REAL NEWS IRISH BLOG CHRIS HEDGES SYRIA OBAMA

People of the World are Fighting Back

What the deluded Americans do not seem to realize is that they are on their own. The only entities willing to support their aggression on Syria is Saudi Arabia and Israel.

By Finian CunninghamAugust 31, 2013 "Information Clearing House -  The United States of America stands exposed in the eyes of the entire world as the number-one terrorist threat to the future of humanity. Many have known this fact already, but now it is universally clear.

As the US prepares to launch an overt war on Syria (the covert war has been raging for 30 months), the vast majority of humanity can finally see through all its decades of pretense and conceit as the world’s model of democracy and international law. And what they see is the ugly opposite. The US is a terrorist state that holds international law, democracy and human rights in utter contempt. It is ready, as it always has been, to kill countless civilians for its selfish political ambitions. That is the conventional definition of “terrorism”.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad made a profound point recently when he said that his country has faced aggression for more than two years, but only now is the real enemy revealing itself - the US and its minions. But the US terrorist state is not just being called out over Syria. It is being revealed as the enemy to the entire world.

From past wars in the Caribbean, Central America, Philippines, Vietnam and Indochina, through coups and covert ops in Iran, Iraq, Africa, to recent killing fields in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, the historical picture is now complete. All these conflicts and many more - too many to mention here - integrate into one indisputable truth. The US is the world’s biggest terror state. If it is not dealt with definitely, then the future of the world is in peril more than ever.

In previous crimes of aggression, the US ruling elite could invoke the spurious cover of “a coalition of the willing”, or the abused authority of the United Nations or NATO. It was able to do that through deployment of lies, fabrications and a supine mass media that would lend credibility to the mendacity. Now, thanks to alternative, critical media and instant global communications, the American lies don’t work any longer. In an instant, they are exposed; just like the attempt in the last few hours of US Secretary of State John to frame up Syria over alleged chemical weapons use.

The New York Times, BBC and the usual Western media mouthpieces for imperialist propaganda dutifully facilitated Kerry and his US state terrorism with bombastic, important-sounding headlines: “Kerry lays out evidence against Syria”. There was hardly a critical question raised, even though there are grounds for dozens such questions. Years ago, that kind of herd-think might have been enough to buy the US warmongers enough time to launch a war - but not any more. Within minutes of Kerry’s supposedly definitive condemnation, statements, articles, tweets and blogs were pulling the charade asunder, showing that apart from Western-media-amplified bombast, Kerry was not saying anything of value. It was just another risible repetition of earlier hyperbole and empty rhetoric. Or in short, lies.

The people of the world have reached a critical mass of intolerance towards the rogue terror states of the US, Britain, France, Israel and a few other accomplices. We have watched their relentless mass murder and exploitation of fellow humans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We have witnessed how this tiny group of state terrorists imposes on the vast majority of humanity their vile criminality and in the process then insult us with grotesque lies and justifications. We have seen how these rogue states have stolen land, poisoned people’s water, burnt their crops, dispossessed their homes, assassinated families with aerial drones and ground drones in the form of death squads. They have committed all these shocking crimes with lies and impunity to the point where now these state terrorists are operating in more than one country simultaneously in a permanent state of relentless war, pushing the very future of humanity to the brink.

However, despite this lawlessness and gangsterism, the people of the world are fighting back.

This week the British parliament voted against the London government’s arrogance to provide its usual criminal special relationship to the Americans. In the execution of past war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - to mention a few - Washington could rely on the trusty British imperialists to give a veneer of “coalition of the willing”. British premier David Cameron’s plans to repeat the criminality by backing Washington’s plans to bomb Syria were dealt a crushing blow by the British parliament voting against any such military action. Cameron was forced to withdraw. The vote in the British parliament is not so much a sign of ethics among Britain’s political class. It is
more a reflection of the global awakening among ordinary citizens that this insane state terrorism must stop.

The French government has also backed off earlier bellicose bravado, with French President Francois Hollande belatedly calling for a “peaceful, political solution” over the Syrian crisis. Even Washington’s reliable Canadian puppet Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that his country will not be getting involved military in Syria. It is also reported that 10 members of the NATO alliance - one-third of the total - are not willing to support American strikes. This latter grouping comprises the usual minions of the US. And we haven’t even yet acknowledged the more strident opponents, such as Russia, China, Iran and the majority of nations elsewhere in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The people of the world have had it with elite Western rulers acting as terrorists who are holding humanity to ransom. The rulers are presiding not only over military terrorism. They are inflicting economic, social and ecological terrorism with their bankrupt capitalist smash-and-grab system. That system has reached the point of meltdown and that is why we are being pushed into relentless wars - in order for the rulers and their politician puppets to corner the remaining resources. The ultimate solution to end the wars is for the people to overthrow the economic system that US and Western elite rulers preside over. The insane criminality of the US rulers over Syria is exposing this historic challenge facing humanity.

After the British parliamentary setback the US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said: “Our approach is to continue to find an international coalition that will act together. It is the goal of President Obama and our government... whatever decision is taken, that it be an international collaboration and effort.”

Can you believe how ridiculous these American puppets sound? What the deluded Americans do not seem to realize is that they are on their own. The only entities willing to support their aggression on Syria is Saudi Arabia and Israel. So, how’s that for credibility? The only support Washington can muster is from a feudal, sword-wielding, head-chopping regime and a criminal pariah genocidal state. Coalition of the Willing? More like Coalition of the Killing.

Colonized by Corporations

Colonized by Corporations

By Chris Hedges

May 14, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes fromdéclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of nobilityand reselling them. It is what most corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years,” Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people."

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness that is essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.” “When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.” And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and commitment.  If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

This article was first published at Truth Dig

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