I think you can measure the death of democracy by the sheer audacity of the propaganda that government can get away with. Michael Fallon today on the Marr programme churned out the “70,000 moderate rebels” lie with a smooth bland face, and mentioned only the Free Syrian Army when pressed on who they were exactly. This is dishonesty on an epic scale.
But the really breathtaking one was to follow. Fallon claimed that the UK had killed hundreds of ISIL militants by bombing in Iraq and caused not one single civilian casualty. This risible claim had appeared in the Daily Mail last week, which is to be expected. But that a government minister can state such an absolutely ludicrous lie before a major BBC journalist without being seriously pushed on the matter, really does say a great deal about what kind of “democracy” the UK now is.
As does the fact that a substantial number of MPs of the official “opposition” have spent the weekend actively colluding with government ministers to forward the government’s militarist agenda.
I am proud to say that Scotland seems largely immune from the prevalent jingoism. The idea that bombing Raqqa will prevent terrorist attacks in Europe is plainly so nonsensical, that it is hard to know whether people like Fallon have actually managed to convince themselves of it or not. What this all will do, of course, is reinforce the military/security state that the UK has become.
I have no doubt that the Iraq War was one factor in making the people of Scotland realise that the UK is not an entity that matches their aspirations for the way a state should behave. Splitting the UK is a process. This incomprehensible Westminster bloodlust for bombing will drive the division wider. As will the whole ambience of the Etonian government and the peculiar social behaviour of its inner group, as even our coy media is hinting at in its coverage of the Shapps/Clarke group.
I can sense Independence coming close with every new morning.
Im not scottish, from the way this is going i pressume most of you are. Do you think people in Scotland are more against intervention because a terrorist attack in Dundee is less likely than in Manchester for example???
Republic:
Sitting in the dock at The Hague.
As they waste their time
No way will this demon ever stand trial for any of the dozens heinous crimes he has committed. Even if by some miracle he were to be indicted- he’d be “taken care of” to use Tony Soprano parlance.
If Scots MPs were a significant factor in securing a NO vote, then I’m sure ISIS would attack.
That’s why ISIS attacked France, isn’t it.
To make sure France bombed them.
“If i was syrian id prefer the Brits to ISIS, and the americans, and the russians, and the french on the basis they dont have a great success rate……” Phil
You’re not a Syrian, Phil. Perhaps if you werea Syrian, you might have preferred the Baathist reginme to ISIS, or the Ottoamn regime, or even the Outer Mongolian regime, to ISIS. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a regime worse than thatof ISIS, unless perhaps it is the Belgian regime in the Congo. But the Brits and Americnas and French have directly helped ISIS and the other clerical facsist to become so pwoerful in the region and beyond. If we genuinely wanted to “degrade” ISIS, our fisrt setp would be to issue an ultimatum to Riyadh. Turkey could destroy ISIS in weeks if it wanted. Instead, Turkey has been helping ISIS and all the other Jihadists in Syria.
Are you suggesting that NATO re-colonise Syria, just like we did Iraq in 2003? Now, that was a wonderful success, wasn;t it?
The stuff about ‘precision bombing’ was trumpeted after the 1990-91 war – all those silly TV pictures of bombs disappearing down chimney – but we know it was fake, it was propaganda. Now we are hearing the same tired old material being regurgitated.
You can fool some fo the people all of the time…
Sorry Phil, I gave you the wrong link (however it is a good one nevertheless).
I meant this one posted by Fredi. ALL WARS ARE BANKERS WARS-The Movie.
At 12.22pm on 28th.
Why was ISIS given the same acronym as the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service.
Is it some sort of in-joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGrG8wy04ek
What a disingenuous and idiotic question Phil. Putting aside that most terrorist attacks are synthetic terror, self-inflicted to further a military agenda, intervention, as you call wanton imprecise bombing is simply inhumane and as we have seen would be highly selective, i.e. ISIS or whatever they’re to be known as now, would not be the target, but Syrian forces and Syrian civil, military and economic targets, as well as civilians themselves. The only discernible goal of the west is subjection of Syria, strangulation by debt, theft of its resources and, and this is where you’re coming from, killing as many people as they possibly can, because they can and wish to show it, I’ve never myself understood what the kick is people get from killing. Perhaps you could explain it Phil?
This Land is Mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
“At some point Russia will announce that its air campaign is over and that there is nothing more that can be usefully achieved by airstrikes. Assad may then declare a temporary no-fly zone over Syria so that the delicate ground campaign can proceed without being compromised by unfortunate misunderstandings and loose-cannon buffoons like Erdogan.”
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Oh I don’t know so much MJ, Syria has backed and been backed by Russia since the onset of the Cold war. In my opinion Assad is holding out hoping for some sort of truce or peace treaty, that will keep him in power.
The peace treaty or truce may come to fruition but not without the removal of Assad, and the treaty/truce will only be forthcoming if NATO proxy forces are taking a pounding, which in my opinion they are, hence Hollande and Cameron, and the bombing campaign.
“If Scots MPs were a significant factor in securing a NO vote, then I’m sure ISIS would attack.
That’s why ISIS attacked France, isn’t it.
To make sure France bombed them.”
No, France is already bombing them. The attack was to try and get them to send ground troops in so they can get revenge for the bombing.
“No way will this demon ever stand trial for any of the dozens heinous crimes he has committed. Even if by some miracle he were to be indicted- he’d be “taken care of” to use Tony Soprano parlance.”
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Yeah Lance, that’s true, but it put a wee smile on my face anyway.
Speaking of Blair shouldn’t we send him to Syria, afterall he was a Middle East ambassador surely he could broker some sort of peace deal, says I with tongue in cheek.
” I have a theory that if we leave the Islamic world alone, it might eventually leave us alone. ”
Well that worked for the Yazidis didn’t it?
https://www.rt.com/news/323855-yazidi-mass-grave-trapped/
Isn’t there a broader geopolitical context to all this.
Iran, Russia and China need Syrian access to the Med for their pipelines and silk roads etc.
The US, UK etc would prefer to stop that.
Syria is just a more complex version of the Ukraine.
re Fredi 2.02
I find Peter Ford to be an excellent commentator on Syrian matters, a man who knows his stuff, with a lot of experience. He seems to be quite outspoken in that clip.
Seeing that kind of comment, I do wonder whether Cameron is going to get his vote through.
“No, France is already bombing them”
Really.
Most reports seem to say that previous bombings of ISIS were ineffectual.
“No, France is already bombing them. The attack was to try and get them to send ground troops in so they can get revenge for the bombing.”
Friday the 13th was the reprisal for French bombing which started on September 15th.
“Isn’t there a broader geopolitical context to all this.
Iran, Russia and China need Syrian access to the Med for their pipelines and silk roads etc.
The US, UK etc would prefer to stop that.
Syria is just a more complex version of the Ukraine.”
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Don’t tell me you actually contemplated that NATO want rid of Assad because he is a bad man, and the West wants to bring democracy to Syria.
If that were the case, Mugabe, Netanyahu, and Salman of Saudi Arabia would be at the top of the list.
“Don’t tell me you actually contemplated that NATO want rid of Assad because he is a bad man, and the West wants to bring democracy to Syria.”
I used to think that.
That’s what the newspapers and telly were always saying.
Then I discovered that they support and promulgate war and slaughter just so’s they can retain their comfy lifestyles.
Meanwhile, Erdogan’s prosecuting journalists for reporting that he’s been supporting these terrorists with weapons, amongst other things;
“Turkish newspaper editor in court for ‘espionage’ after revealing weapon convoy to Syrian militants”
https://www.rt.com/news/323557-turkey-arrests-editor-cumhuriyet/
No need for bombing.
Just get Cameron and Obama to call off their dogs.
The war-mongers, or interventionists as they style themselves to mask the horror, their own moral failure, their greed and bloodlust, their servitude to the elite, are no better than ISIS’s worst nutters on their worst days. They’re actually worse, they sit comfortably far away, in sinecure non-jobs, meritless beneficiaries of nepotism and privilege, a class apart, without the excuses of poverty, insecurity, injustice, amidst carefully sown and tended religious or other divide and rule manifestations, which might lead to extremism, but doesn’t often, without further powerful, external aggravating, facilitating factors, such as putting guns, heavy weapons and cash in their hands.
There are no moderate rebels, the immoderate rebels already eliminated them. The nearest thing there is to a moderate rebel is the Syrian Government and the overwhelming majority who support that government and want the Saudi and Turkish jailhouse dregs and the foreign mercenaries and special forces, special in that they’re all certifiable, to leave their country and the banksters air forces, the BAF, to, at least figuratively drop dead.
Craig writes:
“I have a theory that if we leave the Islamic world alone, it might eventually leave us alone.”
Possibly. But the terrorist attacks against countries that have played no part in the “war on terror” might disprove your theory.
And then we have the daily terrorist atrocities by Muslims against Muslims.
The slaughter by Sunni fanatics of 21 Shia pilgrims in Nigeria on Friday went almost unnoticed by the media, such is the normality of these events today. Indeed, the whole of last week was full of such atrocities around the Islamic world.
The War on Terra – Canada vs Australia [RAP NEWS 17]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM3W5XBrVEA
The West needs Russia, Iran, and China
They need Russian and Iran Oil & and they need Chinese investment (money). Without them the West would fall. (starve and be cold with worry – like it is now)
The West is playing with fire. Nuclear power.
It is looking too as if many of the established western-recognised Kurdish separatists are no more than Israeli puppets themselves, and those Kurds fighting ISIS are clearly not the same as the Kurds working with ISIS selling stolen Iraqi oil via Turkey to Israel.
“And then we have the daily terrorist atrocities by Muslims against Muslims.
The slaughter by Sunni fanatics of 21 Shia pilgrims in Nigeria on Friday went almost unnoticed by the media, such is the normality of these events today. Indeed, the whole of last week was full of such atrocities around the Islamic world.”
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Atrocities, well I don’t recall any Islamic country intervening in the Reformation, nor the War of the Roses, nor the wars of Scottish independence, so why are we poking our nose into their problems.
The truth is we’re not their to help at all, but to forward an agenda.
“The slaughter by Sunni fanatics of 21 Shia pilgrims in Nigeria on Friday”
Who’s running those Sunni fanatics.
Has Nigeria got oil, or something.
The basic problem is that the Tories, including the large faction which sits among the Opposition, sense that time is running out for the politics of imperialism, picking working class pockets and stripping public assets while calling upon the victims to look faraway where dark skinned foreigners are planning to come and pick pockets, seize public property and otherwise plunder and rape.
ISIS really is the latest (and it must be close to the last) in a series of “threats” which grow increasingly ludicrous and diminish in credibility as time passes-and the ruling class’s sense that democracy must be eradicated becomes increasingly urgent. The threat of people thinking for themselves, informing themselves and refusing to submit to the latest hysterical hatefest is rapidly growing. It was hard enough to convince grown-ups that Saddam was about to attack them, how much more difficult is it to cast ISIS in the role of imminent threat to an ancient way of life?
The warmongers are in a difficult position-the lies that they peddle (and cripple their brains by schooling themselves to believe) are only credible to utterly demoralised proles, exhausted by scrabbling around looking for the rent money, desperately insecure and totally demoralised by two generations of Miners Strike re-runs, in which the poor always get poorer and the rich and their agents have complete impunity, in which the tax burden is settled on the backs of the consumer and pools of wealth grow exponentially in tax shelters run by the likes of Cameron’s daddy.
It is a situation that has only been maintained by using the Intelligence and Police services to decapitate any signs of revolt. With complete surveillance of the sort that is now possible, the possibility or reaching total control before widespread spontaneous uprisings are translated into revolution and transformative reform (free tuition, decent unemployment and social security systems, public transportation and housing- all of which were available forty years ago- and a progressive income tax) depends upon cultural globalisation.
The enemy of totalitarian rule is local initiative and popular sovereignty: the UK broken up into its constituent parts, among which are North and South as well as London, Scotland and Wales, the madness of which Fallon is a symptom collapses into a land full of belly laughs and common sense reasoning.
Yes, Craig it is to be hoped that Scotland divorces itself from the UK but only because it can (and will) then purge itself of the sort of sub imperialist authoritarianism, phony antiquarianism and Celtic Tiger posturing that currently infects the “here’s tae us..” Nationalist movement.
“These are precise pieces of equipment, laser guided or GPS aided…” writes Phil:
To be precise they are laser guided to within 50 metres of their targets. This, given the nature of the explosive materials employed, means that a rather large area is fatal for human life.
As Cockburn puts it in The Independent, ISIS has a few thousand militiamen in a city in which there are tens of thousands of completely innocent hostages. There is no justification for bombing the place which is not racist-namely, the calculation that risking the lives of infantrymen will prove more dangerous than committing a minor holocaust in which thousands of unarmed, fightened people are killed. Such was the justification used for bombing Gaza because it is axiomatic in Israel that the life of one IDF soldier is worth ten thousand Arab lives. Now it is being employed to spare British and American people the pain of realising that wars lead to death and that “heroes” sometimes have to face enemy fire.
Fredi
29 Nov, 2015 – 2:55 pm
Sorry about that one, usually they do far better stuff.
I wonder if Andy Murray will accept a Knighthood or, will it be offered?
History repeats itself, and it will continue to do so until that 100th monkey finally wises up and becomes aware that we are being propagandized, manipulated and deceived on a grand scale by our own politicians, intelligence service and the corporate media’s talking heads:
‘
Confession of a CIA Agent: They gave us millions to dismember Yugoslavia
Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, has authored many books which disclosed the secrets of both the CIA and the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has been arrested and detained several times. Mitt Waspurh, a personal friend who worked at the Senate and shared information was killed at gunpoint. As a senior CIA operative, Baer worked in Yugoslavia during the 1991-94 period and in the Middle East. He has worked on several documentaries on National Geographic, accusing the Bush administration of waging war for oil.
The interview was conducted live in Canada, during my trip a few days ago. Robert Baer is currently promoting his book “The Secrets of the White House” in Quebec, where we talked. In an interview we spoke of the background of the war in Yugoslavia.
My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media.
http://www.ebritic.com/?p=551270