Blum’s Anti-Empire Report #136

By William Blum 


Murdering journalists … them and us

Billboard celebrating Muammar al-Gaddafi.  Despite his eccentricities, his rule was way above that of any other

Billboard celebrating Muammar al-Gaddafi. Despite his eccentricities, his rule gave a decent standard of living to his compatriots, many benefits from a relatively secular state, and a measure of independence from Washington’s encroachments.  He had to go.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter Paris, condemnation of religious fanaticism is at its height. I’d guess that even many progressives fantasize about wringing the necks of jihadists, bashing into their heads some thoughts about the intellect, about satire, humor, freedom of speech. We’re talking here, after all, about young men raised in France, not Saudi Arabia.

Where has all this Islamic fundamentalism come from in this modern age? Most of it comes – trained, armed, financed, indoctrinated – from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. During various periods from the 1970s to the present, these four countries had been the most secular, modern, educated, welfare states in the Middle East region. And what had happened to these secular, modern, educated, welfare states?

In the 1980s, the United States overthrew the Afghan government that was progressive, with full rights for women, believe it or not, leading to the creation of the Taliban and their taking power.

In the 2000s, the United States overthrew the Iraqi government, destroying not only the secular state, but the civilized state as well, leaving a failed state.

Gaddafi murdered by Washington-controlled jihadists. A mafia hit pure and simple, ordered by the biggest mafia outfit on earth.

Gaddafi brutally tortured and then murdered by Washington-controlled jihadists. A mafia hit pure and simple, ordered by the biggest mafia outfit on earth.

In 2011, the United States and its NATO military machine overthrew the secular Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, leaving behind a lawless state and unleashing many hundreds of jihadists and tons of weaponry across the Middle East.

And for the past few years the United States has been engaged in overthrowing the secular Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. This, along with the US occupation of Iraq having triggered widespread Sunni-Shia warfare, led to the creation of The Islamic State with all its beheadings and other charming practices.

However, despite it all, the world was made safe for capitalism, imperialism, anti-communism, oil, Israel, and jihadists. God is Great!

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]tarting with the Cold War, and with the above interventions building upon that, we have 70 years of American foreign policy, without which – as Russian/American writer Andre Vltchek has observed – “almost all Muslim countries, including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would now most likely be socialist, under a group of very moderate and mostly secular leaders”. Even the ultra-oppressive Saudi Arabia – without Washington’s protection – would probably be a very different place.

On January 11, Paris was the site of a March of National Unity in honor of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose journalists had been assassinated by terrorists. The march was rather touching, but it was also an orgy of Western hypocrisy, with the French TV broadcasters and the assembled crowd extolling without end the NATO world’s reverence for journalists and freedom of speech; an ocean of signs declaring Je suis CharlieNous Sommes Tous Charlie; and flaunting giant pencils, as if pencils – not bombs, invasions, overthrows, torture, and drone attacks – have been the West’s weapons of choice in the Middle East during the past century.

Perhaps not accidentally Charlie Hebdo was very anti-Russian. This cartoon accuses Putin of "redrawing the map of Russia" to grab a big chunk of Ukraine.

Perhaps not accidentally the much  celebrated Charlie Hebdo was very anti-Russian. This cartoon accuses Putin of “redrawing the map of Russia” to grab a big chunk of Ukraine.

No reference was made to the fact that the American military, in the course of its wars in recent decades in the Middle East and elsewhere, had been responsible for the deliberate deaths of dozens of journalists. In Iraq, among other incidents, see Wikileaks’ 2007 video of the cold-blooded murder of two Reuters journalists; the 2003 US air-to-surface missile attack on the offices of Al Jazeera in Baghdad that left three journalists dead and four wounded; and the American firing on Baghdad’s Hotel Palestine the same year that killed two foreign cameramen.

Moreover, on October 8, 2001, the second day of the US bombing of Afghanistan, the transmitters for the Taliban government’s Radio Shari were bombed and shortly after this the US bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the targeting of these facilities, saying: “Naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.”

And in Yugoslavia, in 1999, during the infamous 78-day bombing of a country which posed no threat at all to the United States or any other country, state-owned Radio Television Serbia (RTS) was targeted because it was broadcasting things which the United States and NATO did not like (like how much horror the bombing was causing). The bombs took the lives of many of the station’s staff, and both legs of one of the survivors, which had to be amputated to free him from the wreckage.

The great phony and intellectual poseur Bernard Henri-Levi enjoying Charlie Hebdo.

The great phony and intellectual poseur Bernard Henri-Levi enjoying Charlie Hebdo.

I present here some views on Charlie Hebdo sent to me by a friend in Paris who has long had a close familiarity with the publication and its staff:

“On international politics Charlie Hebdo was neoconservative. It supported every single NATO intervention from Yugoslavia to the present. They were anti-Muslim, anti-Hamas (or any Palestinian organization), anti-Russian, anti-Cuban (with the exception of one cartoonist), anti-Hugo Chávez, anti-Iran, anti-Syria, pro-Pussy Riot, pro-Kiev … Do I need to continue?

Dumb and Dumber

Remember Arseniy Yatsenuk? The Ukrainian whom US State Department officials adopted as one of their own in early 2014 and guided into the position of Prime Minister so he could lead the Ukrainian Forces of Good against Russia in the new Cold War?

In an interview on German television on January 7, 2015 Yatsenuk allowed the following words to cross his lips: “We all remember well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. We will not allow that, and nobody has the right to rewrite the results of World War Two”.

The Ukrainian Forces of Good, it should be kept in mind, also include several neo-Nazis in high government positions and many more partaking in the fight against Ukrainian pro-Russians in the south-east of the country. Last June, Yatsenuk referred to these pro-Russians as “sub-humans” , directly equivalent to the Nazi term “untermenschen”.

So the next time you shake your head at some stupid remark made by a member of the US government, try to find some consolation in the thought that high American officials are not necessarily the dumbest, except of course in their choice of who is worthy of being one of the empire’s partners.

The type of rally held in Paris this month to condemn an act of terror by jihadists could as well have been held for the victims of Odessa in Ukraine last May. The same neo-Nazi types referred to above took time off from parading around with their swastika-like symbols and calling for the death of Russians, Communists and Jews, and burned down a trade-union building in Odessa, killing scores of people and sending hundreds to hospital; many of the victims were beaten or shot when they tried to flee the flames and smoke; ambulances were blocked from reaching the wounded … Try and find a single American mainstream media entity that has made even a slightly serious attempt to capture the horror. You would have to go to the Russian station in Washington, DC, RT.com, search “Odessa fire” for many stories, images and videos. Also see the Wikipedia entry on the 2 May 2014 Odessa clashes.

If the American people were forced to watch, listen, and read all the stories of neo-Nazi behavior in Ukraine the past few years, I think they – yes, even the American people and their less-than-intellectual Congressional representatives – would start to wonder why their government was so closely allied with such people. The United States may even go to war with Russia on the side of such people.

L’Occident n’est pas Charlie pour Odessa. Il n’y a pas de défilé à Paris pour Odessa.

Some thoughts about this thing called ideology

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]orman Finkelstein, the fiery American critic of Israel, was interviewed recently by Paul Jay on The Real News Network. Finkelstein related how he had been a Maoist in his youth and had been devastated by the exposure and downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 in China. “It came out there was just an awful lot of corruption. The people who we thought were absolutely selfless were very self-absorbed. And it was clear. The overthrow of the Gang of Four had huge popular support.”

Many other Maoists were torn apart by the event. “Everything was overthrown overnight, the whole Maoist system, which we thought [were] new socialist men, they all believed in putting self second, fighting self. And then overnight the whole thing was reversed.”

“You know, many people think it was McCarthy that destroyed the Communist Party,” Finkelstein continued. “That’s absolutely not true. You know, when you were a communist back then, you had the inner strength to withstand McCarthyism, because it was the cause. What destroyed the Communist Party was Khrushchev’s speech,” a reference to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 exposure of the crimes of Joseph Stalin and his dictatorial rule.

Although I was old enough, and interested enough, to be influenced by the Chinese and Russian revolutions, I was not. I remained an admirer of capitalism and a good loyal anti-communist. It was the war in Vietnam that was my Gang of Four and my Nikita Khrushchev. Day after day during 1964 and early 1965 I followed the news carefully, catching up on the day’s statistics of American firepower, bombing sorties, and body counts. I was filled with patriotic pride at our massive power to shape history. Words like those of Winston Churchill, upon America’s entry into the Second World War, came easily to mind again – “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations would live.” Then, one day – a day like any other day – it suddenly and inexplicably hit me. In those villages with the strange names there were people under those falling bombs, people running in total desperation from that god-awful machine-gun strafing.

This pattern took hold. The news reports would stir in me a self-righteous satisfaction that we were teaching those damn commies that they couldn’t get away with whatever it was they were trying to get away with. The very next moment I would be struck by a wave of repulsion at the horror of it all. Eventually, the repulsion won out over the patriotic pride, never to go back to where I had been; but dooming me to experience the despair of American foreign policy again and again, decade after decade.

The human brain is an amazing organ. It keeps working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks a year, from before you leave the womb, right up until the day you find nationalism. And that day can come very early. Here’s a recent headline from the Washington Post: “In the United States the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Oh, my mistake. It actually said “In N. Korea the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Let Cuba Live! The Devil’s List of what the United States has done to Cuba

On May 31, 1999, a lawsuit for $181 billion in wrongful death, personal injury, and economic damages was filed in a Havana court against the government of the United States. It was subsequently filed with the United Nations. Since that time its fate is somewhat of a mystery.

The lawsuit covered the 40 years since the country’s 1959 revolution and described, in considerable detail taken from personal testimony of victims, US acts of aggression against Cuba; specifying, often by name, date, and particular circumstances, each person known to have been killed or seriously wounded. In all, 3,478 people were killed and an additional 2,099 seriously injured. (These figures do not include the many indirect victims of Washington’s economic pressures and blockade, which caused difficulties in obtaining medicine and food, in addition to creating other hardships.)

The case was, in legal terms, very narrowly drawn. It was for the wrongful death of individuals, on behalf of their survivors, and for personal injuries to those who survived serious wounds, on their own behalf. No unsuccessful American attacks were deemed relevant, and consequently there was no testimony regarding the many hundreds of unsuccessful assassination attempts against Cuban President Fidel Castro and other high officials, or even of bombings in which no one was killed or injured. Damages to crops, livestock, or the Cuban economy in general were also excluded, so there was no testimony about the introduction into the island of swine fever or tobacco mold.

However, those aspects of Washington’s chemical and biological warfare waged against Cuba that involved human victims were described in detail, most significantly the creation of an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, during which some 340,000 people were infected and 116,000 hospitalized; this in a country which had never before experienced a single case of the disease. In the end, 158 people, including 101 children, died. That only 158 people died, out of some 116,000 who were hospitalized, was an eloquent testimony to the remarkable Cuban public health sector.

The complaint describes the campaign of air and naval attacks against Cuba that commenced in October 1959, when US president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program that included bombings of sugar mills, the burning of sugar fields, machine-gun attacks on Havana, even on passenger trains.

Another section of the complaint described the armed terrorist groups, los bandidos, who ravaged the island for five years, from 1960 to 1965, when the last group was located and defeated. These bands terrorized small farmers, torturing and killing those considered (often erroneously) active supporters of the Revolution; men, women, and children. Several young volunteer literacy-campaign teachers were among the victims of the bandits.

There was also of course the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961. Although the entire incident lasted less than 72 hours, 176 Cubans were killed and 300 more wounded, 50 of them permanently disabled.

The complaint also described the unending campaign of major acts of sabotage and terrorism that included the bombing of ships and planes as well as stores and offices. The most horrific example of sabotage was of course the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner off Barbados in which all 73 people on board were killed. There were as well as the murder of Cuban diplomats and officials around the world, including one such murder on the streets of New York City in 1980. This campaign continued to the 1990s, with the murders of Cuban policemen, soldiers, and sailors in 1992 and 1994, and the 1997 hotel bombing campaign, which took the life of a foreigner; the bombing campaign was aimed at discouraging tourism and led to the sending of Cuban intelligence officers to the US in an attempt to put an end to the bombings; from their ranks rose the Cuban Five.

To the above can be added the many acts of financial extortion, violence and sabotage carried out by the United States and its agents in the 16 years since the lawsuit was filed. In sum total, the deep-seated injury and trauma inflicted upon on the Cuban people can be regarded as the island’s own 9-11.

Notes

  • US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232
  • Counterpunch, January 10, 2015
  • Index on Censorship, the UK’s leading organization promoting freedom of expression, October 18, 2001
  • The Independent (London), April 24, 1999
  • Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk talking to Pinar Atalay”, Tagesschau (Germany), January 7, 2015 (in Ukrainian with German voice-over)
  • CNN, June 15, 2014
  • See William Blum, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, chapter 3
  • Washington Post, January 17, 2015, page A6
  • William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 30, for a capsule summary of Washington’s chemical and biological warfare against Havana.
  • For further information, see William Schaap, Covert Action Quarterly magazine (Washington, DC), Fall/Winter 1999, pp.26-29

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

 

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Beyond Left and Right, Beyond Red and White: Framing the Liberation War in Donbass

Nina Kouprianova | Center for Syncretic Studies


“There are no separate Russia or Ukraine, but one Holy Rus” – Elder Iona of Odessa

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he year 2014 saw an unprecedented surge of patriotism in contemporary Russia, which resulted in popularizing the notion of the Russian World. One reason for increased patriotic sentiment was Crimea’s return to the home port after the overwhelmingly positive vote by its majority-Russian residents in a referendum one year ago.


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The onset of the liberation war in Donbass from the West-backed Kiev regime was the other. This war truly delineated the stakes for the existence of the Russian World. The latter is not an ethnic, but a civilizational concept that encompasses shared culture, history, and language in the Eurasian space within a traditionalist framework. To a certain extent and despitethe obvious ideological differences, the Russian Empire and the USSR embodied the same geopolitical entity. 

A particularly noteworthy aspect of the ongoing crisis in Donbass is the symbolism—religious and historic—that surpasses the commonly used, but outdated Left-Right political spectrum. In the Russian context, this also means overcoming the Red-White divide of the Communist Revolution. That this war pushed Russians to examine their country’s raison d’être is somewhat remarkable: for two decades its citizens did not have an official ideology, prohibited by the Constitution that is based on Western models. The emergence of a new way of thinking in Russia will become clearer once we refer to the meaning of religious insignia, wars—Russian Civil and Great Patriotic— as well as the question of ideology in the Postmodern world.

Background to the Ukrainian Conflict

Prior to examining these factors, let us recap the recent historic events that led up to them. Since 1991, NATO has been moving closer to Russia’s borders despite its promises otherwise at the time of the Soviet collapse. Western officialdom used project Ukraine—not without its oligarchic elites’ own volition—as project anti-Russia, based upon the negative identity of the Western Ukrainian minority. Large sums of money were invested into establishing aggressively anti-Russian cadres in the media and opinion-making in places like Kiev, where none existed before. Internally, post-Soviet Ukraine was a historically problematic entity from the onset. Indeed, it attempted to house two conflicting identities without much effort at reasonable cohesion: Russians left behind across the newly instituted border as well as eastern and central Ukrainians sharing roots with today’s Russia (historically, eastern Orthodox Novorossia and Malorossia) on the one hand, and Western Ukrainians, such as Galicians (Greek Catholics in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) seeking greater ties with Europe, on the other.

In February of 2014, these two identities came to a clash, when the country saw a West-backed coup d’état under the banner of European integration. A siren song, the latter was essentially meant to transform Ukraine into a large market for dumping European goods, economically, NATO bases, militarily, with a slew of other negative possibilities that surface whenever IMF credits are involved.  The coup channeled a certain level of popular discontent with the Yanukovich government, expressed at the Maidan, to bring about the logical conclusion to project Ukraine. This was an ideologically anti-Russian state—based on the ethnic fundamentalist views of its Western minority—that ignored the wishes of eastern Ukrainian residents. Its violent inception led to another logical conclusion. When the Kiev government denied that region its basic rights of language and popular representation through federalization, and attempted to crush them by force, a liberation war in Donbass—historic Novorossia since the time of Catherine the Great—began as a response. Those that Maidan attendees called “slaves” sought to be free after all.

A year and 50,000 deaths later—if the German secret service is to be believed—this conflict remains on the lips of political analysts. The Donbass infrastructure is destroyed, 2.5 million refugees fled into Russia (including previous guest workers), Ukraine’s economy is collapsing, and half of its best farm lands had already been purchased by the oligarchs and foreign companies. There is even growing disagreement within Europe—over the questions of Ukraine and the consequent Russian sanctions—the atomization of which would benefit Washington’s ability to exert even greater influence in the region over increasingly un-sovereign states.

donbas2This civil-war scenario within the grand scheme of geopolitics was not a surprise for some. Lugansk author Gleb Bobrov, for instance, released what now seems to be a prophetic novel called Epoch of the Stillborn (Epokha Mertvorozhdennykh) in 2008 through a major publisher Yauza-EKSMO. The book described a hypothetical civil war in Ukraine. In 2014, it was republished five times for obvious reasons.

Symbols of Tradition…and Beyond

The iconography of the liberation struggle in Donbass fuses various layers of shared Russian-Ukrainian history. It attempts to overcome its conflicting points and give birth to a new synthesis of the Russian World that surpasses the specificity of Enlightenment-based ideologies, channeling older traditions or finding positive focal points.

One prominent aspect of Donbass resistance is the usage of religious insignia. Post-Maidan protests in eastern Ukraine—before Kiev initiated an “anti-terrorist operation” against civilians in the region—frequently used eastern Orthodox images at the barricades. These were protective icons like those of the Virgin and Tsar Nicholas. Orthodox insignia, unifying eastern Slavs, remained a significant part of the Donbass liberation war since.

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Tanks head into battle featuring Mandylion banners, as do road blocks and individual commanders. Igor Strelkov explicitly had the Slavyansk volunteer-battalion flag blessed in a church and paraded it through that town in mid-2014. Perhaps, subconsciously, such acts underscore the even more ancient Indo-European roots—here, the social and political leadership of warriors and priests, which stand in stark contrast to the salesman-politician within mass democracy.

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Orthodox Christianity has, of course, been the thousand-year-old religious tradition in Kievan and Muscovite Rus, the Russian Empire, and, today, both in Russia and eastern and central Ukraine. And, whereas the USSR was officially atheist, as per Marxist ideology, religion never fully left the private sphere, particularly outside urban centers; at times, it was even officially sanctioned, as was the case with Stalin in 1941. Indeed, historians have pointed out that by the 1930s, the USSR turned into a neo-traditionalist state—albeit with a Communist economy—in which socially conservative values, like pro-natalism, were reintroduced in a top-down manner.

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[dropcap]A[/dropcap] significant role played by Orthodox Christianity in the Donbass conflict is also evident from the fact that over 70 churches had been deliberately damaged or destroyed in this region by the West-backed Kiev forces. Novorossia’s spokespeople stated that they had no strategic military positions nearby, and that generally nothing else was hit next to the churches. Targeting religious architecture and communal centers should not be surprising, considering that Orthodoxy provides powerful cultural links between today’s Russia and Ukraine.

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When it comes to the Red-White schism, the official reading of history in the Soviet Union denounced many aspects of late imperial Russia on an ideological basis. In the 1990s, the pendulum swung far in the opposite direction—this time the target was the entire Soviet period—with more balanced views of history emerging in the next decade. These views are socially unifying rather than divisive, with the latter often exploited by certain outside forces looking to destabilize Russia. Whereas some polarization remains, most Russians have grown to surpass ideology and interpret the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as the variations of the same geopolitical entity. Furthermore, many families contain these seeming contradictions within: while some of their ancestors were well-positioned during the imperial era, or were purged in the 1930s, others were farmers, laborers, and soldiers in the Red Army.

For this reason, the participants of the Armed Forces of Novorossia exhibit a variety of symbolism, the synthesis of which indicates the emergence of a balanced view of one’s past: in it, no single period is wholly positive or negative. For instance, in the spring and summer of 2014, the media paid much attention to Igor Strelkov’s interest in historic reenactment, primarily focused on the Russian Army in the First World War and the White Movement during the 1917-21 Civil War.

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Donetsk’s current leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, was elected in November of 2014, choosing to be inaugurated to the sounds of the Petrine-era Russian imperial March of the Preobrazhenskii Regiment.

[dropcap]Z[/dropcap]akharchenko’s inauguration also involved Cossack participation. Prior to the artificial political division into southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, this region housed the same peoples (narod), including the Don Cossacks—a soslovie (estate) that was autonomous, but fiercely loyal to God and, often, the tsar. Dormant during the Soviet period, Cossack traditions are reemerging. They, too, came to play a prominent role at the front lines of Donbass liberation.

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Cossack heritage underscores the historic complexity of Donbass. A hundred years ago, the Russian Civil War polarized the population in this region primarily on the basis of ideology between the White Movement and the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the current civil-war aspect of Donbass liberation generates this comparison. After all, many of the soldiers drafted by Kiev are actually ethnic Russians from cities like Dnepropetrovsk fighting against other ethnic Russians further east.

Furthermore, despite imperial Russian symbolism, Novorossia’s leadership explicitly sees itself as the heirs of the short-lived and transitional Donetsk-Krivoi Rog Soviet Republic (1918). And, in an industry-heavy area, primarily focused on coal mining, class-based Soviet references cannot be avoided. Novorossia’s banner is based on St. Andrew’s cross and reads, “Will and Labor”; Donetsk Republic flag, too, uses a color scheme borrowed from that period.

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However, the issue of labor has more continuity between these two seemingly polar Red-White camps than one would think. Whereas the Soviet Union attempted to institute social equality in a top-down manner, some industrialists in the late Russian Empire were pious Orthodox Christians, who believed in providing charity on a personal level. They created good working conditions for their employees prior to any labor legislation, including kindergartens and women’s hospitals in the case of Abrikosov & Sons, or schools and pensions in the case of Einem, to name some.

World War Two All Over Again?

Yet it is the Second World War that maintains the greatest Soviet legacy and—the central role in the Donbass conflict. The English-language mainstream media narrative, even including the initially rare sympathetic pieces, describes Donbass residents being duped by Russian television into thinking that they are reliving the Second World War by fighting fascism. Considering that many of them are miners by profession, the derogatory implication is that these working-class people are too uneducated to know better or to think for themselves. There are two issues of note here: one of the Second World War, in general, and the other—of ideology, specifically.

First, just about every family in the former Soviet Union was touched by what in Russia is referred to as the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) with the total loss estimated at approximately 26 million. (As if the entire population of Texas and California during WW2 had been wiped out in the war.—Eds.) People are aware of their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, some of whom are still alive. On an ideological level, this war was the great solidifier for the USSR following the turbulent years of Lenin’s Revolution and Stalin’s consolidation (1917-41). But it is far more than that. The entire geography and topography of Novorossia replicates well-known battles of the Red Army in this region, making it difficult to avoid comparisons.

The town of Slavyanoserbsk outside of Lugansk, for instance, was named after the Serbian officers at the service of Russia’s Empress Elizabeth in mid-18th century. The town was under Nazi occupation in 1942-43—with Soviet partisans active in the area—until the Red Army’s liberation in September of that year. Representatives of the Armed Forces of Novorossia emphasized how the geographic positioning between the Soviet and Nazi troops mimicked that of their own and Kiev forces. To top that off, Serbian volunteers are rumored to have liberated the town from their opponents in August of 2014.

Saur Mogila (Grave), a strategic height in Donetsk region, served as the location for one of the most fierce battles of the Great Patriotic War, with the Soviet troops recapturing it in August of 1943. This level of intensity seemed like a déjà vu in the summer of 2014, when Saur Mogila went back and forth between the Kiev troops and Armed Forces of Novorossia. The latter ultimately recaptured it in August of that year. In fact, the 1963 memorial obelisk to the Great Patriotic War was destroyed as a result of this battle.

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Thus, it seems that every inch of this landscape could tell a similar story. There is a caricature of Hitler “worrying” (play on words with nearby Volnovakha) about Soviet retaking of Mariupol, a 1945 photograph of a T-34 tank labeled “Donbass avengers”—including two brothers and a cousin, and an early postwar painting of the train station in Debaltsevo by a local school teacher.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here even are numerous museum T-34s that were resurrected by the resistance fighters, like this Lugansk-area tank early in 2015.

 

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Furthermore, there are international brigades on both sides of the conflict, apparently mimicking the Spanish Civil War of the same period. Kiev’s troops have Swedes, Spaniards, Americans. The Armed Forces of Novorossia also include Spaniards, Brazilians, Frenchmen, Serbs. If anything, the miners of Donbass could be blamed for knowing their homeland’s history too well, in drawing these Second World War-era comparisons.

Then there is the question of fascism in Ukraine that the Western media avoids, while the Russian counterpart emphasizes.
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During the Second World War, some in Ukraine initially welcomed the Nazis over the Soviet Communists, but quickly grew to despise their colonization. Ukraine experienced varying degrees of collaboration, from the Galician SS to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that despised and fought everyone—Germans, Poles, Russians, and Jews—and was complicit in ethnic cleansing in Volyn region.

Donbass fighter showing Nazi-emblemed helmet belonging to one of the neonazi battalions sent by Kiev to punish the rebels.

Donbass fighter showing Nazi-emblemed helmet belonging to one of the neonazi battalions sent by Kiev to punish the rebels.

Current Ukrainian fundamentalist ethno-nationalists, the Right Sector, the Social National Assembly, and the Azov Battalion, see themselves as the heirs of UPA’s leaders, Bandera and Shukhevich, and explicitly subscribe to the “third way,” including Second World War-inspired insignia. And it is their reading of history that was effectively established after the coup in February of 2014. That these are not simply marginal figures is evident from the complete negation of federalization and Russian-language rights to President Poroshenko calling Odessa a “Bandera city”—particularly insulting to many residents of this Soviet-era Hero City and the site of the Trade Union House massacre in May of 2014 at the hands of Maidan activists.

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Don’t Throw Ideology out with Bath Water

Yet however tempting it is to think that history repeats itself, it is important to note the vast ideological differences. As some theorists pointed out, on a philosophical level the Second World War comprised the battle of three ideologies in order to determine which one best represents Modernity on a global scale. As a result, Communism (USSR) and Liberalism (U.S.) triumphed over Fascism. Subsequently, the Cold War served as the confrontation of the two remaining Modern ideologies, in which the collapse of the USSR (1991) signaled the victory of Liberalism. With Liberalism as the sole remaining representation of Modernity in the historical process—rendering the accepted 20th-century Left-Right paradigm obsolete—the period of Postmodernity commenced. Some analysts call this ideology “neo-Liberalism,” others—“post-Liberalism.” Both, however, describe the same historic trajectory, in which this set of ideas developed into its current form: the individual—with all his traditional ties removed—at the center of history, financial capital with its faceless transnational corporations as well as mindless consumerism and infotainment for the masses, the false belief in infinite economic progress (and expansion), and the secular religion of “human rights” as a tool of foreign policy that is often less than humanitarian, to name a few characteristics.

Of course, the other 20th-century ideologies did not disappear completely. But it is post-Liberalism with its global hegemony that allows them to exist and serve its own purposes. And it is the purveyors of this ideology, the elites in the official West, that sanction the existence of the self-described fascists in Ukraine, much as they do the so-called “moderate” rebels in the Middle East. Thus, the elites’ mouthpiece, mass media, whitewashes the former as “nationalists,” the “far right,” or simply “controversial.” In contrast, those that challenge its dominance ideologically, even in the most modest manner, undergo reductio ad Hitlerum. This is the case with any political party, for instance, Front National, exhibiting a semblance of traditionalism (anti-globalism), as modest as asserting national sovereignty over supra-national bodies, like NATO.

In fact, post-Liberal ideology is one of the factors that blinds many Westerners to the realities of the liberation war in Donbass. The current Western model of citizenship is an abstract one: it centers around a set of principles in which individuals are interchangeable—as long as they adopt “European values” or the “American way of life”—instead of the more traditional notions of rootedness in the landscape, cultural and linguistic ties, and ancestral bonds. Thus, those who subscribe to this abstraction have difficulty understanding how belonging to the same people (narod) overrides living in two different states—contemporary Russia and Ukraine—haphazardly formed at the time of the Soviet collapse, and why they seem so attached to their language, culture, religion, history, and land that they are willing to die for them. But even for those Russians that lean toward more traditionalist thought, it took this war—the war that was meant to separate—to ideologically and spiritually unite them with others like them across the border, to begin questioning who they really are, uncertain, but hopeful, forging the idea of the Russian World. Beyond Left and Right, Beyond Red and White.


 

* Originally published here.

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Let’s Talk a Little Treason

The Real Crimes are the Policies of the US
by KEVIN CARSON

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] normally associate terms like “treason” and “sedition” with right-wing know-nothings like the American Legion. So it’s eye-rollingly painful, in cases like the letter to Iran from Tom Cotton and 47 other Republican senators, to hear self-described progressives seize on those terms.


s the nation grew in power, its depredations grew  apace in scope, hypocrisy, and brutality.  (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y way of background, the Congressional GOP recently invited ultra-hawkish and ultra-racist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress. The invitation was extended and accepted without Obama’s approval — a big no-no in legislative-executive etiquette — in a clear bid to pressure Obama into moving closer to Netanyahu’s aggressive line on Iran. And as if that wasn’t enough, Cotton’s letter (which warned the Islamic Republic that any agreement with Obama will be a dead letter the minute his Republican successor takes the oath of office in January 2017, and maybe before then if Senate ratification is called for) was a direct attempt to sabotage any peace settlement short of war.

Since then I’ve seen a lot of squawking from party-line liberals about the Logan Act — which prohibits anyone from conducting diplomacy with a foreign power without presidential approval — and “treason.”


BELOW: U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-A Arkansas, has joined the mob of idiots, crooks and know-nothings that fill the US Congress. His warning that Iranians have to be stopped because “they already control Teheran” is simply beyond stupid.  In his deformed view, Iran has less of a right to influence its own immediate region than the US, a meddling power based thousand of miles away.tom-cotton-638x425

Now, I consider the Cotton letter an outrage — but not because of the Logan Act or “treason.” Frankly, I don’t give a rip about those things. Normally I consider treason a good thing. The actions of Cotton and the senators who co-signed that letter are despicable because, in a case where the executive is actually less militarily aggressive and imperialistic than Congress, the Congressional GOP is attempting to force Obama into a criminal war of aggression on Israel’s behalf. (Not that the attempt was successful — if anything the backlash may have actually caused the Democratic Party to extricate its collective nose from Israel’s posterior by a few microns.)

On the other hand, this is sort of a man-bites-dog story. Most of the time, we need a lot more “treason” and Logan Act violations against official U.S. foreign policy. For example, right now I’d celebrate any member of Congress who violated the Logan Act and undermined Obama’s actions against Venezuela and the US government’s broader agenda of reimposing Yanqui imperialism on South America.

And any senator who (say) attempted to undermine George Bush’s drive for war with Iraq in 2002-2003, by contacting the Iraqi government or travelling to Iraq, would have been a hero.

Quite frankly, the U.S. in 1945 replaced [Britain], Germany and Japan as the world’s leading imperial and counter-insurgency powers, and since then the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy has been to make the world safe for corporate rule and to protect the global corporations and their trillions in stolen neo-colonial loot from the people of the countries they’re robbing and enslaving. The idea of “treason” against U.S. government policy, as such, evokes no more outrage in me than treason against the policies of Nazi Germany.

Here’s a (very partial) list of cases since WWII where anyone violating the Logan Act and “treasonously” undermining US foreign policy would have been a hero of humanity:  overthrowing Arbenz, Mossadeq, Sukarno and Lumumba; entering the Vietnam War; the wave of US-backed fascist military coups in South America starting with Brazil under LBJ and extending to the rest of the continent under Nixon and Kissinger; Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor; the destabilization of Afghanistan under Carter; US aid to Salvadoran death squads; the first and second Gulf Wars the Bushes lied us into; the Balkan Wars Clinton lied us into… ad nauseam, ad nauseam.

And really high on that list is American backing for the Israel settler state since its illegitimate creation in 1948, and extending through its entire history of ethnic cleansing and Apartheid since then.

Treason against the American state and its policies, as such, is no crime. The policies of the American state itself usually are.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box] Kevin Carson
 is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. [/box]

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‘PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTS’ IN HK

SPECIAL DISPATCH FROM HONG KONG
By ANDRE VLTCHEK

Text and photos by the author, unless otherwise noted. Please be sure to click on the images to appreciate the details. 


Westerners

Westerners mingle with local protesters. Many questions and much incomprehension, side by side.

For decades Hong Kong has been a turbo-capitalist, extremely consumerist, and aggressive society. Its people are facing some of the most unrealistic prices on earth, particularly for housing…

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat is it? It is not orange or green, and definitely not red!  It has an umbrella as its symbol. ‘That humble umbrella’, as many people in Hong Kong are often saying.

But is it really benign?

We are talking, of course, about the ‘democracy protests’ in Hong Kong, also known as ‘the Umbrella Movement’; the latest addition of the ‘popular uprisings’ promoted by the West!

At the North Point in Hong Kong, near Kowloon Ferry, a middle-aged man is waving a banner that reads “Support Our Police”. On the photo, the tents and umbrellas of the ‘pro-democracy’ ‘Occupy Central’ protest movement (also known as the ‘Umbrella Movement’) are depicted in sepia, a depressing color.

“Are you against the protesters?” I ask the man.

“I am not for or against them”, he replies. “But it is known that they have some 1 million supporters here. While all of Hong Kong has over 7 million inhabitants. We think that it is time to clear the roads and allow this city to resume its normal life.”

“On the 28. September”, I continue, “Police fired 87 canisters of tear gas at the protest site, and now this fact is being used in the West and here as some proof of police brutality and of Beijing’s undemocratic rule. Protesters even commemorated this event few days ago, as if that would turn them to martyrs…”

“They are spoiled”, a man smiled. “They mostly come from very rich families in one of the richest cities on earth. They don’t know much about the world. I can tell you that the students in Beijing know actually much more about the world… 87 canisters of tear gas are nothing, compared to what happened in Cairo or in Bangkok. And in New York, police was dragging and beating protesters, even female protesters, during the endgame of the Occupy Wall Street drama.”

Earlier I spoke to my friend, a top Western academic who is now teaching in Hong Kong. As always, he readily supplied me with his analyses, but this time, he asked me not to use his name. Not because of fear of what Beijing could do, but simply because it could complicate his position in Hong Kong. I asked him whether the ‘opposition movement’ is actually homegrown, or supported from abroad, and he replied:

“To answer the question as to foreign interference in Occupy Central, we would have to answer yes. As a global city par excellence Hong Kong is more than exposed to international currents and ideas and, historically, that has also been the case. Doubtless as well certain of the pan-Democrat camp have shaken hands with international ‘do-gooders’, a reference to various US or western-based ‘democracy endowments’ or foundations active across the globe. Taiwan may have a leg in. A British Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee seeks to wade in. But “foreign interference” is seen here as Beijing’s call echoed by C.Y. Leung and with the letter holding back from naming the culprits.”


The protesters have an alarmingly skewed view of “democracy”. Western propaganda has penetrated deeply.  Spitefully, they regard Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador as “dictatorships.”


Protesters may have some legitimate grievances. They want direct elections of the chief executive, and there is, in theory, nothing wrong with such a demand. They want to tackle corruption, and to curb the role of local tycoons. That is fine, too.

The problem is, that the movement is degenerating into a Beijing bashing mission, happily supported by both Western and local (pro-business and pro-Western) mass media.

Several students that I spoke to, at Admiralty and Mong Kok sites, did not even bother to hide their hatred towards the Communist system, and towards the government in Beijing. All of them were denying crimes that are being committed by Western nations, all over the world, or they were simply not aware of them. ‘Democracy’ to them means clearly one and only thing – the system or call it regime, that is being defined, promoted and exported by the West.

“China is surely on the right side of the history”, I tried, at Admiralty, when I met protesters on the 31th October. “Together with Russia and Latin America it is standing against the brutal Western interventions worldwide and against Western propaganda.”

I was given looks of bewilderment, outrage and wrath.

I asked students what do they think about Venezuela, Bolivia, or Ecuador?

“Dictatorships”, they replied, readily and with spite.

I asked them about Bangkok and those ‘pro-democracy movements and demonstrations’ conducted against the democratically elected government; demonstrations that led to the coup performed by the elites and the army on behalf of the West.

I asked about ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrations against democratically elected President Morsi in Egypt, and about yet another military and pro-Western coup that brought army back to power. In Egypt, several thousand people died in the process. The West and Israel rejoiced, discreetly.

But the Hong Kong students ‘fighting’ for democracy knew absolutely nothing about Thailand or derailment of the Arab Spring.

They also could not make any coherent statements about Syria or Iraq.

I asked about Russia and Ukraine. With those topics they were familiar, perfectly. I immediately received quotes as if they were picked directly from the Western mass media: “Russia is antagonizing the world… It occupied Crimea and is sending troops to Ukraine, after shooting down Malaysian airliner…”

Back to Hong Kong and China, two girls, protesters, at Admiralty, clarified their point:

“We want true democracy; we want rights to nominate and to elect our leaders. Local leader now is a puppet. We hate communism. We don’t want dictatorship like in China.”

I asked what do they really want? They kept repeating “democracy”.

“What about those hundreds of millions that China raised from misery? What about China’s determined stand against Western imperialism? What about its anti-corruption drive? What about BRICS? What about its attempt to rejuvenate socialism through free medical care, education, subsidized culture, transportation and mixed/planned economy?”

Is there anything good, anything at all, that China, the biggest and the most successful socialist country on earth, is doing?

Brian, a student at Mong Kok, explained:

“We want to express our views and elect our own leader. It is now dictatorship in China. They chose the committee to elect our leader. We want to have our own true democracy. Our model is Western democracy.”

I asked at both protest sites about brutality of British colonialism. I received no reply. Then I noticed quotes by Winston Churchill, a self-proclaimed racist and a man who never bothered to hide his spite for non-white, non-Western people. But here, Churchill was considered to be one of the champions of democracy; his quotes glued to countless walls.

Then I noticed ‘John Lennon Wall, with the cliché-quotes like’: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”.


 

The Hong Kong protest movement reeks of upper middle class bourgeois consciousness, including its cloying cheap sentimentality and unexamined worshipping of Western “heroes”, like Churchill.


What exactly were they dreaming about, I was not told. All I saw were only those omnipresent banalities about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

There were Union Jacks all over the place, too, and I even spotted two English bulldogs; extremely cute creatures, I have to admit, but explaining nothing about the aspirations of the protesters.

While hardly anyone speaks English here, anymore, all cultural, ideological and propaganda symbols at the demonstrations and the ‘occupy’ sites, were somehow related to the West.

And then, on the 29 September, in the evening, near Admiralty, I spotted a group of Westerners, shouting and getting ready for ‘something big’.

I approached one of them; his name was John and he came from Australia:

“I have lived in Hong Kong for quite some time. Tonight we organized a run from here to Aberdeen, Pok Fu Lam, and back here, to support the Umbrella Movement. Several foreigners that are participating in this have lived in HK for some time, too.”

I wondered whether this could illustrate the lack of freedom and Beijing heavy-handedness?

I tried to imagine what would happen under the same circumstances, in the client states of Washington, London and Paris, in the countries that are promoted by the West as ‘vibrant democracies’.

What would happen to me, if I would decide to organize or join a marathon in Nairobi, Kenya, protesting against Kenyan occupation of Somalia or against bullying of the Swahili/Muslim coast? What would they do to me, if, as a foreigner, I would trigger a run in the center of Jakarta, demanding more freedom for Papua!

Thinking that I am losing my marbles and with it, objectivity, I texted a diplomat based in Nairobi. “Wouldn’t they deport me?” I was asking. “Wouldn’t they see it as interference in the internal affairs of the country?”

“They would deport you” the answer arrived almost instantly. “But before that, you would rot for quite some time in a very unsavory detention [spot]”.

I thought so…


 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VltchekAndre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.



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Imperialism and Iraq: Lessons from the past

Part One

Lawrence in Arab garb.

Col. Lawrence in Arab garb. He felt a true affinity for the Arab tribesmen he encountered.

By Jean Shaoul , wsws.org
(Originally published 29 May 2003) |  (Reposted by reader request)

[A]nyone looking at the events today in Iraq cannot but be struck at the obvious parallels with what happened there in the first half of the twentieth century.

The roll call of imperialist powers with an interest in the region was similar, but the dominant imperialist power at that time was Britain not the United States. British armed forces invaded Mesopotamia, as Iraq was then known, in 1914 with promises of freedom—from the Turks. But the promises were just for public consumption. Behind the rhetoric lay, as ever, material interests—oil. Like the US today, the British vigorously denied any such motive.

lawrence-Otoole

The Hollywood blockbuster Lawrence of Arabia only timidly suggested that Lawrence’s quest for an independent Arab nation had been betrayed. The British were presented as the civilized liberators of Arabia from a backward and brutal master. (Peter O’Toole won an award for his portrayal of Lawrence.)

The military odds enjoyed by the British army were also just as favourable. And after a war to “liberate the Arabs” from Turkish control, came not freedom, but a British occupation.

Then too, horrific aerial bombing marked the occupation. Then too, there was a series of sordid deals between the imperial powers—the US, Britain, France and Italy—over how the spoils of war should be divided up as Britain sought to steal a march on its so-called allies, with the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) shamelessly endorsing the carve up.

More importantly, defence of its oil interests meant British rule over Iraq in all but name—under a League of Nations Mandate until 1932, and later as the power behind the throne, with the Iraqi people bearing the financial burden of Britain’s war, occupation and rule.

British rule finally ended in 1958, when massive street demonstrations threatened to get out of control, and the army stepped in, overthrew the monarchy, seized power and took action to gain control of Iraq’s oil.

It is instructive to examine this earlier period and the role the imperialist powers played in shaping the political, economic and social conditions in Iraq. While all the powers sought to control the oil resources of the Middle East, it was only after the deaths of millions of workers in the first imperialist world war and countless acts of skullduggery that the British were able to establish their hegemony.

Such an analysis confirms that far from liberation and any progressive future, the US occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of the most recent Gulf war bodes only the return to direct rule and control of country’s oil resources by imperialism—this time by the US with Britain as its junior partner.

Imperialist interests in Mesopotamia before World War I

The first imperialist power to establish itself in the Middle East was Britain. Its initial connection with the region was the result of its interest in protecting the route to India and Indian trade. To this end, British naval forces mounted repeated attacks on the Arabian coast and by the 1840s established colonial possessions in the Persian Gulf and Aden. Britain’s domination of the coast opened up the hinterland to Western imperialism.

Mesopotamia, as the three vilayets or provinces of Basra, Baghdad and the predominantly Kurdish Mosul that make up modern day Iraq were then known, had been the easternmost part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. A backward rural economy, many of its peoples were semi-nomadic. By the end of the nineteenth century, the opening of the Suez Canal and the development of river transport by the British had led to Mesopotamia’s increasing integration into the wider capitalist economy. The Basra province became ever more important for the export of cereals and cotton to Manchester and Bombay.

At the same time, there was an increasing interest in the region’s oil resources. While it had been known for thousands of years that certain areas in Mesopotamia and Persia, as Iran was then known, contained oil springs and seepages, apart from primitive local uses there was no developed industry.

European interest in exploiting Mesopotamian and Persian oil commercially began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when capital began to flow into the region. Permission for numerous explorations was sought from Constantinople, often under cover of archaeological excavations. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company discovered the first commercially exploitable oil in southern Persia in 1908.

While British and Indian trade dominated the region, accounting for 75 percent of the total, German capital began to pour into Mesopotamia—particularly after Germany won the concession to build the railway from Turkey to Baghdad in 1903. Since the intention was to carry it on to Basra and Kuwait, this would have created a direct link between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and posed a strategic threat to Britain’s position in India.

The railway took on an additional significance after the discovery of commercially exploitable oil in Persia, since the concession included exclusive rights over minerals in the 20 kilometres on either side of the track.

With the start in 1904 of the British Royal Navy’s conversion from coal to oil, which made transport both cheaper and faster, the government sought supplies that were nearer than the Gulf of Mexico and had a more long-term future. The British government’s advisors believed that since the exports from the main oil producers were set to decline, the oil majors would be in a position to dictate terms to the Royal Navy upon which the Empire depended. Over the next 20 years, government policy increasingly focused on the need to control both the sources and suppliers of Britain’s oil. The government therefore provided full diplomatic support to British nationals in their bids to secure oil concessions in Mesopotamia.

In 1911, an Anglo-German consortium (Royal Dutch Shell, the entrepreneur C. S. Gulbenkian, the (British) National Bank of Turkey and Deutsche Bank) secured an exclusive concession from Turkey to exploit all the oil within the empire’s borders. The Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC), as it soon became known, merged with Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1913, with the ownership shared between British, German, Dutch and Gulbenkian interests. In August 1914, after protracted negotiations, the British government took a majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the forerunner to BP, now Britain’s largest corporation) for £2.2 million, thereby gaining the oil rights to Mesopotamia as well and further strengthening its interests in the region.

At the same time, numerous other international groups had begun to seek oil concessions around Baghdad and Mosul. These commercial tensions played a crucial role in precipitating World War I at whose heart lay the division of Turkey’s eastern lands. As far as Britain was concerned, the fact that new sources of oil, a resource so vital to the Empire, lay outside its boundaries led to the inevitable conclusion that the Empire must be expanded.

Britain seizes control of Mesopotamia in World War I

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, British imperialism’s “Eastern Policy” had been based on propping up the bankrupt Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Tsarist Russian expansionism. But when World War I broke out and Turkey joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria, British policy underwent a complete change.

Fearing that at Germany’s behest Turkey would hamper oil supplies and trade, the British authorities in India sent an expeditionary force to Basra to prevent Turkey from interfering with British interests in the Gulf, particularly its interests in the oil fields in southern Persia. This was to turn the Middle East into an important theatre of war. It became explicit policy to break up the Ottoman Empire and bring its Arab territories under British control.

After a series of ignominious defeats, it became clear that taking control of the Turkish territories was not going to be a walk over. So Britain entered into a series of cynical, fraudulent and mutually irreconcilable agreements designed to secure Turkey’s defeat and further her own commercial and territorial ambitions in the region.

First, Britain calculated that an Arab uprising would be invaluable in attacking and defeating the Turks from the south, and opening a route into Europe from the east, thereby breaking the bloody stalemate in the trenches in Flanders. Its initial contacts were with the Hashemites, a desert dynasty in Hejaz, now part of Saudi Arabia, which controlled the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina and sought to replace Ottoman rule with their own. Britain reasoned that such an alliance would prove useful in securing the loyalty of its Indian Muslim conscripts in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force whom it was using as cannon fodder in its war against Germany. The disastrous defeats at Gallipoli led the British to accept the conditions spelt out under the Damascus Protocol: British support for the Arabs in overthrowing Turkish rule in return for Arab independence for the territories now known as Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. In 1915, they made an agreement with the Hashemite Sherif Hussein of Mecca, promising independence in return for their support against the Turks.

Secondly, at the same time as Britain was using the Arabs to further its aims, it was facing rival claims from her wartime allies, France and Russia, for control over the Ottoman Empire after the war and was forced to cut a deal with them. In May 1916, Britain signed the Tripartite Agreement, better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, according to which Russia would get Istanbul, the Bosphorus and parts of Armenia. France would take what is now Syria and Lebanon while Britain would take Baghdad, Basra and Trans-Jordan (Jordan). Britain evidently took her eye off the ball when she ceded part of the potentially oil-rich Mosul province to France, and spent the next period trying to bring Mosul into her own sphere of influence. Palestine would be separated from Syria and placed under an international administration and its ultimate fate would be decided at an international conference at the end of the war. Only in the most backward and impoverished part of the region, the Arab peninsula, would the Arabs be given independence.

Needless to say, the peoples affected by this disposition would have no say in deciding their future and the terms of the treaty were kept secret. After the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks published the secret agreement to expose the imperialists’ conspiracies against the oppressed peoples of the region, Sherif Hussein demanded an explanation. But right up to the end of the war, the British and French promised full independence to the Arabs.

“The end that France and Great Britain have in pursuing in the East the war unloosed by German ambition is the complete and definite freeing of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national Governments and Administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous population,” stated the joint Anglo-French declaration of November 7, 1918. “France and Great Britain have agreed to encourage and assist the establishment of indigenous Governments and Administrations…. And in the territories whose liberation they seek.”

Thirdly, in November 1917, Britain, intent on stealing a march over France and securing her own interests in the region by holding on to Palestine, made yet another commitment under the cynical subterfuge of humanitarian concerns for the Jews. It issued the deliberately vague Balfour Declaration, which “viewed with sympathy the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine”.

With the aid of the Arabs, the British were able to reverse their misfortunes and take Baghdad in March 1917, and later Jerusalem and Damascus, from the Turks. The Arab Revolt against the Turks, led by Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein of Hejaz, was of strategic importance to the British. It tied down some 30,000 Turkish troops along the railway from Amman to Medina and prevented the Turko-German forces in Syria linking up with the Turkish garrison in Yemen.

Perfidious as ever, British military forces in Mesopotamia ignored the Armistice signed with Turkey at Mudros on October 30, 1918, and continued their march north, capturing the predominantly Kurdish province of Mosul a few days later. This was because it made little sense to keep the central and southern provinces of Mesopotamia without the oil rich northern province. Mosul was also important as an intermediate staging post on the route to the Russian controlled oil-rich Caspian and Caucasian states. Britain then expropriated the 25 percent German share in the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was planning to develop the oilfields.

Thus, by the end of 1918, British forces from Cairo had conquered Palestine and Syria and helped to drive the Turks out of the Hejaz. British forces from India had conquered Mesopotamia and brought Persia and Ibn Saud of Nejd in the Arabian Peninsula into Britain’s orbit. These forces pushed north through Persia to hold the Caucasus against the Turks, while another force moved north and fought the Red Army in support of “independence” for the White-controlled, oil-rich states Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Daghestan, until forced to withdraw in 1920.

Promises of liberation prove fraudulent

With the victors forming queues to take over the former Ottoman provinces and German and Austrian colonies in Africa and the Far East, the British were determined to hang onto their conquests in the Middle East to defend the trade routes to India and secure the region’s oil. They had set their sights firmly on keeping Palestine, the three provinces of Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq, ruling Kuwait from Iraq while maintaining their sphere of influence over Persia and the southern and western coasts of the Arabian peninsula. The Persian Gulf and Red Sea would thus become British lakes.

The central and southern provinces of Mesopotamia came under direct British rule from India and were administered under military law pending a peace settlement. Following the pattern set in India, the British turned to the old tribal leaders, whose influence had declined by the end of the nineteenth century, to collect the taxes and control the predominantly rural population in return for long term security of tenure. This only served to exacerbate landlordism, the impoverishment of the peasantry and the deep-seated hostility to the British occupation. They also cultivated the small but important minorities, particularly the Christians and the Jewish community that played a key financial role and whose relations with the British were to have important repercussions later with the rise of Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

The Kurds in the newly captured Mosul province took the British at their word and immediately set up an independent state that Britain spent nearly two years brutally suppressing with British and Indian troops. The Royal Air Force was sent in to bombard the guerrillas and Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, approved the use of poison gas.

Mosul was to be incorporated into the Iraqi state, abandoning the idea of Kurdish autonomy included in the Treaty of Sevres. In the words of one British official, “any idea of an Arab state is simply bloodstained fooling at present.”

But Britain’s plans to incorporate the Arab world into the Empire were repeatedly thwarted. Firstly, her wartime Allies, particularly the Americans, were determined to prevent her walking away with the lion’s share of the spoils. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued in 1917 on the eve of the US entry into the war, were the price that Britain and France would have to pay for US support.

They signified a new world order in which America’s political and economic interests would predominate over those of the old imperial powers. There would be no secret diplomacy or annexations by the victors and former colonies must have the right to self-determination. But above all else, there would have to be an Open Door policy with respect to trade. That meant an end to exclusive rights to resources and trade. In the context of the Middle East and Iraq, what was at issue was the future of the oil concessions the British had extracted from the Turks. The British viewed Wilson’s policy as such a threat that they forbade the local publication of the Fourteen Points, which only appeared in Baghdad two years later.

READ PART 3 OF THIS SERIES HERE