This is an exposé that every progressive person should see. One of the largest —if not the biggest—public platforms for human interactions is now being policed by certifiable warmongers and lifelong servants of the global plutocracy.
JANICE KORTKAMP—Terrorist attacks never occurred in Syria prior to the US, UK, France and their allies deciding to bring “freedom and democracy” to the country primarily for Israel’s interests (of expanding through all of Palestine, and taking political control over Lebanon while finalizing their theft of Syria’s Golan) using mercenary, violent, extremist proxies deceptively called “moderate rebels” or “freedom fighters” by western governments and media. The sad joke was that “moderate rebels” in Syria (many commanders and at least 100,000 fighters came from outside the country) were as rare as rainbow unicorn kittens.
JACQUES R PAUWELS—To the British soldier and poet Isaac Rosenberg too, the poppies were a strong symbol in the sense of blood and sacrifice; in his poem “Break of Day in the Trenches”, he wrote that “the roots” of the poppies “are in man’s veins.”
It was not a coincidence that poppies flowered abundantly in Flanders’ Fields in the spring of 1915. Normally, the minuscule seeds of this flower penetrate deep into the earth to wait there, sometimes for years, for the soil to be upturned for some reason, and thus exposed to the sunlight and warmth they suddenly germinate. With the digging of miles of trenches and the explosion of tens if not hundreds of thousands of shells starting in the fall of 1914, the conditions were created for an unprecedented burgeoning of poppies the following spring in that corner of Belgium, of course most spectacularly so in the immediate vicinity of the trenches and in the pockmarked no-man’s land.
JACQUES PAUWELS—The [Western] elites had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.
In Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the elite is still very much focused on this task, clearly in the hope that soon nothing at all will be left of the welfare state. The fall of the Berlin Wall made it possible that we are now witnessing a return to the unbridled, ruthless capitalism of the nineteenth century – a catastrophe for ordinary people, for the demos, and therefore a major setback for the cause of democracy.
ALAN MACLEOD—And despite the savagery of the era, Britons themselves remember their empire extremely fondly, far more positively than those in countries subjugated by the crown. In 2014, a poll by YouGov found that 59% of the public considered the country’s empire something to be proud of, with only 19% thinking it was a shameful episode in British history. Perhaps more startling is the fact that more than three times as many Britons believed that their colonies were better off than worse off under their control.
These numbers have begun to change, with the rise of new histories and new political movements, such as Black Lives Matter, that have challenged the jingoistic consensus.