Voices for Peace E-Book

T. J. Coles

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The United States' military doctrine, as proclaimed by its Department of Defense, is to attain 'full-spectrum dominance… in the air, land, maritime and space domains and information environment… without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.' This is an agenda for global conquest – for an ever-expanding US empire. As America prepares for conflict with Russia and China, wars continue in the Middle East and North Africa, tens of millions are exiled from their homes whilst many more face famine. But there is not only hope for change in the air, there is active resistance. People all over the world are challenging the status quo by taking nonviolent action. Voices for Peace features some of the world's leading thinkers, journalists and activists, offering insight, inspiration and solutions to the world's most critical problems: nuclear war, environmental destruction and refugee flows. In the wealth of material presented here, Kathy Kelly talks about the Afghan Peace Volunteers and Standing Rock protesters in the USA, calling for global unity. Bruce K. Gagnon's piece on space weapons discusses South Korean activists' opposition to American weapons in their country. Brian Terrell challenges the legality of drone warfare and outlines the grassroots links being forged between US and Russian citizens. Noam Chomsky discusses US policies towards Russia and Syria, as well as South America, trade, ISIS and Ukraine. John Pilger talks about the Trump-Obama naval build-up around China and exposes Britain's 'deep state' connections to the Manchester terror attack. Former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney analyses the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the deep state in recent US history. Ilan Pappé offers an exclusive analysis of Israel's actions to ethnically cleanse Israel of Palestinians. Finally, Robin Ramsay exposes the unconditional support given to the USA by successive UK governments. Seeking to inform and educate, this penetrating anthology is edited and introduced by author T. J. Coles, who gives a broader framework and context to the individual articles.

Leseprobe

VOICES FOR PEACE

WAR, RESISTANCE AND AMERICA’S QUEST FOR FULL-SPECTRUM DOMINANCE

EDITED BY T.J. COLES

Clairview Books Ltd.,

Russet, Sandy Lane,

West Hoathly,

W. Sussex RH19 4QQ

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Clairview Books

A longer version of this book was published as an ebook by the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research in 2015. This revised edition contains some additional and updated material

© 2017 to T. J. Coles for selection and editorial matter and to the individual authors for their contributions

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The rights of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Print book ISBN 978 1 905570 89 8

Ebook ISBN 978 1 905570 90 4

Cover by Morgan Creative featuring spray can © Fxmdk 73 and OK Bird © Dreamstime.com

Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Contents

Introduction: Bad News, Good News

T. J. Coles

The Coming War

John Pilger

Peace of the Graveyard

Noam Chomsky

Reality and the US-made Famine in Yemen

Kathy Kelly

Preparing for War with Russia and China: The US Quest for Global Domination Depends on Space Technology

Bruce K. Gagnon

A Visit to Russia for ‘Life Extension’ of the Planet: NATO, Poland and Operation Anakonda

Brian Terrell

Where to Turn: War and Peace in Afghanistan and Standing Rock

Kathy Kelly

Redefining ‘Imminent’: How the US Department of Justice Makes Murder Respectable, Kills the Innocent and Jails their Defenders

Brian Terrell

America – and why Britain sucks up to it

Robin Ramsay

The Enemy is Not Trump, it is Ourselves

John Pilger

Historical Perspective of the 2014 Gaza Massacre

Ilan Pappé

Terror in Britain: What did the Prime Minister Know?

John Pilger

‘Je ne sais pas qui je suis’: Making Sense of Tragedies like the Charlie Hebdo Incident When the Government Narrative Doesn’t Make Sense

Cynthia McKinney

About the Contributors

Introduction: Bad News, Good News

This book coincides with three commemorations.

The first is the 50th year of Israel's conquest of the remaining Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza) in June 1967, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai. (Israel abandoned the Sinai in 1982.) The second is the centenary of the Balfour Declaration: the statement by a British foreign secretary (Arthur Balfour) promising a homeland for both Arabs and Jews. The third is the 70th anniversary of Israel's founding in 1948, at the expense of 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their homes. The creation of the State of Israel also created the current refugee crisis for stateless Palestinians, who now number 5 million.1

Israel-Palestine is a symbol of deeper crises in the Middle East. It symbolizes the success of Euro-American propaganda systems in distorting facts and hiding truths from members of the public. A survey conducted by IRmep and Google Consumer Surveys suggests that most Americans (49.2% to 39.8%) think that Palestinians occupy Israel, when the facts are the opposite. More broadly, media distortions and omissions mean that few Westerners realize the extent to which Euro-American bombing has decimated the Middle East and North Africa.2

The Israeli occupation of Palestine also symbolizes the region-wide use of proxies for short-term goals. Israel helped the Islamist political group Hamas in the 1980s as a weapon against the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, which accepted the UN's terms for peace in 1988-89. Hamas became a serious political force after the Israeli settler withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the subsequent Israeli military imprisonment of Gaza. Today, few Westerners are aware that many of the terrorists fuelling the fires in the region – particularly the Free Syrian Army and its offshoots – have been organized and trained by the US and its partners, especially the UK. The UN recently reported that Israel was assisting Al-Nusra fighters in Syria, who are battling Israel's enemy, Bashar al-Assad. The trouble is that Al-Nusra (which changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) is another name for Al-Qaeda.3

The conflict also symbolizes the geostrategic tensions which could very plausibly ignite into nuclear war and end the world.

In 2007, as part of Operation Orchard, Israel attacked an alleged nuclear reactor in Syria. A British minister quoted in The Spectator said, ‘If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic’. Nobody knows what happened, but it is likely that the US raised its nuclear threat level as a warning to Russia not to retaliate against Israeli air strikes against their regional ally, Syria. Israel possesses nuclear weapons, as does its enemy Pakistan, which is also an enemy of the nuclear-armed India. Another official Israeli enemy, Saudi Arabia, has announced plans to develop nuclear weapons in an alleged defence against Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons and is not developing them, despite what lying political leaders allied to the US keep claiming.4

As millions of Palestinian refugees continue to live in the miserable camps of Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere, millions more are trapped in the massive US-Israeli-run prison complexes called Gaza and West Bank. They endure periodic massacres like Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge. The new ultra-right US administration has put paid to any possibility of Israel adhering to international law and the ultra-right Netanyahu government in Israel is committed to further colonization of Palestinian land.5

Trump in the White House

Continuing with the threat of nuclear apocalypse:

Businessman Donald Trump wrote about his desire to attack North Korea as early as the year 2000 in his book The America We Deserve. Calling North Korea a rogue state, Trump says that although ‘China is our biggest long-term challenge ... the biggest [short-term] menace is North Korea’. Trump criticizes Bill Clinton's $4bn aid programme, which allowed North Korea to develop US-supplied fossil fuels and more importantly provided food for the starving population. Offering no evidence, Trump says: ‘Just about anywhere America is threatened – by terrorists, by the spread of nuclear weapons and missile technology, you name it – we can count on the folks in Pyongyang to have a hand in it’ (pp. 125-132). During his campaign and after North Korea falsely claimed to have detonated a hydrogen bomb, presidential candidate Trump said that as President he would use China as a proxy to deal with North Korea. Exactly what this would entail, Trump did not say. But as both China and allegedly North Korea have nuclear weapons (as does the US and North Korea's next-door neighbour, Russia), any escalation could be fatal. China, says Trump, holds ‘total control over North Korea ... [a]nd China should solve that problem. And if they don’t solve the problem, we should make trade very difficult for China’.6

By 2007, the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute reckoned that North Korea was looking to unify with South Korea, not remain isolated as international media would have us believe. In 2015, the US Director of National Intelligence stated that one of North Korea's objectives in claiming to possess nuclear weapons and develop warheads is deterrence: to deter attacks from the US, South Korea and China. ‘We have long assessed that Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities are intended for deterrence, international prestige, and coercive diplomacy’.7

Following these events: in its 70th anniversary edition, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cautioned that the hands of the Doomsday Clock moved from three- to two-and-a-half-minutes to midnight. The Bulletin was founded by conscientious scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which ultimately brought us nuclear weapons and a giant leap closer to apocalypse. Every year, specialists move the hands back or forth, depending on how close they think we are to terminal danger. Midnight symbolizes the end.

‘Over the course of 2016’, says the Bulletin, ‘the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity's most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change’. It identifies two main culprits: The United States and Russia. Together, the report continues, these nations ‘possess more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons’. Both countries have been facing off ‘in a variety of theaters, from Syria to Ukraine to the borders of NATO’. In addition, both are modernizing their nuclear weapons. America is designing small nukes for deployment in war fighting. ‘[S]erious arms control negotiations were nowhere to be seen.’8

Turning to the second main threat to survival, climate change: America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration states: ‘Two key climate change indicators – global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent – have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016’. Under Obama, the US agreed to attend a meagre climate conference in Paris (COP21). Citing Reuters, a Guardian headline reads: ‘Trump seek[s] quickest way to end Paris climate agreement’. In 2016, 65 million people, half of whom children, were – and remain – displaced because of war, flooding, drought, and famine. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that every 60 seconds, 24 persons are displaced.9

Turning to Western politics:

In its 2016 /17 report on the state of the world, Amnesty International notes that ‘[f]or millions, 2016 was a year of unrelenting misery and fear’. This was symbolized by the election – in the most powerful and influential nation in history – of a man who ‘frequently made deeply divisive statements marked by misogyny and xenophobia, and pledged to roll back established civil liberties and introduce policies which would be profoundly inimical to human rights’. The report goes on to say that President Trump's ‘poisonous campaign rhetoric exemplifies a global trend towards angrier and more divisive polities’. Yet, the report also notes that the events of 2016 follow a trend. Trump's predecessor, President Obama, ‘leaves a legacy that includes many grievous failures to uphold human rights, not least the expansion of the CIA's secretive campaign of drone strikes and the development of a gargantuan mass surveillance machine’.10

Meanwhile, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch began his 2017 address warning of the ‘cauldron of discontent’ facing populations across the world. By appealing to populism, ‘certain politicians are flourishing and even gaining power by portraying rights as protecting only the terrorist suspect or the asylum seeker at the expense of the safety, economic welfare, and cultural preferences of the presumed majority’. Roth concludes that this current generation of far-right populists ‘scapegoat refugees, immigrant communities, and minorities. Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia are on the rise.’11

Oxfam reports that neoliberal economic policies have created a global wealth divide in which just eight individuals own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion. Oxfam notes that, ‘[f]rom Brexit to the success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics, there are increasing signs that more and more people in rich countries are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo. Why would they’, asks Oxfam, ‘when experience suggests that what it delivers is wage stagnation, insecure jobs and a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots?’ Taking simple steps such as reductions in military spending and taxing the rich would have lifted 700 million people out of poverty over a 20-year period, the report concludes.12

The good news is that while rights are in decline, dedicated activists are slowing the acceleration.

In 2016, the Afghan Peace Volunteers and Borderfree Street Kids organization visited the Rehabilitation Services for the Blind in Afghanistan (Rayaab). ‘They brought MP3 players as gifts to 50 visually impaired students’, writes activist Dr Hakim. ‘The students will use the MP3 players to listen to recorded school lessons and educational programs.’ Rayaab is led by Mahdi Salami and his wife Banafsha, ‘who are themselves visually impaired’.13

At the local level in Exeter (UK), members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) organized a sponsored walk to raise money for a kindergarten in Umm al-Kheir. The village is in the Palestinian West Bank, which has been occupied illegally by Israel since 1967. ‘The villagers are regularly attacked’ by Israeli colonizers, says the PSC website. The money raised, £4000, ‘will pay for teachers’ salaries for a year, equipment and repairs to the kindergarten building. Education is regarded as particularly important by the villagers’, the group explains, ‘because the settlers and the Israeli army are making it impossible for the villagers to make a living from their traditional employment as herders, so the children will have to train for other work’.14

Turning to America, No More Deaths (No Mas Muertes) is an organization dedicated to ending the deaths and killings of refugees and migrants, including women and children, who attempt to enter the highly-guarded US border with Mexico. As well as fleeing poverty in the latter, many escape gang violence in Guatemala and death squads in Honduras. No More Deaths recently held an art auction in New York to raise money for their aid efforts, which include raising awareness about refugee and migrant rights and providing food and water to exhausted asylum seekers.15

Meanwhile in Europe, Refugee Rescue, a team of volunteers, risks lives to save lives. As hundreds of thousands of men, women and children attempt to cross the Mediterranean to escape war, poverty and climate change, the British government – ignoring its obligations under international law – engages in what it calls ‘counter-refugee’ operations. But Refugee Rescue is having none of it. The organization was ‘born in response to the mass displacement of people fleeing war, [including] families who are forced to risk their lives to get to safer lands ... We could not look the other way.’16

The above is a tiny, scattered selection from a vast array of individuals and groups working for peace, justice and rights. With very, very few exceptions they are excluded from mainstream media because direct action towards the betterment of society, outside the authorized framework of parliamentary democracy, is extremely dangerous to governing elites. From an elite perspective, it is better to portray the world as relentlessly cruel and people as wholly self-interested, as the media do.

Syria: An Exercise in Denial

One of the most important things we can do is educate ourselves and our colleagues about the nature of war and American imperialism. Russia and China often respond to US expansion and aggression, not act aggressively in a political vacuum, as the media would have it. They surely would, had they the power. But the fact is that at this moment in history, America has the power and is seeking to dominate the world accordingly. Today, Syria is at the heart of America's efforts to conquer the Middle East. The West is largely responsible for the carnage in Syria, and because of a media blackout and absence of public figures willing to speak to the facts, very few Westerners know about it.

The BBC's coverage of the US missile attack in early 2017 is a typical example of how Western media operate: how they frame the stories outside any reference to international law; as if the terrorists trying to overthrow Assad are not being trained and organized by the West; how the facts become part of an ideological battle between the inherently moral West and inherently evil East; how it is up to America to lead the world, as if no other countries or the UN matter; and as if civilians are not destroyed by US and British bombs.

In April 2017, chemical weapons were allegedly used to kill civilians in Idlib province. Western media immediately blamed the Russian-backed Assad government, even though Western-backed terrorists possess chemical weapons. Supposedly in response, the Trump administration fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at an air base in Syria, killing seven Syrians, including four children. We only have Russia's figures to go on because the West will not investigate its own war crimes. ‘Washington has entered the war against the Assad regime’, said BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys. ‘It's understood that there were Russians at [the Syrian] airfield.’ This means that although America warned Moscow of the impending attack, it was willing to escalate a proxy war with a rival which has nuclear weapons. The Kremlin warned of ‘negative consequences’ to America's bombing. BBC coverage avoided any mention of nuclear tensions between Russia and the US.17

Humphrys interviewed James Jeffrey, the former US Ambassador to Iraq and Deputy National Security Advisor to George W. Bush. Jeffrey's attitude gives us some insight into the imperial mentality of the US policymaking elite. Jeffrey said that Assad was intent on ‘conquering’ Syria: that is, intent on conquering his own territory. By implication, America owns Syria and by defeating the terrorists, Assad is stealing it from the USA. This imperial mentality is standard among the powerful. In response to America's bombing, Humphrys told Jeffrey to expect a ‘profound international reaction’, particularly from Russia. Jeffrey replied: ‘Who cares?’ Who cares if we escalate war to the point of nuclear exchange?18