1. “Behind the Arab Revolt is a Word We Dare Not Speak
Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of World War Two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “Western civilisation,” found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy.”
As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu, and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone,” the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this Western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market,” according to Britain’s official arms “procurers,” join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.
The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.
How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2011/02/24/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak/
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/02/dc-politicians-deal-with-financial.html
3. Of course it is:
“Libya: Is Washington Pushing for Civil War to Justify a US-NATO Military Intervention?”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23375
4. “Why the Outcome of Bahrain’s Unrest Matters
While the world is focusing on the fighting in Libya, there is a much more profound development taking place in the Persian Gulf, particularly in the country of Bahrain, where the government is negotiating with the opposition. And the outcome of those negotiations will be far more geopolitically relevant and significant than the fighting that is taking place in Libya.
The reason why Bahrain is very important is because in any negotiation you have to have some give-and-take, and it’s likely that the Bahraini monarchy will have to give some concession to the opposition. And once that happens, it will lead to an empowerment of the opposition, 70 percent of which is Shia — 70 percent of the population of the country is Shia — and that has very large-scale implications for the region, particularly for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In Kuwait, the royal family and the legislature have been engaged in a tug of war for many years, and if the opposition forces within the Bahraini parliament achieve some sort of a concession from the government, that will embolden the Kuwaiti opposition forces to seek the same. And there is also the sectarian dynamic there in Kuwait, where some 30 percent of all Kuwaiti nationals — roughly about a million people — are of Shia sectarian background. And therefore, this development that is taking place or unfolding in Bahrain will have implications for Kuwait. Mind you, Kuwait is very important for the U.S. military operations in Iraq.
From the point of view of Saudi Arabia, an empowerment of the Shia in Bahrain will likely energize their own Shia population, which is concentrated in the eastern province, which is an oil-rich area not too far from the border with Bahrain. And this is coming at a time for the Saudis when they’re already in the process of impending succession because of the advanced ages of the top four leaders of the country, namely King Abdullah, Crown Prince Sultan, Second Deputy Prime Minister Prince Naif, and the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman. And so, this couldn’t come at a worse time, and that’s why we see the Saudis engaged in announcing additional social spending packages; the latest one is in the range of $11 billion spending on housing, social benefits, trying to improve employment opportunities. In essence, the Saudis do not want to see anything that can happen in Bahrain spill over into their own country.
And it is for these reasons why this slow simmering situation in Bahrain is far more consequential than the outbreak of fighting between opposition and government forces in Libya.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27563.htm
