Saturday, November 11, 2017
Monday, November 6, 2017
‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Impact <Editor@impact-magazine.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 3:54 AM
Subject: ‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables
From: Impact <Editor@impact-magazine.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 3:54 AM
Subject: ‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables
‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables
28 October 2017
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange today said the CIA and Mossad were responsible for paving the way for ISIS as the whistle blowing organisation released more than half a million formerly confidential US diplomatic cables dating back to 1979.
On the sixth anniversary of the first infamous “Cablegate” by WikiLeaks, when it releases its first batch of sensitive US files, on November 28 2010, it has expanded its Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD) with 531,525 new diplomatic cables from 1979.
In a statement to coincide with the release of the cables, known as “Carter Cables III”, Mr Assange explained how events which unfolded in 1979, had begun a series of events that led to the rise of ISIS.
He said: “If any year could be said to be the “year zero” of our modern era, 1979 is it.”
Mr Assange added: “In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop.
“Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation.”
The Carter Cables III bring WikiLeaks’ total published US diplomatic cable collection to 3.3 million documents.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Aadhaar Overkill - Editorial - The Times of India (New Delhi edition), 30 Oct 2017
Aadhaar Overkill
Originally conceived as an empowerment tool, it is disempowering citizens now
Monday, October 23, 2017
Malignant mindset
Malignant mindset: It is a measure of what has become of us as a people and a nation that we are actually applauding - or at least heaving an almost audible sigh of relief - at the turn of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, as a 'good cop' in the latest episode of Hindutva's perverse pantomime.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'? By John T. Sidel, The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES
What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'?
LONDON — For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the joint banner of Communism and Islam.
Pan-Islam had emerged in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, with the efforts of Sultan Abdulhamid II to lay claim to the title of caliph among Muslims. New forms of Islamic schooling and associations began to emerge across the Arab world and beyond. From Egypt and Iraq to India and the Indonesian archipelago, Islam became a rallying call against European colonialism and imperialism.
Islam’s mobilizing power attracted Communist activists in the 1910s and 1920s. The Bolsheviks, who lacked organizational infrastructure in the vast Muslim lands of the former Russian empire, allied with Islamic reformers in those areas. They created a special Commissariat for Muslim Affairs under the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, promising to establish a distinctive “Muslim Communism” across the Caucasus and Central Asia. During the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, in what is today Azerbaijan, the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, a Ukrainian Jew, called for waging a “holy war” against Western imperialism.
But as we now know, Communism and Islam failed to coalesce into a lasting alliance. By the onset of the Cold War, they seemed irrevocably opposed. Differing views about Communism divided Muslims across Asia, Africa and the Middle East in their struggles for independence and emancipation during the second half of the 20th century. An anti-Communist jihad fundamentally remade Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped set the stage for the rise of Al Qaeda and the emergence of a new form of Islamist terrorism.
Yet around the time of the Russian Revolution, the prospects of Communism and Islam joining forces seemed very bright. They were perhaps no brighter than in the Indonesian archipelago, then under Dutch rule: In 1918-21, left-wing labor organizers working hand in glove with Islamic scholars and pious Muslim merchants built the biggest mass movement in Southeast Asia.
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In particular, members began to join the Sarekat Islam, an organization founded in 1912 as a Muslim batik traders’ association that had morphed into a broader popular movement and was staging mass rallies and strikes across Java. Socialist influence within the Sarekat Islam was already evident at the movement’s congress in 1916, where the Prophet Muhammad was proclaimed to be “the father of Socialism and the pioneer of democracy” and “the Socialist par excellence.”
The Russian Revolution further inspired the Sarekat Islam. By late 1917, activists from the Indies Social-Democratic Union had begun agitating and organizing among the lower ranks of the Dutch armed forces in the Indies. Borrowing the successful tactics of the Bolsheviks in Russia, hundreds of sailors and soldiers were recruited in the hope of staging mutinies and uprisings. The Dutch colonial authorities promptly arrested and imprisoned the activists and ordered their expulsion from the Indies.
But by 1920, the Indies Social-Democratic Union had renamed itself the Communist Union of the Indies, becoming the first Communist party in Asia to join the Comintern. New unions were formed on Java and Sumatra. Peasant villagers mobilized against landowners. A railway strike briefly paralyzed the plantation belt in eastern Sumatra.
It was in this context that the legendary figure of Tan Malaka first appeared. The scion of an aristocratic family from western Sumatra, Tan Malaka had spent World War I as a student in the Netherlands. He came into contact with Socialist activists and ideas, and witnessed the short-lived Troelstra Revolution of late 1918, during which Dutch social-democrats briefly tried to emulate an ongoing revolutionary uprising in Germany. In early 1919, Tan Malaka returned to Indonesia, where he was soon drawn into labor organizing. He joined the embryonic local Communist Party, quickly ascending to its leadership — before the colonial government forced him into exile, and back to the Netherlands, in early 1922.
And so it was with early experience of the revolutionary potential of combining Communism and Islam that Tan Malaka made an appearance at the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow and Petrograd in 1922. There, he delivered a memorable speech about the similarities between Pan-Islamism and Communism. Pan-Islamism was not religious per se, he argued, but rather “the brotherhood of all Muslim peoples, and the liberation struggle not only of the Arab but also of the Indian, the Javanese and all the oppressed Muslim peoples.”
“This brotherhood,” he added, “means the practical liberation struggle not only against Dutch but also against English, French and Italian capitalism, therefore against world capitalism as a whole.”
The official record of the proceedings notes that Tan Malaka’s impassioned plea for an alliance between Communism and Pan-Islamism was met with “lively applause.” But his memoirs recall that after three days of heated debate following his speech, he was formally prohibited from further contributing to the proceedings. The official conclusions of the Fourth Comintern Congress, including the “Theses on the Eastern Question,” are notably ambiguous on the question of Pan-Islamism and strikingly silent on Indonesia, even though the movement there was far more successful than any other Communist mobilization in the so-called East at the time.
An alliance between Communism and Islam was not to be, neither in Indonesia nor elsewhere. The strength of Communism, as a movement, was its ability to mobilize laborers to fight for better wages and working conditions through unions, whether in oil boomtown Baku or the plantations of Java and Sumatra. But as a form of government, Communism meant one-party rule, a command economy with collectivized agriculture and party-state control over all spheres of social life — including religion.
Islamism, by contrast, was a much broader and enduringly more open-ended and ambiguous basis for political engagement. In Java and elsewhere, “Islam” provided a banner for Muslim merchants to contest economic encroachment by non-Muslims and build an infrastructure for organizing in the countryside, largely through Islamic schools. Politically, it was a supple notion: Islamist scholars and activists could be for colonialism, Communism or capitalism.
In Indonesia, tensions between Communists and Islamic leaders had already begun to divide Sarekat Islam in the early 1920s. Communists urged escalating strikes and protests, whereas Islamic leaders advocated accommodation with the Dutch colonial authorities. Sarekat Islam dissolved in the face of Dutch repression after failed rebellions in 1926-7.
In the late 1940s, Islamic parties opposed the Partai Komunis Indonesia (P.K.I.), or Indonesian Communist Party, during the struggle for independence. Islamic parties were uncomfortable with the Communists’ insistence that independence from Dutch colonial rule also upend aristocratic privileges and bring about the establishment of Socialist forms of ownership over land and industry. This conflict extended into the early post-independence period. Islamic organizations actively participated in the anti-Communist pogroms of 1965-66, which destroyed the P.K.I. and left hundreds of thousands of casualties across Indonesia.
By this time, the pattern of antagonism was well established across the Muslim world, and it persisted throughout the Cold War. The institutional and ideological boundaries of both Communism and Islamism hardened, dashing prospects for renewed experiments in political alliance-building.
In Muslim areas of the Soviet Union, the party-state suppressed institutions of Islamic worship, education, association and pilgrimage, which were viewed as obstacles to ideological and social transformation along Communist lines. Where Islamic states were established, left-wing politics was often associated with blasphemy, and outlawed. In countries like Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran, Communist and other left-wing parties found themselves in bitter competition for power with Islamists.
One effect of the failure of revolutionary forces to mobilize under the joint banner of Communism and Islam was to deeply divide Muslims, weakening their capacity first to fight colonialism during the first half of 20th century and then to resist the rise of authoritarianism across the Muslim world. Another effect was to stimulate new forms of U.S.-backed, anti-Soviet Islamist mobilization during the Cold War — including some that turned into the virulent anti-Western terrorist groups that partly define the world today.
Divisions between leftists and Islamists in Egypt after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 also helped set the stage for the country’s return to military rule in mid-2013. Similar tensions divided the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, paving the way for the country’s descent into civil war over six years ago. A full century after the Russian Revolution, the failed alliance between Communism and Islam continues to shape the politics of the Muslim world.
How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars - By Andrew Bacevich - LobeLog
Let the world declare USA as a war-monger nation; to begin with.
How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars
by Andrew Bacevich
Let the world declare USA
as a war-monger nation; to begin with.
How
We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars
by
Andrew Bacevich
Consider, if you will,
these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or
less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the
American people could not care less.
Nor can it be said that
we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities
withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details
that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces
are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by
barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press
releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:
September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive
September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty
September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS
terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Ever since the United
States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have
poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on
the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and
high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional
committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists
offer updates that fill in at least some of the details — on civilian
casualties, for example — that government authorities prefer not to
disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by
network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military
officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries
that put things in a broader perspective.
But here’s the truth of
it. None of it matters.
Like traffic jams or
robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not
welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America,
war is not that big a deal.
While serving as defense
secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the
Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to
war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the
conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved
grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become
reality.
Why do Americans today
show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally
on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity
between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity
or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive
deleted]?
Perhaps just posing such
a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying
to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on
television.
Without any expectation
of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why
we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually
reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly
obvious and ends with the more speculative.
Americans don’t attend all
that much to ongoing American wars because:
1. U.S.
casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on
airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the
number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for
example, a grand total of
11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan — about equal to
the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over
the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries
where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly,
plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The
estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.)
But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United
States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations,
they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).
2. The
true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency,
Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent
on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes,
highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of
life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging
from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since
accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a
boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions.
As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending
wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will
ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of
investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure.
Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about
anyone else to pursue that connection.
3. On
matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the
point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American
people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires
absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this
civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In
effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree:
supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without
inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest
sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform
and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory
rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely
approximating actual accountability.
4. Terrorism
gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more. While international
terrorism isn’t a trivial problem (and wasn’t for decades before 9/11), it
comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to
the United States. Indeed, other threats, notably the impact of climate
change, constitute a far greater danger to the wellbeing of Americans.
Worried about the safety of your children or grandchildren? The opioid
epidemic constitutes an infinitely greater danger than “Islamic
radicalism.” Yet having been sold a bill of goods about a “war on terror”
that is essential for “keeping America safe,” mere citizens are easily
persuaded that scattering U.S. troops throughout the Islamic world while
dropping bombs on designated evildoers is helping win the former while
guaranteeing the latter. To question that proposition becomes tantamount
to suggesting that God might not have given Moses two stone tablets after all.
5. Blather
crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is —
not to put too fine a point on it — vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly
repetitive. William Safire of the New York Times once characterized
American political rhetoric as BOMFOG, with those running for high office
relentlessly touting the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God.
Ask a politician, Republican or Democrat, to expound on this country’s role in
the world, and then brace yourself for some variant of WOSFAD, as the speaker
insists that it is incumbent upon the World’s Only Superpower to spread Freedom
and Democracy. Terms like leadership and indispensable are introduced, along
with warnings about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, embellished with ominous
references to Munich. Such grandiose posturing makes it
unnecessary to probe too deeply into the actual origins and purposes of
American wars, past or present, or assess the likelihood of ongoing wars ending
in some approximation of actual success. Cheerleading displaces serious
thought.
6. Besides,
we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if
the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the
dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to
attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information
Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era
(so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when
being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and
with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that
happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of
2017 — hugely significant and instantly forgotten — those matters will, within
another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that
briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of
Americans — those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts
— have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the
Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t
the finest fighting
force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in
140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then,
slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.
7. Anyway,
the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge
in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House,
all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this
expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves
from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the
slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record
of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be
deities but flawed human beings, Americans — members of the media above all —
pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more
expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think
that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the
exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially
in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion!
Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding
imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by
the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars
that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to
generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.
8. Our
culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from
criticism. As recently as the 1990s, the U.S. military establishment aligned
itself with the retrograde side of the culture wars. Who can forget the
gays-in-the-military controversy that rocked Bill Clinton’s administration
during his first weeks in office, as senior military leaders publicly denounced
their commander-in-chief? Those days are long gone. Culturally, the
armed forces have moved left. Today, the services go out of their way to
project an image of tolerance and a commitment to equality on
all matters related to race, gender, and sexuality. So when President
Trump announced his opposition to transgendered persons serving in the armed
forces, tweeting that the military “cannot be burdened with
the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military
would entail,” senior officers politely but firmly disagreed and pushed back. Given the ascendency of cultural
issues near the top of the U.S. political agenda, the military’s embrace of
diversity helps to insulate it from criticism and from being called to account
for a less than sterling performance in waging wars. Put simply, critics
who in an earlier day might have blasted military leaders for their inability
to bring wars to a successful conclusion hold their fire. Having
women graduate from Ranger School or command Marines in combat more than compensates for
not winning.
A collective
indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America. But
don’t expect your neighbors down the street or the editors of the New
York Times to
lose any sleep over that fact. Even to notice it would require them — and
us — to care.
Republished,
with permission, from TomDispatch.
Photo: Sailors from Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit One Zero Five
board a plane to deploy to the 5th Fleet area of responsibility in support of
the global war on terrorism. (Wikimedia Commons)
Andrew
J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular,
is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book,
Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of
U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,
John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,
and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security
State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright 2017 Andrew J.
Bacevich
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