As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to tear through the global population, the disease is having an especially devastating impact on the tens of millions of displaced people throughout the world.
More than 1 percent of humanity–some 79.5 million people–were living as forcibly displaced people in 2019, the highest number on record. This staggering figure, which is almost double the number of displaced people just a decade ago and 10 million more than at the end of 2018, was cited in the latest United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) annual Global Trends report released last week.
If the world’s displaced were considered as their own country, that country would have a population almost equivalent to that of Germany, Europe’s largest economy, or that of Iran. The vast majority of the refugees come from five countries, all of which have either been direct targets of US imperialist aggression and intrigue or are suffering as a result of decades of colonial domination and neocolonial occupation. Afghanistan, Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela account for 68 percent of the total. Syria alone, which has been devastated for almost a decade by a bloody US-instigated civil war, accounts for over 13 million displaced people–more than half of its 22 million pre-war population.
The poorest countries are bearing the brunt of the crisis, as the imperialist powers in North America and Europe seal their borders to refugees, use heavily armed, fascistic border guards to fire on them, or allow them to drown at sea. The UNHCR report notes that 73 percent of people displaced outside of their home country have found refuge in a neighbouring country, i.e., they live in countries that are often as ill-prepared as their war-torn, impoverished homelands to provide for their survival and well-being.
The report noted in this context the fate of the Rohingya, who were forced out of Myanmar in a vicious campaign of terror by the US-backed military regime. Tens of thousands remain confined to miserable, inhospitable camps in Bangladesh. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the UNHCR has registered growing numbers of Rohingya moving towards Malaysia and other southeast Asian countries due to the hardship produced by lockdown measures and the diminishing prospect of ever returning home.
Refugees and displaced people who seek to reach richer countries in Europe and North America confront brutal repression and the threat of death due to the ruling elites’ criminal policies. In the United States, the Trump administration has established a vast array of internment camps, where desperate and impoverished people fleeing horrendous social conditions in Latin America, including women and children separated from their families, are treated no better than animals. Militarized guards and militias patrol the US-Mexico border, which has become the scene of hundreds of migrant deaths every year.
In “Fortress Europe,” the European Union has all but abolished the right to asylum and shredded the protections adopted in the Geneva Convention on Refugees, a piece of international law instituted following the unbridled savagery of the Nazi regime. Seven decades later, European governments, with Germany in the lead, are well on the way to resurrecting similarly barbaric practices.
Tens of thousands of refugees are confined to hellish concentration camps in Libya and other parts of North Africa, where they are subjected to torture, rape, slavery and worse by EU-funded militias. On the Greek islands, tens of thousands of people are crammed into overcrowded camps with virtually no sanitary facilities, amid a raging global pandemic. Thousands of refugees are left to drown in the Mediterranean on Europe’s doorstep each year.
The cruelty and vindictiveness shown towards refugees by European capitalism is so brazen that even UN officials have been compelled to criticise it. Speaking at the release of the Global Trends report, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said that as a European, he feels “embarrassed and ashamed” over how the EU has handled the refugee crisis.
As horrific as the figures are in the UNHCR report, it accounts for the situation in 2019. It therefore does not take note of the devastating impact of the coronavirus crisis, which has dramatically worsened conditions facing refugees and migrant workers on every continent.
Migrants and displaced people typically belong to the most oppressed and exploited sections of the working class. They have been hit especially hard by coronavirus outbreaks, and largely left to fend for themselves by callously indifferent and often maliciously hostile state authorities, from Modi’s India to Merkel’s Germany and Trump’s United States.
In Germany, where the fascistic Alternative for Germany plays a major role in determining government policy, large numbers of Romanian, Bulgarian and other Eastern European migrant workers are herded into dilapidated buildings often unfit for human habitation. They receive poverty wages and have no rights or job protection. They have been infected in large numbers in meat packing plants and in the agricultural sector, while many more have been placed under effective police guard in hopelessly overcrowded tower blocks and disused army barracks, which then become hotbeds for the spread of the virus.
In India, millions of migrant workers were left to starve by the Hindu supremacist government of Narendra Modi, which failed to provide adequate assistance to them when it unveiled a nationwide lockdown with just four hours’ notice in March. Due to the fact that the vast majority of migrant workers are day labourers in the so-called “informal sector,” they were left virtually overnight with no income to obtain food and other basic necessities. Hundreds of thousands began trekking on foot back to their home villages, often covering hundreds of miles and carrying the virus with them. Many more were detained in camps.
In the United States, migrant workers make up a large proportion of the more than 25,000 meat packing workers infected by CoVID-19. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants received no assistance during lockdown measures, due to fears that contacting state institutions could result in their detention or deportation.
Building on the Obama presidency, which oversaw a record number of immigrant deportations, the fascistic-minded Trump has launched a series of military-style immigration raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs to arbitrarily round up immigrants for detention and removal. In July 2019, Trump launched nationwide raids targeting 2,000 families in 10 major cities for deportation.
The defence of refugees and migrant workers is a task that falls to the working class. Anti-immigrant chauvinism and nationalism have been systematically promoted by all factions of the political establishment in every country to justify right-wing policies of law-and-order and attacks on democratic rights. They also seek to scapegoat immigrants and refugees for the social problems produced by decades of savage austerity and attacks on working conditions, which have in reality been implemented to boost the wealth of the super-rich and pay for imperialist militarism and war.
“The world of decaying capitalism is overcrowded,” wrote Leon Trotsky in the Manifesto of the Fourth International in 1940. “The question of admitting a hundred extra refugees becomes a major problem for such a world power as the United States. In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralyzed by passports and visas. The period of the wasting away of foreign trade and the decline of domestic trade is at the same time the period of the monstrous intensification of chauvinism and especially of anti Semitism… Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.”
Eighty years after these lines were written, their forceful condemnation of the bourgeoisie is, if anything, even stronger than in 1940. While the bourgeoisie of every country is returning to the reactionary politics of nationalism, militarism and the far-right, the working class on a world scale is more interconnected and unified than ever before. The mass multi-racial protests over recent weeks in dozens of countries triggered by the brutal police murder of George Floyd testify to the common experiences of exploitation and state repression faced by workers of all backgrounds around the world under capitalism.
Rejecting the ruling elite’s nationalism and anti-immigrant poison, working people must come to the defence of refugees and migrant workers on a global scale. They must defend the rights of workers of all nationalities to work, live and access social and health care services in the country of their choice without fear of persecution or deportation.
The defence of the democratic rights of refugees and migrant workers is possible only as part of the broadest mobilisation of workers and young people against social inequality, capitalist state repression and militarism and war. Such a struggle should be guided by a socialist and internationalist perspective and set as its goal the transfer of political power to workers’ governments committed to socialist policies.
Jordan Shilton
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
“While it is true that people must liberate themselves from their servitude, it is also true that they must first free themselves from what has been made of them in the society in which they live” New & Used Books for Activists, Protesters & Revolutionary’s; https://www.facebook.com/Fahrenheit451bookstore/
An anarchist perspective on the protests in Venezuela Lacking clear political content, the Venezuelan protests are at the same time capitalized upon by the right and violently repressed by the government.
Editor’s note: Yesterday we published some initial reflections on the Venezuelan protests which decried the anti-democratic intentions of the country’s US-backed right-wing opposition from a left-libertarian perspective. We also highlighted some of the important social advances made by successive Socialist governments, while remaining critical of chavismo as a political program and roundly condemning the police brutality against protesters. Today, we would like to share a short article by Rafael Uzcátegui for the Venezuelan autonomous-anarchist newspaper El Libertario, which highlights the violent repression of the protests by the Socialist government and criticizes its narrative of an anti-government “coup” being in the making.
The situation in Venezuela is complex and still in flux. The unfolding events therefore need to be assessed from multiple independent and critical perspectives that recognize both the violent means through which the US, international capital and the Venezuelan elite are trying to oust a democratically-elected government, as well as the reproductive patterns of state violence to which this Socialist government itself is now resorting. As we have written elsewhere, the Bolivarian Revolution is riven with internal contradictions, and it takes openness to seemingly contradictory perspectives to be able to recognize both its achievements and its limitations.
N.B.: The image above shows Genesis Carmona, 22, being transported to hospital after having been fatally shot in the head by an unidentified gunman during an anti-government protest.
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On February 4th, 2014, students from the Universidad Nacional Experimental del Táchira (Experimental University of Táchira), located in the inland state of the country, protested the sexual assault of a fellow female classmate, which took place in the context of the city’s increasing insecurity. The protest was repressed, and several students were detained. The next day, other universities around the country had their own protests requesting the release of these detainees, and these demonstrations were also repressed, with some of the activists incarcerated.
The wave of indignation had as context the economic crisis, the shortage of first necessity items and the crisis of basic public services, as well as the beginnings of the imposition of new economic austerity measures by President Nicolás Maduro. Two opposition politicians, Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, tried to capitalize on the wave of discontent rallying for new protests under the slogan “The Way Out” and also tried to press for the resignation of president Maduro. Their message also reflected the rupture and divisions on the inside of opposing politicians and the desire to replace Henrique Capriles’ leadership, who publicly rejected the protests. The Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Table) coalition, didn’t support them either.
When the government suppressed the protests, it made them grow bigger and wider all over the country. On February 12th, 2014, people from 18 cities protested for the release of all of the detainees and in rejection of the government. In some cities of the interior, particularly punished by scarcity and lack of proper public services, the protests were massive. In Caracas, three people were murdered during the protests. The government blames the protesters, but the biggest circulating newspaper in the country, Últimas Noticias, which receives the majority of its advertising budget from the government itself, revealed through photographs that the murderers were police officers. As a response to this, Nicolás Maduro stated on national television and radio broadcast that police enforcement had been “infiltrated by the right wing.”
The repression of the protesters draws not only on police and military enforcement agencies; it also incorporates the participation of militia groups to violently dissolve the protests. A member of PROVEA, a human rights NGO, was kidnapped, beaten and threatened with death by one of them on the west side of Caracas. President Maduro has publicly encouraged these groups, which he calls colectivos (collectives).
The Venezuelan government actually controls all of the major TV stations, and has threatened with sanctions radio stations and newspapers that transmit information about protests. Because of this, the privileged space for the distribution of information have been the social media networks, especially Twitter. The use of personal technological devices has allowed record-keeping through videos and photographs of ample aggressions of the repressive forces. Human rights organizations report detainees all over the country (many of them already released). The number has surpassed 400, and they have suffered torture, including reports of sexual assault, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. As this is being written 5 people have been murdered in the context of the protests.
In his speeches, Nicolás Maduro encourages the protesters opposing him to assume even more radical and violent positions. Without any ongoing criminal investigation, he automatically stated that everyone killed has been murdered by the protesters themselves, who he disqualifies with every possible adjective.
However, this belligerence seems not to be shared by all the chavista movement, because a lot of its base is currently withholding its active support, waiting to see what will come next. Maduro has only managed to rally public employees to the street protests he has called. In spite of the situation and due to the grave economic situation he faces, Nicolás Maduro continues to make economic adjustments, the most recent being a tax increase.
The state apparatus reiterates repeatedly that it is facing a “coup”, that what happened in Venezuela on April 2002 will repeat itself. This version has managed to neutralize the international left-wing, which hasn’t even expressed its concern about the abuses and deaths in the protests.
The protests are being carried out in many parts of the country and are lacking in center and direction, having being called through social media networks. Among the protesters themselves, there are many diverse opinions about the opposition political parties, so it’s possible to find many expressions of support and also rejection at the same time.
In the case of Caracas the middle class and college students are the primary actors in the demonstrations. On the other hand, in other states, many popular sectors have joined the protests. In Caracas the majority of the demands are political, including calls for the freedom of the detainees and the resignation of President Maduro, while in other cities social demands are incorporated, with protests against inflation, scarcity and lack of proper public services. Even though some protests have turned violent, and some protesters have fired guns at police and militia groups, the majority of the protests, especially outside of Caracas, remain peaceful.
The Revolutionary Independent Venezuelan Left (which includes anarchists and sectors that follow Trotsky, Marx, Lenin and Guevara) is not involved in this situation. We are simple spectators. Some of us are actively denouncing state repression and helping the victims of human rights violations.
Venezuela is a historically oil-driven country. It possesses low levels of political culture among its population, which explains why the opposition protesters have the same “content” problem as those supporting the government. But while the international left-wing continues to turn its back and support — without any criticism — the government’s version of “a coup”, it leaves thousands of protesters at the mercy of the most conservative discourse of the opposition parties, without any reference to anti-capitalists, revolutionaries and true social change that could influence them.
In this sense, Leopoldo López, the detained conservative opposition leader, tries to make himself the center of a dynamic movement that, up to the time of this writing, had gone beyond the political parties of the opposition and the government of Nicolás Maduro.
What will happen in the short term? I think nobody knows exactly, especially the protesters themselves. The events are developing minute by minute.
For more alternative information about Venezuela, we recommend:
A monstrous crime is being committed in Ukraine right before the eyes of the world and the western media is helping to cover it up and distract the attention of the entire world from the core fact that the events in Ukraine are not a popular uprising but a carefully orchestrated synthetic coup d’état brought about by long entrenched western color revolution infrastructure that was installed by US/NATO/EU to bring about the illegal act of regime change on the sovereign country of Ukraine.
The unprecedented violent actions by the armed insurgents, who openly use deadly force on law enforcement and have set Kiev in flames, attempting to overthrow the government by force, are in fact treasonous crimes against the Ukraine and the people of Ukraine as they are being controlled from the outside and violate all internationally accepted democratic principles as well as all of the internal laws and constitutionally dictated standards of conduct enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine.
It is illegal under international law for any country to carry out measures to bring about the illegal change of the government in any other sovereign state, this includes support of any kind for insurgent forces, the implementation of economic and other measures to pressure the government to step down or dissolve and all other instruments and measures both covert and overt that may be used to bring about what is now popularly called “regime change” by the West and the US Government.
International Law
Overthrowing governments and removing presidents by force is illegal and covered in laws and ruling by bodies such as the World Court and even the International Criminal Court, which has become a mere instrument of the West, however the United Nations Charter is the most important document and widely respected of all of these instruments and one which all countries that attempt to abide by international law attempt to follow.
Under the UN Charter all attempts by the US/NATO/EU to influence the events in Ukraine so as to bring about a resolution that conforms to their own interests are illegal.
The debate over US/NATO/EU meddling in Ukraine and the use of US/NATO/EU military force, economic measures, political pressure and all of the other “tools” they use, including aggressive military attack and occupation, to effect regime changes in countries such as Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Serbia, Venezuela, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Sudan and the other targeted countries, has conveniently been absent of one key fact: coercive, forced and outside regime change violates basic all of the accepted tenets of international law.
UN Charter
According to Article 1 (2) of the UN Charter developing peaceful international relations based on the “principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is one of the founding principles of the United Nations, and by default the UN Security Council. Therefore any attempt by any country to subjugate or pressure another into implementing measures or carrying out an agenda not instigated from within and not in keeping with the will of the people is illegal. The “will of the people” can only be known through referendums and democratic political processes and debates, not through fabricated pogroms in the streets, which the US is expert at organizing. As for pressure on the government, even the implementation of sanctions is therefore illegal as this is done to pressure a government from the outside.
It is prohibited under international law to threaten to use force and Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter states this clearly and requires all UN member states to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states. US/NATO/EU have not threatened military force against Ukraine, as they already have their ground force installed as they did in Syria, Libya, etc. but this applies to other countries they have invaded recently.
Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter states clearly that the United Nations and its members have no authority to intervene in matters which are within the domestic jurisdiction of any state (sovereign country). However the US/NATO/EU have gotten around this by implementing and using what they call the Responsibility to Protect. Uprisings and violent demonstrations such as what is happening in Ukraine fall within the definition of domestic jurisdiction, therefore any outside attempt to interfere is illegal.
Armed Insurgents
What is alarming in Ukraine is the violent and militarized nature of what the West is endlessly painting as a legitimate opposition. This portrayal runs contrary to what the most of the world is seeing right in front of their eyes on their TV screens. Even multiple statements by US officials themselves and a recently released telephone conversation between US official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, show that these are not members of a legitimate internal opposition, but rather radicalized, militarized, trained, planted, funded and supported members of western “color revolution” infrastructure.
The US/NATO/EU continue to egregiously blame the government and are criminally silent when the opposition they support, and in fact planted, murder members of the security forces and policemen. The outright murder, kidnapping and extreme violence against police and security forces should be something that would cause an outcry among police officers worldwide, especially in the US, where their police are given almost god-like reverence, yet the so called “international community” and members of the world’s law enforcement bodies are silent.
Nothing that the insurgents have done would be supported in any US/NATO/EU country or city, yet they continue to call on, threaten and pressure the authorities in Ukraine to not interfere or take required measures. The violent insurgents have made a mockery of law and order and have literally set the capital of a civilized, democratic European country on fire.
Storming, seizing and burning down the buildings which house the instruments and bodies of the state; openly shooting, murdering, kidnapping and falsely detaining members of law enforcement; destroying and setting alight the property of the state and the people; organizing the pogrom we are seeing in Ukraine; violating the law and acting against their own constitution; blackmailing and threatening officials to step down or be complaint and finally promoting policies that are not in keeping with the desires of the Ukrainian people, are all factual aspects of the Ukrainian “opposition”. So why is US/NATO/EU openly supporting them?
Business As Usual for US/NATO/EU
In my journalistic work I have attempted to robustly detail for years what US/NATO have been doing in their redesigning of world’s geopolitical landscape and I cannot repeat this enough, what we are seeing in Ukraine is just another regime change for the West. The tactics they use are always the same, we have seen them and documented them time and again and they continue to be illegal and egregious. Yet they continue with impunity.
All of the regime change actions and provocations that US/NATO/EU have used in Ukraine have been documented and exposed before the fact, yet the US president, EU leaders and their compliant media continue to egregiously stick to their own artificial pre-planned narrative.
The goal was regime change because US/NATO/EU understood that the Ukrainian Government and more importantly the Ukrainian people would not allow their country to be subverted and become yet another US/NATO/EU client state. More importantly this turn to Russia seriously interferes with US/NATO/EU military plans to base US/NATO missiles in Ukraine, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet and achieve their prime military objective of neutralizing Russia and eliminating Russia’s response to a first strike nuclear attack, which at the end of the day is the goal. The people of Ukraine and the organs of government are just inconveniences for US/NATO/EU and even if the country is completely destroyed and divided, their goal will be carried out. The destruction of the state of Ukraine will in fact benefit the US/NATO/EU and this fact we have seen repeatedly in the last 15 years.
Obama Connects Syria and Ukraine
In comments related to a soon to be released Voice of Russia interview Professor Francis Boyle a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law told me the following:
“Obama said that the people of the Ukraine should be able to determine their own future just like the people of Syria should be able to determine their own future. So Obama himself linked the two. The strategy is the same: regime change, civil war, destruction of the State. So this elevates the call by the State Department for a transition to a government of technocrats to the presidential level. The cat is out of the bag. Regime Change of the democratically elected government of Ukraine is openly admitted to be USG policy. Even worse than Syria, whose government was arguably not really democratic. Nevertheless as I point out in my book, the demand for regime change by one government against another government is illegal and violates the World Court’s ruling against the United States in the Nicaragua decision (1996).”
Media Failure
The western mass media continues to promote and spread a phony slanted narrative of the events in Ukraine and their attempts have been formidable and almost impossible to counter. This concerns mostly the nature and portrayal of the police murdering opposition which, like the cop killers in the Caucuses, the West portrays as heroes and some sort of freedom fighters.
Again the hypocrisy of the West in Ukraine is resounding and completely obvious, yet they continue with impunity. US illegality and their complete and total disregard for international law continue to stare the world in the face in Guantanamo and worldwide, yet the compliant media has failed as US illegality has now spread like a cancer to include all NATO/EU countries.
It is another black day for the world as we see that the mass media has completely failed and been corrupted in the West. All of the facts surrounding the murderous insurgents in Ukraine and their bloody uprising and the collusion of the Central Intelligence Agency, US/NATO/EU and the West are being conveniently ignored as the subservient media chooses to attempt to go so far as to blame Russia which has from day one made it a point not to interfere.
Nowhere do we see debates going on regarding: the over $50 billion the US has spent buying out Ukraine; the admission by Victoria Nuland of US meddling in her telephone conversation, during which she implicated the head of the UN in US/NATO/EU plans; the training and equipping of the insurgents by US/NATO/EU; the fact that all outside pressure and meddling is illegal nor the fact that if anything similar happened in the West it would in no way be allowed.
“The entrance of the Western-supported “Euromaidan” occupied City Hall in Kiev now sports a giant banner-icon of the WW2 Nazi collaborator Stephen Bandera, who orchestrated the genocide of Jews and Poles in the Nazi occupied Ukraine, flanked on either side by the blue and yellow three finger salute flags of the literal Neo Nazi, Svoboda party”.
Wake Up Call
They have won and Ukraine has fallen. The President of Ukraine has stated he will step down, which was the first call by the US/NATO/EU, when the first encampments appeared on Maidan Square. This was their clear goal and even though we documented it they have won. However what they have in fact done is committed another crime on an international scale.
Will anyone answer for the crime of subversion and for violating the sovereignty of Ukraine? Not likely. Therefore this should be a serious wake up call to all countries of the world, but will it? Also not likely.
What is striking in Ukraine was that it was a democratically elected government, that all of the US/NATO/EU plans were know from the start and that it was still allowed to proceed.
Once again, as we saw in Iraq, Libya and all other countries where the governments have been recently overthrown and the leader executed or otherwise removed (with North Korea being the perfect example) the only protection that any country has from the imposition of US/NATO/EU regime change is quite simply nuclear weapons.
US/NATO Obama/Neo-Con Plans and Impunity
After 9-11 Neo-Con Paul Wolfowitz, the then US Deputy Secretary of Defense stated that the US Government is now in the business of destroying countries, executing presidents and changing governments at will.
General Wesley Clark who was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, took issue with the Neo-Con architects from the Project for a New American Century (LINK 5) and gave testimony that the US planned to overthrow seven countries after 9/11: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Mr. Clark called the post 9-11 overtaking of the US Government a coup and said it was plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”. In a report Glen Greenwald cites a US Secretary of Defense Memo which gave even more detail and put a timeframe on the plan:
“I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Greenwald reported that General Clark was shocked and wrote about the following exchange:
“And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”
A New Regime Would Be Illegal
Any regime installed in any way other than trough democratic elections in Ukraine and under the current crisis will be illegal. President Yanukovich despite being weak and some might argue incompetent in maintaining stability in his country, was democratically elected in elections that were recognized by the entire world. This is important to underline.
Even though he was placed in a Catch 22 situation by the West where if he cracked down he would be demonized and if he did not he would be overthrown, his handling of the internal crisis leaves a lot of questions to be answered.
Timing of Ukrainian Coup
It is also important to note the similarities between the timing of the events in Ukraine and the invasion by Georgia of South Ossetia. Both taking place during Olympics and again the words of Neo-Con Paul Wolfowitz: “… we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”
Ukraine is the crowning jewel and it looks like they will obtain it.
The views and opinions expressed here are my own. I can be reached at robles@ruvr.ru.
Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned To Take Out Seven Countries In Five Years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran
“So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!””
With the release of a recent conversation between the US ambassador to Ukraine and Victoria Nuland plotting the downfall of the current legitimate elected government in Kiev, it is clear who is behind the attempted coup in Ukraine. US backed “activists” with sniper rifles and hand guns are openly firing on police something that would not be tolerated anywhere in the world but which is being portrayed by western leaders as being legitimate opposition protest behavior. However such cold-blooded murder would lead to brains being swept off the street in their cities. According to Voice of Russia regular Rick Rozoff, who spoke on these issues, what we are color revolution techniques in action and the western media is playing along as a propaganda tool for those behind the scenes.
Hello. This is John Robles, I am speaking with Rick Rozoff the owner and manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list. This is a regular feature of the Voice of Russia.
Robles: Can you give us an update on what is going on with NATO? A lot of stuff is going on, a lot of attention on Ukraine. And I’d like to ask you about Ukraine. But, first, what is going on with NATO right now?
Rozoff: Well, it is acting true to its new purpose in the post-Cold War period as an international military bloc. For example, just in the last week or so, for the first time ever a delegation from the NATO Military Committee, and the Military Committee in its full form consists of the military chiefs of staff of all the 28 full NATO members, visited Georgia. And this, again, is a first, it is unprecedented, and clearly acknowledging or demonstrating how strategically important Georgia is to NATO’s Eurasian but ultimately European plans. That is number one.
NATO’s also commenced its air patrols over the North Atlantic nation of Iceland, including warplanes from both Finland and Sweden with the express intention of further integrating Finland and Sweden, and of course Finland has a lengthy border with Russia, those two countries into NATO as ultimately four NATO members.
We have to recall that both those nations have troops fighting under NATO command with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, that Sweden supplied Griffin military aircraft for the war against Libya three years ago…In parts of the world
Also, NATO warships have docked in both Puntland, which is a semi-autonomous, really at this point independent part of Somalia, as well as in the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa in recent days. This is part of the – permanent – NATO military operation, military presence in the Indian Ocean called Ocean Shield, which complements their permanent military naval deployment in the Mediterranean, Active Endeavor, and so forth.
We also noticed the first US guided missile warship arriving at the Rota naval base in Spain, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, as part of what eventually will be four US warships with interceptor missiles, part of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, but ultimately part of the international US and allied missile shield program, interceptor missile program. So, this gives you some indication of what is going on throughout the world.
There have been other initiatives shown by NATO in other parts of the world, including in Africa most notably. Something that isn’t directly NATO but for all the difference it makes it may as well be, just a few days ago in Brussels, which is the headquarters of both the European Union and NATO, the European Union announced a joint military operation in the Central African Republic (CAR). This is done through the Military Committee of the European Union, comparable to what was done in Chad, neighboring Chad a few years ago.
But it is noteworthy that NATO has recruited several non-EU member states to provide troops for that mission, including Georgia, Serbia, Canada, Norway, Turkey and the United States. This was at an alleged, quote, force generation conference in Brussels on February the 13th, five days ago. That gives you an idea of what is happening internationally.
To segue into our main topic of discussion, today the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, again called on, quote, “all parties in Ukraine” to desist from violence.
I could only imagine if a comparable situation, one that’s…what is occurring in Kiev right now were to be occurring in Brussels, if, say, “all parties in Belgium to refrain from violence”, when state security personnel were being shot to death and set on fire with Molotov cocktails, if he would have such a balanced perspective – of course he would not.
Robles: Regarding Ukraine, how many policemen have been injured already there?
Rozoff: The number is rising of course. But the latest report I see is that over 184 police officers have been wounded, 35 of them critically, and at least seven of them have been shot to death.
Robles: What is the reaction from the US right now? Has Nuland come out condemning any of this? Has anybody in the US condemned this or are they all supporting it?
Rozoff: The US ambassador to Ukraine, the same Geoffrey Pyatt who was caught on tape with Victoria Nuland in recent weeks plotting the downfall of the current legitimate, elected government in Kiev, threatened sanctions, mentioned the fact that sanctions could be enforced against, again, “all parties.” It is impossible to levy sanctions against fascist guttersnipes and mobsters who are on a rampage, they have no assets that can be seized and no trade that can be halted and so forth. So, this is a unilateral threat to the government of Ukraine, which is under siege, quite literally under siege, with government buildings being stormed, personnel being seized captive, even killed in the case of the central headquarters of the ruling party in the country, the Party of Regions, where a member… presumably a member… a security office by one account, at their central headquarters in Kiev was murdered.
What we are seeing is almost gangland violence trying to pass itself off as political opposition. What is very important to noted is that the president of the country Victor Yanukovich is to meet with three major opposition leaders: Yatsenyuk and Klitschko and Tyagnibok at 11:00, Kiev time. So something is going to be breaking at that point but there is a clear coordination between the opposition figures within the Parliament, within the Verkhovna Rada, and the Molotov-cocktail-hurling, rifle-wielding so-called opposition outside.
Robles: I’m sorry, Rick, are there charges? Haven’t charges been pressed against Klitschko and, what is his name, Yatsenyuk? Aren’t they facing charges already? And if you could, can you tell us about..you told me before we started about videos you saw, that they were actually… someone had a sniper rifle or something, a rifle with a scope and they were actually just shooting policemen.
Rozoff: That’s exactly it, and anyone who e-mails me at rwrozoff@yahoo.com, I’d be glad to give then a link to that video. It is circulating, somebody in Italy has sent it out and there are several similar videos, but this is one of the more stark I’ve seen.
It shows a young so-called activist, as US would portray him, with, exactly, a sniper rifle with a scope firing presumably at police or other security personnel; somebody else has a handgun he’s firing. So there are weapons on the street. And clearly the fact that seven security personnel have been shot dead confirms the fact that firearms are being used.
Again, I don’t know in which other capital city in the world this sort of behavior would be tolerated, much less portrayed by Western leaders as being legitimate opposition protest behavior when what you are talking about is cold-blooded murder.
Robles: Can you imagine in the US that people have started shooting police just openly on the street?
Rozoff:I hate to put it in such stark and graphic terms, but the only way I could characterize this is: they’d be sweeping their brains off the street for the next day.
Robles: I mean how can they possibly get away with trying to support this? What are the American people, I mean the average people, thinking about this?
Rozoff: Unfortunately, the average person does not go to the Internet and look up videos, which are readily accessible. But I would have to say largely in the Russian media as I don’t know anywhere else in the world
where we’re seeing these videos, even there are often times Western news agencies – Reuters, BBC and so forth – but because of the controlled nature of news, particularly in relation to foreign affairs, in the United States and other NATO countries we’re only seeing the doctored and sanitized version.
I’ve often argue this, John, I think perhaps even on your show, it’s the equivalent of somebody walking into a movie theater where the hero has finally taken enough from the villain and starts fighting back. And when you see that, and only that, it’s very difficult to confuse the characters and to believe that the perpetrator is the victim and vice versa. This is one of the methods used by the Western establishment so-called news media, which are really propaganda outlets, to portray the “peaceful protestors being assaulted without provocation by brutal security forces.”
But again, you are correct in stating: were something like this to happen in Washington DC or Paris or London, I can assure you the first police officer who was injured in any manner would be the cause for a crackdown the likes of which wouldn’t be forgotten in a hurry. However, this trick about the “regime change”, so-called color revolution technique, which is to place the targeted government in a situation where if they do not respond harshly they are seen as vulnerable and then the violence is escalated. If they make any effort, no matter how belated, to even defend themselves it is seen as being a gross violation of human rights and portrayed that way by the Western governments and their rather formidable media outlets.
And this is a situation that I believe is occurring right now in Kiev. But we have to..anyone who has seen this, who has gone to my website or Russian websites and has seen the actual fires in downtown Kiev, this is again the capital city of a European country going up in flames, for the second time in 15 years, we saw Belgrade similarly set of fire by NATO bombers what will be 15 years from next month, if this is a new world order what you are seeing is a resumption of fascistic, brutal violent uprisings which ultimately are backed by the US and its cohort of NATO military powers. And what I fear right now, if the violence is not halted very quickly in Ukraine, you are going to see full-fledged, if not civil war, you are going to see foreign-backed armed insurgency, if not comparable in every particular to what’s happening in Syria at least similar in terms of its basic dynamic.
Robles: I’d like to make a comment here for… and this might be a little unusual… for American law enforcement officers, police officers in the US. I’d like to make a plea for them, look at what’s happening to their colleagues in Ukraine and call their senators or whoever and ask them: “How can they possibly support this?” What do you think?
Rozoff: That is a very good point. A lot of Chicago police officers incidentally are of Ukrainian ethnic background, there is a neighborhood not terribly far from where I am called Ukrainian Village, as a matter of fact. And to see their colleagues and there is, let’s be honest, there is a special sense of fraternity or comradery between people of the same professions around the world particularly those that entail some degree of personal danger, and for police officers around the world to be watching this: you know, I would suggest that there is an understanding they themselves could be next if some Western-supported insurgent uprising of the sort that is occurring on the streets of Kiev…Incidentally, there is a report by Interfax-Ukraine that armed groups in Western Ukraine, in Lviv, have been intercepted by security personnel en route to Kiev. So what you’re talking about is something almost comparable to, say, Generalissimo Franco’s march on Madrid, Spain in the late ’30s counting on the fifth column, the infamous fifth column, supporters within the city to assist them and so forth. But this is nothing less than an effort to topple a legitimate government in Europe in the 21st century through vicious street violence, the sort one may have associated with Adolf Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 or Mussolini’s March on Rome. This is the kind of sick fascist filth we are seeing in Ukraine.
Robles: I see.
This is John Robles. You were listening to an interview with Mr Rick Rozoff, the Owner and Manager of the Stop NATO website and international mailing list. This is a weekly feature of the Voice of Russia. You can find other work by me and by Mr Rick Rozoff on our website at voiceofrussia.com. Thank you very much for listening and we wish you the best wherever in the world you may be.
A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests U.S. Was Plotting Coup
democracynow.org – A short-lived truce has broken down in Ukraine as street battles have erupted between anti-government protesters and police. Last night the country’s embattled president and the opposition leaders demanding his resignation called for a truce and negotiations to try to resolve Ukraine’s political crisis. But hours later, armed protesters attempted to retake Independence Square sparking another day of deadly violence. At least 50 people have died since Tuesday in the bloodiest period of Ukraine’s 22-year post-Soviet history. While President Obama has vowed to “continue to engage all sides” a recently leaked audio recording between two top U.S. officials reveal the Obama administration has been secretly plotting with the opposition. We speak to Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War,” is out in paperback. His latest Nation article is “Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine.”
World powers deeply involved in the Ukrainian crisis
The center of Kiev has been transformed into a battleground as rioters clash with police on Independence Square. Ukraine has seen some of its worst scenes of violence over the last few days, with over 60 dead and over 500 injured in the escalating conflict. Violence escalated on Tuesday after a group of radicals attempted to storm the building of the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada). On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych agreed to a truce with opposition leaders, and that he would begin negotiations with protesters. Now, the US has imposed individual sanctions for 20 Ukrainian politicians for the use of violence on protesters. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said those actions “resemble blackmail.” RT’s Meghan Lopez discusses the bigger picture of relations between the US, EU, Russia and Ukraine with Brian Becker, the national coordinator for the anti-war ANSWER Coalition.
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