Obama: The real goal is to make Syria into a vassal state.

What the appallingly corrupt Western media will never tell you

Today, Edward Snowden is my hero. More importantly, he is my father’s hero. And he speaks for us both, among others.

In 1976, my father was appointed to the Church Committee, which had been convened to review (and rein in) US intelligence gathering practices. Its findings resulted in the establishment of the secret court system by which the National Security Agency has now obtained – with Patriot Act as lever – so much digital information about Americans’ private lives.

During his time on the Committee, my father was both shocked by what he learned and heartened by the substantive measures taken to guard American citizens’ privacy. And my father was not an easy man to surprise or mollify. He was a student of the unfolding Cold War, a fluent speaker of Russian who had lived in St. Petersburg, where his Vietnamese classmates had scrawled anti-American invective on the blackboards. His closest friends from St. Petersburg eventually undertook a sudden, dangerous defection to the United States. My father knew what the world’s most advanced intelligence gathering apparatuses could do, how arbitrary and vindictive their agendas could be, and how deeply enmeshed their domestic incursions could become with Cold War insecurities and paranoia. Then, he took some comfort in technology’s limits. A friend working for the NSA once reassured him that the technology needed to efficiently gather and review a large volume of broadly-targeted phone records simply didn’t exist. My father was relieved. If that kind of broad intercept were possible, it would strike at the heart of our freedom of association, already grown so frail.

[pullquote] But among the hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of private citizens who must have acquired at least partial or circumstantial awareness of the program at some point, in their capacity as employees of the various digital firms who complied with the government’s requests for data. These individuals – and their lack of action – present a portrait of contemporary morality rendered at a much higher resolution, all ugliness laid plain. Their cowardice commands my attention because it is also my own, and it is also my father’s. [/pullquote]

My parents were both liberal DC beltway attorneys of the come-to-do-good variety. I was therefore enrolled in a so-called progressive primary school, which was selective and expensive. The teachers there shared my parents’ professed politics, and the school possessed its trivial emblems of indifference toward mainstream education, a carpeted gym chief among them. But these were the children of the wealthy and influential, their ruthlessness preternatural and imperturbable (mine, within its own lights, was no exception). Only the precocious were liked by their peers: athletes, musicians, children with savant-level math ability. The rest were legitimate targets for harassment that often took on subtle and sinister dimensions, in large part due to the above-average intelligence and sense of entitlement that pervaded our environment.

The occasional African-American student – whose parents were often conspicuously less bourgeois than the rest – was treated with detached disdain, the detachment a feature of adult enforcement: the ‘white’ children knew that any overt criticism of their darker-skinned peers would be considered beyond the pale. But our teachers could only place so many fingers in so many dikes: black students often struggled or left the school, and slur-riddled graffiti showed up on the door of our only black teacher’s classroom, directed toward her black Muslim intern.

Though none of us could articulate it then (and none would dare once we were old enough to understand what had happened), we didn’t care about our peers’ race at all. But in our quietly vicious way, influenced, perhaps, by our parents’ constant articulation of meritocracy – that most hollow of liberal adornments – we knew these children were not marked for success, and we knew that their presence among us signaled our school’s finely tuned sense of guilt about that very fact. In our own childlike way, we resented having our parents’ sense of shame and stratification thrust onto us, who were yet innocent, wealthy and bright.

Today, I understand the good intentions and tremendous financial sacrifice that underlay my parents’ decision to enroll me in that school. And I understand the rewards my expensive education has allowed me to reap. But I still begrudge my parents that decision. Partly because they chose the progressive school over an admittedly less liberal bilingual institution, a choice which robbed me of my fragile Spanish fluency: I had been raised by my Ecuadorian nanny, Matildé, whose hundred-hour-per-week presence in my household was another ambivalent feature of the highly-disciplined system of “middle class” self-sacrifice my parents had to comply with in order to – as David Simon might have put it – get paid, make friends, and have a future.

But above all else, my bitterness about my formative educational experience arises from an ever-sharpening memory of my teachers’ watchfulness, and their concomitant, fundamental dishonesty. The adults saw everything. We saw that they saw. And we saw that, in spite of all the humanistic rhetoric they daily hung on us, they never really spoke. We saw, though we lacked the vocabulary or class consciousness to articulate it, that if our teachers wanted to keep their jobs, they had to avoid the eminently punishable good deed of identifying the futility of their task: using progressive education as a do-as-I-say enjoinder against the pervasive competitiveness and atomization that defined the society we were preparing to join, even in its liberal reaches. In this manner, moral complacency was role modeled for us, as it was for so many children in so many milieus – educational and otherwise – across the country. Since, almost all of us have proven ourselves to be excellent pupils.

I have had this conversation with my parents, and often begrudge my father his complaints – though they aren’t really so numerous – about the time and place where we live. I remind him that it was his generation, in spite of the tremendous momentum generated during the ‘60s and all the resulting moral authority they claim, who are responsible for today’s America. Once, in response, my father laid bare the impatience and naiveté underlying the notion that any one group of people – even an entire generation – could be responsible for something so enormous. “I challenge you,” he said, “to find anyone my age who’s willing to say that today’s world is the one they wanted, or even the one they envisioned.” He was right. The world is not something that happens, much less something that is made to happen. It is something that accrues, as much through an absence of action as through action itself, over the course of history.

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, my father was the last Democrat out the door at the Department of Justice. For his non-partisan efforts to facilitate the department’s Carter-to-Reagan transition, he received a framed letter from the Gipper himself, which he managed to restrain himself from burning for as long as it took him to lose track of it. He then joined the ranks of liberal political operatives jockeying to maintain their relevance until Americans voted in another Democrat. This was not a fair, humane or even meritocratic competition, and thus began my father’s disillusionment, whereby he learned how little a professed morality – or a beloved platform of noble goals – means when weighed against the American dream’s unadorned core: who gets what job.

Eventually, he learned to laugh at the more ridiculous moments. For instance, an acquaintance’s blunt refusal – as a guest at my parents’ dinner table – to so much as entertain the notion of helping my father network, so rudely put and so bald-facedly self-interested that her boyfriend later called my parents to apologize and cemented the apology by dumping her. The guest in question was Zoë Baird, later nominated to be Attorney General by Bill Clinton.

At the time, however, such moments severely disoriented my father, who suffered from a sense of fair play learned during a childhood that, for all its imperfections, manifested a social mobility so elusive – and yet so culturally resonant – that, if it were tangible, would probably be in a museum by now. The first in his family to attend college, he transcended his working class background by studying his way into Princeton, and then Harvard Law School. Because he was that rare individual whose life had unfolded accordingly, my father embraced the American mythos that has been used to delude so many people of modest means into neglecting or antagonizing their own political interests. In fact, I believe my father rarely questioned American values as such until his only sibling, who was openly gay, died of AIDS in 1989, adrift in the generous bile so many Americans found it in their hearts to spew while their brothers suffered and perished.

Zoë Baird, by the way, withdrew her 1993 Attorney General nomination after revelations about the nanny and chauffeur she’d hired – both illegal immigrants whose social security taxes she had evaded. The incident, dubbed Nannygate, took on a personal dimension for me: it illuminated the subtle moral differences that separate social strivers like Baird from honest white-collar laborers like my parents, regardless of their common profession. My parents had always been assiduous in assisting Matildé – both legally and practically – with her immigration status, which required borrowing against the time they usually reserved for getting ahead in their jobs. That hard work later resulted in Matildé’s naturalization as an American citizen, a process I participated in by helping her study for her citizenship exam. When Matildé took her oath, my mother and I were the two guests she invited.

Now I, too, am an immigrant, who in turn spends his time working with immigrants. I report on Japan’s tiny African expatriate community for Tokyo’s daily English-language newspaper. Most of Japan’s African immigrants are Nigerian, and most of them are Igbo, which is to say they are members of an ethnicity whose fierce individualism and egalitarianism (traditional Igbo culture recognized no kings or chiefs) was smashed by missionaries who imposed a hierarchical social system, which makes for a much more efficient control mechanism. Today, Igbo people inhabit a nation whose boundaries have been delineated according to the West’s whims, visible in the geopolitical subtexts of the war fought over Biafra – the independent Igbo state declared in 1967.

The resulting nation is cursed with a heart made of oil, and its petrodollars are subject to massive chicanery. Imagine Texas at its oil-producing peak, except 90 percent of the money winds up hidden under an elaborate network of mattresses. American oil companies are deeply embroiled in this state of play. Of these companies’ many thousands of employees, one assumes that at least a small handful are dimly aware of the details, and that their awareness might even vitiate the otherwise unadulterated joy they experience when they punch in.

My Igbo friends with enough historical consciousness (usually the result of education, which is usually the result of affluence) bemoan the contemporary outcome of all this cultural meddling and foreign “investment.” Igbo individualism has been twisted to accommodate the morality of success, thereby producing a culture whose defining characteristic is a fixation with material prosperity. Even better than Americans, the more critically-minded of my Igbo friends are intimately acquainted with the dangers of individualism made slave to self-interest. And they know the two have not always been considered identical.

Recently, an Igbo friend of mine who owns a bar in Tokyo’s red light district walked me to the train station near his home. We had just finished dinner in his apartment, with his Japanese wife and bi-ethnic children, in view of his family’s Buddhist altar. Bullet trains had been visible and audible through the apartment’s screen windows, which looked out onto the other quintessential components of the contemporary Japanese vista: ball fields peopled by playing children, massive apartment buildings looming in the distance, their interior lights flickering to life as the daytime waned.

We talked about his conversion from missionary Christianity to Zen Buddhism. We discussed what had brought us to Japan, and why we wanted to stay. We both possessed vivid memories of wars our respective countries had waged. We both remembered what it was like to walk in the cities of our homeland and not feel safe from the violence that is both a symptom and cause of hopelessness. We could readily agree on three words to describe our own hope, which, to us, felt unimpeachably universal. “A peaceful life.”

My friend’s hope, he said, must have come from his parents. Mine, too. I thought about the moments when my father helped to shape that sensibility in me, and what kind of person I might have become if he instead had told me that I deserved what so many people – influential and otherwise – believe they deserve: to win, even at the expense of others’ rights and dignity. It would have been easy enough for my father to make me – out of casual neglect – into a vessel for his own frustrated ambitions, to see his responsibility toward his children as a matter of cumulative, upward motion. Many parents do. I thought about this while my friend and I walked. And I thought about how, in his own way, in spite of everything, there were moments in my father’s life when he had truly spoken. I thought about how I might try, in spite of inducements toward silence, to someday speak as clearly.

But today, at a moment when we have discovered that technology’s advance has made the seizure and storage of our lives’ every detail a sudden, jarring reality, my father and I find ourselves positioned only for muteness. I have traded the opportunity to live in the nation of my birth for the chance to reside in Japan, where – with history in mind – I almost never wonder if the country where I make my home will pre-emptively invade another nation, and where the women in my life can comfortably walk on a city street at night. And, like everyone else, I make compromises to advance my career. These include the routine dismissal or avoidance of serious ethical questions that I encounter in an inconvenient professional context.

My father is planning for retirement. When I spoke with him last, he explained how American economic analysts have determined that one million dollars of savings is a mere fraction of the advisable amount for a couple to retire on. I am certain my parents legal careers’ (modestly compensated by attorneys’ standards) have not permitted them to save nearly that much, but my father’s incredulity contained a pertinacious undertone. If this was the world’s new demand, he would rise and try to meet it. Even as America’s middle class (which existed meaningfully for the flicker of an instant) is confronted with less and less reasonable expectations – unto annihilation, perhaps – my father is determined to prove himself by earning, saving and forbearing. Amid his ongoing quest for stability, he has misplaced his whistle. That such an outcome has befallen him – a person adventurous and radical enough to direct his formative intellectual energy toward a nation, language and culture whose mere mention took the air out of many American rooms – indicates just how effectively financial anxiety now robs even relatively wealthy people of their impulse toward courage.

In light of all this, neither my father nor I are surprised by the government’s actions. Misconduct by government intelligence agencies has been de rigueur since Hoover. Today’s revelations are more of the depressing same. My father jokes that the only difference between abuses of power in Democratic and Republican administrations is the quality of the prose contained in the accompanying legal memos. Neither can I profess much shock at the notion that this has occurred during a Democratic presidency. Such indignation strikes me as symptomatic of a kind of NPR liberalism, wherein possessing a liberal frame of mind excuses us from making any gestures beyond the purely interpretive: when shit happens, make a documentary.

What is much more alarming – and much more contemporary – is the amount of collective complacency that must have been necessary for this program to remain undisclosed for so long. Not just among lawmakers who occasionally hinted at its disturbing dimensions. But among the hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of private citizens who must have acquired at least partial or circumstantial awareness of the program at some point, in their capacity as employees of the various digital firms who complied with the government’s requests for data. These individuals – and their lack of action – present a portrait of contemporary morality rendered at a much higher resolution, all ugliness laid plain. Their cowardice commands my attention because it is also my own, and it is also my father’s. Some of my primary school classmates work at these firms, most of them avowedly liberal. I wonder if they knew, and how that knowledge affected them. I wonder if knowing – but not saying – reminded them of the many adults who role-modeled practical and exigent behavior for us when we were too young to imagine what kind of wreckage such behavior would leave inside us.

Such reflection is among the luxuries I may claim as a child of relative privilege. But for my parents, the impact of the current domestic spying regime, had it been known to exist when they were young, would have been tangible and ruinous. Having learned that the 4th and 1st Amendments could not protect him, my father might have ceased communicating with his friends in Russia, especially the two who later defected. My mother, who assisted foreign nationals seeking political asylum, would have come under further scrutiny (the FBI had already opened a file on her after she attended campus demonstrations against the Vietnam war). All of their attorney-client contacts would have been caught in an immeasurably broad net. When my uncle was sent to a military prison for his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War in 1970 and commenced a hunger strike, records of the telephone calls my grandfather, who was a World War II veteran, made in an attempt to secure his release would have landed in a government database. None of this was illegal, but much of it would have been chilled if my family members knew the US intelligence apparatus could review it with the click of a mouse.

James Baldwin often said that if one person is prevented from speaking about one thing, soon no one will be able to speak about anything. Today, courage belongs to the one person who has spoken, a person whose affluence did not rob him of moral impetus, and who has not confused individualism with self-interest. I write today to express a coward’s gratitude for his actions. My parents add their gratitude to mine. My Igbo friend who walked me to the train station asks that I thank Edward Snowden on his behalf, as well. I believe that Matildé, had she not died shortly after achieving American citizenship, would thank him, too. Today, our only regret is that Edward Snowden, in spite of his courage, has almost certainly sacrificed any possibility of achieving that which he believes we are all entitled to: a peaceful life.

Dreux Richard is an American writer, journalist and literary translator living in Tokyo.

by Stephen Lendman

Will the lying ever stop?

Self-defense is inviolable. It’s a fundamental right. International law affirms it. On May 29, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Washington supports Israel’s right to defend itself.  Israeli-style defense is offense. It hasn’t been attacked in 40 years. It faces no regional threats now except ones it invents. It prioritizes violence, conflict and instability. 

Syria is Washington’s war. Israel’s very much involved. It’s arming US-enlisted death squads. It bombed Syrian targets. It did so lawlessly. It initiated other provocations. It threatens more attacks now.

Russia’s supplying Syria with sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. They have every right to do so. They’re for defense, not offense. Washington wants Syria defenseless. It maliciously calls self-defense belligerent and provocative.  State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell “condemn(ed) the continued supply of Russian weapons to the (Syrian) regime.” He responded to Moscow affirming its S-300 missile sale.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said doing so “does not bring us closer to the political transition that Syria deserves.”

International law is unequivocal. Sovereign rights are inviolable. No nation or combination thereof may interfere in the internal affairs of others. Syrians alone may choose who leads them.

Washington feels otherwise. War was planned years ago. Foreign terrorists were recruited. Syria was invaded. There’s nothing “civil” about ongoing conflict. Naked aggression defines it.   Washington, key NATO partners, Israel, and rogue Arab states are arming, funding, training and directing anti-Syrian death squads. They’ve been doing so since conflict began.

Lifting the so-called EU arms embargo is subterfuge. EU nations agreed to what never existed. Arms flowed freely from the beginning. Recruited assassins get them.  Syria’s been lawlessly invaded. It’s under attack. Assad’s vilified for self-defense. So is Russia for aiding its right to do so.

Hezbollah fighters are involved. They support Syrian sovereignty. They have every right to do so. State Department spokeswoman Psaki responded, saying:

“This is an unacceptable and extremely dangerous escalation. We demand that Hezbollah withdraw its fighters from Syria immediately.”

In other words, do what we say, not what we do. It bears repeating. Washington wants Syria defenseless. It wants Assad ousted. It wants a pro-Western puppet replacing him. It’s longstanding US policy.

It’s waging lawless aggression to do so. It’s using proxy foot soldiers. They’re assassins. They’re death squads. They’re murdering noncombatant men, women, children, the elderly and infirm. They’re committing gruesome atrocities. Clear evidence proves it.

Washington calls doing so humanitarian intervention. Mass slaughter and destruction define US-style liberation. Syria’s being systematically ravaged and destroyed. Imperial priorities matter most.

Rogue states operate that way. America’s by far the worst. Waging war on humanity is policy. Syria’s in the eye of the storm. Conflict rages with no end.  Full-scale US-led NATO intervention could happen any time. Events head steadily toward it. Obama deplores peace. He’s waging multiple direct and proxy wars. He’s got other nations in mind to attack. Wars without end continue.

Lebanon’s Al-Manar television interviewed Assad. He affirmed receiving anti-aircraft S-300 missiles. The first shipment arrived. More will “arrive soon,” he said.  Syria’s battling “one hundred thousand” foreign invaders, he added. Washington, Turkey, other NATO countries, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are directly involved.

Syrian forces achieved decisive victories. Battles continue against terrorists. Syria will attend Geneva II, he said. Its military will respond immediately to further Israeli aggression. Appearing on Lebanese Al-Mayadeen television, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said:

“Syria will not let any Israeli aggression go unanswered without retaliation. The retaliation will be the same size as the aggression, and the same type of weapons will be used.”

He added that any agreement Geneva II reaches will be put to a national referendum. “If it wins support of the Syrian people, we will go ahead with it,” he added.  They alone have sole right to decide internal Syrian affairs. Outside interference has no legitimacy. It’s lawless and unacceptable. On May 29, Syria’s real friends met in Tehran. Over 40 countries attended. So did regional and international organization representatives. They did so to support “Political Solution, Regional Stability.”

A final statement rejected anti-Syrian aggression. It stressed comprehensive national dialogue. It’s the only acceptable conflict resolution solution. It supported Geneva II peace discussions.  It stressed the necessity of restoring and preserving regional stability. Respect Syrian sovereignty. Obey international law. Stop the bloodshed.

End foreign interference. Restore peace. Do so by diplomatic dialogue. These and other lawful steps were highlighted.

Washington, key NATO partners, rogue Arab states and Israel have other ideas in mind. On May 29, Haaretz headlined “Israel says will act to prevent S-300 missile systems from becoming operational.”

Netanyahu lied. He told EU foreign ministers that Syrian S-300s make Israel’s “entire air space (a) no-fly zone.” Israel “cannot stand idly by” and permit it, he said.  Israeli National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidor said Israel will act “to prevent the S-300 missiles from becoming operational.” A day earlier, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon affirmed it. “Israel will know what to do,” he stressed.

On May 29, London’s Guardian headlined “Israel in Moscow talks to halt supply of missiles to Syrian regime.” Senior Israeli intelligence officials made a last ditch attempt to do so. Their arguments don’t wash. They’re convoluted. They mask Israel’s belligerent intentions. Defensive anti-aircraft missiles are solely for that purpose. Syria has no intention to attack Israel or any other regional state.  Nor do Iran or Hezbollah. Doing so would be suicidal. Assad has no death wish. Nor do Iranian or Hezbollah officials. They prioritize peace. They deplore war.

Israel’s entire history is blood-drenched. So is America’s. Therein lies the problem. Both countries partner in aggressive wars. They claim doing so supports liberating struggles.  Israel calls naked aggression self-defense. Justifiable defensive responses are called terrorism. America acts the same way.

Rogue states write their own rules. They spurn rule of law principles. Imperial priorities override them. They matter most.

Syria’s under attack. Events head dangerously close to full-scale US-led NATO intervention. It bears repeating. Libya 2.0 looms. It could erupt any time. It could embroil the entire region. Preventing it matters most.

A Final Comment

A Western-backed Syrian National Coalition statement said:

“The Syrian Coalition welcomes the international efforts to find a political solution to what Syria has been suffering for two years while being committed to the principles of the revolution.”

No “revolution” exists. It reiterated its precondition. Assad must go. So must all Syrian special services heads and high-ranking military officials.

In other words, it demands Syria unconditionally surrender. Otherwise it won’t attend. Geneva II has no chance to succeed either way.  Previous peace initiatives failed. They were dead on arrival. Washington deplores them. Its conflict resolution strategy is aggressive war. Expect nothing different this time.

Separately, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted a US/Qatar-backed resolution. It was maliciously one-way. It “condemned the widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities and the Government-affiliated militias, including against the people of Al Qusayr.”

The resolution passed 36 in favor, one against, and eight abstentions. The usual suspects voted yes. US pressure assured it. Venezuela was the sole nation against.

Russia denounced the resolution. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called it “unilateral and odious.”

It runs counter to planned peace efforts. He referred to Geneva II. Secretary of State John Kerry supports it. He does so disingenuously.  At the same time, he’s “taking steps that in essence aimed at undermining” it, said Lavrov.

Washington, France, Britain and Israel want Iran excluded. Russia insists it be included. Lavrov said supplying anti-Syrian forces more weapons undermines peace.

S-300s are for defense, not offense. Installing them perhaps will help restore it. Peace initiatives so far reflect more hope than reality. Nothing ahead looks encouraging. Hopefully that dynamic will change.

Note: On May 30, Voice of Russia headlined “Turkey arrests extremists with sarin gas for Syria – media.” Russia Today and Interfax were cited.  Turkish “special anti-terror forces” apprehended 12 people suspected of having Al Nusra links. They were seized in southern Turkey.

Reports said they had a two gm cylinder with sarin nerve gas. Turkish authorities haven’t officially confirmed it.

On May 5, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (COI) said testimonial evidence indicates “rebel forces” used sarin. A day later, COI suggested  “no conclusive findings.”

Other reports confirmed anti-Assad elements using chemical weapons. The latest one adds more proof.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.  His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.” 

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html 

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.  It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour 

http://www.dailycensored.com/israel-threatens-syria/

Is this a chain reaction or mass epidemic? Either way, the fact remains – the political upheavals in the Muslim world that began in Tunisia swept across North Africa and Syria, and now a wave of instability has reached Turkey. A member of the Presidium of the Academy of Geopolitical Issues Araik Stepanyan analyzed this complex, ambiguous situation in the country.

“We will identify the external and internal factors that have caused, for the lack of a better word, social unrest in Turkey.

Internal factors have deep roots. The main reason is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the Turkish Republic established by the “father of the Turks” Kemal Ataturk. He decided to raise the status of the ethnic Turks that was low in the Ottoman Empire, turning them into an overriding ethnic group and create a political nation – the Turks.

In 1926, a law was passed stating that all residents of Turkey were ethnic Turks, and different names – the Kurds, Armenians, Laz, Circassian, and so on – were insulting to the Turkish national identity and must not be used. Everybody was recorded as Turks. And, although many years have passed, the first problem in Turkey is a problem of national identity.

The second internal factor that undermines today’s Turkey is a debate about the type of the government – secular or theocratic. The elite of modern Turkey have serious disagreements about this. The heirs of the Ottoman Empire believe that the highest level of prosperity in Turkey was in the days of the Ottoman Empire, where all citizens were equal, except for Christians, and ethnicity was not emphasized. That means, people were Osman regardless of the ethnicity – the Turks, Circassian, or Kurds.

The secular government afraid of Islamic influence is holding to the legacy of Kemal Ataturk. This is the army general staff who until recently served as the guarantor of the Constitution by the secular power. But Erdogan came to power and abolished that item of the Constitution. Incidentally, this is a revolutionary step, and can be compared with the constitution of the Soviet Union whose sixth article stated that the Communist Party was the governing body of the Soviet state. Once it was removed, the state has collapsed. Eliminating his “sixth paragraph,” Erdogan dealt a crushing blow to the General Staff and the army. Naturally, the army is very unhappy and wants to overthrow Erdogan, although it is not directly involved in the rallies.

Third internal factor is the Kurdish issue. The Kurds are seeking autonomy in Eastern Anatolia (the largest region of Turkey), their number is approximately 20 million. Despite the talks started by Erdogan (negotiations with Barzani, president of the Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, and Ocalan, the PKK leader) armed clashes between Kurdish rebels and the official Turkish army continue, with daily casualties on both sides. Thus, this is the third most important factor.

The fourth factor is the Armenian issue. Armenians living in the south-eastern and eastern Anatolia, the original Armenian territories of Western Armenia, have, so to speak, their hidden aspirations. They are hidden because they have bitter experience of being eliminated and thrown out. The Turkish elite, the intelligentsia, too, in turn, realizes that it is impossible not to recognize the Armenian Genocide. About three thousand Turkish intellectuals on Turkish websites apologized to the Armenians for the Genocide and eviction. Then there was football diplomacy with signing the agreement on opening the border between Turkey and Armenia. The Armenians are now fighting with diplomatic methods.  

Turkish demographic policy denies all other nationalities. Turkey strongly advocates that 82 percent of the population is Turks. But for obvious reasons this is not the case. There is a vast array of Greek Muslims who do not even speak the Turkish language and as many Bulgarian Muslims.

There are Armenians who speak Kurdish, Armenians who speak Turkish and Armenians who speak the Armenian dialect. But the state considers them all Turks. This is not the case, but a reason to oppose the government in one form or another.

The fifth factor is internal – it’s Alawites, a religious movement with millions of people who adhere to the same religious beliefs as Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian Alawi. When I see banners proclaiming “Erdogan, you are a thief!” I understand that these are Alawites. In the course of combat activities in Syria, Aleppo in particular, gunmen took out everything – from machines to museum exhibits, and exported them to Turkey, with the connivance of the authorities, and sold or appropriated them.

But Gezi Park or Taksim Square where rallies are held now is a special topic that overlaps, incidentally, with the Armenian issue.

First, in 1500 sultan Suleiman presented this territory to his Armenian assistant who uncovered a conspiracy. In 1560, an Armenian cemetery was laid there. The cemetery existed until late 19^th century and was eliminated after a well-known cholera epidemic, but the ownership was left to the Armenian community. After the genocide in 1915, when the Armenians were expelled, the owner clearly changed. Barracks were built there, then a park. When the authorities planned to build a shopping center, the community exploded. All ethnic minorities, anti-globalization activists, gays, lesbians, football fans, the “green” joined against the destruction of the park. Clearly, everyone had different views and goals, but the only reason was rejection of the current government that none of these social groups liked. Yes, individually they are in the minority, but this is the case where the sum of minorities produces the majority, incidentally, in contrast to Russia.

There is also an external factor. The U.S. lost interest in Turkey after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Turks tried to start building a new Turkic empire, the so-called Great Turan based on pan-Turkism, but the Turkic-speaking states, newly formed in the Soviet Union, gave the initiative a cold shoulder despite the extent of the economic expansion of Turkey in these regions is impressive.

The U.S. does not really support these imperial ideas. Especially when Turkey did not provide its territory for ground operations during the recent war in Iraq, did not let the American ships into the Black Sea during the Russian-Georgian conflict in 2008, incidentally, rightly so, in accordance with the international status of the Black Sea and the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.

The White House is beginning to move away from its ally. Moreover, according to the plan of a military expert Ralph Peters of the National Military Academy of the United States, in accordance with the concept of the Greater Middle East, Turkey is disintegrated. A large Kurdistan is created, and Mount Ararat goes to Armenia. Most important task, of course, is to take control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, close access for Russia to the Mediterranean Sea, and so on. The U.S. has a clear plan and is implementing it. The European Union, of course, agrees with this plan.

America will not save Erdogan despite the fact that he supported the Muslim extremists against Assad. Only Assad is winning, and Turkey has lost its authority with the nearby neighbors. It is likely to face open hostility, because no one has forgotten the Ottoman Empire or the imperial motives of the Turkish foreign policy. Turkish leaders have painted themselves into a geopolitical trap. There are still chances of getting out of it, but, judging by Erdogan’s recent statements, they are becoming slimmer every day.

All of these factors combined lead Turkey to a collapse. It will not happen overnight, but the trend is moving in this direction. All mass movements just show the causes, both external and internal. Therefore, even if the military who wants to overthrow Erdogan comes to power, and the constitution and the role of the General Staff is restored, it will be impossible to stop the process of globalization and crush the rebellion of ethnic groups.

Araik Stepanyan is a political analyst with Pravda.Ru and other Russian publications.

By Jerome Roos, roarmag

The protesters are starting to counter-pose their own direct democracy to the sham of a democracy proposed by Erdogan’s authoritarian neoliberal state.

Something quite amazing is happening in Istanbul. In addition to the silent “standing man” actions around the country, people’s assemblies are slowly starting to emerge in different neighborhoods across the city. As in Spain, Greece and the Occupy encampments before, the protesters in Turkey are starting to counter-pose their own form of direct democracy to the sham of a democracy proposed by Erdogan’s authoritarian neoliberal state. If there was ever any doubt, this shows how deeply intertwined the global struggles truly are.

As the state launches its merciless witch hunt on protesters, activists and Tweeters, thousands of people are starting to gather in dignity in various public spaces. As Oscar ten Houten reports from on the ground in Istanbul, the Beşiktaş Assembly in Abbasaga park, which has been going on for days, tripled its number of participants on Tuesday night, with a total of ten popular assemblies taking place in Istanbul alone and at least one more in Izmir. As Oscar writes on his great blog (which he started at the occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid in 2011):

These meetings have nothing to do with Taksim Solidarity any more. They are spontaneous initiatives by local people who are fed up with Erdogan’s disregard for the Turkish citizens, their rights and freedoms, their history, beliefs and traditions. … We arrive in Kadıköy, and truly, I couldn’t believe this was happening. Well over two thousand people were gathered on the green, to express their anger with the government’s eviction of Gezi, and to share their hope for a better Turkey. Like anywhere else, it was a cross section of the population, which included all races and creeds.

ABOUT ROARMAG AND THE AUTHOR
ROAR is edited by Jérôme Roos, a writer, activist and filmmaker from Amsterdam and a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. Our contributions come from volunteers around the world.