poverty

Official Culture Reprise I: (Or… Don’t reach for the tranquilizers just yet)

 By M.K. Styllinski

“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”

William Blum, author and Former U.S. State Dept. Employee


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© infrakshun

“In 1984, the government continually changed its past by creating new historical fictions to justify its present. I wondered if we had already gone beyond 1984, where, as Orwell said, “truth is falsehood,” and “ignorance is strength.”

Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control (1978)


As the Greek Philosopher Phaedrus wisely stated: “The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.”

Inducing insanity hasn’t been the aim of this blog, but after reading about many of these subjects (let alone experiencing them) it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise to succumb to a heavy heart after being confronted with so many entrenched iniquities. However, the Dark Night of the Soul should eventually liberate not imprison; providing a stepping stone to a richer, fuller appraisal of our world and ourselves. There are demons stalking the souls of our ancestors and the children of our modern world and it must cause concern, but not to the point it induces paranoia and paralysis. We cannot defend and then integrate the shadowlands if we are not aware that they exist and once we see them we do not understand their behaviour. We must become tacticians of the soul if we are to survive.

We have the chance to see evil for what it is – simply the natural expression of a dynamic which has been allowed to reach its extreme. Paradoxically, this also reaffirms the opportunity to reduce darkness and its destroyers and enhance the light with laser-like precision. Perhaps when we look at what is, we are in a better place to use the knowledge we have to imagine what could be. Having observed extreme negativity and its psychopathic stimulus, perhaps we are gradually becoming forewarned and forearmed, ready to break the chains of our psychological and spiritual slavery. This becomes a positive affirmation of the potential of humanity.

Yet, it is true to say that we have left it a little late…

You have to think positive. Things are never that bad.”

Despite this cliché being wheeled out in response to the fact that things ARE “that bad” and actually much worse for the majority of people, there is truth in the statement. The idea that balanced, positive thinking improves health and affects the lives of others in beneficial ways is now proven both clinically and experientially. It requires effort and persistence but it can be done. It’s just one of those essential ingredients in the cooking pot of emotional and mental defence which will decide whether we are victors in the face of evil, or its perpetual victims. Conversely, for that positivity to be worth anything at all it must lead to an application of knowledge that is based on as close approximation to objective reality as possible, otherwise, we are merely listening with our fingers in our ears.

As long as we are not blinded by the dazzle of our carefully cultivated inner suns, perhaps we can to do great things in the future. As Helen Keller once said: “All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” And as the cycle turns – so shall we. But first we must be able SEE how inured in this manufactured reality we have become.

Until then no escape is possible.

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It may seem as though I am vociferously anti-Western and see everything as shadow devoid of any light. This is not the case. What I do see is the enormous potential of humanity and just how suppressed, dumbed down, weakened, maligned and soul-destroyed it has been for tens of hundreds of years. No more so than in the last century, although the methods by which we are kept asleep have become more sophisticated. I’ve also seen myself as an exact replica of those very qualities from which I’m slowly extricating myself. Once we begin to dig deep and actually start to shed those layers that make up our false, conditioned selves, there is the potential to realise that we are so much more than we are led to believe. What is more, we have chosen to love our ignorance, servitude and the formation of societal structures which lock us into an exclusively materialist definition of what it means to be human. And this has meant untold suffering and misery for so many souls. Therefore, our responsibility for the choices we make in our lives have repercussions for ALL since we are inextricably connected to the elected or forsaken responsibilities of others.

We can never exist in isolation however much at times, we wish it were so.

This time, I think there is an opportunity in the face of coming global changes, not for some utopia re-cast in a different guise but to go to the heart of the problem and take back the gold that we have allowed to be stolen from us. Knowledge of how psychopathy and its tributaries of evil manifests in the collective mind and its external realities is something so important that the ancients made it an integral part of their oral traditions whether we focus on Sufism of Persia to Native Americans, the Celts of Britain or the German fairy tales of the 18th Century – the akido of the soul is an art that is slowly being rediscovered.

At this stage, even though it may seem that the global horse has long since bolted and everything seems inevitable, not only is pragmatic optimism required for a richer and more fulfilling life it may also be a scientific inevitability that the fruits of that hope will descend when we least expect it. The unpredictable is not part of a psychopathic blueprint but is part of the Creative Universe. Whether or not we all overcome what is a concerted effort of the few to co-opt and destroy the creativity and peaceable nature of the majority, will depend on whether we can all work together to address the shadow side of humanity and acknowledging our part in its ascendance – wherever and whomever we are.

At the same time, when we decide not to follow what has become Official Culture and not to believe the lies, we necessarily go against the accepted beliefs of the day. This brings us face to face with our own deception – the lies we have told ourselves perhaps over many years which initially helped us survive but have now proved toxic, dimming the light of the soul as each day goes by. As African-American novelist James Baldwin observes it is: “Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

And with yourself.

This “war” should not be one of violence but a psychic battle between truth and lies which necessarily takes place through us, something I am belatedly discovering along my own path. Sometimes you cannot be shown, rather it must come from your self-inflicted lessons which are a natural “becoming.” A choice must then be made to allow such a process of inner change to proceed. Yet, strangely it is not something that can be initiated at will. To bring our accumulated shadows safely and effectively into conscious awareness must be carried out slowly and methodically over time and at different speeds for different people. We must acknowledge that we are far from whole, and to begin gathering in the scattered parts of our psyche so that we differentiate what is truly a part of our own experience and to thereby set some boundaries. Conscious and willed effort as part of a framework of sincerity to change is essential, even though the process is not actually under the control of the will. As Jungian psychologist M. Esther Harding mentions, to find a semblance of wholeness within oneself and therefore more resistance to forces that would turn one into bio-chemical play-thing, such a process: “… originates autonomously from a movement in the unconscious, and may be likened to physiological processes that go on without conscious control or assistance.” [1]

Nonetheless, understanding that our choices are, to a great degree, derived from the matrix of Official Culture, is our starting point. This can lead to the beginnings of an initial spark deep within our own being and will determine how our choices – therefore the quality of our awareness – will develop.We cannot hope to suitably address the external world with tangible results without having first addressed all manner of conflict within.

This is when the real journey begins.

 rainbow_landscape© infrakshun

The events of 9/11 represented a watershed in the fortunes of America and the world.

When faced with questions which are born from objective evidence from not just the few, but from the many, we may then ask ourselves what in all conscience, are we prepared to accept? This includes taking on board the possibility that what we assumed to be true was in fact false; that the trust we placed in those currently in power may be wholly unfounded. It requires that we face the high probability that we have been lied to, beyond the bounds of mere coincidences and “failures of intelligence,” but from a systematic, purposeful propaganda strategy designed to fulfil a set of long known ideological and geo-political objectives. We have an opportunity to discover how much of this proffered evidence impinges on lives. However, we may have to re-evaluate the way in which we have understood the workings of democracy, government, media and human nature – even our own place in society and the world.

While uncertainty, fear and conflict have increased significantly since 9/11, the individual and collective responses to this important event will reveal how creatively we can act for freedom and truth, or how deeply we have chosen to believe the Lie. Pull a thread hard enough and for long enough, it will eventually reveal more than we might care to know. Yet when our preconceived ideas are shattered it can also open our minds, shock us into realisations and more choices as to what we can do with this information. We have the opportunity to see things as they really are which in turn will offer a chance to understand who we are and what we choose to see.

In the context of 9/11 and geo-politics if a pathological perception exists at the highest level of government, the logical conclusion is that there are people drawn from all political and religious persuasions who are psychopaths first, and who will adopt whatever belief will serve their predatory behaviour best. In one sense it doesn’t matter who’s on first: the only underlying constant is age-old predatory behaviour of the psychopath and sub categories of psychological deviance that lie behind all the manifestations of evil we see today. Factions with the US government and its agencies consciously engineered of the 9/11 attacks with many low level US officials unknowingly assisting in its final climax, partly due to the belief that it was yet another military exercise. The primary architects have elements within the Israeli government and intelligence apparatus. There is evidence of both a circumstantial and deductive nature that places Israel firmly at the scene of the crime not least because they had everything to gain from such a tragic event.

The information explored on 9/11 hasn’t even come close to scratching the surface. At the very top of our psychic food chain lies an occult body who enacted a huge sacrifice or “Mega-Ritual” designed to appease and invoke the archetypal forces associated with a variety of Gods and Goddesses and in line with Illuminist traditions of the 3EM. We may never know exactly who were responsible for this attack against humanity, so vast is the net of converging interests. It is also likely that while those at the top of this Pyramid are few indeed, the psychological footprint of their effects can be likened to slow-motion release of a neutron bomb, spreading a psycho-spiritual toxicity as dangerous as any radioactive cloud.

Whether we believe in any of the religio-occult principles which have surfaced over the course of this series, they are taken seriously by many members of international governments and military who are currently deciding the fate of nations.  9/11 is the most potent expression of orchestrated evil for centuries. It represents a nexus of aligned interests with occultism at its core and surrounded by strategies which buffer the observer from the true ritualistic nature of the operation. Yet, it is only one phase in a long tradition of social engineering that is about to reach its apotheosis over the next decade.

So, let’s summarise, very simply some of the themes which have appeared so far.

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Spheres of Influence | © infrakshun


“The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich.”

— Chris Hedges


9/11 Occult Mega-Ritual: orchestrated as a monumental ritual sacrifice in plain sight. The source of this atrocity was carried out by a conglomeration of members drawn from the upper echelons of the Three Establishment Model of Liberal, Conservative and Zionist members. These are in turn, are filtered through memberships of freemasonic branches of Rosicrucian Illuminism and occult Zionism under various names and lodges. In all probability there is a grouping entirely unknown and without any labels who oversee the whole Big Show. Their beliefs are a form of existential Satanism drawing from an archaic techno-sorcery: an intense and a sophisticated mastery of science, psychology and cosmology which effectively marks them out as the leaders of a breakaway society. They are essential psychopaths and the perfect embodiment of the dark side of humanity and its collective shadow. In one sense, they serve a spiritual purpose in the balancing of negative and positive poles. Hence the need to re-establish a level playing field where negative forces can be objectively SEEN and understood.

Military-Occult Intelligence groups: are the key players and intermediaries between governments, think tanks and the military. They are perhaps closet to the core, inner workings though highly compartmentalised and tightly controlled. The MI6-CIA/NSA-MOSSAD triangle is on first, linking hands with the Anglo-American banking families and US Zionist influences. They are the tools which enable mind control/PSYOPS operations, media propaganda, CoIntelpro, Eco-Intelpro, coloured revolutions and false flag terrorism whilst working through the economic architecture of the 4C’s and geostrategy. They are the key cogs on the vast turning wheel.

Organised Religion: Embedded in the 3EM. They are the strings which are attached to a complex system of puppetry which make up the beliefs and myths of religious indoctrination and scientific thought police. Most potent in this bunch are the religious fanatics on the Christian and Islamic divide which has been so carefully nurtured over the centuries. Chabad Lubavitch, Catholic Cults (Opus Dei) Christian Zionism; Neo-Conservatism, Christian Evangelism and various other sub-groupings of right wing authoritarianism are key in the development, disbursement and maintenance of anger, fear, suppressed emotion and thus a variety sexual pathologies. This sustains the negative clouds of emotion needed to prop up the many headed hydra of the “End Times” war. Aside from paid agents (spellbinders) such groupings are largely unconscious of the deeply rooted occult connections.

Corporatism: The 9/11 Mega-Ritual enabled the 4Cs of commercialisation, consolidation, centralisation and control to move ahead with unparalleled success employing a cross fertilisation of all the above groupings into food, oil, agribusiness, asymmetric warfare, weapons, bio and smart technology, banking, security and the tripartite consumption of human and narcotics trafficking which underpins them all.  Stimulated crisis and conflict through the “Shock Doctrine” is the route to further centralisation of all the above. Think tanks and private armies are both political and corporate tools, the presence of which is dictated by money and profits in a self-sustaining – but ultimately finite – feedback system; a symbiotic relationship between governments and big business. The State is the corporation and the corporation is the State. The Underworld has now fused with mainstream geopolitics to produce deep politics and the “Overworld.”


 “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.”

— Frederic Bastiat


The terrorist threat is a vast and complex fabrication which has been entrenched in the collective consciousness through Hollywood programming and decades of largely British, American and Israeli psychological operations. The myth of an outside enemy is self-propagating. We tend to believe what the media and authoritative statements made by government officials and academics tell us until it becomes part of our own belief system. But if we look closely at history, it is a story of our governments fabricating, distorting and creating terrorist movements and the horrendous suffering they inflict on ordinary people. The  9/11 attacks and the spectre of Al-Qaeda (and now ISIL) have been the modern day tools of perception management used to justify all kinds of atrocities and anti-human actions at the local, national and international level.

If the knowledge that organised religion and global economics has been manipulated into a poker game that is loaded for the Establishment to win while everyone ultimately dies at the table, then the house of cards would begin to tumble very quickly. People would see through the media propaganda and learn the language of deceit, which would mean there would be no pretexts for waging war; no justification for the doctrine of pre-emption or the building and maintenance of vast network of bases around the world; no reason for mass surveillance or the hoax that is the War on Terror.

It would all be seen as a sham.

There are key beliefs promoted and created as a resource for World State ideologies. At there inception, they were benevolent and creative. With varying twists and turns in their evolution – some ancient, some more recent – they have all succumbed to forms of pathogenic infection by psychopaths otherwise known as “ponerisation.” The ideology of a World State is promoted primarily through the auspices of apparently benign, philanthropic and altruistic endeavours at both the local and international level. With advanced knowledge of crowd psychology, suppressed technology and occult directives, this minority of psychopaths have been allowed to initiate a phase by phase of extinction of the global population.

Global Strategy of Tension: A War against the People

The emerging Global Pathocracy has kept populations asleep, fearful, unthinking, addicted and poverty-stricken. Tribalism, religious extremism and a spiritually dead secularism has turned the family unit and the community ethos inside out. It has achieved this through a variety of tried and tested methods across the centuries and about which many artists, philosophers, and mystics have tried to warn us. A brief summary of some of the major components involved follows, and describes a national and international Hegelian formula for a “Strategy of Tension.” These various tools of social management and manipulation obviously interpenetrate and overlap.  They comprise:

Synthetic Terror“Strategy of Tension” the “Hegelian Dialectic” or “Problem-Reaction-Solution” and various false flag scenarios. This produces anger, fear, distrust, shock, grief, trauma and revenge. The net result is social dislocation and psychological weakness open to auto-suggestion and thus to ponerological influences. Religious fundamentalism is always waiting in the wings to invert conscience and morality toward the myopia of absolutism. Indeed, intel agencies have traditionally had many agents working within their ranks as part of the process of domestic entrapment. The Terror industry is lucrative, both financially and politically. Terrorism becomes an archetypal external threat which offers the public backing for the fulfillment of geopolitical goals lying behind coloured revolutions and regime changes. The extraction of negative human emotion is the most effective and potent means to justifying the unjustifiable. It is a tried and tested formula that the populace is slowly beginning to understand. That being so, bigger and better atrocities and greater distractions will be applied to keep pace with an increasingly aware public.

Social Engineering Culture, academia, social sciences, green issues, entertainment and education Includes: CoIntelpro and Eco-Intelpro. A subversion of normal development within societies – ethical, spiritual and civic movements; the elevation of belief and emotional reflex partnered with the lowest common denominator of human instincts. Sexuality is progressively ponerised so that there are no limits; where more extreme pathologies become mainstreamed disrupting natural development and causing loss of identity, psychological disorientation – in particular narcissism and addictive behaviour. The entertainment industries are awash with sophisticated psycho-subversion techniques and child abuse networks. Semiotics, psychic driving, Pavlovian conditioning, subliminals and Neuro-Lingusitic programming, Delphic technique – all hijack the sub-strata of instinctive symbolism and iconography as a form of double-think where words and images mean something entirely different to what is seen and heard. Destruction of religious/spiritual beliefs replaced with a materialist perception of reality and the promotion of “group-think” tribalism. Dispersal of memes such as “One world” “global governance” “global warming” etc. and a high level media propaganda. There is literally a social engineering program for everyone. There are key beliefs which are currently most suitable to promote One World philosophy and practice. These include:

  • Transhumanism / SMART society (SMART energy grid; infrastructure, etc.) and Sustainable Development – infiltrated by Eco-Intelpro so as to speed the delivery of technological mainframe for complete surveillance and containment under cover of “saving the world” through technology. The metaphor for this is akin to farming sheep – feeding, watering and making sure protection is given through biometric welfare so that they become not only docile but happy in their domestication. Meanwhile they “progressively” sheared of awareness.
  • Climate Change industry and environmental activism infiltrated by Eco-Intelpro and eco-fascistic principles where human beings are seen as viri and thus less important to the preservation of Nature. (The United Nations’ Agenda 21 and urban development is key in this regard – and no, while right wing patriots do embrace this reality it is not a conservative plot). This feeds into multiple vested interests on both sides of the divide.
  • New Age or Human Potential Movement infiltrated by agents of CoIntelpro to limit quality of consciousness and thus the potential for genuine expansion of awareness. This is achieved in much the same way as the subversion of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The exact same scenario as the transhumanist movement except through spiritual rituals.

State-Sanctioned Mind Control experiments / Ritual Sexual Abuse – Military use of mind control technology targeting populations worldwide (HAARP, MK ULTRA, MONARCH, biowarfare, etc.) Historical tradition of military families being used for mind control experimentation including assassinations and black operations on domestic targets. Child abuse networks are a source of Elite indulgence and fodder for future covert military training. (See Satan’s Little Helpers IV and read David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill ) Extensive internet-based propaganda serves to confuse and disorientate supporting both the “discourse of disbelief” and unsubstantiated conspiracies. Existence of intra-familial/generational Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) are extended and enhanced within the military-intelligence apparatus with crossovers between various religious and occult groupings from inherited “bloodlines”. Abuse in society is encouraged to provide cover for the Elite. The entertainment industries (popular music, movies) are awash with sophisticated psycho-subversion techniques which are both purposely designed and others which are symptomatic of the focus inherent in the medium. All indirectly encourage pathologies such as ADS, depression, narcissistic tendencies and dissociative disorders.

(Asymmetric) WarOrganised and facilitated by governments, corporations and the banking cartels in order to maximise and expand profits. A primary tool for ensuring the majority of the global population remains disempowered whislt extracting material and psychic capital. Culling and sterilisation of populations heads off cyclic disturbance in status quo such as group awareness, genuine revolutionary and social recovery leading to potentially dangerous levels of empowerment which would threaten the monopoly of the 0.01%. To ignite the need for war humanitarian pretexts and false flag atrocities are used. Methods of balkanisation and civil war are carried out along with heavy media and outsourced PSYOPS and PR companies on the ground. Obvious fallout from war is: Poverty, hunger, disease, individual and collective psycho-physiological trauma and a massive rise in pathologies; mass death, mass immigration and exodus of refugees; environmental destruction; opportunities to reconfigure tribal and political alliances and objectives; rape of societies and cultures and replacement with cartel capitalism and monoculture of the 4C’s. This proceeds to a critical breakdown resulting in social compliance to the new established order and eventually seen as normal. Through the creation and/or exacerbation of the division between rich and poor, a vacuum is always created where uncertainty and economic insecurity invites crime and social unrest which can then be manipulated according to elite directives.

Debt slavery – IMF/ World Bank/UN-International Banking cartels. Once war has broken the spirit, these organisations move in to create the conditions by which the newly “democractised” countries sign on to the neo-liberal model of economic slavery. Massive profits can be made from a corporate colonisation of virgin cultures. Multiple dividends for economic destabilisation through debt control by the Structural Adjustment Team of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Health Organisation, (WHO) and the United Nations. (See: The Shock Doctrine By Naomi Klein (2010) and Confessions of an Economic Hit-man by John Perkins). High frequency trading and speculation driven by artificial intelligence technology maintains the “Boom-bust cycles” and debt bubbles which ensure dividends for the 0000.1%.  A comprehensive rigging of every market exists from currency to gold/silver so that during each bubble burst “austerity measures” can be introduced in order to obtain funds from the public purse to repair the excess of the banking industry and maintain the global financial architecture. This cartel capitalism is overseen by the Bank of England in the City of London and the Federal Reserve in the United States which operate under exceptional laws and rulings effectively allowing these bodies to exist as private entities which serve corporate and banking interests. They are two of the primary wheels upon which a legion of banks, hedge funds, financial brokers, think tanks and government agencies inexorably turn. The dynasties of the Rothschilds, Morgans,  Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, along with European royalty and many other wealthy families are the nodes in a circuit of wealth and power within Official Culture that ensures the fiat currency of credit and debt slavery, as well as a concurrent monopolisation of all resources that remain entrenched. Governments already operate as global entities and offer periodic elections to keep the illusion of working democracies. Members of the state are usually deluded by their own lies, ignorance and self-importance thus oiling the wheels of World State operations. Very few in power realise what part they play in the wider game. Government and their federal/civil service personnel ensure the age-old key objectives remain fixed i.e. to disempower the public through information dominance, consumerism and debt.

Food monopoly / Food Contamination – Fast-food society with agri-business, genetically modified foods, chemical industry, animal foodstuffs and factory farming defining its expansion. This has led to severe environmental degradation of soil and desertification; destruction of forests and river pollution which destabilises the balance of eco-systems and expose populations to natural disasters. Mass migration to cities and expansion of slums results. International immigration inevitably increases placing further pressure on other countries’ infrastructure. Severe health problems from agricultural practices (pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilisers) chemical additives, irradiated and genetically modified food is visited on the economically disadvantaged which makes up most of world’s population. Supermarket culture displaces local businesses and increases total reliance on corporations who practice global trade divorced from socio-economic values. Self-sufficiency, autonomy are further eroded in favour of narrow dependence on exports. The nature of fast food causes dietary problems further exacerbating mental health issues. Endemic animal cruelty in factory farming is a reflection of a mechanistic and materialist view of animals as products. It also reinforces our disconnection from nature and ecologically responsible alternatives. The mind-body split is part of the formula for control as is the maxim of “Divide and Rule” and obviously has consequences for the healthy functioning of both. The food industry is to be integrated into SMART agrimatics utilising biotechnology and biometrics for maximum output and efficiency but yielding the minimum nutritional quality due to a purposeful exclusion of essential nutrients.

Depopulation through mass sterilisation, food as a weapon and indirect forms of reduction (economic disparities, debt slavery, war and GMOs) drawn from a resurgence in the support for genetic engineering and eugenics. The co-option of the well-intentioned with NGOs and the United Nations offers a platform of legitimacy. Such a worldview requires a reduction in specific racial types alongside colonisation and resource monopoly. Genocide, tribal warfare, gender imbalance, distortion of science by corporate interests, population anomalies, religious extremism, and profits for governmental agencies and the pharmaceutical industry are the net effects of such actions. The much promoted bad science of overpopulation is used to increase the pressure on scientists and environmentalists to push through predesignated “solutions”. In truth, with a radical return to just and equitable socio-cultural and economic principles much of the overpopulation propaganda would be overturned. The dysfunctional nature of our current economic and social infrastructures comprehensively limit truly creative solutions which would allow a natural return to balanced populations levels.

Big Pharma / Medical Establishment – medicalisation of health is drawn from the same formula for domination which can be seen in the banking industry and other sectors of society. The net result is an undue dependence on pharmaceutical corporations who, in combination with the insurance industry, have state health care and doctors inside their pocket. Greater privatisation and fake social benefits (such as Obamacare) ensure vulnerable sectors of society who are unable to pay, cannot access the health care they need. Just as arm manufacturers and financial institutions are intimately tied to global governments so too the huge profits are made by Big Pharma are accrued from their relationship to the medical establishment. Curing people is the last thing the medical cartels would like to see – quite the opposite. The marginalisation of complementary medicine continues with Big Pharma paying so called medical websites to indulge in propaganda and attacks on alternative healing modalities. Scientific reductionism and a serious abuse of the scientific method can be evidenced and used to support profit at the expense of healing and palliative care. Corruption in science is intimately linked to corruption throughout the corporatised medical establishment. Profit is obviously the overriding aim where natural and sometimes innovative methods of care have been overlooked. Campaigns of character assassination and disinformation are routinely used against those who go against this orthodoxy. This has resulted in a negative feedback loop between the mentally and physically ill who represent numbers on a spreadsheet for Big Pharma companies and state care. As society becomes more prone to infection by the dominating psychopathy then more symptoms will begin to appear in normal people thus increasing the profits of Big Pharma which, acting as a corporate predator in its perceptions will take out anything which threatens its monopoly. Dependence and over-reliance is secured if drugs and psychiatry are joined at the hip. An ill population is an essential revenue stream for Big Pharma. (A similar framework exists in vaccination programs whose overarching agenda is to lessen the integrity of DNA and resistance to specific viri as per psycho-social engineering for docility, sterility and depopulation agenda).

Technocracy – implementation of a “Smart Society” which integrates principles of sustainable development, state surveillance, invasive perception management and virtual reality leisure time. Economic parity and ultimate efficiency are the by-words for acceptance. It is a new form of materialist seduction with technology as the panacea for all ills. The glut of gadgets are showing highly negative effects on the neurology of the very young. Brain growth and the arc of developmental learning is suffering. Narcissism is enhanced in a push-button culture of synthetic networks divorced from the real. Great progress can be seen through internet-based journalism and information dissemination. This is one aspect of technology that for now permitted until it is possible that dissent of this kind can be eliminated. Firstly, the infrastructure and lifestyle must be tied to essential requirements such as income generation, energy in the home and health. Once these are inseparable from survival then if someone is not behaving, his ability to exist in such an etheric web of Wi-Fi relations will simply be switched off. A transposition of elite perception is set to move seamlessly into the new SMART societies.

Inducements of technological benefits will anaesthetise new generations into blindly accepting a total reconfiguration and restructuring of urban life. As a consequence, it will be increasingly difficult to opt out in favour of a genuinely self-sufficient and autonomous lifestyle. This will be equated with subversive and suspicious behaviour and thus citizens will be encouraged to alert the authorities for the good of the whole. Those who wish to opt out of this all encompassing bio-metric lifestyle will be seen as the new terrorists or “organics” strangely rejecting the post-human world of biogenetic integration with the digital world. Targeted through “Pre-Crime” software, they will be seen as the new bogeymen.

Paradoxically, by moving closer to a literal connection into a cybernetic machine of convenience we will be further disconnected from authenticity and the natural world. Objective reality will be replaced with subjective dream world  – a virtuality. This is exactly what the pathocrats would love to see. Transhumanism is the philosophy created to sell their group-think, collectivist dream. Once Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been allowed to proceed, innovation in the military and consumer worlds will tip the balance towards a redefinition of a host of principles and values attached to what it means to be human. You can be assured in such a scenario this will mean much, MUCH less freedom.

All the above listed strategies will be heightened and expanded under such a technocracy.


 “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say you believe a rope is strong as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But, suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice? Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”

— C.S. Lewis


official-culture

Don those masks and look straight ahead…

One World?

Well, not at this level – not yet. But we might find the inversion of such a principle looming rather large in the near future.

All the above strategies are needed to promote the “One World” philosophy which appears so warm and fuzzy at first glance. But it requires the dissolution of national borders, self-determination and independence in favour of a homogenous, group consciousness which replicates across all societal domains. It demands an extreme deference to political correctness and liberalism while at the same time using conservative – even fascistic formulas – to enforce such directives. In truth, no political belief or philosophy is exempt from being used as a temporary tool to lever this One World Order into place. One World, One Humanity, One World Religion, One World Army are all euphemisms for a gradual, phase by phase implementation of a global, centralised control system across all sectors of human endeavour. Eventually, these people wish to see everything interlocking into a seamless, artificial World State of homeostatic, human management, where we will be literally cared for like pets: fed, watered and given our basic comforts. But only as long as we keep our place in this new techno-Feudalism. And keeping our place will mean allowing a Huxleyian slavery of docile “post-humans” to merge into the SMART framework with ultimate ease. If not, then you are “switched off” until you learn to be a good citizen. If the present American police state is anything to go by it will be a case of trading one Orwellian order for another.

It is the the noble aspiration of a world of interconnected and interrelated “Oneness” that serves as the platform for its inversion. It seems humanity has yet to grasp that such a concept is derived from ancient spiritual wisdom that describes what could be termed higher dimensions of consciousness rather than physical plane directives, where opposites collide and choices are known.

The above realities and possible futures describe our current reality but it need not necessarily continue.

Though the ideal of ultimate oneness may not be possible at this level of reality, that doesn’t mean to say that we cannot attain a more balanced civilisation – where even the word “unity” would exist in clusters. Before we can allow a hard-won pragmatism guided by an innate and natural guidance to take over, we must let go of our collective Messiah Complex where every charismatic leader is deified and seen as the next demi-God to lead us into a New Way. We must find our own path of access. And it is that process that will bind us to others searching for the Way, without beliefs which hinder and with a new socio-political and cultural imperative which leaves behind the dead-ends of Liberalism, Communism and Fascism and their various children. Maybe in that frightening void of acceptance and non-anticipation we will learn to find the balance between the sovereign rights of the individual married to the collective. That is, to become group conscious and to realise the value of networking as opposed to being submerged in group consciousness and our individuality squashed by instinct of the herd.

Before we can do this we perhaps we need to discover why it is that notions of authority have loomed so large in our minds and have given the illusion of free-will, from cradle to grave.

 


Notes

[1] (p.309) Harding, M.Esther; Psychic Energy (1962) Second Edition.

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The Terror Industry (2)

“The FBI isn’t nabbing would-be terrorists so much as setting up mentally ill or economically desperate people to commit crimes they could never have accomplished on their own”

– Trevor Aaronson: The Sting: How the FBI Created a Terrorist


US-FBI-ShadedSeal.svg

The Seal of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Politics of Entrapment explored US, British and European sting operations against sex offenders and would-be terrorists. We re-visit the subject from the standpoint of  global terrorism in order to take a more detailed look at the FBI’s role and the historical basis of a strategy of tension, a formula which has been a standard tactic for as long as the State has existed. Indeed, one cannot exist without the other it seems. The American public remains ill-informed about the billions of dollars taken from tax payers to keep the treadmill of the perpetual war on terror and security framework operational. Perhaps this is no surprise, since the censorship in the mainstream media reached No.4 on Project Censored’s most under-reported stories of 2012.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is sitting astride a network of 15,000 spies, most of whom are criminals who have infiltrated a cross-section of ethnic communities in an attempt to uncover terrorist plots. Rather than foiling potential terrorism  – most of which would have been as a direct result of American foreign policy in the first place i.e. “blowback” – these agents provocateurs are responsible for encouraging crimes against civilians and government with a substantial cash reward should they deliver. Since 9/11, over 150 men have been caught in FBI terrorism entrapment operations receiving a sentence of 25 years or more in prison. These unhappy young men had their lives ruined whilst providing essential PR for the FBI and substantial profits for security firms, law enforcement, weapons manufacturers and the US military, justifying the flow of tax dollars, funnelled from a treasury that continues to print money out of thin air.

Although there are many books that cover the complex history of state-sponsored terrorism today, award-winning journalist Trevor Aaronson was one of the first to fully document the FBI’s endeavours in fake terror plots in his 2013 book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. [1] Interviewing case officers and FBI Task Force leaders as well as informants themselves, he documents case after case of undercover agents groomed for entrapment operations. One of these was Quazi Nafis who received 30 years for planning to bomb the New York Stock Exchange in 2012. A fake Al-Qaeda operative and informant known as “Kareem,” was instrumental in his grooming and subsequent capture.

Nafis didn’t have any explosives nor the finances or contacts to acquire it, he was merely a disaffected youth of meagre intelligence, burning with understandable hatred for Western imperialism. Through Kareem, the FBI would provide him with all he needed to carry out the attack which included: “… not only the storage facility and supposed explosives, but also the detonator and the van that Nafis believed would deliver the bomb. …” But it was not to be: “On the morning of October 17, Nafis and Kareem drove the van to Lower Manhattan and parked it in front of the Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street. Then they walked to a nearby hotel room, where Nafis dialed on his cellphone the number he believed would trigger the bomb, but nothing happened. He dialed again, and again. The only result was Nafis’ apprehension by federal agents.” [2]

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© Davidalary | Dreamstime.com – Fingerprint Photo

Some of the more high profile cases include the conviction of a group of young black men known as the Newburgh Four who were jailed in June of 2011 for an alleged 2009 terrorist plot to fire a Stinger missile at US military planes. Career FBI informant and petty criminal Shahed Hussain was responsible for putting them there, offering enormous financial inducements to carry out the plot. The sum of money amounted to $250,000 for one man, free holidays and top of the range cars. He cruised the mosques looking for likely men with radical chips on their shoulders and who could be groomed accordingly. Yet, the men that he managed to find were not radical Islamists bent on terrorist atrocities but, as Paul Harris described, writing for The Guardian, on December 12, 2011, these were: “… impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh’s grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country.” The report stated further: “As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets.” Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University observed: ‘There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided…” [3]

Now, “unique” has become pedestrian.

The case of the Fort Dix Five also deserves a mention. Arrested in May of 2007, on charges of plotting to kill US soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a DOJ press report from June 5 read: “The five defendants are charged with conspiracy and other charges related to their plans to kill as many soldiers at the Army base as possible. A sixth man was indicted for aiding and abetting the illegal possession of firearms by three members of the group.” Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer (an ethnic Jordanian) and Albanians Dritan Duka, and Eljvir Duka, Serdar Tatar (a Turk) and were charged with: “conspiracy to murder members of the uniformed services” along with the “unlawful possession of machine guns” and “illegal alien” status. The fifth member, Agron Abdullahu an ethnic Kosovar was charged with “aiding and abetting the Duka brothers’ illegal possession of weapons.”

The Jewish Anti Deformation League (ADL), the right-wing evangelist Pat Robertson and a coterie of authoritarian organisations displayed a vengeful glee at what were clearly trumped up charges. Referring to the ADL’s gloating of the defendants sentences of life imprisonment in 2008, geopolitical analyst Stephen Lendmen commented: “Imagine their comments if five Israeli Jews had been convicted on the same charges instead of Muslims: “No plot, No crime, so the FBI invents guilt with an entrapment sting operation – its usual modus operandi to ensnare the innocent.”

In his 2008 article on the Fort Dix Five he describes the entrapment narrative which trapped the men:

At a Cherry Hill, NJ Circuit City store in January 2006, Mohamad Shnewer innocently wanted a home video transfered to DVD. It showed men shooting weapons at a Pocono Mountains firing range, playing paintball (an innocent game in which opposing teams try to eliminate opponents by marking them with water-soluble dye shot in capsules from air guns), and repeating Arabic phrases like Allah Akbar (meaning God is Greatest). The store clerk called the police. They notified the FBI. They began investigating and recruited two dubious informants to help.

Each knew nothing about the other. One was Besnik Bakalli, an ethnic Albanian, who falsely told defendants he was a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) veteran – the US/Germany supported terrorist group recruited to destabilize Kosovo/Serbia in the 1990s. At trial, however, he testified that he fought for no group and knew nothing about Islam or extremists calling for jihad.

Mahmoud Omar was the other informant, an Egyptian-born used car salesman/mechanic on probation for bank fraud. He and Bakalli entered the US illegally and faced likely deportation or worse. They were easily recruited, so cooperated, and were well compensated for their efforts – thousands of dollars a month, and according to defense lawyers, Omar (from when recruited in March 2006) will have earned $238,000 for his efforts. NewJersey.com believes more – over $240,000 plus rent and other expenses, and, of course, leniency in handling their charges. Bakalli was used for a shorter period and reportedly was paid about $150,000. The FBI also relocated his parents to America as an added incentive to cooperate. [4]

Perusing the trial evidence it was clear that there was no plot except what the FBI could dig out of their bag of tricks to justify their entrapment program and the subsequent arrests. Though hostile to America’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and an obvious faith in the religion of Islam, all five maintained their innocence, a certainty that remained throughout their arrest and trial.

fbi-entrapment

It seems the FBI can disrupt service utilities to a house and pretend to be helpful technicians in order to gain entry and covertly search the premises in order to “find” evidence that might later justify a search warrant. [5]

Five black US citizens and two Haitian nationals from Liberty City one of the poorest sections of Miami were arrested in 2006 and accused by the FBI of attempting to blow up the Sears Tower and several federal buildings. Known as the Liberty City Seven, two mistrials from 2007 – 2008 was followed by a third trial which ended on May 12, 2009. Naudimar Herrera was acquitted but the five remaining defendants Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Burson, Augustin and Rothschild Augustine all received prison sentences between from 6-14 years and lengthy supervised release orders. Yet, it was perhaps one of the most blatant cases of corrupt entrapment practices yet seen.

Announced with the usual triumphant propaganda from government sponsored media lackeys and commentators, the foiled plot was hailed as a triumph against an attack which could have been “bigger than September 11th.” As the prime mover in the alleged cell was an FBI informant posing as an Al-Qaeda go-between, the “evidence” was likely concocted by FBI informants rather than the existence of any tangible threat.

According to the press release ‘Transcript of Press Conference Announcing Florida Terrorism Indictments’ from the Department of Justice on 23 June 2006, payments for services rendered by four informants amounted to over $160,000. Deputy Director John Pistole even admitted that the so-called plot was: “… more aspirational than operational.” The accused did not have any genuine contact with Al-Qaeda, nor did they have explosives or weapons since the only source would have been through the FBI’s informant. The director assured the press that the individuals posed no danger. After the indictments two local community activists were interviewed by Democracy Now! Online news and summarised the ludicrous nature of the charges:

“a lot of show has been made about the militaristic boots that they had… [I]t turns out… the FBI bought them the boots. If you look at the indictment, the biggest piece of evidence… is that the group ,may have taken pictures of a bunch of targets in South Florida. But the guys couldn’t afford their own cameras, so the federal government bought them the cameras… The federal government rented them the cars that they needed to get downtown in order to take the pictures. In addition… the men provided the FBI informant with a list of things they needed in order to blow up these buildings, but in the list they didn’t include any explosives or any materials which could be used to make explosives. So now everyone in Liberty City is joking that the guys were going to kick down the FBI building with their new boots, because they didn’t have any devices which could have been used to explode…” [6]

As many of the informants are illegal immigrants waiting on their entry status or criminals given immunity in return for working for the FBI, there is a ready and willing supply for identifying potential terrorists and as Trevor Aaronson explains: “… in some cases even planting specific ideas for attacks.” He also poses questions that politicians, many academics and the majority of mainstream journalists have not seen fit to ask, namely: “How many of these would-be terrorists would have acted were it not for an FBI agent provocateur helping them? Is it possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” And most importantly: “Federal officials say they are protecting Americans with these operations—but from whom? Real terrorists, or dupes like Nafis, who appear unlikely to have the capacity for terrorism were it not for FBI agents providing the opportunity and means?” [7]

Occupy Wall Street© unknown

Even the Occupy Wall Street Movement has been embroiled in the same entrapment procedures. The FBI has blew its own its own trumpet all over the media and claimed it had once again foiled a terrorist plot, this time, to blow up a Cleveland bridge. Five members of Occupy Cleveland: Douglas Wright, 26, Brandon Baxter, 20, Connor Stevens, 20, Anthony Hayne, 35, and Joshua Skelly 24, were each sentenced to between 6-11 years charged with conspiracy and the use of explosive materials. Despite cooperating with plea deals given by three of the men, so-called “terrorism enhancements” were used by the presiding judge to increase sentences. Douglas, Brandon and Connor’s appeals were denied. Skelly rejected a plea bargain and chose to take it to trail. Consequently, he was found guilty on all counts and received a ten year sentence. As of early 2015, he is still waiting for his appeal.

As with so many similar “plots” the usual paid FBI informant featured heavily.  Shaquille Azir had a criminal history (leverage for bargaining) and was placed undercover within the Occupy Movement for several months. He eventually delivered the defendants to the FBI as ready-made “terrorists” all of whom had at one time been homeless or without work. Not only had the FBI provided alcohol, drugs and accommodation for the young men, through Azir, but they told the informant to create a sense of dependency within the group with various promises of assistance tailored to their individual needs. It seems Azir had his job cut out to get them interested.  According to the website:  www.cleveland4solidarity.org set up as a campaign to free the men: “They all continue to fight against the government’s attempt to brand them as terrorists and to expose the techniques of entrapment employed by the FBI and their informants.”  The case of one of many, all of which follow the same patterns. [8]

occupycleveland5L-R: Connor Stevens, Brandon Baxter, Douglas Wright, Anthony Hayne (now released) and Joshua Stafford

There are many other cases popping up in America and Europe. One of the most important was the April 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings which saw the entrapment and framing of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – a classic false flag operation designed to dupe the public and engender maximum reaction for domestic and geopolitical ends. [9]

So, how did it come to this? Like most ponerological symptoms they infect the body politik very quickly.

Stemming from the 1970’s and 80’s sting operations of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) the FBI gradually came under its jurisdiction in the face of increasing trade in illicit drugs. The terrorist sting is based on these drug raids with certain differences that make the practice highly controversial. Briefcases full of cocaine or heroin were substituted with empty ones in front of hidden surveillance cameras after which the agents would pounce on their unsuspecting criminals. This defined raids for decades and which were faithfully reproduced in Hollywood cinemas. Now, the terrorist sting generally involves faulty guns and dud bombs. Aaronson points out the fundamental flaw in terrorist stings compared to drugs raids and that which leads to a progressive corruption of the already faulty principles on which they are based:

“In drug stings, federal law enforcement officials assume that any buyer caught in a sting would have been able to buy or sell drugs elsewhere had they not fallen into the FBI trap. The numbers support this assumption. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the DEA seized 29,179 kilograms, or 64,328 pounds, of cocaine in the United States.

In terrorism stings, however, federal law enforcement officials assume that any would-be terrorists caught would have been able to acquire the means elsewhere to carry out their violent plans had they not been ensnared by the FBI. The problem with this assumption is that no data exists to support it—and in fact what data is available often suggests the opposite.

Few of the more than 150 defendants indicted and convicted this way since 9/11 had any connection to terrorists, evidence showed, and those that did have connections, however tangential, lacked the capacity to launch attacks on their own. Of the more that 150 defendants, an FBI informant not only led one of every three terrorist plots, but also provided all the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.

The informant goaded them on the whole time, encouraging the pair with lines like: ‘We will teach these bastards a good lesson.” For his work on the case, he received $100,000 from the FBI.’ ” [10]

Indeed, with an annual budget of $3 billion the FBI has both an ideological and financial incentive for keeping the war on terror mythology entrenched in the American public’s psyche. In order to find out how many of these “terrorists” would have acted without the entrapment ruse, Aaronson, with the help of a research assistant: “… built a database of more than 500 terrorism prosecutions since 9/11, looking closely and critically at every terrorism case brought into federal courts during the past decade.” Thousands of pages of court records were carefully analysed until a coherent pattern emerged. They found that: “… nearly half of all terrorism cases since 9/11 involved informants, many of them paid as much as $100,000 per assignment by the FBI.” The research team also found that: “… 49 defendants had participated in plots led by an FBI agent provocateur, and that number has continued to rise since.” What is more, as Muslim targets held particular personality types so too the informants. A typical pattern and profile of each were matched together.

The following typifies the patterns and personality profiles involved:

The Gold digger: Pattern: Target is broke and thinks he can make big money by catering to informant’s suggestions.

The Convert: Pattern: Target is a newcomer to Islam with only a rudimentary understanding of the religion; often also broke and/or homeless.

The Oath Taker: Pattern: Target swears a fictitious Al Qaeda oath made up by informant; is charged and convicted based on that oath

The Car Bomber: Pattern: Target and informant hatch plot together; FBI supplies vehicle, “explosives,” and phone to trigger the supposed bomb.

The Trainee: Pattern: FBI agent or informant offers to train target as a jihadist, most often via weapons instruction and bodybuilding.

The Subway Bomber: Pattern: With the exception of one attempt to bomb the New York City subway, all the headline-grabbing subway “plots” you’ve heard of were FBI-led nonstarters. [11]

The New York Times in 2012 reiterated the suspicion that it is highly unlikely that these young men would have had the means to execute terrorist plots “… without substantial assistance from the government.” [12] 

Just like the sexual predators in society, from occult ritual abuse to inter-generational abuse the idea promoted is that the lone paedophile and child rapist generally act alone. So too with the “lone wolf” terrorist as a useful asset to keep the cogs turning. Dupes or patsies need to found and groomed which is why the FBI uses its vast network of spies and the NSA’s surveillance to identify locate and monitor tomorrow’s disenfranchised Muslims with chips on their shoulders. Spies are embedded in every Mosque in the US are paid to profile those young men with anti-American views and ripe for radicalisation, thus suitable for sting operations. This is also occurring online across the breadth of social networks (See: Police State Amerika I: Facebook Thought Police…)

Under President Barack Obama’s National Security and Surveillance State, entrapment continues to grow, with a very wide definition as to who exactly is a terrorist. During the tail-end of the George W. Bush’s tenure the number of operations markedly decreased but since Obama’s presidency in January 2009, sting operations have not only resumed but increased in frequency. During Obama’s first term in office, the Justice Department prosecuted more than 75 targets of terrorism stings. Trevor Aaronson discovered that as an adjunct to Obama’s extrajudicial assassination teams, arrests from terrorism stings occur: “… at a rate of about one every 60 days, suggesting either that there are a lot of ineffective terrorists in the United States, or that the FBI has become effective at creating the very enemy it is hunting.”

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Global Terrorism 2013. Red hotspots are combinations of incidents, fatalities and injuries. Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the primary countries exhibiting terrorism hotspots. | Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2013). Global Terrorism Database [Data file]. Retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd

Even if we were to believe that somehow the history of terrorism is defined purely in terms of religious extremism seeking to enforce its will, we’d be barking up the wrong tree on this one too. Religious fundamentalism does not spontaneously arrive. In the vast majority of historical cases a vacuum emerges out of the chaos of economic depression, famine and most frequently from the influence of invading forces. In the last forty years British and American invasions have increased the likelihood of religious fundamentalism and the rise of terrorist groups simply through their neo-colonial ambitions. Consequently. these terrorist groups have been indirectly or directly created and further encouraged by Western powers.

It is foreign occupation which fuels terrorism not the perceived spectre of Islamism or any other extremist grouping; they are secondary results of policies which destabilise, balkanise and create collective trauma. These conclusions have been stated by researchers across the political divide for some years but only recently has it been shown beyond any doubt, that engaging in drone strikes and so-called interventionist polices in the Middle East weakens national security and increases terrorism, without exception. At higher levels of Pathocracy this is fully understood and required while at the lower levels of their followers’ greed and ignorance is enough to maintain these destructive dynamics. Factor in geopolitical plans stretching back many decades to claim the Middle East for ideological aims, to exploit resources such as natural gas, oil and minerals and you have all the reasons you need for the continuance of civilian atrocities, year after year.

Taking into account the presence of intelligence operatives and informants responsible for encouraging suicide attacks and those which occur “spontaneously”, extensive research published by the University of Chicago prove that over 95 percent of all attacks are in response to foreign occupation. [13]  The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) the Global Terrorism Database hosted at the University of Maryland has precise statistical data which supports the University of Chicago’s own findings. It is the most comprehensive open source terrorism database available to journalists and civilians alike. The results are a clear indictment of US and NATO foreign policy, all of which show a massive increase in terrorism since the Global War on Terror began 14 years ago. These charts below show the number of terrorist attacks recorded in the following countries:

alqaedaincidentsovertime_iraqIraq

terrorism_in_Afghanistan_since_2004Afghanistan

terrorism_in_the_Middle-EastMiddle East

terrorism_in_SouthAsiaAsia

su_saharanAfrica_terrorismovertimeAfrica

terrorism_worldwideSharp rise in Global terrorism since 2004

Notice the sharp peak in each region. For the Middle East and predominantly Iraq, so-called terrorism shot up during 2002-2003, the year of the Invasion by US and coalition forces. Afghanistan saw a sharp ascent from 2001 and another rapid incline in 2010 following the large-scale increases in military operations against the Taliban by the Afghan and US coalition forces. Obama sent a further 30,000 troops in that year. Asia and Africa in 2004 both saw massive geo-strategic grab for resources by US-NATO under cover of humanitarian pretexts and false flag events. United States Africa Command, (U.S. AFRICOM) was operational by 2007 and established as cover for strategic control of the Continent. It is in this year we see a huge spike lasting until 2013. This has obviously excluded the horror of ISIL – the latest creation of Western Intelligence black operations. Judging by the events of 2014 we can only summise that we will see a huge corresponding spike when the new data is in.

All the charts show a parallel increase in terrorism and / or insurgency. Have a look at the following chart which illustrates just how false flag terrorism and grassroots insurgency follows the US and NATO forces around and directly related to power plays for their resources. Cause and effect?

terrorism_iraq_afgh_1974_2013

Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2013). Global Terrorism Database [Data file]. Retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd

alqaeda_incidentsovertimeGlobal Al-Qaeda attacks since 1990s – 2012

isis attacks2007_2013ISIS/ISIL attacks in Iraq 2006 -2012

alqaedaincidentsovertime_iraqAl-Qaeda attacks in Iraq from September 2001-2013

privatecitizensAttacks on Private Citizens & Property  (Most attacks in Pakistan and Iraq)

In these set of charts we can see a similar trajectory. As Al-Qaeda has outlived its usefulness in the region, covert funding by Western governments’ military intelligence and private outsourcing were stepped up for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL) taking over the mantle of the Global Terror demon. Just as Al-Qaeda begins to wane, ISIL begins its rapid ascent with billions of dollars seemingly arriving from nowhere in 2006, to reach a peak in 2009 with the subsequent tales of horror and atrocity, all of which is entirely authentic, though not the methods of media propagation. This is designed to ramp up the emotional response which military powers can use to ride their imperial desires. The sharp dip in incidents was merely a re-fuelling prior to another sharp increase in terror across the Middle East and Africa in 2014-2015. Through all this, carefully designed civilian attacks and the loss of property has suffered an exponential rise for several decades. Once again, this took off in 2004 as the West and its banks launched their quest for perpetual war.The Global population bears the brunt of these crimes. | Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2013). Global Terrorism Database [Data file]. Retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd


Now that Al-Qaeda, as America’s primary outsourced terror collective has been transferred to ISIL it seems the war hawks at the Council on Foreign Relations want to let bygones be bygones and make the terrorist organisation a firm friend so that things aren’t too complicated for us all. Barek Mendelsohn writing in CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs that due understanding should be exercised since Al-Qaeda is after all the “enemy of our enemy” and that:

“… the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing al Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS … [America’s] interests would be better served by keeping the terrorist organization afloat and Zawahiri alive.” [14]

The irony is so pathological you just couldn’t make it up.

Foreign occupation is the main cause of terrorism. It is expedient for invading powers to keep populations back home locked in fear and seeking revenge while the youth of both domestic and foreign populations become open to radicalisation, similarly encouraged by entrapment plots by the FBI and world intelligence agencies. Regimes with suitably strategic dividends are destabilised and plunged into civil war so that resources can be extracted. Selling these invasions under humanitarian interventions or seeking retribution for a perceived atrocity against “democracy” are the usual pretexts.

This is the state of the world we live in. It is a direct result of the Grand-Daddy of false-flag attacks which took place on September 11th, 2001 and which re-ordered the world according to pathocratic principles of paranoia, greed, separation and asymmetric warfare. Thanks to the Israel and its Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden administrations, the constitution and Bill of Rights have been shredded, where inverted totalitarianism is becoming normalised.

The next post will see, in graphic detail, how the United States of America is sliding into a full-blown police state.

 


Notes

[1]Terror Factory, The: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism By Trevor Aaronson, IG Publishing (2015 edition)| ISBN-10: 1935439960.
[2] ‘Inside the Terror Factory’ By Trevor Aaronson, January 11, 2013, Mother Jones| http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/terror-factory-fbi-trevor-aaronson-book
[3] ‘Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI ‘entrapment’ tactics’ By Paul Harris, The Guardian, December 12, 20013. | http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/12/newburgh-four-fbi-entrapment-terror
[4] ‘It’s the Wrong Time to be a Muslim in America – The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five’ by Stephen Lendman, Counterpunch, December 31 2008.
[5]’Can Authorities Cut Off Utilities And Pose As Repairmen To Search A Home?’ October 29, 2014. NPR News. http://www.npr.org/
[6]‘Aspirational Rather than Operational’ – 7 Arrested in Miami Terror Plot. Democracy Now! 2007.
[7]op.cit. Aaronson.
[8]’Did the FBI Use Occupy Cleveland Case to Equate Activism with Terrorism?’ By Kris Hermes, Alternet, September 12, 2012.]
[9]The event demands a book in itself and due to brevity, it will not be covered in this present series. Suffice to say, if you wish follow up and research this subject yourself the following books and articles are recommended: Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False Flag Terror Attacks by Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley; ‘False flag theater: Boston bombing involves clearly staged carnage’ By Shelia Casey, May 8, 2013| ‘Boston Bombings ‘set-up’: Mother of patsies says sons groomed by FBI ‘Russia Today, 20 Apr 2013. | “False-flag” meme goes mainstream with Boston Marathon bombing, Kevin Barrett, Veteran’s Today/Press TV, 17 Apr 2013 | ‘Boston Bombings: The most obvious staged event since 9/11’, The Caterpillar Flys, 29 Apr 2013. | ‘Were The Boston Marathon Bombers ‘Mind Controlled’?’ By Joe Quinn, Sott.net, 11 Jan 2014.
[10] p.32; Aaronson; The Terror Factory.
[11] ‘The Best Terrorists Money Can Buy’ – Broke-ass losers. Big talkers. Ninja wannabes. How dangerous are the FBI’s sting targets?’ By Trevor Aaronson, Mother Jones, September/October 2011 Issue.
[12] ‘Man Is Charged With Plotting to Bomb Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan’ By MOSI SECRET and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUMOCT.The New York Times 2012. October 17, 2012.
[13]Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (2010) by Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman, Chicago University press.
[14] ‘Accepting Al Qaeda’ The Enemy of the United States’ Enemy’ By Barak Mendelsohn, Foreign Affairs, March 9, 2015.

World State Policies X: MONSANTO and Seeding the Future

“The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded [with GMOs] that there’s nothing you can do about it. You just sort of surrender”

– Don Westfall, biotech industry consultant and vice-president of Promar International, in the Toronto Star, January 9 2001.


monsanto11

                       VISTOENLAWEB.ORG

With its astonishingly aggressive lobbying and ruthless application of gene technology, the Monsanto Corporation lies at the top of the GMO pile. if ever there was a psychopath in corporate form, Monsanto fits the bill. As the largest producer of glyphosate herbicides, Monsanto’s most popular brand, “Roundup” has proved to be a health hazard for humans and animals and just about any sentient being unfortunate enough to come into contact with its mass spraying. The Environmental Protection Agency has officially stated that Monsanto is a “potentially responsible party” for 56 contaminated sites in the United States.

Not content with routinely damaging the health of its employees or residents living nearby, the company was involved in yet another controversy when introduced recombinant Bovine somatotropin (rBST), a synthetic hormone injected into cows to increase milk production. Unfortunately for Monsanto there were substantial side effects for humans, including the reduction of natural defences against cancer. [1]Cows became seriously ill with various diseases most notably mastitis, an infection of the udder which contaminates milk with pus. It was found that the unnatural increase in milk production at the expense of the cow’s health was ultimately passed on to the consumer along with the high level of antibiotics inflicted on the cows in order to combat the original side-effects. Before selling the operation, it did not stop the company from conducting a large-scale lobbying campaign to prevent labelling of rBST milk which was largely successful.

Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications summed up the regulatory ethos in 1998: “Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA’s job.” And when the Food and Drug Administration has been holding hands with Monsanto throughout its career of maximizing profits over people, this statement amounts to nothing more than callous irresponsibility. [2]

With its legendary history of environmental pollution and such heart-warming products as defoliate Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, the manufacturing of DDT and widespread innovation in plastics and subsequent spread of PCBs, Monsanto feels right at home when virgin forests need clearing and indigenous peoples require to be forcibly removed if the bribes prove ineffectual. The soya bean crops can and will be planted, come what may. The dominant types of GM foods as transgenic plant products include corn, canola, rice, and cotton seed oil, all of which Monsanto produces, distributes and directs according to a military-evangelical blend of national and international lobbying. Argentina was an early target of the GMO junta and represents a classic case-study of geo-political strategy working in unison with government and agribusiness’ interests. The soya bean has radically changed socio-economic and environment of the country. The displacement of other forms of often natural crop cultivation, pasture-based cattle ranching and the destruction of virgin forests and grasslands continues apace, with China and Europe benefitting from its substantial exports.

Economically, the divide between the rich and poor always becomes more pronounced when mass farming is introduced. Argentina has seen hundreds of thousands of workers forced off the land and a rise in poverty and malnutrition since the imposition and subsequent dependency on the soya bean. According to official statistics: “20.6 percent of Argentina’s 38 million people are poor. But in the North Eastern region, where soy is king, 37 percent are below the poverty line, and 13.6 percent live in absolute poverty, unable to feed themselves properly.” [3]

individual_monsanto_federal_position-largeThe revolving door of individuals working for Monsanto and Federal government (click on the image to enlarge) Source: http://occupy-monsanto.com/

Back in the mid-1970s Kissinger, as a Rockefeller provocateur, had considerable experience in fermenting dissent in other countries. Chile had been a textbook case of black operations let loose against a democratically elected leader and replaced with General Pinochet’s brand of fascism. According to declassified US State Department documents released years after the event, the same formula was envisaged for Argentina in a 1976 meeting between Argentine Foreign Minister, Admiral Cesar Guzzetti; Rockefeller’s political go-between vice-president Nelson Rockefeller and Kissinger as Secretary of State. Author F. William Engdahl notes: “Rockefeller even suggested specific key individuals in Argentina to be targeted for elimination. At least 15,000 intellectuals, labor leaders and opposition figures disappeared in the so-called ‘dirty war.’ ” [4]

Argentina began its trade in slavery and an increase in minority wealth and social divisions. With the help of foreign investment and support from Monsanto and the big six grain conglomerates such as Cargill, wealthy landowners worked to erode traditional workers’ rights and grab as much extra land as they could. Upwards of 200, 000 rural famers and their families have been displaced from generationally owned land, inevitably finding themselves destitute or living hand to mouth on the outskirts of cities or in slum areas. Prior to Wall St. and their banking families descending on Argentina, it enjoyed one of the highest living standards in Latin America. In fact, Soy is now the main export of the nation, amounting to one-third of the country’s total exports. [5]

Both in Latin America and the USA, Monsanto is now able to hold farmers to ransom by forcing them to sign binding contracts where they must agree not to re-use saved seeds. They must also pay new royalties to Monsanto every year. The fact that farmers have been working the land for thousands of years with their own seeds provided by Nature, free of charge is a minor quibble for the corporation and its shareholders. Despite most of the world’s farmers being too poor to afford the company’s GMO license and various other seed fees, most fall under Monsanto’s targeted multi-million marketing and live to bitterly regret it. Such a system is another manifestation of the neo-feudalism so favoured amongst the Establishment. Seeds have become an intellectual property and by extension, the genetic source of Nature as patent.

With the advent of soya bean monoculture and mass farming techniques comes the intensive use of agrichemical herbicides and pesticide, and preferably for Monsanto, their favourite and highly toxic “Round up.” Ironically, parallel to much lower yields with Roundup crops compared to traditionally grown soya, health issues for rural communities, farmers and animals soared as a result of constant exposure to the spraying crops increased. They found their own natural food cultivation destroyed by the chemicals not having the built-in gene resistance found in the large Monsanto designed soya bean crops.

In 2002, it was found by the UK’s Cropscience company that chicken fed glucosinate-tolerant GM maize Chardon LL were twice as likely to die prematurely than chickens in the control group. And from the same year up to 2005, four Italian universities published articles revealing adverse effects from GM soya which targeted pancreatic, hepatic (liver) and testicular cells in young mice. [6]

In 2005 and 2006, the Russian Academy of Sciences conducted an experiment on female rats fed with glyphosate-tolerant GM soya and reported that the female rats produced an excessive number of stunted pups, over 50 percent of them dying within three weeks and the other half, sterile. Accusations of faulty data could not be levelled at the experiment as it was repeated many times with the same result. [7]

Many more studies have not only shown the toxic effects on plants and animals but the economic and environmental unsustainability of herbicide and pesticide use. As the top-soil becomes essentially burned away, more and more agrichemicals are needed to maintain a false fertility derived from a dying soil and zombie crops saturated with chemicals. This inevitably leeches into the animal and human food chain adding to the concern of health issues and the already questionable nature of GMOs themselves. Meanwhile, great profits continue to accrue for the CEOs and their shareholders safely tucked away behind their boardroom desks, buffered from the carnage of the ecological and socio-economic disaster that claims the most vulnerable, a dynamic which has continued to characterise large-scale GMO cultivation.

As F. William Engdahl observes, the consequences for the environment and human health remain worrying:

“By 2006, together with the United States, where GMO Monsanto soybeans dominated, Argentina and Brazil accounted for more than 81 percent of world soybean production, thereby ensuring that practically every animal in the world fed soymeal was eating genetically engineered soybeans. Similarly, this would imply that every McDonald’s hamburger mixed with soymeal would be genetically engineered, and most processed foods, whether they realized or not.” [8]

With the help of WTO sanctions, strong-arm tactics of companies like Monsanto and the background support of a Washington Government firmly on board, the ambitious objective of controlling the world’s food supply by seeding every country with GM crops is well underway. In 2002, aid agencies were instructed by the US State Department to take their orders from the government agency USAID and to:

“… immediately report to them any opposition in a recipient country, to GMO food imports. They were told to collect documentation to determine if the anti-GMO attitude of the local government was ‘trade or politically motivated’ If they determined it was trade motivated, the US Government had recourse to the WTO or to the threat of WTO sanctions against the aid recipient country, usually an effective warning against poor countries.” Even emergency famine relief aid came in the form of: “… genetically modified US surplus commodities, a practice condemned by international aid organizations, as it destroyed a country’s local agricultural economy in the process of opening new markets for Monsanto and friends.”

In the same vein, the cosy relationship between agri-business, GMO firms and the US State Department and its agencies is obvious when food aid organisations ship only grain that has been provided by USAID – and that meant only genetically modified US grain. [9]

In the late 1980s and 1990s Monsanto’s gene technology produced a breakthrough which would enforce the rights of the company’s gene patents and fees. It was a chilling development in biotechnology fittingly named “Terminator” where the seeds would be genetically modified to “terminate” themselves after just one harvest season. A toxin was released before the seed ripened which caused the plant embryo to die. This meant that the thousand year old tradition of saving of seeds for the next harvest would become illegal under agribusiness.

The Terminator seeds or patented ‘suicide’ seeds, officially termed GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies) hark back to a project more than twenty years old as part of the early experiments in genetic engineering. By 1998 the US Patent Office had granted joint ownership to US Dept. of Agriculture and the Delta & Pine Land Company for ‘Control of Plant Gene Expression’ Patent No. 5,723,765. [10]

In the official D&PL SEC filing it states:

“The patent broadly covers all species of plant and seed, both transgenic (GMO-ed) and conventional, for a system designed to allow control of progeny seed viability without harming the crop’. […] ‘One application of the technology could be to control unauthorized planting of seed of proprietary varieties … by making such a practice non-economic since non-authorized saved seed will not germinate, and, therefore, would be useless for planting.” With almost salacious anticipation: “the prospect of opening significant worldwide seed markets to the sale of transgenic technology in varietal crops in which crop seed currently is saved and used in subsequent seasons as seed.” [11]

The company is clearly saying that dis-empowering farmers is economically viable by preventing any escape from the GM juggernaut once it has duped its passengers into hitching a ride. It is a disturbing declaration of intent and planning which has been pressing ahead since the first GM trials back in 1982.

fluorescentTobaccoA second generation of Terminator technology was developed at the end of the 1990s called T-GURT seeds, or Trait Genetic Use Restriction Technologies. Otherwise known as the ‘Traitor’ process the plant’s fertility and its genetic characteristics can be controlled by the introduction or restriction of a chemical inducer, rather like a light switch which could be turned on or off depending on what you wanted the plant to do. It was cheaper and less complicated to produce than Terminator seeds. Tied to the agrichemicals, it was potentially a big bonanza with total control over what the farmer could and couldn’t do, charging him every step of the way. Of course, the gene resistance to certain pests would be provided by Monsanto or Syngenta who held the patent rights. You wanted your GM crops to flourish then you had to pay. If farmers tried to buy “illegal seeds” from other sources then the chemical compound needed to turn on the resistance gene would be missing. As with any commercialisation and consolidation process, more farmers in the developing world needed to be “persuaded” to climb aboard and the big companies were not afraid of using the tactics of bribery, coercion, and illegal smuggling.

The health issues still loom large in Monsanto’s continuing fortunes. For instance, in 2003, the company’s Bt maize hybrid left five Pilipino villagers dead and many seriously ill. They tested positive for antibodies to the Bt protein. [12]  The Law of Unintended consequences frequently arrives in the absence of humility. As many experts have warned, the rise of superbugs and their ability to adapt in response to highly synthetic crops and their chemicals was inevitable. A research paper published in the latest issue of the journal GM Crops & Food [13]detailed the problems from the Western corn rootworms which have been busily munching their way through genetically modified maize. A 2010 sample of the rootworm population had “… an eleven-fold survival rate on the genetically modified corn compared to a control population.” Strong resistance to GM corn is becoming the norm. As farmers become dependent on GM crops the outlook is bleak for both agriculture and consumers. Adaptation, resistance and increasing recovery rates amongst the burgeoning population of super-bugs means ultimately the poor and vulnerable and the burgeoning global middle-class will foot the bill, not just for corn which has become a vitally important derivative product, but for a range of foodstuffs and consumables in general.

The drop in GM crop yields will continue just as many farmers continue to plant, while receiving very little in return and where rising costs outweigh the perceived benefits. As food prices steadily rise in response to yet another manipulated economic downturn, Elite families like the Rockefellers are not remotely concerned. After all, they sell organic food and non-GMO food in their various cafeterias and conference venues, [14]so why should they be concerned about their agri-engineering of the world’s populations if it gives them a good return on their money and reduces the population growth that much more?

This hypocrisy gives the global population two forced choices: eat poisoned GM foods or die of starvation.

The Obama Administration carried on the tradition of staying snug and warm in the corporate pocket as the above diagram illustrates. To that end, bought-and-paid-for Congress happily allowed their puppet president to sign into law the Agriculture Appropriations Bill 2013. This effectively gave immunity from prosecution for agri-business, which means MONSANTO has a free reign to do as it pleases.

Rows of a Carrot Field

As we have seen so far in this series,  the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, the World Bank and the UN Development Program and their close working relationship with the WHO banded together to introduce covert sterilisation programs using vaccinations. Lest we think that the merging of birth control and eugenics is just paranoid ramblings of researchers with too much time on their hands, keep in mind the sources behind the genetic engineering and biotechnology are not necessarily those who work within these fields. It then becomes easier to determine which direction humanity is being led.

Transgenic plants have already taken on frog and fish genes but in the context of birth control the Rockefeller passion for a depopulated world, the geneticists have been busy bees. Take Epicyte in San Diego for example, which held a press conference in 2001 to make an announcement about its work stating:

“Epicyte reported that they had successfully created the ultimate GMO crop-contraceptive corn. They had taken antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility, isolated the genes that regulated the manufacture of those infertility antibodies, and, using genetic engineering techniques, had inserted the genes into ordinary corn seeds used to produce corn plants.” [15]

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is another media darling that has rode the wave of philanthropy and praise while concealing its real agenda. While anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (rather than Climate change) is fast being seen for what it truly is: a politically driven power-grab, this apparently escaped the notice of the billionaire in his TED talk of 2010 where he followed the Al Gore (Goldman Sacs) propaganda of CO2 emissions as the global culprit for ensuing global catastrophe. Eager to show his depopulation credentials by highlighting dire projections of a global population at 9 billion by 2050, he made this curious comment early on in the talk: “… if we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps about 10 to 15 percent.” It is here we see that Bill has enthusiastically bought into the Elite nonsense and has put his money where his misinformed mouth is by pledging $10 billion for vaccines in order: “… to fight disease among the “world’s needy children.” [16] That is an extraordinarily large sum by anyone’s standards and truly admirable if it is founded on real science and long-term beneficial effects.

Unfortunately, neither of those possibilities is likely to be true.

billgates

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is famous for his relentless drive and constant activity. He is the CEO of the Microsoft Corporation representing one of the most all-encompassing monopolies on earth. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have used an almost inconceivable amount of dosh dispensed to needy causes around the world. It also helps that multibillionaire Warren Buffet added to the already blistering endowment total of $34.6 billion with a gift of a further $30 billion dollars’ worth of shares in one of his businesses which no doubt made Bill & Belinda supremely happy.

Apart from Gates’ chosen ignorance and/or indifference regarding the toxic health effects and long-time propaganda relating to GM foods and their use and distribution, vaccines are still Gate’s number one passion. His foundation decided to commission Japanese scientists to make another whacky vision a reality by engineering vaccines into mosquitoes that will deliver the inoculations through their bite. Bill & Melinda had stalwart support and involvement from the World Health Organisation, The PEW Charitable Trusts, and government agencies in the United States, England and Malaysia. They secured the development and promotion of the GM mosquitoes under the pretext of eradicating Dengue fever which was virtually non-existent until it suddenly popped up in Florida just after the genetically-modified vaccine carrying mosquitos was released. [17]In truth, GM mosquitos were released into the environment in the Cayman Islands in 2009 but the CIA sponsored experiments in bio warfare had been using mosquitoes in Florida for several decades so it was no surprise to find Dengue fever conveniently appearing to support Bill and Melinda’s quest for mass vaccination and the depopulation they so earnestly seek.[18]

Where Rockefeller’s and Gates’ visions really fuse is through the little known project that has been quietly carrying out its operations in the remote location of Svalbard, Spitsbergen, on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean.

It was claimed by Norway without much fuss in 1925 because no one really wanted it. Nonetheless, on this barren outcrop of rock inside the mountain lies the “doomsday seed bank” or more officially known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault where a motley crew of Monsanto, the Syngenta and Rockefeller foundations and Bill Gates have been investing millions; squirreling away different varieties of seeds from all over the world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. [19] They have the capacity to store more than 3 million seeds tucked safely away from whatever catastrophe they envisage befalling the Earth’s environment. As F. William Engdahl not unreasonably, asks: “What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?” [20]

Up until 1998, Margaret Catley-Carlson was working for John D. Rockefeller’s Population Council (the eugenics inspired front for “family planning and sterilisation) and now chairs the Rome-based Global Crops Diversity Trust (GCDT) founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), a branch of the CGIAR. Other GCDT members read like an Elite encyclopaedia of Establishment insiders from the weapons industry to Hollywood, biotech companies to bankers, all of whom share the same entropic perception of reality that hasn’t changed for two hundred years. With such rampant colonisation of the developing world; ecologically disastrous consequences from invasive technology like Terminator and Traitor; the death of traditional farming practices and the fake harvest gains they engender, the construction of the Doomsday Seed Vault surely raises urgent questions as to its true nature. It represents a significant biotechnology resource in combination with other seed banks around the world, all of which are owned and run by the same six agribusiness partnerships and their affiliated think-tanks and top-tier organisations. The Svalbard seed vault has the capacity to house over 4.5 million seeds, but to what end?

frohvelv_svalbard_Svalbard Global Seed Vault (left) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation HQ (right)

When you have the likes of Bill Gates, Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta and the Rockefellers getting together for a joint venture you can be sure that it is most certainly not for altruistic reasons but to make a big, fat profit. However, they are not just in it for the money. On the one hand, the “Green Revolution” and the monoculture expansion continue to make inroads into Africa while on the other, they preserve seed diversity in a “doomsday vault.”

Is it not chilling that the guardians of this seed diversity are corporations and foundations pushing for a biotechnological free-for-all with a history of rapacious corporate predation and the funding of social control and eugenics?

***

The nature of psychopaths in power demands the introduction of long-term ideas that facilitate the reduction and dilution of the global population. Social dominators and authoritarian personalities are attracted to romantic notions of a World State and a neo-feudalism in order to maintain Elite bloodlines. Is it possible that eugenic beliefs of Anglo-Saxon superiority and various military-corporate-occult machinations are a cover for the mass culling and manipulation of “normal people” in favour of psychopathic dominance? This obsession with genetically altering nature has a variety of disturbing off-shoots in this context.

If we cast our eye back to the discussion of Israeli ethnic specific weaponry, the advances in genetic bio-warfare and interest in eugenics and place this in context of population reduction, is it really so far-fetched to expect that genetically modified crops may serve a more sinister purpose at the very top of this agricultural pyramid? A book called BattleField of the Future has a chapter written by Lt. Col. Robert P. Kadlec, USAF entitled: “Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare.” Kadlec refers to cost effective and economically viable nature of biological weapons and warfare (BW) stating: “Not only is BW more affordable, but militarily significant quantities of BW agents (kilograms) in legitimate biological laboratories make BW production easy to accomplish and conceal. Any nation with a moderately sophisticated pharmaceutical industry can do so.” He then remarks on GMO-based biological weapons of mass destruction, the use of which: “… under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. In this context, biological weapons offer greater possibilities for use than do nuclear weapons.” [21] Indeed, MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the “… bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population,” adding: ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ [22]

If we recall the Rockefeller history and Kissinger’s “Food as a weapon” politics and the US military fetish for bio-warfare then we must also entertain the probability that genetic engineering serves a variety of purposes all of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the betterment of humankind. If the spectre of bio-warfare and the weaponisation of food are part of the “invisible hand” of Pathocratic rule then we can expect a future planted with the same dark seeds.

There may be a further reason why the Elite are falling over themselves to eradicate a large quota of the population, build their bunkers and conserve various seed species. Do they have the inside knowledge that “something wicked this way comes”? The rise in cases of Ebola and various strains of Bubonic plague and the possibility of adaptive and muting strains may well indicate a strange confluence of natural occurrences and synthetic manipulation connected with the above bio-warfare. Further, if you are aware that the Earth endures terrain changes and cyclic catastrophes throughout its history with a similar cyclic manifestation of disease carried by cosmic harbingers such as comets and meteors, knowledge of such a confluence may be known by many at certain privileged levels. They may be at least partially aware of myth and science that tells us that we are way over due for another periodic of environmental and cosmological upheaval. Specific preparations would ensue, especially if you seek to retain control and protect your place at the top of the pyramid after the dust and ashes have settled.

Whatever the truth, it seems we won’t have too long to wait before we all find out.

In the next series of posts we will look into how the Establishment has co-opted environmentalism with special attention to the idea of eco-fascism and its traditional alignment to elite ideology.

——————

For news, resources and activism please visit:  monsantowatch.org

 


Notes

[1] Hankinson SE, Willett WC, Colditz GA, Hunter DJ, Michaud DS, Deroo B, Rosner B, Speizer FE, Pollak M (May 1998). “Circulating concentrations of insulin-like growth factor-I and risk of breast cancer”. Lancet 351 (9113): 1393–6. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)10384-1. PMID 9593409. / Pollak M (June 2000). “Insulin-like growth factor physiology and cancer risk”. Eur. J. Cancer 36 (10): 1224–8. DOI:10.1016/S0959-8049(00)00102-7. PMID 10882860. / Sandhu MS, Dunger DB, Giovannucci EL (July 2002). “Insulin, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), IGF binding proteins, their biologic interactions, and colorectal cancer”. J. Natl. Cancer Inst. 94 (13): 972–80. DOI:10.1093/jnci/94.13.972. PMID 12096082.
[2] ‘Playing God in the Garden’. The New York Times by Michael Pollan October 25, 1998 The New York Times Magazine. p. Section 6; Page 44.
[3] ‘Soy – High Profits Now, Hell to Pay Later’ By Marcela Valente , Jul 29 , 2008 (IPS)
[4] op. cit. Engdahl (p.178)
[5] Javier Souza Casadinho, “Expansión de la soja en el Cono sur” (“Expansion of Soy in the Southern Cone”), Centro de estudios sobre tecnologías apropiadas de la Argentina Red de Acción en plaguicidas de América Latina (Center for the Study of Appropriate Technologies of Argentina, Pesticide Action Network Latin America) (Source Watch)
[6] GM Crops the Health Effects, The Soil Association 2007 | http://www.soilassociation.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=SqDvBO1pyEUpercent3D&tabid=390
[7] ‘Weaponized Food and Medicine is Bad for Your Health’ by Paul Fassa, Natural News, August 25, 2009 | http://www.naturalnews.com/
[8] op. cit. Engdahl (p.190)
[9] op. cit. Engdahl (pp.267-268)
[10] United States Patent 5,723,765 Oliver, et al. March 3, 1998: Oliver; Melvin John (Lubbock, TX), Quisenberry; Jerry Edwin (Idalou, TX), Trolinder; Norma Lee Glover (Quanah, TX), Keim; Don Lee (Leland, MS) Assignee: Delta and Pine Land Co. (Scott, MS) The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of (Washington, DC) Appl. No.: 08/477,559. http://patft.uspto.gov/
[11] op. cit. Fassa.
[12] Ibid
[13] ‘Western corn rootworm and Bt maize: Challenges of pest resistance in the field’ Volume 3, Issue 3 July/August/September 2012. Authors: Aaron J. Gassmann, Jennifer L. Petzold-Maxwell, Ryan S. Keweshan and Mike W. Dunbar. http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/gmcr.20744
[14] ‘Gates and Rockefeller Cafeterias Reject Monsanto GE Foods 01 March 2012. | http://www.templestreamxangablog.com
[15] op. cit. Engdahal (p.270)
[16] ‘Gates’ Vaccine Boost’ UPI, Jan. 29, 2010.
[17] PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases – http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0001502
[18] ‘Viruses and the GM Insect “Flying Vaccine” Solution’ by Brandon Turbeville, Activist Post December 13, 2010
[19] ‘‘Doomsday Seed Vault’ in the Arctic – Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t’ By F. William Engdahl Global Research, December 4, 2007.
[20] Ibid.
[21 Battlefield of the Future: 21st Century Warfare Issues Editors: Barry R. Schneider, Lawrence E. Grinter Revised Edition 1998. PDF http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/ Chapter 10 Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare, Lt Col Robert P. Kadlec, MD, USAF (p.251).
[22] op. cit. Engdahl (Global Research)

Save

The Z Factor XV: Inglorious Human Rights

“Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized,…”

– UNICEF, Children in Israeli Military Detention: Observations and Recommendations (2013).


  unicef

Israeli West Bank Barrier otherwise known as “The Wall”| Photo from the cover of UNICEF’s 2013 report Children in Israeli Military Detention: Observations and Recommendations (2013).


Jewish cultivation of victimhood and the mythologising of certain events in history have been used to affect a form of thought control that confers a mighty buffer to criticism. This serves to prop up a lasting deference and preferential treatment at both the socio-cultural and political level. But what of vengeance? Does the atrocious human rights record by Israelis have anything to do with Amalekian revenge and their association with Arabs as the New Nazis in waiting, should they be given power and equal rights?

Inglorius Barsterds, a 2009 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino goes some way in explaining the perceptions of some of in the global Jewish community regarding the ideas of revenge and victimisation. Producer Lawrence Bender, after reading the first draft of the film script exclaimed: “… as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, … because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” The film’s executive producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, also reportedly “… enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.” [1]

I  bet they did.

The film is set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II and follows the exploits of a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as ‘The Basterds’ as they go about inflicting various forms of Tarantino-esque revenge upon the Third Reich while going under cover to assassinate high-ranking Nazi officials. It is a nicely crafted film, musically rich, inventive, and visually powerful; chock full of comic-book humour and film culture references. As we’ve come to expect from Tarantino, it is also gratuitously violent and patently immoral.

Represented as cathartic “kosher porn” according to one of the Jewish actors who had a leading role, the film quite literally exorcised the Jewish archetypes of passivity and victimhood into an unbridled blood lust of revenge. While Tarantino revels in his own pornographic love of violence in a war-time setting, it perversely delves into some very dark arenas of Jewish lore with somewhat disturbing results. In attempting to come up triumphant by dramatically reversing Jewish guilt, passivity and victimhood, it merely creates their nemeses.  Nevertheless, Jewish influence in the entertainment industry and our Official Culture being as it is, we can’t be too surprise that it was deemed a resounding success by most critics and audiences.

However, a few were not convinced including author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn who found the portrayal of Jewish-American soldiers mimicking German atrocities done to European Jews disturbing and went to the heart of the matter  He when he stated: “ … Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by—well, by turning Jews into Nazis.” [2] The Jewish press, summed up Tarantino’s style of film making as lacking any kind of depth or subtle understanding and when faced with Nazis and Jewish retribution it was inevitable that audiences would be served with an: “… alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.” [3] To which Tarantino would probably say, is exactly the point.

It’s only “entertainment” right?

inglourious_basterds_poster1-horz

Promotional Posters for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009)

The fact that the film not only went down a storm in Israel only serves to reinforce the idea that most Israelis and Jewish-Americans seem to be happy with the fact that Jews exacting revenge by using the same methods of destruction is without any moral ambiguity: “The ‘chapters’ of the movie showing Nazi-scalping, baseball bat-wielding Jews instilling fear into the hearts of the German army (and Hitler), as well as the bloodbath finale where Nazi elite are all burned alive, elicited cheers and hearty rounds of applause, while the man himself won a standing ovation as the end credits rolled.” [4]Such gleeful bloodletting and burning alive of Nazis is comfortably explained away by the right of victimhood while simultaneously fuelling Nazi-like behaviour that is not only deemed just and appropriate, but natural.  It was indeed a “wet dream” for Jewish movie moguls trumped only by Tarantino’s blatant and cynical pandering to the same, making sure he’ll always be welcome in Hollywood for a long time to come.

***

What makes this such an interesting mirror for the Israeli-Arab conflict is the current and appalling human rights abuse we see inflicted on Palestinians. It makes this “Jewish Fantasy” a far more disturbing and topical piece of propaganda than it first appears.

46811_157072180975064_155832537765695_550634_7658175_n

So, let’s have a look at some cold hard reality:

  • From September 29, 2000 to the present (March 2012) 125 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,471 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis [5]
  • 1,092 Israelis and at least 6,537 Palestinians have been killed; [6]
  • 9,226 Israelis and 45,041 Palestinians have been injured; [7]
  • 0 Israelis are being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 5,300 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel; [8]
  • no Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 24,813 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since 1967. [9]
  • The Israeli unemployment rate is 6.4 per cent, while the Palestinian unemployment in the West Bank is 16.5 per cent and 40 per cent in Gaza; [10]
  • Israel currently has 236 Jewish-only settlements and ‘outposts’ built on confiscated Palestinian land. [11]

Persistent violations of the Geneva Convention underlie these statistics with the Israeli military as the primary source for these atrocities. moreover, the brunt of these  attacks have been borne by Palestinian children. It is not hard to see that much of these human rights violations and deaths are sourced from beliefs that see Palestinians as not only unwelcome but less than human, a belief that has been instilled into socio-political consciousness of Israel for a very long time.

In 1973 Rabbi A. Avidan gave some religious “inspiration” for Israeli soldiers and subsequently published by the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army. Although no other Rabbi or military personnel criticised the memo it was eventually taken out of circulation presumably due to conflict in the chains of command. It stated: “When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that these civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah [Jewish religious law] they may and even should be killed … In a war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good.” [12]

This “guidance” for the military feeds the parallels with Nazism and ethnic cleansing in general and brings the history of Biblical Jewish conquest into focus but also explains some of the brutality currently experienced by Palestinians, most notably children. A standard mantra for abrogating responsibility and to cover a probable shoot-to-kill policy is the following statement when the Israeli military killed yet another 3 year-old girl in her home: “A spokesman for the Israeli military justified the girl’s killing, saying that soldiers thought that Palestinian resistance fighters were somewhere in the neighborhood.” [13] This has remarkable mileage when you’d like to see the demise of a population. So, let’s review just a few of the many indiscriminate attacks against Palestinians under occupation.

In 2002, Palestinian Mohammad Abu Kweik, 8, his two sisters, Bara, 14, Aziza, 16, and their mother Bushra Kweik, 38, were killed when their Mitsubishi pick-up truck they were travelling in was bombed by Israeli forces in the West Bank Palestinian ghetto of Ramallah, she had picked them up from school. A car following the family was also hit killing two Palestinian children aged 4 and 16. Apparently, they were attempting to assassinate a man who was not in either vehicle. [14]

In July of the same year 11-year-old Khalil Ibrahim, was shot in the head in Rafah a part of the Gaza ghetto as he in a playground with his friends, two of whom were wounded. “The children were gunned down by Israeli soldiers from a Jewish guard tower as they were playing.” [15] In May 7, 2001 Israelis shelled homes in the Khan Yunis Refugee Camp and fired large-calibre machine guns which killed 4-month-old Iman Hijo, “shrapnel tearing a hole into the infant’s back.” The attack also wounded 24 civilians, he girl’s 19-year-old mother, as well as three brothers and sisters, were among the wounded, “including 18-month-old Mahmoud Hijo, [who] was in intensive care at Nasser Hospital with shrapnel wounds, doctors said.” … “Israeli troops also fired on the refugee camp’s Khaldieh School in the West Bank, killing a Palestinian school-teacher.” [16]

children-watchingIndiscriminate airstrikes (not Hezbollah’s or Hama’s shielding as claimed by Israeli officials) and violations of human rights were most evident in Gaza offensives by Israeli army between 2006 – 2009 causing a large spike in civilian casualties, the most brutal of which was the massacre of Palestinian women and children in Israel’s “Cloud of Autumn.” [17]  When you grow up with state-mandated violence, hatred and poverty it is little wonder so-called resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have formed. What needs to be borne in mind is that these are people who simply want to lead normal, ordinary lives with some dignity and respect for even the most basic human rights. According to American Educational Trust: “The majority of these [Palestinian] children were killed and injured while going about normal daily activities, such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes. Sixty-four per cent of children killed during the first six months of 2003 died as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks, or from indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers.” [18]

One report from Hebron describes the case of two year-old Burhan Sidir who was blown apart by Israeli mortar fire. His legs and head were found in the street and had to be retrieved by relatives. Can we even imagine the shock, grief and horror at having to pick up your son’s head from the street and carry on with your life?

Just think about that for moment when we become irritated that we’ve missed the last episode of Game of Thrones. Palestinians live with this kind oppression every day of their lives. everyone knows someone who has lost a son, daughter, mother, father, sister or brother.

Total disregard for Palestinian lives has given Israel numerous warnings for war crimes. [19]Palestinian inter-factional fighting between particularly between Hamas and Fatah on top of a fluctuating humanitarian crisis creates intolerable conditions for the young and old alike in the occupied territories. Worse still, is the spectre of targeted killings of children and teenagers by the Israeli military. Though it may not be official policy it appears to be a reality nonetheless, with higher level officers sometimes giving the order to shoot commensurate with reflexive actions of Israeli soldiers as whole which belie “a culture of impunity.” Many recent reports confirm what Palestinians have been living with for decades, namely that a Palestinian life – even a child – means nothing for many in the Israeli military and that an apparent unlawful death is like a fine for a parking ticket at around 100 or 200 shekel [$US22 or $US44]. Mandating a collective punishment on the Palestinian people is drawn from an ever-present emotion of revenge as Israeli soldiers explain:

In May 2004, Israeli forces launched an operation in southern Gaza that resulted in the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, and the deaths of 50 Palestinians, up to half of whom were civilians Rafi, an officer in an elite unit connected to the air force, told how the entire mission was about revenge. “The commanders said kill as many people as possible,’ he said. Orders were also given to kill anyone seen on the rooftops of homes, irrespective of what they were doing or whether they were armed. Among the casualties were Asma Moghayyer, aged 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, who were shot as they were collecting clothes from their rooftop washing line. Rafi described how his impression of the operation was ‘chaos’ and the ‘indiscriminate use of force’. ‘Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters,’ he said. [20]

The explanations that issue forth to justify attacks by Israeli Defence Forces hold less and less validity when such an unspoken policy exists as well as the numerous occasions of attacks in the refugee camps. When teenagers and children have been killed the Israeli military issues standard denials that anything untoward has taken place. How tragically ironic it surely is to see another kind holocaust going on in the occupied territories.


“(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.”

— Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988


The baby in the photo (right) was killed by a bullet to the head during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. He is of one of thousands over the years, yet Israel is still considered a democracy.

What if it were your little niece or nephew?2308984369_6ef2825b9c_o

Your baby son or daughter?
Asma, 16, and her younger brother Ahmed, are typical examples of more “collateral.” They were both shot through the head by an Israeli soldier: “as they fed their pigeons and collected the laundry from the roof of their home in Rafah refugee camp.” Yet, just hours after the deaths Israeli officials were busy blaming Palestinians suggesting that the children had been planting bombs or killed accidentally by other external factors despite clear evidence to the contrary:

Dr Ahmed Abu Nkaria, who pronounced the Mughayar children dead, insists on proving the manner of their killing. He pulls Asma’s body from the mortuary’s refrigeration unit and fumbles through the teenager’s hair to reveal the hole where the bullet entered above one ear and ripped a much larger wound as it emerged above the other.

“The Israeli propaganda is that they were killed in a work accident. These are the kinds of lies they tell all the time,” he says. “They say all the dead are fighters. They say they do not deliberately kill children, but about a quarter of the dead from the first day of shooting are children. The evidence is here in the morgue. Does this girl look as if she was blown up by a bomb?” […]

Ahmed lies with 14 other bodies … He was a small boy who could not easily be mistaken for a man.

Dr Nkaria rolls the child over to show a tiny round hole in his forehead, just above his fringe. There is a much larger hole at the back of the head where the bullet came out. Neither Asma nor Ahmed show signs of any other injuries, particularly of the kind that might be expected from a blast, such as shrapnel spread across the body, burns, or mutilation.

“This is what the Israelis claim is a ‘work accident’,” Dr Nkaria says ….”This is Ibrahim Alqun. He is 14 years old. He was shot in the back of the head. The bullet came out of his right eye,” he says. The child’s face is badly mutilated by the wound. The bodies of the children continued to pile up in the mortuary yesterday.

Saber Abu Libda, 13, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he left his home in Tel al-Sultan in the morning to find water for his family. Dr Nkaria’s finger probes a tiny hole in the small child’s back which masks the devastation done to his heart as the bullet shot through it. “No one can say this child was a fighter. Look at the size of him and look where they shoot him – in the back, not coming to attack someone,” the doctor says. [21]

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A Palestinian rescue worker carries the body of a child from the al-Dallu family into the hospital in Gaza City on November 18, 2012, after seven members of theal-Dallu family, including four children, were among nine people killed when an Israeli missile struck a family home in Gaza City, the health ministry said. AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED ABED


The cases of children and teenagers being shot in cold-blood are numerous and amount to daily executions. A climate of fear is a constant part of Palestinian lives in the occupied territories and refugee camps.

Take the 2004 case of 13 year-old Iman walking to school and who accidentally found herself in Israeli army’s “forbidden zone” at the bottom of her street. It was broad daylight; she was carrying her satchel and wearing her school uniform. Only a few minutes later “the short, slight child was pumped with bullets. Doctors counted at least 17 wounds and said much of her head was destroyed.”

Standard denials followed from the military unit responsible for killing the school-girl. This was followed by an initial army investigation that cleared the commander of the unit of any wrong doing, despite his own soldiers accusing him of “… giving the order to shoot knowing the target was a young girl, and of then emptying the clip of his automatic rifle into her.”

Some Palestinian witnesses gave detailed descriptions as to what happened to Iman. Basim Breaka saw the killing from his living room: “Some soldiers were lying on the ground and shooting very heavily toward her,” …Then one of the soldiers walked to her and emptied his clip into her. For sure, she died on the second or third bullet. I could see her lying on the ground, not moving. I can’t imagine why that soldier wanted to shoot her after she was dead.” [22]

A prosecution case was brought by the family of Iman Darweesh al-Hams due to the lightness of the charges brought against the commander who was “reprimanded in custody.” Not one month later a tape surfaced showing exactly what happened to Iman and who was responsible. The whole Israeli unit continued firing at Iman well after she had been identified as a “frightened child,” and illustrated that both the unit and the commander were culpable. In the recorded exchanges someone in the operations room asks:

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Iman Al Hams was a 13-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israel Defense Forces fire near a military observation post in a “no-man’s” zone near the Philadelphi Route on 5 October 2004, in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. (wikipedia)

“Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?” The observation post, housed in a watchtower, replies: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastwards, a girl of about 10. She’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

Not until four minutes later was it reported that the girl had been hit and had fallen. The observation post reports: “Receive, I think that one of the positions took her out.” … Operations room: “What, she fell?” Observation post: “She’s not moving right now.”

The tape records the commander as telling his men, after firing at the girl with an automatic weapon and declaring he has “confirmed” the killing: “Anyone who’s mobile, moving in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed.”

The soldiers said that the commander had fired two shots at the girl from close range as she lay on the ground before withdrawing, turning and “emptying his magazine” by firing some 10 bullets at her body. This account is broadly confirmed by the terms of the indictment issued this week. [23]

The Commander, “Captain R.” was subsequently acquitted and within a few months promoted to the rank of major. To further compound the misery of the al-Hams family the former Captain received “82,000 New Israel Shekels (roughly $17,000) to compensate him for his defense expenditures and time spent in jail.” [24] [25]

The family’s lawyer summed their feelings in a statement to the press believing that “… the commanders and the soldiers who fired should all have been charged with murder.”

Israel Gaza Conflict Enters Fourth Week

A homeless Palestinian girl stands in a burnt classroom at a United Nations school after it was hit by Israeli shelling on January 17, 2009 in Beit Lahia. | Photo: UNRWA photographer Iyad El-Baba/Electronic Intifada

In the summer of the same year Israeli soldiers killed a 13-year-old Palestinian girl as she was playing football near her home in southern Gaza. “Medics said teenager Sara Mahmud Zurub was shot in the chest in an outlying neighbourhood of the city of Khan Yunis on Monday and died on the way to the hospital.” The report also lists a separate incident where soldiers “soldiers shot dead a 50-year-old Palestinian woman in the south of the territory. The army claimed it had fired towards a site where mortars were allegedly fired from.” [26]

4 year-old Raghda al-Assar died in September 2004 of wounds she sustained two weeks before. She had been shot in the head by Israeli soldiers while sitting at her desk at elementary UNRWA school, in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis: “The shooting began when Palestinian militants who oppose the Israeli occupation of Gaza launched a series of missiles at a nearby Jewish settlement. The UN says that the soldiers shot indiscriminately into the crowded refugee camp for more than half an hour.” “Headmistress Um Khalid says the incident has caused a lot of fear among her pupils, with some crying uncontrollably and others too afraid to come to school.” [27]

On the same day in Rafah, a 16-year-old Palestinian Mahmud Said Qishta, was playing outside his home in Rafah “when he inadvertently stepped on an explosive device left behind by the Israeli army.” He later died of his wounds. [28] Nor is this “careless” use of explosives exceptional. On Nov. 22, 2001, five Palestinian school boys ages 7 to 14 were on their way to classes in the Gaza strip when they were killed by a bomb planted by Israeli forces Palestinian children bid farewell to their deceased playmates, killed by a booby-trapped bomb planted on the path to their school by the child-killing Israeli army. [29]

While in March of 2008 in the Jabalya refugee camp 12 year-old Sami Abu Salem was killed by an Israeli sniper bullet. “An ambulance tried to reach her but Israeli soldiers opened fire at it, wounding a paramedic and causing the tires to lose air, and so she bled to death three hours after she was wounded.” [30]

Palestinian doctors and paramedics have been considered as targets by the Israeli military when attempting to rescue victims. In March 4, 2001 57-year-old Dr. Khalil Suleiman was killed while Israeli military opened fire on the ambulance attending to victims in the Jenin refugee camp. Three paramedics including a 9-year-old girl were wounded. [31] Tragedies and atrocities frequently occur at check-point crossing reminiscent of Nazi Germany: “An ill, one-year-old Palestinian baby died in his father’s arms on Sunday after the pair passed several hours under baking sun waiting to cross from the Gaza Strip into Israel, medics said. Ibrahim Abu Nahel and his father arrived at the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel at 8 a.m. on Sunday.” [32]

In 2008 Ramallah, an Israeli soldier received only 28 days confinement for causing the death of a Palestinian pre-term baby at a Hawara checkpoint near Nablus city. Israeli troops at the checkpoint “… prevented him and his pregnant wife from crossing the point in order to go to hospital despite the fact that his wife was bleeding. “… as they were waiting, his wife gave birth to their son Zaid who lived just for a few moments and after one hour and a half Palestinian paramedics arrived at the checkpoint and completed the birth process to save the life of his wife.” [33]

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Palestinian girls traumatised at funerals of relatives and siblings | AFP

Harassment by Israeli border guards and airport security officials also takes place in the jolly land of Palestinian occupied rule. Israeli officials have been strip-searching girls as young as seven inflicting humiliation and indignity upon Muslims and Christians under the amused gaze of Israeli armed guards. Like so much Israeli unofficial policy it serves as another tool of psychological torture that pressures Palestinians not to return to Palestine.

One example comes from Oregon attorney Hala Gores from a Palestinian Christian family in Nazareth who had to leave due to Israeli discrimination and was strip-searched at just 10 years-old: “Gores has never returned to her family’s ancestral home in Nazareth, she says, in part because she does not want to repeat the experience of having no control over what is done to her. The Israeli policy appears to target only Christian and Muslim children, and is equally applied to those with Israeli citizenship and citizenship in other countries, including native-born Americans. There are no reports of Jewish children being strip-searched.” [34]

Perhaps one of the worst years for children murdered in the operations mounted by the Israeli military in Gaza was from June – September, 2006. Figures from the Palestinian Centre of Human Rights (PCHR) [35] put’s the whole tragic mess into perspective:

  • Bara Nasser Habib, 3 (hit by shrapnel to the head and body, Gaza City, 26 July)
  • Shahed Saleh Al-Sheikh Eid, 3 days old (bled to death after airstrike, Al-Shouka, 4 August)
  • Rajaa Salam Abu Shaban, 3 (died of fractured skull in air raid, Gaza City, 9 August) 
  • Jihad Selmi Abu Snaima, 14 (killed by a shell, Al-Shoukha, 10 september)
  • Khaled Nidal Wahba, 15 months (died of wounds from an airstrike, 10 July)
  • Rawan Farid Hajjaj, 6 (killed with his mother and sister in an airstrike, Gaza City, 8 July)
  • Anwar Ismail Abdul Ghani Atallah, 12 (shot in the head, Erez, 5 July) 
  • Shadi Yousef Omar 16 (shot in the chest by IDF, Beit Lahya, 7 July)
  • Mahfouth Farid Nuseir, 16 (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
  • Ahmad Ghalib Abu Amsha, 16, (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
  • Ahmad Fathi Shabat, 16 (killed by missile while playing football, Beit Hanoun, 11 July)
  • Walid Mahmoud El-Zeinati, 12 (died of shrapnel wounds, Gaza City, 11 July)
  • Basma Salmeya, 16 (killed in Israeli airstrike, 12 July, Jabalia)
  • Somaya Salmeya, 17 (killed in Israeli airstrike, 12 July, Jabalia)
  • Aya Salmeya, 9 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
  • Yehya Salmeya, 10 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
  • Nasr Salmeya, 7 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
  • Huda Salmeya, 13 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
  • Eman Salmeya, 12 (killed in Israeli airstrike, Jabalia, 12 July)
  • Raji Omar Jaber Daifallah, 16 (died of shrapnel wounds from missile, Gaza City, 13 July)
  • Ali Kamel Al-Najjar, 16 (killed by Israeli tank shell, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 19 July)
  • Ahmed Ali Al-Na’ami, 16 (killed by Israeli tank shell, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 19 July)
  • Ahmed Rawhi Abu Abdu, 14 (killed by drone missile, Al Nusairat refugee camp, 19 July)
  • Mohammed ‘awad Muhra, 14 (killed by Israeli bullet to the chest, Al-Maghazi refugee camp, 20 July)
  • Fadwa Faisal Al-‘arrouqi, 13 (died from shrapnel wounds, Gaza City, 20 July)
  • Saleh Ibrahim Nasser, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 24 July)
  • Khitam Mohammed Rebhi Tayeh, 11 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 24 July)
  • Ashraf ‘abdullah ‘awad Abu Zaher, 14 (shot in the back, Khan Younis, 25 July)
  • Nahid Mohammed Fawzi Al-Shanbari, 16 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 31 July)
  • ‘aaref Ahmed Abu Qaida, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Beit Hanoun, 1 August)
  • Anis Salem Abu Awad, 12 (killed by airstike, Al-Shouka, 2 August)
  • Ammar Rajaa Al-Natour, 17 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
  • Kifah Rajaa Al-Natour, 15 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
  • Ibrahim Suleiman Al-Rumailat, 13 (killed by drone missile, Al Shouka, 5 August)
  • Ahmed Yousef ‘abed ‘Aashour, 13 (killed by missile fire, Beit Hanoun, 14 August)
  • Mohammed ‘Abdullah Al-Ziq, 14 (killed by drone missile, Gaza City, 29 August)
  • Nidal ‘abdul ‘aziz Al-Dahdouh, 14 (killed by rifle fire, Gaza City, 30 August)
  • Jihad Selmi Abu Snaima, 14 (killed by artillery fire, Rafah, 10 September

Not content in assassinating Palestinian youth the Zionist state imprisons children they do not kill. Human rights violations and forced labour form the basis of life inside prisons. From the authors of Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children prison is not only a central feature of Palestinian life, but part of Israel’s system of control “permeating every aspect of Palestinian life. It is a system backed by legal, political, economic, cultural and psychological structures, and designed to keep more than 3 million people under submission,” 600,000 Palestinians of whom have spent time in prison since 1967. [36]

The expertly researched book records the daily horrors of Palestinian children who are arrested: “… at checkpoints, on the street, or at their homes by heavily armed Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. The soldiers take them to detention centres in Israeli settlements or military camps… the children are interrogated. This almost always involves some form of torture or abuse, including sleep and food deprivation, threatening language, beatings with heavy batons, being punched and kicked, as well as being tied in painful and contorted positions for long periods of time …” [37]

Astonishingly, a police state applies to Palestinians who are under military law whilst Israelis enjoy the privileges of their own civil law. Interrogation is then followed by a military court or virtual Star Chamber that decides the fate of children designed to try adults. This is due to “The [Israeli military] court’s definition of a child [being] a person who hasn’t yet reached the age of 14. A child between 14 and 16 ‘is a big child’ and if more than 16, an adult.” [38] Despite the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, defining a “child” as any individual under the age of eighteen years, for the Israeli military court system, this can be discarded according to their own whims and preferences. This means that a child of fourteen who has thrown stones at armoured tanks or soldiers equipped with riot gear and weapons with live rounds can be plucked from his bed at night, face a pseudo-military court, be tortured and abused and while absent for his or her trial, face many months in jail.

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Children a Rahfar border refugee camp – “the largest concentration camp”

Children often find themselves signing confession forms which are either entirely fictitious or distorted. In effect, these children are duped into signing false confessions along with a hefty fine rather than a release form. As all legal documents are in Hebrew as well as being terrified out of their wits it is little wonder that they end up part of the prison population rather than back with their families. Once the children are under prison control the absence of freedom exercised by Israeli military police even extends to bodily functions since “detainees are not allowed to use the toilet and are forced to relieve themselves while fully clothed in the presence of others.” [39]

Pretty much standard protocol in the use of torture.

Describing the pattern of invasive tactics that lead to detention, Murad Abu Judeh, a seventeen-year-old male resident of al-Arroub refugee camp in Hebron district, recalls:

We heard a very loud knock on the door … fifteen soldiers entered the house, three of them were masked and wearing civilian clothes. One of the masked soldiers asked me my name and for my ID card. I went to my room in order to bring the ID and one of the soldiers followed me. When I bent over to get the key for my drawer he kicked me on my back six times, pushing me to the ground. He searched my drawer, then grabbed me by my neck and took me back to the main room where I found the soldiers had upturned our furniture. The masked soldier whispered in my ear, “We’ll rape you one by one.” [40]

It is not just Palestinian children who have died in the continuing conflict that defines Arab-Israeli relations. Israeli children too have to shelter from the constant threat of Hamas fired missiles. Ambushes by Palestinian militants also occur though attacks on Israeli civilians are relatively uncommon by comparison. However, in one particularly brutal incident condemned by Amnesty international as a crime against humanity a pregnant mother of eight months and her four children were executed by a militant Palestinian group. [41]  Atrocities will happen when people have known nothing but violence and oppression since birth and when the total disregard for life is simply mirrored back to the perpetrators of the daily crimes from the Zionist state.

So, you see, maybe some Israelis and some Jews can celebrate in the confines of the cinema and enjoy the shedding of Nazi blood in cathartic kosher-porn of gore.  But when victims rule by perpetrating genocide upon their Arab neighbours who are in reality their brothers and sisters … Then it makes a mockery of remembrance; with Yahweh laughing down through the ages at the success of his child sacrifice. For some a promised land is worth thousands of children’s lives as long as they’re mostly Palestinian.

This post is dedicated to all those Israelis, Jews and Palestinians who join together to resist evil and work for peace.

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“Little Handala”


 See also: Rogue state: Declassified Israeli docs spell out 60-year-long strategy to ethnically cleanse Arabs

normanfinkelstein-reaction

Occupation1012Occupation 101

Occupation 101 – Official Movie (1 of 7) in High-Definition – New Digitally Remastered Version. Award-winning documentary film on the roots of the Palestine-Israel conflict and U.S. Government involvement.


The following graphs and many other details on the Israeli occupation can be found at www.ifamericansknew.org

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation. It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.

Please click on any statistic for the source and more information.

Statistics Last Updated: March 5, 2014

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed
September 29, 2000 – Present

129 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Chart showing that approximately 12 times more Palestinian children have been killed than Israeli children

Israelis and Palestinians Killed
September 29, 2000 – Present

Chart showing that 6 times more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

1,109 Israelis and at least 6,862 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Israelis and Palestinians Injured
September 29, 2000 – Present

8,550 Israelis and 54,761 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information.)

Chart showing that Palestinians are injured at least six times more often than Israelis.

Daily U.S. Military Aid to Israel and the Palestinians
Fiscal Year 2013

Chart showing that the United States gives Israel $8.2 million per day in military aid and no military aid to the Palestinians.

During Fiscal Year 2013, the U.S. is providing Israel with at least $8.5 million per day in military aid and $0 in military aid to the Palestinians. (View Sources & More Information)

UN Resolutions Targeting Israel and the Palestinians
1955 – 1992

Israel has been targeted by at least 77 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by 1. (View Sources & More Information)

Chart showing that Israel has been targeted by 77 UN resolutions, while the Palestinians have been targeted by 1.

Current Number of Political Prisoners and Detainees

Chart showing that Israel is holding 5,023 Palestinians prisoner.

0 Israelis are being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 5,023 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel. (View Sources & More Information)

Demolitions of Israeli and Palestinian Homes
1967 – Present

0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and at least 27,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since 1967. (View Sources & More Information)

Chart showing that 24,145 Palestinian homes have been demolished, compared to no Israeli homes.

Israeli and Palestinian Unemployment Rates

Chart depicting the fact that the Palestinian unemployment is around 4 times the Israeli unemployment rate.

The Israeli unemployment rate is 6.8%, while the Palestinian unemployment in the West Bank is 22.5% and 22.5% in Gaza. (View Sources & More Information)

Current Illegal Settlements on the Other’s Land

Israel currently has 262 Jewish-only settlements and ‘outposts’ built on confiscated Palestinian land. Palestinians do not have any settlements on Israeli land. (View Sources & More Information)

Chart showing that Israel has 227 Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.
Note:  All photos from the occupied territories courtesy of “Children of Palestine”  at Occupied Palestine. The photos are graphic and extremely disturbing. If you want to see the reality of Israeli occupation visited upon families in Palestine then look at these photos and channel this anger and outrage constructively – Seek to understand and raise awareness of these issues with others. Let’s end the dominance of psychopaths infiltrating our social systems and subverting them toward greed, poverty, war and ecological disaster.
 

Notes

[1] ‘Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger’ By Jeffery Steinberg, The Atlantic Magazine, September 2009. “Roth told me recently that Inglourious Basterds falls into a subgenre he calls “kosher porn.” “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”
[2] ‘Inglourious Basterds: When Jews Attack’ Daniel Mendelsohn, Newsweek. August 14, 2009.
[3] ‘Inglorious Indeed’. Tablet Magazine, by Liel Liebovitz, September 9, 2009.
[4] ‘Israelis go wild for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds’ By Sara Miller, Haaretz, September 16 2009.
[5] ‘Remember these Children 2000’: a coalition of groups calling for an end to the killing of children and a fair resolution of the conflict. http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/
[6] B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. (Visit their statistics page, last updated September 30, 2011.)
[7] The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has collected data on both Israeli and Palestinian injuries since 2005. Their Protection of Civilians: Casualties Database provides careful and detailed documentation for each recorded injury, including location, gender, age, type of weapon used, context and incident type, and nationality of both the offender and the injured.
[8] International Middle East Media Center, “Gaza’s Ministry Of Detainees: ‘There Are 5,300 Detainees Still Imprisoned By Israel’” (October 21, 2011)
[9] The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions estimates that 24,813 houses have been demolished in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967 (as of July 28, 2010).
[10] CIA World Factbook on Israel, the CIA World Factbook on the West Bank, and the CIA World Factbook on Gaza. All 3 are the estimates for 2010.
[11] Americans for Peace Now’s “Facts on the Ground” Map Project, (www.peacenow.org) there are 171 official Israeli settlements and 101 informal outposts on Palestinian land. APN’s interactive settlement map shows the name, location, and population for each settlement and outpost on Palestinian territory, all of which are considered illegal under international law.
[12] op. cit. Shahak (p.76)
[13] ‘Israeli army murders 3-year-old girl inside her house’ Al-Jazeera, January 26, 2005.
[14] ‘Israelis Murder Palestinian Family: Mother and three children’ Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2002.
[15] Ibid.
[16] ‘Israelis Kill Baby Girl and School-Teacher, Wound Ten other Children in Refugee Camp’ New York Times, March 16, 2001, (p. A-10)
[17] ‘Israel: Investigate ‘White Flag’ Shootings of Gaza Civilians’ Internal Israeli Military Investigations Inadequate Human Rights Watch, August 13, 2009. / ‘Israel: Gaza Ground Offensive Raises Laws of War Concerns’ Both Sides Must Take ‘All Feasible Precautions’ to Protect Civilians, Human Rights Watch, January 5, 2009 | Massacre of Palestinian Women and Children – Israel’s “Cloud of Autumn” Massacre in Gaza, Global Research, November 10, 2006.
[18] American Educational Trust, 2005. http://www.remberthesechildren.org,
[19] ‘Israel raid ‘could be war crime’’ BBC News, 15 September 2008. / ‘Criticism of Israeli War Crimes Mounts’ by Jonathan Cook, January 10, 2009.
[20] “Israeli soldiers reveal official ‘hoot to kill’policy towards Palestinian civilians” By Rick Kelly, World Socialist Website, wsws.org, 15 September 2005. “The soldier explained how there was a general culture of impunity within his unit, including with regard to the killing of Palestinian children. The attitude was, ‘so kids get killed,’ he said. “For a soldier it means nothing.”
[21] ‘Palestinian doctors despair at rising toll of children shot dead by army snipers’ by Chris McGreal in Rafah, The Guardian, May 20, 2004.
[22] ‘Israelis fired on girl ‘having identified her as a 10-year-old’, military tape shows’ By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem, The Independent, 24 November 2004.
[23] Ibid.
[24] ‘Inquiry faults probe of Gaza girl’s killing’ By Amos Harel, Haaretz February 18, 2006.
[25] ‘Court: Iman al-Hams death may have been prevented’ Ynet News, January 7, 2007.
[26] ‘Israeli soldiers kill teenage girl’ 26 Jul 2004, Al-Jazeera.
[27] ‘Gaza’s tragic classroom casualties’ BBC News, 27 Sep 2004.
[28] Ibid.
[29] ‘On The Way To School,’ Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Nov. 26, 2001: “…places explosive charges where children are likely to pass and then claims that only the other side practices terrorism?”
[30] ‘Israeli sniper bullet takes 12-year-old girl’s life’ Diaries: Live from Palestine, Electronic Intifada, 9 March 2008,
[31] op. cit. Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2002.
[32] ‘Gazan baby dies after 4-hour wait to cross border’ Agence France Presse, August 27, 2007.
[33] ‘Israeli officer who caused death of Palestinian baby sentenced to 28 days’ September 13, 2008.
[34] ‘Humiliation and Child Abuse at Israeli Checkpoints Strip-Searching Children’ by Alison Weir, CounterPunch, March 15, 2007.
[35] ‘Gaza: The children killed in a war the world doesn’t want to know about’ By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 19 September 2006.
[36] p.7; Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children by Catherine Cook, Adam Hanieh, Adah Kay, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, in association with Defence for Children International: Palestine Section, 2004. | ISBN-10: 0745321615 | The authors of Stolen Youth worked for Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) between 1999-2003. Their work is based on the human rights reports of B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Physicians for Human Rights, the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, on the DCI/PS case files, the Israeli press, and their own research, the interviews and testimonies of children, lawyers, advocates, and families.
[37] op. cit. Cook, Hanieh and Kay (p.5)
[38] Ibid.
[39] op. cit. Cook, Hanieh, and Kay (p. 81)
[40] op. cit. Cook,Hanieh, and Kay (p. 53) [DCI/PS case file, 17A/2001].
[41] ‘Pregnant mum and four children gunned down’ The Sydney Morning Herald. May 3, 2004.

In the Name of the Father III: Flood-Gates Open

Angel Vatican 04 weba“… members of the Catholic Church should ‘weep before the execrable acts of abuse which have left life-long scars”

Pope Francis


Record payments for damages against the Catholic Church continue to pour in. A recent bill of $3.3 million for a Santa Rosa woman (the highest of its kind) brought the total to more than $24 million in settlements and jury verdicts paid by the Catholic Church in the past year. This is from seven Northern California cases alone. Globally the figure is set to rise substantially. But for a vast religious corporation whose income in 2010 was $97 billion, they will no doubt be able to accommodate more settlements as they arise. [1]

It would be wrong to think that only the major city dioceses were prone to the kinds of corruption and paedophile rings we have become used to hearing about over the years. Similar cases are being picked up on the radar of Christian and law enforcement awareness. Many of these cases are falling out of the “norm” of paedophilia abuse or being made to fit the safer category of the lone paedophile. The instances of ritual abuse have also appeared in small towns and communities across America. It seems religion, incest and the occult have a small-town tradition in some parts.

The one time thriving Church of Hosanna, Ponchatoula, home of antique shops and the host of Louisiana’s annual strawberry festival, was the centre of a scandal that underlined the power of communal secrecy. In June 2005, the town was “stunned” by a “Child Sex Ring” in which the pastor, his wife, the sheriff’s deputy and nine other pillars of the community “were accused of engaging in cult-like sexual activity with children and animals inside the hall of worship. Eight face child rape charges that could bring the death penalty.”

The report from the Associated Press went on to say that:

… witnesses have described the use of robes, pentagrams on the church floor, sex with a dog and the sacrifice of cats. The alleged victims, suspected to number up to two dozen, include children ranging from infants to young teens — some of them the offspring of those accused. […]

Investigators believe the abuse began in 1999 and continued until the church closed in 2003. But it was not until a woman called from Ohio in April, saying she had fled to protect her child, that police claim they had even an inkling of what was happening. […]

Glynn Fendlason served as pastor of the church, then known as First Assembly of God…. The active membership dispensed thousands of meals to the poor and elderly. […] “We all knew something wasn’t right,” Fendlason said. “Not something like this, though.” [2]

Suppressed knowledge on the nature of programmed narcissism and psychopathy in society is serving these predators extremely well.  They play us all like the concertinas that we are with ignorance as the tuning fork. Statements from a former deputy Sheriff commenting on an accused sited in the above report illustrate the point: “He seemed real Christian;”…”He never cursed. When we went out to eat, he’d bow his head and say his prayers.” [3]

As part of a haven of child molesters within the Church, a particularly vicious priest was sent to a rehabilitation centre set up by the Catholic Church for the treatment of paedophilic priests. Two evaluations came to the conclusion that he was a serious risk to re-offend. However, the charming and affable Father Drove had managed to persuade the treatment centre that this had all been a terrible injustice. How could such a personable man have done such a thing? It was impossible wasn’t it?

After a brief course of ‘treatment’ the center declared the previous evaluations dead wrong about Father Drove’s interest in adolescent boys. […] Later [he] was charged with eighteen additional counts of sexual abuse and he was accused by four more victims.[…]  He  repeatedly befriended children – often from poor and troubled families – who were in counselling with him, and he lavished gifts, presents and affection on them. Then he would molest them in callous and sometimes brutal ways. For example, one boy was crying in a counselling session about his increasing drug problem and family difficulties. Father Drove got up, undid the boy’s pants and started performing fellatio on him. On another occasion he was performing fellatio on a boy when he suddenly left the room. Another priest came in and finished the job. On yet another occasion, he took a boy to a rectory for an overnight visit where two other men were allowed to anally rape the boy that night. ….Many of the children he molested were in counselling for emotional or drug and alcohol problems. [Emphasis mine] [4]

And it was only by the lack of knowledge concerning such people that the priest was able to repeat the pattern of trust with led to more boys being abused.

priest-boy© infrakshun

One psychopathic priest was convicted of raping and killing women he chained in his Philadelphia church-home basement and received a 2nd death sentence; a Catholic priest who headed the psychiatric unit at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, who sexually exploited a woman for 5 years starting when she was 13; another Reverend was convicted by a jury of sexually abusing a 5 year old girl and her 7 year old brother during visits in the rectory; a catechism instructor charged with coercing 10 boys to perform sex acts; an evangelist who received a 20 year prison sentence for running a child prostitution ring of 800 victims; a bible school teacher, who was sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison for molesting, sodomizing and photographing them in sexual acts.  “He beat one victim, tape-recording it for sexual gratification: ‘Ten seconds of indiscretion is ruining my entire life,’ he complained, referring to oral sex with a boy, 10. He told the judge: ‘But I have an illness. You cannot make me a criminal.’ ”

At the time of writing, the scandals are still flooding in, this time from Brazil where the Vatican, reports that 10 per cent of the country’s clergy are sex offenders or one in 10 of Brazil’s priests are involved in some form of sexual misdemeanour. A Vatican commission sent to Brazil to investigate reports in September 2005 found a 70 per cent increase in the number of priests involved in cases of sexual misbehaviour and this during the heighted awareness that such abuse was receiving in the media. [5]

While the Church is still held in high esteem in the so-called “developing world,” this too is faltering after the discovery that abuse in the Brazilian Catholic Church could be even more of a problem than in the United States. That poverty is recognised as a vital link in the prevalence and continuation of child abuse this is not so revelatory. As is often true in cases of systematic abuse, the victims are from the lower end of the social scale with little or no recourse to the law. The ability to defend oneself as a last resort is frequently denied, or as the same report stated: “Brazil’s wealth gap made it easier for priests to exploit youngsters with impunity.”

Familiar tactics of cover-ups, intimidation of witnesses and clergy diocese transference has also taken place, though with a high ratio of heterosexual abuse of women and children. The commission also found that “… in the last three years at least 200 Brazilian priests had been referred to church psychological institutions following cases involving paedophilia. Ten clerics were in jail and a further 40 were on the run from the law.”

A recurring pattern found amongst clerical child molesters was the conscious planning of their actions down to the very last detail. Such meticulous planning is a hallmark of the essential psychopath. In one case a Father Tarcisco Tadeu Spricigo was jailed for 14 years and eight months for sexually abusing boys, one of them a five year old:

In his diary, obtained by police in Sao Paulo, the 48-year-old priest stressed the need ‘to have boys who can keep a secret and without sexual scruples’.

He recommended: ‘Always present oneself as the dominator. Be caring and not hurried. Never ask questions, but have certainties. Get secure and needy boys, who don’t have fathers and who are poor. Never get involved with rich kids.’

[Regina Soares Jurkwicz, author of Unveiling the Politics of Silence: Sexual Abuse of Women by Priests in Brazil] said: ‘The number of cases seems to be rising … [but] this is not a new problem. It has just been something that nobody dared talk about and, to a certain extent, that is still the way it is.’ [6]

And the “way it is” extends from Boston to Brazil, Dublin to Düsseldorf.

If we jump across the globe to the United Kingdom, the late Cardinal Basil Hume left a question mark as to his role in yet another possible cover-up. As one of the most respected and well-loved leaders of over 4 million Roman Catholics in England and Wales, this caused some controversy.

Ampleforth college, a top Catholic public school, has admitted that since 1966-1995 at least 30 to 40 boys, some as young as ten years old, were sexually abused by the monks who worked there, though former pupils believe the figure could be over 100 or more. It was established by police that by 1975 that Hume: “… was aware of the risk that at least one monk, Father Piers Grant-Ferris, posed to pupils. Yesterday Grant-Ferris, 72, pleaded guilty at Leeds crown court to abusing 15 boys at Ampleforth’s prep school over a nine-year period up to 1975. Some of these boys, boarders aged between eight and 10, were beaten for his sexual gratification. [7]

Cardinal Hume banished Grant-Ferris but did not inform social services or police. As the report points out, this would have led to a far greater risk of abuse within the school, which nevertheless continued for a 20 year period with more boys being abused, in some cases to the point of rape. Only by 2003 were the signs so evident that action was taken.

Are we meant to believe that Hume was unaware of the problem? According to the Church elect we are meant to justify the secrecy by claiming it all took place in an era of different sensibilities and social mores, or that it was through a collective misunderstanding of the 1962 directive of silence by the Vatican.

By 2010, the Vatican’s active attempts to protect child molesters within the Church was becoming a standard practice and obvious to everyone, not least the new victims who were unfortunate enough to fall into the path of these predators. An Associated Press investigation found that 30 cases of priests accused of paedophilia and pederasty had been transferred or moved abroad. Former Benedictine monk Richard Sipe and critic of the effective protection of priests was interviewed in the AP reports and stated: “The pattern is if a priest gets into trouble and it’s close to becoming a scandal or if the law might get involved, they send them to the missions abroad … Anything to avoid a scandal.” [8]

What has changed is the number of high-ranking clergy beginning to speak out about the deception. The archdiocese of Dublin, Ireland had refused to turn over records on priests who abused children perpetuating the grief of the victims and allowing priests to continue to abuse. All that changed when Diarmuid Martin was appointed Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin.

We only have to test the authenticity of the Catholic Church’s claim that they are doing everything to eradicate sexual abuse with the April 2014 report from UK’s The Independent:

Italy’s bishops have adopted a policy, with backing from the Vatican, that states they are not obliged to inform police officers if they suspect a child has been molested.,/span>

The Italian Bishops’ Conference said the guidelines published on Friday reflected suggestions from the Vatican’s office that handles sex abuse investigations.

Victims have denounced how bishops systematically covered up abuse by moving priests while keeping prosecutors in the dark.

Only in 2010 did the Vatican instruct bishops to report abuse to police — but only where required by law.

Italian guidelines cite a 1985 treaty between the Vatican and Italy stipulating that clergy aren’t obliged to tell magistrates about information obtained through their religious ministry. The guidelines remind bishops, however, they have a ”moral duty“ to contribute to the common good.

Clearly, the Catholic Church’s power and wealth is more important than it’s congregation. But it may even more sinister than that.

In 2012, Martin was featured in a CBS News 60 minutes TV special which revealed how the Archbishop had “… provided tens of thousands of pages of evidence against specific priests” and directly challenged the cover-up of his archdiocese and the behaviour of the Catholic Church, which according to Martin is at “breaking point” from the effects of the longstanding sexual scandals. In the programme, the Dublin Archbishop made it very clear what sexual abuse means when perpetrated by predators masquerading as priests: “Abuse isn’t [just] the actual sexual acts, which are horrendous, but sexual abuse of a child is … a total abuse of power. It’s actually saying to a child, ‘I control you.’ And that is saying to the child, ‘You’re worthless.’” [9] Back in the US in 2012, a landmark case was heard with the first Roman Catholic priest to be convicted for his part in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. More is set to follow.  [10]

When those who set themselves up as spiritual leaders and choose to keep silent while boys are abused and refuse to speak out against crime within one’s own family, it could be said to be “against God.” What does it say about the basic building blocks of an age old religious doctrine of spiritual guidance that harbours such an endemic legacy of abuse and then proceeds to lie about it for decades?

What message does this give people desperately in need of spiritual succour?

One is forced to question the foundations of such a religion that would allow abuse and deception to exist. The only reason it has now been revealed was largely due to the victims finally having the courage to speak out which gave courage to others. It did not come from within the Church that was satisfied with its age-old secrecy to which generations of children have become sacrificed – deeply and irrevocably.

There are those within the Church who have the temerity to set themselves up as “God’s intermediaries” while consciously forcing all to remain silent about institutional crimes against those they were meant to protecting and assisting. By remaining silent, one becomes a willing accomplice to child abuse perpetuating its presence within.

Destroying children’s lives under the cover of religion is nothing more than a evil in action.

 


Notes

[1] “In 2010, the Catholic Church had an income of $97 billion.” From Alain de Botton’s TED talk on Atheism: http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
[2] ‘Church sex case allegedly involving children, animals stuns Louisiana town’ By Alan Sayre, Associated Press, June 10, 2005.
[3] Ibid.
[4] op. cit. Salter (pp. 22-23),
[5] ‘Scandal of sexual abuse by priests shocks Brazil’s 125 million Catholics’ by Tom Phillips and John Hooper, The Guardian, November 26, 2005.
[6] Ibid.
[7] ‘Silence and secrecy at school where child sex abuse went on for decades’- Yesterday’s revelations cast a cloud over the late Cardinal Hume’s former role at a top Catholic college, by Ian Cobain, The Guardian, November 18, 2005.
[8] ‘Predator Priests Shuffled Around Globe’ CBS News / Associated Press, April 14, 2010. | http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/14/world/main6397279.shtml
[9] ‘The Archbishop of Dublin challenges the Church’ CBS News | 60 minutes, (transcript) March 4 2012. | http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57390125.html
[10] ‘Monsignor convicted of child endangerment in priest abuse coverup’ Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2012. | http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-priest-sex-abuse-trial.htm

Crowd Control III: Mixed Messages (2)

“The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.”

– Ross E. Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children


The already seriously flawed European Justice system was brought into sharp relief with the case of Myriam Delay (now Badaoui) in France, where although abuse did take place, an extended ring of paedophilia was said to have been absent. “The trial had shattered the lives of 18 people accused in the case, with one committing suicide and others losing custody of their children, while sending France into a paroxysm of soul-searching.” [1]

The Outreau abuse trial started in 2000 and lasted until December of 2005 where over 66 adults were accused of raping, sexually abusing and prostituting 45 children between January 1999 and February 2002. By July 2005 videotaped testimony of the children provided “horrific details of abuse” which took place on a poverty stricken council estate “in a chronically deprived community.” [2]

One of the country’s biggest criminal trials, and the largest paedophile trial held in France, the Deputy public prosecutor Herve Lollic told the AFP news agency: “We are certain of not having identified all the victims and it is probable that we have not identified all the aggressors,” which doesn’t inspire the greatest confidence that justice would be done.  Charges were brought against an intra-familial paedophile ring in a poor area of a town in Western France. ‘These were people in difficulty, excluded from normal society, who found each other. And for them, everything was sexualised,’ said one local news journalist.  Another expert at the trial mentioned that ‘these were people who were unable to manage their sexual impulses. And nobody told them these things shouldn’t be done …’ [3]

Many of the accused were said to have been innocent of the crimes, with just four of the 17 men and women originally charged found guilty. What was deemed as evidence was later said to be no more than the imaginings of Myriam Delay  and the wild inventions of other children. As well as crucial evidence that was never heard in court which would have exonerated many of the accused, most of the 13 suspects who continued to plead their innocence were placed in detention in 2001. In the beginning of 2006 President Jacque Chirac called the case of the Outreau 13 “… an unprecedented judicial disaster…” [4]

France has been repeatedly criticised by the European Court of Human Rights and campaign groups for its pre-trial detention that can last up to five years. Many lost their jobs and saw their children taken into care. The case has revealed serious flaws in France’s judicial system, which should never have allowed most of the cases to come to court. This can only benefit those who commit the crimes and serves to feed the idea that much of the organised paedophilia and sexual abuse are children’s fantasies.  It underlines just how difficult it is to obtain prosecutions of high level networks if isolated groupings within society are loaded with incompetence and purposeful obstructions. It remains worrying however, that Miriam Delay on 10th day of her trial, suddenly admitted to fabricating much of the story concerning tales of gang rapes and a child prostitution ring based in her home. After a trial that shattered lives of 18 people accused in case, with one committing suicide and others losing custody of their children it begs the question was it all lies? The answer is no. There were cases of abuse. Delay’s retraction appeared to prove that no “commercial” bartering of “services” was organised.

outreau “The innocent and politicians first!”

After so many cases of abuse coming to light in the last 20 years it could be argued that social workers were trying to cultivate due caution coupled with suitable vigilance. 21 of the 23 families in the case had been monitored by French social workers after the first report in 1999, but the investigation only began in earnest in 2002 which seems more than a little apathetic in light of the severity of the abuse.

The Deputy public prosecutor said “… I fear that these things do not just happen in Angers…” With such painfully slow realisations forming at this late stage it is no wonder that intra-familial abuse and other forms of exploitation continue to rise in society. Where cases of intra-generational abuse occur, how does one penetrate the wall of secrecy set up as a natural course by the victims and perpetrators alike? When these walls are finally broken down, the methods adopted often lead to fatal flaws that see the wrong persons accused and caught up in the ensuing and very slippery shadows, which then causes suspicion and accusations to all, regardless of tangible evidence.

From the UK to the US and things are no better. Children are suffering unnecessarily as victims only to become further victims of court ineptitude and cultural and personal bias resulting in families being broken up and effectively destroyed. Meanwhile, the real abusers continue to get away quite literally, with murder.

From a series of life history interviews conducted by Sara Scott Ph.D from the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the University Liverpool, UK, the stories from one particular family detail a history of “violence, cruelty and sexual abuse.” One interviewee responded to a question about her uncle and abuse:

… once I was at boarding school he used to have to pick up us up from the airport and stay overnight and going back to school and things like that; he used to abuse then a fair bit…. My uncle in many ways was like my dad. He’d come across as a very nice bloke, good laugh and a joke. They managed to do what my parents had done, build up and image of everything’s fine, nothing’s wrong… ‘We’re the perfect family.’  My uncle has a daughter and four grandchildren – at least one I know that’s been abused.  I’m almost certain he’s abused his own daughter, he abused my sister, he abused my dad… very much into abusing people.

He abused you dad when he was young?

Yeah, from what I can gather from what my sister’s told me from when he was fairly young until his teens. Quite badly abused my dad, because of the 18 years [between them]. [5]

Scott goes onto emphasize the “ordinary” and “routine” nature of such abuse which existed in these families. Abuse began when the children were infants where it was so much part of their formative years that it became normalized:

[Kate]: Yeah, I can remember what I call normal abuse … which basically didn’t have any cult meaning, it was just my father. That was pretty much a regular occurrence as much as eating my meals actually. I can’t really distinguish particularly … It would happen at home or used to take me for walks in the park … anywhere really … I don’t think it really bothered him at all. […]

[Sinead:] As soon as I saw my mum each day I would get bath. And my mum used to pay particular attention to my private parts. She would wash me quite roughly and insert her fingers inside me. Sometimes my dad would help and he would help, and he would do the same thing. That must of gone on since I was born really. I do remember my dad would quite often insert things inside me, his hand was a favourite. It got to be normal, I just used to relax, it didn’t hurt so much. It was so ordinary, I didn’t think: ‘O, my God, what are they doing?’ That went on till I went to school. [6]

It seems to be true with many cases of intra-familial abuse that emotional cruelty and degradation also featured to a greater or lesser degree. In the case of the above middle class English family such instances included: “….pissing on me when I was in bath and putting my head down the toilet and putting faeces in my mouth. Nice, you know, nice things like that … I hate him.” [7]  Far from being merely a product of a dysfunctional family, incest is carried out most often by parents committing rape upon their own child which tends to cut through the psychoanalysis double-speak of “parents loving too much” [8] or the “failure of family obligations.”

***

If we look to the internet there are ample opportunities for those to find others who are attempting to make incest acceptable along with paedophilia. As with most forms of deviancy of the kind that includes bestiality, sadomasochism and fetishes of all types the internet provides a homogenous and anonymous entry into all manner of fantasy that is attempting to slip from pathology to normalcy.

There are even chat-rooms and websites that are de facto support groups for people engaged in incest. Ideas that advocate a better understanding of consensual sex between “kin”, blur the line yet again between the complexities of father-daughter relationships for example, where perhaps the only way to find a proper relationship is to give in to the adult’s manipulations, sex being the only way to gain “love” and attention. However, our concern here is for the child for whom the idea of consent, when confronted by the father or mother in such cases is a cruel abstraction devoid of any meaning. It can only be a form of parental rape at this stage and must be prosecuted as such.

In the UK, the old offence of incest was replaced with a more modern law that prohibits sexual relations between children under 18 and their blood relations, adoptive parents and siblings, step-parents, foster carers and those in a position of responsibility in the family. The “position of responsibility” covers people such as a friend of the child’s mother, a relative by marriage, such as an uncle, or another adult that lives in the same household. Whereas in New York, US, the penalty for those who molest an unrelated child differs greatly for those who molest children to whom they are related.

One may ask, which is worse: a stranger who rapes a child or the child’s own father committing the crime?

20051128© infrakshunghg

Not so, overseas. Sex with a child under the age of 11 is a Class B felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. If, however, the sexually abused child is closely related to the perpetrator, state law ensures significantly more lenient treatment, to the extent that the prosecutor may choose to charge the same acts as incest. The problem being this is not listed as a sex offence, but as an “offense affecting the marital relationship,” It is therefore a Class E felony, whereby even a convicted offender may be granted probation. [9]

Can you imagine how useful a political tool this has become for the high-flying family man with a supercharged career and a penchant for abusing his children as he climbs the ladder to the top? Find the right lawyer, pay the money and rely on incest loopholes to finish the job. Such inconsistencies are not so surprising when we look at some of the definitions of sexual practices in law. In the State of North Carolina orgies are defined as “7 people in a closed room with their feet off of the ground.” Necrophilia (sex with corpses) was not illegal in Iowa until the late 1980s. It is surely little wonder that child abuse and the courts are in such chaos.  Similar eccentric laws exist in many Southern States.  Regardless of the precise statistics of each category there is a high probability that the prevalence of familial abuse and sexual abuse in general is not decreasing, though more overt and unplanned violent crime may well be on the decrease.

If we return to the US, in 1970 the results of one study recorded 86,324 persons arrested for sexual offences. In 1986, 168,579 persons were arrested for sexual offences which are almost double the number. The United States Department of Justice recorded in 1981 and 1989 respectively, that from 1970 to 1979 the rate of increase for sexual offences, other than forcible rape and prostitution was 5 percent. From 1979 to 1988 the rate of increase for these offences was 44.5 percent. [10] Therefore, we can make the tentative observation that the single largest group in our prison population may be those convicted of sexual offences, second only to drug offences. This maybe as much to do with sex-paranoia as puritanical authoritarianism where both are doing battle and squeezing any semblance of objectivity.

It is also worth noting that the high rate of physical and sexual abuse (including rape and violence within the family) will induce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children in particular, especially where genital pain is involved. This becomes understandable when we realise that an estimated 61 percent of violent sex offenders in State prisons have a prior conviction history and a further estimate of 1 in 4 imprisoned rape and sexual assault offenders with dominant past histories of violent crime, with 1 in 7 having been previously convicted of a violent sex crime. [11]

With child abusers who have been known to re-offend as late as 20 years following release into the community, this is not a problem that will disappear with sporadic under-funded, community-based supervision and management. This is a problem that goes very deep indeed into all aspects of social systems: economics, politics, and education.


“Society does not believe that women really do sexually abuse children … There’s almost a perception that boys should be happy or grateful, or certainly not experiencing sexual contact with females as abusive.” – Dr Joe Sullivan  [12]


As mentioned previously in discussions of The Female Psychopath female sexual abuse is another taboo the recognition of which still lags behind of male abuse both in reporting and investigations. Women in society are seen as the carers, nurturers and protectors. To accept that some women also abuse, whether sexually or physically is unconsciously resisted which has led to a paucity of research and data, though this is slowly changing. As always, this too creates tensions between child advocates, agencies and feminist groups who fear that it will feed into the already difficult plight of women in society generally, not least the arena of abuse.

There is one theory that suggests that women frequently abuse children physically rather than sexually. This is the most readily available individual, or individuals to whom the abuser can claim to exert control and retain that power normally denied to them, especially within a fragmented and disintegrating home environment where pathologies tend to manifest. [12]  Examples of female sexual abuse fall into distinct categories including: teachers who are involved with adolescent and/or pre-pubescent boys or consider themselves “in love” and/or want to teach them about sex; [13] women who are coerced into offending and who are initially abuse dependent i.e. allows another male to initiate the action but can end up abusing on their own; [14] and abusers who have been sexually abused themselves from a very young age and go on to inflict the same abuse towards their own children. This may not be necessarily aggressive, threatening abuse, rather “a cry for emotional intimacy.” [15]

Pathological narcissism and psychopathy may also play its part where cases are just too extreme to be classed as anything else. The case where a mother feared she would “lose her boyfriend while she recuperated from surgery arranged for her 15-year-old daughter to have sex with him,” is but one example. [16]

Though the above suggests there are important differences between male and female abuse, this type of offending, despite the cultural stereotyping of young boys “enjoying it and wanting it” can be just as detrimental, creating concerns regarding masculinity, deep-seated anger, betrayal, helplessness, negative attitudes towards relationships with the opposite sex and continuing occurrences of self-blame and guilt. In other words, female sexual abuse, like male abuse, has long term psychological effects that can ruin lives.

Social service and mental health professionals are unused to the idea that females can and do abuse children making the detection and of such crimes even more difficult. This means that children remain vulnerable to continuing and undetected abuse of this kind. There are estimates that 5 percent of girls and up to 20 percent of boys that have been abused are perpetrated by women, though the small amount of data available is less than definitive. [17]

With inter-generational physical and sexual abuse being unreported yet prevalent, anti-sexuality set against sexualisation form dominant forms of “edutainment” with a vacuum of appropriate role models and a widening of the gap between the rich and poor. However, with power comes impunity and while society at large battles with its demons, locked into a cycle of self-abuse, we begin to get an idea that all is not well with the authorities and established institutions in the Western world that purport to guide, instruct and look after its populace. Children are not only becoming victims within the family but are also manifesting narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies which have been inflicted upon them.

There can be no greater barometer than by looking at the plight of children under globalisation. There is thus something very wrong indeed in our institutions and social systems if the very core of the family is exhibiting symptoms of emotional decay and psychological disorders to the extent that parents, siblings resort to the abuse, torture and murder. This is further exacerbated by a climate of fear placing pressure on parents who are made to feel hypersensitive and over protective of their own children. Like certain representatives of the climate change industry, the child abuse industry often has some fat pay cheques to offer their employees.

The traditional roles of the father, mother and the family unit in general are deteriorating in the UK and the US.  Similarly, children are desperately in need of enduring role models that nurture and nourish their growth rather than creating unnecessary tensions which are pulling the child’s psyche apart. To say that children globally are receiving mixed messages would be an enormous understatement.

The spectre of the lone paedophile / child molester is given endless mileage and moral panics are whipped up to protect the organised networks of abuse. These are sometimes mirrored in the family and communities at large. The ability to tackle these issues remains diffused at best, due to the active or passive acquiescence of law enforcement and authorities already tied to what is institutional abuse in secret. This situation can only worsen if the core reasons for its presence continue to be brushed under the proverbial carpet. And these reasons are to be found in our present systems which define the very societies themselves. The Rule of Law only goes so far in protecting the innocent, but ensures immunity to those with money, prestige and power on a scale that is unacceptable for so-called democratic nations. Perhaps it has always been so, but the structures upon which our present laws were founded seemed to have all but crumbled away when the courts and custody battles are placed under the microscope.

 


Notes

[1] ‘French paedophile ring case turns into judicial fiasco’ The Guardian, December 2, 2005.
[2] Ibid.
[3] ‘Outrage over innocent 13 jailed in sex abuse scandal’ The Times, January 20, 2006.
[4]  ‘Child abuse gang horrifies France’ By Sarah Shenker, BBC News, July 27, 2005.
[5] p.66; The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief By Sara Scott, 2001, published by Open University Press. | ISBN 0-335-20419-8.
[6] op. cit. Scott (p.67)
[7] Ibid.
[8] Systemic treatment of incest: A therapeutic handbook.T.S Trepper and M. J Barrett, New York: Brunner/Mazel. (1989).
[9] The Incest Loophole’ By Andrew Vachss, The New York Times Op-Ed, November 20, 2005.
[10] U. S. Department of Justice (1981). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics-1981. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Washington, D. C. /U. S. Department of Justice (1989). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics-1989. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Washington, D. C.
[11] US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, February 1997.
[12] ‘Female paedophiles more prevalent than conviction rates suggest, leading forensic psychologist says’ By David Lewis
28 Apr 2015. ABC News Australia.
[13] ‘Unspeakable Acts’, Trouble and Strife 2 I(Summer), I3 p. I5 by L. Kelly. 1991.
[14] Bridget Mary Nolan, a former Australian teacher was convicted in December 2005 of having sexual intercourse with an underage student at her school. She was sentenced on March 1, 2006 to two years and four months but which led to a suspended sentence after Nolan entered a $1,000, three-year good behaviour bond. The sentencing judge justified his decision not to hand down a jail sentence due to her showing “genuine remorse.” The Australian, January 2006, p. 5./ The Australian. 2 March 2006, p. 3.
[15] A woman told investigators that she was “…coaxed into raping her 6-year-old son when her husband threatened to leave will spend the next 16 years in prison….The woman’s 30-year-old husband was sentenced …to two concurrent life.” published in The Akron Beacon-Journal, October 5, 2002.
[16] ‘Breaking the last taboo: child sexual abuse by female perpetrators’ By Renee Koonin, Australian Social Work journal, Volume 30, No 2. May 1995.
[17]  ‘Police: Teen given to older man for sex.’ Associated Press, August 10, 2006.
[18] A paper: Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research, ‘Women as Perpetrators,’ by D. Finkelhor, and D. Russell New York: Free Press. (1984).

Crowd Control II: Mixed Messages (1)

“In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been charged with and/or convicted of from one to three victims. In the interviews I have done, they have admitted to roughly 10 to 1,250 victims. What was truly frightening was that all the offenders had been reported before by children, and the reports had been ignored.”

― Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders


If you’ve been following the trajectory of these posts you’ll have hopefully understood that we are dealing with a highly complex set of influences which make up the overall picture of child abuse, sex crime and our current expressions of sexuality.  None of these issues lend themselves to simplistic solutions. Aside from the activities which go on within institutions, the high profile but rare cases of violent sexual abuse and sometimes murder which have been committed in the lower income levels of society play a part in giving undue credence to such crimes, making them appear much more common than they are. [1]  

That doesn’t mean to say that such crimes are not a very big part of the European and American Establishment. They most certainly are. But many of these crimes often have pathways leading directly to government, banking, the church and other institutions whose initial ideological and political constructs have become something entirely different. They now offer sanctuary and protection to child rapists and other psychopaths by virtue of a Hive Mind tradition that has fused with conscienceless individuals.  They are able to stimulate the market for abuse at both the macro-social and micro social level while simultaneously hiding behind their political, religious or corporate mask. This has ultimately meant that these networks of child abusers are buffered and protected by the societal chaos encouraged through public “lone” paedophile trials, celebrity pederasts and intra-familial abuse cases, the latter of which often act as suppliers to the Elite.

Sensationalising the issue increases the “fear factor” and a parental paranoia that is leading to restrictions on natural child development. The erosion of childhood has led to “a drastic decline in children’s outdoor activity and unsupervised play…” [2] This is due to technology and the so-called litigation and “claims culture” which has produced so much alienation and social fragmentation in America and Europe. We are now living in a world where parents and adults alike are becoming increasingly wary of even talking to children that are not their own or tending to a minor injury in the school-ground lest they be accused of inappropriate “touching.” [3] The well promoted obsession with lone child molesters is out of all proportion to the cases reported.  All of which benefits the Establishment where the most serious child rapists reside.

lone-predator

© infraskhun

So, while we know that child abuse is serious problem let’s also take a look at the other side of the coin, and how an abuse paranoia is currently manifesting in the UK.  To this into perspective for a moment, last year over 100 children in the UK alone were killed on the roads, more than 6,000 were injured and 1,000 seriously, leaving them disfigured or disabled for life. How many children in the UK have been killed by the lone child molester in a comparable time scale? Seven.[4]  Over 40,000 children ran away from home while the British government still insists that the traditional “family values” should be maintained without providing the support that families need. Britain also has one of the worst records of child poverty in Europe. Among 100,000 and 200,000 people under eighteen, experience homelessness each year.

A UK Home Office report from 1999 became yet another research study to be added to the growing body of respected research confirming the real risk comes from sexual abuse not from isolated child molesters but from relatives, family friends and siblings. The research also found that: “… only one in five men jailed for molesting children was likely to be caught re-offending, compared with reconviction figures of 50 percent for non-sexual offenders within two years of the original crime.” [5]

While the lone child molester and “stranger danger” meme gets enormous coverage in the press, the less sensationalist trend is the incidence of abuse that occurs within the family unit suggesting a hidden pathology afters years of ponerisation. Economic deprivation, the rise in narcissism and the materialism from which it is sourced is a large factor in the presence of abuse within the family. This serves as another reminder that sexual crime can always provide an infinite variety of scapegoats while ignoring the core reasons for why these offences take place. We might equally say that recognised offenders were expert in covering up their crime coupled with the fact that the age of the victim invariably ensures that the molestation is not reported adding difficulties in provision of definitive data.

According to Mary Marsh director for the National Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC): “Over the last 30 years, hundreds of children have been beaten, starved, burned, suffocated, poisoned, shaken, strangled or stabbed to death by their parents” [6] She believed the child abuse killings were a “national disgrace,” her belief drawn from the statistics which suggest that more children die in the home than in the street. Yet still, the lone child molester threat continues to pervade popular culture holding parental sensibilities to ransom with 63 percent of parents believing most child murders occur outside the home. [7]  Meanwhile, massive advertising from child charities  targeting children in the family to report on signs of abuse to the organisation, further fuelling the idea of the family as a den of corruption, already under severe socio-econommic pressures. It’s a rock and a hard place.

While the NSPCC’s had some dubious methods for raising awareness of this problem, the collected data and conclusions found were pertinent. One NSPCC poll found that 70 percent of parents were “more concerned for their children’s safety after the deaths of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.” [8] Cases such as these allow newspapers to milk the fears of all parents who in turn campaign for legislation that adds to the overreaction for a predator that is statistically already within the home and more importantly, as an indirect result of individuals  found in the top echelons of our social systems and thus shaping it toward a singular psychological worldview. Perception management ensures that this is a “natural” consequence of people’s nature and the evolution of modern culture. Yet so far it seems, neglect, physical violence (and in some statistics rape) represent an overall increase far above sexual abuse. More than three children are said to die each day in America as a result of child abuse or neglect. [9]

2013-07-12 20.26.14

© infrakshun

While statistics need to be viewed with a suitably sceptical but open mind, sufficient studies over several decades have confirmed that there is a much higher incidence of physical abuse as opposed to sexual abuse, closely followed by neglect which is seven times more prevalent than the former. Indeed, it seems the younger the child the greater the risk of murder (infanticide) for those aged under five. The US fairs no better. The number of homicides of children under age 5 has increased over the past two decades, albeit with a modest decline in the last few years, according to government figures. The number of infanticides of children age 1 and younger is also increasing since the 1990s. Infant sexual abuse (nepiophilia) is also a rising problem within the family. The effects of sexual abuse on those of pre-verbal age are relatively unknown.

Nevertheless, research offers evidence that the foetus can be highly sensitive to external stimuli of a positive or negative nature so we can also surmise that the infant will be equally sensitised to the intent and physical effects of sexual abuse. A toddler’s brain has twice as many connections among its 100 billion neurons as the brain of a fully matured adult. [10] It is a crucial process of development within an intricate and complex system, housing neural circuits of learning that is highly almost exclusively dependent on external stimuli. The parents and the environment can directly affect whether or not the child inherits damaged circuits and the surfacing pathologies, however slight, or creative ones that lay down a healthy foundation for the future. Evidence from a recent report fro Reuters in December 2011 has even shown that: “Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat”.

When infants and children are exposed to unhealthy social encounters which include stress and anxiety, the brains do not wire themselves properly in the “emotional centres,” which leads to negative cognitive reactions which then become “hard-wired.” If we then take the trauma associated with infant abuse, we can imagine the damage inflicted on the neurology of a developing baby and the future generational line.

A leading expert in the field of sexual abuse of the infant child, Dr. Bruce Perry at the Baylor College of Medicine, believes the development of the cerebral cortex can be reduced by as much as 20 percent from the effects of abuse resulting in many brain structures remaining under-developed.  Instead of dense neural clusters as by-products of creative learning, there are effectively “holes” sourced from trauma, stress and anxiety. [11]

Perry indicates that the human brain has a variety of ways by which it can store or “recall” experience right across the board of motor, vestibular, emotional, social and cognitive applications. The body locks in these memories that, according to Perry, are non-cognitive and pre-verbal: “It is the experiences of early childhood that create the foundational organisation of neural systems that will be used for a lifetime.” [12] Of these neural patterns, instead of laying down stable and proper functional platforms for further learning, the imprinting shock of abuse lays down trauma and anxiety related to psychosexual development during the general mapping process. This then leads to a greater propensity for widespread damage in the biological life of an emerging infant with personality development prone to severe disruption.

With the long term effects of child abuse covering a wide range of fears, anxieties, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behaviour, poor self-esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships, we can tentatively conclude that the effects may be a form of emotional fall-out which not only has a very long legacy but offers a primary resource for the manipulation of the mass mind. When emotion, fear and trauma dominates, the mass mind is wide open to propaganda and perception management.

american-beauty

Promotional poster for “American Beauty” (1999) about the darker psycho-sexual and social tensions behind American suburbia which ultimately lead to redemption.

The 1999 multiple Oscar-winning film American Beauty portrayed middle-class suburban America as undergoing a reaction to the narcissism, sexual subversion and overall inversion of the American Dream. Themes explored included gender, maternal and paternal love, sexuality, beauty, materialism, alienation, self-liberation and redemption. Literary critic and author Wayne C. Booth described the film’s “elusive centre” and the talented mix of creative energy of all those involved that made the film so successful. Similarly, when art manages to make connections with the subconscious and speaks to underlying themes simmering below the surface there will inevitably some form of resonance.

The film explores the underlying connector as a materialist, consumer led “beauty” that has removed all possibilities for sense of the sacred and sanctity in American life. Beneath the struggle to adjust to impinging economic realities intolerance, fear and mental illness are descending upon middle America.  As such, beauty is still present in the unlikeliest of places from simple teenage eroticism to a plastic bag floating in the air currents of an urban alleyway. It shows how existential emptiness and the loss of meaning govern much of American and European daily life. These are the pathways by which sexual extremes and pathological deviancy may enter under cover of suburbia created from the norm of Establishment and institutional perceptions of reality.

Much of the youth in America and Europe are drowning in a sea of superficiality. There is an absence of proper role models and any form of integral education which is adding to the inevitable rise in gang-related crime. The pathological tendencies which have been allowed to gain a foothold in young social groupings are thus becoming gradually more fertile for subset-pathologies to be expressed. Indeed, it seems that the trend for children to be abused by their own age groups than by adults is also on the rise.

One comprehensive report analysed data between 1976 and 1994 and estimated more than 37,000 children had been murdered. [13] In fact, during the same period, 1 in 5 child murders were committed by a family member and 1 in 5 child victims were known to be killed by another child. Children under 18 accounted for 11 percent of all murder victims in the US in 1994. Nearly half of these 2,660 child victims were between 15 and 17. In most murders of a young child, a family member killed the child, while in most murders of an older child, age 15 to 17, the perpetrator was an acquaintance to the victim or was unknown to law enforcement authorities. Keeping to the same statistical research we also find that in family murder of a child 10 percent of victims was age 15 – 17, while in murders by strangers 67 percent of victims were in this age category.

Since the mid-1980’s the increases in the number and the rate of murder among 15-17 year-olds, particularly among black youth in this age range, outpaced changes in murder in all other age groups. [14]  Since 1980, there has been a 15 percent annual average increase in the number of prisoners sentenced for violent sexual assault (other than rape) which is “faster [increase] than any other category of violent crime and faster than all other categories except drug trafficking.” [15 The majority of these prisoners are young men.

In another survey conducted by the US Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) the steady growth of child abuse over the last ten years was confirmed with the total number of reports across the US increasing by 45 percent since 1987 and the rate of child abuse fatalities similarly increasing by 39 percent since 1985.[16 Based on data from all three years, the survey found 82 percent of children were under the age of five while 42 percent were under the age of one at the time of their death. (See Crowd Control)

suburbanfamilyPhysical violence against children is more prevalent than sexual abuse yet they often they go together. Since the 1970s, the phenomenon of child abuse has been increasing and so too the limits of the extremes that surface. Regarding the instances of filicide (the killing of one’s own children) “Head trauma, strangulation and drowning were the most frequent methods of filicide (the killing of a person’s own child). Fathers tended to use more active methods, such as striking, squeezing or stabbing; mothers more often drowned, suffocated or gassed their victims.

In a study of child abuse in New York City the incidence of child abuse increased 1026 percent between 1964 and 1974 which ranged from neglect, physical violence, sexual molestation and assault to incest and emotional terrorism. [17] The US Department of Health, Education and Welfare stated: “An epidemic of child abuse is occurring in this country.” [18] Though fluctuating parallel to the number of cases investigated which has dipped of late, similar to the high incidence of missing persons, the increase was in part attributed to a growing awareness from the public and the willingness to report child abuse. Yet the number of total child maltreatment cases that were investigated by state agencies remained constant from 1986 to 1993 for example, but the percentage of cases investigated declined dramatically, suggesting a steady rise. Indeed, the instances of child abuse and neglect almost doubled in those seven years alone totalling more than 2.8 million children.[19]

Overwhelming statistical data analyses from the US Department of Health and Services (DHHS) Administration for Children and Families Division, confirm that since 2000 – 2007 a steady but fluctuating rise in the incidence of multiple forms of maltreatment overwhelmingly came from biological parents at 79.9 percent. [20]  Back in the UK, 1 in 14 children have been violently assaulted by their parents, and we’re not talking about a tap on the bottom here. Incidences of being kicked, punched, choked, burnt or threatened with a knife have been listed as the common attacks within the home. Broken bones, bruising, bites, burns and head injuries were some of the results, some of which were carried out by mothers at 52 percent and with fathers at 45 percent. It is almost a given that fathers are assumed to have been responsible for carrying out the vast majority of domestic abuse cases involving children yet many surveys and studies both in the UK and the US seem to prove that this is another myth. Most sexual abuse is carried out by step-fathers and siblings for example,[21]  with poverty and low income families most likely to harbour the abuse. [22]

One of the most common forms of sexual abuse is that of incest (or intra-familial abuse) remaining one of the most under-reported and least discussed crimes. This is due in part, to the lack of accurate statistics and information borne from the fear and secrecy inherent in such a crime not least the difficulty in gathering such highly sensitive information. Social and familial pressure maintains a strong taboo that is almost impenetrable. The coercion by the abuser and the feelings of guilt and shame further cement the wall of silence.

Research indicates that 46 percent of children who are raped are victims of family members. Incest is traditionally defined as “sexual intercourse between persons too closely related to marry (as between a parent and a child)” yet here too the definition has been expanded to include sexual abuse by anyone who has “authority or power over the child.” [23] The perpetrators of incest may include immediate or extended family members, babysitters, school teachers, scout masters, and priests.

The study of a nationally representative sample of state prisoners serving time for violent crime in 1991 revealed that 20 percent of their crimes were committed against children, and three out of four prisoners who victimized a child reported the crime took place in their own home or in the victim’s home. [24]  While intra-familial abuse often seems to cross over into ritual abuse there are cases that are inter-generational and “poly-incestuous” cases involving parents, grand-parents, aunts and uncles. Sometimes this can extend to over three or four generations or more.[25] Deprived neighbourhoods with poor unemployment and a history of economic hardships also featured in a variety of studies. The “infection” naturally draws in “friends of the family” further increasing the perpetuation of abuse and the likelihood of psychopaths participating, further increasing the severity of the effects.


Notes

[1] There is evidence that child abductions are on the rise in England and Wales: From The Independent, May 2006, ‘Indypedia’: 1985 – 102, 1990 – 208, 1995 – 355. This also includes family kidnappings and not necessarily those by strangers. 2000/01 – 546  2005/06 – 1,028.
[2] ‘Play on’ By Jenny Cunningham, January 3, 2002, spiked-online.com
[3] ‘Protection risks doing more harm than good.’ By Sandra Dick, January 18, 2005, The Scotsman.
[4] Research and Development Statistics (RDS) Home Office UK, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/
[5] ‘Home Office Report says: Most child sex attacks committed by relatives, family friends.’ Agence France Presse, 1999. BBC News, 13 October, 2002.
[6] ‘NSPCC steps up campaign on child abuse killings’ 14 October 2002, nspcc.co.uk/ The “fear-mongering” methods by which organizations like NSPCC alert the public to these dangers is also under scrutiny by some commentators, something we will look at in following posts.
[7] Child murder rate ‘a national disgrace’ BBC News, October 13, 2002.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) 1996 Annual Fifty State Survey: […] 25 states provided the following breakdown for reported cases: 62per cent involved neglect, 25per cent physical abuse, 7 per cent sexual abuse, 3per cent emotional maltreatment and 4per cent other. For substantiated cases, 31 states gave the following breakdowns: 60per cent neglect, 23 per cent physical, 9per cent sexual, 4per cent emotional maltreatment and 5per cent other.
[10] ‘The Long Term Neurological and Developmental Effects of Sexual Abuse on Infant Children’ Mike Earl-Taylor and Lindsay Thomas, March 2003 (quoted from science in Africa.co.za )
[11] Trauma, Violence, and Abuse: A Review Journal. January 2000, by Bruce Perry Vol. 1, Number 1. Sage Publications, Inc.
[12] Ibid.
[13] US Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime and Victims Statistics 1998.
[14] Statistical data from Yesican.org/
[15] US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, February 1997.
[16] Nation Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA) 2000 Annual Fifty State Survey.
[17] Quoted from ‘Child Abuse in America: Slaughter of the Innocents’ By James W. Prescott, Ph.D.From Hustler, October 1977
[18] Ibid.
[19] Survey shows Dramatic Increase in Child Abuse and Neglect 1986-1993 Wednesday, Sept. 18, 1996, Michael Kharfen, US Depart. Of Health and Services, http://www.acf.dhhs.gov.
[20] Chapter 4, Perpetrator sex Child Abuse stastics, Child Maltreatment, DHHS report 2007.
[21] ‘Revealed: The Truth about Child Sex Abuse in Britain’s Families’ by Jeremy Laurance, The Independent, November 2000.
[22] “‘One in 14’ children attacked,” BBC News, 19 November, 2000.
[23] Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its After effects in Women, by Sue E. Blume, 1990, published by  John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY.
[24] The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) ncvc.org.
[25] ‘Poly-Incestuous Families: an exploratory study’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, By K.C. Faller, 1987.

Good Intentions II: Feed The World

“… every seasoned aid worker knew then, and knows now, that there is no necessary connection between raising money for a good cause and that money being well spent, just as there is no necessary connection between caring about the suffering of others and understanding the nature or cause of that suffering.”

– Foreign Aid expert


230px-Live8Logo

Live 8 Promotional poster

Author and Professor of Engineering at Oakland University Barbara Oakley PhD names the entrenched idea of changing the world before changing oneself as a kind of “hyper-altruism” that has had a recent resurgence among the minds of mega-philanthropists such as Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Belinda and Bill Gates. They have donated billions to the needy in Africa and the sub-continent and have encouraged their fellow filthy rich friends to do the same. She quotes The Economist’s Matthew Bishop and Michael Green who termed this new phenomenon as “philanthrocapitalism” which continues to pump huge amounts of money into the foreign aid industry.

So, why are the same problems showing little signs of being affected by such massive financial contributions and in fact are largely getting worse?

According to Oakley:

“Financial altruism detached from strategic and objective thinking has been shown time and again to have detrimental consequences at exorbitant costs. […] Not all aid is bad but debate has continued regarding the efficacy of foreign aid and whether massive investments are of any use.” She makes the further and vital point: “Staring at pictures of starving children can in some sense, hijack analytical portions of the brain. Perhaps it is this that results in some of the ineffectual and pathologically altruistic behaviour that characterizes many foreign aid policies and programs.” [1]

Oakley then discusses the advances in neuroscience that strongly suggest:

“… developing dispassion – the ability to displace ourselves emotionally from a situation that arouses our primal, emote control responses – is vital in being able to help others. In a related vein, developing our ability to use our rational brain to feel compassion for others – without mirroring their emotions – is important for preventing compassion fatigue or burn out often seen in those who care for the suffering.” [2]

We know we need to cultivate objectivity as well as our more intuitive feelings modes so that they work in unison. However, there is something more here than the dynamics of how our rational brains are so easily bypassed by images which elicit the required response. Pathological altruism is exacerbated and encouraged by psychopathy at institutional levels and which requires a total subversion of nobler thoughts that lead to altruistic action. This merely results in the creation of further multi-layered problems rather than the needed long-term amelioration.

It is the reflex of empathy and its altruistic actions which can and do cause harm based as they are on a) guilt that we do not do enough for our fellow-man and b) a lack of knowledge as to how this selfless giving may actually manifest in the world. Rather than facilitate the easing of suffering it can compound the problems, adding insult to injury as this passage from Oakley quoting the Time’s Nancy Gibbs illustrates:

After the 2004 tsunami, aid poured in from all over the world. But included tons of out-dated or unneeded medicines that Indonesian officials had to throw out. People sent Viagra or Santa suits, high-heeled shoes and evening gowns. A year later after an earthquake in Pakistani, so much unusable clothing arrived that people burned it to stay warm. It may make us feel good to put together children’s care packages with cards and teddy bears – but whose needs are we trying to meet? It may not feel glorious but often the greatest need is accomplished quietly, invisibly. Either way, the same principle holds in helping as in healing: First, do no harm.  [3]

And if such a simple, genuine outpouring of good intentions can be so easily go astray, what does this say about the more complex dynamics of our global institutions and foreign aid organisations enmeshed in a world that is by nature operating on a model that is exploitative?

The role of celebrities as entertainers, image makers and icons is ready to be made use of should opportunities arise. When necessary, the good-will and compassion of the people with disposable income and an awakening conscience can move mountains. This show of “people power” is, however, consistently diverted by a financial system that is grossly and purposefully unjust. The role of the media and the celebrity-fest surrounding the Live Aid world-wide concert in 1984 and the Live 8 concert which followed in 2005 is a case in point. Coinciding with the latter concert was the annual G8 Summit hosted by the UK. The G8 is composed of the world’s leading industrialised nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United States and Russia).

On the Live 8 website we read:

These concerts are the start point for The Long Walk To Justice, the one way we can all make our voices heard in unison. This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty. The G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough. By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.[4]

Despite having no rules governing its own operations, no formal or legal powers and no mechanisms of accountability, the G8 wields huge economic, military and diplomatic power in the institutions of global governance. These institutions include the UN Security Council, World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. They are products of a system that is the antithesis of decentralisation, the driving force being to achieve new market access for their members. As one aid expert stated regarding Geldof’s initial Live Aid: “… every seasoned aid worker knew then, and knows now, that there is no necessary connection between raising money for a good cause and that money being well spent, just as there is no necessary connection between caring about the suffering of others and understanding the nature or cause of that suffering.” [5]

This applies as much to ourselves as it does to the world at large. “Understanding the true nature and cause of that suffering.” The unpalatable truth is that G8 leaders and those above seem to have neither the inclination nor the desire to alter history unless it benefits their own particular requirements.

These concerts illustrated the well-spring of genuine empathy and compassion which was allowed to be cynically used and exploited via the egos – however well-intentioned – of a collection of celebrities. It was a perfect opportunity for politicians to get in on the act and smile for the cameras while the feckless media sung along. The facts are rather different to the sophistry and rhetoric heard so often from the likes of Bono and Geldof. Their own positions of influence are conveniently used to promote an agenda diametrically opposed to their own wishes to cancel debt and end poverty in Africa.

One has to ask why eleven years later, did we need another Live Aid?

Why did all those in the G8 for whom the suffering of millions have never made the slightest impression, suddenly grow a conscience?

They doffed their hats to Sir Bob because it dove-tailed into their agenda.

Bush, Geldof and Bono

The seemingly inspiring and very well-intentioned Live 8 event served as an actual and symbolic rendering of how our subjectivity is used against us all, directly mirroring the issues in exploitation. In this instance, it is a more intangible but cynical twisting of a potential mass altruism and the devaluing of an innate desire to assist, since we are encouraged to be drawn into the sensation of compassion without due attention to cause or effect or where these emotions are taking us. The very same participants within a system who created that tangible suffering in the first place are also those taking full advantage of directionless conscience. It is a circular feedback that benefits only the status quo based as it is, on the ignorance of the mechanism of politics and bureaucracy and our wishful thinking that we can “change the world,” in this context.

Not one month after the famous Live 8 concert, a much touted headline read: “$55bn Africa debt deal ‘a victory for millions’ which was splashed across the front page of the Observer in June 12 2005 with Sir Bob Geldof’s rhetoric reaching epic proportions stating: “Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny…”

Firstly, the G8 proposals for HIPC debt cancellation were already inadequate based on debt relief that will be granted to poor countries “… only if they are shown to be “adjusting their gross assistance flows by the amount given.” In other words, their aid will be reduced by the same amount as the debt relief, thus gaining nothing. Paragraph two states that “it is essential” that poor countries “boost private sector development” and ensure “the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign”.[6]

So, there we see the real reasons for the winks and smiles.

Let us not forget that debt payments rose in 2006 and have doubled in 2015. This alone dilutes the aforementioned “victory”. It is also the height of hypocrisy that while Bono, Geldof and other entertainers were wooing G8 leaders, British arms sales to Africa had reached £1bn a month before the concert and show no signs of slowing.[7]  This underlined the hollow nature of the event and the truth behind African poverty and debt.  (The hypocrisy is also underscored by Bono’s penchant for shifting his assets to offshore tax havens and investing in the very corporate franchises that he is telling us have to be reformed).[8]

The foundation of Africa’s wealth and resources are largely in the hands of trans-national corporations some of whom are directly or indirectly under the direction of G8 membership. The men in suits and soppy grins are the brokers and beneficiaries of this appalling suffering which continues under the euphemism of an “African Union.” This was signed into effect on July 11, 2000, by 54 nations of Africa. Like the European Union, it has only one peacekeeping force, one Central Bank, one Court of Justice, one currency, and so forth. Essentially, it is a blueprint for control that affords very little rights to Africans by promoting civil war and corruption from which the West can profit. They do this by keeping a cap on any independent development that might eclipse western interests.

Immediately after the Gleneagles meeting had wound down and G8 leaders had been chauffeured away to their sumptuous hotels the Belgian government was already hatching plans to give lenders greater control over poor countries and reneging on agreements to write off 100 percent of their debt. Belgian IMF representative Willy Kierkens is quoted in a document leaked to the activist group Jubilee Debt Campaign to an address to the IMF executive board that “rather than giving full, irrevocable and unconditional debt relief… countries would receive grants.” [9]

The then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that the agreed upon total of $48bn a year of aid by 2010 would also include a 100 percent cancellation of multilateral debts of the most indebted countries. Yet Gordon Brown brazenly claimed in a Treasury Committee that this aid increase includes money put aside for debt relief. Blair lied yet again and G8 member countries showed that their signatures symbolised nothing more than a temporary appeasement. [10]

Logo_of_the_African_UnionAfrican Union logo

From Making Poverty History a key working group, one activist argued that there existed the same old spin doctors doing what Alistair Campbell did so ruthlessly when covering up for Blair’s lies in the Downing Street Memos: “‘Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and our criticisms of UK government policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white bands, celebrity “luvvies” and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown.” [11] [12]

Yet Make Poverty History is not the only one to be absorbed by the new politics masquerading as New Labour – the new evangelism of the US. It is this New Wave that is shackling African Countries into the false economy of the African Union and the realization that any allotted money can only be accessed if they sign up to World Bank and IMF economic policy conditions.

While Blair, a born opportunist, was busy jumping aboard the Make Poverty History train, he knew all along that the emotional fuel would run out. Why else would he be secretly cutting the government’s Africa desk officers and staff at the same time that the Department for International Development was forcing the privatisation of water supply in Ghana for the benefit of British corporations? [13]

Amelioration of poverty, disease and significant successes do take place. And Geldof is right when he said that there was a global change in attitude. But this has never been the problem. Most normal human beings are immensely keen to help those suffering and in need. But the outpouring of emotion is not enough unless it is supported by effective frameworks (untarnished by political pathologies) through which change can flow. Overall, while temporarily more children were able to go to school and less were hungry the dependency and cycle of that debt remains. The “support” addresses symptoms which, although worthy, amount to sops and buffers around the primary fences of poverty, prolonged and exacerbated by Western exploitation. This includes massive bias towards privatization which comprises one half of the World Bank expenditure on what it considers worthwhile projects. Worthwhile that is, to its own coffers.

More and more conditions have been added to the initial agreements which were already piecemeal and ineffective. There were no real high level negotiations between Bush and Blair other than how best they could capitalize on naivety and gullibility of nations. For this duo it was merely an exercise in extracting the juice of image and hype to buttress their plummeting support on a range of issues. The overriding stipulation surrounding the whole sham of debt relief and the Make Poverty History movement was that it be conditional and tied to the original economic structures that created the problems in the first place.

Throw as much money as you like at these problems it will not alter the cycle of debt and poverty until the structure is re-evaluated and radically reformed.

We can only do that by becoming aware of what we are dealing with and immunizing ourselves against this psychological pathogen in our midst. We do that by learning everything is to know about how such people think and act.  Meantime, compassionate peoples are played by seasoned psychopaths for whom getting fat on power and profit at the expense of others is easy. The fact that 7,000 Africans die every day means nothing. They rely on it to secure their spoils.

There are ample reasons to conclude that Live Aid in 1984 was harmful as well as positive in limited terms. Yet what exactly did all this achieve? A compassion that lends wings to long-term action based on objectively evaluated pragmatic solutions, or a deadly compassion that serves to play into the hands of global leaders? “The fact is that Ethiopia remains one of Africa’s poorest countries, and the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is, if anything, worse off today than it was after Live Aid. Geldof himself has been of two minds. He says that Live Aid “created something permanent and self-sustaining” but has also asked why Africa is getting poorer.” [14]

As well he might.

Yes, just as the Ethiopian famine was a hideous reality, the final results of this great resettlement served the G8 powers admirably. As journalist David Rieff stated, the: “… resettlement policy – of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the “villagisation” of three million others – was at least in part a military campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted by Western aid money…” In effect, UN institutions and donor governments helped a totalitarian project kill thousands of people under the pretext of humanitarian assistance, where “…aid to victims was unwittingly transformed into support to their executioners.” [15]  According to French NGO Medecin Sans Frontieres [16] the death total from deportation and raids came to as many as the lives that were saved. The result was good PR for G8 leaders and more misery for the poverty-stricken.

So, do nothing? Isn’t the “the positivity of the action better than the pessimism of the thought?” As we have seen, it is a little more complex than that. Geldof has to be commended for his seemingly genuine intent and ability to cut through apathy and despair. Yet his passionate comments in a recent report to answer his critics summarises so many whose dynamism and emotional drive are used against them:

‘Behind all of this bitter carping is the corrosively cynical view that none of this works. That because they, as critics, do nothing, nobody else should even try. Well, they’re wrong. You can alter policy. The individual is not powerless in the face of either political indifference or monstrous human tragedy. Let me say it embarrassedly, cornily, almost guiltily. Let me try to say it without sounding like some pious twat. You can change the world. And millions upon millions of you did that this year. This stuff works. Sometimes. [17]

He goes on to discuss the dying baby Birhan Woldu the “little scrap of humanity” now a grown women who was saved by the original Live Aid concert 20 years ago… “all of it was worth it for just her. For that single life.”

It is hard to disagree isn’t it?

In one very real sense he is absolutely right and nothing should prevent such a call to action. But how are we to confront the deeper issues behind this call that is “in the box” of a wider control system that demands the cycles of endless Live Aids? That for one life saved, millions of dead will follow due to a subjective activism that plays into the hands of those several steps ahead. Live Aid camouflages the core issues and thus leads to a perpetuating cycles of the same.

Perhaps what we are facing in the 21st century is not a call to end third world debt or to demonstrate against any one particular political atrocity, of which there are many. It is to raise our awareness to the fact that the very core actions of our world are purposely and intentionally created by a minority of psychologically deviant persons. Until we grasp that fact, which includes an in depth knowledge of the mechanisms of political psychopathy, Geldof’s well meaning, but ultimately naive mission will be co-opted with mathematical precision.

Contrary to what the musician states, this stuff does not work. It never has. As clinical psychologist Andrew Łobaczewski  states: “even normal people, who condemn this kind of [Pathocracy] along with its ideologies, feel hurt and deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality, when a widely idealized group is exposed as little more than a gang of criminals.” [18]

And we are still duped by such a gang who know crowd psychology very well indeed.

 


Notes

[1]  (pp.239 -241) Pathological Altruism By Barbra Oakley http://www.amazon.com/Pathological-Altruism-Barbara-Oakley/dp/0199738572
[2] Ibid. (p.242)
[3] Ibid. (p.243)
[5] “Cruel to be kind?” by David Rieff, The Guardian, June 24, 2005 – “Live Aid forced the world to confront the Ethiopian famine and raised more than £50m. But as Bob Geldof prepares his Live 8 reprise, aid expert David Rieff argues that guilt-stricken donations helped fund a brutal resettlement programme that may have killed up to 100,000.”
[6] “John Pilger isn’t celebrating victory -‘The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade led by pop stars” Daily Mirror, June 26, 2005.
[7 ‘UK arms sales to Africa reach £1 billion mark’ The Guardian, Antony Barnett, June 12, 2005.
[8] ‘U2 Under Fire For Tax Move’ Irish Examiner, August 9, 2006.
[9] ‘G8 debt deal under threat at IMF’ By Steve Schifferes BBC News, 15 July, 2005
[10] ‘How the G8 lied to the world on aid’ The truth about Gleneagles puts a cloud over the New York summit by Mark Curtis, The Guardian, August 23, 2005: “Russia’s increase in ‘aid’ will consist entirely of write-offs. A third of France’s aid budget consists of money for debt relief; much of this will be simply a book-keeping exercise worth nothing on the ground since many debts are not being serviced. […] … the deal applies initially to only 18 countries, which will save just $1bn a year in debt-service payments. The 62 countries that need full debt cancellation to reach UN poverty targets are paying 10 times more in debt service. And recently leaked World Bank documents show that the G8 agreed only three years’ worth of debt relief for these 18 countries. They state that “countries will have no benefit from the initiative” unless there is ‘full donor financing’.The deal also involves debts only to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, whereas many countries have debts to other organisations. It is a kick in the teeth for the African Union, whose recent summit called for “full debt cancellation for all African nations”.
[11] http://www.downingstreetmemo.com. “The Downing Street ‘Memo’ is actually meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002. Published by The Sunday Times on May 1, 2005 it was the first hard evidence from within the UK or US governments that exposed the truth behind how the Iraq war began.  This site is intended to provide information about the Downing Street Memo and how it fits in with numerous other documents and events that relate to the Bush administration’s march to war.”
[12] ‘Make the G8 history’ By Stuart Hodkinson, Red Pepper, July 2005.
[13] If one visits the newly created Dept. of International Development (DFID) and the G8 websites one would be forgiven for thinking that everything is on track and the world is save in their hands. Toss in some rhetoric, statistics and self-effacing explanations of how hard it is to accomplish significant gains on the Millennium Development goals (yet drive to do all you can for the Department’s “Business Partnership Unit” which reveals the real intentions behind the Department as a whole) and there you have another quango headed by cabinet minister Hilary Benn MP with the inevitable cracks of impartiality will begin to appear if not intentionally created. Set up to filter direct action and further apply bureaucratic obstacles, political manipulation takes the place of clear, unambiguous directives. The case studies, and funding alone, although with merit, indicate a symptomatic and piecemeal approach that once again does not incorporate an overall strategy. that ensures a free-for-all competitive dash where the structure of suffering is allowed to be brushed under the global carpet.
[14] ‘Cruel to be kind?’ by David Rieff, The Guardian, Friday June 24, 2005.
[15] Ibid.
[16]www.doctorswithoutborders.org.
[17] ‘Geldof’s Year’ The Guardian, December 28, 2005.
[18] p.166; Political Ponerology – A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes By Andrew Lobaczewski.

The “Structural Adjustment Team” II

“The WTO has rapidly accumulated a sordid record. Binding decisions from its enforcement tribunals have undermined consumer and environmental protections around the world. TNCs have used the threat of WTO action to roll back or block countless rules designed to benefit workers, consumers and the environment, and to promote human rights and development in the world’s poorest countries. But all this has been predicted long before the WTO came into formal effect. From the outset GATT was seen as a “rich man’s club” dominated by Western industrial countries.”

Znet / Z mag.org, 12/28/04


wtoThe World Trade Organisation slithered into view much later in 1995 replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO’s mandate is to make sure that the free market has unfettered access to all and everything under the banner of free trade. International trade restrictions are to be reduced or done way with completely. This means a free ride for corporations once they claim their country.

The World Bank does exactly what its name implies: an international institution that gives loans to developing countries in order to improve their socio-economic standing and eradicate poverty. At least, that’s the official line if you believe the BBC and other MSM outlets. At the most basic level of interpretation, the interests which dominate the bank are drawn from Neo-liberal economic perception rooted in the Establishment classes which means that their interests dominate over all else. Though the World Bank represents 186 countries it is governed and funded by a powerful few, namely the United States and the G8 nations. It is thus tied to the formation of an economic order that conforms to their reality and no one else’s, the evidence of which is obvious for all to see. It is an immediate contradiction in terms that the reduction of poverty is formulated from an economic order which can only increase it.

One only has to look at the past and traditionally American presidents of the World Bank to understand the biased economic and corporate beliefs behind the dispensing of loans. These have included from 1991-1995: JP Morgan bank executive Lewis T. Preston; from 1995-2005: corporate lawyer and banker Sir James Wolfensohn; 2005-2007: Neo-Conservative and Iraq war strategist, US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and from 2007: the present incumbent Robert Zoellick former Bank executive with Goldman Sachs, Deputy Secretary of State and US Trade Representative. The eight international development goals that 193 United Nations member states and over 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. The World Bank has also agreed to commit itself to these goals which are to:

  • Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger
  • Reduce Child Mortality
  • Improve Maternal Health
  • Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases
  • Ensure Environmental Sustainability
  • Develop a Global Partnership for Development [1]

Tragically, (though certain members of the World Bank are entirely cognizant of this fact) eradicating poverty long-term is unlikely to be achieved because the World Bank actively creates it. That is not to say that great gains have not been made before the Global Economic Crisis. (GEC) According to the UN fact sheet “…the world is on track to meet the MDG target of halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day between 1990 and 2015.” While this is great news, to make sure this is a lasting change leading to the eradication of poverty and hunger and not just a peak in the overall trough of global economic fortunes, the very nature of economics has to change so that the crises such as we have witnessed in 2008 and onwards do not send the achievements plummeting back to former figures.

Since these achievements, by the UN’s own admission is largely due to the “extraordinary success in Asia, mostly East Asia” based on exactly the same banking and economic model of the West then it can only offer the same eventual boom and bust scenarios which have long been part of Western capitalist “growth” and the environmental and social problems attached to them. Thanks to the GEC global unemployment has rocketed as it does with any crisis. Consequently, while extreme poverty has been reduced, halving the levels of hunger is proving much more difficult, with only intermittent change.

Similarly, reducing child mortality, combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other disease cannot hope to have lasting results because the World Bank cannot recognise that all related problems largely stem from the economics has largely been absorbed into the underworld of systemic crime which has effectively become the “overworld.”

To ensure environmental sustainability the World Bank must redesign its economic framework to such an extent that there would be little reason for it to exist. The millennium goals are a world class oxymoron for most if not all institutions and organisations shackled by the very same myopic mind-set seen from those who inhabit the leather chairs of World Bank offices. A “Global Partnership for Development” under World Bank terms can only mean a continuing strategy for corporatism. If their basic economic directives do not change then neither do the consequences for most of the global population, despite G8 countries being willing to cut billions of owed debt from their books. [2]

All this may sound desperately cynical on my part. But you see, if you the UN is still encased in the same economic box, then any long-term alleviation of poverty, hunger and mortality rate will logically be dependent on the those highly unstable fluctuations which characterise the financial architecture of the globe. Nothing less than a radical overhaul of the very concept of banking and commerce is needed. Micro-credit and micro-banking is one example and a great step forward in this direction. [3]

The World Bank is the largest source of development finance in the world and has an impressive (or iniquitous depending on your view) record of large-scale engineering, reconstruction and infrastructure projects in developing countries. More regional and local projects have also been financed including roads, bridges, dams and pipelines which often go hand in hand with the extraction of natural resources and the presence of corporations lingering in the background.

The World Bank, The IMF, the WTO and the United Nations have helped to create, augment and sustain the current global financial architecture and its various social iniquities while offering occasional bursts of short-term relief in the guise of numerous social programs and initiatives. Seldom do they address the root causes of national and international socio-economic problems. Counter to the prevailing view that these post war institutions offer at least a partial amelioration of global problems, we can see that they are in fact, representatives of a Global Official Culture dressed up in humanitarian goals.

The above is the standard interpretation of the organisation which is enough in itself to petition for change. However, it goes deeper than that.

Former insider and one-time Senior Counsel Karen Hudes knows how the World Bank lies to run things. A graduate of the Yale Law School with over 20 years of experience in the legal Department at the World Bank and founder of the Non-Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association, Hudes knows about her subject extremely well.  During a May 2013 interview with journalist Alex Newman of New American magazine she was explicit as to how the mechanism of corruption is allowed to keep functioning and who is responsible. The article, entitled: ‘World Bank Insider Blows Whistle on Corruption, Federal Reserve’ reports that the domination of the global financial system, according to Hudes is sourced from: “…a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained.” The New American continues:  “Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.”

The article goes on to describe the basis of this control system:

“Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the ‘network of global corporate control,’ Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. ‘What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group, she explained, adding that the ‘corrupt power grabbers’ have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.’

According to the peer-reviewed paper, which presented the first global investigation of ownership architecture in the international economy, transnational corporations form a ‘giant bow-tie structure.’ A large portion of control, meanwhile, ‘flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions.’ The researchers described the core as an ‘economic ‘super-entity’ that raises important issues for policymakers and researchers. Of course, the implications are enormous for citizens as well.

[…] ‘I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt,’ she told The New American in a phone interview. “The pillars of the U.S. government — some of them — are dysfunctional because of state capture; this is a big story, this is a big cover up.’

At the heart of the network, Hudes said, are 147 financial institutions and central banks — especially the Federal Reserve, which was created by Congress but is owned by essentially a cartel of private banks. ‘This is a story about how the international financial system was secretly gamed, mostly by central banks — they’re the ones we are talking about,” she explained. ‘The central bankers have been gaming the system. I would say that this is a power grab.’ ” [Emphasis mine]

Rather than seeing this as a case of conspiratorial fever or a left-right political agenda being played out, it is far better to simply accept that Hudes – as have so many other whistleblowers in recent times – simply stated the objective reality of what she experienced, confirming what so many outsiders suspected after witnessing first-hand the trail of devastation it has produced.

If we know, then we may change it.

Perhaps we can see why the psychopath in society has played a large part in creating and maintaining the economic architecture which is still ruining lives. Psychologist and leading authority on the psychopath Dr. Robert Hare stated that if he could not study psychopaths in prison, his next best choice would be a Stock Exchange. If people are no more than units of labour consumption and values have no meaning at all when set against the personal power and corporate greed then it goes some way to explaining why such consistently toxic systems continue to ravage humanity and its home. As normal human beings try to compete in a system that is favoured towards the human predator it is inevitable that they are pushed to the periphery to become the minority rather than the majority. If there are four times more psychopaths at the head of large corporations than in the general population it means they immediately have a huge advantage in obtaining whatever it is they want, which is usually everything.

 


Notes

[1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_1_EN.pdf
[2] “G8 Finance Ministers agreed in June 2005 to provide enough funds to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the African Development Bank (ADB) to cancel an additional $40–55 billion debt owed by members of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) to allow impoverished countries to re-channel the resources saved from the forgiven debt to social programs for improving health and education and for alleviating poverty.” United Nations Millennium Development Goals website, 16 June 2009. This is an example. One can cancel 100billion of debt but if the same directives remain in place then so too will the next generation of victims. They will re-channel their resources so that they can be ready to take the next set of measures to keep them dancing to the WB, IMF and WTO tune.
[3] Microcredit or Microfinance: United Nations declared 2005 to be the International Year of Microcredit and the founders of the microcredit movement were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. For more articles see: New York Times: ‘Tiny Loans Make a Big Difference in Lives of Poor’ | http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/technology/29venture.html | USA Today/Associated Press: Microcredit pioneers win Nobel Peace Prize – http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-13-norway-nobel_x.htm | Wall Street Journal: A new way to do well by doing good – http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06005/633114.stm | BusinessWeek: ‘Microfinance funds lift poor entrepreneurs—and benefit investors’| http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_19/b3932134_mz070.htm | The Economist: ‘Microcredit in India, High finance benefits the poor’ – http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2413549

The “Structural Adjustment” Team I

By M.K. Styllinski

“The causes of the sustained crisis of development in the Third World are extremely complex, but it is certain that excessive reliance on export-led growth in an unstable world economy creates major structural problems that all growth strategies must avoid. But exports are at the core of the IMF philosophy, and its guidance has gravely hindered the struggle of innumerable poor nations to escape their suffering.”

Gabriel Kolko


The World Bank, (WB) The International Monetary fund, (IMF) and The World Trade Organisation (WTO) are responsible for extending Official Culture on a macro-social scale. They are by default, a global cartel spreading a belief which has translated the true meaning of globalisation as a New International Economic order which has led to decades of social, economic and cultural decay for the world.  The unofficial goals of the IMF and World Bank was to always make sure that the consolidation of riches and power would remain in Elite hands and be expanded; fully aware that World War II gave them the opportunity to do just that.

As with so many institutions hastily created during the end and just after the Second World War, The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded by US and British Governments at The Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 Hampshire, USA. The official line was to develop strong economies for those European countries most affected by the carnage of the War. What it also did was to firmly establish an overriding economic belief to the exclusion of any other. Both are closely allied with Wall Street bankers and the US Treasury so that economic policies that benefit private investors and financial speculators in the free-market are guaranteed to be implemented, come what may.

The best illustration of this is the “Washington Consensus” developed by the World Bank and IMF members in the early eighties and which finalised the process of large-scale outsourcing, financial deregulation, and privatisation. This paid huge dividends for multi-national corporations, the international banking industry, Wall St., and the world’s richest family dynasties but proved to be a social, cultural and ecological disaster for both the working and middle-class in the West and the developing world. It was finally eclipsed by the rise of China but the results live on.

Both the IMF and the World Bank decisions are based on 40 percent of the votes from the G8 countries which is not what you might call “representative.” Considering its toxic effects its more than ironic that the IMF is funded with taxpayer money, yet functions in a state of secrecy and legal immunity. Extraordinarily, the World Bank and the IMF are not accountable for their actions under law. It is therefore almost impossible to dismantle this vast banking entity holding so many countries to ransom with almost breath-taking hypocrisy that it is somehow acting as global saviour. At the same time, as with the United Nations, if the US sees something that threatens its interests then it merely has to veto the proposed action by the World Bank and sit back and puff on a cigar. This extends to the design and implementation of loan packages by international bankers and finance staff without any participation from civic society or government policy and most importantly, from those it will most affect.

At 18 percent of the vote the US straddles both institutions and makes sure that the power of their veto always conforms to US and G7 interests. This means the global economy stays within the narrow confines of what is possible and not possible which is defined by the very same institutions in the first place. This in turn, ensures that poorer nations are excluded from all talks despite being present at the meetings.

A flagship example of this reality-disconnect arrived in the form of the “Structural adjustment” policy replaced by the euphemistic “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” (PRSPs) in 1999. The latter sounded wonderfully altruistic but the framework and “solutions” remain exactly the same, namely, to determine other countries economic policies so that they fall into line with the dominant Capitalist model of the West. That means comprehensively trashing social welfare introducing austerity measures in order to pay for the “generous” loans to rebuild its infrastructure. With its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the IMF describes itself as “an organization of 188 countries working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty.”  The organisation’s stated objectives are to promote international economic cooperation, international trade, employment, and exchange rate stability, including by making financial resources available to member countries to meet balance of payments needs.

The sticking point in all this is that if you increase and promote Neo-Liberal economic policies which are, by nature, elitist and centralist then poverty can only be the end result. Hence the idea of the IMF reducing poverty will still produce large guffaws of incredulity at any self-respecting anti-globalisation gathering. Much like the World Bank, the IMF is better suited as a warden of a global apartheid as described by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in 1980. The IMF and the World Bank have overseen the Structural Adjustment scam for decades and it only becomes comprehensible when one sees these giants as glorified loan sharks for the corporate, banking and military sphere as it is in these sectors that the institutions pay dividends.

When the country becomes the victim of a global economy that causes intolerable strains on its economic infrastructure, then it is persuaded to turn to the very institutions that are part of the problem in the first place. If economic catastrophe looms then the IMF is usually the first port of call. This is an open door not just to loans but the whole economic policy that requires a complete “re-adjustment” to their worldview. It is a Faustian bargain and one which leaves the social fabric of the country irrevocably torn. The prioritization of debt repayment overrides all and any other consideration, where GDP becomes the only measurable unit of human currency so that values, community and local business mean nothing.

In order to ensure that the debt remains viable and the corporations and bankers that oversee the privatization and liberalisation that ensues social welfare programs and other cultural initiatives are inevitably cut in order to feed the new black hole of intervention. Deregulating the markets of targeted countries opens them up to rampant speculation, corporate predators and the endemic corruption that goes with it. This means it is much easier to sell off a nation’s assets at sub-standard prices. Haiti is a case in point. In 2000 the IMF stepped in and carried out food terrorism by forcing the nation to accept highly subsidized genetically modified US rice while making sure that Haiti’s farmers did receive the same treatment. US corporations now have the monopoly on Haiti’s food production, distribution and exports with over 50 percent of rice being sold back to the Haitians. The indigenous farmers meanwhile have become yet more victims of the US monoculture and have ended up working in sweatshops for slave wages. [1]

Under structural adjustment, social spending from government budgets to programs and subsidies are all severely cut or reduced in order to quickly start repaying the debt. The whole way of life changes: hospitals, businesses and schools begin to be sucked into the dollar-sign mentality where materialism replaces values and a sense of community are extinguished. The cost of living rises exponentially while the quality of life plummets. Everything becomes a matter of survival as poverty arrives with a vengeance. Meanwhile, bankers and corporatists are upgrading their yachts and opening new off-shore tax accounts.

As we have seen in spectacular fashion, the IMF’s record of bailing out countries (which is really bailing out the Banksters) continued during the 2008 economic collapse up to the present time. IMF bailouts deepen, rather than solve, economic crises except when countries such as Iceland reject the IMF debt slavery and actually take Banksters to court. [2] Bailouts of billions of dollars amount to shoring up a financial system that favours the status quo rather than staving off collapse. South Korea, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and others have all experienced the consequences of the IMF’s “helping hand” which led to severe economic instability to surface in other countries. Billions of dollars, pounds and euros have disappeared into a black hole which has meant that vast cuts in social systems under the banner of “austerity measures” have been secured so that the taxpayer actually foots the bill for reckless and criminal activities of the bankers themselves. It is no coincidence that large Anglo-American banking firms made billions of dollars of profit after governments showered them with bailouts while the general public in both Europe and America suffered a massive drop in their standard of living with unemployment soaring to levels unheard of. [3]

The number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty increased to over 50 percent during the 1995 IMF-imposed economic reforms and peso bailout and the national average minimum wage fell 20 percent. This is a familiar story and one which has now led to a severe global depression with the bankers kicking the bailout can further down the street in an attempt to cream as much hedge fund benefits from this financial disaster as they can. They knew it was coming as all good high-level speculators do. This is exactly what has happened in the past to some Asian, European and Latin American countries, most famously Argentina which suffered from a protracted and very serious economic collapse in 2001 after being considered a model of compliance from IMF and US treasury loan “largesse.” [4]

To allow an easy ride for foreign investors to plunder countries targeted by the Structural Adjustment Team restrictions to what can be bought, sold and owned is lifted. Interest rates are also increased in order to push up and maximize profitability for the corporate marauders who then syphon it off to their native countries. Meanwhile, local economies and their communities disappear to produce unemployment, immigration and the increase in the inner city slum quota.

Commensurate with this arrival of what is touted as an economic saviour is the dramatic reconfiguration of agriculture as one of the most important influences of the Structural Adjustment Team. Subsistence farming, community-based local produce and environmentally sustainable practices gives way to monoculture farming predicated on pesticides, herbicides, GM food-stuffs and genetically modified crops. The whole nature of a society and a nation are altered from the control of food and food production. Local competition is quickly eradicated as wealthy landowners and managers take over. The rise in famine and malnutrition surfaces rapidly in response to agribusiness, as does the level of environmental degradation from massive exploitation of resources.

Under the IMF’s take on reality, export production is king; a diversified domestic economy cannot work. At least, not if you are a bankers intent on reaping short term benefit. It literally pays to place the country into debt. Almost 80 percent of all malnourished children in the developing world live in countries where there is a food surplus and farmers have changed from local to intensive farming for the West. [5] Structural adjustments were a euphemism for turning a country inside out and having its insides picked clean by an economic model that was number-based rather than human-based. In summary, it is another form of global, economic imperialism.

In a desperate attempt to prop up the global financial and centralised government systems to which it owes its existence, the IMF released a report called “Taxing Times” in October 2013, outlining schemes to allow bankrupt governments to accrue more money through higher taxes and even confiscate money straight out of our bank accounts. This occurred in the 2012 financial fiasco in Cyprus which saw those with savings above £100,000 lose over 75 percent to government looting which will serve as a template for a more global enterprise enshrined in law.

Massive transfer of wealth to governments and corporations is what the Structural Adjustment Team do so well. Indeed, since people are very much more aware of the danger of having their pensions and savings stolen by this institution it means it must device more devious ways of preventing that resistance. Which is why the report warms to the European Union’s idea of taxing anyone with more assets than debt so that the global financial system remains tied to debt and fiat currency.

Without debt the IMF and its brothers cannot exist. Though the report is dressed up as targeting the tax–haven rich in reality, it is the middle classes who hold much of the proportionate savings thus offering a vast untapped source of revenue. Woe betide the average wage earner and the rich who are not enmeshed in the Establishment as they will become the targets of a new tax regime designed to continue the present iniquities rather than lose them. After all, the IMF realises that it cannot tax the assets of the 1 percent of its super-rich brethren as it wouldn’t be enough to service government needs. However, factor all those middle-class households with positive net wealth then it represents a bonanza of untapped taxation.  Taxes of 60 – 70 percent are being touted as a means to find new sources to both increase and feed the debt hole. As corporations and private businesses are also seen as a way to inaugurate a massive new global taxation scheme underpinned by regulatory enforcement it really means that the same centralised system will continue to funnel extortionate amounts of money into pointless government programs which underpin unceasing, infinite maw of debt as the arbiter of economic reality. And the IMF want to erect these new taxes in law before people have a chance to understand what it means: a further tightening of the screw of cartel capitalism where private property and personal assets are up for grabs. True structural reforms will remain absent under the IMF stewardship.

The IMF has a partner in crime.

The WTO acts as the oil between ‘free-trade’ nations encouraging global competition and the unrestricted flow of goods and services. But because globalisation means more and more trans-national companies taking a bigger and bigger slice of the pie then “competition” has come to mean “exploitation” rather than the now almost quaint notion of measured capitalism proposed by the Keynesian model. The WTO is therefore a tool of corporatism like its partners.

It must be considered the height of hypocrisy regarding the standards of these institutions who insist on countries adhering to democratic reforms as prerequisite to receiving their loans. It is clear however that neither the IMF, the WB, the WTO or for that matter the United Nations  come close to being examples of anything approaching democratic. While the WTO in particular, may be constitutionally democratic, its actions and net results are perfect examples of the opposite where corruption and financial misappropriation is highly damaging to any countries that fall under its influence.

The WTO is essentially a corporate enabler. It makes sure the small print is limited and regulations designed to protect the consumer and the ordinary man and woman in the street are so diluted as to be non-existent. Trade agreements are the WTO’s forte as is the continuing expansion of the corporate net. But to make sure these trans-nationals have unlimited market access, circumvention of the domestic laws, civil rights, access to natural resources and services of vulnerable countries must be carried out and the WTO trade agreements provide this opportunity, dressed up as benefits for all.

Some of the most important and influential agreements from the WTO include:

  • The 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) This “general agreement” means that ways were found to remove any and all domestic restrictions and regulations to trade. It makes a nation’s right to govern itself i.e. its sovereignty is thrown out of the window under the pretext of free trade.
  • The Trade Related agreement on International Property Rights (TRIPS) is perhaps the most dangerous “agreement” formed at the Uruguay round of the WTO talks which permits intellectual property rights to include seeds and plants. It is the basis upon which corporations like Monsanto have held farmers to ransom and prosecuted many for planting unlicensed seeds which have already been genetically modified to have a limited life so that farmers must buy a new batch every year. Thousand year old ties to Nature and her knowledge have been tossed out of the window in a matter of a decade. Peter Drahos writes that “It was an accepted part of international commercial morality that states would design domestic intellectual property law to suit their own economic circumstances. States made sure that existing international intellectual property agreements gave them plenty of latitude to do so.” [6]
  • The Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) allows domestic finance to fall under the domination of corporate dictates while eroding a nation’s ability to have a say in their own policies regarding foreign investments domestic fiscal policy.

What all this means is that GATS, TRIPS and TRIMS are the means by which vulnerable countries are coerced into giving up their economic, social and cultural independence while their often unique resources are plundered – all under law.  They are able to do this because corporate lobbyists have direct access to government policy makers and spend billions of dollars making sure the WTO agreements stay firmly in the court of corporatism. Which is why most developing countries are never able to have a voice or stand up for their rights once they have been seduced by the false promises of loans which are only given on the agreement to implement Structural Adjustment Programs.

 


Notes

[1] Oxfam America Research Backgrounders: ‘Haiti Rice Value Chain Assessment: Rapid diagnosis and implications for program design’ By David C. Wilcock and Franco Jean-Pierren| http://www.files.meetup.com/1337582/Rice%20Value%20Chain%20Backgrounder%20.pdf
[2] ‘Iceland just sentenced its first bankster to prison’ by James http://www.12160.info, Social Network, December 28, 2012.
[3] ‘Eurozone Unemployment Soars to New High’ VOA News, April 2012. – http://www.voanews.com/content/eurozone-unemployment-reaches-record-high/1579633.html | ‘Youth unemployment soars, and it’s not just a phase’ By Heather Stewart, The Guardian, 13 April 2012 -www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/apr/13/youth-unemployment-rising-work-programme | ‘Gallup Finds Unemployment Rate Soars Following Presidential Election’ By Tyler Durden, http://www.zerohedge.com June 12, 2012.
[4] ‘Economic debacle in Argentina: The IMF strikes again’ – “Argentina’s economic policies during the 1990s were developed under the direction of the IMF. The following article analyses the fatal flaws in these policies.” By Arthur MacEwan, TWN Third World Network via http://www.fpif.org. | http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr137b.htm
[5] ‘Facts and Figures About the UN Millenium Goals’ http://www.gender-cawater-net / In its 2000 Millennium Declaration, the United Nations set 8 goals for development, called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals set an ambitious agenda for improving the human condition by 2015.
[6] p38; Information Feudalism, By Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, New Press, 2003 | ISBN-10: 1565848047.