The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a
reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is
embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as
flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality
terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making
elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind
of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
"To
initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in
1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme
international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Had
the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not
have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated
their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would
be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall
to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the
bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like
the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the
precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and
its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In
2011, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more
than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were
used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross
identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children
killed] were under the age of ten".
The public sodomising of
the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted
by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (psychopath), with the words: "We
came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country,
was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide"
against his own people. "We knew... that if we waited one more day,"
said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could
suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and
stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication
of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They
told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in
Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark
for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian
intervention".
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS,
many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering
shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the
city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama,
David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi's true
crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to
stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The
petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously
planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold,
establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor
countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the
very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter" Africa
and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".
Following
Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama,
wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion from Libya's Central
Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African
Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency".
The
"humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western
liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were
committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist
province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war
crimes [sic], claimed that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged
between 14 and 59" might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair
evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The
West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose
criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin
Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With
the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins,
along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station,
international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of
the "holocaust". The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went
home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily
denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". A year
later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final
count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both
sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The
"holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
Behind
the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely
independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and
economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major
manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the
expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had
begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav
provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at
Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a
secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia
was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling
Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost
defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999
Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were
subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord
included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last
day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a
country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the
implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all
government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment
followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the
precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya,
and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership
of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the
following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been
invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements
suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their
economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a
crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis
estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was
deployed.
"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat
mission in Afghanistan is over." These were opening words of Obama's
2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000
military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite
assignment. "The longest war in American history is coming to a
responsible conclusion," said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed
in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The
majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time
as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic
crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book 'The Grand
Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives', Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the
present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate
the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because "the pursuit
of power is not a goal that commands popular passion... Democracy is
inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward
Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping
democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National
Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to
Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In
the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country
on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic
regime in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the
abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for
women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000
political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The
new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage
was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the
gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students
were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a
third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. "Every girl,"
recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, "could go to high school and
university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used
to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday
and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the
mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools.
We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people
the West supported."
The PDPA government was backed by the
Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance
later admitted, "there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the
revolution]". Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements
throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to
succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the
"threat of a promising example".
On July 3,
1979, the White
House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups
known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year
in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of
Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the
US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger
interests... would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government],
despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic
reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.
The
mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They
included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars
in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and
throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a
"freedom fighter".
Such fanatics might have remained in their
tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to
promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular
political liberation and "destabilise" the Soviet Union, creating, as he
wrote in his autobiography, "a few stirred up Muslims". His grand plan
coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia
ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's
intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the
world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin
Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban
and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New
York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This
was called "Operation Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when
the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had
gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was hanged from a
streetlight by the Taliban.
The "blowback" of Operation
Cyclone and its "few stirred up Muslims" was September 11, 2001.
Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men,
women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from
Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer's message
was and remains: "You are with us or against us."
The common
thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American
invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and
"collateral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported
from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet
only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the
greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror
marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the
air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own
ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world's greatest single
campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at
weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama's victims. According to
the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list"
presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He
then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and
who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a
pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and
festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a
faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".
"For goose-steppers,"
wrote the historian Norman Pollack, "substitute the seemingly more
innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic
leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and
executing assassination, smiling all the while."
Uniting
fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American
exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking
declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian
Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl
Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This
sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains
unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally
unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as
enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I
grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a
distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed
most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million
soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were
400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that
cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the "tragedy" of
American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places - just as
the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's
violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an
Oscar this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a
licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a
"patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its
opening days".
There are no heroic movies about America's
embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain)
went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and
were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring
to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and
most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with
Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the
US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun
was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space
programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern
Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a
Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for
the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and
its "new wave" hailed by the enforcer as "nationalists".
This
reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5
billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were
neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include
Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia"
and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the political
left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup
government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy
Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On
February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA
to give us highly precise modern weaponry". If he succeeds, it will be
seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken
up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe - with the
exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi
invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent
Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about
European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She
referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism".
It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D.
Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and co-founder of the extreme right
wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor
to Dick Cheney.
Nuland's coup did not go to plan. Nato was
prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval
base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally
annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted overwhelmingly to
return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was
voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At
the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population
in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi
militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege
cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off
electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and
pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into
Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the
violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The Nato commander, General
Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley
Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were
"massing". In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These
Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the
population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's
ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most
are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their
homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and
establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on
them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On
May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the
trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector
leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our
national history". In the American and British media, this was reported
as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists"
(neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a
referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried
the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the
fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall
Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked
by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its
"restraint".
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their
aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie
that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military
commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the
very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news
conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the
regular units of the Russian Army". There were "individual citizens"
who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian
invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign
Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.
On
February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma,
introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev
regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed
were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been
exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of
a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to
the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity
of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president
as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter.
Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative
journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No
European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to
dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but
the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's
media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up
this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well
established... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war
three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need
to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to
facts or reason."
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor
said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of
psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with
some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign
calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people
psychologically for the attack... In the propaganda system of the Hitler
State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important
weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in
effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline.
"And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of
war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was
fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and
advised his readers that "America has the best kit".
In 2003,
Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the
slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell
documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and
biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still
trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian,
Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the
next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."
The outbursts -
or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not
untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a
Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The
Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page
advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the
Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain".
This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its
F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with
its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in
military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The
rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want
its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former
senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas
"investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want
Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the
board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The
manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want
Ukraine's rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine's
mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and
exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice
melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and
Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris
Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His
successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that
is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear.
It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never
to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements
that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most
important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our
humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is
assured, and a holocaust beckons.
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