How Imperialism Works

Incredibly offensive but honest essay on information warfare by US intelligence officer

Below are excerpts from a seminal essay on the future significance of information warfare written by the now retired Lieutenant Colonel, Ralph Peters formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence for the US Army War College journal, Parameters. Though the article was originally published in 1997, it was recently re-published in light of its continued relevance, and has since been quoted by Pepe Escobar in his article “”War Porn: the New Safe Sex”, with direct reference to the media war on Syria. Though unabashedly racist and classist in content and offensively triumphalist and jingoistic in tone, Peters’ essay provides a devastatingly honest account of the central role information warfare will continue to have in US military strategy. As if anticipating the current informational onslaught against the resistance axis, the article serves to confirm how the US media has become the most potent tool in its wider war on its “rejectionist” enemies. Excerpts from the 9 page article are below, with particularly interesting/offensive parts highlighted in upper-case. 

 

“ONE OF THE DEFINING BIFURCATIONS OF THE FUTURE WILL BE THE CONFLICT BETWEEN INFORMATION MASTERS AND INFORMATION VICTIMS.

How can you counterattack the information  others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). …. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot  control its children. Our victims volunteer.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures  are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them.

THE LAID-OFF BLUE-COLLAR WORKER IN AMERICA AND THE TALIBAN MILITIAMAN IN AFGHANISTAN ARE BROTHERS IN SUFFERING.

These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives….

Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.

Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one’s own impoverished group or country or region. ….

This discarded foreigner’s desire may be to attack the “Great Satan America,” but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture “doesn’t work.” The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.

Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. ..The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses. WE ARE KARL MARX’S DREAM, AND HIS NIGHTMARE.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted—men and women everywhere—clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason.

THE DE FACTO ROLE OF THE US ARMED FORCES WILL BE TO KEEP THE WORLD SAFE FOR OUR ECONOMY AND OPEN TO OUR CULTURAL  ASSAULT. TO THOSE ENDS, WE WILL DO A FAIR AMOUNT OF KILLING. WE ARE BUILDING AN INFORMATION-BASED MILITARY TO DO THAT KILLING. THERE WILL STILL BE PLENTY OF MUSCLE POWER REQUIRED, BUT MUCH OF OUR MILITARY ART WILL CONSIST IN KNOWING MORE ABOUT THE ENEMY THAN HE KNOWS ABOUT HIMSELF, MANIPULATING DATA FOR EFFECTIVENESS AND EFFICIENCY, AND DENYING SIMILAR ADVANTAGES TO OUR OPPONENTS. ..

Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy’s heart. We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. .. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform  all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will

not be competitive. THEY MIGHT MASTER THE TECHNOLOGICAL WHEREWITHAL TO WATCH THE VIDEOS, BUT WE WILL BE WRITING THE SCRIPTS, PRODUCING THEM, AND COLLECTING THE ROYALTIES. OUR CREATIVITY IS DEVASTATING.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. BUT HOLLYWOOD IS “PREPARING THE BATTLEFIELD,” and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans “saw” Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey’s tanks. OUR UNCONSCIOUS ALLIANCE OF CULTURE WITH KILLING POWER IS A COMBAT MULTIPLIER NO GOVERNMENT, INCLUDING OUR OWN, COULD DESIGN OR AFFORD. WE ARE MAGIC. AND WE’RE GOING TO KEEP IT THAT WAY.”

Source: Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, Winter 2010-11. pp. 126-134.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/Articles/2010winter/Peters.pdf

The Counter Revolution Disguised as Democracy in Egypt and All Over The World!

Post Categories: Africa
Shamus Cooke | Saturday, June 2, 2012, 9:39 Beijing
 

In a country where the embers of revolution are still glowing, you would assume that a presidential election would produce a revolutionary-appearing government. Not so in Egypt. The revolutionaries who toppled the hated dictator Mubarak will have zero representation in the upcoming runoff election for president.

Those who opposed the revolution, however, are well represented. The runoff election features Ahmed Shafiq, the dictator’s former Prime Minister who remains a military strongmen. Shafiq’s presence in the election is a stark reminder that the revolution’s goals have yet to be accomplished.

The other non-revolutionary presidential contender is Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood stayed quiet during the initial phase of the revolution until their youth wing dragged them into the fray. The leadership has since pretended to be an ally of the revolution, but their fake revolutionary credentials have been exposed several times since winning a large chunk of parliamentary seats, steadily eroding their popularity.

For example, Egypt’s executive power still consists of a cabinet handpicked by the military, a fact that began to fan the revolution’s hot coals, re-igniting mass protests. The Muslim Brotherhood stayed silent — as before — until the heat once again forced them into action: the Brotherhood shut down parliament, demanding that the army’s cabinet step down.

But the military responded with inaction and threatened to shutdown parliament permanently. The Brotherhood responded by compelling the re-opening of parliament, and the cabinet remained in place.

The Brotherhood is now correctly viewed by many as being somewhat subservient to the military, a role their leadership played pre-revolution. This exposure accounts for the drop in their popularity that resulted in their earning only 25 percent of first round Presidential votes, after winning 47 percent of the Parliamentary seats in November/December.

Regardless of which candidate wins the election, the military could very well remain the real power in the country. This is because Egypt still lacks a constitution; the new president will literally have zero power until one is created. If the military’s candidate loses they will fight to limit the president’s power. Many of the  more honest  contenders  for president have already boycotted the election for this reason.

A Constituent Assembly had been bureaucratically set up by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament to write a constitution, but other parties boycotted it because of the Brotherhood’s overwhelming power over the proceedings. Then Egypt’s military-dominated courts dissolved the Assembly , probably to keep the Brotherhood’s power in check (the military and the Brotherhood have a love-hate relationship, relying on each other as props while simultaneously vying for power).

The pathetic state of Egypt’s democracy led the spokesman for the military’s candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, to declare “the revolution has ended.” But he has spoken too soon. When stripped down to its essentials, a revolution is the majority of working people actively engaged in politics. And because the coming election will not allow this majority an avenue to be engaged in politics, they will likely continue their political engagement in the streets.

Inevitably, however, the revolutionaries will learn that it’s not enough to oust Mubarak; a positive vision must replace the dictator, lest representatives of the old regime attempt to replace the dictator with his clone.

Hopefully, the revolutionaries will create a vision that unites them against their opponents, while organizing themselves as a cohesive, powerful social force that can withstand the organized power of the past, complete with inspiring ideas capable of mobilizing working people and truly transforming society, as opposed to a mere shuffling at the top.

The Egyptian ruling class is consciously using these elections to channel the revolution’s energy into a dead-end. This is a timeless revolution-killing strategy: the ruling class calls for an election before the revolutionaries have had the time to properly organize themselves, leaving the election to be won by those groups — The Muslim Brotherhood and the army in this case — who were organized pre-revolution. The winners of revolutions are the organized or the wealthy, often times both.

Egyptian society will refuse to remain calm after these elections; there are too many economic and social problems that remain unfixed post-revolution, most notably high unemployment within an economy in shambles.

The military government has already asked the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund for a $3.2 billion loan , which will not be finalized until after the elections. The delay was intentional, since the conditions of the debt deal will inevitably include austerity — cuts to basic social programs, elimination of gas and food subsidies, combined with privatizations of the public sector and other anti-worker policies.

Like the revolutionaries in Greece, Egyptians will fight against austerity while fighting for a truly democratic Constituent Assembly; either issue by itself could re-spark the still smoldering revolution.

But democracy will have a new meaning for Egypt’s revolutionaries: the abstract ideal will be tossed aside in favor of a democracy of economic and social equality, requiring that the economic and social power of Egypt’s old rulers be smashed.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).  He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com.

Somebody Else’s Atrocities, “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Gov’t Co-Opted Human Rights”

Prof. Noam Chomsky | Monday, June 4, 2012, 8:19 Beijing

 

In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James Peck observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.
Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let’s keep to the past few weeks.
On May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace of the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic Committee expressing the “profound concerns of the Government and people of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical Company as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement.”
Dow provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to destroy crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with Agent Orange.
These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most lethal carcinogens known, affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S. soldiers. To this day in Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants are very likely the effects of these crimes – though, in light of Washington’s refusal to investigate, we have only the studies of Vietnamese scientists and independent analysts.
Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which killed thousands and injured more than half a million.
Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February, Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and prosecution of those responsible.
Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.
Women and children were permitted to escape if they could. After several weeks of bombing, the attack opened with a carefully planned war crime: invasion of the Fallujah General Hospital, where patients and staff were ordered to the floor, their hands tied. Soon the bonds were loosened; the compound was secure.
The official justification was that the hospital was reporting civilian casualties, and therefore was considered a propaganda weapon.
Much of the city was left in “smoking ruins,” the press reported while the Marines sought out insurgents in their “warrens.” The invaders barred entry to the Red Crescent relief organization. Absent an official inquiry, the scale of the crimes is unknown.
If the Fallujah events are reminiscent of the events that took place in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, now again in the news with the genocide trial of Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, there’s a good reason. An honest comparison would be instructive, but there’s no fear of that: One is an atrocity, the other not, by definition.
As in Vietnam, independent investigators are reporting long-term effects of the Fallujah assault.
Medical researchers have found dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukemia, even higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium levels in hair and soil samples are far beyond comparable cases.
One of the rare investigators from the invading countries is Dr. Kypros Nicolaides, director of the fetal-medicine research center at London’s King’s College Hospital. “I’m sure the Americans used weapons that caused these deformities,” Nicolaides says.
The lingering effects of a vastly greater nonatrocity were reported last month by U.S. law professor James Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.
Anaya dared to tread on forbidden territory by investigating the shocking conditions among the remnants of the Native American population in the U.S. – “poverty, poor health conditions, lack of attainment of formal education (and) social ills at rates that far exceed those of other segments of the American population,” Anaya reported. No member of Congress was willing to meet him. Press coverage was minimal.
Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.
“The international commotion,” Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times last month, “aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of another age who first made ‘international human rights’ a rallying cry for activists across the globe and a high-profile item on Western governments’ agendas.”
Moyn is the author of “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,” released in 2010. In The New York Times Book Review, Belinda Cooper questioned Moyn’s tracing the contemporary prominence of these ideals to “(President Jimmy) Carter’s abortive steps to inject human rights into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union,” focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere. She finds Moyn’s thesis unpersuasive because “an alternative history to his own is far too easy to construct.”
True enough: The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck provides, which the mainstream can hardly consider, though the relevant facts are strikingly clear and known at least to scholarship.
Thus in the “Cambridge History of the Cold War,” John Coatsworth recalls that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” But being nonatrocities, these crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn’t inspire a human-rights crusade.
Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller writes that “Dissidents are heroic,” but they can be “irritants to American diplomats who have important business to transact with countries that don’t share our values.” Keller criticizes Washington for sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when others commit crimes.
There is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S. influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in prison from a long hunger strike.
And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, the elderly Korean priest who was severely injured while holding mass as part of the protest against the construction of a U.S. naval base on Jeju Island, named an Island of Peace, now occupied by security forces for the first time since the 1948 massacres by the U.S.-imposed South Korean government.
And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci, facing trial again for defending the rights of Kurds. He already has spent much of his life in prison on the same charge, including the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was providing Turkey with huge quantities of military aid – at a time when the Turkish military perpetrated some of the period’s worst atrocities.
But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along with others too numerous to mention.

Prof. Noam Chomsky

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Africans In Israel Attacked by Zionist Government and Racist Mobs.

Migrants from Sudan and Eritrea beaten, robbed and threatened with deportation.

By Abayomi Azikiwe.Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Since late May the rising animosity toward African migrants in Israel has reached a boiling point. After months of anti-African speeches in the Knesset and the cabinet of Binyamin Netanyahu, mobs of racist gangs began to attack Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans in south Tel Aviv.

People were beaten on the streets, their business were looted amid calls for the banning and deportations of Africans. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians have likened migrant workers and small business people from Africa to a “cancer” within society.

On June 4, four people were taken to a hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation after their home was firebombed in Jerusalem. The arson attack took place in a two-story building in a poor neighborhood close to the Mahane Yehuda market at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. (Alarabiya.net, June 4)

It was reported that some 18 people lived in the building where the fire was started in a narrow entrance corridor. Outside the building racists had painted “Get out of the neighborhood.”

Violence Given Official Support

These attacks against African migrants are by no means spontaneous but are taking place within a broader political context. The State of Israel, founded on the racist and imperialist notions of entitlement to the land of Palestine, has for decades engaged in massacres, imprisonment and forced removals of the Arab population.

On May 23 a rally in Tel Aviv of 1,000 people was addressed by several leading Israeli politicians, many of whom are members of the ruling Likud Party of Netanyahu. Accusations of criminal activity and taking employment opportunities away from Israelis worked the crowd into an agitated state.

Likud Member of Parliament Miri Regev told the crowd that “The infiltrators are a cancer in our body. The infiltrators must be expelled from Israel! Expulsion now!” (Press TV, May 29)

Later mobs carrying sticks and stones began to rampage through areas populated by African migrants. The crowds shouted “Blacks Out!” and “Infiltrators get out of our homes.”
In addition to the vandalism and looting of shops operated and frequented by Africans, two men who were sitting in a vehicle were assaulted while the car was smashed up.  The mobs claim that Africans have disrupted their lives and neighborhoods by stealing and threatening Israeli women with sexual assaults.

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai told the army radio station in an interview that “We must put all these infiltrators behind bars in detention and holding centers, then send them home because they come and take work from Israelis.

It has been estimated that up to 60,000 African migrants have entered the State of Israel from Egypt since the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime 15 months ago. The migrants say they are fleeing the unstable political situations in Sudan and the Horn of Africa where drought, food deficits and western-backed internal conflicts have created massive dislocation of civilian populations.

The Israeli government on June 3 put into effect a law passed by the Knesset in January that allows for the detention of African migrants for up to three years. Israeli officials say the new law will both discourage migration as well as provide a legal mechanism for the detention and mass deportation of Africans.

After the mob attacks on May 23, Netanyahu stressed that “The problem of the infiltrators must be solved and we will solve it.” Interior Minister Yishai, who is a member of another right-wing party, the ultra-orthodox Shas, said that the Africans are a threat to the character of Israeli society.

“The infiltrators along with the Palestinians will quickly bring us to the end of the Zionist dream. We don’t need to import more problems from Africa,” Yishai said in reference to the burgeoning economic problems in Israel which have sparked demonstrations over the last year by the settler population.

Feeling the impact of the world economic crisis, the Israeli state is based upon the maintenance of a settler population through government subsidies for housing and social welfare needs. With the overall decline in the manufacturing and service sectors, unemployment and the lack of housing has created tensions between the settler population and their government based in Tel Aviv.

Yishai also said of the Africans that “Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man.” Another right-wing politician, Aryeh Eldad, encouraged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to shoot on sight Africans attempting to cross the border into the Zionist state. (Reuters, June 3)

There are already detention facilities for migrants on the border with Egypt that are overflowing with inmates. Reports indicate that these prisons where migrants are held prior to deportation can house up to 5,000 people.

Nonetheless, the Israeli government approved the construction of another prison for migrants last year. This was done at the same time that plans were made for the building of a $167 million fence on the border with Sinai to ostensibly keep out African immigrants as well as revolutionaries who may be engaging in attacks against the Israeli state.

Continuing the Legacy of Racism and Forced Removals

Many longtime observers of the State of Israel are not surprised at the latest outbreak of racist violence against African migrants. Although the rationale for such attacks are supposedly based on the lack of “legal immigration documents” by Africans from Sudan and Eritrea, similar acts of discrimination are carried out against Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted into the settler state during the 1980s.

During the period of the Ethiopian Revolution, a drought and famine struck the country in 1984-85. The Soviet Union supplied planes to relocate people to areas where relief could be provided while the Israeli government targeted the Ethiopian Jewish population for immigration to occupied Palestine.

However, these Ethiopians have suffered discrimination since arriving in Israel. Evidence of such racism occurred during the mob violence in Tel Aviv on May 23 when Hananya Vanda, a Jewish Israeli of Ethiopian origin was attacked by the racists who later said they “did not know he was Jewish.” (Gulf Today, June 4)

Millions of Palestinians remain in refugee camps in and outside of their national homeland nearly sixty-five years after the establishment of the Zionist state. The United States government and ruling class subsidizes the Israeli rulers to the tune of billions of dollars every year and the transferal of sophisticated military and intelligence equipment and technologies.

The State of Israel serves as the most important outpost for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Last year at the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama in his address urged the Palestinian Authority not to seek recognition as a legitimate state and to return to the negotiating table with Israel where no progress has been made in nearly two decades since the failed Oslo Agreements.

The Palestinian enclave of Gaza remains the largest open-air prison in the world. The IDF periodically engages in aerial strikes on the people of Gaza killing civilians almost on a daily basis.

The elimination of racism and discrimination in Israel will not take place until the territory is liberated from U.S.-backed Zionist rule. The entire political and economic fabric of the state is based on oppression and exploitation and the recent events of racist violence directed against African migrants provides an even greater opportunity for unity between the Arab and African populations throughout the region.

120520st - Painting of Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed creates an uproar

120520st - Painting of Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed creates an uproar