A related article & editorial like you'll never read in the NZ Herald:
Isabel
The Man Behind the Curtain
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
I have to admit that I felt fiendishly gleeful when the reports came out that Hugo Chavez had exposed the CIA's little political destabilization game in Venezuela by getting his hands on the "Operation Pincer" memorandum and publishing it! What a hoot! It was just TOO priceless that the Man Behind the Curtain was exposed as less than the "Great and Powerful Oz," being instead, a gang of petty crooks in positions of power trying to again manipulate the public into believing their lies. | Humbug! |
The principal victims of British policies are Unpeople - those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the 'savages' of colonial days, who could be mown down by the British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilization.The concept of Unpeople is central to each of the past and current British policies considered in this book. Through its own intervention, and its support of key allies such as the United States and various repressive regimes, Britain has been, and continues to be, a systematic and serious abuser of human rights. I have calculated that Britain bears significant responsibility for around 10 million deaths since 1945 including Nigerians, Indonesians, Arabians, Ugandans, Chileans, Vietnamese, and many others. Often, the policies responsible are unknown to the public and remain unresearched by journalists and academics.In this book, I aim to document for the first time the secret record of certain episodes in government planning. The declassified files to which I refer are instructive not only for the light they throw on the past. They are also directly relevant to current British foreign policy surrounding Iraq, military intervention and the 'war against terror'. British interests and priorities have changed very little over time; essentially, the only variation has been in the tactics used to achieve them.Of the basic principles that guided the decisions taken in these files, there are three which seem particularly apposite when considering current events.The first is that British ministers' lying to the public is systematic and normal. Many people were shocked at the extent to which Tony Blair lied over Iraq; some might still be unable to believe that he did. But in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.A second, related principle is that policy-makers are usually frank about their real goals in the secret record. This makes declassified files a good basis on which to understand their actual objectives. This gap between private goals and public claims is not usually the result, in my view, of a conscious conspiracy. Certainly, planned state propaganda has been a key element in British foreign policy; yet the underlying strategy of misleading the public springs from a less conscious endemic contempt for the general population. The foreign-policy decision-making system is so secretive, elitist and unaccountable that policy-makers know they can get away with almost anything, and they will deploy whatever arguments are needed to do this.The third basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are invoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.
"Dealing with Islamist extremism, the messages are more complex, the constituencies we would aim at are more difficult to identify, and greater damage could be done to the overall effort if links back to UK or US sources were revealed." (William Ehrman, Director-General, Defence & Inteligence, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, London, April 2004)
The reason for the popular majority is found in a few of the key amendments: One article expedites land expropriation facilitating re-distribution to the landless and small producers. Chavez has already settled over 150,000 landless workers on 2 million acres of land.Another amendment provides universal social security coverage for the entire informal sector (street sellers, domestic workers, self-employed) amounting to 40% of the labor force.Organized and unorganized workers workweek will be reduced from 40 to 36 hours a week (Monday to Friday noon) with no reduction in pay.Open admission and universal free higher education will open greater educational opportunities for lower class students.Amendments will allow the government to by-pass current bureaucratic blockage of the socialization of strategic industries, thus creating greater employment and lower utility costs.Most important, an amendment will increase the power and budget of neighborhood councils to legislate and invest in their communities.The electorate supporting the constitutional amendments is voting in favor of their socio-economic and class interests; the issue of extended re-election of the President is not high on their priorities: And that is the issue that the Right has focused on in calling Chavez a dictator and the referendum a coup.
M Sarkozy is attempting to manipulate this ignorance and foster an exaggerated self-interest and jealousy that is anathema to the French psyche. While loath to admit it, many of the middle class supporters of M Sarkozy are motivated by jealousy. They are jealous of the employment benefits enjoyed by state workers and are being manipulated by M Sarkozy into supporting policies that would strip state workers of those benefits. What the middle classes fail to understand is that in supporting government action against the working classes now, they are setting themselves up for similar treatment in the near future.
In both cases, the referendum and the strikes, the issues are about the rights and needs of the masses of humanity everywhere: the rights to social security, the right of the people to be free from discrimination and oppression, the right to a life of reasonable work for reasonable pay that provides a decent life; the right to a free education for all who are capable and want it; and the right to health care. In short, the real issues are the rights of the people to live and determine their own destiny.
This term [Hidden Holocaust] conveys the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale and enormity is such that one feels that the word "holocaust" does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is "hidden", in the sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially unacknowledged.This "hidden holocaust", is escalating, accelerating, intensifying; according to all expert projections from the social and physical sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species, unless we take immediate drastic action, now. [...]In early 2007, then Prime Minister Tony Blair described the War on Terror as "a clash not between civilizations", but rather "about civilization." The War on Terror is, he proclaimed, a continuation of "the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence." ["A Battle for Global Values", Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007) ]But the "hidden holocaust" is not an aberration from our advanced civilization that represents the peak of human development, requiring only some reforms. Rather, the "hidden holocaust" is integral to the very structure, values and activities of our civilization. It is part and parcel of the "global values" of the international political and economic order that underpins industrial civilization. And unless we attempt to transform the nature of our civilization, we will all perish in a holocaust of our own making. (The Hidden Holocaust - Our Civilizational Crisis)
And finally, now that we have a clearer view via the Operation Pincer memorandum, spread the word and thank Hugo Chavez for exposing The Man Behind the Curtain.
Thanks for the great post. The War on Terror produces terror (cold products from matter) in microorganisms to stop cilia. There's the rub!
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