The 2011 intervention was a link in the chain of events leading to last month’s floods and tragedy.
“However, with very few exceptions, the publications declined to acknowledge that, in 2011, NATO opted to bomb Libya until its government was overthrown. In this regard, the papers have failed to remind their readers that NATO’s intervention was part of the chain of events that led to this month’s calamity.”
News media manufactures consent, and one way that happens is by manufacturing amnesia — burying a government’s past misdeeds makes it easier to sell future ones.
The catastrophic floods that Storm Daniel unleashed on Libya, which have killed as many as 10,000 people, are both a natural disaster and a human-made one. In the week following Storm Daniel, a large portion of the media coverage described “war” as a reason the country was ill-equipped to handle the catastrophe.
However, media discussion of NATO’s contribution to what has become Libya’s forever war has been almost non-existent. NATO’s intimate involvement — albeit by proxy — in the current war in Ukraine makes the omission all the more remarkable.
War in contemporary Libya is traceable to February 2011, when protests against Muammar Gadhafi’s government evolved into an armed conflict. In the initial days of the fighting, the U.S. mediaamplified claims that the Libyan air force was bombing demonstrators despite statements by top Pentagon officials that there was “no confirmation whatsoever” that such bombing was happening.
Western media outlets and politicians accused Gadhafi of carrying out a systematic mass slaughter of civilians, and of intending to do more of the same, particularly as government forces advanced on rebel-held Benghazi. In this climate, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 in March 2011, which authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
NATO dubiously interpreted the resolution as granting it the right to overthrow the Libyan government. NATO forces — primarily Britain, France and the U.S. — subsequently conducted roughly 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision-guided bombs during their seven-month campaign.
Pro-slow campaigners who have been defending controversial new 20mph speed limits enforced in London and Wales last week actually want ‘car free cities’ and an end to private vehicle ownership, plans suggest.
Last week, Mark Drakeford’s Welsh Labour government imposed a blanket 20mph across all built up residential areas – sparking outrage from residents who say their journeys now take twice as long and use twice as much fuel.
Meanwhile in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a further 40 miles (65km) worth of roads in the capital are set to become 20mph zones by the end of 2023.
Many Indians asked how the government of Canada could allow violent Sikh separatists to openly operate out of British Columbia. Even more Sikhs ask how Delhi had the audacity to commit a political murder outside Vancouver. What, they wondered, would Ottawa do?
Given Ottawa’s dovish policies, probably not much.
Who murdered Canadian Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar? This crime, which occurred last June near Vancouver, British Columbia, has riveted Canada and put Ottawa on a collision course with India, now the world’s most populous nation.
Canada’s amiable prime minister, Justin Trudeau, accused India’s intelligence service of being behind the murder. Governments rarely speak so candidly and particularly so Canada which tries to be friends with the rest of the world and has long feared being squashed by the mammoth, ten times larger United States.
But according to key Ottawa sources, the inter-allied Five Eyes intelligence entente (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain) identified India’s powerful intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing, as the culprit in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. This accusation was based on electronic intercepts between New Delhi and British Columbia, Canada. The Indians appear to have been lax in their communications security. India denies any role in the murder.
Sikhs are a warrior sect that counts for only 2% of India’s billion-plus population. Sikh farmers are among India’s most productive, growing much of the nation’s wheat crop.
I’ve followed the Sikh struggle for an independent theocratic state called Khalistan for over 20 years. I met Sikh leaders and priests in Amritsar, Punjab, and was even received at the Sikh’s holiest site, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, shortly after it was stormed by Indian Army troops as part of notorious Operation Blue Star. I interviewed the fearsome Sikh general KPS Gill who played a key role in crushing the Sikh struggle for independence.
No other nations that I know of have recognized an independent Sikh state. Thousands of Sikhs were assassinated, tortured and jailed by India’s central government. Many sought refuge in Canada’s British Columbia in and around Vancouver. There, they enjoyed complete freedom and a sort of government in exile.
And regardless of the final outcome of the current violent conflagration in the Ukraine, this geo-economic constellation and incentive-structure will not have significantly changed. Hence, notwithstanding US opposition, it can be expected that the economic relationship between Europe, the EU and Germany in particular on the one hand and Putin or post-Putin Russia on the other hand will eventually, in the not too-distant future, be normalized again.
My speech last year here in Bodrum on Germany’s role in the ongoing war between Russia and the Ukraine, or better and more accurately: between Russia on the one hand and the US, as the boss of NATO, its various European vassals and in particular Germany, and the Ukraine and the Ukrainians as their proxy: as their dispensable tools, useful idiots and sacrificeable lambs on the other hand, has not gone over too well with many supposedly libertarian folks from the former so-called East-bloc countries.
While there had been always participants from Eastern Europe coming to our conference, in fact, often quite a few of them, there are very few here this time. I find this disappointing of course, but I do not regret what I said last year on this subject or find any serious fault with my analysis. To the contrary, if anything, later events such as the destruction of the North-Stream pipeline by, according to all indicators and indications, the US or in close cooperation with the US, and the frank and captivating admission of Merkel, Holland, Macron and Selenskij that the Minsk agreements had never been meant seriously by them but solely served the purpose of buying more time for the Ukraine to get armed for a military confrontation with Russia, further strengthened my arguments.
The indignant rejection by the typical Eastern-European (but also many a Western European) “libertarian” of my speech on the topic presented here last year has little if anything to do with erroneous explanations or faulty analyses of the horrifying events still going on before our very eyes in the Ukraine, then, but it is owed instead to their very own superficial or fake understanding of libertarianism and the requirements of libertarian – and more generally: revisionist – historical research, judgement and evaluation. In fact, it is the result of nationalist, collectivist and statist sentiments overtaking and trumping all calm and sober libertarian thought and analysis in the face of war.
(But maybe states resort to war precisely for this reason: that people tend to “lose their mind” in wartimes?!)
The claims made by my various critics, that I just don’t sufficiently know Putin, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Lithuanians, etc. even the Germans and the Americans and their various particular histories, typically appear little more than regurgitations of some official, national or nationalistic, and invariably statist, school-book history and historical narrative as it is taught and promoted everywhere, at all times and in all countries. Some even accused me of insufficient understanding of the Soviet system and the history of the former Soviet-Union, notwithstanding the fact that I have actually extensively written on this very subject and the horrors of socialism. And on a more personal note: my motherly grandparents were expropriated by the Soviets in 1946 and my grandfather was killed by them in a forced labor camp.
That being said, what, then, was the central thesis of my speech of last year? And why, and in what regard, does its rejection by many supposed or presumed libertarians, especially from Eastern Europe, indicate a deficient understanding of libertarian principles on their part?
First and foremost: States are not productive enterprises. Rather, states are criminal gangs, protection rackets, or Mafias writ large, taxing or otherwise ripping off productive people to their own advantage and that of their members, friends and supporters – and they must be recognized as that. With this fundamental and sobering insight under the belt much mental fog and confusion is cleared up immediately.
Gang wars, then, typically involving some territorial issues, are always wars conducted by rival gang leaders with other people’s money, machines and manpower (just think of taxation and compulsory conscription!). The cost of war, whether conducted in an offensive or in defensive mode, then, is socialized (while prospective gains are privatized), thus making war more likely and lengthy.
In a nutshell, the scenario currently unfolding in the Ukraine is this: The Selenskiy gang has deliberately and continually provoked the much bigger next-door Putin gang, and it has been actively encouraged and supported in its provocations by the leaders of the world’s biggest, if far-away gang of all, the US-Biden gang (assisted by its NATO-vassals and associate gang leaders in Europe), that views (and pressures its allied gangs to likewise view) the Putin gang as “the enemy:” as one of only two remaining stumbling blocks on the way toward global hegemony and world domination, as its very own explicitly and repeatedly stated ultimate goal.
Pentagon apologists for DU weapons typically note that alpha particles are so low-energy they “fail to penetrate the dead layers of cells covering the skin, and can be easily stopped by a sheet of paper.” True enough, but when introduced into the body, where the tiny alpha-particle-emitting particles can become lodged in lung or kidney tissue, they prove to be quite good at killing or damaging adjacent cells.
In its fundraising promotions, NPR touts shows like Morning Edition as providing listeners a “deeper look” at complicated stories.
Sometimes that is the case, but not this month, in its coverage of an announced decision by the Biden administration to further escalate the violence in Ukraine by supplying that country’s military with controversial depleted uranium (DU) anti-tank shells. Morning Edition (9/8/23) glossed over the reason many nations consider their use an atrocity. In fact, many commercial news organizations did a much better job in reporting in depth on this story.
‘Not nuclear or radioactive’
Morning Edition co-host Leila Fadel had one source for the three-and-half-minute report: Togzhan Kassenova, a senior research fellow at SUNY Albany’s Center for Policy Research, whom she introduced as “an expert on nuclear politics.” (The Center describes itself as having “a long and notable history of managing and implementing grants and sponsored programs for the government of the United States, including projects for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Naval Research.”)
Kassenova, responding to questions from Fadel, misrepresented what DU is and what its risks are when used in battle. “Anti-tank rounds with depleted uranium are not nuclear or radioactive,” she claimed, adding without any further detail that “there are some safety implications that need to be kept in mind.”
In fact, as the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website explains, “Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive.” DU is a mix of U-238 and some other, rarer uranium isotopes that are left after the fissionable U-235 used in nuclear bombs and as reactor fuel has been refined out. All uranium isotopes are significant releasers of alpha particles as they decay; in other words, they’re radioactive. These low-energy but relatively large particles, not even mentioned by Kassenova, are essentially helium nuclei, composed of two protons and two neutrons. They can do serious cellular and genetic damage when uranium dust is ingested or inhaled.
Fadel didn’t question her guest’s effort to minimize the risk posed by uranium projectiles, though even the most cursory attempt to research the issue would have disclosed these problems.
The House on Wednesday night voted down an amendment to the Pentagon appropriations bill introduced by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) that would have banned the transfer of civilian-killing cluster bombs to other countries.
The amendment failed in a vote of 160-269, with only 85 Republicans and 75 Democrats supporting the measure.
Cluster bombs spread small submunitions, known as bomblets, over a large area. They are so hazardous to civilians because many of the submunitions do not explode on impact and can be found years or decades later, often by children. Due to their indiscriminate nature, cluster bombs are banned by over 100 countries.
The vote on Gaetz’s amendment came after the Biden administration announced a weapons package for Ukraine that included the second tranche of cluster bombs in the form of 155mm artillery shells. The administration first shipped cluster bombs to Ukraine in July. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed that without the widely-banned munitions, Ukraine would be “defenseless.”
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