We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Mali and AFRICOM’s Africa Agenda: Target China

Click here to access article by F. William Engdahl from Boiling Frogs.

As always, this astute geo-political analyst provides a comprehensive and powerful antidote to cure us of mainstream media's poisonous coverage of the latest Empire adventure in Mali which he amusingly describes as follows:
We are being told repeatedly in recent months that something supposedly calling itself Al Qaeda—the organization officially charged by the US Government as responsible for pulverizing three towers of the World Trade Center and blowing a gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001—has regrouped
According to the popular media account and statements of various NATO member country government officials, the original group of the late Osama bin Laden, holed up we are supposed to believe somewhere in the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, has apparently adopted a modern business model and is handing out Al Qaeda official franchises in a style something like a ‘McDonalds of Terrorism,’ from Al Qaeda in Iraq to Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in Libya and now Al-Qaeda-in-the Islamic-Maghreb.
Guess what? Many of the key actors in this contrived war were educated or trained in the US, and others put in place by French political agents. Once again, we see Empire operatives destabilizing a small country and creating choas, but a carefully managed chaos ultimately designed to serve Empire interests. Engdahl describes this type of operation:
The method is sometimes referred to as “Gang/Counter-Gang.” The essence is that the orchestrating intelligence agency or military occupying force, whether the British Army in Kenya or the CIA in Afghanistan, de facto controls the actions of both sides in an internal conflict, creating small civil wars or gang wars to the aim of dividing the overall legitimate movement and creating the pretext for outside military force in what the US now has deceptively renamed as “Peace-Keeping Operations” or PKO.
Following this, Engdahl writes about the Empire's general plan to counter the successful strategies of the Chinese government in their efforts to gain influence in Africa and access to African resources.

Under capitalism the world always tends to be seen by capitalist actors as functioning according to the Law of the Jungle. In advanced capitalism this tendency degenerates into an almost exclusive reliance on the use of force to maintain dominance.