

Likewise, ActionAid’s Teresa Anderson reported back from a Narrative Working Group on lessons from Copenhagen: “Don’t tell a lie that Paris will fix the climate. People were arrested in Copenhagen for this lie. No unrealistic expectations – but we need to give people hope that there is a purpose to the mobilisation.”

Most important, she reminded, “There is Global North historical responsibility, and those who are most vulnerable have done the least to cause the problem.” This is vital because in Durban, UN delegates began the process of ending the “common but differentiated responsibility” clause. As a result, finding ways to ensure climate “loss & damage” invoices are both issued and paid is more difficult. The UN’s Green Climate Fund is a decisive write-off in that respect, with nowhere near the $100 billion annually promised for 2020 and beyond by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Most important, said Anderson, given the tendency of Third World nationalists to posture on this point, “Elites in both North and South are to blame, so it’s not a matter of pure geographical injustice. It’s the economic system that is driving climate change.” Looking at more optimistic messaging, she concluded the report-back: “Powerful positive actions are in play. We are life – fossil fuels are death. Paris is a moment to build movements, to show we are powerful and will fight into 2016 and beyond to solve the climate crisis. It takes roots to weather the storm ahead.”

Responding, said former Bolivian negotiator Solon (now Bangkok-based director of Focus on the Global South), “I think we need a clearer narrative: let’s stop an agreement that’s going to burn the climate. We already know that agreement exists. If China peaks emissions only by 2030 or if we accept Obama’s offer to China, we all burn. The Paris agreement will be worse than the draft we’ve seen. The point is not to put pressure for something better. It’s to stop a bad deal. We are against carbon markets, geoengineering and the emissions targets.”

But the clearest message came from veteran strategist Pat Mooney of the research network called the etc group, describing to the mass meeting what he wanted to see in Paris: “It should start like New York and end like Seattle. Shut the thing down.”

Back in 2009, just weeks before he died, this was what Dennis Brutus – the mentor of so many South African and international progressives – also advised: “Seattle Copenhagen!” The Paris Conference of Polluters also needs that kind of shock doctrine, so that from an activist cyclone a much clearer path can emerge towards climate justice in the months and years ahead.

Humanitarians for War on Syria

Rick Sterling

A massive campaign in support of foreign intervention against Syria is underway. The goal is to prepare the public for a “No Fly Zone” enforced by US and other military powers. This is how the invasion of Iraq began. This is how the public was prepared for the US/NATO air attack on Libya.

The results of western ‘regime change’ in Iraq and Libya have been disastrous. Both actions have dramatically reduced the security, health, education and living standards of the populations, created anarchy and mayhem, and resulted in the explosion of sectarianism and violence in the region. Now the Western/NATO/Israeli and Gulf powers, supported by major intervention-inclined humanitarian organizations, want to do the same in Syria. Is this positive or a repeat of past disasters?

Who are the Humanitarian Interventionists?

Major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the campaign include Avaaz, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), “White Helmets” also known as “Syria Civil Defence, “The Syria Campaign” , Amnesty International etc.. These campaigns are well funded and in accord with the efforts of John McCain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others who are explicit in wanting “regime change” in Syria. Turkey continues to press for the No Fly Zone as the US and Turkey launch another round of training “moderate rebels” at bases in Turkey.

Today March 30, 2015 Avaaz is ramping up its campaign trying to reach 1 million people signing a petition for a “Save Zone” in Syria.

“Life Saving” No Fly Zone?

Avaaz organizer John Tye explained the rationale for the Syria No Fly Zone petition in a lengthy letter. He argues that a No Fly Zone (NFZ) will “save lives” and help “stop the carnage”. In sharp contrast, here is what General Carter Ham, the head of AFRICOM when the ‘no-fly zone’ over Libya was enforced, said on “Face the Nation”

“I worry sometimes that, when people say “impose a no-fly zone,” there is this almost antiseptic view that this is an easily accomplished military task. It’s extraordinarily difficult. Having overseen imposing a no-fly zone in Libya, a force that is vastly inferior in air forces and air defenses to that which exists in Syria, it’s a pretty high-risk operation… It first entails killing a lot of people and destroying the Syrian air defenses and those people who are manning those systems. And then it entails destroying the Syrian air force, preferably on the ground, in the air if necessary. This is a violent combat action that results in lots of casualties and increased risk to our own personnel.”

Recent History of No Fly Zone

The most recent No Fly Zone was that imposed on Libya in March 2011. It was authorized by the UN Security Council after a wave of media reports claiming that Libya was using mercenaries, Libyan troops were engaging in widespread violence and Viagra fueled rape, and finally that the city of Benghazi (population 700,000) were facing massacre and possible ‘genocide’.

Alarming press reports were issued by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, etc.. Avaaz launched an online “Libya No-Fly Zone” petition. These groups rallied public opinion which contributed to the UN Security Council resolution granting USA and NATO right to take over Libyan airspace. That led to a bombing campaign of nearly 10,000 attack sorties over the next eight months, the murder of Qaddafi, deaths of about 30 thousand, downfall of the government and installation of the outside appointed National Transition Council.

Since then there has been an explosion of violence, racism, sectarianism, and chaos. Libyans have experienced a huge decline in security and standards of living. The No Fly Zone which was supposed to “prevent a massacre” has led to vastly greater violence and chaos in Libya and beyond. Fighters and weapons flooded from Libya to Turkey and into Syria, expenses paid by Qatar.

As for the early reports about mercenaries, rape, viagra and looming massacre ….. these have been exposed as false. The mercenaries were fighting on the side of the “rebels”. The massacres were those that followed the NATO destruction. The entire “viagra” story was a fraud.

The details are documented in Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa by Maximillian Forte and Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya by Horace Campbell. Forte devotes one entire chapter to detailing the false manipulation of public opinion by would-be humanitarian organizations.

Avaaz Ignore Results from Libya

Despite writing the long letter in response to specific questions including Libya, Avaaz organizer John Tye avoids any reference to their “Libya No Fly Zone” campaign and the aftermath. This is perhaps understandable but raises questions about sincerity and motivation. Are many members of the public being unwittingly duped into joining the campaign?

Part 2 of this article will examine: What is the evidence of war crimes in Syria? Are the humanitarian interventionists R2P (right to protect) or R4W (responsible for war)?