Veröffentlicht am Januar 19, 2012 von Daniele Puccio
Development of some economic/social indicators:
When Hugo Chavez came to power in ’98, the venezuelan GDP was at about 90 billion $. In 2010 Venezuela’s GDP was already 387 billion $.
In 2003 62% of Venezuelans were “below” the poverty line. Until 2009 the number reduced to 29%.
Total external debt stocks to GNI was 47% in 2003. In 2010 it was only 14%.
In 2003 unemployment was almost at 17%. In 2009 it was 7.6%.
Under-five mortality rate (the probability per 1,000 that a newborn baby will die before reaching age five) was 26.2 in 2002, in 2010 it’s 18.3%
In 2002, the merchandise trade as a share of GDP was 43.6%, in 2010 it’s 27.2%.
Life expectancy is higher now, Literacy rate rose up to 95%.
The most significant changes can be seen between 2003 and today. In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took control of Venezuela’s oil resources from the US.
Veröffentlicht am November 29, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
WHAT IS ANTI-IMPERIALISM ?
This year we have witnessed something that should be very worrying to all those that consider themselves anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-racist. The British state has been at the head of a colonial war in North Africa, and there has been practically zero meaningful opposition to that war within Britain. In February 2003, two million people marched in London against war in Iraq. Only eight years later, all it takes is some reasonably sophisticated propaganda from the press and suddenly nobody is motivated to take a stand against wholesale destruction, widespread massacres and racist lynchings.
The western empire is pushing its agenda of complete domination of Africa and the Middle East, by destabilising and attempting to overthrow all resistant, independence-minded states and groups (in particular Libya, Syria, Iran, Algeria, Hezbollah, Hamas). Dressing this up as a movement for democracy, they have thrown most people off the scent. We need to fully understand imperialist strategy and tactics, and develop our own strategy and tactics to oppose them.
Thanks to Carlos Martinez for organising this great event in the first place. Thanks to Harry Fear for the live-streaming and recording of this great event.
Talks by Marcel Cartier, Daniel Renwick, Francisco Dominguez, and Obiang Nsang. Chaired by Suzella Palmer
Marcel Cartier (Bronx-based rapper and activist, talking about organising against the US empire from within the belly of the beast)
Francisco Dominguez (Chair of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, talking about opposing imperialism from a Latin American perspective)
Obiang Nsang (All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, talking about opposing imperialism from a Pan-African perspective)
Daniel Renwick (Youth worker, writer and activist, talking about the anti-war movement in Britain)
London — November 28, 2011 18:30-21:11
You can read the poem Obiang Nsang performed at the beginning of this event here
Veröffentlicht am Oktober 27, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
“For us, there is no government in Libya.”
“We don’t recognize the government that they have installed. NATO has installed a government in Libya by force of bombs. And with genocide – genocide and an assassination. They have murdered a president. No matter who the president was or if you like him or anyone else likes him, he was the president of Libya. They killed him and threw him into the desert. And beyond that they are talking about some 50,000 dead. A true genocide. The destruction of a country
“Independently of who the president was, whether you or others didn’t like him … he was the president of Libya.”
“Libya isn’t under anyone’s control. A war will start there now,” Chavez said. “Well, it already started, imposed by NATO and the United Nations Security Council. They destroyed that country, and now there’s chaos there, violence everywhere.”
Veröffentlicht am Oktober 1, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
This is an absolute must-read analysis: one of the best reads in a long time — this correctly throws light on the blatant exposure of the numerous layers of gate-keepers from so many areas of life: media such as The Guardian and the New York Times to organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations, as well as journalists, intellectuals and activists…
by Toni Solo
September 25th 2011
Right now in Libya the UN recognized government and its NATO masters are bombing hundreds of civilians to death in Sirte, Bani Walid and Sabha. They have bombed schools and hospitals and murdered whole families. This infamy was sanctioned by the UN from the beginning and has been justified by many of the cream of international progressive intellectuals. It is long past time to identify and condemn these accomplices to the crimes against humanity in Libya committed by the Western elites and their puppet governments.
The colonial war against Libya has defined more sharply than ever the structures of knowledge, attitudes and behaviour that characterize progressive and radical intellectual production in Europe and North America. The war has thrown that production into crisis. It could not be clearer now that the class function of intellectual managers like Gilbert Achcar, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ignacio Ramonet and similar individuals is to neuter effective protest against corporate capitalism and imperialism.
The crypto-fascist Irish poet W.B.Yeats once wrote, “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” Intellectual managers like Achar, Ramonet and Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and Santiago Alba Rico might ask themselves, “Did our work prepare the vicious NATO genocide in Libya?” Of course, the answer is “yes, it did”. They also seem to think that reality is perfectly all right.
They avow they seek radical social change and revolution in theory. But wherever processes have achieved genuine social change in the real world, as in the Libyan Jamahiriya, they attack them or, as in Venezuela, seek to mould them to their own narcissistic criteria. If one looks at the expressions of dissent privileged under corporate consumer capitalism they are all varieties of anarchism.
Of course they are. Anarchist anti-communism is a spoilt child doted on and nurtured by the capitalist elites– a nuisance, but a useful one and very much part of the laissez-faire family. Capitalism easily accommodates and co-opts fatuous slogans like “Another world is possible”. We can see what world they have in mind by looking at Libya. The intellectuals who supported the murderous racist Libyan renegades and NATO’s contract putsch-insurrection are a good example of how the process of co-optation and accommodation works.
They assimilate themselves into the rituals and processes of public life in the plutocracies of North America and Europe. They shift between academic life, non-governmental activity and participation in the mass corporate psy-warfare media and their alternative counterparts, the gatekeepers of permissible dissent. Libya has finally brought this reality out into the open in the most categorical way. One has only to look back at what influential intellectual managers produced around the time of the March 19th UN Resolution 1973.
“The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France.”
“Under such circumstances, any other reasonable leader would have understood that the time to negotiate and give up power had arrived. But not Colonel Gadafi. At the risk of submerging his country in a civil war, the “Guide”, in power for 42 years, explained that the demonstrators were “youngsters Al Qaeda had drugged by adding hallucinogenic pills to their Nescafé”. And he ordered the armed forces to repress the protests with heavy gunfire and extreme force. The Al Jazeera channel showed military planes strafing civilian demonstrators.”
and
“One can be against the current structure of the United Nations, or reckon that its operations leave much to be desired. Or that the Western powers dominate the organization. These are acceptable criticisms. But for the moment the UN constitutes the only source of international law. In that sense, and contrary to the wars wars in Kosovo or Iraq which were never sanctioned by the UN, the current intervention in Libya is legal, according to international law; legitimate according to the principles of solidarity among democrats; and desirable for the international community which brings together people struggling for their liberty.”
“The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is the idea that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil. In fact, the whole range of Western oil and gas companies is active in Libya: Italy’s ENI, Germany’s Wintershall, Britain’s BP, France’s Total and GDF Suez, US companies ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Occidental, British-Dutch Shell, Spain’s Repsol, Canada’s Suncor, Norway’s Statoil, etc. Why then are Western powers intervening in Libya today, and not in Rwanda yesterday and Congo yesterday and today? As one of those who have energetically argued that the invasion of Iraq was “about oil” against those who tried to outsmart us by saying that we were “reductionists,” don’t expect me to argue that this one is not about oil. It definitely is. But how?
My take on that is the following. After watching for a few weeks Gaddafi conducting his terribly brutal and bloody suppression of the uprising that started in mid-February — estimates of the number of people killed in early March ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition’s estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000 — Western governments, like everybody else for that matter, became convinced that with Gaddafi set on a counter-revolutionary offensive and reaching the outskirts of Libya’s second largest city of Benghazi (over 600,000 inhabitants), a mass-scale slaughter was imminent.”
Counterfactual perception management
One could quote many more examples of the intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, stupidity, arrogance and cynicism of these prestigious writers and others like, for example, Santiago Alba Rico, Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and Samir Amin. But the extra bulk of documentation would add nothing to the overall picture of narcissistic collaboration with the dominant NATO corporate psy-warfare machine. Nor is it worth dallying over the role of NATO’s favourite gatekeepers of permissible dissent like Counterpunch, ZNet, Rebelión and other similar alternative information web sites.
Those sites did their job of muting and censoring effective discussion and argument at crucial moments prior to the March 19th vote in the UN Security Council and around the decisive event of NATO’s ground invasion of Tripoli in August. A tiny handful of writers, among them John Pilger and Tariq Ali, spoke out against the war. But even they still swallowed hook, line and sinker the NATO psy-warfare caricature of Muammar Al Ghaddafi as a blood-on-his-hands dictator-clown.
While the individual errors of Achcar, Wallerstein and Ramonet may vary, all of them start from the central premise of NATO’s psychological warfare offensive, namely, that Libya was a dictatorship overthrown by a popular revolution. As part of their suspiciously coherent perception management of events in Libya, all these NATO psy-warfare collaborators omit the following facts:
• prior to March 19th the Libyan Jamahiriya had called for negotiations and a UN fact-finding mission – rejected both by the renegades and the dominant powers in the UN;
• the only reliably confirmed information about events in Libya between February 17th and March 19th came from the Libyan government the Libyan government’s account was confirmed by testimony from both Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen as well as by Russian military intelligence prior to the March 19th Resolution 1973.
• there was never any reliable evidence of the Libyan Jamahiriya bombing or machine gunning peaceful demonstrations in February or March;
• on the other hand credible accounts of racist pogroms and lynchings by the Libyan renegades were available from the very start of the events in Benghazi in February ;
• the African Union’s constant insistence from the very start of the conflict on a negotiated peace was welcomed by the Libyan Jamihiriya;
• the devastating role played by international sanctions imposed on the basis of the flagrant fabrication of Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie terrorist atrocity badly affected Libya’s development between 1992 and 2003;
• by 2011 Libya’s population enjoyed an unparalleled high standard of living relative to the rest of Africa;
• US$200bn in funds were saved by the Libyan Jamahiriya and administered for the benefit of the Libyan people and impoverished African countries;
• the Libyan Jamahiriya promoted innumerable significant and strategic development initiatives in other African countries;
• prior to their NATO supported putsch- insurrection, the currrent renegade leaders promoted corporate friendly Western neoliberal policies that were firmly resisted by Muammar Al Ghaddafi
• once they realized Maummar Al Ghadafi was resisting deepening neoliberal reforms, NATO planned and carried out the Southern Mistral war game in which they practised a military assault against Libya
Analysis with feet of clay
One could go on delving into more detail to rebut all the false claims and hypocritical assertions made by NATO psy-warfare fellow travellers like Ramonet, Achcar and Wallerstein. But it is enough to look at the excerpts quoted above to see how skewed, disingenuous, arrogant, cynical and downright baseless their arguments are. These are classic characteristics of NATO country perception management against targets from the Cuban revolution to the UN supported coups in Haiti and the Ivory Coast
Immanuel Wallerstein completely failed to predict the course of events in Libya in the most abject and ridiculous way. The UN Security Council did pass a resolution. NATO did resolve to go to war. President Sarkozy easily secured his country’s approval for French armed forces to participate in NATO’s colonial war.
Wallerstein demonstrated complete idiocy in his appraisal of events in March 2011. We can add his illustrious corpse to the Ship of Fools adrift over Libya full to the gunwales with NATO dupes who got things completely wrong on Libya. Wallerstein’s fatuous patronising arrogance duped him into hopeless error. By contrast, the appraisal of the facts by Fidel Castro and President Hugo Chavez was absolutely right.
The falsehoods of Ignacio Ramonet
Ignacio Ramonet completely misrepresented the nature of the events in February in Benghazi. No reliable evidence indicates that peaceful demonstrators were fired on. At the time, the Libyan government’s account was confirmed by testimony from both US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the US armed forces Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, as well as by Russian military intelligence prior to the March 19th Resolution 1973. Now the highest estimates of deaths as a result of the armed insurrection in Libya between February 17th and March 19th are around 250.
Ramonet got things wrong because he took as his source a notorious NATO propaganda outlet, the UK Guardian newspaper. The Guardian’s foreign news coverage is at least as cynical and skewed as that of El País or Le Monde. Ramonet also relied on the Qatar dominated Al Jazeera, now overwhelmingly staffed by staff who previously worked with NATO country mainstream corporate media.
It is not as strange as it seems that a supposed radical like Ignacio Ramonet should ignore the entire history of imperialist interventions over the last 200 years. At one time Ramonet was extremely proud of his work promoting the World Social Forum. That body is thoroughly compromised by its links to corporate funders.
On Libya, Ramonet also dishonestly suggests as a fact something he most certainly does not know, namely that Muammar al Ghaddafi ordered the use of extreme force against peaceful demonstrators. That suggestion is pure propaganda as is his selective quote of Muammar al Ghaddafi’s comments at the time.. To write as Ignacio Ramonet then did, that UN Resolution 1973 was legal, legitimate and desirable, takes self-serving cynicism to its very extremes.
Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates had already pointed out correctly that enforcing a no fly zone necessarily involved military aggression. But the UN Charter specifically rules out military action except in self-defence. Hence President Obama’s counterfactual statement that the United States is not at war against Libya. So much for United Nations legality.
In any case, Resolution 1973 calls for a peaceful negotiated solution. That option proposed by the Libyan government and the African Union and by Latin America’s ALBA bloc of countries had already been rejected by the Libyan renegades. They rejected negotiations on the strength of the support they were getting from the very governments who cynically passed the Resolution knowing neither they themselves nor the renegades had any intention of seeking a peaceful settlement.
Ramonet argues that the UN blank cheque for intervention was legitimate in terms of democratic solidarity. Here we come up against a fundamental contradiction of the international neocolonial Left. Igancio Ramonet, a famous critic of corporate capitalism, tacitly accepts, after all, that North America and Europe are composed of democracies and he explicitly describes the Libyan Jamahiriya as a dictatorship.
But it is the Libyan Jamahiriya that carefully saved and invested hundreds of billions of dollars which it then used very clearly for the benefit of the Libyan people and other African peoples. On the other hand, it is the rotten-corrupt plutocracies of Europe and North America that have sucked dry their peoples so as to enrich a tiny corporate elite of crooked bankers and speculators and to protect their criminal financial system. The democratic solidarity Ramonet is talking about is no more than a narcissistic construct conjured up to justify his ideological prejudice against the Libyan Jamahiriya.
To conclude, as Ignacio Ramonet then does, that the UN Resolution 1973 was in any way desirable is plainly disingenuous folly. The terms of Resolution 1973 left matters wide open to whatever interpretation the North American and European governments concerned chose to put on it. No serious observer expected anything less than the ruthless application of force to support the racist putsch-insurrection struggling for existence in Benghazi.
That putsch-insurrection completely lacked popular support in the rest of Libya. Like Achcar and Wallerstein, Ramonet ignored plenty of readily available information that indicated those very facts which have been confirmed over and over again since March 19th 2011. Ramonet’s reputation is one more illustrious corpse in the Ship of Fools illuminated by the flames of NATO’s genocide in Zliten, Tripoli, Sirte and Bani Walid.
Gilbert Achcar – psy-warfare operative
Gilbert Achcar’s is perhaps the most egregiously dishonest and overt case of collabroation in NATO’s psychological warfare against the Libyan people. With regard to Libya, Immanuel Wallerstein turned out to be a dunderhead and Ignacio Ramonet, more than anything, a narcissistic disingenuous buffoon. But Gilbert Achcar’s position is one carefully politically calculated in the most absolute bad faith.
Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at Britain’s Foreign and Colonial Office’s extra-mural School of Oriental and African Studies. He has taught in France and Britain for over 30 years now. Only the most naive would believe Achcar has not been utterly co-opted by his environment. His remarks on Libya demonstrate his moral and intellectual capitulation as a colonialist apologist to a fault.
“The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous.” It is very rare for a NATO psy-warfare operative to out themselves like this. Self-evidently, it is Gilbert Achcar’s view that is truly preposterous, suggesting the Western regimes intervening in Libya have done so for any other reason than that the Libyan Jamahiriya blocked their plans on several fronts.
Achcar continues to out himself as a NATO apologist by shamelessly citing as categorical fact the most extreme and ridiculous figures of civilian deaths at the hands of the forces of the Libyan Jamahiriya with absolutely no basis in any legitimate reporting or investigation. “Estimates of the number of people killed in early March ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition’s estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000.”
Only a NATO stooge would expect to be taken seriously when citing the International Criminal Court as a reliable source. As it turns out, the ICC on this matter has been completely discredited, along with its other ridiculous lie about allegations of mass rape by Libyan army troops on Viagra. The illustrious corpse of the ICC’s Luis Moreno Campo’s reputation, or its desiccated remains, joins those of Wallerstein, Ramonet and Achcar and their accomplices in the NATO fellow-travellers funeral Barge-of-Fools going up in flames in the sands of Libya.
The facts now established and accepted by all but NATO collaborators like Gilbert Achcar are that the Libyan security forces did not fire on unarmed demonstrators. Respected human rights organizations put the number of fatalities as a result of the armed insurrection between February 17th and March 19th at around 250. So it was extremely unlikely that Achcar’s scare of “mass-scale slaughter” was in any way likely, especially since the Libyan authorities were offering to negotiate. What is indeed absolutely clear is that Achcar is a fully committed psy-warfare operative in NATO’s war against Libya and everyone who expresses solidarity with the Libyan Jamahiriya.
Intellectuals and counterintelligence
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the CIA and its fellow intelligence agencies invested a great deal of money and resources suborning intellectuals in Europe and in North America. The story of Encounter magazine and the career of the poet Stephen Spender in Britain is emblematic. Other examples abound. It would be extremely foolish to think the same practices have not persisted and become more sophisticated into the present day.
An example of the way the counter-intelligence network of outright NATO collaborators and fellow travellers works has come to light in relation to Libya. One of the gatekeepers of permissible dissent, the Spanish web site Rebelión, prominently featured an article by Santiago Alba Rico. Like Achcar, Alba Rico is a prominent academic, a specialist on the Arab world in the best traditions of Orientalism. Alba Rico demonstrates that Edward Said’s critical concept of Orientalism can readily involute upon itself for the purposes of neocolonial propaganda.
In the course of his article Alba Rico writes of the situation’s complexity only to drastically simplify it in favour of his point of view. “Even Nato is aware of this complexity as is demonstrated by the fact – as Gilbert Achcar has pointed out – that Libya has been bombed very little, with the aim of lengthening the war and trying to achieve the defeat of the regime without truly breaking with it.” One pictures Achcar and Alba Rico in places like Zliten, or Sirte telling the mourning relatives of dead NATO victims there to stop crying, “After all, you’ve only been bombed a little…”
Only a shameless apologist for NATO would attempt to allege that Libya has been bombed “very little”. On cue, Alba Rico seizes on this and uses Achcar’s grotesque cynical falsehood to pad out his own apology for the colonialist onslaught against the Libyan Jamahiriya. At this point, it is possible to move on from the lies and hypocrisies of these NATO collaborators and fellow travellers and look at their claims for their own intellectual and ethical standards.
One useful source of information about what has really been going on in Libya beyond NATO psy-warfare disinformation reports has been Leonor Massanet. Someone who worked with Rebelión until very recently has confirmed that Santiago Alba Rico engaged in deliberate behind-the-scenes character assassination of Leonor Massanet. Alba Rico’s aim, in which to some extent he clearly succeeded, was to discredit Leonor because her plausible and credible account of events in Libya contradicted his own thoroughly false analysis.
When one comes across cases of people being turned into non-persons or being calumnied in this way, one is at the limits of legitimate intellectual disagreement. Beyond that frontier one, is then dealing with the abuse of power for counter-intelligence purposes to neutralize effective dissent. Right now, the whole world is a vast mess of low-intensity conflict and outright war. The Western elites are determined to dominate the world’s peoples and their natural resources. The activities of NATO fellow-travellers like Gilbert Achcar and Santiago Alba Rico are far from innocent or coincidental.
Here we are faced with the reality of the thorough hypocrisy of the co-opted alternative news and information media. All of them, whether it’s Rope-a-dope [4], Zzzz [5] or Sumisión [6] purport to deliver reliable factual information from a variety of viewpoints. All of them are infested with hypocritical self-regarding phonies who readily suppress views they dislike. They all engage in what Gilbert Achcar would term “Stalinist” censorship and the making of non-persons. Leonor Massanet is far from being the only victim of this pernicious deceitful managerial counter-intelligence manipulated culture.
Psy-warfare’s next offensive : ALBA
Psychological warfare is a vital component of total war. All through the 1980s and 1990s the North American and European NGO sector was systematically co-opted by NATO country governments to serve NATO propaganda ends. In effect, they are the soft extra-mural arm of their countries’ Foreign Ministries, and routinely project those countries’ foreign policies. That reality has been very well documented. It is as true of the structures available to progressive intellectual workers as it is of the NGOs that employ progressive aid and development workers.
The alternative media’s coverage of NATO’s contract putsch-insurrection against the Libya Jamahariya has demonstrated this with the most startling clarity. Along with the Libyan Jamahariya, other perennial victims of their deceit and hypocrisy have been the Sandinista Front for National Liberation in Nicaragua, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia as well as national Communist Parties in general. Presumably, other people devoted to other causes and issues will have had identical experiences.
It is a fact that neocolonial intellectual and cultural networks tend to dominate international anti-imperialist intellectual production. Their members have a vested interest in maintaining the class structure inherent to that production, one that effectively censors argument and maintains strictly policed parameters. The colonial invasion of Libya has demonstrated with absolute clarity that effective anti-imperialism – for example by the FSLN in Nicaragua or the PSUV in Venezuela – is under threat from both the right and the neocolonial left.
After Libya, a likely future target will be Nicaragua. But the NATO elites view Nicaragua as simply an hors d’oeuvre for the main course, Venezuela. The battle for Venezuela began back in 2002 and will get more and more fierce once President Hugo Chavez wins re-election ten years on, in 2012. The international neocolonial Left is hard at work sawing the floor away from under the Sandinista revolutionary process in Nicaragua. Nor is it in any way controversial to say they are busy trying to co-opt the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. Libya has shown they are capable of any infamy.
Veröffentlicht am September 28, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
Caracas, Venezuela
September 26th, 2011
Your Excellency, President of the General Assembly:
Honorable Representatives of the Peoples of the World:
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I address these words to the United Nations General Assembly, to this great forum where all the peoples of the earth are represented, to express Bolivarian Venezuela’s truths and to reassert our inalienable commitment to justice and equality, that is to say, to peace.
Peace, peace, peace… We do not look for the peace of the cemetery, as said Kant ironically, but a peace based on the most zealous respect for international law. Unfortunately, the UN, through all its history, instead of adding and multiplying efforts in favor of peace among nations, ends up supporting, sometimes through its actions and other times by omission, the most ruthless injustices.
It should always be remembered that “saving future generations from the scourge of war” is mentioned in the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations – it’s just a dead letter. From 1945 on, wars have done nothing but inexorably increase and multiply themselves. We see, once again, Libya destroyed and bloodstained by the will of the powerful.
I want to call on the governments of the world to reflect: since September 11th, 2001, a new and unprecedented imperialist war began, a permanent war, in perpetuity.
We have to look directly at the terrifying reality of the world we live in. It is necessary to ask a series of questions on the basis of the risks and threats we face: Why is the United States the only country that scatters the planet with military bases? What is it afraid of to allocate such a staggering budget for increasing its military power? Why has it unleashed so many wars, violating the sovereignty of other nations which have the same rights on their own fates? How can international law be enforced against its insensible aspiration to militarily hegemonizing the world in order to ensure energy sources to sustain their predatory and consumer model? Why does the UN do nothing to stop Washington? If we answer these questions sincerely we would understand that the empire has awarded itself the role of judge of the world, without being granted this responsibility by anyone, and, therefore, imperialist war threatens us all.
Washington knows that a multi-polar world is already an irreversible reality. Its strategy consists ofstopping, at any price, the sustained rise of a group of emerging countries, by negotiating great interests with its partners and followers in order to guide multipolarity along the path the empire wants. What is more, the goal is to reconfigure the world so it is based on Yankee military hegemony.
Mankind is facing the very real threat of a permanent war. The empire is ready to create the political conditions for triggering a war anywhere, and the case of Libya proves it. Within the imperial view of the world, the well-known Clausewitz’s axiom is being reversed: politics is the continuation of war by other means.
What is behind this new Armageddon?: the absolute power of the military-financial leadership which is destroying the world in order to accumulate ever more profits; the military-financial leadership which is subordinated, de facto, to an increasingly larger group of States. Keep in mind that war is capital’s modus operandi: the war that ruins the majority and makes richer, up to the unthinkable, a few people.
Right now, there is a very serious threat to global peace: a new cycle of colonial wars, which started in Libya, with the sinister objective of refreshing the capitalist global system, within a structural crisis today, but without any limit to its consumerist and destructive voracity. The case of Libya should alert us to the attempt to implement a new imperial kind of colonialism: that of military interventionism backed by the antidemocratic organisms of the United Nations and justified on the basis of prefabricated media lies.
Humanity is on the brink of an unimaginable catastrophe: the world is marching inexorably toward the most devastating ecocide; global warming and its frightening consequences are announcing it, but their perspective on the ecosystem, which resembles the ideology of the conquistadors Cortés and Pizarro, as the influential French thinker Edgar Morin rightly pointed out, pushes them to continue degrading and destroying. The energy and food crises are sharpening, but capitalism continues to trespass all the limits with impunity.
Given such a meagre outlook, the great U.S. scientist Linus Pauling, awarded the Nobel Prize on two occasions, continues enlightening our path: “I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs — there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism. I believe in the power of the human spirit”. Let us mobilize all the power of the human spirit: it is time now. It is imperative that we unleash a great political counter-offensive in order to prevent the powers of darkness from finding justifications for going to war, from unleashing a widespread global war through which they attempt to save the western capital.
Venezuela calls for the establishment of a broad alliance for peace and against war, with the supreme aim of avoiding war at all costs. The warmongers, and especially the military-financial leadership that sponsors and leads them, must be defeated.
Let’s build the balance of the universe foreseen by the Liberator, Simón Bolívar – the balance that, according to his words, cannot be found within war; the balance that is born out of peace.
It is necessary to remember that Venezuela, alongside the member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), was actively advocating for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the Libyan conflict. That is also what the African Union did. However, in the end, the logic of war decreed by the UN Security Council and put into practice by NATO, the armed wing of the Yankee empire, was imposed. The logic of war having its spearhead in corporate mass media: let us bear in mind
that the “Libyan Case” was brought before the Security Council on the basis of an intense propaganda by the western mass media, who lied about the alleged bombing of innocent civilians by the Libyan Air Force, not to mention the grotesque media setting of the Green Square of Tripoli. This premeditated bunch of lies was used to justify irresponsible and hasty decisions by the Security Council, which paved the way for NATO’s military regime change policy in Libya.
It is worthwhile to ask: What has the no-fly zone established by Security Council resolution 1973 become? How could NATO perform more than 20,000 missions against the Libyan people if there was a no-fly zone? After the Libyan Air Force was completely annihilated, the continued “humanitarian” bombing shows that the West, through NATO, intends to impose their interests in North Africa, turning Libya into a colonial protectorate.
How can we say that an arms embargo was imposed on Libya when it was NATO itself that introduced thousands of heavy weapons to support a violent upheaval against that country’s legitimate government?
The embargo was, of course, meant to prevent the Libyan government from defending its sovereignty.
This demonstrates, once again, the cruel logic of international relations, where the law only applies to the weak. What is the real reason for this military intervention?: Recolonizing Libya in order to capture its wealth.
Everything else is related to this goal. “Nobody colonizes innocently,” as the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire said, quite rightly, in his extraordinary essay called “Discours sur le colonialisme.”
By the way: the Residence of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Tripoli was invaded and looted, and the UN kept it to itself, remaining ignominiously silent.
We call for the immediate cessation of bombing operations in Libyan territory. Similarly, we will continue calling for respect for international law in the case of this sister nation. We will not remain silent in light of the evil intention of destroying the basis of its sense and reason. Therefore, we ask this Assembly: Why is the Libyan seat in the UN granted to the “national transitional council,” while the admission of Palestine is blocked by ignoring, not only its lawful aspiration, but also the existing will of the majority of the General Assembly? Venezuela hereby ratifies its unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people and its total support for the Palestinian national cause, which naturally includes the immediate admission of Palestine as a full member state within the United Nations.
And the same imperialist pattern is being repeated regarding Syria. If some permanent members of the Security Council had not taken the firm stance that was missing in the case of Libya, it would have authorized shooting missiles and bombs in Syria.
It is intolerable that the powerful of this world intend to claim for themselves the right to order legitimate and sovereign governments’ rulers to step down. This was the case in Libya, and they want to do the same in Syria. Such are the existing asymmetries in the international setting and such are the abuses against the weakest nations.
It is not for us to bring forward a conclusive judgment about the national situation in Syria; first, because of the inherent complexity of any national reality and, second, because only the Syrian people can solve their problems and decide their fate in light of the people’s right to self-determination, which is an inalienable right in all respects.
If we direct our eyes to the Horn of Africa we will witness a heartbreaking example of the UN’s historical failure: most serious news agencies report that 20-29,000 children under the age of 5 have died in the last three months.
The great journalist Frida Modak, in her article, “To Die in Somalia,” reveals all the misery there, which is worse than that ravaging the rest of the vast region of the Horn of Africa, and which undermines the role of large international organizations, the UN in the first place. She writes: “What is needed to face this situation is $400 million, not to solve the problem, but just to address the emergency that Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia are going through. According to all sources, the next two months will be crucial to prevent more than 12 million people from dying, and the worst situation is that of Somalia.”
This reality could not be more atrocious, especially if, at the same time, we ask ourselves how much is being spent to destroy Libya. This is the answer of U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich, who said: “This new war will cost us $500 million during its first week alone. Obviously, we do not have financial resources for that and we will end up cutting off other important domestic programs’ funding.”
According to Kucinich himself, with the amount spent during the first three weeks in Northern Africa to massacre the Libyan people, much could have been done to help the entire region of the Horn of Africa,saving tens of thousands of lives.
The reasons behind the criminal military engagement in Libya are not humanitarian at all: they are based on the Malthusian notion that “there are just too many people in the world” and they have to be eliminated by generating more hunger, destruction and uncertainty, and creating – at the same time –more financial profits. In this regard, it is frankly regrettable that in the opening address of the 66th General Assembly of the UN, an immediate appeal to solve humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa was not made, while instead we were assured that “the time has come to act” on Syria.
As of 2010, 19 UN General Assembly votes confirm the universal will demanding that the United States stop the economic and trade blockade against Cuba. Since all sensible international arguments have been exhausted, we have no choice but to believe that such cruel actions against the Cuban Revolution result from imperial arrogance in view of the dignity and courage shown by the unsubmissive Cuban people in their sovereign decision to determine their own fate and fight for their happiness.
From Venezuela, we believe it is time to demand of the U.S. not only an immediate and unconditional end to the criminal blockade imposed against the Cuban people, but also the release of the five Cuban antiterrorist fighters held hostage in the prisons of the American Empire for the sole reason of seeking to prevent the illegal actions of terrorist groups against Cuba, under the shelter of the U.S. government.
From Venezuela, we believe it is time to demand the United States not only the immediate and unconditional end to the criminal blockade imposed against the Cuban peoples, but also the release of the five Cuban antiterrorist fighters held hostage in the prisons of the American Empire for the sole reason of seeking to prevent the illegal actions that terrorist groups prepare against Cuba, under the shelter of the Government of the United States.
Mr. President of the General Assembly and distinguished representatives of the peoples of the world: We want to reiterate that it is impossible to ignore the crisis of the UN. Before this same General Assembly we expressed, back in 2005, that the UN model had been exhausted. Back then, we also expressed the urgent need for it to be rebuilt.
Up until now, nothing has been done. The political will of the powerful has prevailed. Certainly, the UN, in its current functioning, docilely serves their interests. For us, it is obvious that the UN is not improving, nor will it improve from the inside. If the Secretary General, along with the President of the International Criminal Court, take part in an act of war, as in the case of Libya, nothing can be expected from the current structure of this organization and there is no longer time for reform. The UN does not accept any reform whatsoever; the illness at its core is deadly.
It is unbearable that there is a Security Council that turns its back, whenever it wants to, on the clamor of the majority of nations by deliberately failing to acknowledge the will of the General Assembly. If the Security Council is some sort of club with privileged members, what can the General Assembly do?
Where is its room for manoeuvre, when Security Council members violate international law?
Paraphrasing Bolívar when he spoke of nascent Yankee imperialism in 1818, we have had enough of the weak following the law while the strong commit abuses. It cannot be us, the peoples of the South, who respect international law while the North violates it, destroying and plundering us.
If we do not make a commitment, once and for all, to rebuilding the United Nations, this organization will lose its remaining credibility. Its crisis of legitimacy will be accelerated until it finally implodes. In fact, that is what happened to its immediate predecessor: the League of Nations.
A crucial first step in rebuilding the United Nations would be to eliminate the category of permanent members and veto power within the Security Council. Likewise, the decision-making power of the General Assembly must be maximized democratically. We also require an immediate, in-depth revision of the UN Charter with the aim of drafting a new Charter.
Peoples of the World:
The future of a multi-polar world, in peace, resides in us, in the organization of the majority of the people on earth to defend ourselves against the new colonialism, in order to achieve a balance in the universe that is capable of neutralizing imperialism and arrogance.
This broad, generous, respectful, and inclusive call is addressed to all the peoples of the world, but especially to the emerging powers of the South, which must assume, with courage, the role that they are called on to play immediately.
From Latin America and the Caribbean, powerful and dynamic regional alliances have emerged, seeking to shape a regional democratic space, respectful of differences and eager to emphasize solidarity and complementarity in order to foster the ties that bind us and settle what keeps us apart politically. And this new regionalism allows for diversity and respects the various rhythms of nation. Thus, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) advances as an avant-garde experiment of progressive and anti-imperialist governments, seeking ways to break the prevailing international order and strengthening the capacity of the people to face, together, the prevailing powers. But this does not prevent its members from making an enthusiastic push for the consolidation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a political bloc that federates the 12 sovereign States of South America with the purpose of grouping them under what the Liberator Simón Bolívar called “a Nation of Republics.”
Furthermore, the 33 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean are currently preparing to take the historic step of establishing a great regional entity that joins us all, without exclusions, where we can together design the policies that will ensure our wellbeing, our independence, and our sovereignty, on the basis of equality, solidarity, and complementarity. Caracas, the capital of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is proud to host, next December 2nd and 3rd, the Summit of Heads of State and Government that will establish, definitively, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
The people of Venezuela place our hopes on a broad alliance among the regional organizations of the South, such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), CARICOM (the Caribbean Community), SICA (the System of Central American Integration), the African Union, ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) or ECO (the Economic Coordination Organization), and especially the cross-regional instances of coordination among emerging powers, such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which should become a pole of influence in coordination with the peoples of the South.
I want to conclude by remembering the great Venezuelan singer, Alí Primera. In one of his songs he asks us: “What is man’s struggle to achieve peace? And what peace, if they want to leave the world just as it is?” Today more than ever before, the worst crime against peace is to leave the world as it is: if we leave the world as it is, the present and future will be determined by perpetual war. On the contrary, to quote Alí Primera, achieving peace involves radically reversing all that impedes humanity from being humane.
Hugo Chávez Frías, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
Veröffentlicht am September 26, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
By Eva Golinger, September 22nd 2011
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has confirmed the release of Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer was in large part due to the request and mediation efforts of President Chavez
Iran’s release of US citizens Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer on Wednesday, September 21, made headlines worldwide, but little details were initially provided regarding the reasons behind their liberation. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has now publicy affirmed the release of Fattal and Bauer was in response to requests made by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of state of Iraq and Oman.
The two US citizens were originally detained on July 31, 2009, along with Sarah Shroud, after they were caught by Iranian border guards who claimed they had entered Iranian territory without authorization. The three young US citizens alleged they were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan, a touristy area for outdoor activities that borders Iran, and were kidnapped by the Iranian security forces while on Iraqi territory.
They were immediately taken to Tehran and jailed, accused of espionage and illegal entry into the country. After more than a year in detention, Sarah Shroud was released on $500,000 bail last September 14, 2010, on humanitarian grounds due to a health condition.
The trial against the three US citizens began on February 6, 2011, without the presence of Shroud, who remained in the US with her family, fighting for the release of her two friends, one of whom, Shane, became her fianceé while in prison. On August 20, 2011, Bauer and Fattal were convicted of “illegal entry” and “espionage” by the Iranian court and sentenced to a prison term of 8 years. Spying typically carries a death sentence in Iran.
During the past few weeks, rumors circulated regarding the imminent release of the two “US hikers”, as they’ve been referred to by news media. Their lawyer in Iran, Masoud Shafiei, had announced to the press that despite their 8-year sentence, they would soon be released.
In early September, Iranian President Ahmadinejad affirmed that by unilateral humanitarian gesture, he would request release of Bauer and Fattal, and on September 21, the two left the Iranian prison, where they had been held for more than two years, to finally go home.
VENEZUELAS ROLE
While the US government failed to facilitate in anyway the release of the three US hikers, Venezuela played a key role. Soon after the initial detention of the hikers, an informal request was made to President Hugo Chavez to intervene on behalf of the three US citizens, based on Venezuela’s close ties with Iran. Chavez, who formerly and successfully mediated the release of several hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2007-2008, including several US citizens, agreed to get involved.
Over the past year and a half, Venezuela has played a key role in mediating and negotiating the release of Bauer and Fattal. Pleas were also made directly to President Chavez requesting his involvement in the release of the hikers by US author Noam Chomsky and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, along with Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn and other allies of Venezuela.
While Chavez made the request to release Bauer and Fattal directly to President Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry dealt with the details of the mediation process for their liberation.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement a day after the release on Thursday, September 22, confirming the important role Venezuelan President Chavez played in the release of Bauer and Fattal.
“The statement said that after the completion of the judicial processing, the Islamic Republic of Iran released the other two on bail again due to Islamic kindness and affection and in order to show respect for the mediation efforts made by several world leaders, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and top authorities of several friendly states like Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Omani King Sultan Qaboos as well as a number of religious figures, who have all requested their freedom”, reported FNA.
According to Venezuelan officials, President Chavez’s involvement in mediating the release of Bauer and Fattal was a “pure, humanitarian gesture of solidarity”.
Once again, President Chavez has played a major role in assuring the freedom of US citizens imprisoned for different reasons around the world.
Veröffentlicht am September 21, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
by Hugo Chavez
Miraflores, September 17, 2011
His Excellency, Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations
Mr. Secretary General:
Distinguished representatives of the peoples of the world:
I address these words to the United Nations General Assembly, to this great forum that represents all the people of earth, to ratify, on this day and in this setting, Venezuela’s full support of the recognition of the Palestinian State: of Palestine’s right to become a free, sovereign and independent state. This represents an act of historic justice towards a people who carry with them, from time immemorial, all the pain and suffering of the world.
In his memorable essay The Grandeur of Arafat, the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote with the full weight of the truth: The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these people have suffered and continue to suffer. And I dare add that the Palestinian cause also represents a constant and unwavering will to resist, already written in the historic memory of the human condition. A will to resist that is born of the most profound love for the earth. Mahmoud Darwish, the infinite voice of the longed-for Palestine, with heartfelt conscience speaks about this love: We don’t need memories/ because we carry within us Mount Carmelo/ and in our eyelids is the herb of Galilee./ Don’t say: If only we could flow to my country like a river!/ Don’t say that!/ Because we are in the flesh of our country/ and our country is in our flesh.
Against those who falsely assert that what has happened to the Palestinian people is not genocide, Deleuze himself states with unfaltering lucidity: From beginning to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed. It represents the very essence of genocide: to decree that a people do not exist; to deny them the right to existence.
In this regard, the great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo is quite right when he forcefully states: The biblical promise of the land of Judea and Samaria to the tribes of Israel is not a notarized property contract that authorizes the eviction of those who were born and live on that land. This is precisely why conflict resolution in the Middle East must, necessarily, bring justice to the Palestinian people; this is the only path to peace.
It is upsetting and painful that the same people who suffered one of the worst examples of genocide in history have become the executioners of the Palestinian people: it is upsetting and painful that the heritage of the Holocaust be the Nakba. And it is truly disturbing that Zionism continues to use the charge of anti-Semitism as blackmail against those who oppose their violations and crimes. Israel has, blatantly and despicably, used and continues to use the memory of the victims. And they do so to act with complete impunity against Palestine. It’s worth mentioning that anti-Semitism is a Western, European, scourge in which the Arabs do not participate. Furthermore, let’s not forget that it is the Semite Palestine people who suffer from the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Israeli colonialist State.
I want to make myself clear: It is one thing to denounce anti-Semitism, and an entirely different thing to passively accept that Zionistic barbarism enforces an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. From an ethical standpoint those who denounce the first, must condemn the second.
A necessary digression: it is frankly abusive to confuse Zionism with Judaism. Throughout time we have been reminded of this by several Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Erich Fromm. And today there are an ever increasing number of conscientious citizens, within Israel itself, who openly oppose Zionism and its criminal and terrorist practices.
We must spell it out: Zionism, as a world vision, is absolutely racist. Irrefutable proof of this can be seen in these words written with terrifying cynicism by Golda Meir: How are we to return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as people think, that there existed a people called Palestinians, who considered themselves as Palestinians, and that we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”
It is important to remember that: from the end of the 19th century, Zionism called for the return of the Jewish people to Palestine and the creation of a national state of its own. This approach was beneficial for French and British colonialism, as it would later be for Yankee imperialism. The West has always encouraged and supported the Zionist occupation of Palestine by military means.
Read and reread the document historically known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917: the British Government assumed the legal authority to promise a national home in Palestine to the Jewish people, deliberately ignoring the presence and wishes of its inhabitants. It should be added that Christians and Muslims lived in peace for centuries in the Holy Land up until the time when Zionism began to claim it as its complete and exclusive property.
Let’s not forget that beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, Zionism started to develop its expansionist plans by taking advantage of the colonial British occupation of Palestine. By the end of World War II, the Palestinian people’s tragedy worsened, with their expulsion from their territory and, at the same time, from history. In 1947, the despicable and illegal UN resolution 181 recommends dividing Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State, and an area under international control (Jerusalem and Belem). Shamefully, 56 percent of the territory was granted to Zionism to establish its State. In fact, this resolution violated international law and blatantly ignored the will of the vast Arab majority: the right to self-determination of the people became a dead letter.
From 1948 to date, the Zionist State has continually applied its criminal strategy against the Palestinian people with the constant support of its unconditional ally, the United States of America. This unconditional allegiance is clearly observed by the fact that Israel directs and sets US international policy for the Middle East. That’s why the great Palestinian and universal conscience Edward Said stated that any peace agreement built on the alliance with the United States would be an alliance that confirms Zionist power, rather than one that confronts it.
Now then: contrary to what Israel and the United States are trying to make the world believe through transnational media outlets, what happened and continues to happen in Palestine —using Said’s words— is not a religious conflict, but a political conflict, with a colonial and imperialist stamp. It did not begin in the Middle East, but rather in Europe.
What was and continues to be at the heart of the conflict?: debate and discussion has prioritized Israel’s security while ignoring Palestine’s. This is corroborated by recent events; a good example is the latest act of genocide set off by Israel during its Operation Molten Lead in Gaza.
Palestine’s security cannot be reduced to the simple acknowledgement of a limited self-government and self-policing in its “enclaves” along the west bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip. This ignores the creation of the Palestinian State, in the borders set prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital; and the rights of its citizens and their self-determination as a people. This further disregards the compensation and subsequent return to the Homeland of 50 percent of the Palestinian people who are scattered all over the world, as established by resolution 194.
It’s unbelievable that a country (Israel) that owes its existence to a general assembly resolution could be so disdainful of the resolutions that emanate from the UN, said Father Miguel D’Escoto when pleading for the end of the massacre against the people of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.
Mr. Secretary General and distinguished representatives of the peoples of the world:
It is impossible to ignore the crisis in the United Nations. In 2005, before this very same General Assembly, we argued that the United Nations model had become exhausted. The fact that the debate on the Palestinian issue has been delayed and is being openly sabotaged reconfirms this.
For several days, Washington has been stating that, at the Security Council, it will veto what will be a majority resolution of the General Assembly: the recognition of Palestine as a full member of the UN. In the Statement of Recognition of the Palestinian State, Venezuela, together with the sister Nations that make up the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), have denounced that such a just aspiration could be blocked by this means. As we know, the empire, in this and other instances, is trying to impose its double standard on the world stage: Yankee double standards are violating international law in Libya, while allowing Israel to do whatever it pleases, thus becoming the main accomplice of the Palestinian genocide being carried out by the hands of Zionist barbarity. Edward Said touched a nerve when he wrote that: Israeli interests in the United States have made the US’ Middle East policy Israeli-centric.
I would like to conclude with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish in his memorable poem On This Earth: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: On this earth, the lady of earth, Mother of all beginnings/ Mother of all ends. She was called… Palestine./ Her name later became… Palestine./ My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.
It will continue to be called Palestine: Palestine will live and overcome! Long-live free, sovereign and independent Palestine!
Veröffentlicht am September 6, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
Che Guevara:
“We have declared ourselves to be within the group of non-aligned countries, although we are Marxists-Leninists, because the non-aligned countries, like ourselves, FIGHT IMPERIALISM.”
Malcolm X:
“Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed. The French Revolution — what was it based on? The land-less against the landlord. What was it for? Land. How did they get it? Bloodshed. Was no love lost; was no compromise; was no negotiation. I’m telling you, you don’t know what a revolution is. ‘Cause when you find out what it is, you’ll get back in the alley; you’ll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution — what was it based on? Land. The land-less against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed. And you’re afraid to bleed. I said, you’re afraid to bleed.”
“The Congolese have been killed year after year after year, and whatever the United States gets in the Congo, she is getting what she asked for; the Congo killings is like the chickens coming home to roost.”
Thats very interesting regarding Palestine & Hezbollah
“You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. … Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, singing “We Shall Overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation”
Huey P. Newton
Huey P. Newton even asked William Buckley on what side he would have stood on in 1776, wheter he would have been on the side of the colonizers or on the side of George Washington so there is no need for a debate on what side Huey would have stood regarding the orchestrated imperial counter-revolutions trying to overthrow Hezbollah, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Laurent Gbagbo, Robert Mugabe & now Bashar al-Assad. It’s not a matter of domestic affairs, Che, Malcolm, Huey declared a war on imperialism and clearly stated that there is no place on earth where you could call something a revolution that is backed & financed by the United States.
“We feel that the white students should relate and pay more attention to the colonized situation here of the blacks first, because after all, this is home. This is not to say that they should not denounce Americas treacherous actions abraod. I think that can be done at the same time. It’s just a matter of placing emphasis upon the criminal activities of America here in the homeland.”
Veröffentlicht am September 5, 2011 von Daniele Puccio
First of all, to prove the necessity of the following article. Did you know about this?
or about this?
Media bias has reached a new level of insanity. If you didn’t know about this, you definitely need to take the time and read the following.
Syria, a religious melting pot.
A cultural & religious approach. Although 87 per cent of the syrian population are muslims one of Bashar al-Assad’s main policies is to uphold Syria as a secular state. Around 75 per cent of them are sunni. The remaining 25 per cent include shia, alevi and others. Although it is a predominantly muslim (sunni) state there aren’t any religious minoroties that are being oppressed or even prosecuted by the government as in other countries in that region. Actually Syria is a cultural & religious melting pot in which everyone can follow & practice their religion as free as in no other arab state. One reason for that may be that the syrian president, Bashar al-Assad himself is a religious minority, an alevi. Christians, jews and other religions can aswell practice their religion without the fear of being oppressed. Unlike in other muslim states, practically, punishment for homosexuality doesn’t exist anymore in Syria. Article 520 of the penal code considers it as an illegal act, but unlike in Saudi Arabia e.g. there is no remarkable prosecution anymore. That’s only one reason why Assad has gained much popularity and can easily be described as the most popular contemporary arab leader. The fundamentalist opposition in contrast is known for its homophobia.
In conclusion one has to agree that there is no religious & cultural freedom in the middle east as there is in Syria and from the narrative of muslim arabs, who strongly believe in Islam and don’t live in a “westernized” or western country it is pretty remarkable how his government managed to bring and uphold that kind of tolerance into an arab country.
“Also, a parallel can be made between Colonel Gaddafi’s authority and that of Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father). They rose to power during the same period and both made use of their intelligence and brutality to hold sway. Bashar al-Assad, on the contrary, did not seize power nor did he expect to inherit it. He accepted to fill the office of president when his father died because his older brother had perished in an accident and because only his family heritage could have prevented a power struggle among his father’s generals.
Although it was the army who went to look for him in London, where he was quietly practicing his profession as an ophthalmologist, it is his people who be-knighted him. He is undeniably the most popular political leader in the Middle East. Up to two months ago, he was also the only one who moved around without armed guards, and felt comfortable in a crowd.”
No doubt that Bashar al-Assad is far from perfect and Syria is far from what we could consider a model. No doubt that there are authentic demonstrations going on, pro-Assad aswell as anti-Assad. The main question we have to ask ourselves is why are there such protests, why pro & contra, why do we only hear about contra and what did the Assad rule since 1970 do for its people? Therefor the maybe most important part of this article is to understand Syria’s history. The best approach to understand the Assad rule i came across, is this one.
“Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq. “These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve,” Sharon said to a visiting delegation of American congressmen.
Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials that he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea.
Bolton said the United States was striving to get a new UN Security Council resolution regarding Iraq and that the result of the vote would affect the U.S.’s relations with Western Europe and Russia, after the war in Iraq.
Bolton also met with Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky.”
A year earlier, on May 6 2002, John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called both states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 he said that the United States should have overthrown the syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein.
So obviously the plans to interfere in syrian internal affairs weren’t made yesterday. Now you have the so called “arab spring” which started with two revolutions that were based upon the masses & majority of people revolting against the regime. Ben Ali in Tunisia, aswell as Mubarak in Egypt have been very friendly towards the west, if not to say they were U.S. puppet states. Then the arab spring apparently reached Libya. The major difference between those “uprisings” was that in Egypt for example you could see the “made in USA” logo on the weapons used against the demonstrators. After Israel, Egypt was issued with more U.S. military aid than any other country . In Libya the so called rebels were issued by the west not only with weapons and other military equipment but they also had the largest army in the world, NATO, to bomb their way, killing thousands of civilians during the “revolution”. But that’s another story. The point is that the “syrian uprising” has absolutely nothing to do with the majority or even a notable minority of the syrian population being upset with Assad’s “authoritarian regime” or “brutal regime” as the western media tries to portray it. The people engaged in overthrowing Assad are – of course – backed by the west but not to bring “democracy” but to destabilize Syrias stable cultural,religious & more or less political landscape.
From a United States’ imperialistic and hegemonic viewpoint there are several reasons why Assad’s Syria needs to be overthrown.
1. Close relations to Iran, Hezbollah and the palestinian resistance
2. Refusal of peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan & Egypt
Syria and the delusions of the western press
Here are several articles debunking the reliability and exposing the bias media reports on the so called massacres against his own people.
1 ) On April 15, Peter Lee wrote this for Counterpunch:
“On April 10, a mysterious and bloody incident occurred near the seaside town of Banyas, in Syria.
Nine members of a Syrian army patrol were shot to death and twenty five were wounded—the single bloodiest incident in the Syrian uprising to date.
Western news services largely ignored the incident and concentrated on reports of the army’s move to encircle and pacify Banyas.”
He then goes on:
“By a remarkable coincidence, the events in Banyas attracted the close attention of one of America’s chief Syria watchers: Dr. Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Landis’ wife is Syrian, and her cousin, Lt. Colonel Yasir Qash`ur , was one of the two Syrian army officers who died in the incident.
An amusing example is the case of the blog “Gay Girl in Damascus”, created on 21 February 2011. Edited in English by 25 year-old Amina, the website became a source of reference for Western media. Therein the author described the plight of a young lesbian under Bashar’s dictatorship and the day-to-day unfolding of the terrible repression unleashed against the revolution. As a gay woman, she garnered the protective empathy of Western web surfers who mobilized as soon as her arrest by the secret services of the “regime” was announced.
However, as it happened, Amina was a fiction. Betrayed by his IP address, a US 40 year-old “student” was discovered to be the real author of this masquerade. This propagandist, who was allegedly preparing a PhD in Scotland, recently participated in a pro-Western opposition conference held in Turkey, urging for a NATO intervention. He quite obviously did not attend in his capacity as a student
“Reality reversal is a principle being applied on a large scale. We may recall the United Nations reports on the humanitarian crisis in Libya alleging that tens of thousands of immigrant workers were fleeing the country to escape from violence. The conclusion drawn and spewed by the Western media was that the Gaddafi “regime” had to be toppled in favor of the Benghazi rebels. And yet, it was not the government of Tripoli who was responsible for this tragedy, but the so-called revolutionaries in Cyrenaica who were hunting down black Africans. Stirred by a racist ideology, they accused them of being at the service of Colonel Gaddafi and lynched whoever they could get their hands on.
In Syria, the images of armed groups perched on the rooftops and firing at random into the crowd or on police forces were broadcast on national television networks. Yet, these same images were relayed and used by Western and Saudi television channels to attribute these crimes to the government of Damascus.“
Who are the syrian opposition and who backs/supports/funds them?
The following will show & expose the clear war agenda against sovereign Syria, orchestrated by the U.S. , Israel, Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the western media outlets and Al-Jazeera + Al-Arabiyah of course.
Anna Haq, for Counterpunch published an article called “The Complexities of Syrian Violence“, in which she also points out the syrian government’s mistake and does not defend the treatment of the few “peaceful” protestors at all, but she points out something very important.
“Peaceful demonstrators are on the streets of different Syrian cities. They demand freedom, but they do so in the name of a majority that is not on those streets. Until April 22nd, these demonstrations did not exceed about fifty people at a time (in most cases, fifteen to twenty people would gather bravely). Mainstream journalists, perhaps buoyed by the Arab Spring, exaggerated the number of demonstrators (and perhaps tampered with pictures taken from pro-government demonstrations to make them seem anti-government gatherings) led the Syrian government to exclude all journalists. This was a bad decision. It meant that the reports coming out of Syria are mystifying; with the government’s own accounts always seen as suspicious while the anti-government accounts generally taken as truth.”
More Media Falsification & Manipulation
There is evidence of gross media manipulation and falsification from the outset of the protest movement in southern Syria on March 17th.
The Western media has presented the events in Syria as part of the broader Arab pro-democracy protest movement, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia, to Egypt, and from Libya to Syria.
Media coverage has focussed on the Syrian police and armed forces, which are accused of indiscriminately shooting and killing unarmed “pro-democracy” demonstrators. While these police shootings did indeed occur, what the media failed to mention is that among the demonstrators there were armed gunmen as well as snipers who were shooting at both the security forces and the protesters.
The death figures presented in the reports are often unsubstantiated. Many of the reports are “according to witnesses”. The images and video footages aired on Al Jazeera and CNN do not always correspond to the events which are being covered by the news reports.
Without evidence, the reports suggest authoritatively that the police is shooting at the soldiers and vice versa the soldiers are shooting on the police. In a April 29 Al Jazeera report, Daraa is described as “a city under siege:
“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out. Inside the city, shops are shuttered and nobody dare walk the once bustling market streets, today transformed into the kill zone of rooftop snipers.”
“Unable to crush the people who first dared rise up against him – neither with the secret police, paid thugs or the special forces of his brother’s military division – President Bashar al-Assad has sent thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Deraa for an operation the regime wants nobody in the world to see.”
“Though almost all communication channels with Deraa have been cut, including the Jordanian mobile service that reaches into the city from just across the border, Al Jazeera has gathered firsthand accounts of life inside the city from residents who just left or from eyewitnesses inside who were able to get outside the blackout area.”
“The picture that emerges is of a dark and deadly security arena, one driven by the actions of the secret police and their rooftop snipers, in which soldiers and protestors alike are being killed or wounded, in which cracks are emerging in the military itself, and in which is created the very chaos which the regime uses to justify its escalating crackdown. (Daraa, a City under Siege, IPS / Al Jazeera, April 29, 2011)”
The Al Jazeera report borders on the absurd. Read carefully.
“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out”, “thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Daraa”
This situation has prevailed for several weeks. This means that bona fide protesters who are not already inside Daraa cannot enter Daraa.
People who live in the city are in their homes: “nobody dares walk … the streets”. If nobody dares walk the streets where are the protesters?
Who is in the streets? According to Al Jazeera, the protesters are in the streets together with the soldiers, and both the protesters and the soldiers are being shot at by “plain clothes secret police”, by “paid thugs” and government sponsored snipers.
The impression conveyed in the report is that these casualties are attributed to infighting between the police and the military.
But the report also says that the soldiers (in the “thousands”) control all roads in and out of the city, but they are being shot upon by the plain clothed secret police.
The purpose of this web of media deceit, namely outright fabrications –where soldiers are being killed by police and “government snipers”– is to deny the existence of armed terrorist groups. The later are integrated by snipers and “plain clothed terrorists” who are shooting at the police, the Syrian armed forces and local residents.
These are not spontaneous acts of terror; they are carefully planned and coordinated attacks. In recent developments, according to a Xinhua report (April 30, 2011), armed “terrorist groups” “attacked the housing areas for servicemen” in Daraa province, “killing a sergeant and wounding two”.
While the government bears heavy responsibility for its mishandling of the military-police operation, including the deaths of civilians, the reports confirm that the armed terrorist groups had also opened fire on protesters and local residents. The casualties are then blamed on the armed forces and the police and the Bashar Al Assad government is portrayed by “the international community” as having ordered countless atrocities.
The fact of the matter is that foreign journalists are banned from reporting inside Syria, to the extent that much of the information including the number of casualties is obtained from the unverified accounts of “witnesses”.
It is in the interest of the US-NATO alliance to portray the events in Syria as a peaceful protest movement which is being brutally repressed by a “dictatorial regime”.
This article , although it had only been confirmed by Syrian state TV, reveals that two terrorists confessed that they fabricated news for Al-Jazeera & received money to buy weapons in order to attack security forces in Hama.
U.S. secretely funding syrian opposition, Wikileaks cables reveal
“the State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables.
The London-based satellite channel, Barada TV, began broadcasting in April 2009 but has ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria as part of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad. Human rights groups say scores of people have been killed by Assad’s security forces since the demonstrations began March 18; Syria has blamed the violence on “armed gangs.” “
Saudi / Zionist involvement
Bassam Abu Abdulla, from the Al Watan news agency in Damascus’ reply to PressTV’s question “How’s the situation in Syria compared with other events taking place in the region?”
“Now, about the role of the foreign factors. Yesterday, I think, The Washington Post newspaper published that the United States Department of State supported the Al-Barada TV channel, a TV channel in opposition of Syria, paying them USD 6 million to secretly support some so-called opposition leaders.
I don’t trust these kinds of people who are living in Washington, Paris, or London.
The real situation is that because the Syrian position is against the American plans in the region and against Israel, and because Syria is supporting the resistance movements — generally, Hezbollah and Hamas [that are] against the American plans — the conspiracy against the US is continuing.
We are talking about different parties participating in these conspiracies. We can watch these different groups. The first group is the corrupted people inside Syria.
The second group is the Salafi group who is being supported by [Saudi Arabia's] Bandar bin Sultan, the American CIA and [Israel's] Mossad.
The third group is composed of some regional parties against Syria.
The fourth group is the Muslim brothers in London, and now they are in Saudi Arabia.
All these groups, besides the TV channels war, are working against Syria now. The Syrian government will soon face this situation because we are not talking about severe demonstrations, but we are talking about the Salafi group – those who speak a very strange language in the Syrian society and who want to divide the Syrian nation, which is a redline for all Syrians. Because of that we will soon see the Syrian government deal with them in another way.“
Personal thoughts
The manufactured consent, especially the leftists & progressives support for western aggression against a sovereign country has dramatically changed since Libya. While the same people that opposed the complete operation against Iraq in 2003 were shockingly quiet about the NATO attacks on Libya and the violation of UN Resolution 1973 that called for the protection of civilians, not for regime change.
It was no secret that Saddam Hussein’s troops used terrible weapons in the war against Iran, aswell as against the kurds in his own country. Nonetheless the left & progressive completely opposed not even the NATO attacks on Iraq, but also the sanctions imposed that caused at least several hundred thousand civilian casualties. There was no question about wheter one has to decide to stand with Saddam or with the west. It appeared pretty obvious that the west’s interests had nothing to do with even caring about one single Iraqi, so the question was more to dedice wheter we let Iraq be imperfectly theirs or if it is going to be imperfectly ours. Ironically enough that we in the west claim to have the moral/political decision to make regarding what’s good or bad for a foreign, sovereign nation. Not only was it the west that issued Saddam the weapons & more or less forced him & his military to use them against Iran, but it was again us not only arresting him, bringing him to court & hanging him on a muslim holiday for exactly those crimes but all of this happened in context of the bloodiest & inhumane invasion since Vietnam.
Now the west is on a hunt for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, obviously trying to kill him & his family as they did to Saddam. There’s not only no evidence that troops loyal to Gaddafi commited some kind of a mass murder or genocide against its own people, speaking of directly targeting ‘innocent civilians’ but there’s far more evidence, admitted & confirmed by the west and their media that NATO killed thousands of civilians in context of UN Resolution 1973. Furthermore we didn’t see a third to half of the Iraqi population getting out on the streets in solidarity & loyalty to their leader, as libyans did for Muammar Gaddafi & their system, the libyan arab Jamahiriya. The western media treats those people as unequal as their own people at home. While there were no remarkable reports on the 1.7 million people on Green Sqare on July 1st of 2011, the media only reported some small ‘rebel’ protests where – taking a closer look – you can hardly find any notable civilian support for the rebels, even in the videos & pictures provided by the corporate media. The same bias took place in the United States. When Minister Farrakhan & others spoke on the Millions March in Harlem in support for Gaddafi & libyan arab Jamahiriya no notable media outlet reported about it. Then again, when the Tea Party is holding a rally with a few thousand supporters it is all over the media, newspapers & magazines.
Now the west, along with his corporate media, with the support of Al-Jazeera & Al-Arabiyah is preparing for eihter a massive destabilization, if not even a war against Syria. President Assad now tries not to let any foreign, private media into his country. On first sight this may sound harsh for our understanding of democracy but – assuming Assad is an intelligent man – we, aswell as his government know what foreign media can do to you if the agenda is clear, which it obviously is. So, let me address the people in the west, who, like myself have the power to make other people aware of the current situation in Syria. Let’s for one second assume that those attacks on protestors have taken place, which i would totally condemn of course. Now, we must ask ourselves several questions.
Do we really want our tax money being spent on another war on a country in the middle east?
Why are we funding & therefor creating opposition movements all over the world, from Venezuela over Iran until Syria, and if the state fights back we try to call it “mass murder/genocide against its own people”?
Only imagine what happened in London if Syria or Iran would have issued the rioters/protestors with money & weapons to create chaos & destabilization in the streets of the UK. Regardless wheter you believe in the necessity of the people rioting there or not, the state has the right to – lawfully & righteously – prosecute the people who broke the law during the riots. So now, even in London, UK, the streets where David Cameron, Sarkozy’s partner in bringing “democracy” to the arab world is the current president, people have been killed, injured and in the outcome many were unlawfully jailed & prosecuted. One man even faces a 4 year prison sentence for a comment he made on Facebook encouraging people to riot. Only imagine if such happened in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria etc.
Although undeniably, there is a need for reforms it is pretty obvious that there is absolutely no need for a regime change in Syria. The “freedoms” or “democratic changes” the peaceful protestors (which are only a small number compared to the US-backed salafists & other fundamental groups) demand will not at all be taken seriously by any possible oppisiton right now, so the syrian demonstrators should actually be very careful what they wish for, going out in the streets and demanding regime change instead of reforms. Bashar al-Assad should have used his large popularity to address his people and introduce reforms earlier than he did. No doubt there are some authentic demonstrations going out on the streets, but yet, neither any media outlet can prove wheter Assad is giving the orders or the combined Alawite dominated Security, Military, Ba’ath Party and the Shahiba thugs. Since he’s head of state he will be held accountable. The people who jump on the bandwagon of the syrian demonstrations similar to those in Libya should be very careful since we know way better now, now when it’s too late. Personally, i call upon the BRICS states to mediate & try to get a dialogue in that region, but the first premise would be complete western withdrawal, and by that i mean the western media bias, the intelligence, the Saudi, Qatari & of course turkish influence. There will never be an authentic revolution – backed by the west. If we learned one lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Venezuela etc then to NEVER TRUST THE WEST, and as sad as it may sound, when people die, people die but then the BRICS states or the ALBA states should make demands and call upon Assad. How can you call for empire, which killed millions of arabs only in the first decade of the 21st century, to help you? Western double standars reached a point of insanity and we in the west must acknowledge that we don’t care about any Syrian, nor do we care about any protestor who may have been shot, nor do we care about the level of freedom the syrians enjoy. It’s mainly about destabalizing the country & destroying the religious freedom, to once again promote fundamentalist religion in the region to cause & directly fund friction among muslim people. I’m actually not sure if the plans are to invade or bomb Syria. In my opinion the west will mainly focus on managing to get regime change & establish an eliteist, fundamentalist religious government as Saudi Arabia to prevent a real arab uprising, based on unity against western imperialism. Iran, Syria & the Hezbollah are the remaining powers in the middle east that will never back down from their strong supporting & funding of the palestinian resistance to one day see the liberation of Palestine, the end of the zionist regime and the establishment of a state in which muslims, christians, jews, blacks, browns & whites can peacefully live together. Nonetheless an attack on Syria is very likely to happen. There is already an oil embargo and voices are calling louder and louder for a no-fly zone, what always led to air strikes or/and a ground invasion. The difference between Syria and Iran/Lebanon is that Syria won’t be able to defend themselves against NATO or Turkey as western proxy. The zionist regime already lost its war against Hezbollah in 2006 and, in my opinion, the west will never attack Iran by a military strike, not even a NATO attack because they know very well that Iran has the power to strike back and aswell attack the western metropolies as direct answer. So it is pretty obvious that empire’s next target is Syria.
The media-blocked protests in Israel are also an indicator of people recognizing the dirty war games their government is playing together with the west, the Saudis & their support from Al-Jazeera. I believe that israelis do not necessarily support their zionist regime, they are just being indoctrinated with fear and hatred against the palestinians which causes them to rather be quiet about their own governments crimes against the palestinians. The real revolution doesn’t start on the streets, but in the minds of the people, especially the young generation. If the majority of the “arab spring protestors” were aware of the geostrategic plans of the west and their real agenda in the region, not Libyans, Syrians or Iranians would see a necessity to rise up, but first of all the people in the gulf states would then see the dramatic need of getting rid of their western puppets in power when their natural resources make them the richest nations on earth. Only then, when Iran, the Hezbollah & Syria don’t face threats from the west anymore, there can seriously be talks about more democratic freedoms in those countries and if people outside of the Global South should be involved in it or not.
In the following days i will cover & write down some important issues about Turkey’s role as US proxy, the underestimation of the religious meaning of the Assad’s & the syrian opposition, reports from people who have visited the refugee camps in Syria and report what some voices directly from Syria & the Hatay region in Turkey, which formerly belonged to Syria, in which lots of Syrians live say.
I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …
Lupe Fiasco:
“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”
M-1 of Dead Prez
After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign
Its all simple an plain, American took the stands to gain
Your president got an african name, now who you’re gonna blame?
When you’re dropping them bombs out of the planes using depleted uranium
Babies looking like two-headed aliens
Follow the money, trail the leash to the criminal
Ain’t nothing subliminal to it, that’s how they do it
See the game they’re running give a fuck if he’s cunning articulate and handsome
Afghanistan held for ransom by the hand of this black man
Neocolonial puppet, white power with a black face, he said fuck it, i’ll do it
A master of disguise, expert in telling lies
Then they gave him a nobel peace prize
Shoulda known he was trained in Chicago, word to Chairman Fred & Mark Clark
What they’re doin in the dark will come out in the light
Like a wikileaks site, so i guess Nkrumah was right
Who’s ready to fight? Last stage of imperialism, i ain’t kiddin
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye “This ain’t livin”
Chorus
I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …
Lupe Fiasco:
“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”
Black the Ripper
O-B-A-M-A , you ain’t fooling everyone, i see the games you play
You was VIP at the BIC and we know that’s codename for CIA
The same way your cameras are watching us, we are watching you
Think we’re easy to control? You ain’t got a clue
Revolution’s on the way, let’s see what you gonna do
You gonna send the troops? You gonna drop the nukes?
See it’s not where you from, it’s where you at
He’s sitting in the White House so who cares if he’s black?
And why is soldiers still out there in Iraq?
Natural Resources ain’t yours, it’s theirs, give it back
You’re just another puppet, but i’m not surprised
Look at Collin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice
They didn’t change shit, house niggas fresh off the slaveship
You’ll all burn in hell, even Michelle … Obama Nation
Chorus
I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …
Lupe Fiasco:
“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”
Lowkey
Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa
I say things that other rappers won’t say
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay
Hope you didn’t build a statue or tattoo you arm
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador
Morales and Chavez, the state’s are on a hunt for ya
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia
Take a trip to the past and tell em i was right
Ask Ali Abunimah and Jeremiah Wright
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Libya
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry
But the same president just bombed an african country
