Baba Beijing is going mano à mano with Western soft power
DISPATCH FROM BEIJING
With Jeff J. Brown
This is a crosspost with China Rising
The Beijing Capital Museum cost a cool ¥1 billion ($150 million) http://en.capitalmuseum.org.cn/Visiting/Visiting.htm and the China National Museum down the street is said to have cost twice that much. http://en.chnmuseum.cn/. Sandwiched in between them is the jaw dropping National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA), affectionate called the “Floating Egg”. http://www.chncpa.org/ens/ They cut a ¥2.7 billion check for this sublime cultural statement of the Chinese people, and didn’t bat an eye. Quickly, can you think of a Western city spending $850 million in taxpayer money, on three cultural venues? You are right, I can’t either. Interestingly, both the Capital Museum and the NCPA commissioned French architects, making them very cosmopolitan indeed.
Meanwhile, back at the closed down PLA Palace (People’s Liberation Army), mobs of Chinese were standing in line to get in, for free of course. Why? Because, outside the main building, there are 300 pieces of military weaponry on display, going back to World War II: tanks, artillery, airplanes, missiles, boats, even a satellite, etc. The last thing I want to ogle over is death machines, but my Sino-compadres were having a gay old time. I swear, some of them must have taken a photo of all 300 displays, friends and family members proudly posing in each frame. Humanity’s fascination with war and war materiel is timeless and transcends all age groups. I suspect that young Han Dynasty, ancient Greek and Native American kids grew up fantasizing war games and the use of weapons thereof. I know when I was a kid, growing up in “kill a commie” John Wayne-America, that surely was the case. It’s a sad indictment of human civilization, to say the least.
Few statesmen on the world scene—except for Putin—coompare to China’s leader Xi Jinping in terms of overall quality, vision and maturity. He perfectly understands the corrosive malignancy of Western propaganda and its embedded values.
Standing in a long line for a half an hour and being the only Caucasian within shouting distance, I got to visit with my queue neighbors quite a bit. About 30 of them were all wearing the same baseball cap, pictured at the top of this article, a garish, red, white and black striped affair, with big, thick, embossed letters screaming, “BROOKLYN STYLE”. On one side was a round logo, sporting a modified stars and stripes flag, saying, “U.S.A. AMERICAN – NEW YORK CITY”. Jeez Louise, I was appalled, but not wanting to be moralistic and cause any loss of face, I did not say anything. After all, China is a free country. But, I was saying to myself,
Do you people not realize that since 1949, the United States and Europe have been and continue to spend untold billions of dollars and euros, to destroy your Chinese Dream, and subjugate and enslave you, for another century of humiliation?
But then the most amazing thing happened. After this big slug of cap-sporting Chinese went into the open area, to visit all the weapons, these hats magically disappeared. Vanished. For the life of me, I couldn’t spot one on a single head.
Suddenly, I got very interested in them and could see that I was watching a cultural phenomenon happening right before my very eyes. I had already taken a picture of some them sporting Brooklyn Style, while they were standing in line. But now I wanted to take a close up photo of one. Problem was, they had all taken them off. I looked and looked and finally found a young woman from the group, who clearly had not caught on to what was going on, or hadn’t been told, as she was the last one sporting it. This is the shot you see above.
Why would all of them take off their big, bad American caps in unison, like that? Many other people who were wearing more generic or Chinese themed hats, were keeping theirs on. Plus, it was pretty cold and very windy outside. Any head cover would have been better than nothing. At first, what was clear to me, in fact, was that these caps were so overtly American, and to show them off on such hallowed communist ground, as the China People’s Revolutionary Military Museum, was obviously considered to be in bad taste.
After I thanked this young lady for letting me take her photo, I turned around, looked up and saw a big billboard, and suddenly, all the pieces of the puzzle seemed to come together.
There, shouting out for all the visitors to see, was the national flag of China, with the three characters that are dancing in the minds of the nation’s people: the Chinese Dream. What was even more striking was the openly strident tone of the rest of the text, on the left,
The Chinese national flag fulfills the great revival of the Chinese Dream,
Just as (we) need to realize (our) national prosperity, (our) people’s flag energizes (us), (and) the people’s happiness.
And on the right, short, direct and to the point,
Follow the Chinese path
Carry forward the Chinese spirit
Solidify China’s power
The other giveaway about this big billboard: it was brand new. Referring to my previous article about Xi Jinping’s new national campaign to promote his Four Comprehensives, http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/02/12/chinese-president-xi-jinpings-new-four-comprehensives-are-a-rebuke-of-the-west/
it is clear that signboards like this are going to be the next big thing in the CPC’s fight for the soul of the masses.
These two messages are much more forceful about supporting the Chinese way of life, in the first case, and a total rejection of the West, in the second. The second half is really a call to civilizational arms and elevates the Anti-West bar, as high as any time since the Mao Era. Back then, Party propaganda was a raised fist, defiant and scornful, with Uncle Sam being crushed under the work boots of the proletariat,
A group of workaday Chinese intently enjoying a European music string quartet performance, before going to watch a sold out Arab ballet, “1000 and One Nights”, at Beijing’s French architectural marvel, the NCPA. (Image by Jeff J. Brown)
While at the Military Museum, I also visited the Beijing Millennium Monument next door, built in honor of the Year of the Dragon 2000. Free entrance for the masses. Inside, half of the museum was dedicated to a dazzling display of Chinese art and culture. What was the other half presenting? Classical European artists’ prints.
With a dazzling display of Chinese art on one floor, on the other floor, the Beijing Millennium Monument showed off a century of original prints, by European classical masters. Entrance was free. (Image by Jeff J. Brown)
In both cases, the Chinese masses prove themselves to be much more cosmopolitan and open minded, in their culture and entertainment, than the vast majority of Westerners. How many Westerners listen to their country’s latest hits, as well as selections from China’s humongo pop/rock music industry? Movies? Books? The Chinese do, seamlessly and without prejudice.
How many Western cultural and entertainment venues share the limelight with Chinese-origin content? China’s museums and theaters routinely bring in thousands of exhibitions and performances from around the world and they get subsidized to travel the four corners of the country, so second tier city citizens can also benefit. The NCPA has a full venue of classical and modern Chinese acts, while they just recently offered Carmen, Henry IV, Aida and The Great Gatsby for show fare, all of them sold out, packed with Chinese audiences.
No, I’m not worried about the Chinese losing their vast interest in world culture and entertainment. All Baba Beijing wants to do is remind them,
Be cosmopolitan, but don’t forget that our 5,000-year-old civilization has a lot to offer you. Please remember, Kentucky Fried Chicken and American TV shows are not what the Chinese Dream is all about. It’s about being Chinese first, the Communist Party of China’s Heavenly Mandate and the democratic dictatorship of the people. Now, go enjoy yourselves, eat, drink and be merry – modestly.
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Want a fun, low cost honorary degree in Chinese Studies? Jeff’s book, 44 Days, will have you laughing while learning and becoming an expert on all things Middle Kingdom. If you live in China, buy it from Jeff directly, by contacting him on his Wechat group, or email, jeff@brownlanglois.com
Jeff J. Brown—TGP’s Beijing correspondent— is the author of 44 Days (2013), Reflections in Sinoland – Musings and Anecdotes from the Belly of the New Century Beast (summer 2015), and Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). He is currently writing an historical fiction, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping, due out in 2016. Jeff is commissioned to write monthly articles for The Saker and The Greanville Post, touching on all things China, and the international political & cultural scene
He currently lives in Beijing with his wife, where he writes, while being a school teacher in an international school. Jeff is a dual national French-American.
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Syria: Russia Advances – Washington, Riyadh and Ankara Freak Out
Alexander Mercouris
Threats of Turkish and Saudi military intervention in Syria look like bluff in absence of support from Washington.
The last ten days have been the moment when it has finally dawned upon the West that the Syrian army – backed by Iran and Russia – is close to winning a decisive victory in Syria.
The Syrian army has expanded the government’s control of the countryside around Damascus. It has cleared Hama and Homs of the jihadi rebels who established themselves there in 2012. It has broken the siege of Aleppo, reopening the roads that link Aleppo to the rest of the country. It has also succeeded in largely clearing the rebels from Latakia province, site of Russia’s Khmeimim airbase.
These initial steps of consolidation are now being followed by military offensives along two axes.
Syrian government troops celebrate victory
The first is in the northwest of the country, with the Syrian army now very close to encircling the jihadi rebels who since 2012 have partly occupied and besieged Syria’s biggest city and economic capital, Aleppo.
It seems that all the main road links to Turkey have now been cut, reducing the jihadi rebels to reliance on country roads through Idlib province where they are very vulnerable to attack from the Russian airforce.
The second is along the main road from Hama to the Islamic State’s “capital” Raqqa.
The encirclement of the jihadi rebels besieging Aleppo threatens the collapse of the rebellion in the north of Syria. The fall of Raqqa would cause the collapse of the Islamic State in Syria.
Much of the Western media—on cue—are crying foul and denouncing hypocritically the Russian assault on ISIS and al-Nusra strongholds. Here the UK’s Daily Mail does its bit for the empire accusing the Russians of using “cluster bombs.”
US government and NGOs like “Freedom House”, long instruments of imperialist propaganda have been busy distributing images and claims besmirching the actions of Russia.
As I have explained many times, the nature of the Islamic State means it cannot afford to lose its core territory – and certainly not its “capital” Raqqa.
A movement that claims its leader is the Commander of the Faithful of God and the political heir of God’s Prophet – ie. the Caliph – cannot be seen to lose. Defeat inevitably calls such claims into question, and if great enough will cause the collapse of the movement as its followers become disillusioned and start to doubt.
Al-Qaeda – which has never made such claims for itself – can survive defeat and reorganise itself into an underground guerrilla or terrorist movement. The Islamic State cannot.
In the West – and in Ankara and Riyadh – the prospect of the Syrian government achieving victory, and of the Russians succeeding in Syria where the Western powers have utterly failed, has provoked horror.
The result has been a concerted attempt over the last ten days to get the Russians and the Syrians to accept a ceasefire, leaving the jihadi rebels in Aleppo intact and in place, and preventing a Syrian military advance on Raqqa.
As far as the Western machinery of lies goes, the Russians could be distributing candy to children and they would still be accused of heinous crimes. Considering Washington’s long history of real, documented crimes, this is beyond simple hypocrisy. It’s criminal complicity.
Firstly, an attempt was made to force the Russians to stop their bombing by threatening a walkout of the rebels from the Geneva peace conference unless the bombing stopped.
The Russians rejected the demand, and in order to prevent the threatened walkout from taking place the UN suspended the conference.
The Western media then promptly – and predictably – blamed the Russians. The fact the peace conference was suspended because the rebels threatened a walkout was barely reported.
Instead false reports were published that Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General, had blamed the Russians for the suspension of the peace conference by accusing them of indiscriminate bombing.
Ban Ki-Moon’s office has complained on his behalf at the way in which his comments have been misrepresented. However the Western media agencies that misrepresented his comments have failed to report this, or to correct their earlier wrong reports of his comments.
The US in the person of Secretary of State Kerry then tried again to persuade the Russians to agree a ceasefire at his meeting with Lavrov in Munich.
The Russians again said no. The result was a joint statement that simply restates what had already been said by the preceding UN Security Council Resolutions – that the parties should work towards a ceasefire but that the jihadi terrorist movements would be excluded from it.
There then followed a media campaign to try to represent the rebels in Aleppo as part of the Western backed Free Syrian Army – and therefore covered by the ceasefire.
As the Western commentators who claim this almost certainly know, this is simply not true. The Free Syrian Army – to the extent that it exists at all – is largely located in the south of the country, near Damascus. The Russians not only claim they are not bombing it, but say that they are actually cooperating with it. The rebels in the north, and specifically those in Aleppo, are jihadis.
This media campaign to misrepresent the character of the rebels in Aleppo is accompanied by an intense media campaign to try to embarrass the Russians by claiming that their bombing campaign is indiscriminate and is killing thousands of civilians.
Russian bombing undoubtedly has killed civilians, though not on the scale that is being alleged.
The Russians not only publish very detailed accounts of their bombing raids – far more detailed than those the US and its allies publish – but they share information, including detailed information about the flight paths of their aircraft, with the US military.
That makes it all but impossible for the Russian bombing to be anything like as indiscriminate as is being alleged.
Though some Western journalists at least know this, that has not prevented them from bombarding Medvedev and Lavrov at the security conference in Munich with demands that Russia stop bombing civilians, whilst ridiculing and misrepresenting their denials that such bombing is taking place.
The failure to get the Russians to stop their bombing – and to stop the Syrian army from advancing – is having two outcomes.
The first is that parts of the Western media are now criticising the US administration for “weakness”, though short of attacking the Russian military in Syria – something strongly opposed by Western public opinion and by the uniformed military in Washington – they have no alternative to suggest.
The second is a plan hatched by the Saudis for a Western invasion force to march into Syria to capture Raqqa before the Syrian army does.
Since despatch of a US ground force to capture Raqqa is for domestic political reasons out of the question – and almost certainly could not be organised quickly enough anyway – what that means in practice is a Turkish invasion of Syria to capture Raqqa.
At the same time the Turks are trying to keep routes to Aleppo open by shelling the Syrian government’s Kurdish allies in the north of Syria around the town of Azaz, which is located on the main highway between Aleppo and Turkey.
All these moves are being accompanied by increasingly shrill demands from the Saudis for Assad to be removed “by force if necessary”.
These military moves by the Turks and the Saudis should be seen for what they are: manifestations of panic at the collapse of their regime change strategy.
Without US support a Turkish advance on Raqqa is simply not practical.
The US is most unlikely to support such a move because it would entangle Turkey with the US’s own Kurdish allies, as well as with the Russians.
It would also be a major extension of the war, with the Turkish army fighting on foreign soil in a way that could easily end up threatening Turkey’s own stability.
That is emphatically not in the US’s interests, and for that reason too the US is likely to oppose it.
As for Turkish shelling of the Kurds around Azaz, that cannot change the situation around Aleppo, which is further to the south. In the meantime it is again embroiling Turkey in another row with the US.
As I discussed previously, with a personality as whimsical and impulsive as Erdogan, it is impossible to predict his moves with any certainty. However so far Turkish and Saudis moves have been more bluster than action.
The Syrian conflict has far failed to become a big issue in the US Presidential race – a fact that strongly suggests most Americans do not want the US to become embroiled in the conflict.
That the American people do not share the enthusiasm of the neocons for tangling with the Russians in order to aid violent jihadis who hate – and have previously attacked – the US should surprise no-one. That and the opposition of the uniformed military is a major constraint on US action, and makes US intervention on the side of the jihadi rebels – and the Turks and the Saudis – look unlikely.
If so the latest moves by the Turks and the Saudis are a bluff, and one that is likely to be called before very long.
Alexander Mercouris is a London-based writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law. He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law, being a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences. He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/authors/alexander_mercouris/#ixzz40HfdEUDA
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71st anniversary of Dresden fire bombing: Allied war crime prelude to the Cold War
ANNALS OF ANGLO-AMERICAN (SANCTIMONIOUS) CRIMINALITY
Aftermath of the 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany by Allied forces.
By DOUGAL MACDONALD
On the night of February 13-14, 1945, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber command carried out two devastating attacks on the German city of Dresden. At the time, Dresden’s pre-war population of 640,000 had been swelled by the presence of an estimated 100,000-200,000 refugees. Seven hundred and twenty-two aircraft dropped 1,478 tons of high explosives and 1,181 tons of incendiaries on the city. The resulting firestorm destroyed an area of 13 square miles, including the historic Altstadt Museum. Shortly after noon on February 14, a fleet of 316 U.S. bombers made a third attack, dropping a further 488 tons of high explosives and 294 tons of incendiaries. On February 15, two hundred and eleven U.S. bombers made a fourth attack, dropping 466 tons of high explosives.
The fire-bombing of Dresden was considered to be a gratuitous crime on the part of the British which caused up to 300,000 deaths.[1] Dresden was almost completely defenseless against the Anglo-American terror-attacks, which allowed the bombers to descend to lower levels and to maintain a steady height and heading, making their bombs even more effective.
Dresden had not previously been bombed during the war. The city was not considered a likely target because it was not a major contributor to the Nazi war economy and no key oil refineries or large armaments plants were located there. In the British Ministry of Economic Warfare’s 1943 “Bomber’s Baedeker,” Dresden was ranked 20th of 100 German towns in its importance to the German war effort. In fact, Dresden was best known worldwide as a site of architectural treasures and was sometimes referred to as the “German Florence.” Despite this, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the Dresden raids based on a plan submitted in August 1944 by Sir Charles Portal, Britain’s Chief of the Air Staff.[2]
Codenamed “Operation Thunderclap,” the plan involved concentrating an entire attack on a single big town other than Berlin to try to inflict a single major blow on Germany using all available power. Portal opted for the “area bombing” of a city because cities afforded a big target. In January 1945, Churchill approved Portal’s plan, specifically in regards to large cities in eastern Germany, and demanded immediate action. The next day Churchill was told that Dresden, Berlin, and two other cities would be attacked as soon as conditions allowed.
Incendiaries, which are explicitly designed to start fires, were heavily used in the first three Dresden raids. The deadliness of the resulting firestorm was such that even people who took shelter from bombs underground in cellars or subways were either roasted to death by the heat or suffocated because the firestorm sucked the oxygen out of the air. This heavy use of incendiaries underlines once again that the Dresden attacks aimed to terrorize and kill people.[3] Confirming this further is the fact that Churchill specifically ordered that the terror-bombings be focused on Dresden’s working class areas. Or, even more blatantly, in the words of Arthur Harris, the commander of the RAF’s Bomber Command: “You destroy a factory and they rebuild it. In six weeks they are in operation again. I kill all their workmen and it takes twenty-one years to provide new ones.”[4]
The bombing of Dresden was an Anglo-American war crime never brought to trial.[5] A war crime, by definition, is any crime that transgresses the laws of war, and the bombing of civilians has long been banned by international law. The 1923 Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare declared: “Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the citizen population, of destroying or damaging private property not of military character, or of injuring non-combatants is prohibited.” Even the Hitler-loving British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared in 1938: “It is against international law to bomb civilians as such.” In the same year, the League of Nations Assembly unanimously accepted similar principles.[6]
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy was Dresden selected for the February 1945 bombings? Dresden was directly in the path of the advancing Soviet Army, who occupied the city shortly after the raids on their way to Berlin (Dresden was soon to be part of the post-war Soviet Zone). The idea was that the death and devastation caused by the bombing would be seen and reported back to Stalin, showing him the destructive capabilities of the U.S. and British bomber forces. With the end of the war only three months away, the aim of the Dresden raids was to try to intimidate Stalin and the Soviet Union so they would not stand up to the Anglo-American imperialists after the war.
About three weeks after Dresden, another similarly coded message was sent to Stalin and the Soviet Union via the U.S. imperialists’ firebombing of Tokyo, which incinerated between 80,000 and 200,000 people. In August 1945, the U.S. imperialists sent two new messages, targeting Hiroshima and Nagasaki to showcase the destructive force of their new atomic bomb. Just as Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki had little or nothing to do with the war against the Japanese imperialists, Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against the Nazis. But it had much, if not everything, to do with a new conflict in which the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists would be Anglo-American allies and the enemy would be the Soviet Union. The Cold War was born amid the ashes of the hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who were murdered in the deadly infernos of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Notes
- In 2004 a commission of thirteen German historians mysteriously reduced this figure to the current official estimate of 25,000 deaths. This deliberate reduction to downplay the number of deaths parallels the imperialist campaign to reduce the number of deaths attributed to the Nazis, e.g., the number of official deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was recently reduced from the immediate post-war figure of 4 million, agreed upon at the Nuremberg Trials, to 1.4 million.
- The most ludicrous theory of the origin of the Dresden raids is that Winston Churchill, the virulent anti-communist who initiated the 21-country invasion of the fledgling Soviet Union in 1918 and who made the Goebbels-inspired Iron Curtain speech in 1946 that officially opened the Cold War, carried out the Dresden raids because Stalin ordered him to! Of course, no documentation of this so-called order exists.
- Andrew Chandler, “The Church of England and the Obliteration Bombing of Germany in the Second World War.” English Historical Review, 108 (1993), pp. 920-46 (p. 931).
- Similarly, the U.S. imperialists used white phosphorus and napalm weapons to terrorize and kill civilians during the Korean and Viet Nam wars.
(Originally published by TML Daily, February 14, 2011 – Vol. 41, No. 20. )
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The US “Plan B” for Syria and the threat of world war
Bill Van Auken
Negotiations on Syria’s bloody armed conflict were held in Munich Thursday against the backdrop of a government offensive, supported by Russian airstrikes, to break the grip of Western-backed “rebels” over the largely shattered eastern part of Aleppo.
The talks were convened under the auspices of the 17-member International Syria Support Group, which includes the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar—in the war for regime change in Syria, along with Russia and Iran, which are allied with and actively aiding the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Washington demanded an immediate cease-fire and halt to Russian airstrikes in Syria. The US, together with the reactionary Arab monarchies and the regime in Turkey, fears that without a halt to the fighting, the Islamist militias that they have supported, financed and armed for nearly five years may face irreparable defeat.
Russia, for its part, reportedly proposed a cease-fire that would begin on March 1, thus allowing enough time for the Syrian government to reestablish its control over Aleppo.
Late Thursday night, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that they had reached a tentative deal that would see a ceasefire “within a week” along with expedited humanitarian aid. Kerry allowed that while the agreement looked good “on paper,” it was yet to be tested. All of the underlying conflicts remain unresolved, and both US and Russian military operations are to continue in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
On the eve of the Munich talks, Kerry, in an interview with Washington Postcolumnist David Ignatius, delivered an unmistakable threat in connection with the US negotiating strategy in Munich: “What we’re doing is testing [Russian and Iranian] seriousness.” he said. “And if they’re not serious, then there has to be consideration of a Plan B… You can’t just sit there.”
“Plan B” would consist of a sharp escalation of the US military intervention in Syria, carried out under the cover of combating ISIS, but directed at toppling the Assad government.
The ruins of Aleppo—the whole Middle East is now a heap of rubble—owing to the greed and sociopathy of the global ruling class, whose leaders are in Washington.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar have also reportedly spent the last several days discussing a “Plan B” that would involve their participation in direct military intervention to save the “rebels” that they have supported. The Saudi-owned news group al-Arabiya has quoted officials in Riyadh as confirming the House of Saud’s decision to send troops into Syria in what would constitute a provocatively hostile invasion.
Responding to the ominous implications of such an escalation, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the German daily Handelsblatt Thursday: “The Americans and our Arab partners must think hard about this—do they want a permanent war? All sides must be forced to the negotiating table instead of sparking a new world war.”
Medvedev’s choice of words was not mere hyperbole. A military intervention to rescue the “rebels,” which amounts to a war to save Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, the leading force on the ground in Aleppo province, could quickly bring the US and its allies into combat with Russia, an armed confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
US officials have spoken in recent days of creating a “humanitarian corridor” to Aleppo and other rebel areas under siege by government forces. Presumably this “corridor” is meant to replace the main supply route for the “rebels” from Turkey, which has been cut off by the government offensive, disrupting the CIA-orchestrated arming of the “rebels” with stockpiles poured in from Libya, the Gulf oil kingdoms and beyond. Such a corridor would require a military force to protect it and enforcement of a “no-fly zone,” meaning a confrontation not only with Syrian government forces, but with Russian warplanes as well.
Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally, is meanwhile blocking its border to Syrian refugees in order to create the maximum crisis possible so that it can pursue its own strategic aims, which include not only regime change in Damascus, but also the bloody suppression of the Kurdish minority on both sides of the frontier.
The Obama administration has issued no warning to the American people that it is embarking on a policy in Syria that could pit the US against the Russian military and potentially trigger a global catastrophe.
There is no significant popular support for US military intervention in Syria, which has been promoted under the false flag of “humanitarianism,” aided by a whole coterie of pseudo-left organizations that have specialized in portraying a bloody sectarian campaign by CIA-backed Islamist militias as a “Syrian revolution.”
The extent of the catastrophe unleashed upon Syria through this intervention was spelled out in shocking terms with the release of a new study by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, which found that fully 11.5 per cent of the population inside Syria has been either killed or injured as a result of the armed conflict. The death toll from the war—combined with the systematic destruction of the country’s social infrastructure and health care system and a dramatic drop in living standards—has caused life expectancy to plummet from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.
The study found further that the country’s unemployment rate had soared from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 52.9 percent by the end of 2015, and that the overall poverty rate is estimated at 85.2 percent.
In short, the Obama administration has inflicted upon Syria a war that is every bit as criminal and lethal as the war carried out by the Bush administration against Iraq.
The Syrian people are the victims of a US-orchestrated war that is driven by the global strategy of American imperialism to reverse its economic decline through the use or threat of military force. Washington sought regime change in Syria as a means to an end: the weakening of the two principal allies of Damascus, Russia and Iran, and the reassertion of a Western stranglehold on the vast energy resources of the Middle East.
The threat of world war is posed not merely by the prospect of US and Russian warplanes facing off in the skies over Syria, but by the entire logic of the Syrian war for regime change and the broader strategic aims that it serves. This finds expression in NATO’s escalation of the military encirclement of Russia and the increasingly provocative anti-Chinese policy being pursued by the Pentagon in the South China Sea.
The US drive for global hegemony was articulated in the strategic maxim enunciated by the Pentagon nearly a quarter of a century ago that Washington must prevent the emergence of any power capable of challenging the dominance of American capitalism on a global or even regional scale. This “grand strategy” has led to unceasing US wars of aggression since and now poses the real threat of a third, nuclear, world war.
Against this barbaric strategy of the US ruling establishment, the American and international working class must advance its own independent strategy, fighting for the withdrawal of US and all foreign military forces from Syria, Iraq and the entire Middle East and for the unity of the working class across all national, religious and ethnic boundaries in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism, the source of militarism and war.
Bill Van Auken is a senior editorial writer with wsws.org.
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The US Government would support the devil himself – Dr. Michael Parenti
The rulers of the US empire are committed to stopping a world in which the land, the labor, the natural resources, the markets are directed toward the betterment of the ordinary people in that world.
Collage: Voice of Russia
YOU HAVE A CHOICE: LISTEN OR READ.
Dr. Michael Parenti
PART 2
Robles: Since the end of the Soviet Union the Russian people just opened their arms to the West and welcomed everything.
Parenti: Well they have such a mythology, they just self-generated a mythology about the West. Everything in the West: “Oh yes, you have things that are wrong but you fix them, we don’t. Oh, you are this, oh, you are that. There is no starvation, there is no poverty in the West”. I used to hear that from people. It was really something to hear it.
There was a guy in Moscow, he had gone to Moscow University, he spoke very good English, so he had a good education. He had a fairly small apartment, but a wall full of books and all that, and he seemed like he lived fairly comfortable. And he said: “The very poorest people in your country (in the United States) the very poorest people in your country live better than I do”.
And I say: “No, you don’t know. They sleep in doorways in my country, the very poorest people, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.”
He said: “That’s all right, you don’t have to lie to us anymore”. That was what he said. I couldn’t believe the guy, yeah.
And they’ve even got racist, some of them, and they say: “Oh, well, that is just the blacks, they are stupid and lazy anyway and blah blah”.
I said: “No, it’s not just the blacks”. And anyway that’s an outrageous comment. So they were very much brainwashed.
I thought Lech Walesa, a couple of years ago (a few years ago) made a very, very good comment, I mean it is the first thing that ever came out of his mouth that I could tolerate anyway. He turned to his people, he was talking to the Polish people who were full of complaints about how terrible things were and how this and that. He said: “Look, you wanted America, you are getting America”. And that was it.
And their favorite theme, I mean, we saw some of this right here on the western media and I was so surprised that they even ran it. But they did a few little specials, like documentaries on what’s happening in Poland. And these people were repeatedly saying, people they interviewed, were repeatedly saying: “It was better under the Communists. This is terrible, we’ve got to pay for this, we’ve got to pay for that, and so it was better under the Communists. I’m going to lose my little plot of land here now and it was better under the Communists’. Well, too late. you wanted America, and you are getting America.
And I think that same element, by the way, there is an element of that in Ukraine. Some of the people who are opposing the Russian and Ukrainian relationship and want Ukraine to go West, some of those people have the dream of: someday I’ll be dancing in Paris or New York or something, or there is so much I can get still, and some of its going to come down to me, I talked to all those people who rallied us and gave us some money. And there they are.
Robles: Do you believe like some people do (and I think some people cannot believe it’s any other way) that the US government actually cares about people, or cares about countries, or cares about the people?
Parenti: No, as I tried to say, they put out that messianic front about how we have to fight this humanitarian war. We have to go in and stop Milošević who is another Stalinist, and demonizing the Serbs for killing all these people, when in fact the Croats and the Kosovars and the Bosniacs were all engaged in savage killings with each other. And the Serbs were the only honest ones who said: “We weren’t angels”. While all the others pretended that they were angels.
And the US has supported some of the worst and horrible people, as I’ve mentioned with Afghanistan for instance. No, they support the devil himself, there is no virtue, there is no virtue in their position. They don’t even give support to their own people! When hurricane Katrina almost destroyed all of New Orleans. They didn’t do a thing, they had been warned about it, we again and again told them.
Robles: But that was because they were blacks, right?
Parenti: They were blacks and they voted against the Republican Party when they did vote. They were people who were critical and were not really adoringly swept up in the American dream. So that’s it.
So the process has been, again and again, to take leaders, demonize them (if they are leaders who have been recalcitrant and trying to take an independent course) and use that as an excuse to bomb their people, or coop their people, take their people in.
The true meaning of the most hypocritical media equation in history—
“The West” does NOT mean “democracy”. It only means the Global Plutocracy
And they do want, of course they want, Ukraine in NATO, that would be wonderful for them. They would be right at the doorstep, it would be a way of really hemming in their enemy (or potential enemy) which is Russia.
The Russians haven’t been acting like an enemy, they don’t rattle their sabre against the United States, and neither do the Chinese nor anybody else. But it doesn’t matter, you could just declare that: “They’re enemies and they are hostile to us and we try to negotiate with them”, and that means unless you agree in the negotiation with the proposal that I put up, you are not negotiating; “We try to negotiate but they don’t want to, they don’t want to cooperate”.
For those the word cooperate means: “you’ve got to do what I tell you.” But yes, they don’t want to cooperate, if that’s what cooperate means.
Robles: I believe it was Sergey Lavrov, when all this Ukrainian stuff started up, and he says: “Well, it might sound ridiculous, but I’m telling you to make an independent sovereign decision, even if it is slapping ourselves in the face”. Something (I’m paraphrasing) something to that effect, and you would never hear a US official saying that, it’s ridiculous.
Parenti: Well Yanukovich though is not… he is not wanting to get dragged into the EU net, is he? I mean, here I will defer to you, because you are right there on the spot, but it does seem to me that he seems quite pleased with the offer that the Soviets just made.
Robles: Russians, Russians there are no more Soviets, Doctor.
Parenti: I know, this is absolutely outrageous. I have for 30 years been fighting (or more, I forget for how many years now) for the Russians. Doesn’t that sort of pull the rug out of some of these “democracy-loving-protestors”, or what?
Robles: Well yeah, but they were open to the agreement right, and they sat down and they looked at the benefits. Of course, he is the president of the country, any president he wants to do what is better for his country, right? And when you are talking about.. this is just the first part, $100 billion for your country over 7 years, as opposed to $1 billion, and giving up your sovereignty, and the one thing that the Ukrainians thought …
Parenti: What do you mean giving up their…? Who’s giving up their…? The Ukrainians are giving up their sovereignty?
Robles: Well, in my opinion and I think many people would agree, that any country that joins the EU, and that is one reason the UK didn’t want it, they would give up a lot of their sovereignty.
Parenti: Oh. Right.
Robles: In joining NATO they give up their sovereignty. I mean, when you have American troops in your country…
Parenti: Right
Robles: Like in Serbia, what did they do? They recognized Kosovo and the first thing they did, they built the biggest military installation (US military installation) in the world outside the USA, in Kosovo?
Parenti: In Kosovo! Yeah, yeah.
Robles: Yeah.You’ve written and spoken about Serbia in the past?
Parenti: I wrote a book called “To Kill a Nation: The Destruction of Yugoslavia”. And that was what it was about, it was about the whole war that took Yugoslavia, which was a viable social democracy where more than 80% maybe 90% of its economy was publicly state owned and it was going well and they were trying to also build up the worker-controlled enterprises and such, and turn it into a cluster of small right-wing mini-republics where everything has been privatized and everything has been deregulated and the people are poor and miserable, and that is what they got.
Or in the immortal words of our “friend” Lech Walesa: “you wanted America, you got it”. But now most of those people did not want it, they got bombed into it, you know.
Robles: You know who Doctor Edward Herman is right? He has done some really good work on exposing the Srebrenica Massacre, there was actually two: the first one(s) were when these Albanian Muslims came in and they obliterated thousands of … they murdered, Serbian women and children. Do you know anything else about …?
Parenti: Right. The Bosnians made the big complaint that the Serbs massacred them.
Robles: Yeah, and that was the pretext for the invasion.
Parenti: Right, yeah. Well, all I can say is Milošević stood trial for one year about Bosnia and Srebrenica,and all that stuff and at the end of it, the head jurist, their Carla del Ponte, she said: “We do not have a case of genocide here. We haven’t made the case, we haven’t won the case.” People would get up and then they were cross-examined by Milošević, and they would recant and say: “No, no I didn’t kill that many, no, no…”.
Robles: Why is the US now…(you’re there, I’m here right, so this is a good dialogue here,) can you tell me from sitting over there, why does the US keep demonizing Russia and why is it surrounding Russia with missiles, and China as well? And why is NATO continuing to expand, in your opinion?
Parenti: Well, as I just said, there are only two kinds of countries: satellites and enemies. And any country that can go its own willful way, and do what it chooses; any country that can shut out the US and Western plutocracy, that country is getting in the way of the profits and the dominance that people could have.
Some of the writers here in America will talk about this as “craving for power”, but I don’t think so. They use the power for a particular function, which is to make the world safe for global capitalism because they have a huge link or investment in that global capitalism. It’s a class war, still very nicely disguised behind things like “security, democratic elections and humanitarian wars and fighting against genocide or something like that, and terrorism”.
Egypt’s tyrant Hosni Mubarak being embraced (and certified as “good”) by the current figurehead of the visible part of the imperial deep state, Barack Obama. [CC BY by Muhammad غفّاري
I’ll give you example of one: Mubarak in Egypt. Now there has never been a harsh word in the US media about Mubarak, and the guy was a murderer and he was an oppressor, he was a dictator. But you never heard a word, now the US supported demonstrations and uprisings when it was in Libya and Syria, and Iraq, and Yugoslavia. But in Egypt, they didn’t support that at all (they weren’t supporting it), and they would rather … they would rather end up as they did in Afghanistan.
They would rather end up supporting Islamic militant terrorists (not that I’m saying all Islamists are militant and terrorists but this extreme Sharia group)…
Robles: Of course not….
Parenti: … they would rather see those guys take over, they would rather see the Taliban take over in Afghanistan, rather than seeing the kind of country that the revolutionary movement in Afghanistan was trying to build: a country where the children could go to school, women could go to school, there was land reform, all the things I mentioned before; human services and the country was developing.
They don’t want development, they want exploitation. They don’t want people who have a keen sense of their own entitlement, who have a high level of expectations.
They do the same thing here in the United States. They fight against human services, they are still trying to attack and destroy Social Security, what little that we have left of our own social services.
They are furious against anything that resembles a social democracy of any kind. For them, they want us poor and hungry and ready to work at any desperate level that we have to. And it is time that we get our chains back on, and so that kind of struggle that they are carrying out in Ukraine or in the Middle East or in Central Europe with Yugoslavia, it’s the same struggle they are carrying out here in the United States itself.
Robles: That’s become clear to me since 9-11, I think. But I think maybe a lot of us: we believed this stuff about “promoting democracy” and “freedom” and “helping build societies” and everything”. So it was quite a… I think a lot of people were kind of shocked…
Parenti: Yeah…
Robles: If I could just for a second, why they went in and invaded/destroyed Iraq? And then people were kind of surprised: “Why isn’t there a plan for rebuilding? There is no plan for afterwards”. But what you are saying now is that was done on purpose, there was not supposed to be any rebuilding, right?
Parenti: What country are we talking about?
Robles: Well, we could talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya…what they are trying to do with Syria.
Parenti: Yeah, there is no plan to rebuild. No. They want it shattered, they want it on its knees, they want to be able to go in and make their own terms. That’s exactly what they want to do.
Robles: It is a shame. Regarding Afghanistan, I’ve talked to some people that were there in Soviet times, I’ve interviewed some Afghani “patriots” (I would say), and people who commented that everything they had in Afghanistan was built by the Soviet Union, almost, all the infrastructure: roads, airports, buildings, apartment blocks, right? And effectively 12 years (13 years almost) of NATO occupation and US occupation – they destroyed everything. There is nothing left.
Parenti: Yeah.
Robles: And there is no plan for rebuilding. I mean, some people thought: “Oh, KNBR and Halliburton they will go in and they’ll start building stuff”. But they are not interested in building anything.
Parenti: That is a good point, a very good point.
Robles: I mean if they do go and rebuild they are going to profit from it, right?
Parenti: Yeah. Or if they do go in and build, as in Kazakhstan or in Kosovo, they build a big monster military base. That’s what they build.
Robles: They are not going to build hospitals; they are not going to build schools.
Parenti: No, no, they are not interested in that. And that’s again and again that is the case. And that is why they can support a Mubarak, but if you had a political group or individual leader like Gaddafi or even Assad, or Milošević or anybody else, then they would really be putting the heat on Egypt.
Even with Iran. Iran is big, it is still a counterweight, it is not socialist, it is not even particularly maybe anti-capitalist, but it is independent and it is critical of the US and it doesn’t fall in line, and Israel is very keenly hoping to see Iran go the way of Libya, Yugoslavia, Syria, and the like.
That was the end of part 2 of an interview with Dr. Michael Parenti, a Yale graduate, a noted scholar and the author of several books, including The Face of Imperialism. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. Thank you very much for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.
John Robles
Original: http://sputniknews.com/voiceofrussia/2014_01_07/The-US-Government-would-support-the-devil-himself-Dr-Michael-Parenti-8278/
SEE PART ONE OF THIS INTERVIEW ON PAGE 2 BELOW
US Empire successful in stopping the betterment of the world’s people – Dr. Michael Parenti
© Screenshot: Youtube
YOU CAN LISTEN OR YOU CAN READ
This is Part 1 of a longer interview.
Robles: Hello Dr Parenti. How are you this evening? And it is a great pleasure to be speaking with you.
Parenti: Thank you John.
Robles: Regarding Imperialism; now, one of your recent books was called “The Face of Imperialism”, kind of a big question, I would like to ask you about the United States. Is it a dying empire in your opinion?
Parenti: No, I don’t think so. I think the empire is doing very well. The empire is racking up victory after victory.
The US Empire is now, despite its defeat in Indo China and Vietnam, it now has Vietnam in the market system pretty much. In these recent years it has knocked out Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was committing economic nationalism, and that’s not allowed by an empire. And they’ve dismantled Libya and got rid of Gaddafi. They are destroying Syria, and it goes on and on, and they’re targeting Iran.
Robles: I’m sorry sir, would you call that success? I mean Afghanistan was an over 12 year quagmire. What was the success there?
Parenti: Yes, that one… They are going to lose Afghanistan, but they do succeed, they succeeded in stopping the betterment of the masses of people.
They are committed to stopping a world in which the land, the labor, the natural resources, the markets are directed toward the betterment of the ordinary people in that world.
When the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan, and it went in only after the third or fourth request by the Afghani military government…
Robles: Thank you very much for saying that.
Parenti: Yes.
Robles: They were requested several times and just like when Russia went into Georgia. There were 3 days … there was requests and pleadings by Russian nationals being killed there for Russia to intervene.
Parenti: Right! Exactly.
Robles: Go ahead. I am sorry for the interruption.
Parenti: Well, and the policy that the Soviets pursued in cooperation with the existing Afghani government was to break the feudal class. To do a much needed land reform, to allow schools for women and for children, and all that, and these Mujahidin and these other people were just absolutely furious at this, this was totally intolerable.
Plus they convinced themselves that the Soviets were the Devil’s atheist, “Godless Communists” were coming, and the US played on that a lot.
That was a success basically. The Mujahidin, backed by the CIA and such, destroyed the Afghani revolution, destroyed all the reforms that were being made, killed a lot of people, and today we have this horrible retrograde Taliban as the only alternative to the puppet government under Karzai and headed by the US.
Robles: And that is called success? It’s a shame; it’s a disgrace I think. You mentioned destruction of country after country after country. Now sir, how is that a success then?
Parenti: Ok, it’s a success because the goal or the function of the state in the empire is to advance the interests of the empire, and those interests are to make sure that the – as I said – the land, the labor, the natural resources, the human resources, the social organization of culture. The markets of every country should be a part of, and in the orbit of this giant US imperial state.
You see the US Empire sees only two kinds of countries in the world: satellites or enemies (or “potential” enemies). The satellites are the countries that vote the way the US wants in the UN, that had their country opened to investments and resource extraction, all the things we were just saying. Their markets are open, the EU, all of that. Of course they can take independent courses in limited ways on particular issues. But the overall pattern is to make this world safe for the Fortune 500, for the plutocracy in the US, and the plutocrats in other countries too. They are very internationally minded, in the sense of sharing in the wealth and investment, and even as they compete with each other. So that’s the satellites.
And if a country doesn’t fit as a satellite, such as Russia, or China, or maybe to some extent India, then those countries are seen as potential enemies, or actual enemies. I heard Obama say in one of his speeches – a State of The Union I think it was to the Congress – he said “China, our competitors, is out producing us”.
And I’m saying “our competitors”, I’m saying “I have no competition with China, I’m not in any fight with China, what is this stuff, what is this?”
And with Russia also, it does seem like the Cold War is going on, as you mentioned when we were talking earlier, before we went on the air. It’s absolutely right, has this Cold War ended or what is the US now doing? The US was one of the countries that started this Cold War many decades ago, and they’re still doing it.
Well we find out now that you don’t have to be a Communist, or a Bolshevik, or anything. If you are charting an independent course, if you are trying to use the land, the labor, the markets, the wealth of your nation, in a way that is for the self-development of your nation for the interests of your own people, then you become marked and the US media goes into high gear and they talk about “Milosevic”, and they talk about “Noriega”. They talk about just about every…
Robles: A perfect example just right now. A glaring unbelievable example…(Ukraine) and I would like to comment on what you said about the Cold War. I think the Cold War was over for Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Parenti: Since the end of the Cold War, so-called, what back in 91, 2, around there was it?
Robles: Yes, yes.
Parenti: Since then the US military budget, the enormous US military budget has more than doubled in its size. It’s now about, counting the money that goes into the Department of Energy and such, almost all of it is targeted for military purposes. It’s about a trillion dollars a year. That’s just enormous; that’s tremendous.
Now why? Who is attacking us, who is doing this? Hugo Chavez in Venezuela wasn’t attacking the US, but the minute he started taking some of the oil earnings and using it for … or subsidizing… and putting it out at a subsidized rate for his own people, and making all sorts of other reforms for the poor and the not so poor. But the minute he was doing that he became, he was pegged as a firebrand, “hostile to America…”
Robles: Well there were plans to assassinate him. For what?
Parenti: Yes, and they overthrew him. They participated in a coup that overthrew him, which didn’t work, he got back in. And there are questions about his death, which he himself took with him to the grave. He was saying “isn’t it strange that 5 leftist progressive heads of state in Latin America all have cancer suddenly”. But we don’t know. All right we won’t even get into that. The point is…
Robles: Well that’s a very good point. I studied that; I researched that and going way back if we could for a minute, if you will humor me for a second? Going back to Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby, they were actually involved in trying to off Fidel Castro – now this is out there this information – under, I don’t know if you read Dr Mary’s Monkey, I believe that was the title of the book, it was regarding a CIA cancer assassination program, and that was “way back when”, in the 50s right, late 50s early 60s? Can you imagine with the technology that the CIA has, I think they have already delivered mechanisms to install cancer, and I don’t think it was a coincidence.
Parenti: Yes, and Ruby himself, Ruby himself was whacked I think that way. And he himself said, he himself said: “They are killing me here, bring me to Washington where I can talk, they are killing me, I’ll tell you everything blah-blah and I think someone else, I forget now, I haven’t done … I haven’t been in there … I did some original research in that area. I republished an old article, it’s available on the Internet, anybody can get it about Oswald and all that. But Ruby, or somebody reported, that they were giving him injections of some kind in his cell, and he died of cancer in the cell.
Let me get to the major point, which is any leader who uses the resources, and labor, and substance of his country for the well-being and self-development in that country is seen as someone who is evil, has a hidden agenda, hostile toward America, hostile toward the West – that curious term “The West” – which really means the western plutocracy, the ruling plutocracy
They say “The West”, but they do want to make a kind of a multi-national component that is running the globe, and this multi-national, mostly American, but now it’s got British plutocrats and multi billionaires and French multi billionaires, and others too are on the ride, and Canadian ones, and so forth.
So … and it’s so consistent, it’s so consistent. Anybody who starts to do that – Gaddafi, he was demonized – you take the leader and you demonize him, and you say he’s got weapons of mass destruction, or he’s crazy, he’s an extremist, he’s a terrorist, he wants to kill us.
Robles: A dictator. A despot.
Parenti: And the American public sometimes falls for the Messianic call that’s sent out, which is “we are God’s gift to humanity, we Americans really care about the world, America is always on the side of virtue; Americans reach out, when we fight wars they’re humanitarian wars to save people from some harsh dictator or ruthless killer,” be it Noriega or Chavez, or whomever.
Robles: You are an informed, educated person. What is your opinion on President Bashar Al-Assad? The main thing he did was try to improve the social conditions for his people before all of this happened.
Parenti: The Ba’athist Party that he ruled was a leftist, it was the leftist wing of the Ba’athist Party, and they had a lot of human services.
The tens of thousands of refugees from Iraq that flooded into Syria, Assad gave them, he gave them full human services, the same services that the people in Syria were getting at the time when they were still had them before everything got torn up by this war. And refugees that he got from Libya, he also did the same, and he countenanced a country with multi-denominations of religions, and he didn’t try to impose any one sect on anybody else.
So he, it seems to me, he was doing pretty well, and he had an awful lot of support. And, well, but the country’s ruined now, I don’t know, and the FSA, which is I guess is the CIA/USA backed group is getting knocked out by the Islamic … the other group, these Sharia hardline boys.
Robles: Moving away if we could, a little bit to something that’s been very important, and it’s very obvious, and when you’re talking about Imperialism, and all these nefarious attempts to replace governments and install governments and demonize and everything. It’s all right there, on page one, for everyone to see, going on right now in Ukraine.
Parenti: Well I think they might do the old sweetheart revolution, color revolution, which one? Orange, green, blue – they are going to try that.
Secondly, wouldn’t it be kind of risky that close to the Soviet borders to start a full-fledged war, they don’t have a good alibi cooked up just yet?
Robles: OK, Russian borders, there’s no more Soviet Union.
Parenti: Right, I’m sorry, did I say Soviet?
I think President Putin was correct when he said ‘the elimination of the Soviet Union, the overthrow of the Soviet Union was one of the great catastrophes of modern history’. He was quite right on that one.
Robles: He also recently said that, “the Soviet Union is gone, and it will never be revived”. He said that in July, I believe it was.
I think the way it was done, it could have been done a lot different to preserve some of the power that Russia had at the time, but they gave up too much territory. I think that’s a point that always has bothered me. There was no need to give up all the Republics.
What kinds of US imperialist intervention do you see going on in Ukraine right now?
Parenti: Well it just seems that these antigovernment demonstrators are people who were from the earlier demonstrations.
They seem to have, they have resources of all kinds: communications, money, food, headquarters. They seem quite equipped that they’ve got the world, and that means the western world, and all the western media, they’ve got all that on their side, so that their efforts doesn’t look like a sabotage or trying to advance a rightwing thing their efforts look like “Oh they’re just lovers of democracy, and that’s all it is”, or they want to join the EU, which would really take them, well, would take them to the cleaners – that’s the old American expression – it would cost them a lot.
This is that element whose hearts are in the West, who are still so rabidly anti-communist, that even the residue of a shadow of a former Communist country is a little too much.
And what they’ve go against the present Russian government is that it hasn’t completely stripped the entire economy of subsidies and public services.
That was the end of part 1 of an interview with Dr Michael Parenti, a Yale graduate, a noted scholar and the author of several books including “The Face of Imperialism”.
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