December 23, 2012

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Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

August 30, 2012 By 4 Comments

Originally posted by Christina Bonnington and Spencer Ackerman on Wired.com, August 30, 2012

It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

A mockup of developer Josh Begley’s drone-strike app for iOS. Wired.com

It’s the third time in a month that Apple has turned Drones+ away, says Josh Begley, the program’s New York-based developer. The company’s reasons for keeping the program out of the App Store keep shifting. First, Apple called the bare-bones application that aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia “not useful.” Then there was an issue with hiding a corporate logo. And now, there’s this crude content problem.

Begley is confused. Drones+ doesn’t present grisly images of corpses left in the aftermath of the strikes. It just tells users when a strike has occurred, going off a publicly available database of strikes compiled by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles media accounts of the strikes.

iOS developers have a strict set of guidelines that must be adhered to in order to gain acceptance into the App Store. Apps are judged on technical, content and design criteria. As Apple does not comment on the app reviews process, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly why an app got rejected. But Apple’s team of reviewers is small, sifts through up to 10,000 apps a week, and necessarily errs on the side of caution when it comes to potentially questionable apps.

Apple’s original objections to Drones+ regarded the functionality in Begley’s app, not its content. Now he’s wondering if it’s worth redesigning and submitting it a fourth time.

“If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley says.

Begley’s app is unlikely to be the next Angry Birds or Draw Something. It’s deliberately threadbare. When a drone strike occurs, Drones+ catalogs it, and presents a map of the area where the strike took place, marked by a pushpin. You can click through to media reports of a given strike that the Bureau of Investigative Reporting compiles, as well as some basic facts about whom the media thinks the strike targeted. As the demo video above shows, that’s about it.

It works best, Begley thinks, when users enable push notifications for Drones+. “I wanted to play with this idea of push notifications and push button technology — essentially asking a question about what we choose to get notified about in real time,” he says. “I thought reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.”

But that conversation may not end up occurring. Begley, a student at Clay Shirky’s lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, submitted a threadbare version of Drones+ to Apple in July. About two weeks later, on July 23, Apple told him was just too blah. “The features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough,” read an e-mail from Apple Begley shared with Wired, “or your app did not appeal to a broad enough audience.”

Finally, on Aug. 27, Apple gave him yet another thumbs down. But this time the company’s reasons were different from the fairly clear-cut functionality concerns it previously cited. “We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,” the company e-mailed him.

It was the first time the App Store told him that his content was the real problem, even though the content hadn’t changed much from Begley’s initial July submission. It’s a curious choice: The App Store carries remote-control apps for a drone quadricopter, although not one actually being used in a war zone. And of course, the App Store houses innumerable applications for news publications and aggregators that deliver much of the same content provided by Begley’s app.

Wired reached out to Apple on the perplexing rejection of the app, but Apple was unable to comment.

Begley is about at his wits end over the iOS version of Drones+. “I’m kind of back at the drawing board about what exactly I’m supposed to do,” Begley said. The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.’ secretive, robotic wars, with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley’s thinking about whether he’d have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.

Drones+ iPhone App from Josh Begley on Vimeo.

Source: https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/

Filed Under: Censorship, Genocide, Internet, Media, Military, Murder, Pakistan, Technology, Terrorism, USA, War, Weapons

Syrian Peace Deal: UN’s Cloak to NATO’s Dagger

April 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Turkey begins fabricating “cross border” incidents to justify Brookings prescribed “safe havens” inside Syria.
by Tony Cartalucci on April 9, 2012

From the very beginning, US policy makers admitted that Kofi Annan’s “peace mission” to Syria was nothing more than a rouse to preserve NATO’s proxy forces from total destruction and create “safe havens” from which to prolong the bloodshed. It was hoped that with established “safe havens” in Syria, protected by Turkish military forces (Turkey has been a NATO member since 1952) violence and pressure verses the Syrian government could be perpetually increased until it finally collapsed and the carving up of Syria could commence.

Photo: Annan is a trustee of Wall Street speculator George Soros and geopolitical manipulator Zbigniew Brzezinski’s International Crisis Group (ICG), along side Neo-Conservative corporate lobbyist and warmonger Kenneth Adelman, US State Department-listed Iranian terror organization MEK lobbyist - General Wesley Clark, Wall Street-backed color revolution leader- Mohammed ElBaradei of Egypt, and Brookings Institution’s Samuel Berger. Serving as “advisers” to the International Crisis Group include, Neo-Conservative warmonger Richard Armitage, former Foreign Minister of Israel Shlomo Ben-Ami, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bank of Israel Governor Stanely Fischer, and President of Israel Shimon Peres. While Annan poses as a representative of the “United Nations” he is in reality representing the pro-regime change agenda of the ICG and the special interests that fund its work.

….

This has been confirmed by Fortune 500-funded, US foreign-policy think-tank, Brookings Institution which has blueprinted designs for regime change in Libya as well as both Syria andIran. In their latest report, “Assessing Options for Regime Change” it is stated (emphasis added):

“An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership.This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.” -page 4, Assessing Options for Regime Change, Brookings Institution.

Click to enlarge

Image: Also out of the Brookings Institution, Middle East Memo #21 “Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf),” makes no secret that the humanitarian “responsibility to protect” is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.

….

And while “peace” was being peddled by Soros-funded International Crisis Group trustee Kofi Annan, the US, UK, France, and members of the West’s proxy Arab League simultaneously called for Assad to stand down and withdraw troops from secured cities while openly declaring that arms and cash would continue to flow to the rebels. The “Friends of Syria” summit would even ludicrously declare that “wages” would be paid to rebels to continue their battle to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Clearly the label “peace deal” is inappropriate for a proposal that seeks to empower and indeed see one side prevail militarily over another whose hands are purposefully tied. It is an unconditional surrender to foreign-funded terrorists simply labeled as a “peace deal.”

The Brookings Institution’s “safe havens” and “humanitarian corridors” are meant to be established by NATO-member Turkey, who has been threatening to partially invade Syria for weeks in order to accomplish this. And while Turkey claims this is based on “humanitarian concerns,” examining Turkey’s abysmal human rights record in addition to its own ongoing genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people both within and beyond its borders, it is clear they are simply fulfilling the agenda established by their Western patrons on Wall Street and in the city of London.

Photo: Turkish tanks entering Iraq to raid Kurdish towns and hunt suspected rebels in 2008. More recently, Turkey has been bombing “suspected” rebel bases in both Turkey and Iraq, as well as conducting mass nationwide arrests. Strangely, as Turkey verifiably does what Libya’s Qaddafi and Syria’s Assad have been accused of doing, in all of their hypocrisy, are now calling for a partial invasion of Syria based on “humanitarian concerns.”

….Now, Turkey is fabricating stories involving Syrian troops “firing across” the Turkish-Syrian border. The New York Times published these bold accusations before admitting further down that “it was unclear what kind of weapons caused the injuries on Sunday around six miles inside Turkish territory,” and that “there were conflicting accounts about the incident.” As are all the accusations used by NATO, the UN, and individual member states to justify meddling in Syria’s affairs, these tales involve hear-say from the rebels themselves.

It is clear that Turkey, NATO, and the UN are attempting to set the pretext for the establishment of “safe havens” and “humanitarian corridors” intended to circumvent the UN Security Council which has seen attempts to green-light military intervention vetoed twice by Russia and China. As the UN “peace deal” deadline of April 10 comes and goes, we can expect an ever increasing din of propaganda purporting Syrian violations against Turkish sovereignty, the continued propaganda campaign accentuating the “victimization” of NATO’s death squads, and the public roll-out of Brookings’ Turkish established “safe haven” within Syrian territory.

Image: Some of the corporate sponsors behind the Brookings Institution, from whose playbook Kofi Annan is being directed in his disingenuous “peace mission” to Syria. (click image to enlarge)

Image: Just some of the corporate and “institutional” sponsors of the International Crisis Group, upon which Kofi Annan sits as a “trustee” with other dubious personalities including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Israeli President Shimon Peres, Egypt’s Mohammed ElBaradei, and Neo-Cons Richard Armitage and Kenneth Adelman. (click image to enlarge)

….The UN “peace deal” was a rouse from the beginning. The West has no intention of leaving Syria intact and will seek all means by which to prevail in toppling the government, carving up the country along sectarian lines, plunging it into perpetual violence as it has Libya, and moving next toward Iran. While it is essential to expose the truth behind Syria’s unrest, is also important to identify the corporate-financier interests driving this nefarious agenda and boycott them entirely while seeking out viable local solutions to support instead. If none exist, it is our duty to use our time, money, attention, and resources to create such alternatives instead of perpetuating the self-serving agenda unfolding before us.

Ultimately it is “we the people” paying into this current paradigm that allows it to continue moving forward, therefore it by necessity must be “we the people” who undermine and ultimately replace it.

Source: https://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/syrian-peace-deal-uns-cloak-to-natos.html

Filed Under: Africa, British Petroleum, China, Corporations, France, Genocide, Human Rights, Iran, Libya, Military Industrial Complex, NATO, Russia, Safety, Syria, Terrorism, Turkey, United Kingdom, United Nations

The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Matter of Peace or War?

December 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Let us, on this International Day, reaffirm our commitment to translating ‎solidarity into positive action. The international community must help steer the situation ‎towards a historic peace agreement.‎” That is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 29 November 2011.

Mr. Ban called on the Israeli and Palestinian leadership to show courage and determination to seek an agreement for a two-State solution that can open up a brighter future for Palestinian and Israeli children.

There have been many Middle East peace proposals and many negotiations including an Arab state, with or without a significant Jewish population, a Jewish state, with or without a significant Arab population, a single bi-national state, with or without some degree of cantonization, two states, one bi-national and one Arab, with or without some form of federation, and two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with or without some form of federation.

During the 19th Century some Jews banded together to form a political ideology called Zionism, based on the idea of a “Jewish homeland.” In the USA the Zionist movement developed a powerful political lobby to promote its aims, while its military groups pursued a violent terrorist campaign in Palestine against the Arabs and Britain to force acceptance of its demands.

On 29 November 1947 the United Nations adopted a partition resolution dividing the land of Palestine into two independent states- one Arab and one Jewish, while Jerusalem was put under international protection. This was accepted by most of the Jewish settlers, who comprised 13% of the population and rejected by the majority Arab population, the original inhabitants who demanded self–determination. The British said the decision would be a failure and refused to apply it. When British forces withdrew in May 1948, and Israel declared independence fighting broke out between Arabs and Jews.

One of the first plans for settling the Arab-Israel war of 1948 was made by the UN emissary, Count Folke Bernadotte. Count Folke Bernadotte was a Swedish noble and diplomat, nephew of the Swedish king, fluent in six languages; he was an outstanding humanitarian and very well respected for his integrity. He gained international recognition through his work as head of the Swedish Red Cross during World War Two, organizing exchanges of disabled prisoners. Bernadotte also used his position to negotiate with Heinrich Himmler, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party, and save the lives of about 30,000 Jews, Allied prisoners of war and other people from the concentration camps, just before the end of the war.

Count Folke Bernadotte

On 20th May, 1948, the United Nations Security Council appointed Bernadotte as mediator in the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. After meeting Arab and Jewish leaders he succeeded in obtaining a 30-day truce that began on 11th June. In then developed his first plan for peace.

First Proposal

Bernadotte’s first plan called for the Jewish State to relinquish the Negev and Jerusalem to Transjordan and to receive the western Galilee. Bernadotte advocated a total demilitarization of Jerusalem and blamed the Jewish forces for “aggressive” behavior in the city.

The Arab world rejected the Bernadotte plan on the grounds that, as Syrian officer Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib said, “Most of these mediators are spies for the Jews anyway.” The Israeli government, hating the idea of giving up Jerusalem and bent on military victory, quickly followed suit. Fighting resumed on July 8 and the Israeli army gained strength and succeeded in pushing back the Arabs until a second UN cease-fire was declared on July 18, this time with no time limit and a threat of economic sanctions against any country that broke it.

After the unsuccessful first proposal, Bernadotte continued with a more complex proposal that abandoned the idea of a Union and proposed two independent states. Having witnessed the expulsion of the Palestinians from their home, he called for the unqualified return of all Palestinian refugees expelled as a result of the conflict. He declared:

“The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return…. [N]o settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged. It will be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right of return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine…”

The Palestinian People

Second Proposal

This proposal was completed on September 16, 1948 and it contained what he described as “seven basic premises” regarding the situation in Palestine:

  1. Peace must return to Palestine and every feasible measure should be taken to ensure that hostilities will not be resumed and that harmonious relations between Arab and Jew will ultimately be restored.
  2. A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so.
  3. The boundaries of this new State must finally be fixed either by formal agreement between the parties concerned or failing that, by the United Nations.
  4. Adherence to the principle of geographical homogeneity and integration, which should be the major objective of the boundary arrangements, should apply equally to Arab and Jewish territories, whose frontiers should not therefore, be rigidly controlled by the territorial arrangements envisaged in the resolution of 29 November.
  5. The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.
  6. The City of Jerusalem, because of its religious and international significance and the complexity of interests involved, should be accorded special and separate treatment.
  7. International responsibility should be expressed where desirable and necessary in the form of international guarantees, as a means of allaying existing fears, and particularly with regard to boundaries and human rights.

On 17 September 1948, the day after he submitted his progress report to the UN, a four-man team of the Jewish nationalist Zionist group Lehi (commonly known as the Stern Gang or Stern Group) ambushed Bernadotte’s motorcade in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood.

The four hit men were, in fact, Stern Gang members consisting of three gunmen and a driver. The three gunmen were Yitzhak Ben-Moshe, “Gingi” Zinger, and Yehoshua Cohen. Cohen was the shooter who murdered Bernadotte. The fourth member of the hit team, the jeep driver, was Meshulam Makover.

The Assassination of Count Bernadotte

Of the three Stern Gang leaders who dispatched the killers, Israel Eldad, Natan Yalin-Mor and Yitzhak Shamir, only Yalon-Mor was brought to trial along with one gang member, Mattiyahu Shmulovitz. They were not charged with Bernadotte’s murder but with membership in a terrorist organization. Following their conviction Yalon-Mor and Shmulovitz were pardoned under a general amnesty ordered by Ben-Gurion after serving only two weeks in jail.

Based upon events in Israel following Bernadotte’s assassination it is apparent that being a member of the Stern Gang was not blight on one’s good name but a career-enhancing credential. For example, Natan Yalin-Mor was elected to a seat in the First Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The shooter, Yehoshua Cohen, became Ben-Gurion’s personal bodyguard. In 1983, Yitzhak Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin as Prime Minister.

From 1948 through to the present day, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is ongoing. After all these years, the only unanswerable question is the one that was asked by Bertrand Russell in his message to the International Conference of Parliamentarians held in February 1970:

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased.

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?

It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

Sources:

https://www.1948.org.uk/right-of-return/

https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/un/solidarity-day-palestinian-people

https://www.soschildrensvillages.ca/News/News/child-charity-news/Pages/International-Solidarity-Palestinian-749.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_a_Palestinian_state

https://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Bernadotte_Plan.htm

https://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDbernadotte.htm

https://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/49384

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/folke.html

https://suspiciousdeaths.blogspot.com/2010/06/count-folke-bernadotte.html

Filed Under: Featured, Genocide, Human Rights, Israel, Palestine, Politics, War Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Tibetan Nun Burns Herself To Death In China

November 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Nun is 11th ethnic Tibetan this year to have taken own life in region known as centre of defiance against strict Chinese control

A Tibetan nun has burned herself to death in south-west China, Xinhua news agency said, the 11th ethnic Tibetan this year known to have set themselves on fire in a region that has become the centre of defiance against strict Chinese control.

Qiu Xiang, 35, set herself on fire at a road crossing in Dawu county of Ganzi, called Kandze by Tibetans, in Sichuan province, the state news agency said.The nun was from the county’s Tongfoshan village, Xinhua said.

The report said it was unclear why she killed herself and the local government had launched an investigation.

Last week, a Tibetan Buddhist monk doused himself in fuel and set himself ablaze in Ganzi.

Most people in Ganzi and neighbouring Aba, the site of eight self-immolations, are ethnic Tibetan herders and farmers, and many see themselves as members of a wider Tibetan region encompassing the official Tibetan Autonomous Region and other areas across the highlands of China’s west.

China has ruled Tibet with an iron fist since Communist troops marched in in 1950. Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled nine years later after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

The Dalai Lama, whom China condemns as a supporter of violent separatism, led hundreds of monks, nuns and lay Tibetans in prayer in his adopted homeland in India in late October to mourn those who have burned themselves to death.The Dalai Lama denies advocating violence and insists he wants only real autonomy for his homeland.

But the Chinese foreign ministry has said the Dalai Lama should take the blame for the burnings, and repeated Beijing’s line that Tibetans are free to practise their Buddhist faith.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/tibetan-nun-burns-death-china

Filed Under: Censorship, China, Crime, Genocide, Imperialism, Martial Law, Occupy, Politics, Propaganda, Protests, Religion, Rights, Social Unrest, Spirituality, Surveillance, Tibet, Torture, Violence Tagged With: ,

Turkey: Erdogan Apologises to Kurds for Mass Killing

November 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

DOHA, Nov 24, 2011 (IPS/Al Jazeera) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has issued the first official apology for a bloody military campaign that killed thousands of Kurds in southeast Turkey in the late 1930s.

“If it is necessary to apologise on behalf of the state … I will apologise, I am apologising,” Erdogan told his Justice and Development Party (AKP) members on Wednesday in televised remarks.

Erdogan said that the air strikes and ground operations in the city of Dersim - now named Tunceli - killed 13,800 people between 1936 and 1939, according to an official document of the time, which he cited in his speech.

“Dersim is one of the most tragic events of our near history. It is a disaster waiting to be enlightened and boldly questioned,” Erdogan said.

The offensive took place under the rule of the current main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which was established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.

About 11,600 people were exiled to other regions across Turkey, Erdogan said, citing another official document signed by Ismet Inonu, then leader of the CHP and Turkey’s second president after Ataturk died in 1938.

Turkey was under the one-party rule of the CHP until 1946.

Erdogan said the archives of his office were open for any research of official documents about the events.

Opposition blamed

Erdogan slammed the CHP for the killings and urged the party to “face up to” that bloody campaign. The current leader of the CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is from Dersim.

“Dersim is the most painful and bloody (event) among tens, hundreds of disasters the CHP had caused,” Erdogan said.

“It is not the AK Party and the AK Party government that should face up to this event and apologise; it is the CHP.”

Recently, Mehmet Metiner, an AKP deputy, proposed changing the name of Sabiha Gokcen Airport in Istanbul, which was named after the adopted daughter of Ataturk.

Gokcen was Turkey’s first woman pilot and actively took part in the air campaign against Dersim.

While Turkey is breaking a taboo on its official rhetoric about the Dersim killings, the country rejects Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during the World War I period.

Armenians say that up to 1.5 million of their kin fell victim to genocide in 1915, when the Armenian community across the country was driven from their homes.

Turkey refuses to categorise the 1915 killings as genocide, and counters that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian forces.

Ankara is still battling Kurdish fighters, whose Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) took up arms in southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

The PKK is fighting for an autonomous Kurdistan and greater cultural and political rights for Kurds in Turkey.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

 

Source: https://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105956

Filed Under: Crime, Genocide, Justice

In Remembrance: The Native American Indians

November 24, 2011 By 4 Comments

Today on “Thanksgiving” when you are sitting down feasting with the family, please, give thanks to this man from the Wampanoag Indians.

It was Vernon ‘Silent Drum’ Lopez’s Wampanoag Ancestors who warmly greeted the first settlers to Plymouth Rock - before eventually, along with other tribes - being wiped out.

Please remember these generous-hearted people who welcomed the settlers with open arms and hearts…

Thank you.

Filed Under: Genocide, Native American Indians, USA

A Counter-Culture Thanksgiving

November 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
That time of year is upon us again, when Americans will play along with traditions that have been largely corrupted by an establishment who seeks to propagate a dehumanizing culture of lies. Those may seem like strong words to describe one of your favorite times of the year, but just bear with me for a minute. I’m not suggesting that we do away with Thanksgiving altogether, or any other holiday for that matter. These are tough times that we are living in and having a day to relax and spend with loved ones is one of the most positive things that we can do. Especially in this culture where the family unit is demonized and being replaced with various state institutions, it is very important to make time for the people in your life. However, that doesn’t mean that we have to go along with a lot of the false historical narratives that have infected our most cherished celebrations.

Thanksgiving is by far the most obvious example, so it will probably be the best place to start.Since we were children our heads were filled with lies every single Thanksgiving; lies that rationalized and justified the genocide that took place so this country could be colonized.

Now that we live in the information age, people are a lot less likely to believe the downright fiction that has been passed off as history for generations.

Unfortunately, there are still way too many people who insist on playing along with these stories for the sake of fitting in or “respecting tradition”.

Our generation is the first in history to have access to alternative viewpoints, so let’s take the leap and create a culture that is actually empowering to those who adopt it.

Unfortunately the people that are responsible for creating mainstream culture have no interest in our well being. We are the source of their power, so in order to keep us under their control, they feed us a culture that programs us to operate according to their wishes. They do this by infecting some of the things that we enjoy the most with their toxic ideas. This is extremely common with holidays because they are so sacred to so many people. All that we need to do is remove the specific toxic ideas from contemporary culture and replace them with something that is actually beneficial.

As far as Thanksgiving is concerned, we really need to counteract the nationalistic folklore that has accompanied this holiday throughout our lives. If anything, it should be a day about preserving the true history of what happened, keeping the native culture alive, and paying respect to the people that were slain at the hands of our oppressors’ ancestors. Notice I didn’t say “my ancestors” or “our ancestors”, because that would not be a true statement. The people that are truly responsible for imperialism throughout history have progressively handed their power and plans down through their bloodlines. In other words we are being oppressed by blood descendants of the people who were oppressing our ancestors; the very people who committed and planned this genocide of which I speak.

To say that there was just one civilization here before colonization began would be a disservice to the diverse culture of the pre-Columbus Americas. Making the generalization that every tribe in that hemisphere was the same would be like saying that Canada, Mexico and the United States had identical cultures today. Contrary to the Europeans claims that the Americas were a vast uninhabited wilderness, there was actually a massive native population that numbered in the hundreds of millions. Traces of this large population seemed easy enough to destroy at first, considering the natives put a great deal of care into making as little an impact on their environment as possible. However, as time passes archeologists are continuing to uncover evidence that the pre-Columbus civilizations were much more advanced and populated then the historical record has told us thus far.

That’s not the only thing lied about in our history class. The ruling classes were also well aware that there were unexplored continents on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Many early European civilizations took voyages to the other side of the Atlantic over a thousand years ago; it is even believed that early Irish and Norse cultures actually had trade established with some Native American tribes. All of this information was hidden from most of the general public; only the nobility who were literate and had a decent understanding of history knew that the world was twice as big as most people believed. Oppressive warmongering rulers always hide important information from their subjects so they are easier to control and more willing to accept subpar living standards. This situation is no different. The popular myth that the world was flat was merely propaganda to keep any explorers from traveling west and discovering the new world before they were ready to conquer it for themselves.

Due to lack of resources, and the extensive crusades and inquisitions that were raging in Europe for many centuries, it took the elite until 1492 to make their official move across the Atlantic Ocean. Prior to this, only exploratory voyages were taken to the new world in order to prepare and gather information for future colonization.

When the elite were ready for conquest they sent an inquisitor and mapmaker by the name of Christopher Columbus to begin the Native American genocide and colonization process. Columbus was not an explorer, but one of the few elite members of society that had access to occult information such as the existence of the Americas.

Two years before Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1490 he created a map which actually showed portions of North America, namely Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. This proves that Columbus knew exactly where he was going when he set sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus most likely obtained this knowledge through a secret society he belonged to called “the Knights of Christ” which were apparently a surviving underground order of the knights Templar. This connection would explain why all three of Columbus’s ships from his famous first voyage were flying the colors of the knights Templar, the Maltese red cross. Regardless of where Columbus got his information his mission was certain, to harvest natural resources using native slave labor and to claim land for the catholic monarchy. This colonization would be the start of the most brutal genocide in known human history.

This is sadly the true history of the place that we live in, and while it may be unpleasant there is a lot that can be learned these from historical tragedies. By continuing to perpetuate the ethnocentric myths about the founding of this country we are ensuring that these lessons from the past will remain hidden.

In the counter-culture it isn’t necessarily our goal to completely eradicate all traces of contemporary culture form our lives, but our goal is simply to create a culture that is our own. Let’s enjoy Thanksgiving with our families without playing along with the traditional misinformation that holds very little value in relation to the true origins and nature of this holiday.

 

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/counter-culture-thanksgiving.html

Filed Under: Genocide, Native American Indians, USA

How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot A Hand

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Almost two million Cambodians died as a result of Year Zero. John Pilger argues that, without the complicity of the US and Britain, it may never have happened.

On 17 April, it is 25 years since Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. In the calendar of fanaticism, this was Year Zero; as many as two million people, a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were to die as a consequence. To mark the anniversary, the evil of Pol Pot will be recalled, almost as a ritual act for voyeurs of the politically dark and inexplicable. For the managers of western power, no true lessons will be drawn, because no connections will be made to them and to their predecessors, who were Pol Pot’s Faustian partners.

Yet, without the complicity of the west, Year Zero might never have happened, nor the threat of its return maintained for so long.

Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power. “They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.” In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half a million people. Year Zero began, in effect, with them; the bombing was a catalyst for the rise of a small sectarian group, the Khmer Rouge, whose combination of Maoism and medievalism had no popular base.

After two and a half years in power, the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese on Christmas Day, 1978. In the months and years that followed, the US and China and their allies, notably the Thatcher government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand. He was the enemy of their enemy: Vietnam, whose liberation of Cambodia could never be recognised because it had come from the wrong side of the cold war. For the Americans, now backing Beijing against Moscow, there was also a score to be settled for their humiliation on the rooftops of Saigon.

To this end, the United Nations was abused by the powerful. Although the Khmer Rouge government (“Democratic Kampuchea”) had ceased to exist in January 1979, its representatives were allowed to continue occupying Cambodia’s seat at the UN; indeed, the US, China and Britain insisted on it. Meanwhile, a Security Council embargo on Cambodia compounded the suffering of a traumatised nation, while the Khmer Rouge in exile got almost everything it wanted. In 1981, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.” The US, he added, “winked publicly” as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge.

In fact, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since January 1980. The extent of this support - $85m from 1980 to 1986 - was revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On the Thai border with Cambodia, the CIA and other intelligence agencies set up the Kampuchea Emergency Group, which ensured that humanitarian aid went to Khmer Rouge enclaves in the refugee camps and across the border. Two American aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote: “The US government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed . . . the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation.” Under American pressure, the World Food Programme handed over $12m in food to the Thai army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge; “20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerillas benefited,” wrote Richard Holbrooke, the then US assistant secretary of state.

I witnessed this. Travelling with a UN convoy of 40 trucks, I drove to a Khmer Rouge operations base at Phnom Chat. The base commander was the infamous Nam Phann, known to relief workers as “The Butcher” and Pol Pot’s Himmler. After the supplies had been unloaded, literally at his feet, he said: “Thank you very much, and we wish for more.”

In November of that year, 1980, direct contact was made between the White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a secret visit to a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect Reagan’s transitional team. By 1981, a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about the charade of the UN’s continuing recognition of the defunct Pol Pot regime. Something had to be done. The following year, the US and China invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was neither a coalition nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea (Cambodia). It was what the CIA calls “a master illusion”. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The two “non-communist” members, the Sihanoukists, led by the Prince’s son, Norodom Ranariddh, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, were dominated, diplomatically and militarily, by the Khmer Rouge. One of Pol Pot’s closet cronies, Thaoun Prasith, ran the office at the UN in New York.

In Bangkok, the Americans provided the “coalition” with battle plans, uniforms, money and satellite intelligence; arms came direct from China and from the west, via Singapore. The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress - spurred on by a cold-war zealot Stephen Solarz, a powerful committee chairman - to approve $24m in aid to the “resistance”.

Until 1989, the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close professional and family contacts with the SAS. He revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force. Soon afterwards, Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that the British training for the “non-communist” members of the “coalition” had been going on “at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years”. The instructors were from the SAS, “all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain”.

The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after the “Irangate” arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986. “If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot,” a Ministry of Defence source told O’Dwyer-Russell, “the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements.” Moreover, Margaret Thatcher had let slip, to the consternation of the Foreign Office, that “the more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government”. In 1991, I interviewed a member of “R” (reserve) Squadron of the SAS, who had served on the border. “We trained the KR in a lot of technical stuff - a lot about mines,” he said. “We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt with marking changed . . . We even gave them psychological training. At first, they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . .”

The Foreign Office response was to lie. “Britain does not give military aid in any form to the Cambodian factions,” stated a parliamentary reply. The then prime minister, Thatcher, wrote to Neil Kinnock: “I confirm that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them.” On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the government finally admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the “resistance” since 1983. A report by Asia Watch filled in the detail: the SAS had taught “the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay devices”. The author of the report, Rae McGrath (who shared a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign on landmines), wrote in the Guardian that “the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy”.

When a UN “peacekeeping force” finally arrived in Cambodia in 1992, the Faustian pact was never clearer. Declared merely a “warring faction”, the Khmer Rouge was welcomed back to Phnom Penh by UN officials, if not the people. The western politician who claimed credit for the “peace process”, Gareth Evans (then Australia’s foreign minister), set the tone by calling for an “even-handed” approach to the Khmer Rouge and questioning whether calling it genocidal was “a specific stumbling block”.

Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s prime minister during the years of genocide, took the salute of UN troops with their commander, the Australian general John Sanderson, at his side. Eric Falt, the UN spokesman in Cambodia, told me: “The peace process was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge] to gain respectability.”

The consequence of the UN’s involvement was the unofficial ceding of at least a quarter of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge (according to UN military maps), the continuation of a low-level civil war and the election of a government impossibly divided between “two prime ministers”: Hun Sen and Norodom Ranariddh.

The Hun Sen government has since won a second election outright. Authoritarian and at times brutal, yet by Cambodian standards extraordinarily stable, the government led by a former Khmer Rouge dissident, Hun Sen, who fled to Vietnam in the 1970s, has since done deals with leading figures of the Pol Pot era, notably the breakaway faction of Ieng Sary, while denying others immunity from prosecution.

Once the Phnom Penh government and the UN can agree on its form, an international war crimes tribunal seems likely to go ahead. The Americans want the Cambodians to play virtually no part; their understandable concern is that not only the Khmer Rouge will be indicted.

The Cambodian lawyer defending Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military leader captured last year, has said: “All the foreigners involved have to be called to court, and there will be no exceptions . . . Madeleine Albright, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush . . . we are going to invite them to tell the world why they supported the Khmer Rouge.”

It is an important principle, of which those in Washington and Whitehall currently sustaining bloodstained tyrannies elsewhere might take note.

 

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/200004170017

Filed Under: Cambodia, Crime, Genocide

Cambodia Genocide - Remember That Britain’s SAS Trained The Khymer Rouge

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
At a time when the USA is supporting Israel’s actions in Palestine, we should remember that the USA and UK supported Pol Pot and his murderous Khymer Rouge.
The Khymer Rouge killed off around one quarter of Cambodia’s population. Vietnam was pro-Russia. Pol Pot was not pro-Russia.

So the USA and UK supported Pol Pot. In 1970, Cambodia’s head of state Prince Sihanouk was toppled by pro-American forces.

In the early 1970s, the USA was bombing sections of Cambodia as part of its Vietnam War. This helped win recruits for Pol Pot.

Pol Pot ran the government of Cambodia from 1975 until 1979, although he was influential before 1975.

In 1972, the Vietnamese intervened in Cambodia against Pol Pot’s group.

“Washington took immediate steps to preserve the Khymer Rouge as a guerrilla movement,” according to Jack Colhoun in Covert Action Quarterly magazine, Summer 1990.

Zbigniew Brzezinski said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the DK (Democratic Kampuchea).”

The USA allowed the Khymer Rouge to use camps in Thailand.

John Pilger, 17 April 2000, wrote in the New Statesman, about US and UK help to Pol Pot. (New Statesman - How Thatcher gave Pol Pot a hand)

Almost two million Cambodians died as a result of Pol Pot.

John Pilger argues that these lives could have been saved if the US and Britain had not helped Pol Pot’s Khymer Rouge.

The illegal bombing of neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, between 1969 and 1973, killed an estimated half a million Cambodians, and helped Pol Pot gain recruits.

The Khymer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese at the end of 1978.

In the years that followed, the US and the UK’s Thatcher government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand.

Khymer Rouge representatives were allowed to continue occupying Cambodia’s seat at the UN.

In 1981, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.”

The US, he said, “winked publicly” as China sent arms to the Khymer Rouge.

The US secretly funded Pol Pot in exile.

This was revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In November 1980, Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a visit to a Khymer Rouge operational headquarters.

In 1982, the US invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea.

According to John Pilger, the ‘Coalition’ was dominated, diplomatically and militarily, by the Khymer Rouge.

One of Pol Pot’s closet cronies, Thaoun Prasith, ran the office at the UN in New York.

In 1989, the British role in Cambodia was revealed. In the Sunday Telegraph, Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force.

Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that the British training for the members of the ‘coalition’ had been going on “at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years”.The instructors were from the SAS, “all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain”. The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after 1986.In 1991, John Pilger interviewed a member of “R” (reserve) Squadron of the SAS, who had served on the border.”We trained the KR in a lot of technical stuff - a lot about mines,” he said.”We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt with marking changed . . .”We even gave them psychological training. At first, they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . .”

On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the UK government finally admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the “resistance” since 1983.

A report by Asia Watch filled in the detail: the SAS had taught “the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay devices”.

The author of the report, Rae McGrath (who shared a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign on landmines), wrote in the Guardian that “the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy”.

In 1992, a UN “peacekeeping force” arrived in Cambodia.

The Khymer Rouge was welcomed back to Phnom Penh by UN officials.

Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s prime minister during the years of genocide, took the salute of UN troops with their commander, the Australian general John Sanderson, at his side.

The result of the UN’s involvement was ‘the unofficial ceding of at least a quarter of Cambodia to the Khymer Rouge (according to UN military maps).’

 

Filed Under: Cambodia, Genocide, Law

Khymer Rouge Leaders Go On Trial In Cambodia Charged With Genocide

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Three senior regime members appear at UN-backed tribunal accused of playing key part in death of 1.7 million people

Three surviving members of the Khymer Rouge leadership have gone on trial at a UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia, accused of playing a key role in the death of at least 1.7 million people during one of the 20th century’s most brutal regimes.

In their opening statements, prosecutors emphasised the chaos and horror that overran Cambodia during the Khymer Rouge’s brief, paranoid and bloody rule from 1975 to 1979.

“Every Cambodian who was alive during this period was affected by the criminal system of oppression which these accused put in place. The death toll is staggering,” Chea Leang, the Cambodian co-prosecutor, told a packed tribunal in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Facing charges including crimes against humanity, genocide, religious persecution, homicide and torture, are three of the Khymer Rouge’s top leaders under the supreme ruler, Pol Pot, who died in 1998. Nuon Chea, 85, was the Khmer Rouge’s chief ideologist and “Brother Number Two” to Pol Pot; Khieu Samphan, 80, served as president; and 86-year-old Ieng Sary was the regime’s foreign minister. All showed little reaction as the charges were read out.

Chea Leang gave an overview of the alleged offences, before more detailed testimony next month:

“The forced evacuations of Cambodian cities, the enslavement of millions of people in forced labour camps, the smashing of hundreds of thousands of lives in notorious security centres and the killing fields, and the extermination of minorities, the countless deaths from disease, abuse and starvation – these crimes ordered and orchestrated by the accused were among the worst horrors inflicted on any nation in modern history.”

It is the first time that such senior regime figures have faced trial, and, given their ages, many presume they will die before the long and complex case is completed.

A fourth defendant, 79-year-old Ieng Thirith, Ieng Sary’s wife and the Khymer Rouge’s minister for social affairs, was ruled unfit to stand trial last week because she has Alzheimer’s disease.

The joint tribunal, set up in 2006 after long negotiations between the UN and Cambodia’s government, has thus far only completed one case. Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, was jailed for his role in the deaths of more than 14,000 people while running the notorious Tuol Sleng torture centre.

Andrew Cayley, the international co-prosecutor, said the defendants’ ages and the decades that have passed since the crimes should not tempt the court into compassion. “They murdered, tortured and terrorised their own people, they unleashed a radical social reformed process … to create a living nightmare for all Khmer. They took from the people everything that makes life worth living. Let us never for one moment forget in this trial that this is the tragic legacy that these elderly people represent.”

The Khymer Rouge in effect turned the entire country into a forced labour camp as they pursued their goal of a pure, agrarian socialist society, purging the middle classes and intellectuals in particular. Between 1.7 million and 2.2 million people – from a pre-regime population of about 7 million – were murdered or died from illness, overwork or starvation.

The tribunal is intended to act in part as a reminder of the Khymer Rouge’s crimes in a country in which the great majority of the population was born after its fall.

Many of those attending the opening day of the case had their own appalling stories of life under the Khymer Rouge. Chim Phorn, 72, said that as chief of a commune in the country’s north-west he had been forced to beat to death an unmarried young couple who became romantically involved. “I was ordered to kill the young couple because they fell in love without being married. If I did not kill them, my supervisor would have killed me, so to save my life, I had no choice but to kill them,” he said.

Chum Noeu, 62, who lost 13 relatives under the regime, said: “We want justice so that the dead can finally close their eyes. What is the truth behind all of torture and killings? What happened?”

The defendants have shown no willingness so far to co-operate and are expected to deny any responsibility.

 

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/21/khmer-rouge-leaders-trial-cambodia?intcmp=239

Filed Under: Cambodia, Genocide, United Nations
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