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by John Pilger February 26, 2015 from GlobalResearch Website
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness.
Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear.
Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened.
Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery.
They are the progeny of modern fascism,
weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal
theatre known as news.
Take the
catastrophe in Libya.
The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that,
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words:
His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people.
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces.
They told Reuters there would be,
Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie
provided the first spark for NATO's inferno, described by David
Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".
The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources.
Whether or not this would happen, the
very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to "enter"
Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships".
The "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media.
In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing "genocide" against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.
David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as,
Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War".
The West's heroic allies were the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set
aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them
to call him any time on his mobile phone.
The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing,
A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788.
This included combatants on both sides
and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The
"holocaust" was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
This was not acceptable to the expanding
European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun
a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav
provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at
Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous Eurozone, a
secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia.
Yugoslavia was doomed.
NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics.
The Rambouillet accord included a secret Appendix B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day.
This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this.
Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country.
It was the precursor to the catastrophes in,
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism.
They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions".
The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address.
In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.
In fact, more civilians were killed in
Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The
majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's
time as president.
In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because,
He is right.
As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy.
Who knows this vital history...?
More than 13,000 political prisoners
were freed and police files publicly burned.
By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted,
Alarmed by the growing confidence of
liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that
if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and
progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".
In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that,
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
Invited to London, he was lauded by
Prime Minister Thatcher as a "freedom fighter".
His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region.
In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia.
This was called "Operation
Cyclone". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the
last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who
had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - was
hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
Operation Cyclone became the "war on terror", in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.
The enforcer's message was and remains:
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder.
The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collateral damage". In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians ("gooks") were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered.
In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest
aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked
today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the
air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own
ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA "kill list" presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room.
He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains.
Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority.
As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said,
This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology.
That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture.
I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers.
By contrast, US losses, including in the
Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this...
The New York Times described it as a,
There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism.
During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens - as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America.
Germans and east Europeans who had
colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity
were given safe haven in the US;
many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun
was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space
program.
The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as
the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh
Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the "Moscow-Jewish
mafia" and "other scum", including gays, feminists and those on the
political left.
The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get "the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry".
If he succeeds, it will be seen as an
act of war by Russia.
At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism".
It was Nuland who masterminded the coup
in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con"
luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing
Project for a New American Century,
she was foreign policy advisor to
Dick Cheney.
The mostly Russian population of Crimea
- illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 - voted
overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s.
The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed.
There was no invasion.
They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions.
More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia.
In the western media, they became unpeople escaping "the violence" caused by the "Russian invasion". The NATO commander, General Breedlove - whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - announced that 40,000 Russian troops were "massing".
In the age of forensic satellite
evidence, he offered none...
Their revolt and establishment of
autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little
of this has been explained to western audiences.
In the American and British media, this
was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between
"nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting
signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
Obama congratulated the junta for its
"restraint"...
On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically:
There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion.
This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko,
Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with
nuclear-armed Russia.
It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's
fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and
Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently,
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media:
In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war.
He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine.
He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit". In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq.
He lauded Blair as a,
In 2006, he wrote,
The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal.
The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber.
On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words:
This American "kit" will cost British
taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered
across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial
has demanded an increase in military spending.
The 'rulers'
of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base;
they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe
Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in
charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given
Ukrainian citizenship.
They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border.
Their man in Moscow used to be Boris
Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West.
His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a
sovereign nation; that is his crime.
Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves:
If we remain silent, victory over us is
assured, and a holocaust beckons.
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