UK Chilcot Inquiry Confirms What We Knew: Tony Blair and George W. Bush Are War Criminals

Cameron government is blocking publication of their “official” report

By Carl Herman

GlobalResearch.ca, January 4, 2013: The UK Cameron government is blocking publication of their “official” report on Iraq war until perhaps 2014 or later, according to the UK’s most popular newspaper website.

Perhaps this delay is in part because the Blair government was advised before the war by all 27 attorneys in their Foreign Affairs Office that war on Iraq was unlawful. That would mean armed attack on Iraq would be an unlawful War of Aggression, with identical criminal implication on US armed attack on Iraq.

Unlawful war requires US military to refuse all war orders and arrest those who issue them (more documentation here).

Public understanding that current wars “on terror” are not even close to lawful would end these wars. War law forbids all armed attack unless under attack by another nation’s government.

As I wrote in 2010:

All the lawyers in the UK’s Foreign Affairs Department concluded the US/UK invasion of Iraq was an unlawful War of Aggression. Their expert advice is the most qualified to make that legal determination; all 27 of them were in agreement. This powerful judgment of unlawful war follows the Dutch government’s recent unanimous report and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s clear statements.

This stunning information was disclosed at the UK Chilcot inquiry by the testimony of Foreign Affairs leading legal advisor, Sir Michael Wood, who added that the reply from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office to his legal department’s professional work was chastisement for putting their unanimous legal opinion in writing.

Sir Michael testified that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw preferred to take the legal position that the laws governing war were vague and open to broad interpretation: “He took the view that I was being very dogmatic and that international law was pretty vague and that he wasn’t used to people taking such a firm position.”

Mr. Straw’s opinion is an Orwellian lie of the crystal-clear letter and spirit of the UN Charter that outlawed wars of choice in 1945. The UN Charter forbids all use of force except when explicitly authorized by the UN Security Council, or in a narrow definition of self-defense upon an armed attack by another nation’s government. This is arguably the single most important and clear law on the planet, the victory of the generation who sacrificed during World War 2, and damning criminal testimony for anyone in government to claim that this law is vague.

Violation of the laws to prevent war, a War of Aggression and a Crime Against Peace, are also arguably to worst crime a nation can commit.

UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith testified he ”changed his mind” against the unanimous legal opinion of all 27 of the Foreign Office attornies to agree with the US legal argument that UN Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized use of force at the discretion of any nation’s choice. This testimony is also criminally damning: arguing that an individual nation has the right to choose war violates the purpose, letter and spirit of the UN Charter, as well as violates 1441 that reaffirms jurisdiction of the Security Council in governance of the issue. This Orwellian argument contradicts the express purpose of the Charter to prevent individual nations from engaging in wars. A two-minute video of his mincing testimony is below as he pretends that war is still a lawful foreign policy option.
Moreover, the US and UK “legal argument” is in further Orwellian opposition to their UN Ambassadors’ statements when 1441 was passed that this did not authorize any use of force:

John Negroponte, US Ambassador to the UN:

[T]his resolution contains no “hidden triggers” and no “automaticity” with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK Ambassador to the UN:

We heard loud and clear during the negotiations the concerns about “automaticity” and “hidden triggers” — the concern that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action; that on a decision so crucial any Iraqi violations should be discussed by the Council. Let me be equally clear in response… There is no “automaticity” in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required in paragraph 12.

The Chilcot inquiry was initiated from public outrage against UK participation in the Iraq War, with public opinion having to engage a second time to force hearings to become public rather than closed and secret. The hearings were not authorized to consider criminal charges, which is the next battle for UK public opinion.

Concentrated US corporate media will not report the Chilcot inquiry “emperor has no clothes” facts and conclusion that the current US wars are unlawful. The US Senate Church Committee revealed CIA infiltration of US corporate media to disinform the American public to support US political agendas.
The cost of these unlawful wars is over a million Iraqi lives above those expected to have died in pre-war conditions and $3-$5 TRILLION in long-term US taxpayer costs (that’s $30,000 to $50,000 per average US household of $50,000 annual income; do the math to figure your family’s share).

US Senate and House Committee investigation has shown through all disclosed evidence that all of the justifications for war with Iraq were known to be lies at the time they were presented to the public. You are an irresponsible citizen if you do not verify these easily-understood facts from the disclosed evidence. A colluding corporate media for unlawful wars is a lame excuse for inaction when the facts are in front of you now.

See Also:

Chilcott's anger as Blair's Iraq memos to Bush stay secret

Sandy Hook Massacre: What the MSM Won't Discuss

According to the Associated Press, reporting on the day of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre:

A law enforcement official says that the 20-year-old suspect in the Connecticut school shootings killed his mother at their home Friday and then drove his mother's car to the school where he went on a deadly rampage.

The car the "20-year-old suspect," Adam Lanza, is supposed to have driven on his way to commit mass murder was this black Honda civic.

(Photo : Reuters ) Car driven by school shooter Adam Lanza is towed from
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Image Source

The picture reveals the vehicle's registration to be 872 YEP. But that, it appears, is not the registration of a vehicle owned by Adam Lanza's mother, but of a vehicle owned by Christopher Rodia of Norwalk, CT.

But this fact raised no YE(L)P from the mainstream media, which brings to mind Conan Doyle's story, Silver Blaze, featuring the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time:"

Detective Inspector Gregory (of Scotland Yard): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

In the Sherlock Holmes story, the dog made no noise because the crime was an inside job, with no intruder causing the dog to raise the alarm.

In the case of the Sandy Hook massacre, why did the mainstream media raise no alarm over the fact that the registration of what it had reported to be Adam Lanza's mother's car was, in fact, in the name of Christopher Rodia, a small-time thief with multiple convictions and family connections to the drug trade? Speculation may  have been criminalized,  but you remain free to consider the question for yourself?

Actually, one commercial news source did mention the Rodia connection, and that was the Norwalk Citizen, the paper of Chris Rodia's home town. The paper acknowledges that a "policeman’s call to dispatch on an audiotape" identifies Rodia as the owner of the car. But without citing any counter evidence, the paper rejects the idea that Rodia was connected with the Sandy Hook killings on two grounds:

1. Rodia's denial: "That was such a heinous crime, I don’t want to be connected to it in any way," Rodia said.
2. That connection between the car and Rodia has not been reported in the mainstream media.

Rodia's "I didn't do it gov." may be compelling to some, although if this type of plea were generally accepted, the police would achieve few convictions. And to argue as the paper seems to, that the evidence of a possible mainstream media conspiracy of silence is evidence of no mainstream media conspiracy of silence, seems lame, even by the standards of what has come to be known to some as the lame-stream media.

What the report in the Norwalk Citizen appears to confirm, since the assumption is not denied, is that the car said to be Adam Lanza's mother's is indeed Chris Rodia's. How unfortunate, therefore, that the Norwark Citizen did not think to ask Chris Rodia how it was that his car, with a rifle or shot-gun in the trunk, happened to be parked outside Sandy Hook Elementary at the time of the massacre.

There are many other curious and as yet unexplained facts in the case of the Sandy Hook massacre.

But, as Time Magazine demands speculation must end.

Which is to say, this story is to be handled as any inside job would be handled by a complicit media, with a statement of the final verdict on the case before a competent investigation has been undertaken.

Which is not to say that Sandy Hook was an inside job, an act of state terror designed perhaps to facilitate gun control legislation, but if not, why are the media not carefully analyzing the facts of the case before announcing what happened?

Postscript

CTPost, January 3, 2012: State Police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said ... [t]he car confiscated at the scene, the black Honda with that license plate, belongs to a relative of Lanza's and not to Rodia, he said.

But still nobody to know who, exactly, the vehicle belongs to. Odd how cagey the authorities are about the facts of the case.

According to most press reports, the car belonged to Adam Lanza's mother. But if so, why won't the police confirm it? But according to some reports, Adam Lanza was carrying his brother, Ryan's ID on the day of the massacre, so was it Ryan's car, not his mother's that was impounded outside the school?

Post-Postscript, February 4, 2013

This item from Fellowship of the Minds blog, reproduces a record apparently confirming that Nancy Lanza owned a 2010 black Honda, as well as a silver BMW, which would be consistent with the story that Adam Lanza drove his mother's car on December 14, 2012.

See Also:

The Sandy Hook Nuns had a purple getaway van

Bing Cache Shows Local Paper Reported Sandy Hook Shooting Before It Is Claimed to Have Happened

Niall Bradley: Sandy Hook massacre: Evidence of official foreknowledge?

And

CT Police Captain Mark Kordick to Radioman911 

The Liberal Mind and the New World Order

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

On Who Rules and How

Aangirfan writes:

According to professor Peter Dale Scott:

Terror events serve the agenda of criminal members of the elite.

These criminals exercise power within government institutions such as the intelligence services.

Systemic Destabilization.

Anatomy of a False-Flag Terror Attack - The Kentroversy Papers

According to professor Peter Dale Scott:

"As examples of systemic deep events, we can point to two spectacular bombings in Italy, the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and simultaneous Rome bombing of 1969. 

"These were initially blamed on marginal left-wing anarchists, but were ultimately revealed to have been false-flag attacks organized, as part of a strategy of tension, by right-wing neo-fascists inside the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI, with a possible green light (according to the chief of SISMI) from elements in the CIA. 

"Since then an Italian premier has confirmed that the parallel intelligence structure responsible for the bombings was part of a stay-behind network, Gladio, which we now know was originally organized by NATO....



"In an era when the combined wealth of the 225 richest people nearly equals the annual income of the poorer half of the earth’s population, it can be assumed that the power and influence of the illicit wealthy is a major force to be reckoned with in world affairs. 

"And it is clear that some in these shadow elites stand to benefit from the crimes Breivik has been charged with: specifically 'destabilizing or destroying basic functions of society,' and 'creating serious fear in the population.'"

Systemic Destabilization.

On Guns and Freedom

Carroll Quigley (November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977), Bill Clinton's history mentor at Georgetown University, noted historian, polymath, and theorist of the evolution of civilizations, believed that democracy depended on the public availability of cheap but effective weapons"

". . . [T]he nature, organization and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determines what happens in political life." [p. 1,200]

". . . We have democracy because around 1880 the distribution of weapons in this society was such that no minority could make a majority obey. If you have a society in which weapons are cheap, so that almost anyone can obtain them, and are easy to use — what I call amateur weapons — then you have democracy. But if the opposite is true, weapons extremely expensive and very difficult to use — the medieval knight, for example, with his castle, the supreme weapons of the year 1100 — in such a system, with expensive and difficult-to-use weapons, you could not possibly have majority rule. But in 1880 for $100 you could get the two best weapons in the world, a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver; so almost anyone could buy them. With weapons like these in the hands of ordinary people, no minority could make the majority obey a despotic government.

Gladys Smith: the poor girl from Canada who became America's sweetheart

The Unassimilated Indian

HMS Grappler at Comox, BC. In 1862, the Grappler escorted
smallpox-infected natives who were expelled from Victoria.
The resultant spread of the disease among the Indian
population largely depopulated the BC coast, making way
for immigrant settlement.

Throughout the post-Columbian colonization of North America, settlers have pursued one of three policies toward the indigenous inhabitants: expulsion, extermination or assimilation. For the settler citizen who seeks an overview of this brutal process of Native dispossession without risk of unbearable laceration of conscience, Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian: a Curious Account of Native People in North America is an excellent primer, lightly written, ironic, but without overt bitterness or anger.

Astonishingly, despite relentless harassment, chicanery, exploitation, ethnic cleansing and mass murder, the Indians of North America still remain, and still remain largely unassimilated, which leaves the question of their ultimate future still to be determined.

To the Indian, whether it be the largely assimilated and rationally dispassionate, Tom King, or the angry National Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, the goal is native self-determination and sovereignty. And the means to sovereignty, according to Atleo, is the working out of treaties that promise the native people shared control of Canada's vast resource wealth and extensive lands.

The problem for the Indians is that treaties mean little or nothing unless the contracting parties have the muscle to back up their rights. In such matters, might, though usually not right, is nevertheless decisive. And at present, the indigenous people of North America are no stronger relative to the settler states than in the past and thus are in no better position to regain their sovereignty than at any time since 1492.

Thus, treaties notwithstanding, the future of the indigenous people of North America will depend for the foreseeable future on the intentions of the settler states. Currently, Canada's Indian policy is focused on the provision of routes to assimilation. In place of the discredited policy of forced residential schooling are now generous grants, scholarships and systems of positive discrimination to draw bright natives off the reserves and into the academic and professional worlds of the settler society. It is difficult to find objection to this policy except that it deprives the native communities of some of their most able and creative individuals who might contribute disproportionately the the welfare of their community of origin. However, not all Indians seeking education will abandon their tribal communities. Many are idealists intent on returning to the reserve as teachers and mentors who will bring hope, enlightenment and practical improvement to the lives of those who remain permanently at home.

A darker side to Canada's native policy is manifest in the system of payments and subsidies to Native bands that make welfare a seemingly deeply destructive form of Indian assimilation, one that is resistant to change in part because it is rewarding to Native politicians who are able to line their pockets with taxpayer funds supposedly intended for social services on the reserve. For example, 50 Indian chiefs receive salaries greater than that of the Prime Minister of Canada, with one band councilor at a reserve in Atlantic Canada receiving a tax-free salary in 2008 of $978,468 (equivalent to about $1.8 million off reserve). This brings to mind the bantustans of apartheid South Africa, where native people were subject to the repressive discipline of native chiefs highly paid by, and thus presumably attentive to, the needs of the national government.

The future of Canada's native nations will thus depend on where the interests of Canada and of the native people intersect, and whether the native leadership is capable of, or truly intent upon, the interests of the mass of their own people. In the case of the Innu, great progress toward a mutually beneficial arrangement seems to have been achieved by the 1995 Nunavut land claims agreement, negotiated by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, under the terms of which the Innu of the North West Territory formed the self-governing territory of Nunavut, within the Canadian confederation.

One might hope that such an agreement will one day provide Canada's Indian first nations a similar degree of sovereignty. However, the challenge for the first nations is great, because they are, unlike the Innu, widely dispersed and highly differentiated among over 600 bands or nations. There is not the slightest possibility that Canada will agree to the creation of 600 independent, sovereign Indian nations, with populations ranging from a few dozen individuals to a few tens of thousands. To think otherwise is to make the ideal the enemy of the feasible. To achieve the greatest attainable measure of independence and self-government, Canada's Indians must devise a democratic Indian federation that will, as a single entity, seek something like provincial status within the greater Canadian confederation.

Thus empowered, Canada's first nations will be in a position, for the first time, to negotiate a full, fair and early settlement of all land claims, and to establish educational and other institutions to preserve Indian culture and adapt it to the modern world.

The Financial Times: Ethnic Cleansing of the English From Their Own Capital City "Deserves Attention" LOL

The Financial Times of London Reports:

December 26, 2012 2:38 pm
London’s ‘white flight’ deserves attention

By David Goodhart

That the city is no longer majority ‘white British’ is a remarkable development.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that London no longer contained a majority from the UK’s main ethnic group, known in the demographers’ jargon as the “White British”.

One face of Immigrant Britain.

 Wow. Fancy that. Who'd have thought it. Still it's only the descendants of some dead white European males, the jargonized "white British," who've been ousted. I mean, it's not like some actual, you know, well known European nation that's been ethnically cleansed from its own capital city, one of the greatest cities in the world. 

Except, well, actually, it is what was until very recently perhaps the most illustrious of all European nations, the English, that's being genocided, not only in their capital city but in many of their other large cities. Last year, the English became a minority in the City of Leicester, an ancient industrial town at the geographic heart of England. And in Birmingham, England's second city, English children in elementary school are not even the largest minority.

So yes, let's all remark the remarkable fact of the genocide of the English — the nation of Will Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Sam Johnson, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill — but without mentioning the English by name, of course. No need to get anyone upset or make any of the not very English scum running the major British political parties — plus the security services clown running the alleged British National Party — look like, well, the bought traitors that they are.

But you have to realize that this is something totally, unexpectedly new.

London is arguably the first great western capital city to pass this landmark, though that depends on where you draw the boundaries around Washington and on excluding Brussels as a special case because it is an “embassy capital”.

So there you are, the ethnic cleansing of the English in their own capital "deserves attention" only because of its novelty. Because London is arguable the first great western capital city to be genocided, unless you count Washington which is not the homeland of any ethnicity other than of the native Americans who were genocided a long time ago. Oh and Brussels, but that's a "special case," apparently, so just tough cheese for the Belgians, and not something to worry about.

In any event, it is a remarkable development for London and one that was unexpected.

Apparently, the Financial Times, with editorial offices in London, employs writers so incredibly stupid that they do not notice the ethnic make-up of the city where they work, and only became aware of the ethnic cleansing of the native race in London when it was announced in the evening newspaper. And even then, they nearly missed it!

However, the London Evening Standard, the capital’s main evening paper, tucked it away on page 10 on the day of the announcement, and the BBC London television news had it as the seventh item that evening.

But this is all transparent obfuscation of what has been known for years: that the English are being genocided by a combination of policies that employ all means of state-controlled education and propaganda to promote mass murder of unborn children, 189,931 last year,  and every kind of non-reproductive sex, thereby driving the fertility of the native population far below the replacement rate, while mass immigration, both legal and illegal, is promoted.

But in any case, to claim the foreign takeover of London is a matter for surprise is a complete inversion of the truth. For years the UK national newspapers have carried stories reporting the takeover of one London borough after another by an immigrant majority. Moreover, it has been common knowledge for years that the majority of children in London are born to foreign-born mothers. So the contention that the extirpation of the English majority in their own capital city is somehow a surprise is a lie pure, simple and direct.

Two days later I met a senior official from Mr Johnson’s Greater London Authority who, asked about the data, said: “What’s the fuss?”

Ha! There you have it. The genocide of the English in their own homeland is a matter deserving "attention" but not "fuss."

This studied indifference of London’s political and media elite appears to be in sharp contrast to the feelings of many of the white British people who live in less salubrious parts of the city.

Or, who gives a damn about the English, or white British as the genocidalists and their propagandists call them the better to distract attention from the fact that the English are being displaced from England, the only homeland they have.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years – they underestimated the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think-tank I lead.

So we are to understand that most of the "leading academic geographers" in Britain are incompetent fools who misled the folks in government just as much as they deceived the morons at the FT — a claim that is surely another lie and a libel too.

And did you get that "majority  minority city"? The immigrants are to have the benefit of being treated as a minority even when they're the majority, meaning that the English must be considered the majority even when they are a fast declining minority. This is really clever: mind-bending psychological manipulation in the aid of genocide.

Further, we are to understand that the progressive elimination of the English from London, Birmingham, Leicester, and many other great cities has nothing to do with mass immigration. No, that's the lie put about by racist white British. What's actually happened is that the English just buggered off. Went to live in the bucolic copuntryside 50 miles out of town and now commute to the city in their Porche's and Jags. It's only the racist losers like Emma West who are still left in the city where they'd better show some respect for their new neighbors, if they don't wish to be whipped off to jail — for their own protection from all the friendly New Britishers threatening to cut their throats.

But, really, the English are lucky to have all those foreigners come in and take their place, convert their empty Christian churches into mosques, bingo halls, whatever. They even have the good fortune of having the son of a German-Jewish social climber to head the English church — luckily too, they have a Muslim as head of the BBC's religious programming, an Israel-Firster as Prime Minister, and a Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal [sic] Opposition, the son of an illegal immigrant, who thinks the essence of Englishness is to invite in more immigrants.

White flight is an emotive term that suggests discomfort with the changing racial composition of a neighbourhood. Clearly there are many reasons why white British people might want to leave London – house prices, schools, fresh air and so on – but merely by considering where it is happening, there appears to be prima facie evidence that white flight has played a role.

Yep, there you have it. The English flight from Londonistan, as someone many years ago humorously named England's greatest city, is the product of racism, pure and simple.

In Barking and Dagenham, for example, notorious for the brief success of the far-right British National Party in the late 2000s, the white British population fell by 40,000, almost one-third, between 2001 and 2011. Other increasingly diverse outer London boroughs such as Redbridge and Hillingdon have also experienced large falls in their white British population.

Forty thousand in ten years from a borough with 180,000 inhabitants. That sure looks like prima facie evidence, in fact I'd say absolutely definite evidence of ethic cleansing.

Does white flight always have to be the other side of the coin of large-scale immigration? It is a remarkably understudied phenomenon. This is perhaps because it is based on a notion of group identities and affinities that most liberal academics do not feel or understand and tend to stigmatise as “racist,” at least when expressed by white people. But one of the interesting things about white flight is that it has continued, and in the case of London apparently increased, at a time when racist attitudes have been in sharp decline.

You tend to get less overt English opposition to mass immigration when the English have become the minority, often a very small minority in their own neighborhood.Or to put that another way, the English know when they're beat, and they know who's gonna get beaten up if they raise any objection to Asian street gangs or knife-wielding Jamaican thugs.

Some of the blame for this must lie with a modern political mind – of both left and rightwingers – that has failed to understand some quite normal human feelings about rapid change and the unfamiliar. It has failed, too, to think more carefully about how to make it easier for different kinds of people to live alongside each other sharing common spaces in mutual trust.

Wow, maybe the political establishment has something to be held responsible for. I mean it's not as though they just lost a great war, or destroyed the economy. No they just wiped out most of their own people in their own greatest city.

So noisily have London’s political leaders been celebrating the diversity of their multiracial city that they have forgotten to see what is happening under their noses.

"They forgot." Oh dear, they were so busy celebrating diversity and trashing English culture for Black History Month that, in a fit of absence of mind, they genocided their own people.

If you walk around the city centre you see racially mixed pavements, shops, buses, tubes and even workplaces. But there is also a great deal of what the Americans call “sundown segregation”: if you followed people home you would find yourself in some of the most ethnically segregated places in Britain.

So there you are. The English really genocided themselves, taking flight from multi-culti Britain out of pure racism. Fortunately, there are still white iberals in Britain anxious to continue the replacement of the politically incorrect English with nice foreign people with a different mindset: you know, not Christian, with none of that nonsense about the traditional rights and freedoms of the English. A lot of them don't even speak English, or if they do it's not English so as you could understand it.

Thus do the mainstream media discredit themselves: one article at a time.

Note: There are some intelligent comments at the FT web site in response to the remarkably stupid David Goodhart's remarkably stupid article. You can access the article via this Google link.

See Also:
Beware: The New Goths Are Coming

Globalization: The Next Step — Wiping Out the Savings of the Middle Class

The poor don't save, or if they do they don't save much for the obvious reason that they have little to save from. The rich don't save, they invest. Which means that saving cash for the future, for a rainy day, for illness or retirement is a middle-class virtue and in the age of the New World Order, an invitation to theft. Theft by the monied interest, that is, operating through the governments and central banks that they own.

How is such theft possible?

Bank of Canada Governor, Mark Carney, soon to take up his new post as Governor of the Bank of England, has given as clear an understanding of how the swindle will be perpetrated as can be expected from a public source, openly musing about central banks targeting, not inflation, but GDP.

What's it mean?

Central banks traditionally had one instrument with which to influence a national economy; namely, interest rates. When a credit-fueled real estate or consumer spending boom threatened to drive demand in excess of supply thus causing prices to rise, central banks would raise interest rates, thereby slowing bank lending and heading off a major inflation. Conversely, when a contraction in demand threatened a recession, central banks lowered interest rates to stimulate borrowing, and hence demand.

But there's trouble when demand flags or fails to rise when interests rates are already close to zero. If people won't borrow to spend when interest rates are zero, whaddya do? Whereas, the central bank can rein in borrowing by raising interest rates, they cannot force people to take loans however low interest rates fall.

Or, as the bankers like to say, you cannot push on a piece of string. But wait: what if you make interest rates negative? Yeah: borrow a buck and pay back 50 cents in seven years time. Only a fool would refuse the offer. Right?

QE V. 1.0. Image source

But folks won't deposit their cash with a bank that nicks 10% of their money every year. True, but what if the central bank prints a bunch of cash, and give it out to all and sundry — large corporations, hedge funds, Wall Street banksters, and all those folks who'd like to buy a car, a home, take a holiday, but who have no cash. That's the new instrument of central banking. QE, quantitative easing, conjuring money out of thin air and handing it out to all and sundry: the government for stimulus spending, to bankers with "troubled assets," to Government Motors, Chrysler, windmill makers and every other friend of government.

Soon you've got the economy going again: everybody's buying and investing in real things, houses, factories, big box superstores, whatever. And the big debtors know that when it comes time to pay the money back it will be worth much less than when they borrowed it, even after they've added in the ongoing interest expense.

But this is really not for the little people. Once the inflation's ignited, interest rates will be raised. Not enough to compensate for the loss in the value of your savings, of course. But enough to prevent reflating the housing bubbles, and to prevent the plebs from buying more than the bare necessities of life from the big box importers of cheap Chinese stuff. And enough to prevent the average middle-class devotee of thrift from realizing how badly they are being gouged — especially after the measly interest they earn on their devalued savings has been taxed at their marginal rate of 40 to 50%.

So if you've got GIC's or money sloshing around in a credit union account, or maybe a wad of those nice new plastic Canadian fifties or  hundreds stashed under the mattress, get ready to see it all shrink in value.

For the monied interests, the proprietors or the New World Ordure, the universe is unfolding as it should. The consumer society, the vision of which brought down the Soviet Union, the economic miracle of which we in the West proudly assumed to be the mark of Western superiority, will soon be a thing of the past.

And as the billionaires so reasonably assert: it's no good having the plebs louse up the place with their ugly suburban villas, while choking the roads and poisoning the atmosphere with their SUV's.  No, the thing is to export those overpaid Western jobs to the slave plantations of Asia, and bring millions of Third Worlders to the West, where they will be content to work at minimum wage or less, without any silly nonsense about the great Western tradition of respect for human rights and freedoms.

This phase of the unfolding of the New World Order is spelled out in a report for CEO's now in circulation. The economic problem of the day, the report states is excess debt. Much of this debt the report says will never be repaid. Hence the conclusion:

Holders of the debt, be they countries or companies, should be allowed to default, whatever the short-term pain of such a process.

Note, no suggestion of debt relief for the little people overloaded with mortgages and car loans. No, no, certainly not. On the contrary, the report asserts:

 ... retirement ages will have to increase. People will have to work harder, for longer and should be encouraged to do so by changes in benefit[s]

Ha! There goes yer sick pay, you malingering bum, there goes yer food stamps, yer workshy layabout, there goes yer pension you thought you'd paid in for. What's more:

The size of the state should be radically reduced and immigration encouraged. Competition in labour markets through supply-side reforms should be pursued. 

Ha ha! That'll show you, just how much we need you — not at all! We're gonna bring in millions and millions of foreigners who will swamp your working class neighbourhoods, and impose their religions and cultural habits on your community whether you like it or not. It's called genocide and that's the policy of the New World Order, aka the hypercapitalist entity that owns the political leadership of the Western States.

See also:

 What Millions Want For Christmas: A Job
The latest jobs reports shows there are over 12 million people unemployed [in the US], the average duration of unemployment is over 40 weeks, and over 40% of the unemployed have been unemployed for over 27 weeks.

Another 8 million people want full-time jobs but only have a part-time job. And finally, unemployment stats do not capture millions more who are so discouraged they stopped looking for jobs.

Brain Squeezed Elites: From the Maya to the Mymidons of the New World Order

By Colin Liddell

Alternative Right: One of the legacies of the world financial crisis is that it showed how absolutely clueless pundits, politicians, and financial planners can be about the direction we are heading in. This also explains our growing fascination with the mysterious Maya and their reputation for fathoming the distant future by reading the stars and the courses of the planets.

With the great vacuum of ignorance that enshrouds the future, it is not surprising that this long dead civilization with an astronomical bent has been sucked into the role of providing gnostic hints of what is to come. It was either that or Madame Zaza’s tea leaves.

According to a lot of breathless twats on the Discovery Channel, the Mayans saw something very important lined up for 2012, namely the end of their Grand Cycle, scheduled to end on the 21st of December this year. Depending on who you speak to this will precipitate either the end of the universe in a cataclysm of fire, a new age with everyone being very nice to each other, or the election of Ron Paul as President of the United States.

But before we get carried away with the impending sense of momentous cosmic change, shouldn’t we pause to ask the all-important question, “Who the heck were the Maya?” just in case they turn out to be a bunch of jungle bums stoked up on fermented coconut juice rather than credible prognosticators of the end of humanity.

Like any semi-barbaric, non-European people, the Maya are nowadays talked about in the hushed reverential tones dictated by political correctness as one of the great civilizations, even though they lacked metal tools and wheels, and enjoyed a spot of human sacrifice. 

Rather than evidence of their primitiveness, their lack of tools is often cited as proof of their civilizational superiority, as only a truly higher culture could have built pyramids with so little in the way of technology. In such encomiums little is said about the possibility that the threat of human sacrifice probably served as an extremely important motivator for the toolless masses.

The key to understanding the Maya is their astronomy. The basic problem all primitive agricultural societies face is timekeeping. In the case of Britain, this led to the founding of Neolithic sites such as Stonehenge, where the stones were aligned to measure changes in the position of the rising sun and thus the seasons.

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Mohandas Gandhi Versus Barak Obama On the Right to Bear Arms

Image source.

As Barak Obama, in the wake of the Sandy Hook slaughter, professes his devotion to the protection of innocent lives by promising further restrictions on gun ownership in America, American drone strikes that have killed dozens of innocent children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen continue on a daily basis.
Americans might be wise, therefore, to take heed not of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama, but the true practioner of non-violence, Mohandas Gandhi who wrote:

I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race.

and

I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence ..."

When my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence.

Good advice to Americans, one would think, at a time when UPI reports that US Homeland Security is purchasing enough hollow-point bullets to blow away every American citizen.

Arguments for denying Americans the right to bear arms as protection from a tyrannical government are based on one statistic; namely, the US gun death rate of around ten per 100,000, which is high compared with happy, successful, places like Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand, France or Finland, where the gun death rate is only 1.03, 1.47 2.66, 3.00 and 3.64 per 100,000, respectively.

However, if you look into the statistics, the differences appear to be of questionable significance. Most US gun deaths are suicides, but the US suicide rate, at 19.2 per 100,000, is lower than that of New Zealand, Sweden, France and Finland, where rates are 20.3, 21.4, 23.5 and 25.7 per 100,000. And in Ireland, the suicide rate is virtually identical to that of the US at 19.2 per 100,000.

It is true that the homicide rate in the US is higher than in Europe and happy New Zealand, at 4.2 (3.7 with a gun) per hundred thousand versus 0.9, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 2.2 in New Zealand, Sweden, France, Ireland, and Finland. But if you look at US homicide rates by race, you see that the black rate is ten times the white rate.

So the homicide rate by US whites, who despite the genocidal plans of the globalist elite are still the majority in America, is closely comparable, at 2.8 per hundred thousand, to Finland's 2.2, which makes the case for abandoning the Second Amendment to the US Constitution appear entirely fraudulent. When that case is made by a government bent on intimidation of the people through sexual humiliation by blue-gloved goons at every airport and soon at a train station and shopping mall near you, its credibility is nil.

The Insolence of a Zionist Chickenhawk

By Stephen Walt

Pugnaceious chickenhawk, Bill Kristol

CounterPunch, December 20, 2012: I suppose I could be flattered that William Kristol is trying to use my endorsement to derail Senator Chuck Hagel’s candidacy to be the next secretary of defense. But in fact I’m disgusted, because Kristol’s predictable hatchet job depends on the false charge that my co-author John Mearsheimer and I are “Israel-haters.” It is, to be blunt, a shameful lie. It is also a revealing glimpse into how Kristol thinks and operates.

Here’s Kristol’s problem: Hagel is a decorated Vietnam veteran who was wounded twice in the service of his country. Instead of helping cause wars from the sidelines like Bill does, Hagel fought with bravery on the battlefield. He’s also a Republican with ample experience in national security and intelligence matters whose judgment President Obama respects. Hagel has been quite supportive of Israel throughout his public career, and his views on many Middle East topics are similar to those of prominent Israeli officials. But he hasn’t been as slavishly devoted to Israel as fanatics like Kristol would like, and he’s skeptical about the merits of a war with Iran (as are many Israeli experts). Hagel also said openly he “was a United States senator, not an Israeli senator,” and that his primary responsibility is to serve the American national interest, not Israel’s. This statement would disqualify him were he in the running to be Israel’s minister of defense, but it is precisely what you’d expect a loyal American to say.

Well, if you’re Bill Kristol and you can’t find any legitimate grounds to oppose Hagel, what do you do? You smear him. You try to convince people that Hagel’s perfectly sensible views are really a manifestation of some sort of hidden anti-Semitism. Since Hagel has never done or said anything to support such a vicious charge, you have to use the well-known McCarthyite tactic of guilt-by-association. How? Point out that yours truly blogged that his nomination would be a “smart move.”

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See Also: Robert Merry in the National Interest: The Assault on Chuck Hagel.

Iranian Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Nursing Terrorizes the Government of Canada

It is reported that the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research has refused to publish an article by an Iranian assistant professor despite earlier acceptance of the article.

The journal has informed the author that, on the command of the Government of Canada, it cannot publish the article as previously agreed, for political and non-academic reasons.

Canada has closed its embassy in Tehran and ordered Iranian diplomats out of Canada for what it called the "civil rights abuse of the citizens of Iran" and "the threat [posed by Iran] to the security of Canadian personnel and Israel."

Canada's Minister of External Affairs, John Baird, has called Iran "the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world," and a country that "routinely threatens the existence of Israel," a somewhat biased point of view, one might think in view of Israel's repeated hysterical demands that the US nuke Iran now, and a view that has no logical connection with psychiatric nursing, obviously.

Which raises some questions. Is John Baird a total moron? Is the Harper government bribed by a certain shitty little warmongering country? Is Canada nothing more than a weak and helpless subordinate in US/Israel's drive for complete imperial dominance of the Middle East? And does refusing to publish a minor academic work in a minor academic journal really going to undermine the Government of Iran?

But whichever is the case, and perhaps there has to be a positive answer to all four questions, Canadian journal publishers might as well wind up their business if they are too gutless to stare down such petty-minded governmental stupidity. The Can. J. of Psych. Nursing Res. is published by the Registered Psychiatric Nurses Foundation, a pretty flaky looking outfit. Let's hope other Canadian journal publishers show greater commitment to the ethic of international cooperation and solidarity among scientists.

Those Dirty Racist French Opposed To Their Own Genocide

By Dimitrios Papageorgiou

Alternative Right: Europa Nostra! "We are all inheritors of Rome, Athens, Sparta and Christianity."

Génération Identitaire, recently gained worldwide attention, with their "Declaration of War" video, and their occupation of a mosque at the historically important location of Poitiers. They are an organization filled with youthful energy in a state that has accepted multiculturalism and embraced its doctrines. I conducted an interview with Arnaud Delrieux, one of the leadership cadre of Generation Identitaire, an interview that serves as an introduction to the very interesting views of young French people fighting for their right to live as a homogenous community in their country.

Identitarianism, nationalism, communitarianism, socialism? How would you describe identitarianism to a non-French person?

There is no “identitarianism.” Génération Identitaire is not a club for ideologues fantasizing about the “Grand Soir” (the general upheaval to come) or “glorious tomorrows.” We are young and pragmatic, both in our methods and worldview. This does not, however, keep us from having an ideal: we want to live in peace on our land according to our identity, like every people has the right to.

The 20th century was the century of ideologies – Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Nationalism, all of which failed. The 21st century is the century of identities. Indeed it is the very substance of the European people that is threatened by the steamroller of globalization, invasion-migration and multiculturalism. Sovereignists have missed the boat by a longshot: it’s no longer the power or sovereignty of nation-states that’s in jeopardy; it’s the very identity of our friends, our families and our kinfolk. On the ethnic scale, because of the effects of migrant submersion on demographics, and on the cultural scale, because of the uniformization of different ways of life. In addition to this, European nation-states, prime inheritors of the Jacobinist ideas of the French Revolution, were the first agents in the destruction of popular traditions, deep rooted cultures and spiritual mass movements which fortified and irrigated European societies. No ideological recipe forcibly applied by these nearly extinct fossils can protect us anymore. The people have to take their fate into their own hands: time to wake up!

A nation can rise from the ashes of war or economic crisis, but it cannot survive the disappearance of its own people. There are 10 to 12 million Muslims in France and around 15 million immigrants, African and Muslim for the most part. It is the foremost political problem. Our fight is one for survival. We do not want to disappear, we want to live, and we want to be actors of our history and not simple bystanders. We do not want to become the Native Americans of Europe.

All of our political vision must be rethought in the light of this reality. We must take this reality and draw adapted political solutions from it, not twist it to meet some preconceived dogmas. We do not have any fixed answer to all the problems faced by the French and European people. However, we have adopted basic principles that serve as a compass in the ongoing storm. First we consider that ethno cultural homogeneity of a people is the foremost condition for social peace. Multiculturalism spawns “multiracism”: just look at Lebanon, Brazil, South Africa, etc. Then, we believe that Europe is our chance: if the European people were united, we’d be invincible. I’m not the one saying this, the strategic analysts working for the White House are: they call our continent the “heartland,” that is to say the heart of the World. Finally, we are rabid defendants of direct democracy, federalism and localism. Of course I’m not talking about the so-called European “federalism,” which is in reality nothing more than technocratic centralism in disguise. By “federalism” I mean “unity in diversity.” Localism is the relocalization of economic activities, political power and people. Like the Americans say: “small is beautiful!” But small is also stronger: countries like Switzerland, who frequently engage in direct democracy, show us the way.

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The Myth of American Meritocracy

By Ron Unz

 The American Conservative, November 28, 2012: ^[1]Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.^{1 [2]} Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”

But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.


During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.^{2 [3]} This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.^{3 [4]} On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.^{4 [5]}

The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.^{5 [6]} Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.^{6 [7]} Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.^{7 [8]}

But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.

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A very fast sail boat

World record nautical mile, average speed 65 knots, 120 kph.

Wikipedia Wales Denies Porn-Vending Career Earned a Fortune

Here's your correction, Wikipedia founder

Head of online 'encyclopedia' known for damaging reputations demands retraction

by Chelsea Schilling 

Chelsea Schilling is a commentary editor and staff writer for WND, an editor of Jerome Corsi's Red Alert and a proud U.S. Army veteran. She has also worked as a news producer at USA Radio Network and as a news reporter for the Sacramento Union.More ↓

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Former porn star Sylvia Saint wears Bomis.com T-shirt (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

(WARNING: This story contains information of a graphic nature that some readers may find offensive.)
The founder of Wikipedia, the online “encyclopedia” that has damaged reputations with reckless, irresponsible and defamatory charges, has demanded of WND a correction to a column which characterized him as making a “fortune” in pornography before starting the company.
In her Jan. 14 column at WND, Judith Reisman came to the defense of heavy-metal drummer Bradlee Dean, who Reisman argues, has been “slammed” by Wikipedia.
Reisman, Ph.D., an author and academic known for debunking myths about pornography and the fraudulent sex research of Alfred Kinsey, wrote:

Wikipedia’s trashing of iconoclastic, ordained preacher Bradlee Dean proves that the heavy-metal drummer and his band have been doing a great job of delivering truth to American youth. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s creator, made his original fortune as a pornography trafficker. Wales’ cult of far-leftist volunteer editor zealots labor minute-by-minute to mislead readers who think Wikipedia’s half-truths – and worse – are a legitimate “encyclopedia.”

Shortly after publication, Reisman’s statement that “Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s creator, made his original fortune as a pornography trafficker” caught the attention of none other than the Wikipedia founder himself.
In an email to WND, Wales wrote:

This is absolutely and categoricallly [sic] false. I have never made any “fortune”, as a pornography trafficker or otherwise, and I have never been a “pornography trafficker” at all.
Additionally, as I have never even heard of Bradlee Dean, your disgusting attempt to smear me is absolutely and completely irrelevant to the argument you sought to make in the first place.
I demand an immediate edit to that story to remove the lie about me.

WND Editor Joseph Farah explained to Wales that Wikipedia’s own page about Bomis – a now-defunct company founded by Wales and his partner in 1996 – states that “Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.”
Wikipedia also notes that launch of the popular website was supported by Bomis: “[Bomis'] primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia.”

For the lurid details read on

Canada-Syria: White dominions, brown colonies

By Eric Walberg

France and Britain have begun to circle Syria like vultures (my apologies to vultures, who politely wait for their prey to die). They plan to save Syria from chemical bombs — a surreal replay of Suez 1956, where France and Britain cooked up a pretext to invade Egypt with the US posing as the more restrained gang member, not to mention Iraq 2003, when they reversed their roles.

Meanwhile, Canada sings on demand for its US-Israeli sponsors. The Canadian government solemnly announced this week it is ready — if asked by NATO — to deploy the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, which handles chemical, biological and radioactive attacks. Canada will also send a Disaster Assistance Response Team to provide clean water in Syrians, as well as engineers and staff who can help set up a field hospital. A friendly navy frigate is already offshore.

Once again Prime Minister Stephen Harper plays his supporting role in the NATO-scripted drama unfolding in the Middle East. He takes “the threat of chemical weapons in Syria very seriously”, but demurs on whether Canada will send CF-18 fighter jets over Syria, as it did in Libya to enforce a no-fly zone, or put combat troops on the ground. He has not yet given the current opposition coalition, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), his blessing, although US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally recognized the opposition at a Friends of Syria summit in Morocco on Wednesday, joining the Euro crowd.

The Canadian government has no foreign policy anymore, doing exactly as it is told by its Israeli advisers, so the reason for Harper’s coyness must be found there. Israel itself is in a quandary about Syria.

Israeli policy during the past three decades has following the divide-and-conquer Yinon Doctrine, playing various forces among its Arab neighbors against each other — Maronite and Orthodox Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Druze, etc — in order to keep the Middle East weak and unstable.

In Syria, that even meant quietly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood during its ill-fated uprising in 1981, not because Israel wanted an Islamist Syria, but to keep the Syrian government off-balance. The secular and nationalist Baathist regime, together with Egypt, fought a war with Israel in 1967. These secular governments were the big threat, and it was only natural to try and cripple the regimes of Egypt and Syria, even if that meant working with Islamists.

Today, the West is eagerly arming the SNC, where Islamists predominate, even as Israel and Canada dawdle. How can this be?

The explanation is simple. As Kissinger said of Iraq and Iran during their war in the 1980s, “A pity they both can’t lose.” Or Truman when the Germans invaded Russia 22 June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” Not only is Egypt now rediscovering its Islamic, very anti-Zionist roots, making Egyptian Islamists the main enemy, but there is no guarantee the SNC will defeat the Syrian army, and unlike far away France, Britain and the US, Israel must live chock-a-block with whoever is in Damascus — and Cairo — when the mustard gas clears.

Ha, ha. Only joking. What about the chemical weapons threat? Syria is one of the few countries that has not signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). (Israel has signed but not ratified it.) But Assad has made it clear he will not approve their use on civilians. Saddam Hussein’s example is proof enough of the madness of that. The real worry over WMDs is that whatever supplies the Syrian government has could soon fall into the hands of the western-backed rebels, in particular, al-Nusrah Front (aka, al-Qaeda in Iraq).

However, who can blame Assad if he drops a few on invading Brits, French, and yes Americans? It would be a perfect way to ‘celebrate’ the centenary of WWI, where holier-than-thou Germany, Britain and France pioneered their use, despite having signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 banning them. Britain used chlorine against the Germans in 1915 but the wind blew back on the British trenches — a case of ‘friendly gas’. The US took their use to new heights in Vietnam with Agent Orange. Only the one-time US ally Saddam Hussein was ever brought to justice for using them. The US and Russia still have stockpiles (not to mention nuclear and biological weapons), despite their obligation under the CWC to destroy them all.

The Syrians would get special satisfaction from gassing the French, who carved up and invaded Syria in 1920. Syria was promised France by Britain as its reward for the 1.7 million French who died in the WWI bloodbath that killed 16 million (Britain lost ‘less than’ a million). The only ‘positive’ outcome for the Allies was the destruction and occupation of the Ottoman Caliphate and the creation of a Jewish state there.

This was an outrageous betrayal of the Arabs, who had arguably tipped the balance in WWI — at great loss — in Britain’s favor, on the promise of post-war independence. But, as the Spanish say, ‘You don’t dance with the devil; he dances with you.” Britain wanted Iraq for its oil and Palestine for a Jewish state, “the hill citadel of Jerusalem” according to geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder — the last link in the British empire. With a wink and a nod from Britain, France invaded Syria in 1920 and crushed a heroic uprising in 1925--1927, killing thousands. Greater Syria was divided into southern Turkey, French-occupied Lebanon/ Syria, and British-occupied Jordan/ Palestine.

It was not till 1946 that the French were finally booted out — kicking and screaming. Post-WWII Syrian politics is a litany of coups, egged on by the US, until the army and socialist Baathists finally settled on Hafiz al-Assad in 1971. Trying to pick up the pieces after the brutal French occupation and living next door to permanent nightmare Israel are not conducive to the charade of western-style pluralism, so the subsequent harsh dictatorship of Assad I and the new-improved Assad II are not surprising. The SNC alternative has no prospects for ruling a united Syria. Syria’s future under the SNC is already being played out in Iraq, though Assad is far more popular and sensible than Saddam Hussein, and his demise will take down much of the Syria social order with him.

This is fine from an Israeli point of view as long as the Islamists are kept busy fighting their coalition ‘allies’ within the SNC. But if the Islamists dominate in the SNC, and if the power vacuum allows al-Qaeda to take root (it already has), this could be a problem for Israel. Look what happened to the Islamists in Gaza, where they surged and triumphed in elections in 2006 and remain strong. Israel has only to look south to Egypt to see how a revolutionary coalition can turn into an Islamic government which is not nearly as pliable as the secular dictatorship it replaced. This is what keeps many Israelis rooting for Assad.

When France was colonizing Syria a century ago, Canada was already the great colonial success story as a ‘white dominion’, and was allowed to join the ranks of the imperial rich, unlike Syria et al. (Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ lobbied Churchill to create a united Arab British mandate as the first ‘brown dominion’, with no success.)

As a former colony of both France and Britain, the loyal ‘white dominion’ of yesteryear, Canada may look like the perfect intermediary today: ‘Be nice and you too can graduate from colony to dominion.’ However, the flip side of white dominion status is that, like Israel or South Africa, you have built your society on the bones of the ‘brown’ natives. So it is not surprising that this week, even as Harper was toying with recognizing the SNC (who cares?), he faces ongoing protests over government neglect of Canada’s First Nations.

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike in Ottawa charging the government with “marginalizing our political leadership, along with the enforced segregation of our people so that our rich heritage can be wiped out and the great bounty contained in our traditional lands be made available for exploitation by large multi-national companies.” But Canada’s First Nations — what’s left of them — can thank their lucky stars they weren’t born in the ‘brown colonies’ of the Middle East.

Eric Walberg is author of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/