All posts filed under: historical perspectives

The Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy: Questions, Hints and Allegations

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by Edward Curtin If you were going to arrange a political assassination in an indoor crowded setting, would you plan to have one of your operatives (not the assassin) at the murder site be a strikingly curvaceous young woman in a conspicuous white dress with black polka-dots, and then have her flee the scene, yelling, “We’ve shot him, we’ve shot him,” so that multiple witnesses would see and hear her as she made her escape? Would you have the same woman earlier in the day pick up a salesman in the hotel where the assassination was planned, spend the day with him driving around and having dinner together, while repeatedly inviting (i.e. luring) him to join her later that night at a big public event where they will shoot their famous victim, whom she names? Would you have your operative tell this man that, although she wasn’t staying at the hotel, and although she had been in town only three days, having flown from NYC where she had arrived from overseas, that she knew the …

Strategic Engineered Migration as Weapon of War

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by Leonid Savin, Voltairenet, November 5, 2015 After reading the title, you may think it is describing the phenomenon that Europe has recently been facing: the hundreds of thousands of refugees, both victims of the hardships of civil wars and opportunists, who are invading the Balkans by land and by sea and then making their way further, trying to reach richer countries like Germany, France and Scandinavia by any means possible. It would seem that this stream of refugees has objective reasons: armed conflicts and wars have been going on in Libya, Syria and Iraq for many years, while the situation is also turbulent in Palestine and Afghanistan. In Tunisia and Egypt, meanwhile, both of which experienced the Arab Spring, the situation also leaves much to be desired. Hardly anybody is taking notice of Bahrain, where opposition protests have been brutally suppressed for years, while in Yemen, air strikes are even being carried out on wedding processions. The location of these two states is not very convenient, however – there is simply nowhere to flee. …

A Slaughterhouse of the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945)

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For the last several years, Serbia and Croatia are in the process of negotiations toward settling all historical disputes and questions as the part of E.U.’s conditions for Serbia in order to join the Eurobloc in the recent future. In other words, Brussels expects by both sides to achieve a “historical” deal according to which the past is going to be finally “settled”, i.e., forgotten and forgiven between two nations – the Serbs and the Croats. In the following text, we would like to contribute in this “historical” agreement by featuring one crucial episode in Croat-Serb relations: Magnum Crimen from the WWII.

How US Flooded the World with Psyops

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by Robert Parry, from Consortium News Special Report: The mainstream U.S. media obsesses over Russian “propaganda” yet the U.S. government created a “psyops” bureaucracy three decades ago to flood the world with dubious information, reports Robert Parry. Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home. The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States. Raymond, who has been compared to a character from a John LeCarré novel slipping easily into the woodwork, spent his years inside Reagan’s White …

(Quasi)Academic Foundations of a Racist “Greater Albania”

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by Prof. Vladislav B. Sotirovic The topic to be addressed in this text is the basic misconception on the question of the Balkan Albanian ethnogenesis and national identity that was framed by extremely geo-politically coloured the German-based “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnic and cultural origin. This (quasi)theory, unfortunately, has very deep and negative regional political-security consequences during the last century. The implementation of the “Illyrian” (quasi)theory of the Albanian ethnogenesis was accepted firstly by the Rilindja, (the renaissance) – the Albanian nationalistic and chauvinistic political movement in 1878–1913 for the sake to create the ethnically pure Greater Albania as a national state of all Balkan Albanians composed by self-interpreted all ethnographic and (quasi)historical “Albanian” territories at the expense of historical truth, justice as well as the Slavic and the Greek national interest. The “Ilyrian” (Quasi)Theory on the Albanian Balkan Origin The so-called “Illyrian” (quasi)theory of the ethnic origin of the Albanians (created by the German and the Austrian scholars) became purposely the most popular theory of the Albanian nation’s derivation among the majority of …

Why Albanians Fled Kosovo During the 1999 NATO Bombing

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Interview with Čedomir Prlinčević from the Emperor’s New Clothes This interview dates from December 2000, but is still highly relevant to today. NATO’s conduct in Kosovo can be seen as anticipating much of its current actions on Syria and/or Ukraine. The same exploitation of emotional and inaccurate narratives, the same promotion of wars of aggression in the guise of “humanitarian intervention”, the same promotion of dangerous elements such as terrorists and gangsters as “rebels” or “freedom fighters.” The same utter disregard for the longterm consequences for the people who have to live in these regions. In 18 years little or nothing has changed, and the same playbook is still in use. Introduction This is the second Emperor’s Clothes interview with Čedomir Prlinčević (pronounced Ched-o-meer Pra-linch-eh-vich). Mr. Prlinčević, an historian, was chief archivist in Priština, capital of Kosovo, and head of the Jewish community there until, as he explained in his first Emperor’s Clothes interview, the terrorist KLA drove him and his family and thousands of others from their homes. Heavily armed British NATO forces stood …

The Great American Perpetual Motion War Machine

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The so-called ‘military-industrial complex’ ushered in by the passing of the 1947 National Security Act is a luxury America and the world can no longer afford. The unprecedented threat posed by the over-privileged belligerents infecting U.S. military doctrine with their unbridled hegemonic ambition is redolent of that of the British Empire in the years leading up to the Great War in 1914. With Donald Trump advocating massive upgrades of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and full-spectrum dominance likely to remain integral to American foreign and national security policy making, along with musing on how we arrived at this point, we ponder the here and now, and an unthinkable, yet, still avoidable future

Social-Democracy and the Centre-Left: Decline and Fall?

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Viewed retrospectively, the significance of the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolutionary offensive of the 1980s has been seen primarily as a political project aimed at the overturning of the post-WW2 political and social settlement; an undertaking in which it has largely succeeded. However, perhaps of equal importance was the political assimilation of centre-left, liberal class, into this emerging neo-liberal, neo-conservative movement.

British and French forces decide to intervene to save besieged city

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by Terje M London, December 5,1864 Yesterday, an obviously emotional British foreign minister declared that a coalition of concerned world powers have decided to intervene in the American Civil War.  The intervention is a dramatic new development in this war, which has lasted almost four years. It was the regime’s considerable progress in the siege of Richmond, Virginia, that made the international coalition decide to act. ‘The coalition of the willing’, created by prime minister Lord Palmerston, intends to establish a no-gunboat-zone along the seaboard and on the major rivers of the ‘Confederation’.  These plans have long been on the drawing board, but the final decision was not made until now due to its unpopularity in British public opinion. In addition, the regime in Washington received assistance from Russia, the only great power that showed any support for it.  Tsar Alexander II of Russia sent a fleet last year to New York Harbor to show his solidarity with his fellow leader.  It was obviously also intended as a warning to his geopolitical rival, Queen Victoria. …

No Pasaran, Commandante Fidel!

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by Andre Vltchek Many years ago, Fidel declared: “Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.” It did; destiny shaped them all, los Barbudos, and threw them right into the center of the whirlpool of world history. As they fought for the freedom of Cuba, of Latin America and the entire oppressed world, they actually managed to defy their own words: in the end they irreversibly shaped the fate of our planet, of the entire humanity. Fidel stood firmly at the forefront of the struggle, from the very outset to his last breath. I was driving through Central Vietnam when the message of Fidel’s death arrived on my phone screen. For several minutes there was absolute emptiness and silence inside me. Then, on a wide and beautiful river I spotted several marvellous ships belonging to an ancient Vietnamese fishing fleet, and a boat proudly flying both the Communist red flags with yellow stars, as well as several desolate black flags – symbols of mourning. In a remote place in Asia, Fidel’s …

The Ukrainians as “Imagined Community” Nation

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by Prof. Vladislav B. Sotirovic Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally a western part of the Russian Empire from the mid-17th century. Present-day it is an independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. According to Anderson, “the nation” is an abstract and firstly subjective social construction that defies simple, objective definition yet have been for the last two centuries the crucial basis of conflict in world politics and international relations, through assertion of their expressed nationalism. However, nationalism is quite broad ideology which can be easily transformed into political movement. That became the case, for instance, exactly with the Ukrainian self-imagined ethnonational identity. Acting politically, in principle by all means, on behalf of its own nation usually encompass pretty much a large scale of political ideas and practices including and ethnic cleansing or/and genocide on particular other national groups that happened, for example, in the WWII Ukraine when the Poles, …

Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

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by Bryan Hemming It Can’t Happen Here On the morning of April 9th 1940 mum’s cousin, Bjørg, got out of bed to celebrate her eleventh birthday. That wasn’t the only event to make the day so memorable. Later that morning the Germans invaded. There are times it becomes difficult to separate fiction from reality. In Sinclair Lewis’s semi-satirical novel It Can’t Happen Here, published in 1935, Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip campaigns for the U.S. presidency on a populist ticket, promising to restore the country to its former prosperity and greatness. But behind all the glitz he harbours a more sinister agenda. He plans to seize complete control of the government and impose a dictatorship supported by a paramilitary force trained to crush dissent with extreme violence. My Norwegian mother told me that German officers ordered the immediate evacuation of Oslo on the day of the invasion, saying Luftwaffe planes were on their way to bomb the city and everyone in it. Mass panic ensued as the entire population grabbed all they could carry only to …

The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact & Imperialist Propaganda

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In it’s unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a medium of expansive policy by the USSR and Hitler’s Germany. The distortion of historical events, the amalgamation of lies and the half-truths by the Imperialists and their collaborators aim in defaming the huge role of the Soviet Union in the anti-fascist struggle of WW2.

The Real Boris Yeltsin: Democratic Reformer Or Brutal Dictator?

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by Dr Paul Kindlon at Russia Insider This week marks the 25th anniversary of the “August coup” that brought Boris Yeltsin to prominence and power. In the western media Yeltsin is often contrasted with Putin and portrayed as an ethical reformer and anti-corruption crusader. But is this the real Yeltsin? Coincidentally, at the time Yeltsin was standing on top of a tank declaring himself as a defender of political reform, I was in Chicago“defending” my doctoral dissertation. Little did I know that only one year later I would be reporting Russian news as a broadcast journalist in Moscow and interviewing key players involved in the conflict between anti-Yeltsin pro-communist figures and pro-Yeltsin democracy advocates. Because of my position as a journalist in Moscow I was able to learn a great deal about “the real Boris Yeltsin”. So let’s get to the key questions on this metaphysical matter… “Wasn’t Boris Nikolaevich an ethical, anti-corruption reformer?” Well…his humble origins are fairly well-known, but not many people outside of Russia are aware of the fact that hard-drinking Boris …