Eurasia

Lectura para un lunes por la mañana. En el semanario suizo Current Concerns del 15 de Abril (http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=2341), el historiador Tobias Salander resume un reciente libro de Franz Betschon. Nada que los lectores de Astroboy no sepan ya, pero conciso y bien escrito. El título de la nota es: “The strategy of the new Silk Roads – a peace model for Eurasia”. Acá va:

"While the US is reeling from one crisis into the next and Europe gazes wide-eyed at its former protector, hoping not to be torn down with him, optimism prevails in Asia, Latin America and Africa. For quite some time, authors like Kishore Mahbubani have been trying to show the contemporaries of the Western Hemisphere that they are obviously facing a turning point in history. But what is to be done, especially in Europe? With whom to cooperate if not with the descending belligerent power USA?

Would it not be logical to turn our sight to the East? Europe is situated on the edge of the big world island Eurasia. Our sight – but not in the imperialist sense of Bismarck, who pinpointed “his Africa” in Eastern Europe, neither captivated in thought patterns of the Cold War, which has fortunately been over more than 20 years ago. Why not an approaching those countries in partnership, friendship and respect for the achievements of their peoples?

If we do not perceive how Asia is developing, Asia will develop into a new center of gravity of the world economy without us: This is the point of view of an analyst who has widely travelled, who is cosmopolitan and educated and still rooted in the best Swiss tradition: Franz Betschon entitled his book “The Eurasian Chess Tournament”1, reviewed below, following the title of the similar-sounding work of Zbigniew Brzezinski. However, the tone, the basis of the analysis and the view is a counterpoint to the negative standard work on imperial geo-strategy and superpower hubris.

“The Empire is over.” The US empire, the hegemony of the world‘s only superpower USA, is over, a Eurasia-centric world order is spreading, however an Asia-centric, only in case Europe does not make a move toward Asia. This is the quintessence of the exceptionally readable and clarifying book “The Eurasian chess tournament. Crises, background and forecasts” written by Franz Betschon. The Swiss citizen has a doctor’s degree in sciences and is a certified mechanical engineer of the FIT Zurich; he is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School in Boston, a retired Colonel of the General Staff of the Swiss Air Forces, hence a scientist and cosmopolitan economist trained in the best Swiss manner, with a sharp analytical mind. As one who has traveled around the world, worked among others as a member of the board of an Israeli high-tech company, which – built with Swiss help – has become one of today’s leading companies of its kind in the world, the author tries to compare and deepen his experiences and observations with the study of publicly available sources in order to understand the present times and not to run the risk of lagging behind the general development. Thus Betschon draws on sources from many corners of the world, since during his studies he noticed that the European perspective on the world is quite narrow and has been tainted by the decades of the Cold War, whereas in other parts of the world the same problems are seen in a very different light. Recognizing the signs of the times also means adjusting to new developments and meeting any possible dangers more adequately. 

As his great role model, a thing which is painfully lacking in today’s world and especially in Switzerland, Betschon mentions the great historian Jean Rodolphe von Salis. What that Swiss and world citizen achieved in World War II starting off from Switzerland which gained him and our country worldwide respect, namely providing a coherent assessment of the military situation, von Salis could do merely because of his widely ramified network of relationships. In telephone conversations with acquaintances in the various countries von Salis had built up his knowledge despite intelligence eavesdroppers. How much easier this is today! In times of the World Wide Web a mouse click takes us to newspapers from the Asian, African or Latin American regions.

From what time on did the US become so violent? Keyword “QDR”

The analysis which Betschon collected on over 200 pages and which culminates in the above-quoted conclusion is a compelling read and puts in order the thoughts that can get into a deadlock so easily by today‘s tide of mainstream tittytainment.

When the author concludes that the days of US dominance are irretrievably gone, there are no anti-American sentiments behind this statement, as one might be inclined to think. Quite the contrary, the author appreciates the United States’ selfless commitment during the darkest hours of World War II in Europe – however, he raises the question at what point in time America has suddenly become so violent again: so that it rendered torture acceptable again, waged preemptive wars without ever thinking of the Nuremberg Trial and principles, which had declared the war of aggression the most serious crime and in which the chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson had demanded that in future the US would have to be measured by this standard as well.

It became evident that something was wrong in the state of USA when the Pentagon’s 5-year plans “Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR)” for the years 2001 and 2006 were released. They argued in favor of the right to pre-emptive war although this violated international law. In order to let the reader really imagine the monstrosity, the author transfers this attitude on to he neighborly coexistence of individuals, which would then be something like “You can always shoot your neighbor if he bothers you. You have to fulfill two conditions: You have to say that you felt threatened, and you will have to aim so well that he subsequently can not testify.” (Betschon, p 52) The author points out that this shameless contempt for all the values that the West had fought for for centuries would harm the people of the Middle East, first and foremost, but also the civil society of the aggressors in the medium and long term.

The principle of sovereign states vs. the principle of “divide and conquer”

The author classifies the empire’s aggressive and inhumane foreign policy against the backdrop of two principles: the principle of sovereign states on the one hand and that of “divide and conquer” on the other. What the generation that lived through the Cold War would have thought hardly possible, making a clear view on the present so difficult, is the fact that the first of the two principles, the principle of sovereign nation-states, gained after the 30-year war in the Peace of Westphalia, is today no longer represented by the once acclaimed US democracy, but by the once outlawed Russia, while the Machiavellian principle of “divide et impera” has been and still is upheld by George W. Bush and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama. Although the author is not really pleased about this surprising finding, it is to his credit that he presents the genuine facts without being blinded by mindcuffs and personal preferences.

What had become obvious as early as at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, namely that Russia under Putin was no longer the weak and exploitable post-Soviet country, but again a superpower that was willing and capable of defending itself both economically and militarily, became concrete for everyone at the same-named conference in 2008: While presenting a self-confident country the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov stressed that this did not mean a new block thinking and confrontation, but the peaceful coexistence of sovereign states. On the other side stood US Defense Secretary Robert Gates,who presented the view of the aggressive hegemon. Therewith Gates positioned himself in the model of the British Empire à la Churchill and not in that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Betschon works out these two contrasting policy approaches: While the British Empire pursued a policy of conflict and manipulation, hence the “Divide and conquer!”, the pre- and post-war US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated the other model of cooperation, i.e. that among sovereign nations. Due to the early death of Roosevelt, the hardliner Truman then joined the British line and employed the atomic bomb without any consideration.

Europe and Asia coalesce economically

Even if the US foreign policy before Truman may not always have been quite as unblemished as presented above: it is beneficial anyway that the author avoids the West’s Russia-bashing and opens up new ways of perception. Only if the Russian enemy stereotype is questioned, the road of the long-overdue collaboration between the European countries and the big neighbor in the near but also in the far East will be opened.

In the chapter “Megatrends”, the author dares to make some highly exciting and actually most obvious predictions of future developments: Without tying ourselves down on time and order too much, we might expect the following:

1.    Europe and Asia will irreversibly grow together economically.
2.    Eurasia will develop a federal trade, foreign and security policy.
3.    The term “West” will be unnecessary: Western Europe, North America and Israel will no longer form a unit.
4.    Continental Europe will be oriented eastbound. North America will only be of interest for the trade.
5.    EU and NATO might be reconsidered and replaced by something new.

And what if the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN were moved into the new center of gravity of the world economy, to Shanghai for example? Or if the Asian countries came to the conclusion that there was no longer any need for this US-dominated institutions, that we could live well and above all better without them? And that they had lived together with Europe for over 2'000 years – long before the American double continent was marred by the Anglo-Saxons? It took indeed a very long time in the so-called New World until the whites could be brought to apologizing with regard to the genocide of the indigenous population.

Betschon is not sure whether the Europeans already became aware of the signs of the times and will make a move towards Asia – but nonetheless, the Asians are already coming to meet us. We do not only talk about tourism and the booming watch stores in Lucerne and Interlaken, which are often frequented by the rising Chinese middle class, but also about investors from China and India, who increasingly have saved long-established brandsin Europe from ruin, such as India’s Tata Group that did not only take over the British steel company Corus, but also the car companies Jaguar and Land Rover in 2007.

Tomorrow’s world: Latin America, Asia, Europe – and the US on the side

In Africa we realize that we are facing or else that we are amid a turning time in history: more and more Chinese companies are doing what so far has been reserved to the Europeans: establishing trade relations, making investments, exploiting raw materials – but the Chinese are able to combine their profits with real benefits for the locals, something that one has never encountered in European colonialism, imperialism and in the present neo-colonialism.

While the West suspiciously is staring at the Chinese dragon full of distrust, wondering whether it is going to work like the American eagle, i.e. reveal an aggressive militarism, we overlook that the world has turned into a square world: Today it is made up by Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America on the side. On the side? Our Western media like to conceal this: Increasingly important decisions are taken without the former superpower Number 1. Current Concerns reported the Phnom Penh humiliation.2 Since this event was simply non-existent in the mainstream media of the West, we had to resort to an article in the “Asia Times”, which showed quite clearly how far we lag behind the real development in the west. Obama had been disinvited by a meeting of the ASEAN countries. The United States, which wanted to sow a spirit of discord between the Asian countries, especially between the smaller ones and China, saw themselves left out. The world has become a different one, asKishore Mahbubani has been trying to explain to us for a long time – friendly, but very determinedly. And if the West does not want to acknowledge this, the fracture will be irreversible. It would be better for everyone to advance into the future together. But to that end the West would have to really live its values that are highly respected by the rest of the world, rather than operate toughest interest policy under the guise of values.

IMF and dollar hegemony are declining

Betschon mentions several events that illustrate this turning point in time:
The ten Southeast Asian countries of ASEAN – since we hardly know them in the West, they are listed by name here: These are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – these ten states together with China, Japan and South Korea have created the Asian Monetary Fund with the RMB/yen as their central currency – a process that makes the US-dominated IMF superfluous.

The same happens in South America: the founding of the Latin American Monetary Fund causes the IMF to close its offices in one state after the other. Venezuela gives its members the necessary loans to pay off the IMF.

In Europe the euro, originally intended as an alternative to the dollar, faces massive attacks, but not from China! Russia, however, neither dances to Washington’s tune any longer: There, the gradual dismissal of IMF and dollar hegemony is taking place by increasingly relying on their own resources and gold.

These are all operations that in the long run will make it impossible for the US to impose their own debts to other countries of the world with the help of the dollar printing press. Especially since the funds for the military should be reduced and thus the well-tried, however no less burglary-gang like gunboat diplomacy will no longer work.

A key year for the waning of US influence on this planet was the year 2008: Coinciding with the Lehman Brothers the following events occurred without any input from the US, so busily concerned with their own interests:

•    In Lima, the 60 nations met at a World Food Summit, with Angela Merkel and China being invited but not the United States.
•    Simultaneously, the foreign ministers of the BRIC countries gathered in Yekaterinburg in Russia. Brazil, Russia, India and China had indeed invited the Europeans, but not the United States.
•    By the end of May, the new Russian president made his first trip abroad. In the past, this trip went to the US first; however this time China was the first stop.
•    At the same time an important summit between Japan and China took place – without the United States, which would have been inconceivable in the past. 

Europe: out of the US stranglehold, back to its own values

In this situation of a world that is easily organized without the Empire, Europe faces the question whether it should not continue to live the best values that the US neocons have contemptuously called that of the “old Europe”: on the one hand this would mean a move away from late colonialist ideas, the respect for the sovereignty of other states and non-interference in their internal affairs – in other words a rejection of questionable R2P strategy, the “responsibility to protect”, which, as stated by Dr Hans-Christoph von Sponeck3, has always been used as a pretext to intervene in other countries to secure the raw materials there and keep China out, just like in Sudan, in Libya, and almost in Syria if Russia and China had not objected with a courageous “Nyet”. Or as the Russian political scientist Fursow4 formulated in simple terms: In Syria, the Western crusaders ran into the Great Wall of China!

Finally Betschon advises Europe not to use double standards. There are ample examples listed in the books by Kishore Mahbubani5, but also in the articles of the international law expert Professor Hans Köchler6, who among others sharply criticizes the practice of charges by the International Criminal Courts (ICC).

Development corridors with pearl necklace-like development centers

Europe based on its new-old foundation of this best Western tradition would easily find an ally in the East, which includes about a quarter of today’s world population: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members regularly meet in this context with the observer states Mongolia, India, Pakistan and Iran. 

Whoever in Europe is of the opinion that nothing can grow together, because it does not belong together, must rethink his or her world view, which goes back to the ancient Euro-centric antiquity. There is no intra-Eurasian border in a true geographical-geological sense, but only in a historical and cultural one. 

However, the boundaries have been blurred early; we just have to recall the Russian-Western European entanglements, which refer to the exchange of craftsmanship, scholars and blue blood. And behind Russia there is China, which has been working since the mid-1990s on the establishment of five major infrastructure corridors that will connect Asia with Europe: Railways are there to form the backbone. Betschon stresses that this development corridors may similarly establish pearl necklace-like development corridors similar to the ancient silk roads with great effects.

Beijing-Hamburg: Railway faster than ships

However, who was aware of Europe staring at the USA with fascination? For example, that on 9 January 2008 a Pioneer Railway of goods for Europe was set in motion for the first time, from Beijing indeed. Its destination was Hamburg! A distance of 9,800 km across six countries. The result? It reached Hamburg after 18 days – container ships in order to reach the same destination would have taken almost 40 days on sea! An event, which opened up new dimensions – and a glance at the map of Eurasia shows: What is more obvious than the expansion of the land routes from China to Europe? Eurasia is a continent, a contiguous land mass that naturally belongs together – something that we cannot say about the links between Europe and the US, separated by two oceans.

Of course, a historian will also remember dark times when contemplating the issue of trans-Eurasian transport corridors: continental European countries had already tried to connect with the East by land. We remember the project of a “Berlin-Baghdad railway”. As historian Daniele Ganser shows in his book “Europa im Erdölrausch” (Europe in the oil rush) cheap oil could have been transported from Iraq to the Central European business centers, without being dependent on the British fleet and thus the empire of Great Britain. We all know what happened next: a small strip of land was not included in the German-Habsburg-Ottoman land bridge: Serbia. It is a well-known fact that in Austro-occupied Sarajevo the shot was fired which was to secure the oil monopoly in the Middle East for the naval power of Great Britain, we also call it the First World War, though perhaps less frequently with the above-mentioned background.

May the European countries, Russia and China watch out and keep in mind that today’s (as yet) number one naval power, the United States, wanted to stage something similar to the British in 1914. Past attempts to destabilize the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, the Central Asian republics could be filed against this background.

The Empire in retrogression – daily in the newspapers

Franz Betschon published his illuminating analysis in 2009. He needn’t correct anything, just like his revered idol von Salis. On the contrary, many problem areas mentioned by him have only become more visible in the three years since that time. It is very revealing that President Obama appointed Hagel his Secretary of Defense: that a US Secretary of Defense warns of the pro-Israel lobby and seeks negotiations with Iran; or that a Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Kerry visits Cairo, Riyadh, Doha, but misses Tel Aviv, is the one thing. That there are now talks with Iran in which the United States is present, and at the same time China and Russia are present, too, is the other. That the Turkish Prime Minister equated Zionism with racism, fascism, anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism and condemned it, for which he was sharply criticized in Israeli media7, but still remains a close ally of the United States and wants to join the EU despite or even with these statements, is a third thing. It is startling thatKenneth Waltz in Foreign Affairs of July/August 20128 wanted to grant Iran the bomb, because the world might become safer, especially the Middle East, because the nuclear power Israel would have a counterpart – Israel, which according to this grand old man of US political science, represented the main danger for peace in the region. This sounds like a Brzezinski chessboard strategy, to which Betschon refers several times, but as an exit strategy of the Empire’s chess players.

Continuing Roosevelt’s concept of respect for the sovereignty of nation states

We would wish the peoples in Eurasia, but also the peoples of the Middle East, and indeed regardless of nationality or religion, that the Chinese strategy of the new Silk Road and thus the peaceful interaction in economic and political terms without transatlantic disruptions could be realized. How many blossoming landscapes could develop if the great continent grew together, the way Kishore Mahbubani has repeatedly described. If the former mortal enemies Japan and China can cooperate peacefully today after the horrors of World War II, after more than 30 million Chinese killed by the Japanese, why should that be impossible in the Middle East? And why should the US not be oriented towards Roosevelt’s concept of respect for the sovereignty of nation states? Given the horrendous debt this is actually a top priority – and common sense. A task that would befit Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama well. And the EU could prove worthy of their Nobel Prize and bury its hostilities towards the East. Moreover, the Swiss population could become involved as a nation of good offices and mediate this complex situation and with their federalism they could be a model for fruitful and peaceful coexistence without flirting with large structures.

If the book by Franz Betschon is able to direct the thinking, feeling and acting into this direction, it will have beneficial effects. We’d like to wish this book a large readership – not only in Switzerland.

Notas:

1    Franz Betschon: Das eurasische Schachturnier: Krisen, Hintergründe und Prognosen (The Eurasian chess tournament. Crises, background and forecasts.) Frankfurt/Main, 2009. ISBN 978-3-8301-1234-1.
2    David P. Goldman: Post-US world born in Phnom Penh. In: Current Concerns No. 53 of 31.12.2012
3    Dr Hans-Christof von Sponeck: The R2P attempt failed miserably in Libya. In: Current Concerns No. 18/19 of 08.05.2012
4    Hit Syria – Target: Russia. Interview with Professor Andrei Ilyich Fursow. In: Current Concerns No 37 of 10.09.2012
5    Kishore Mahbubani: The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the East. 2008. ISBN-13: 978-1586484668.
6    Hans Köchler: Weltgericht ohne Weltstaat. Strafjustiz unter dem Diktat der Realpolitik? Kommentar zu Idee und Wirklichkeit des Internationalen Strafgerichtshofes zehn Jahre nach dem In-krafttreten des Römer Statutes. Vienna, 01.07.2012. http://ipo.org/Koechler-ICC-Weltgericht-ohne-Weltstaat-IPO-OP-1July2012.htm  
7    At UN conference, Erdogan calls Zionism “crime against humanity”. In: Ha’aretz, 28.02.2013.
8    Kenneth N. Waltz: Why Iran should get the bomb. Nuclear balancing would mean stability. In: Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012. Edited by the Council on Foreign Relations. Current Concerns No. 43/44 of22.10.2012

Pánico (2)

Lo dijimos ayer: a partir de ahora Todo Puede Suceder. Mientras continúa el avance de las fuerzas armadas sirias en prácticamente todo el país, en las últimas 24 horas ocurrieron dos hechos significativos: 

Por un lado, una tremenda serie de bombazos en Reyhanli, territorio turco muy próximo a la frontera noroeste de Siria. Muchos muertos, centenares de heridos (véase: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/137438.html). Rápida reacción turca acusando a Siria de los hechos. Sin embargo, nadie se lo cree: Reyhanli es un pueblo de mayoría alawita que apoya mayoritariamente al presidente sirio. En segundo lugar, se reportan ataques con cohetes, por parte del "Ejército Sirio Libre", a la población shiita de Hermel, en el norte de El Líbano (véase: http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-monitor/2013/04/syrian-rebels-intensify-rocket-attacks-lebanon). 

En síntesis: internacionalización del conflicto sirio. Todo muy burdo, sí, pero claramente indicativo de la magnitud del pánico que está atacando a la curiosa Santa Alianza de estos tiempos: NATO + Israel + Turquía + Arabia Saudita + Qatar. Alcanzará para justificar una invasión a Siria por parte de esta especie de Armada Brancaleone? Habrá que ver. Puede ser un globo de ensayo más, puede ser el comienzo de algo más groso, puede que el tiro les salga por la culata, como suele ocurrir últimamente.

Dos detalles no menores: primero, a esta altura de los acontecimientos, Siria cuenta con uno de los ejércitos de tierra más preparados del mundo para operaciones tanto defensivas como ofensivas sobre el terreno, para operaciones regulares e irregulares, armado hasta los dientes por Irán y Rusia, con una inteligencia militar preparada y sofisticada, con cuadros leales y motivados (los desertores hace tiempo que se fueron o están muertos), con misiles defensivos instalados y listos para operar (los famosos S-300 hace tiempo que fueron instalados), con una flota rusa que está a días de agrandarse dramáticamente. Hace dos años que el ejército sirio está en operaciones: una preparación formidable. Posiblemente haya signos de desgaste, claro, pero los tipos huelen la victoria y la moral es alta.  

Segundo, se está consolidando un eje en Medio Oriente: Hezbollá (Líbano) + Siria + Irak + Irán, para felicidad de Rusia (sobre todo de Gazprom) y de China, y espanto de la Armada Brancaleone. Sí, el eslabón más flojo es Irak, sin dudas. Mucho depende de cómo se resuelva el problema kurdo. No sabemos gran cosa del tema, así que mejor callar. Una cosa parece garantizada: llega el turno de sudar frío para los monarcas sauditas y qataríes. Nervios aquí y allá. Hace pocos días salió eyectado el ministro de defensa de Arabia Saudita, y fuerte candidato al trono, el príncipe Khaled bin Sultan. 

Más informaciones para este boletín.

Pánico

El gráfico muestra el número semanal de muertos en Siria entre el 18 de Marzo del 2011 y el 1 de Marzo de 2013

Las fuerzas de la NATO + Israel + Turquía + Arabia Saudita + Qatar parecen estar en una fase de pánico en lo que respecta al conflicto sirio. Uno no puede dejar de mirar el gráfico que ilustra este post a la hora de evaluar lo sucedido en los últimos dos años. Acá va una opinión entre muchas, esta vez procedente del sitio web notthemsmdotcom (http://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/249/). Bajo el título: “Moral expediency. The US, Israel and Al Qaeda in Syria”, Phil Greaves señala las inconsistencias del Imperio y sus lacayos en esta etapa (¿terminal?) del conflicto. Transcribimos los párrafos finales, que resumen un cuadro de situación:

"The military tide has most definitely changed in the SAA’s favour in recent weeks, the Syrian Army has routed the Salafi/Jihaddi militants in several key areas; this is the reasoning behind Israels recent raids on Damascus. It beggars belief that Assad, currently fighting for his life and his Governments stake in Syria, would move substantial quantities of sophisticated weapons out of Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The US and its allies (clients) are panicking, the “Redirection” has not gone precisely according to plan, (does US strategy ever go to plan?) and is currently reeling out of control. The extremist proxies Gulf autocrats have fomented and armed are a law unto themselves, and the ‘opposition in exile’ is as incoherent and incapable today, as it was on the day of its US/Qatari/Saudi creation. Whether the US has finally reneged on its proxies in Syria, and pulled the plug on its clients attempts to supply heavy weaponry remains to be seen. It is virtually impossible for the US to step up its overt military aid to jihaddi militants, so it must fall back on Israel. There are two key reasons for this. First, the Israel military is already an international pariah, with no credibility to lose in the middle east, the US is trying to hold on to what little credibility it has. Second, US jets using an Arab client’s airfield to launch strikes on a fellow Arab nation, would provide far too much domestic political backlash for the KSA, or any other client to allow it. Time and US perseverance may force someone into this role. But using Israel makes it irrelevant. The Jordanian Monarchy has already allowed Israeli drones to use its airspace, and as we know has been staging a huge multinational special forces base on Syria’s border, for quite some time.

One cannot honesty look at the current situation in Syria; the plethora of available evidence of Salafi/Jihaddist militants since the start of the conflict; the main donors and funders of supposed “freedom fighters”, and still deem it as anything other than a regional war. Instigated by the Bush administration and its GCC clients, and dutifully carried out by the Obama administration and the Neo-Con hawks that sway foreign policy in Washington. The ultimate goal was the swift overthrow of the Syrian Government, and leaving behind another failed state; incapable of resistance to US/Israeli/GCC hegemony in the region. That ship has sailed, the false democratic ‘revolution’ is long over. The SAA has regained in confidence and is winning its offensive, the media war on the Syrian Government seems also to be coming to a grinding standstill. Apart from the “massacre” and “chemical weapons” agitprop from Western and Gulf outlets, there is not much more they can throw at them. Much to the Wests chagrin, the Syrian government is still standing; it still has a strong and well equipped army that is winning its chosen battles; it still has popular support within its borders, and crucially, it still has the backing of international allies.

One cannot imagine if this were still being purported as a “grassroots democratic uprising,” that the US would be eager to use Israel and give the Assad regime such a propaganda coup. It is too late for falsehoods now, and desperate times call for desperate measures. What remains to be seen is whether the recent Israeli strikes were a precedent of more to come, an attempt to prolong the internal conflict and “level the playing field”, or simply, a provocation toward Iran."


Como decía la canción de George Harrison, a partir de ahora "Todo Puede Suceder". Hasta la próxima.

Acuerdos de la Triple Frontera

Basilea, idílica ciudad suiza en la frontera entre este país, Alemania y Francia

Leemos en Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-basel-committee-and-the-global-banking-mafia/5334459) una linda nota a cargo de Valentin Katasonov, como para comenzar la mañana del viernes. Si vive usted en la Gran Democracia del Norte, y tiene la suerte de estar empleado en la Reserva Federal, trate de que no se te atragante la tostada.

Título: The Basel Committee and the Global Banking Mafia

Texto: “The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (hereinafter – the Committee) is closely associated with supranational organisations like the Bank for International Settlements in Basel (BIS), which is often called the «club», the «headquarters» of central banks or the «Central Bank of Last Resort». The Committee’s office is situated in the BIS building. At the end of 1974, following the disequilibrium of international currencies and banking markets caused by the collapse of the Herstatt Bank in West Germany, the heads of central banks in the G10 countries established the Committee under the auspices of the BIS to develop common international rules with regard to banking supervision. The Committee formulates common standards for banking supervision and recommendations for their implementation, on the assumption that national authorised bodies (first and foremost central banks) will push them forwards in their own countries. With regard to G10, this is the group of countries that signed a general agreement on borrowing with the IMF in 1962 (Belgium, Great Britain, West Germany, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, the USA and Japan). Switzerland, which was not a member of the IMF, joined in 1964, but the name of the group remained as before. Representatives from Luxembourg were also included in the Basel Committee from the very beginning and, from 2001, the Committee has included representatives from Spain. At present, the Committee includes representatives from central banks and national authorities on banking supervision from 27 countries (the 13 countries already mentioned along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey, which all joined the Committee in 2009). Over almost four decades of its activities, the Committee has published tens of documents on different areas of activity, including general issues on the organisation of supervision, capital adequacy, all kinds of risk, the corporate governance of lending and borrowing organisations and so on.

The Committee’s key area of activity is the definition of standards on capital adequacy for banks. All of the Committee’s documentation is centred around an incredibly simple ratio: equity : a bank’s capital = capital adequacy ratio.

Kabbalists of the money world are looking for this ratio’s magic number, which would guarantee the stability of the banking system. In fact, the Committee is seeking to legitimise what is a crime. In Europe, a system of so-called partial, or incomplete, coverage of obligations by banks as borrowing and lending organisations has already existed for a long time (at least since the 18th century). Figuratively speaking, this system allows banks to make money «out of thin air». For example, for every 1 dollar of lawful money that depositors place in a deposit account, banks are allowed to release 5 or 10 dollars of non-cash (credit) money by way of credit. This used to be called counterfeiting and was strictly punishable by law. Nowadays, it is called the «norm» or «principle» of banking, legalised by national laws, and in economic textbooks it is known as the «money multiplier». The principle of «partial» coverage (reservation) is «protected» by a supranational structure called the «Basel Committee on Banking Supervision», which lends the principle an appearance of respectability.

No cunning standards and formulae will remove the main effect of the «partial» coverage (reservation) of obligations – the banking crises. In the almost four decades that the Committee has existed, the world has been witness to a countless number of banking failures and crises. In order to prevent such problems, obligations need to be covered 100 percent, but then banks would be deprived of the opportunity to engage in their own «financial alchemy». There is a strict taboo on the honest and frank discussion of «partial» reservation both in central banks and the Committee: they are trying to convince the public that it is possible to invent a «magical formula» for capital adequacy so that banks can continue to make money «out of thin air» as before. This is outright deception.

Basel I and Basel II – straws for the drowning

Up to the end of 2012, two fundamental documents had been implemented by the Committee that defined the «magical formula» for capital adequacy and recommended that this formula be used by national authorities on banking supervision – Basel I and Basel II. The first of these came into existence in 1988 and had the very respectable name of the «International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards» (Basel I). This agreement defined the minimum capital adequacy ratio as 8 percent, calculated as the ratio of equity (regulated by the supervisory authority) to risk weighted assets. Only credit risks are taken into account (although a bank’s capital can be made up of investments as well as credits). In fact, the Committee gave the go-ahead for a financial-monetary orgy, respectfully called «the development of monetary and financial markets» in economic textbooks. The markets began to «blister», the «blisters» began to burst and the real economy and ordinary people suffered the most. To date, more than 100 countries in the world adhere to the rules of Basel I, according to the official declaration.

At the turn of the century, a new version of the standard began to be prepared called Basel II, which was to start in 2004. The new version contained extremely feeble attempts to take account of new banking risks (besides credit risks), especially in view of the rapid development of derivatives markets, the emergence of hedge funds and other institutional speculators, with which banks were extremely closely linked. At the height of implementing the new standard, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 broke out. It once again demonstrated that the Basel standards are no more than a fig leaf covering the tyranny of the world’s usurers. Basel II was unable to cure the world’s moneylenders of their greed, the global banking giant Lehman Brothers sank to the depths in front of everybody’s eyes and, in order to save others, America was forced to spend upwards of three trillion dollars from the public purse, with Europe spending about the same. There were even attempts to prove that it was the implementation of Basel II that had caused the start of the financial crisis, since in order to make up for the lack of equity, banks decided to use extremely risky methods to attract capital and had to go as far as falsification and outright deception (accounting offences, the use of off-balance sheet transactions, etc.). During the financial crisis, the Committee began to spasmodically introduce changes and amendments to the Basel II standard.

The features of Basel III

At long last, a new document emerged called Basel III. Proposals for Basel III were approved at the G20 Summit in Seoul in November 2010. Participants at the Summit also approved the timeline for the phased implementation of the standard. 1 January 2013 was given as the start date. The new document is exceedingly complex and voluminous, numbering nearly 800 pages. I would like to draw your attention to the following features:

1. The timeline for implementing the standard stretches to 2018; in other words, the standard is not «strict», it gives banks enough time for manoeuvre;
2. The bar for the capital adequacy ratio of banks was raised, but not so much that it would avoid new crises;
3. The role of the «human factor» in the assessment of banks by supervisory authorities was increased; and
4. Within equity, a special role has been given to gold as a financial asset.

In my opinion, the last feature is the most important; it is a high-quality innovation that distinguishes Basel III from Basel II.

In previous Basel standards, only cash (which comes under the heading of «legal tender» in all countries) and government debt securities – Ministry of Finance and Treasury bonds – were regarded as high-quality equity. Moreover, this did not include all bonds, only those given the highest rating by leading international rating agencies. For a long time, the highest quality form of equity was considered to be US Treasury bonds. In other words, the banks in those countries that took part in Basel I and Basel II must have been helping Uncle Sam by purchasing US bonds and covering up the holes in the US budget, thereby supporting the US dollar and working against gold as the main rival to «green paper».

«Basel III»: the partial rehabilitation of gold

Before the 1970s, when the Bretton-Woods currency system existed in the world and there were not yet any «Basel» standards, everything was different. Banks were principally valued in terms of the amount of gold in their equity. The more gold there was relative to the total amount of capital and the total amount of assets, the safer the bank was believed to be. It was all simple, clear and logical. However, those good old times came to an end with the collapse of the gold standard and the IMF’s decision to carry out a full and final demonetisation of gold. Gold was demoted to a run-of-the-mill exchange commodity like oil, wheat or coffee. As a last resort, banks could use gold as an investment medium, but the metal stopped being regarded as a valuable financial asset.

Up to now, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has stored the gold in its «black body», so to speak. On the whole, the rules of the game were such that there was no benefit in banks hoarding their gold. At best, bankers regarded the yellow metal with the eyes of speculators buying and selling gold to make short-term profits.

Basel III has raised the status of gold dramatically. New rules have been provided to transfer gold to a bank’s tier 1 capital at 100 percent of its value. Banks now have the opportunity to replace their paper assets (primarily US Treasury bonds) with gold. Experts have calculated that such a practice will create additional demand for the precious metal to the extent of at least 1700 tonnes. There have been even higher estimations of up to 3000 tonnes. A number of experts believe that the development of Basel III was carried out with powerful lobbying from the Rothschilds, who have an interest in restoring the monetary status of gold in the world. For the last two centuries, the Rothschilds have had control over the main gold reserves, been involved in the extraction of gold and are «market makers» in the precious metals market. In September 2012, before the Basel Committee’s new standard had even come into force, the heads of one of the world’s largest banks, Deutsche Bank AG, which falls within the Rothschilds’ sphere of influence, made a public statement that gold had again been transformed from a commodity into money. The statement caused a painful reaction on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, first and foremost in the US Federal Reserve System. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, once again issued a standard statement that gold was far from the best type of money.

It is not difficult to see that Basel III is a blow to the US dollar and the American economy. America’s reaction was sufficiently prompt and harsh. At the end of last year, America’s monetary and financial regulators (the Federal Reserve system, the Deposit Insurance Agency and the Office of the Comptroller of Currency) reported that they had been sent a petition by leading American banks stating that the new Basel standards were crippling for lending and borrowing organisations. After this, the Federal Reserve System and other US financial regulators went to the Committee and announced that the introduction of Basel III in America was being postponed, and no date for transition to the new standard was given. At this point, European banks started to feel anxious, believing that if they began the transition to the new standard, they would find themselves uncompetitive in comparison with American banks. Therefore, they also refused to shift to Basel -III.

So who exactly has embraced Basel III since 1 January 2013? The list is not very long, with a total of 11 countries in all: Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, Switzerland, South Africa and Japan. It is also possible to add India here, which announced it would be joining Basel III from 1 April 2013. It is remarkable that the list contains just four countries from the «golden billion» zone: Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Japan.

Turkey’s absence from the list is mysterious. The country actively encourages the wide use of gold in banking operations, and the proportion of gold in the equity and assets of Turkey’s banks compared with other countries is high. In reality, the Turkish banking sector is completely ready to implement the Basel III standards. As the London newspaper the Financial Times observed, the policy of the governor of the Central Bank of Turkey, Erdem Ba?ç?, has yielded impressive results for Turkish banks: they have attracted 8.3 billion US dollars in new deposits through gold programmes over the last 12 months and are now able to channel these resources into lending.

One can observe that nearly all the leading gold producers are on the list given above: China, South Africa, Canada and Australia. A number of the countries on the list are leading importers of gold (China, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and India). China, which has been included on the list of «golden» leaders, has long been hinting at the possibility of transforming the Yuan into a gold standard. Switzerland, meanwhile, is pushing forward a project to introduce a parallel currency within the country in the form of a gold franc.

«Basel III»: banks’ U-turn on gold

The implementation of the new Basel rules could lead to a radical change in the positions of individual countries’ banks in the global financial system. To begin with, it is expected that the positions of Chinese banks will become stronger, bearing in mind that for several years in succession, China has ranked first in the world in terms of the volume of gold both extracted and imported. The positions of those banks that bravely embraced Basel III will also become stronger, since the price of gold over the last 12 years has shown an unprecedentedly high growth rate – an average of 17 percent per year. In 2012, a troy ounce of gold cost 1700 dollars. According to many gold traders, meanwhile, the «fair» («equilibrium») value of metal is at a level of no less than 5000 dollars. Whoever managed to get on the «gold train» by buying low-cost tickets will be much more likely to find themselves on the global financial Olympus tomorrow.

Even those banks that have still not entered the zone of Basel III activities understand that their future depends on how quickly they will be able to turn towards gold. IMF and World Gold Council statistics do not give a clear picture of gold purchases by the entire banking sector. However, there are statistics for the purchase and sale activities of central banks in the gold market. Following the collapse of the Bretton-Woods currency system, central banks across the world sold more gold than they bought for more than three decades. After the recently concluded financial crisis, the situation changed dramatically. In 2011, net purchases of gold by the world’s central banks amounted to 457 tonnes. This is more than 10 percent of the total demand for precious metals on the world market (4400 tonnes). During the 15 years preceding the crisis, meanwhile, net purchases totalled an average of 400 tonnes per year. Thus, the central banks made a sharp about turn and started to purchase gold in the kinds of volumes that had not been observed since the 1960s. Last year was a record year in terms of the amount of net purchases of gold by the world’s central banks since 1964. According to preliminary data released by the World Gold Council, a new record will also be set in 2012: the net purchase of gold by the world’s central banks rose to 536 tonnes.

With regard to commercial banks, before the introduction of the Basel III standard they only saw gold as a way to increase their own profits through speculation and/or investment, but they had no incentive to establish their own considerable reserves of precious metals. I think their attitude to gold is going to change in 2013, they will buy it for themselves with a view to improving the sustainability of their business and attracting clients.

The validation of the Basel III standards in a number of countries in 2013 is a serious indication that gold has returned to the world of money. We are not yet talking about the classical gold standard, of course, whereby banks are able to freely exchange paper money for metal. But metal may become more widely used to cover banks’ liabilities and be a financial asset of the «highest authority». Who knows, maybe in the future, when banks have accumulated enough gold, the issue of the reinstatement of the gold standard will be put back on the agenda…”

Hasta la próxima.

Batallas culturales (2)

Acá va otra muestra de lo que decíamos en la introducción al post anterior. Esta vez la nota es de Andre Vltchek y apareció en Counterpunch. Un toque más personal que la nota de ayer, más melancólico, aunque igualmente asqueado de los lavados cerebrales diarios de los MSM (acrónimo de "mainstream media"). La nota es larga, aunque ya se sabe que este blog no es para twitteros. Acá va:

Welcome to the Machine: Imperialism is Now Murdering Stories

Nothing frightens fascism and its older brother imperialism more than real people and their honest stories. It is because ordinary stories of ordinary people are so genuine and so accurately reflect authentic human fears, desires and dreams that the ideologues and propagandists of the Western regime, which is supported by unnatural hyper-pseudo-reality, feel, for their survival, that it is essential to annihilate those stories, to wipe them from the surface of earth, even to erase them from our memories.

Real human feelings get in the way; they still resist, block the path to the total commercialization of life and the full implementation of the perverse concepts introduced by the Empire. Such resistance is described and glorified in real stories, making them ‘extremely dangerous’ and potentially fatal to the regime.

Human nature is fundamentally optimistic and kind; it is mostly evenhanded and sharing. If it is not grossly manipulated, fooled, even conned; it generally puts the life of others well above cold profit. It is disposed to be compassionate, forgiving and accepting. It is not perfect, far from it, but as the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus declared at the end of his brilliant novel “The Plague”:  “there is more to admire than to despise in humans”.

That is all very bad news for market fundamentalism and for the masters of the world. They need to ensure that the majority of the human race consists of greedy individuals, aggressive people, people who do not think or feel but consume, and, if they do think, about how to amass more, consume more; definitely not about how to build a decent and egalitarian society.

* * *

Each human life is made up of stories, of true and sincere stories. Some stories are ‘common’ and can occur, with certain variations, in any part of the world. A boy meets a girl, and their love is ‘forbidden’, because they belong to a different class, ethnicity, or religion. They fight for their future together, against all oppressive customs and taboos, and they win or they fall. But after their epic struggle for happiness, their village, or their clan, will never be the same. A son of rich man walks down the road in a miserable village, right near his mansion. He meets an old man or a woman. They sit for a while and talk. Poor peasant conveys a message to a young feudal lord. Later this provokes questions, doubts and thoughts; he studies. One decade later he joins the revolution, to overthrow his own class. Almost all men and women of the revolution lived through that moment when they were told the truth on some dusty country road: Che, Lenin, Engels, Marx, Mao, Fidel, Chavez.

Some stories are extremely unique and powerful: As documented in a great book written by Ron Ridenour, “Backfire”, several Cuban men and women are approached by the CIA and asked to destroy their own country, to kill innocent people, to cause explosions on board civilian airliners in the middle of the flight, to assassinate Cuban leaders, to poison humans and crops with chemicals. They accept; they take money. Then they immediately join the Cuban intelligence and for years work as ‘double agents’, to protect, to save their beloved Cuba. There is not one moment of hesitation. Fatherland is not some commodity; it is not for sale! The Personal lives of some of them are ruined in the process. They keep no money for themselves. They give their entire CIA pay to their country, to buy medicine and other necessities. They feed North Americans with false information. Eventually the story is made public. They save Cuba.

Such are the great stories of decency, of courage, of progress.

“My life is my story”, once uttered a brilliant German film director, Wim Wenders.  The identity of each person, no matter how rich or poor, educated or simple, consists of memories and dreams, and of extremely complex and fascinating webs of stories.

Most ‘real’ stories are wise, and they contain unmistakable sparks of humanism. Many of them are also aiming at something that we are all secretly longing for from the bottom of our hearts: something very positive, warm, compassionate and tender. They are yearning for good conclusions, not for some toxic and pinkish Disney or Hollywood-style ‘happy ending’, but for solid, just, and decent finales. That is exactly why real stories’ are becoming targets of hit men hired by the Empire.

In order to plunder unopposed, to control, and to manipulate, the Western Empire assumed that it has to give legitimacy to its own acts of terror. Those acts have to be elevated to the highest moral ground. To do so, traditional logical and philosophical thinking has to be decomposed, then ‘new thinking’ introduced. A thoroughly new breed of stories must emerge, and even how stories are told must change. Some would ask: ‘How could crime be packaged as altruism’?

It can, of course, in those societies that perceive ‘reality’ after getting stoned on huge daily doses of advertisement and propaganda, two sides of the same coin, two synonyms of lie and deception. In order for the brutal Empire to pose and to be considered as the savior of the world, first the analytical thinking of people has to be damaged, their ability to think has to be sharply reduced. The stories they are told have to become ‘light’, ‘entertaining’, extremely far from the reality. The human spirit has to be broken, human nature reshaped.

Then all that is real and decent and pure in people has to be dragged through a muddy and nontransparent bath of nihilism. Things that used to be sacred have to be spat on, optimism humiliated, and ordinary kindness and warmth killed. Instead, substitutes have to be injected, if needed, by force. It is because the acts of imperialism, like constant plunder and the commodification of life itself, are grotesquely unnatural occurrences; they are morbid and pathological. And the only way they can be accepted is if the reality is canceled, and then substituted by a ‘new’, gruesome and irrational pseudo-reality.

* * *

If in thousands of brainless Hollywood films, millions of people continuously vanish, victims of mutants, robots, terrorists, giant insects or microorganisms invading the earth, then the public becomes hardened, and ‘well prepared for the worst’. Compared to those horrors of pseudo-reality, the real agony of millions of men, women and children in places like Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan appear to be quite insignificant. “Their children get cancer from depleted uranium coming from our bombs, or they get simply torn to pieces… well, guess what: our children are eaten by monstrous tarantulas or murdered by Arab terrorists…” Those words are not pronounced, of course. The monologue takes place in the subconscious realm. If a false giant shark begins stuffing itself with the actors depicting defenseless swimmers on a picture-perfect resort beach, such fictitious terror shocks more viewers and at much greater extend than some real violence unleashed against the prisoners at the US torture and detention centers like those at Abu Graib or Guantanamo.

Pseudo-reality is designed to dwarf reality.

Using the same concept, the viewers tend to feel much greater shock when California keeps falling off the cliff to Pacific Ocean, in one of those disaster movies, than when they read about dozens of real and decent governments all over the world being overthrown by the Empire for simply being ‘too decent’, even when millions of real people perish in the process.

Psychologically, for many people there is no border between reality and pseudo-reality, anymore. Consumers of blockbuster movies and the mass media were made immune to the real terror the Empire is spreading all over the world, because they have already seen ‘much more frightening’ stuff beaming from the box. Simultaneously, indoctrination gets encoded permanently in people’s brains; they cannot make the distinction, anymore, between some outright BBC propaganda against China or Cuba and the reality they encounter when they visit those two countries.

Some now judge the world and make political and other decisions strictly based on that hybrid of reality and pseudo-reality: “Chinese murdered brutally several thousands of people when they torpedoed some fictional ship, as we witnessed in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, therefore we have to finance their ‘opposition’ and send our battle ships to East China Sea, to deter the potential expansion plotted by Beijing.”

And if our film studios and pop writers keep demonizing Chinese people, South Americans, Russians, Arabs, Iranians, North Koreans and many others, the imaginary threat, in some very twisted but well calculated and effective way, suddenly begins to justify real and countless aggressions by the military forces of the Empire.

* * *

The Empire that consists of Western fascist regimes that call themselves ‘democratic’ and ‘free’, have already murdered several hundreds of millions of human beings on all continents. They dropped mountains of bombs and biological weapons on countless countries; they have experimented on people, and overthrew most of the governments that were determined to serve their own people. They murdered Presidents and trained gangsters, whom they elevated to the ranks of top military brass, as happened in Indonesia, Chile, Egypt, El Salvador and in many other places. These gangster-soldiers were then given training, on Western military bases, in the ‘art’ of interrogation, torture and punitive rape, as well as ‘disappearance’ of the opposition.

No other system spilled more blood; no other system plundered more resources and enslaved more people, than the one we are told to describe by lofty and benign terms like ‘Western parliamentary democracy’ or ‘Western constitutional monarchy’. But the writers of ‘new stories’ and manufacturers of pseudo-reality do their absolute best to block this line of thinking. There is no discussion about the fact that the world is now fully enslaved by Western neo-colonialism, that it is controlled and oppressed to the greatest possible degree.

The past is already fully changed and re-written, with collaborators coming from the ranks of both academia and so called ‘liberal’ and ‘creative elites’. Grotesque lies are thousands of times repeated and therefore, as was suggested by the chief ideologist of Nazi Germany, they became truth. As Joseph Goebbels so correctly observed, many decades ago: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

The lies are retold about China, the Soviet Union, Latin America, about Western colonialism, and neo-colonialism, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and so many other essential places and events. Almost all related stories, except those that were pre-selected, approved, and useful for the propaganda, had been successfully eradicated, muted, or at least ridiculed.

Inside the Empire itself, almost nobody is protesting, except when it comes to demands for higher wages and better benefits. The Western masses became the most complacent, uncritical group of people anywhere in the world. It is obvious from the art they are producing and consuming, from their political affiliations, from their aspirations.

An amazing paradox has developed, without being noticed or commented on: ‘the system, which has been professing both individual choice and extreme self-centeredness, actually managed to reduce a substantial part of the human race to an obedient, thoughtless, submissive, and frightened mass of uniformed beings convinced about their own superiority. The individuality of people almost entirely vanished. Their identity is now closely linked and fully dependent on the manufactured identity of television stars, pop musicians and footballers.

* * *

It is logical and essential that the Empire tries to make sure that the real stories get discredited, destroyed, wiped out from the face of the earth; in order to prevent lapses, in order to make sure that human brains stop doubting and accept what they are being served. Even the closest historic allies of real stories have been kidnapped, corrupted, and forced against them: books, films, music, and theatres, even fairytales.

But to the dismay of their tormentors, while in terrible pain, abandoned and endlessly sad, the stories do not seem to yield. It is because they are brave and proud, as human beings essentially are, and they know that so much depends on them – they are holding one of the last lines of defense against the capitalist genocide, against commercialization of life itself, against the attempt to exterminate human species as we know it.

As a storyteller I know all this, because they, the stories, are always talking to me. I also know that we will hold that imaginary defense line until the very end, together, come what way, with others who are still capable of thinking and hoping, and dreaming.

We will never cease telling the stories, real stories, because that is what human beings have been doing for centuries and millennia; telling stories, listening, learning, reading, moving forward, reluctantly, stumbling but moving nevertheless. We will be holding the line of defense against cultural fascism, because to succumb would simply be like betraying everything that makes life worth living.

For centuries and millennia people were dreaming about justice and kindness, they were fighting for better world where everyone has roof over the head, and food, free education and medical care, where there is no fear and no danger coming from beastly and greedy usurpers. The ‘real’ stories were carrying such dreams, in their core.

Several years ago I sat in an old Café Brasilero in Montevideo, Uruguay, with one of the greatest Latin American writers, Eduardo Galeano, a man who wrote some of the most magical and powerful stories in the 20th century. Before we parted, he said: “I am a hunter of stories; I listen to the stories, then I give this back to the people after putting the stories through a creative process. My position is always that in order not to be mute, one shouldn’t be deaf. One has to be able to listen in order to speak. I am a passionate listener. I listen to reality. Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her – to that lady called Reality. I am trying not to fail her.” If the regime decides to starve us, real storytellers, we will, as in the marvelous story of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “No One Writes To the Colonel”, rather “eat shit”, than to betray that magic lady called Reality. The stories, the reality is not for sale, as the truth itself is not for sale.

* * *

At the last page of an old copy of the novel “River of Fire”, written by Qurratulain Hyder, there are letters and numbers entered with a simple pencil: D.K. 30-9-99 24036. I don’t remember how I obtained that book, and I don’t know what these numbers really mean. The handwriting is unfamiliar. But they certainly mean something; something very significant, one more story, a symbol penciled into one of the greatest tales ever written in India. Both ‘River of Fire’ and the penciled note make one dream and to use imagination – to be alive.

As pornography could not be defined as love, the ‘new stories’ that shape our worldview and penetrate our psyche, are actually not true stories at all. They are substitutes that were implanted in order to replace permanently the real thing.

They kill life itself in the real living beings.

Those endless car chases, meaningless slaughters of thousands of humans in almost every film, never-ending computer generated disasters and horror scenarios, all have very little to do with real life. The ‘new stories’ are more like some addictive substance, narcotics, cigarettes stuffed with chemicals, or very bad booze. All over the world, billions of hooked viewers, adult and children, women and men, even elderly, are now watching the same rubbish, consisting of computer-generated plots and images, phantasmagoric scenarios. As was the case with the CIA-run Paris Review, the storytellers have been encouraged to elevate form over substance. We are expected to ‘become daring’ by showing as many female genitals in our art, describing as many mind-blowing situations, inventing ‘personal dramas’ and epic quests for ‘self-fulfillment’.

All calls for egalitarian society, for rebellion, revolution, for the end of neo-colonialism, of state terror, of propaganda, were turned to absolute taboo. ‘Politics are boring’ is one of the main massages we are encouraged to spread around. Because people are not expected to mingle in ‘what is not their business’. Ruling the world is reserved for the corporations and few gangsters with excellent PR. The voters are there only to give legitimacy to the entire charade. And if they don’t, they get slaughtered like in that brilliant novel called “Seeing” by Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago.

Or as in real life, Europeans were massacred in France, Italy and Germany after the WWII, when they were going to vote Communists into power, but instead were confronted by old Nazis who were put to work by Western allies, concretely by the US and UK, to murder the leaders and supporters of the Left. Successful Nazis were then shipped, discreetly and with all that loot from Jewish victims, to distant South America, where I met and interviewed some of them and their children – in Paraguay, Chile, and Peru. But don’t you even think about writing stories about it.

“Colonia Dignidad!” I was then told by one of the editors of major German Magazine Der Stern, when I presented him with damning photos and true stories about the murderous German colony in Southern Chile. At one point he burst laughing: “Never again!”

Real stories have been ridiculing such arrangement of the world. True stories were always ‘political’, because everything that matters is actually ‘political’. Education and medical care are political and so are housing, city planning, green areas, corruption, arts, religiousness or secularism, and therefore even love and how it can or cannot be expressed. Great novels have always been political, and what we see now, their de-politicizing, is abnormal, even perverse, fabricated. Many great songs used to be political, and they still are – in Latin America, in Russia, or in China.

Even Hollywood used to go political in some of its greatest films like “All President’s Men”, “Marathon Runner”, “They Also Kill Horses”, “The Way We Were”, “Kiss of the Spider Woman”, to name just a few. The French cinema was political almost by definition and so was almost everything great coming from Latin American and Italian studious, directly or indirectly. And Soviets were telling their stories about saving the world from fascism, and about their attempt to build a classless society. All that had to be stopped, by every means.

Lenin very correctly pointed out that film is the most important art form that can influence the masses. He knew it and spoke about it, but the Western regime made perfect use of that fact. To make the world fragmented, to control it easily, the Empire made sure that intellectual exchange between the continents was decisively disrupted. Everything had to be rerouted through ‘hubs’, where the information and messages could be monitored, selected and finally modified. Such hubs were New York, London, Los Angeles, Miami; all depending on what parts of the world were to be influenced, and through what media.

Los Angeles is the center for visual indoctrinating and de-intellectualization, while Miami is, among other things, the center for extracting teeth and turning into brainless pop the most political music form on earth, salsa, which originally came from Cuba and the rest of Caribbean isles.

If not directly destroyed, most of the great mainstay stories from different parts of the world had to be thoroughly ‘retold’, and only then be re-distributed widely all over the world, in their shiny, new and useless form. The punch lines of Russian, Japanese and French film masterpieces have been amputated by pathetic Hollywood remakes.

Anglo-Saxons were now the only ones allowed to present their version of the stories to the whole world. And they truly perfected that brainwashing, indoctrinating narrative for instant consumption by, by now, fully uniformed viewers all over the world.

The main goal is clear: to make sure that people would not think. They should not think when they read, when they listen to music, when they watch films. They should not think much at all: just to study their specialized fields, work for companies, consume, vote as they are told, and obey. Or else! 

Now people worldwide have been fed by the same doctrines, as they were fed the same products. An entire new religion of ‘coolness’ and ‘stigmas’ was born, propagated by electronic and social media, in turn fueled by the major multi-nationals. To be ‘cool’ was turned to very opposite of what it used to be for centuries. Now it meant not to think, to be like the others, to be ‘light’, to chat, to exchange meaningless messages and information, to desire the same products, to look the same, to accept what the Empire and market-fundamentalism were professing. Those few thinking beings were booed and expelled to the margins, since the very young age; they were humiliated and at the end forced to join the ranks.

The concept was simple: “we will make you stupid, uniformed, uninformed, unimaginative. Then, we will give you free choice, and it is likely that you will demand even more empty entertainment, more uniformity, more social media, more chemical dreams. You will not protest, you will not demand the change of system. You will work hard to make elites richer, and consume what you are told you should find desirable. Amen.

We – your regime and you – will then be locked in one perfect symbiosis”.

It went further. At some point, the Western ideologues and their media outlets awarded themselves exclusive rights to judge, to erect moral concepts. It is as if a gang of bandits invades some frontier town, kills hundreds of men, rapes women, and robs the bank. The next day, members of the gang catch some miserable bicycle thief who took advantage of the chaos. The thief gets tried and condemned to several years in prison for his ‘terrible crime’. The bandits pose as heroes and saviors.

This, actually, would be an extremely good story to tell. The whole charade is so ridiculous, so transparent. But, shockingly, nobody is laughing, definitely almost nobody is laughing in the West!

* * *

One of the greatest films ever made – Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” – got swiftly overshadowed by a Hollywood remake, the “Magnificent Seven”, because it had to be the American cowboys, not Japanese samurais, who had the right to demonstrate a true moral standard to the world. Of course, Kurosawa was a socialist realist, and his early scripts were totally unacceptable to the Western regime. It is also important to recall that Kurosawa, after the war, was busy searching for ways to avoid the censorship imposed on Japanese art and media by the US occupation administration.

Like films, also all those brilliant fairytales from all over the world had to be kidnapped, recycled, their teeth extracted, their social message reduced to zero. Disney had repackaged those mighty as well tiny creatures from all corners of the planet, into a horrid, fast food-concept of fairytales; it destroyed and humiliated them, turned them into pinkish and yellowish kitsch.

Even in those countries with ancient cultures and folklore, like Thailand and Indonesia, there is hardly anything left of the original legends: children are growing up fully dependent on mass-produced toys designed in computer workshops in the United States, instead of relying on their own storytellers and wonderful legends. It is the same as with the junk food, and later, cigarettes.

All identity is wiped out, all creativity and originality destroyed. Even original lullabies are now disappearing from many parts of the world.

* * *

Writers, thinkers, journalists, filmmakers – most of them, gradually – became obedient propagandists of the regime. Thus the horrid prophecy of Orwell and Huxley materialized, quietly, without any major dramas or ‘significant events’. Of course true drama – the slaughter of hundreds of millions of innocent men, women and children in all corners of the world – has been ongoing for centuries. But the victims were, as Orwell called them, un-people, so nobody cared. Then suddenly, everything became constrained. The flow of stories virtually stopped. We don’t know when exactly it happened. Nobody does.

* * *

I often think about true stories in these dark days of the Western talibanisation of the planet. I draw inspiration and optimism from them. Not too long ago, just some twenty years back, in the early 1990s, I was just a kid, a young reporter, covering the South American continent. I will never forget dynamism, zeal and courage of the people I encountered in Chile, Argentina, Peru and Colombia. My novel, my rebellious Point of No Return that is just now being re-introduced to English readers after being fully re-edited, was greatly influenced by those years spent in Latin America.

Chile and Argentina were just waking up from their terrible nightmares, from brutal dictatorships supported by the West. Both countries were trying to come to terms with their past, to rebuild their societies. Peru was still consumed by a brutal ‘dirty war’.

The stories were everywhere; they were searching for storytellers, competing for our attention, chasing us. I was still based in New York then, where I knew dozens of aspiring writers and filmmakers, many of them continuously lamenting about ‘not knowing what to write’.

These were the post-Reagan days, New York was atomized, fragmented, with miserable slums and homeless people everywhere; people rotting at the entrances to subways, men and women dying lonely deaths, abandoned by their families and society. But writers took the luxury of not knowing what to say! This was the era when the Empire was consolidating its power abroad, from south and Central Africa to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The Soviet Union, country where I was born, was decomposing after the Afghanistan trap, under the terrible reign of one naïve nitwit, and then under another one, a brutal notorious alcoholic and protégé of the West.

I was shuttling between awakening in Latin America and absolute stagnation in the West, where the writers were too busy suffering from identity crises to notice what was happening in the world!

* * *

I remember how ecstatic I felt high in the Andes. Of course, not because of the war, but thanks to the stories, an incredible amount of them, of which almost all were genuine. There, the air was thin and so was Anglo-American propaganda. There, the stories were firmly in control of life. People talked. I listened. It was how it always was, for millennia, and it all felt right. I learned how to tell the stories in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. I learned how to listen. Sometimes it took the entire night to hear one simple and short tale in a clay hut, but it was always worth it.

One night my English photographer and I left the city of Ayacucho in the middle of the night, both of us shaken to the core. Just two days earlier we were stopped by the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, hastily tried at the side of the road, and then condemned to death. True, we managed to talk ourselves out of execution, explaining, honestly, our distaste for both the President Fujimori and Yankeeimperialism. But we were still in shock, as our young lives could have just ended there, at the curb, in one instance. Ayacucho means ‘corner of death’, it is a beautiful but cursed place high in the mountains, very indigenous and battered by centuries of colonialism and consequent feudal mores. It was pitch dark, and we turned all beams of our Land Rover on, shaking from altitude sickness, driving fast in order to ‘fly over’ an uneven dirt road. We were on assignment for a big news magazine, and we were young, and definitely not quitters.

At one turn, an indigenous woman dashed under our wheels. She jumped, then knelt, begging. I slammed the brakes. This could have been a typical trap; and it could have been our end. But the woman was crying, in pain, she was heavily pregnant, indicating that she was entering labor. Then she joined her hands in one powerful plea. We stopped. We had no clue what to do. Two hardened war reporters with a big car and all that equipment inside, totally helpless, clumsy, stupid when faced with new life that was demanding our assistance. We literally carried her to the car, put her on the back seat and played, just to do something, some Chilean ballads from car stereo. We tried to make her feel better.

What followed was a mess, a total mess! And from that mess a child was born. A girl. She was born alive and she survived; we all made sure that she survived. And two of us, two not so tidy young men who were cracking terrible jokes just a few minutes before, while our eyes were glued to the dusty road at some 4.000 meters altitude, searching for deadly military patrols, were now jumping around that good-natured indigenous matron with red cheeks, cleaning sweat from her forehead, trying to be at least somehow useful. Eventually we drove both of them – mother and her tiny daughter – to the next village, where we found a willing midwife. As birth-assistants we absolutely failed, but for weeks we felt endlessly proud and the girl – the baby girl – still lives in my memory – as the most beautiful, the dearest child.

That was one of the greatest stories I ever encountered, simple and pure as a creek, back there, high in the mountains. Later I saw similar scenes in the movies. The men helping were always sensible, comical, and absolutely unrealistic. We were not really sensible at all. It was a war, a brutal war, and it was cold and a woman was probably abandoned by her man; kicked out from her house… It was not a happy story, but it was human and at the end, a good story, and it probably made both of us better men. 

After that, I saw death on many, too many occasions, and it was necessary to see it. I don’t regret seeing death, because that is how this world is arranged, and I can’t write about things I have never witnessed. Everyone who went to war knows that how it is shown in most of Hollywood films is simply a lie. I described the war in my Point of No Return, and I am describing it again, now, in detail, in my latest 1.000 page novel.

It is important to write about the war, about the stories that one experiences during the battle and in ravished cities and villages. Because almost all wars in the modern history are caused, are triggered by us, by the West. Because our ‘culture’, our brutality, our greed, caused hundreds of millions of lives to be lost, all over the world.

Our ‘real’ wars now became ‘remote’. We invented carpet-bombing, we dropped an A-Bomb; we killed millions of men, women and children in Indochina. We killed them mostly with our flying monsters, dropping millions of tons of steel on poor hamlets and villages full of people who just wanted to be truly free – free from our dictates and from our terror. And now we use drones. We don’t even dare to fly that heavy metal shit, anymore.

All this, because we are cowards, and our culture is both that of despots and weaklings. And to realize it, the only way to understand it, is to read and to watch real stories of those whom we have been brutalizing and torturing.

But we don’t want to. We close our ears with the palms of our hands. We refuse to hear them speak and laugh, we make sure not to hear them cry and scream. We are killing them, but we are doing it ‘surgically’, long-distance, while watching on television sets tarantulas consuming our cities, while stuffing ourselves on pre-fabricated food and buying toys for tiny children – toys that have no heart and no soul, anymore. 

We have turned into total idiots, and we even kill like idiots. Oliver Stone made films about how we ‘fought’ the wars. That was the closest to reality. It was also an exception, and many people did not like what they saw. The Soviet people fought real war and they saved our planet. They also helped to liberate dozens of countries from Western colonialism. Without them, there would be no freedom in Africa, Middle East and most parts of Asia. But those facts are oppressed and can’t be mentioned. What also can’t be mentioned is the heroic, and at the same time humble, involvement of Cuban people in the African liberation struggle.

Soviets also made great films about fighting and wining the war, and about saving us from fascism. “The Cranes Are Flying”, “The Ballad of Soldier”, “The Dawns Are Quiet Here”, to name just some. Those wonderful Russian stories are completely unknown, from films to modern novels, even those brilliant cartoons they made for children.

The West which, at the beginning, fought half-heartedly the German Nazis while simultaneously committing crimes against humanity in Africa, Middle East and Oceania, made sure that everything connected with heroic struggle of Soviet Russia was dragged through dirt, and later has been using the same tactics again China and Latin America, particularly Cuba.

Cuba is the greatest enemy, a country the West demonized and tried to destroy by chemical warfare, terrorism and relentless propaganda. Why Cuba? Because Cuba has three things that Western regime does not have: it has heart, it has humanism, and it has guts.

*   * *

Is there any true opposition, or even self-criticism in the West? Or is the West really increasingly resembling its ally from the old days – the Taliban?

No films depict the open racism of Winston Churchill and his theories regarding “the beastly lesser races”, or many other colonial monsters like British PM David Lloyd George, who, while his country was bombing Iraqi civilians in the mid-1920s, killed an international proposal to ban aerial bombarding with the phrase “We have to reserve the right to bomb the niggers.” Hardly any stories unveiling terror unleashed against the colonies, in practical terms against the entire world, are being allowed to domesticate in the psyche of Europeans and North Americans.

Busts and monuments to the worst racists and criminals are now decorating London and all major British cities, as are the statues of Belgian King Leopold II, a mass murderer responsible for the slaughter of 10 million Congolese people and for the chopping of hands of those who did not work fast enough to fill up his coffers, now scattered all over Brussels.

The greatest and the most frightening story, that of enslaving of the world by European and later North American tyrants, was never told. The stories of resistance against this unprecedented and ongoing terror are perpetually suppressed.

* * *

So here I am again, in Egypt. One ugly armored vehicle is moving its cannon from left to right, as if searching for something, for someone. It passed me and I could clearly see the inside of its muzzle. It did not stop; it ignored me, as I was not the one it was searching for. I keep working, unhurriedly, photographing and filming, then photographing again. I work monotonously, each move calculated.

Then something hits my chest. I do not feel almost any pain, not much pain at all, just some. I thought it was a bullet; they say one does not feel much pain in the first instances, during few seconds after being hit. I did not want to look down, because if I was hit by a bullet through the chest, it would be all over very soon: my insane life, all those adventures and battles I lived almost since I was a child. And so I kept working, by inertia.

There was disgusting smoke all over the street and soon I realized that I was not hit by a bullet, but by an empty teargas canister. I was alive, and suddenly, as if to celebrate that fact, that miracle, my brain recalled the handwriting penciled into the last page of The River of Fire. And I recalled the face of a girl, a maid called Ratan, from The Postmaster, the first of Three Daughters trilogy directed by one of the most brilliant filmmakers of all times – Satyajit Ray. I recalled her story, originally written by Tagore: 

A new postmaster comes from Kolkata to a small village. Ratan, a maid, an orphan, is ‘given to him’. He is kind to her; he does not beat her as the previous ‘owner’ did. But he is bored in the village. He begins to teach her how to read and write. He talks to her. They are scared of terrible storm, together. He falls ill. She moves to his house; she stays next to him, day and night, awake, and saves his life. She falls in love with him, although not one intimate word is uttered. He recovers. He decides to leave. A new postmaster arrives. She meets her love, on an empty road, as he is departing. She looks at him, for the last time. He stops, and then moves on. This, outside of India almost unknown frame, is one of the most beautiful moments in the world cinema.

‘What a story’, I think. ‘What a tremendous story!’

The smoke was now covering entire surface of the avenue. “What am I doing here?” I thought, just for a fraction of a second. But subconsciously I knew: I was at the frontline, for years, fighting for survival of real stories. Those that are all around us: small but deep, frightened and humiliated by multi-million productions coming from Hollywood and Disney, with all their false pathos and noise, and lies. As I watched the cannon, I thought that philosophers, not only storytellers, were ‘out of vogue’. Both were assigned the identity of wooden toys, made with love but now obsolete, pushed to oblivion by hyper reality, by electronic media, which reduced emotions and human interaction to just a few abbreviated incoherent barks.

I pushed the shutter. My heavy professional still camera recorded a moment – a tiny girl clinging to her mom, teargas burning her eyes. But her story, her tiny and real story: how could it compete with some giant insects invading the earth; how could it compete with the horror of entire California falling of the cliff in those doomsday Hollywood movies. What I was actually doing here was desperately trying to record last glimpses of humanity. The real pain, real longing, hope and yes, love.

In order to record all those disappearing stories, I kept moving in geographical extremes, in some of the most inaccessible parts of the world, in conflict and war zones. I was propelled by thorough spite for virtual reality, which was attempting to murder compassion, hopes, dreams, even love. And it went without saying that the virtual reality felt absolute spite for people like me.

I straightened my filthy shirt and checked my lenses. They were intact. Cameras were working. My body was working. The name of the girl in Ray’s film was Ratan. The handwriting at the end of the River of Fire said: D.K. 30-9-99 24036. Whatever it meant. The gun moved again, this time from right to the left. Again it did not stop. I was alive. And my heart was still on the left, where it belonged, and it was beating regularly, pushing red blood through my veins. And I was not going to stop telling ‘real’ stories, for as long as there was that naturally left-centered movement inside my swelling chest.