coup | ukwatch.net

UK and US Culture

Ellie Keen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:49:33 +0000

Can I claim that my age [78], my life’s experience [WWII Nazi occupation, two dictatorships plus a revolutionary civil war], my birthplace [Athens, Greece], my profession [civil engineering], and my strict adherence to rationality and honesty, as an atheist, give me the right to address [mostly] young Britons and young Americans and “lecture” them on the subject presented below? The answer is: No! I do not have the right. I have the duty to address them. Here is the subject:

The German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” [“The Mirror”] is one of the most important mainstream magazines of Europe and arguably of the world. “Der Spiegel” is definitely not a radical leftist publication. In its latest issue, that of February 25, 2008, on page 56 we read: “A clean ‘surgical coup’ would have been ‘attractive in many respects’, noted on May 6, 1976 the Planning Staff of the British Foreign Ministry”.

Now, what is a “clean surgical blow”? It is a method of killing women and children by using technology developed in institutions of higher learning, also known as “universities” or “institutes of technology”. The greatest experts in the world in this kind of “surgery” are Bush father and son, husband and son, respectively, of Barbara [of New Orleans fame]. This technology involves bombs, rockets, etc. By extension a “surgical coup” is an occupation of a country without the use of bombs, etc, but through torture and intimidation.

What was the target of this “surgical coup”? Rome! The cradle of Christianity [or something of the sort]. Note the date: it is 1976! Why would rational people want to do a thing like that? The [rational] people we are talking about are: US President Gerald Ford [plus “Kissy” of Harvard, aka Henry Kissinger], James Callaghan [British Prime Minister], Valery Giscard d’Estaing [President of France], Helmut Schmidt [Chancellor of Germany], et al. The reason for the coup: a “horror picture” [Horrorvorstellung] of the Italian Communist Party winning the elections.

[Note: That the Italian Eurocommunists (a term coined by the CIA!) were very “soft” communists, almost social democrats of the German kind, and most importantly note that they were completely independent from the Soviets and therefore they did not constitute a “threat” to the West, that was known to the Americans, the British, and the rest of the “civilized” West.]

The “Der Spiegel” article goes on: “Since the end of the Second World War again and again the USA has paid millions to [foreign] politicians and parties. One part of the money landed at Secret Service officers who cooperated with extreme rightist terrorists, whose bomb attacks with dozens of dead were then charged to radical leftists.” Beautiful and Christian world!

Thus, declassified documents in the UK, the US, and Germany “show that the British above all [the others] were thinking about a radical solution… a coup d’etat through rightist military in Rome”, by means of the above mentioned civilized “surgery”!

Now, addressing the ordinary Britons, especially the young Britons, one could ask why the British insisted in sowing murderous violence (that is what a coup means) in the lives of a peaceful people? The answer is not very difficult. The British elites are the poodle of the American elites. To secure the favor of the “owner” they, the British elite, have to be arse-lickers. The expressions: “The British are the lieutenants of the Americans” or “there is a special relationship” between them, are rather hypocritical.

How about the ordinary Britons? On the basis of my personal experience I have concluded that, in very general terms, in any given population the “distribution” of socio-political ideology is approximately as follows: about 30%, for a strange biological [?] reason, are rightists (that is crypto-fascists or even crypto-Nazis, but are called, simply, “conservatives”), about 40% consider themselves “moderate” or even “progressive” (but in reality they are scared people striving to make a living), about 15% are politically indifferent to the point of cynicism, about 10% are leftists (honest people with integrity and dignity), and finally there is the 5% of economic elite with their servant personnel ( the latter are called, also, politicians, military, etc).

Therefore, it is a considerable part of the ordinary Britons that allows the British elites to be the “poodle” of the US elites. That part could be the 30% of the “conservatives” reinforced by part of the cynics or it could be the 40% of the “moderates” aided again by the cynics. The nomenclature in Britain is Conservatives vs. Laborites, in the US it is Republicans vs. Democrats, and so on for other countries.

Let us go back to the case of Italy. Notice that the date for the discussion about a coup in Italy is May 1976. Only 20 months before that date, in July of 1974, the same coup scenario ended in Greece after a seven-years-long dictatorship instigated by the US elites through the rightist military in Greece. No need to elaborate on the brutality of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship in Greece. However, there is an interesting lesson to be learned: today in the central prison of Athens there are two members of the military dictatorship, Ioannidis [the master torturer and dictator for the last lap of the scenario] and colonel Dertilis [a sheer murderous person]. They have been in prison for 33 years. The only protection their US mentors could offer them was a modicum of luxury in their cells. It would be equally interesting to follow the fate of Musharraf of Pakistan, when the people tortured by his goons demand justice.

The “Der Spiegel” article closes with the following paragraph: “Luckily for Italy things turned differently. In the June 1976 election it was surprisingly the DC [Christian Democracy] that won 38.7 percent. The PCI [Italian Communist Party] stayed at the opposition with 34.4 percent.” Does the word “luckily” show how “mainstream” is the position of the German magazine or does it mean that the Italian people avoided “surgery”? Let us hope it is the latter. As for the 34.4 per cent of the 1976 Italian communists, in no way all of them can be considered leftists of the above mentioned 10%. Most were of the “moderate” variety.

What would have happened if the Italian communists had won? Not much. The state would have been a copy of the Christian Democrats with a more humane face this time and possibly with some benefits for the working people. However, the climate could have been favorable to plant the seeds for a pareconish kind of society!

So, finally, we arrive at the crucial question. Why is it that the British and the American elites, products of Oxford and of Cambridge or of Harvard and of Yale, respectively, do not give a damn about human life and act in an immoral and even in a rather “psychotic” way?

Let us try to see who these elites are. They are white, they profess to be Christians, they are very rich, they have the arrogance of the highly “educated” [education supposedly based on the classical Greek ideas], they are deeply racist, they carry the complex of the awareness of being untalented [so, they buy Rembrandts!], they grow in families of cruelty and hypocrisy, they are cowardly [so, they build armies and brutal police forces to dominate the ordinary people and thus feel secure], their women are equally brutal [in some cases even worse, e.g. Thatcher]. No need to go on, there is enough accumulated evil up to this point to last for the next dozens of Vietnams and Iraqs, not to mention “surgical” interventions in Italy, Greece, etc.

But, as the [Chomskyan] argument goes: it is the institutions that use the individuals to carry out the brutality. If the present “batch” of elites goes, then there would be another one to replace them, say a “batch” of Soviet communist elites. However, could it be that the institutions are products of the culture of the particular societies, the UK and the US ones, for the case we are talking about? But the culture of a population is the sum of the beliefs and acts of the individuals that constitute that specific population.

Therefore, the only way to stop the brutality by the UK and the US elites is for the ordinary people of these countries to start thinking about changing their culture.

[Note: Of course I did not mean to “lecture” anybody. All I tried to do is furnish some bits of information about the Italian case which might be unknown to young Britons and to young Americans. Information, that helps one to understand the human pain of the Iraqis, the Afghans, and the Palestinians.]

To blame the victims for this killing spree defies both morality and sense

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:09:43 +0000

The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week’s carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence – or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides – has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a “holocaust” if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.

So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the “numerous civilian casualties” on the week’s “significant rise” in Palestinian rocket attacks “and the Israeli response”, condemn the firing of rockets as “terrorist acts” and defend Israel’s right to self-defence “in accordance with international law”. But of course it has been nothing of the kind – any more than has been Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees.

Nor is the past week’s one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel – backed by the US and the European Union – imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January’s mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn’t work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians.

But the US and Europe’s response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the “starting point” of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years.

Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation – or to self-defence – whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world’s largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

The truth is that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians’ democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair – and also passed to the Guardian – George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: “What happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran’s support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt’s unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president’s face.

Neither looks a serious option, not least because Hamas cannot be crushed by force, even with the bloodbath that some envisage. The third, commonsense option, backed by 64% of Israelis, is to take up Hamas’s offer – repeated by its leader Khalid Mish’al at the weekend – and negotiate a truce. It’s a move that now attracts not only left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin, but also a growing number of rightwing establishment figures, including Ariel Sharon’s former security adviser Giora Eiland, the former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy, and the ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz.

The US, however, is resolutely opposed to negotiating with what it has long branded a terrorist organisation – or allowing anyone else to do so, including other Palestinians. As the leaked American papers confirm, Rice effectively instructed Abbas to “collapse” the joint Hamas-Fatah national unity government agreed in Mecca early last year, a decision carried out after Hamas’s pre-emptive takeover. But for the Palestinians, national unity is an absolute necessity if they are to have any chance of escaping a world of walled cantons, checkpoints, ethnically segregated roads, dispossession and humiliation.

What else can Israel do to stop the rockets, its supporters ask. The answer could not be more obvious: end the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed 60 years ago – who, with their families, make up the majority of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, agree a truce, exchange prisoners and lift the blockade. Israelis increasingly seem to get it – but the grim reality appears to be that a lot more blood is going to have to flow before it’s accepted in Washington.