From 2015: US bioweapons labs, billions in research is a ‘real problem’ – Russian security chief

The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.

Source: US bioweapons labs, billions in research is a ‘real problem’ – Russian security chief — RT News

RT News

Oct 31, 2015

31 Oct, 2015

Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council. © Sergey Guneev / RIA Novosti

 

The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.

Speaking after Russia’s Security Council meeting, Patrushev mentioned the threat stemming from biological weapons laboratories that operate on the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

“There are also other problems, such as the production of military-oriented biological weapons and the very large funding allocated to this,” Patrushev said. “This is tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, the number of laboratories under US jurisdiction or control has increased 20 times.”

What is more worrying is that some of such laboratories “operated and operate” on CIS soil, said Patrushev.

“This is why the problem is real,” he said.

The head of the Security Council has also mentioned the chemical weapons issue, saying that Russia will dispose of its remaining arsenal by 2020 – eight years earlier than the US.

“We are putting into practice a program to get rid of chemical weapons. Russia will dispose of these weapons by 2020. It was expected that the US will also destroy these weapons by that time, but according to today’s plans, it will carry out the disposal by 2028,” Patrushev told journalists.

In June, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the US of encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, as well as obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons.

One of Russia’s particular concerns is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public and Animal Health Research, a research facility for high-level biohazard agents, located near Tbilisi, Georgia, a CIS member, and Russia’s neighbor.

“American and Georgian authorities are trying to cover up the real nature of this US military unit, which studies highly dangerous infectious diseases. The Pentagon is trying to establish similar covert medico-biological facilities in other countries [in Russia’s neighborhood],” the Russian ministry said in June.

At the time, Moscow also blamed the US for derailing “decades of international effort to strengthen” the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), a 1972 international treaty aimed at eradicating bioweapons worldwide.

World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945- )

The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.

Source

GR Editor’s Note

The following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published more than 16 years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of  Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007. 

The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.

Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies.

We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”. 

Michel Chossudovsky, January 2020

---

World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945-)

by Prof. Eric Waddell

The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect “regime change”. The cloaks of “human rights” and of “democracy” were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts.

The aim of the United States is to protect and reinforce national interests rather than to create a better world for all humankind. It is an “imperial grand strategy” of global dimensions designed to ensure unlimited and uninhibited access, notably to strategic resources, notably energy, and to markets. Rather than to establish a direct colonial presence, the preferred strategy is to create satellite states, and this requires constant, and often repeated, military interventions in countries around the world, irrespective of their political regime.

Democratically elected governments are as much at risk as dictatorships. In recent years, the tendency has been for such direct interference to increase since less of these countries are prepared to act as willing allies. Indeed, events of 2003 would suggest that the number of unconditional and powerful U.S. allies is now reduced to three: Great Britain, Australia and Israel. The US strategy is characterised, wherever possible, by invasion and the setting up of friendly (puppet) governments. Attention is focussed, by preference, on relatively small and weak countries, the aim being to achieve rapid victory.

Historically, this process of US domination of the World has been characterized by:

(i) direct military intervention with nuclear or conventional bombs and missiles,

(ii) direct military intervention with naval or ground forces,

(iii) indirect military intervention through command operations and

(iv) the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons.

Broadly speaking, three historical phases can be identified:

– 1945-49: The U.S.-Soviet struggle for European domination, terminating with the stabilisation of the frontier between the two blocs and the creation of NATO;

– 1950-89: The Cold War proper and, in the context of it, the emergence of the non-aligned group of nations;

Regime Change in the U.S.: Proposal from a Concerned Citizen

– 1990 on: The post-Cold War

The first period was characterized by a significant degree of US military intervention in Europe, the second by a concern to confine the Communist bloc within its frontiers and to prevent the emergence of pro-communist regimes elsewhere in the world, and the third, focused on gaining control over the former Soviet republics and in the oil-rich Middle East. The Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean/Central America reveal themselves to be Regional Theaters of concern throughout the post-2nd World War period.

click image to enlarge

The non-negotiable defense and promotion of “the American way of life” through global military interventions took form in the closing months of the 2nd World War and it came at great cost to much of the rest of the World’s population. Although Germany capitulated in May 1945 and the United Nations was created in the following month, the U.S. nevertheless chose to use nuclear weapons to bring Japan to its feet.

The dropping of two atomic bombs, respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year resulted in some 150,000 immediate deaths and tens of thousands of wounded. Such nuclear terrorism was quickly denounced by the international scientific community and no other nation has resorted to the use of such weapons of mass destruction. However, the U.S.A. regularly brandishes the threat of recourse to them, while under Bush they have been reinstated as an integral part of national discourse. But the story does not end with nuclear weapons, for the U.S.A. has also, over the past half-century, used chemical and biological weapons in its quest for global domination with, for example, recourse to Agent Orange in Viet Nam and blue mold, cane smut, African swine fever, etc. in Cuba. All such weapons of mass destruction are an integral part of the country’s arsenal.

In this context, the map of U.S. Military Interventions since 1945 only tells a part of the story. While the country’s global reach is apparent, the scale of military violence is not fully revealed. Up to 1,000,000 people were killed in the CIA command operation in Indonesia in1967, in what was, according to the New York Times, “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history”. Another 100,000 were killed in Guatemala, in the CIA-organized coup. And the map makes no mention of military interventions where the U.S. played a support (e.g. Rwanda and the Congo in the 1990s) as distinct from a lead role, or where U.S. arms were used by national military forces, as in East Timor where, in the hands of the Indonesian military, they were responsible for the death of some 200,000 people from 1967 on.

Interestingly, with regards to the international arms trade, it was President Reagan who announced, in 1981, that “The U.S. views the transfer of conventional weapons… as an essential element of its global defense posture and an indispensable component of its foreign policy.”

The U.S. Empire knows no limits. Its aim is political and military domination of the world. Under the US system of global capitalism, the demand for energy and other vital resources is unlimited.

America’s “Road Map to Empire” was not formulated by the Bush administration as some critics are suggesting. In fact, there is little that is “new” about the “Project for a New American Century”. It is just that the post-war rhetoric of human rights and social and economic development has diminished, to be replaced by the primary concern with global supremacy through military force. The imperial project was outlined in the immediate wake of the 2nd World War. It was part of the “Truman Doctrine” formulated in 1948 by George Kennan, Director of Policy and Planning at the U.S. State Department:

“We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity. We should cease to talk about the raising of living standards, human rights and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Postscript 2007

In one sense little has changed since 2003. The next target for military intervention has already been clearly identified. It is Iran which so happens, according to the most recent US Government official energy statistics, to rank third among the world’s oil-rich nations, and to be the one with the largest increase in proven oil reserve estimates over the period 2005-2006.

In another sense however a new portrait is beginning to emerge, where a war-weary and increasingly vulnerable United States is moving to the creation of a Fortress North America which embraces its northern neighbour. Once again the logic is clear. Canada now ranks second, ahead of Iran and Iraq but behind Saudi Arabia, in terms of world oil reserves, thanks notably to the tar sands of Alberta. A minority government in Ottawa, dominated by Albertan interests, is consciously taking Canada into both the US energy and the military and strategic fold. In so doing, the country is joining the ranks of the United Kingdom and Australia as an unflinching US ally.

If global reach is becoming a too costly and hazardous endeavour then fortress North America becomes an increasingly attractive alternative, particularly when the minor partner is consenting and docile.

Eric Waddell is a distinguished author and professor of Geography based in Quebec City

ANNEX:  

MAP, for larger view click link below and enlarge

http://www.globalresearch.ca/audiovideo/USA_intervention_bleu.gif

 

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2020

Escobar: Why The New Silk Roads Are A “Threat” To US Bloc

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

Mon, 01/27/2020

 

Under the cascading roar of the 24/7 news cycle cum Twitter eruptions, it’s easy for most of the West, especially the US, to forget the basics about the interaction of Eurasia with its western peninsula, Europe.

Asia and Europe have been trading goods and ideas since at least 3,500 BC. Historically, the flux may have suffered some occasional bumps – for instance, with the irruption of 5th-century nomad horsemen in the Eurasian plains. But it was essentially steady up to the end of the 15th century. We can essentially describe it as a millennium-old axis – from Greece to Persia, from the Roman empire to China.

A land route with myriad ramifications, through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, linking India and China to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ended up coalescing into what we came to know as the Ancient Silk Roads.

By the 7th century, land routes and sea trade routes were in direct competition. And the Iranian plateau always played a key role in this process.

The Iranian plateau historically includes Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia linking it to Xinjiang to the east, and to the west all the way to Anatolia. The Persian empire was all about land trade – the key node between India and China and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Persians engaged the Phoenicians in the Syrian coastline as their partners to manage sea trade in the Mediterranean. Enterprising people in Tyre established Carthage as a node between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. Because of the partnership with the Phoenicians, the Persians would inevitably be antagonized by the Greeks – a sea trading power.

When the Chinese, promoting the New Silk Roads, emphasize “people to people exchange” as one of its main traits, they mean the millenary Euro-Asia dialogue. History may even have aborted two massive, direct encounters.

The first was after Alexander The Great defeated Darius III of Persia. But then Alexander’s Seleucid successors had to fight the rising power in Central Asia: the Parthians – who ended up taking over Persia and Mesopotamia and made the Euphrates the limes between them and the Seleucids.

The second encounter was when emperor Trajan, in 116 AD, after defeating the Parthians, reached the Persian Gulf. But Hadrian backed off – so history did not register what would have been a direct encounter between Rome, via Persia, with India and China, or the Mediterranean meeting with the Pacific.

Mongol globalization

The last western stretch of the Ancient Silk Roads was, in fact, a Maritime Silk Road. From the Black Sea to the Nile delta, we had a string of pearls in the form of Italian city/emporia, a mix of end journey for caravans and naval bases, which then moved Asian products to Italian ports.

Commercial centers between Constantinople and Crimea configured another Silk Road branch through Russia all the way to Novgorod, which was very close culturally to the Byzantine world. From Novgorod, merchants from Hamburg and other cities of the Hanseatic League distributed Asian products to markets in the Baltics, northern Europe and all the way to England – in parallel to the southern routes followed by the maritime Italian republics.

Between the Mediterranean and China, the Ancient Silk Roads were of course mostly overland. But there were a few maritime routes as well. The major civilization poles involved were peasant and artisanal, not maritime. Up to the 15th century, no one was really thinking about turbulent, interminable oceanic navigation.

The main players were China and India in Asia, and Italy and Germany in Europe. Germany was the prime consumer of goods imported by the Italians. That explains, in a nutshell, the structural marriage of the Holy Roman Empire.

At the geographic heart of the Ancient Silk Roads, we had deserts and the vast steppes, trespassed by sparse tribes of shepherds and nomad hunters. All across those vast lands north of the Himalayas, the Silk Road network served mostly the four main players. One can imagine how the emergence of a huge political power uniting all those nomads would be in fact the main beneficiary of Silk Road trade.

Well, that actually happened. Things started to change when the nomad shepherds of Central-South Asia started to have their tribes regimented as horseback archers by politico-military leaders such as Genghis Khan.

Welcome to the Mongol globalization. That was actually the fourth globalization in history, after the Syrian, the Persian and the Arab.    Under the Mongolian Ilkhanate, the Iranian plateau – once again playing a major role – linked China to the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia in the Mediterranean.

The Mongols didn’t go for a Silk Road monopoly. On the contrary: during Kublai Khan – and Marco Polo’s travels – the Silk Road was free and open. The Mongols only wanted caravans to pay a toll.

With the Turks, it was a completely different story. They consolidated Turkestan, from Central Asia to northwest China. The only reason Tamerlan did not annex India is that he died beforehand. But even the Turks did not want to shut down the Silk Road. They wanted to control it.

Venice lost its last direct Silk Road access in 1461, with the fall of Trebizond, which was still clinging to the Byzantine empire. With the Silk Road closed to the Europeans, the Turks – with an empire ranging from Central-South Asia to the Mediterranean – were convinced they now controlled trade between Europe and Asia.

Not so fast. Because that was when European kingdoms facing the Atlantic came up with the ultimate Plan B: a new maritime road to India.

And the rest – North Atlantic hegemony – is history.

Enlightened arrogance

The Enlightenment could not possibly box Asia inside its own rigid geometries. Europe ceased to understand Asia, proclaimed it was some sort of proteiform historical detritus and turned its undivided attention to “virgin,” or “promised” lands elsewhere on the planet.

We all know how England, from the 18th century onwards, took control of the entire trans-oceanic routes and turned North Atlantic supremacy into a lone superpower game – till the mantle was usurped by the US.

Yet all the time there has been counter-pressure from the Eurasian Heartland powers. That’s the stuff of international relations for the past two centuries – peaking in the young 21st century into what could be simplified as The Revenge of the Heartland against Sea Power. But still, that does not tell the whole story.

Rationalist hegemony in Europe progressively led to an incapacity to understand diversity – or The Other, as in Asia. Real Euro-Asia dialogue – the de facto true engine of history – had been dwindling for most of the past two centuries.

Europe owes its DNA not only to much-hailed Athens and Rome – but to Byzantium as well. But for too long not only the East but also the European East, heir to Byzantium, became incomprehensible, quasi incommunicado with Western Europe, or submerged by pathetic clichés.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as in the Chinese-led New Silk Roads, are a historical game-changer in infinite ways. Slowly and surely, we are evolving towards the configuration of an economically interlinked group of top Eurasian land powers, from Shanghai to the Ruhr valley, profiting in a coordinated manner from the huge technological know-how of Germany and China and the enormous energy resources of Russia.

The Raging 2020s may signify the historical juncture when this bloc surpasses the current, hegemonic Atlanticist bloc.

Now compare it with the prime US strategic objective at all times, for decades: to establish, via myriad forms of divide and rule, that relations between Germany, Russia and China must be the worst possible.

No wonder strategic fear was glaringly visible at the NATO summit in London last month, which called for ratcheting up pressure on Russia-China. Call it the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s ultimate, recurrent nightmare.

Germany soon will have a larger than life decision to make. It’s like this was a renewal – in way more dramatic terms – of the Atlanticist vs Ostpolitik debate. German business knows that the only way for a sovereign Germany to consolidate its role as a global export powerhouse is to become a close business partner of Eurasia.

In parallel, Moscow and Beijing have come to the conclusion that the  US trans-oceanic strategic ring can only be broken through the actions of a concerted block: BRI, Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+ and the BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Middle East pacifier

The Ancient Silk Road was not a single camel caravan route but an inter-communicating maze. Since the mid-1990s I’ve had the privilege to travel almost every important stretch – and then, one day, you see the complete puzzle. The New Silk Roads, if they fulfill their potential, pledge to do the same.

Maritime trade may be eventually imposed – or controlled – by a global naval superpower. But overland trade can only prosper in peace. Thus the New Silk Roads potential as The Great Pacifier in Southwest Asia – what the Western-centric view calls the Middle East.

The Middle East (remember Palmyra) was always a key hub of the Ancient Silk Roads, the great overland axis of Euro-Asia trade going all the way to the Mediterranean.

For centuries, a quartet of regional powers – Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Persia (now Iran) – have been fighting for hegemony over the whole area from the Nile delta to the Persian Gulf. More recently, it has been a case of external hegemony: Ottoman Turk, British and American.

So delicate, so fragile, so immensely rich in culture, no other region in the world has been, continually, since the dawn of history, an absolutely key zone. Of course, the Middle East was also a crisis zone even before oil was found (the Babylonians, by the way, already knew about it).

The Middle East is a key stop in the 21st century, trans-oceanic supply chain routes – thus its geopolitical importance for the current superpower, among other geoeconomic, energy-related reasons. But its best and brightest know the Middle East does not need to remain a center of war, or intimations of war, which, incidentally, affect three of those historical, regional powers of the quartet (Syria, Iraq and Iran).

What the New Silk Roads are proposing is wide-ranging, economic, interlinked integration from East Asia, through Central Asia, to Iran, Iraq and Syria all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean. Just like the Ancient Silk Roads. No wonder vested War Party interests are so uncomfortable with this real peace “threat.”

From Armageddon to Pharmageddon

Source

http://www.greenmedinfo.com

Written By:

Neville Raymond

December 31st 2019

This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2020
Visit our Re-post guidelines

How the use of violence to teach lessons has outlived its authority

For years I had been working on a book on how earth-shattering catastrophes had birthed our religious and political order, and how we can heal our wounded species by reparenting ourselves with our birthright of unconditional love. A year before finishing it, I decided to experiment with Twitter. Trying my hand at various topics, I stumbled on the subject of vaccines and discovered that the mainstream campaign to censor the truth about them left me with a lot to say.

So there I was, caught up in two different strands of thought. The first had to do with a religious and political structure forged in a cauldron of catastrophes, ten or fifteen thousand years ago. It was traditionally designed to be supported by three pillars. A body of laws enforced by punitive judgments. A penal system based on hell and damnation, torture, imprisonment and social death. And an infrastructure of war built for mass murder and mayhem. And then there was the second strand that had to do with one of ‘the great triumphs of modern medicine’ – vaccines.

When I was contacted for an interview by Demand the Truth, I hadn’t quite figured out how, or even if, these disparate strands of thought fit together. In the few days I had to prepare for the interview, I discovered what they have in common. They are both founded on the same teaching principle. And this teaching principle may just help us unravel the mystery of history.

Let’s take it step by step. Vaccines work on the theory of using dead or inactivated viruses – along with neurotoxic adjuvants and preservatives that would make a health inspector blanch – to teach the immune system to protect itself from disease. The problem, as we’ve discovered to our horror, is that vaccines instruct the immune system by catastrophically damaging it. In the course of training the body to fight disease, vaccines wage war on the immune system and wreak havoc on it with a range of afflictions – brain inflammation, cardiac arrest, central nervous system breakdowns, bowel disorders, and of course the very diseases we are being vaccinated for.

All this is not in dispute. Anyone who has studied vaccines will attest to the truth of it. The evil of vaccines can be summed up in two words: toxic teaching. The method of teaching employed by vaccines is to inflict all sorts of toxic violence on the body. Since the formal word for a teaching method is pedagogy, we could say vaccines represent a system of toxic pedagogy.

Toxic pedagogy is nothing new. For millennia the accepted method of teaching children was through violence. Parents hit children in the name of discipling them. Teachers cane children in the name of instructing them. Does all this violence make children better? Not in a million years! It traumatizes them. The scars on their bodies heal in a few days, the damage to their psyches lasts a lifetime. All this is common knowledge. Swiss psychologist Alice Miller helped pioneer the study of toxic pedagogy decades ago. All that remained was to trace its origins to a series of earth-battering catastrophes that decimated life on this planet thousands of years ago.

Anthropological records are abuzz with stories of gods almost annihilating the human race. Geological records abound with evidence of interplanetary comets and asteroids colliding with earth and laying waste to it. The problem is not with falling solar system debris per se. It is with the few who survived and went on to repopulate the species. They were so traumatized that they came to terms with these cataclysmic forces by personifying them as angry gods that passed a sentence of mass death on man. Infernal fire and brimstone from heaven were not the random outcome of astrophysical forces. They were symptomatic of gods of wrath, determined to teach an errant species the lesson of its life. And voila! We have the origin of toxic pedagogy – the grotesque idea that the way to teach man to behave properly is through violence and destruction of a literally cosmic order. Gods modeled this toxic pedagogy for man. Man in turn modeled it for his children. He unleashed thousands of years of violence and aggression against his own flesh and blood under the guise of punishing them, disciplining them, teaching them a lesson.

Now psychologists know how children cope with corporal punishment. Typically, they split off from the victimized part of themselves and learn to identify with their victimizers. Thus the violent things parents did to their children, their children grow up to do to their children. It is how violence cycles from generation to generation. But in the big picture, it is the so-called gods who got the cycle of generational abuse rolling. They are the originators of abuse on a cosmic scale. And so the usual coping mechanism by which the child breaks his sympathetic connection with the victimized self, and goes over to the side of the victimizing parent, is now replayed in a religious dimension between gods and humans. As man disowns his victimized self, he learns to treat human nature as an object of shame, contempt and mortification. And the gods – who are, after all, what we might call doomsday gods – are exalted as objects of reverence and veneration.

Counterintuitive as this seems, it reprises the process by which battered children divorce their abused selves and espouse the cause of their abusers. But when it happens in a collective arena, the consequences are far more extreme than when an abused child grows up to dominate a household as an abusive parent. By framing dreaded gods of destruction as objects of worship and devotion, religion gives birth to a class of institutional guardians who presume to rule over society as the incarnation of Doomsday Gods. These quasi-divine rulers exercise their authority by passing violent judgments on mankind. They gather the reins of power by setting up elaborate penal systems to crack down on man for an endless litany of sins and crimes. From ancient kings to modern commanders-in-chief, the primary function of these leaders is to wage war. To this end, they literally weaponize cosmic fireballs and celestial barrages of fire and brimstone – at least, as far as the state of technology enables them to do from age to age – and then they deploy these super-weapons to inflict death and destruction on errant members of the human race.

This is where we went wrong as a species. Humans are hardwired for unconditional love. Being nurtured and cherished is how we grow and thrive. But now we have a class of rulers that trade in the love that is man’s birthright for the death-dealing wrath of Doomsday Gods. Their function is to maintain social control and serve as bastions of law and order. But their mission is to do so by following in the toxic steps of the Doomsday Gods. They keep humanity in line by handing down a battery of punitive judgments. They correct the transgressions of fellow humans by impersonating Doomsday Gods and hurling doom and perdition from on high. First, as flaming arrows shot from bows and fiery boulders flung from trebuchets. Then, over the course of time, as cannonballs and cluster bombs and ballistic missiles raining down from the heavens.

Thus the arsenals of war are not born of human aggression. They are born of human beings coping with their terror of monster gods as children do, by trying to imitate them and instrumentalize their fiery wrath. The whole system of corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool – of capital punishment and warfare as methods of chastisement and correction – is not inborn in humanity. It is born of a faulty, utterly fallacious interpretation of cosmic catastrophes. Thus the gods did in the beginning. And thus humans (as quasi-gods) do over the course of history.

For millennia we put our health, wealth and welfare in the hands of these psychotic specimens of divinity. Thanks to the better angels of our nature, we are finally coming to our senses. We’re beginning to understand that our trust is completely misplaced in a class of pseudo-divine rulers who are more bound to grandiose delusions of godhead than bonded to the reality of their own flesh and blood. How can we entrust the administration of our laws, the governance of our lives, to those who channel the brute insentient forces of the universe, laboring under a delusion of being doom-dispensing gods? How can we delegate the burden of upholding social order to those who embody the forces responsible for a breakdown of cosmic order. How absurd is that?

Something profound was lost when the human spirit was acculturated to imitate the gods. We lost that loving feeling that is our main reason for being. We lost that integral connection with our inner child that is the mainspring of our empathic identification with the weak and small among us. That is what the Reparenting Movement sets out to recover. Our civilization went off the rails when, under the hammer blows of celestial catastrophes, our leaders split off from their humanity to identify with a syndicate of wrath-crazed gods. A Reparenting Revolution frees us from this mad misalliance. It creates havens of unconditional love where, by reconnecting with the violated self – the innocent victim of childhood abuse – we quit aligning with heavenly and/or earthly Father Figures that cycle and recycle the brute forces of cosmic violence and destruction.

In reparenting, we conjure up the Good Parent – the Loving Mother/Father we were always meant to have. We envision who we would have liked our Good Parent to be. We focus on what we would have liked our Good Parents to say. We call to mind how we would have liked our Good Parent to relate to us as children. We experience the grief, anger and anguish of never being treated that way – and by virtue of experiencing it all, we’re able to get it out of our system.

Deep in our DNA is an infallible blueprint of our birthright of love. Even if the Good Mother or Good Father is conjured up in our minds, our bodies respond as if they are actually present. We get to cry, scream, yell, and rage and do all the things we never got to do with our real parents. By modeling the Good Parent for each other, we deprogram ourselves from a cult of the Bad Parent that enslaved, exploited and exterminated us for ages. We refuse to embrace the various forms of toxic pedagogy that a majority of authority figures still practice to this day.

We are now at a crossroads of history. By realizing that violence against children is bad, we are ready to withdraw our trust from authority figures who have always used violence to teach us a lesson. And nothing brings this lesson home to us like vaccines. It turns out the pedagogy of the Needle is as toxic as that of the Rod. An entire book has been written on how the medical assault on the American brain has spawned an epidemic of social violence and criminality.^[1] The poisoned needle destroys our emotional intelligence, our capacity for prosocial interaction, by creating a raging inferno of inflammation in our brains. And the punitive rod destroys our capacity for fellow feeling, our ability to peacefully cooperate, by stimulating a cauldron of rage and aggression in our psyches. It is no wonder, then, that guardians of public health, armed with the needle, have failed us as miserably as guardians of public order armed with the rod?

It’s about time we come together to declare the age of institutional guardians over. Can we trust guardians of public order to save the world, when under the pretext of safeguarding it, they give ample proof of their compulsion to build up the means to destroy it? No more than we can trust guardians of public health to protect future generations, when under the guise of immunizing them, they give us abundant proof of their obsession to do our children a world of harm.

The thrust of progress from the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment is towards greater autonomy, greater democratization. We abolished the Divine Right of Kings. Next up is to abrogate the Divine Right of Capital. But to truly emerge from our nonage – to genuinely co-create a world that works equally well for us all – we have to undergo two seminal shifts. One is to be disabused of our faith in truncheons and tanks as pedagogical tools to teach a lesson. Two is to realize the religion of power is as much a superstitious cult as the power of religion. Those playing god over us have always derived their power and authority from an irrational, nay, insane misreading of cosmic cataclysms! Because it is so alien to our psychobiology, the cult of authority only succeeds by brainwashing the mind and bulldozing the body. When we come from love, we are all on the same side. Love advocates for us. It empowers us to give voice to what ails the body and assails the soul. By definition, love is not something we fight. That which is imposed from above us can never be congruent with that which rises up within us – which is why it has to be rammed through with coercion and force. You want to stick it to me, better bring a Big Stick.

As it turns out, the sweeping distrust in authority figures caused by the toxic pedagogy of vaccines couldn’t come at a better time in our history. It’s just what the doctor ordered to give us the final push to topple an ideology of dominance and violence. For the idea of gods battering an evil species to death isn’t merely the template for corporal punishment. It is also the template for racism and genocide. Gods cleansing the earth of a polluted race is the model for Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness, and his demented clone in the film Apocalypse Now. When they cry, Exterminate all the brutes, they follow in the steps of the Doomsday Gods who did exactly that.

In this sense, it can be said that vaccines are a veiled form of imperialism. The poor immune system is looked on as a benighted entity to be instructed and improved. That’s the excuse for the needle going in to disrupt its intricate workings and ravage it with chronic ills. And that’s the way the body is exploited in perpetuity by the medical industrial complex. Just as there is no appreciation that humans are designed to thrive as a communal body, there is none that the body flourishes from coexisting with trillions of bacteria and viruses. Vaccination is based on a militaristic model of medicine. Viruses are stigmatized as the enemy. Zap the virus, cure the disease. Many biologists don’t even believe in the existence of viruses (which are free-floating bits of RNA). They believe a virus is only able to invade a cell and take it over because the cell is weakened by faulty diet, stress, lack of sleep, lack of exercise and of course, the chronic lack of love.

The same thing is true of the bad guys. There are no human enemies, just unloving attitudes that can be changed. You don’t want flesh-eating bacteria? Fine, just change the biological terrain. You don’t want mean, angry people preying on their kind? Fine, just change the psychosocial environment. Don’t abuse children. Don’t abandon or neglect them. Attend to all their needs, understand and empathize with them, free them to find the joy in existence. That’s the way to rule out antisocial behavior and make it impossible for evildoing to gain any traction.

The bottom line is humans are good. If it weren’t for being terrorized out of their wits by celestial catastrophes, personified as imaginary gods of wrath, humans would be happy to be led by the loving kindness of their nature. Give the body the kind of nourishment it needs, and there is no need for the Needle to protect society from various sorts of pathology. Give the psyche the kind of nurture it needs, and there is no need for all those extension of the Rod – like spears and arrows, assault rifles and missiles – to safeguard society from various forms of psychopathology.

In the end, the iconic image of Napalm Girl, running down the street, flailing outstretched arms, merges into the autistic boy, running around flapping his arms. Both are the casualties of a militaristic mindset, harking back to the brutal absurdity of a war the gods waged on our species. Sooner or later we have to remember our religion and politics still bears the imprint of a Day of Doom when gods destroyed the world to save it. Only then will we no longer be doomed to go on mindlessly destroying the global village to save it – or wrecking the human body to protect it.

---

References

[1] Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality, Harris L. Coulter

Neville Raymond is the author of The Reparenting Revolution – From a Power-Based to a Love Based Society (2018) and The Genesis of Genocide – Breaking Through to the Heart of the Holocaust (2001).  His latest book, The Hand to Heart Book of Reparenting – Co-creating a World where the Human Race Falls in Love with Itself is due out in November 2019.

Iran apologized, but Trump and other US presidents will never say sorry for what they’ve done to Middle East

“We should contrast Iran’s mature handling of the disaster with the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board were killed when USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser, fired off a surface-to-air warhead at the aircraft, claiming it had been mistaken for an enemy warplane. However, the Americans never formally apologized for the deaths.

After years of wrangling, the US paid out over $60 million in compensation to Iran under a ruling in 1996 by the International Court of Justice. Even then, Washington did not accept liability. “I will never apologize,” said former President HW Bush.”

Source

http://www.rt.com

Finian Cunningham

is an award-winning journalist. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain’s Independent, among others.

11 Jan, 2020

Iranians mourn plane crash victims with vigil ©  YouTube, Ruptly

Commendably, Iran has apologized for shooting down the passenger jet and killing all 176 people on board. It shows integrity to take responsibility for the disastrous loss of life at a time of intense adversity.

Now, will other parties also show similar humility in admitting their role for creating precarious conditions where death seems an inevitable outcome? Specifically, can US President Donald Trump recognize that his administration’s policy of hellbent hostility towards Iran is driving up conflict and, ultimately, the loss of innocent lives?

The shoot-down of Flight 752 was a heartrending tragedy for countless families of several nationalities. Most of the dead were Iranians, which must add to the pain felt by that nation. But at least by owning up to the truth, the Iranian authorities have spared grieving victims from prolonged anguish of not knowing what happened.

The swift admission by Iran of its terrible error in shooting down the airliner – mistaken for an incoming enemy cruise missile – has taken critics of Iran by surprise. Two days after the plane came down, Western leaders and media were claiming it was an Iranian missile that caused it. Iranian aviation officials at first denied that, saying they believed it was a technical onboard problem, such as engine failure.

Critics of Iran were saying that “the regime” would stonewall the truth and hide behind obfuscation about what happened. Initial Iranian denials weren’t malicious. It was probably more a case of not knowing what happened in a situation of confusion and calamity. When the Iranians put their hand up to acknowledge it was one of their air defense units which had fired the missile, it took integrity and humility to admit fault.

ALSO ON RT.COMRouhani apologizes to Zelensky on behalf of Iran for downing Ukrainian jet

We should contrast Iran’s mature handling of the disaster with the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board were killed when USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser, fired off a surface-to-air warhead at the aircraft, claiming it had been mistaken for an enemy warplane. However, the Americans never formally apologized for the deaths.

After years of wrangling, the US paid out over $60 million in compensation to Iran under a ruling in 1996 by the International Court of Justice. Even then, Washington did not accept liability. “I will never apologize,” said former President HW Bush.

There is also evidence that in the case of Flight 655, the captain of the USS Vincennes was reckless and aggressive in his behavior; and that the shoot-down was no accident. Captain William C Rogers and his crew were later awarded military medals of honor.

ALSO ON RT.COMPlane Wrong Blame Game: How attacks on Iranian & Russian airliners are forgotten

In the case of Flight 752 this week, the Iranians were on high alert for an expected American offensive following the missile attack only hours earlier by Iran on two US bases in Iraq. That attack was in revenge for the American drone assassination of Iran’s top military commander Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3. The Iranians claim that following the missile attack on US bases, there were several reports among their air defense units of suspected incoming enemy planes. It was in this supercharged tension of pending war that the Iranians made the fatal error of hitting the airliner.

Admittedly, it seems ludicrous now that Iran did not take the precaution of closing down its airspace during those hours for normal commercial flights. That seems reprehensible negligence on the part of the Iranians, given the onerous circumstances.

Nevertheless, an objective bigger picture is required to fully comprehend the grief. There is an important distinction between fault and blame. The Iranians are at fault for having caused this horrendous tragedy.

They pulled the trigger. But there is little doubt as to who is ultimately to blame.

ALSO ON RT.COM‘I wish I was dead’: Senior IRGC commander accepts responsibility for downing Ukrainian jet, says it was mistaken for missile

President Trump has created a tinderbox situation in the Middle East with his “maximum pressure” campaign of hostility towards Iran. Scrapping the nuclear accord, reimposing crippling economic sanctions and relentless bellicose rhetoric defaming Iran as a “terror state” has pushed the region to the brink of all-out war. Remember, Trump has several times threatened Iran with total destruction, which infers a willingness to use nuclear weapons.

A build-up of American forces, including nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, in the Persian Gulf over the past year has been carried out under the tenuous claims of “defending US interests” from alleged Iranian aggression. The whole manic narrative is turning reality on its head as to who is the real aggressor.

The murder of Qassem Soleimani was the most critical assault yet on Iran’s national security in a mounting campaign of US provocation. There is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims that Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US forces and diplomats in the region. The Americans point to the death of a US contractor last month from an attack on a base in Iraq as the work of Iranian-backed militia. It’s far from clear who carried out that attack. Some reports say it was a jihadist terror group linked to the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). In any case, the American response was disproportionate and suggests the contractor’s death was used as a pretext for ramping up the offensive on Iran.

On December 27, US warplanes killed at least 25 members of an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq and Syria. That sparked off violent protests at the American embassy in Baghdad on January 1. Trump and his officials were quick to accuse Soleimani for orchestrating the protests. Then two days later, the iconic military leader – seen as Iran’s second most senior figure after Ayatollah Khamenei – was blown to pieces by a US airstrike ordered personally by Trump.

The following slander from the Americans has been repugnant and gratuitous. Trump has called Soleimani “the world’s top terrorist”, and gloated over his death, saying, “we stopped him, cold.” Given that Soleimani was perhaps the most effective military strategist in Iraq and Syria in defeating the IS terror network illustrates the sickening distortion by Trump and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Indeed, the death of Soleimani has been a cause for celebration by the remnants of IS.

Iran is severely at fault for the shoot-down of the civilian airliner. The sense of shame and mortification expressed by the Iranian authorities is palpable. There is genuine remorse for the deaths of their own compatriots and several other nationals.

READ MORE: Now Iran & Iraq BOTH want the US to leave the Middle East, but it never will

But the blame for this horrific event lies in Washington and the Trump administration in particular. The relentless demonization and hostility towards Iran, the ongoing illegal aggression in myriad forms from sanctions to blatant military threats, and the cold-blooded murder of a national hero, Soleimani, has created a powder-keg. The downing of Flight 752 is the consequence. Should we be surprised? It is almost inevitable, given the reckless, destructive dynamics unleashed by Washington. Indeed, we may dread more such tragedies and deaths of innocents, even if an all-out war is not triggered.

One thing seems certain. We will not see any apology or conciliation from the US. Humility and responsibility are anathema to Washington’s arrogance.

What’s behind the West’s hatred of Iran?

Source

http://www.redressonline.com

By Stuart Littlewood

10th January 2020

Mossadeq’s great sin: he “broke the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests”. US and Britain are still smarting.

Nobody saw that coming. Trump ordering Qassim Soleimani’s execution, I mean.

Nobody thought even he was quite so stupid.

It follows his last year’s caper when the “cocked and loaded” drama-queen ordered military strikes against Iran’s radar and missile batteries in retaliation for their shooting down of a US spy drone. He changed his mind with only minutes to spare on account of a reminder that such lunacy might actually cost human lives.

Plus the fact that the drone was eight miles from the coast, well inside the 12 nautical miles considered to be Iran’s territorial waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and it clearly represented a military threat and provocation. So he had no lawful claim of self-defense that would justify a military attack. The United Nations Charter allows only the use of military force in self-defense after an armed attack or with Security Council approval. So his proposed action would have been illegal as well as unwise, but none of that seemed to enter into his calculations then, or now.

Before that, we had Trump’s executive order in August 2018 re-imposing a wide range of sanctions against Iran after pulling the US out of the seven-party nuclear deal for no good reason, a spiteful move that annoyed the European Union and caused all sorts of problems for other nations. And he was going to impose extra sanctions aimed mainly at Iran’s oil industry and foreign financial institutions.

“If the ayatollahs want to get out from under the squeeze,” warned US National Security Adviser John Bolton, “they should come and sit down. The pressure will not relent while the negotiations go on.” To which Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, responded: “If you stab someone with a knife and then you say you want talks, then the first thing you have to do is remove the knife.”

United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy described the sanctions as “unjust and harmful… The reimposition of sanctions against Iran after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, which had been unanimously adopted by the Security Council with the support of the US itself, lays bare the illegitimacy of this action.”

The other parties to the nuclear deal – Russia, China, Germany, France, the UK, and the EU – vowed to stick with it and continue trading with Iran, with some EU foreign ministers saying Iran was abiding by the agreement and delivering on its goal when Trump withdrew and they deeply regretted the new sanctions. Trump, in turn, called Iran “a murderous dictatorship that has continued to spread bloodshed, violence and chaos”. The irony of such a remark was, of course, completely lost on him.

I read on 9 January that the EU “will spare no efforts” to keep the nuclear deal with Iran alive, though I doubt if Boris Johnson, passionate Zionist that he is, will be among them.

When it comes to aggression and dishonesty the US has form, and lots of it. Who can forget during the Iran-Iraq war the cruiser USS Vincennes, well inside Iran’s territorial waters, blowing Iran Air Flight 655 to smithereens and killing all 290 passengers and crew onboard? The excuse, which didn’t bear examination afterward, was that they mistook the Airbus A300 for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat manoeuvring to attack.

George H. W. Bush commented on a separate occasion: “I will never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are… I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.” Trump seems to have caught the same disease. And, from the outside, the White House itself seems home to the sort of “murderous dictatorship” he describes.

The need to continually demonise Iran

When I say the West’s hatred of Iran, I mean primarily the US-UK-Israel axis. Ben Wallace, UK Defence Secretary filling in for Boris Johnson who had absented himself, has told Parliament: “In recent times Iran has felt its intentions are best served through… the use of subversion as a foreign policy tool. It has also shown a total disregard for human rights.” This is amusing coming from the British government and especially a Conservative one which adores Israel, the world’s foremost disregarder of human rights and international law.

Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic revolution. But you have to go back to the early 1950s for the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have had to endure a whole century of British exploitation and bad behaviour. And the axis wants to keep this important slice of history from becoming part of public discourse. Here’s why.

In 1901 William Knox D’Arcy obtained from the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of the country. The Persian government would receive 16 percent of the oil company’s annual profits, a rotten deal as the Persians would soon realise.

D’Arcy, with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, formed a company and sent an exploration team. Drilling failed to find oil in commercial quantities and by 1908 D’Arcy was almost bankrupt and on the point of giving up when they finally struck it big. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was up and running and in 1911 completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War I Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wished to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16 percent and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually canceled the D’Arcy agreement and the matter ended up at the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were an improvement but still didn’t amount to a square deal for the Persians.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and Anglo-Persian changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51 percent holding, had effectively colonised part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. Six thousand went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was violently put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis, Anglo-Iranian declared £40 million profit after tax and handed Iran only £7 million.

Iran by now wanted economic and political independence and an end to poverty. Calls for nationalisation could not be ignored. In March 1951 the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalise Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country. Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, canceling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets.

His explanation was perfectly reasonable…

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results this far. With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease and backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.

M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525

For this he would be removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for three years then put under house arrest until his death.

Britain was determined to bring about regime change, so it orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

America was reluctant at first to join Britain’s destructive game but Churchill (prime minister at this time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into Russia’s arms at a time when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Dwight Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

Chief of the CIA’s Near East and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, played the lead in a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA.

In August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over. Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He remarked:

My greatest sin is that I nationalised Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share – 40 percent going to Anglo-Iranian. The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died on 5 March 1967.

The CIA-engineered coup that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. The British-American conspiracy backfired spectacularly 25 years later with the Islamic revolution of 1978/9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

Smoldering resentment for at least 70 years

And all this happened before the Iran-Iraq war when the West, especially the US, helped Iraq develop its armed forces and chemical weapons arsenal which were used against Iran. The US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam in that conflict and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up:

The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was know that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens. The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.

And while Iranian casualties were at their highest as a result of US chemical and biological war crimes, what was Trump doing? He was busy acquiring the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Trump Castle, his Taj-Mahal casino, the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan – oh, and he was refitting his super-yacht Trump Princess. What does he know, understand or care about Iran and the Iranian people today?

On the British side our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was at Oxford carousing with fellow Etonians at the Bullingdon Club. What does he know or care?

The present Iranian regime, like many others, may not be entirely to the West’s liking but neither was Mossadeq’s fledgling democracy nearly 70 years ago. If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees, Iran might have been “the only democracy in the Middle East” today.

So hush! Don’t even mention the M-word: MOSSADEQ.

On the Brink of War?

Are we on the brink of a Third World War? There are signs that demand that we ask this question. Three clusters of signs compel us to probe a question that could well determine the future of our civilization.

Are we on the brink of a Third World War? There are signs that demand that we ask this question. Three clusters of signs compel us to probe a question that could well determine the future of our civilization.

One, the nature of the event itself — the reckless assassination of the Iranian general, Qassem Sulaimani, on the orders of the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, on 3^rd January 2020 at Baghdad airport — and the fears it has generated of a full-scale war between the two countries and other actors.

Two, the events that have preceded and followed the 3^rd of January murder that portend the danger of a much bigger conflict  in the world’s most tumultuous region.

Three, the tussle for power and influence in West Asia between various actors and their protectors and allies which only needs a trigger to set the entire region ablaze.

The Assassination

While the Trump administration has tried to justify the killing of Qassem Sulaimani in terms of his role in combating the American military presence in West Asia, it is indisputably true that he was also instrumental in the defeat of Al-Qaeda and Daesh and their affiliates in both Iraq and Syria — groups which the US leadership formally regarded as “terrorists.”   If Qassem had an iconic stature in Iran and certain other countries in the region it was because of his success against terrorists inasmuch as his resistance to the Americans whom he saw as occupiers.

In any case, it is doubtful if it was Qassem’s position against the US presence that was the primary factor in his assassination. Isn’t it possible that Trump was hoping that the assassination of a major figure from Iran — since Iran has been depicted as a demon in the US media — would lessen the adverse impact of his impending impeachment?  Besides, if he is perceived as a tough leader willing to eliminate a foreign opponent, wouldn’t it boost his chances of re-election in the presidential polls at the end of this year?

The Context.

Qassem’s killing should be seen in the context of deteriorating US-Iran relations since Trump withdrew from the Iran plus six nation nuclear agreement in 2018. He intensified his pressure upon Iran in a multitude of ways. Sanctions were increased manifold. Drone surveillance over Iranian territory became more pronounced. A US drone which had allegedly violated Iranian air-space was shot down by Iran on 20^th January 2019. A tit-for-tat pattern in US-Iran confrontation developed often on Iraqi soil. The US for instance attacked a militia base in Iraq on 29^th December 2019 which prompted pro-Iranian Iraqis to retaliate by occupying the US embassy in Baghdad on the 31^st of December. Tit-for-tat confrontation arising from the targeting of Iran by the US has heightened the danger of an all-out war.

Tussle for Power

Perhaps a greater danger stems from the tussle for power within West Asia itself. Saudi Arabia, because of its immense oil wealth and its revered status as the land that situates Mekkah and Medina, has for a long while regarded itself as the leader of the Muslim world. The Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979 was perceived as a challenge to its status partly because it had overthrown a monarchical structure and rejected US hegemony over the region. Besides, the vast majority of Iranians are Shia in contrast to Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Wahabi teachings. The uneasiness between the two states did not create any severe friction until the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 which led eventually to the rise of the majority Shia population through the ballot-box. The empowerment of the Shia in Iraq, and their links to Shia Iran were interpreted by the Saudi elite as a threat to their position. Soon, they also witnessed the strengthening of the minority Shia component of Syria largely because of a war imposed upon the land through the machinations of some regional actors backed by the US and its allies. It is because of these reasons — and not the military manoeuvres of Qassem Sulaimani alone —– that the Shias and Iran have become more influential in West Asia.

The increasing influence of Iran has also incensed Israel. Since the 1979 Revolution when the Iranian leadership stated unequivocally its commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people, Israel has been antagonistic towards Iran. It has worked closely with the US elite to undermine Iran on a variety of fronts. It is their common enmity towards Iran that has now helped to forge a bond between the Israeli and Saudi elites.

It is this struggle for power, Saudi and Israeli elites on one side, and Iran and some of its allies on the other, which has exacerbated the potential for a huge conflict in the region.  Needless to say, the US role in this power struggle, as protector and defender of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran has heightened the danger of war as never before.

Apart from these three clusters of signs, there are other factors which may also point in the direction of a possible war. They are related to the global economy and global political power. The irreversible shift in global power from the US and the West to China and certain other actors is causing much consternation in Washington DC and London among other capitals. It signals the end of the epoch of Western dominance. Is a world war a way of preventing that change from taking place?

While the danger of a world war is real, we must also recognise that people everywhere do not want a war. A lot of governments have condemned the brazen assassination of Qassem as a gross violation of international law. In fact, some members of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate regard the authorisation of the murder by the US president as a stark transgression of US law.

For critics of US foreign policy outside the US in particular, Trump’s abuse of power is characteristic of a government which more often than not has behaved as if established law and civilised norms do not apply to it. US ‘exceptionalism’ is one of the main reasons why the global movement against hegemony has become so much stronger in the last three decades. 

They know as others do that war, a creature of hegemony, is a terrible scourge. It is not just a question of millions dying. Much of civilization as we know it will also be eliminated especially since one of the protagonists is convinced that destroying cultural sites in a war is legitimate.

Iran which had suffered so much from a war imposed upon it in the eighties and has not initiated a war for the last 250 years is opposed to a military confrontation with the US. This is why avenging Qassem’s death for the Iranian leadership does not mean starting a war. It is a rational leadership which will focus upon driving the US military forces out of West Asia through politics and diplomacy. 

If it succeeds in achieving this, it would have transformed the region and the world for the well-being of human beings everywhere.              

Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Global Research, 2020