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

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Egypt’s Junta Has Nothing to Lose

Click here to access article by M. K. Bhadrakumar from Strategic Culture Foundation.

One might say that "the more things change, the more they stay the same". As one country after another is destabilized using death squads, terrorist groups, and adjunct militaries, the change of US administrations changes nothing. That is simply because behind the smoke and mirrors of capitalist electioneering, there exists the same shadow government dominated by banksters and their hired operatives that have the same agenda--world domination by any means necessary.
The appointment of Robert Ford as the new American ambassador to Egypt was indeed an ominous sign that the Obama administration expected civil war conditions to arise in Egypt. Ford’s forte during his hugely successful "diplomatic" assignment in Baghdad in the middle of the last decade was to organize the notorious death squads, which tore Mesopotamia apart and destroyed Iraq almost irreparably.
Equally, Ford played a seminal role in his subsequent ambassadorial assignment in Damascus in 2011 in successfully triggering the Syrian civil war. Ford is the living embodiment of the stunning reality that between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, there has been no real shift in the United States’ policies in the Middle East aimed at perpetuating its regional hegemony…
However, I don't share his cynical regard for the great Egyptian tragedy of the past month as just another geopolitical game being played by Empire directors. The author is no anti-capitalist, he just wants geopolitical players to play nice, and when they don't--which is nearly always--he trots out his cynicism, and even goes so far as to justify the military's brutal repression. (Note in the following paragraph that "pluralist democracy" is Empire newspeak for capitalist electioneering.)
... a strategic ambivalence has developed – as had happened during the brutal civil war in Algeria – to the effect that political Islam is a pernicious thing and is antithetical to pluralist democracy and human rights, and sometimes coercion and even military force may become necessary to counter its surge.
Nowadays ruling classes and empires are being threatened by freedom and peace loving people everywhere. The "Arab Spring" was an example of this. As a result we see the capitalist directors and their Medieval cronies resorting to the most barbaric methods possible to make the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Iraqis, and the Syrians as examples to deter any more freedom loving people from aspiring to a better life. However, I don't think this story is over yet.