adminNew York and ended with the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan will be far more serious than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich were one direct result of that Great Depression. But Hitler and the Third Reich did not have BBC World Service, CNN, Euro News, Twitter and Face Book to spread their poison. As a result they were much easier to contain and isolate than today’s Hitler.
This is the reality, which Africa, the Non Aligned Movement and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations need to ponder. The Euro-American empire is squeezed by a crisis far worse than the Great Depression and the disastrous happenings which constitute that squeeze include: the September 11 2001 bombings; George W Bush’s declaration of a limitless and endless war on terror; the NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq and the looting of Iraq’s oil at the point of the gun; the global financial tsunami beginning in 2008 and still playing out; and the Arab uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East partly as a response to the effects of the so-called war on terror in the Middle East and North Africa.
What the world has seen in the illegal invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq and in the current bombing of Libya represents a threat to world peace many times bigger than the Nazi threat; and part of the reason why the threat is so much greater is the fact that the global propaganda machinery is controlled by the aggressors.
To appreciate the scope of the threat, one would have to imagine Hitler enjoying in 1939 the sort of global media reach and sympathy, which the US and its NATO axis enjoy today. Like Nazis, the present imperialists manufacture really big lies that are capable of being employed to destroy whole countries.
To take just the case of Iraq alone, there was elaborate propaganda planning long before the March 2003 invasion. It involved lying to the home populations of the aggressor nations, especially the US and UK. It involved plans to infiltrate, take over and dismantle the Iraq media.
And it involved setting up the aggressors’ own media outlets in Iraq during and after the conquest of that country, according to The Times (London) of November 5 2002, according to Imperial Ambitions by Professor Noam Chomsky, according to Martin Sieff of United Press International, according to national Security Archive and Interpress Service.
The first big lie about Iraq was that it posed a serious and imminent security threat to the US, which needed to be stopped. There was no effort to elaborate or specify, since this could be left to the security experts to do so.
The second big lie was to tie Iraq to the September 11 bombings of New York and the Pentagon and to hint that Iraq was somehow connected to Al Quaeda, even though in fact it was the Bush family who had business ties to that terrorist organisation.
The Third big lie was that Iraq was planning new attacks, new atrocities.
The biggest of the lies – the allegation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which could hit Europe and North America in a matter of minutes – was saved till last, that is, close to the actual mobilisation for illegal war.
The results of this calculated media orchestration of lies were spectacular. According to US opinion polls cited by the various authors, soon after the September 11 attacks only 3 percent of the US population thought Iraq could be involved. After the media campaign by the US and UK governments for less than a year, the percentage jumped to 60 percent, that is by September 2002.
According to Imperial Ambitions, at that time: Only in the United States do people fear Iraq. This is a real achievement in propaganda . . . No one else in the world believes any of this. No other country regards Iraq as a threat to its security. Kuwait and Iran, which were both recently invaded by Iraq, don’t regard Iraq as a threat to their security (any more at 2002)”
The propaganda campaign against the US population over the demand to invade Iraq succeeded so well that former US Secretary of State Colin Powell even took it to the UN Security Council where he purported to present a factual dossier which was in fact a fabrication. Although a significant minority of the US population still opposed the war, the doubts created by the media’s acceptance of the Pentagon’s propaganda meant that the majority really believed Iraq was an imminent threat to Europe and America. They differed with Tony Blair and George W Bush only on the appropriate response to the alleged threat.
To illustrate that the command of global media networks by the aggressors is a huge problem for the rest of the world, it is important to note that – when it suited the rulers of North America to save face after the Iraq invasion turned out to be a disaster – the imperialists did not hesitate to use election campaign propaganda to drive US public opinion like a yo-yo against the very same invasion. This time they used Barrack Obama as an anti-war presidential candidate and they even arranged for him to receive the Noble Prize for Peace! Therefore, according to Richard Wolffe in Renagade: The Making of Barrack Obama:
“Five years after (Obama’s) speech in Chicago, the vast majority of Democratic (party) voters were adamantly opposed to the war in Iraq and anything that smacked of President Bush’s foreign policy.”
One key reason for this reversal in public opinion was that by 2008 the current global financial crisis had hit the US hard and its direct impact on the people’s livelihoods forced them to connect it to the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, the ruling elites decided to cut their losses by promoting Barack Obama as a new face who could end the wars as quickly as he would also stem the global financial crisis.
This was yet another hoax, as Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate today. Obama is fighting three wars where Bill Clinton fought only one and Bush fought two. What comes out clearly in the danger to the peace which western media monopolies pose. Obama’s “peace and change” image in 2008-2009 was strictly a product of TV propaganda.
Now, what Africa, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Bricks countries must pause to consider is this:
Big lies were employed by the US (Reagan) administration to justify the terrorist destruction of Nicaragua in the 1980s; big lies were used by the same administration to justify the US invasion and destruction of little Grenada in 1983. Big lies were used by the US and NATO to justify the violent destruction of Yugoslavia from 1990 to 2004. Big lies were used to justify the illegal invasion, occupation, division and looting of Iraq from 2003 to-date. And the latest victims are Coté d’Ivoire and Libya, where we are told that “civilians” exist only on the side of conflict, which has been co-opted, funded and blessed by NATO and France.
A huge, pre-meditated experiment is underway to test a theory, which emerged in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. First the theory:
Before it died, The Daily Gazette did a story called Africa in need of a new colonialism? That was on January 28 1993. The article paraphrased British reactionaries (including Paul Johnson of the Spectator) who were urging the North Atlantic powers to abandon their fear of being called racists and imperialists, so that they could intervene unreservedly in African affairs.
The Herald on December 30 1993 also reported the same western efforts to escort world opinion toward the acceptance of a more overt and aggressive pursuit of the Third Enclosure Movement. The article was entitled “Open Western Plans for the Recolonisation of Africa,” by Karrim Essack. The opening paragraph of that article is worth quoting:
“The advocates of recolonisation of Africa are open about it. The mouthpieces (or opinion escort services) of both conservative and liberal establishments have written about it. The New York Times, seen by many as a liberal paper, said: ‘The Africans are a savage people, neither mentally nor economically able to adjust themselves to the swift pace of civilisation.’ Not to be out done, Time (magazine) . . . endorsed President (Bill) Clinton’s stand on intervention in Africa . . . “
The following year the liberal US magazine The Atlantic Monthly provided an apparently global and non-racist rationale for western destabilisation of and intervention in the South. In the magazine’s issue of February 1994, Robert D Kaplan published a long piece called “The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.”
Among the most open and racist advocates of recolonisation was one Paul Johnson, who like US Senator Jesse Helms, realised the recolonisation of the world needed to start with the colonisation of the United Nations itself. On 20 January 2000, Jesse Helms announced the plan as a scheme to reform the UN Paul Johnson said:
“I foresee the UN Security Council using its advanced powers moving into the business of government (as opposed to mere intervention) taking countries into trusteeship for various periods and becoming itself an architect of honest and efficient administration. It will restore the good name of colonialism it once enjoyed.”
So, the theory is that, with the cooperation of co-opted and well-funded African collaborators, colonialism and imperialism could be restored and dignified for the material and strategic benefit of Europe and North America.
What Africa and the Bricks nations have to wake up to is the grim reality that the US-NATO axis is carrying out an experiment with Africa as the main laboratory or theatre. There is no absolute agreement within the axis; and the Germans, because of their Hitler past, are the most reluctant to plunge headlong into that experiment with no guarantees of anything. The other powers, particularly Britain, France and the US, are feeling the squeeze the most. They are therefore the most bellicose of the lot.
The first question to ask is: What is the purpose of the experiment? What are the aims of the experiment? The aim of course is the maintenance of US-led global dominance in all its aspects. The US-NATO experiment is meant to find out the following
First, whether or not a fast US-NATO move on strategic energy sources, strategic minerals and strategic locations could secure the future of the empire against China and India without scaring the rest of humanity into an immediate global backlash meant to restore some balance. The US-NATO alliance is particularly concerned about the G20 and the Bricks countries. Can Euro-American dominance be re-established quickly before China, India, Russia, Brazil and others figure out what is going on and decide to counter it?
Second, there is also a desire to use the experiment to trigger an arms race which would neutralise the Chinese and Indian challenge to western economies. China may not overtake the US as the biggest world economy if it tries to compete with the US and its NATO allies in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable arms race. So far the Chinese have refused to take the bait and have been focusing on sharpening their competitiveness in manufacturing, trade, and credit.
The US-NATO axis is anxious to know if the Chinese will continue to evacuate their nationals whenever a country is invaded or a government is overthrown – as happened in Libya ad Coté d’Ivoire respectively. Will the Chinese at some point decide to support the other side in the conflicts and trigger a series of proxy wars similar to those of the Cold War era?
In Yugoslavia, Iraq, Coté d’Ivoire and Libya, Euro-American forces have disrupted peaceful trade and forced the Bricks countries to lose business and to evacuate their nationals. ow long will this be tolerated?
Third, the squeeze is also tangible, material. Will African oil and other strategic resources provide the cheap wealth the west needs to recover from the series of disasters since September 11 or is the shortfall in fact an endless pit? Just before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011, there was already a 25 percent shortfall in available global food stocks.
The tragedy in Japan has increased that shortfall because the radiation from damaged nuclear reactors has contaminated both seafood and agricultural products. Moreover, the energy that was produced by the nuclear reactors now has to be replaced with energy from oil and other sources.
Precisely because Japan was the second largest capitalist economy until the earthquake and tsunami, there is therefore a concentration of western investment in Japan, which has now, been destabilised by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear explosions. So, we face a hyperactive and speculative world capitalist economy in which oil stocks, food stocks and technology stocks are all tumbling because of uncertainty triggered by a rapid series of disasters. This is happening in a global market where traditionally the US has controlled the foreign policies of its allies through the guarantee and control of cheap energy supplies. This whole area is now clouded in uncertainty and we see that France is already in a panic. The offensive and expansionist nature of NATO has now come out clearly in Afghanistan and Libya. We now see why NATO did not dissolve and disarm after its only reason for existence disappeared with the former Soviet Union.
The experiment is also ideological. Since Africa is the last frontier for truly tangible material wealth – strategic minerals, oil, timber, land, food, and biodiversity – this experiment is also meant to test whether the Africans have developed a native ideology which is commensurate with the value of their resources and the upgraded strategic status which the continent now occupies as a result of the global crisis.
Put another way, the experiment is intended to find out if the ideology of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism has survived the era of economic genocide induced through sanctions, structural adjustment and IMF riots.
Will the Africans be able to invoke the alliances, the spirit and courage which shocked Henry Kissinger in 1974-1975 in Southern Africa, for instance? Are the Africans still capable of the heroism and determination, which freed even a European Portugal from the fascism of Marcello Caetano and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar?
Is the current crop of so-called “new African leaders” capable of appreciating the meaning of a NATO that puts on the robes of the United Nations in both Libya and the Ivory Coast?
-The experiment is also military. Can the US-sponsored and NATO-anchored African Command system widen its base and operational area from Djibouti and Somalia to Coté d’Ivoire and the entire Maghreb, without triggering a Pan-African response?
The Required African Response
So far the Africans have been murmuring, either in isolation or in small, negligible groups. Judging by what we have experienced with Zimbabwe’s response to the illegal Anglo-Saxon sanctions, the African response to aggressive Euro-American forays into Africa might take too long to be noticed and to have any consequence.
Africa needs an international strategy to make Europe and North America pay for their aggression and inhuman experiments.
The first response has to be ideological because it is cheap and because it is intended to convince real people in real communities in their own countries about the significance of a forced return to the Congo situation of 1960-1968 at the hands of the very same forces who overthrew and murdered Patrice Lumumba. Africa is today better organised and better educated than the Africa of Lumumba and the Congo in 1960. But its education is still too Eurocentric to trigger the sort of awakening, which can comprehend the meaning of this new scramble for the continent.
In terms of the rule of law, in terms of the laws of Coté d’Ivoire under which all the parties went to election, Laurent Gbagbo was the legitimate sitting President of Coté d’Ivoire when French forces wearing the robes of the United Nations attacked Coté d’Ivoire’s state house.
His opponent, Alassane Quattara, was brought in first through outsiders’ lies, which solidified through media repetition. The phrase “internationally recognised winner of the election and internationally recognised President of Coté d’Ivoire” is an assertion, a declaration made de facto via illegal force of arms and abuse of the names of the UN and AU. The real will behind this illegality and aggression is France backed by NATO and the real motive is the real estate, the cocoa producing land of Coté d’Ivoire, the land of Africa.
A few years ago the Heads of State and Government of SADC observed that the worst enemy of SADC were white racist dominated media houses owned or sponsored by interests opposed to African sovereignty, interests opposed to African economic indigenisation, interests which felt threatened by the survival and consolidation of the African liberation movements now in government.
The reporting of political events in the region since 30-31 March 2011 demonstrates that the situation is still as it was fifteen years ago when the SADC Heads of State and Government made their observation.
The media hosted by members of SADC and AU are misrepresenting to our people the significance of the Arab uprisings, the meaning of the bombing of Libya and the illegal overthrow of the Government of Coté d’Ivoire. Citizens of the 54 African nations in the AU must create a media industry, which does not lie to them on matters so important.
The second response is a strategy to make Euro-American aggression costly. This is the only way NATO and Africom can be stopped where they have come so far. Africans need an ingenious strategy to make the Euro-American forays into this continent far more costly than Vietnam.
This means strategically choosing ways of fighting back, which put Europe, NATO and the US at a disadvantage. This means refusing to fight NATO on grounds, on terrain, chosen by NATO. Africa must now sponsor a continental guerrilla movement to rid Africa of foreign forces and mercenaries. The African nations who are upset over Libya and Coté d’Ivoire outnumber those who welcome the aggression. Even those who first supported UN Security Council resolution 1973 are upset because they see that this resolution has been abused and that it was meant to facilitate naked aggression and greed. They too want to make sure they are not abused again by the US and its NATO allies.
The third response must be economic. Those African countries opposed to western interference in Coté d’Ivoire and Libya must apply economic sanctions against the US and France while deliberately going out to embrace economic cooperation with Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Venezuela.
Finally, African countries opposed to imperialist aggression here must demand not just some mild reform of the UN system. No. The first move must be to agitate for a new host country for the UN headquarters. The US and its NATO allies have abused the UN system enough. It is now time to take the UN out of the US and to restructure it so that it no longer serves the post-Hitler arrangements of 66 years ago.
The Security Council must now include a majority from the South and the East, with Brazil and India included but not the only ones.
SADC must agitate for a position were Africa will coordinate its vote and be given two veto votes in the Security Council which will be exercised collectively to protect African interests.
Online Reporter