I believe it is critical to see the role that our government plays domestically and globally in perpetuating and fueling violence. Violence always creates more violence. Yes, there is amazing beauty in our country. And there is a very dark side. May we heal our individual and collective shadows. May we be that brave, may we care that much. Another world is possible. ~ Molly
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| Passersby look at the home of Ali Mukhar Al-Gharari, which was struck by one large piece of aircraft-delivered ordnance, in Tripoli, November 13, 2011. In 2011, NATO launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times) |
Again and again, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere, state lies to the public, with the help of corporate media, have allowed the United States to wage war abroad as a means to control other nations and their natural resources.
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism. Its 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, with war-making elites urging us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome.
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.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, NATO launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that "most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten."
The public sodomizing of the Libyan president, Muammar el-Qaddafi, with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew ... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda." Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention."
The public sodomizing of the Libyan president, Muammar el-Qaddafi, with a "rebel" bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: "We came, we saw, he died." His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning "genocide" against his own people. "We knew ... that if we waited one more day," said President Obama, "Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda." Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention."
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Qaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars.
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's Special Air Service, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.
For Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande, Qaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of US imperial power. Qaddafi 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 United States as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships."
For Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande, Qaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of US imperial power. Qaddafi 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 United States as it prepared to "enter" Africa and bribe African governments with military "partnerships."
Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/29368-why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue
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