Hate speech redefined as 'speech we do not like'

Babylon Bee

U.S.-A coalition of groups and organizations has come together to officially redefine hate speech as "speech we don't like."

The coalition included several dictionaries, the SPLC, the majority of colleges and universities in the nation, several Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, and the Democratic Party. Representatives from each of these groups came together at Harvard University to vote on and ratify the proposal officially changing the definition of "hate speech" to "speech we don't like."

"A lot of people are getting the wrong idea about hate speech," a representative from Instagram said. "They believe hate speech actually has to be hateful to qualify. So I think we need to clarify terms here. For instance, we just deleted a post that a lot of progressives did not like. It wasn't hateful or anything, but they did not like it."

The Instagram rep then displayed this slide of the post they had deleted:

© Babylon Bee

 

"See, we said it was hate speech, but this confused people because it wasn't actually hateful. So I move that we immediately change the definition of hate speech to 'speech you do not like.'"

After the motion passed, dictionaries quickly updated their definitions to read:

Hate speech - (noun) - speech you do not like or speech that offends you in any way // That guy said he disagrees with me. What awful hate speech!

At publishing time, the coalition had clarified that this definition does not apply to conservatives.

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The rise of the neocon strategy of regime change and the destabilization of Europe

Robert Parry
Consortium News

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe - dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey - started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through "regime change."

Instead of the promised wonders of "democracy promotion" and "human rights," what these "anti-realists" have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing - such as that there hasn't been enough "regime change."

For instance, The Washington Post's neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed "realists" for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for "regime change."

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.

In early 2014, the neocons and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in Geneva by blocking Iran's participation and turning the peace conference into a one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad's representatives who then went home. All the while, the Post's editors and their friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad's forces.

The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings back into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement first emerged as "Al Qaeda in Iraq" in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way and Obama had conducted a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad's military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red with blood.

But now a year later, the likes of Hiatt still have not absorbed that lesson — and the spreading chaos from neocon strategies is destabilizing Europe. As shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it should have come as much of a surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their wake.

When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central America to play with. President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them, bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the Mideast and Europe.

Those strategic areas went to the "adults," people like James Baker, George Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft. The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide against peasants, students and workers.

The result - not surprisingly - was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon "success" in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called "feet people" through Mexico to the southern U.S. border. 

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The Greek Tragedy: Some things not to forget, which the new Greek leaders have not.

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail. 


Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.

I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.

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NATO and Nazism: Global hegemony in the guise of "collective defense"

Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook

Chief among the stated reasons the United States has decided to arbitrate the future of Ukraine for its citizens, is the grave danger Russia allegedly poses not only to Kiev, but to Europe and the rest of the world. This despite the fact that it was the US which facilitated violent protests that eventually overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in 2013-2014 in the first place, leading directly to the war now unfolding in the heart of Eastern Europe.

It was not long ago that another ambitious power cited Russia as a threat and invoked "collective defense" to justify what would become a contest between nations leaving tens of millions dead and entire countries in ruins. Nazi Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler would claim regarding his decision to invade Russia that:

The purpose of this front is no longer the protection of the individual nations, but rather the safety of Europe, and therefore the salvation of everyone.

I have therefore decided today once again to put the fate of Germany and the future of the German Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.

Sounding eerily familiar are US and NATO justifications for their continued expansion east and escalations made against Russia today. And also like that other ambitious power, the United States has waged wars all across the planet, far from Russia's borders and with little to do with Russia's interests beyond its borders, long before it turned its sights on Moscow.

Since World War II, the United States has invaded, bombed, and/or occupied the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Some of these nations have been attacked by the US more than once. In many more countries the US has facilitated the violent overthrow of various governments, particularly in South America and the Middle East, first through the use of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then through more veiled organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It has troops stationed in over a hundred nations around the world, occupying hundreds of military installations.

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War and social attacks spread throughout Ukraine

RINF

The Ukrainian army has expanded its offensive against the rebel controlled cities of Luhansk and Donetsk, fighting house-to-house battles with rebel groups. While the casualty figures for the civilian population and on both sides increase, the government is claiming important territorial gains.

Ukrainian security council spokesman Andrei Lyssenko stated on Wednesday that the armed forces controlled large parts of the rebel stronghold of Luhansk. There has yet to be any independent confirmation of this report. The New York Times cited a human rights observer in Luhansk who had not seen any Ukrainian troops so far.

The pro-Russian separatists appear still able to launch counter-attacks. On Wednesday, they announced that they had shot down a fighter plane and two military helicopters over Luhansk. They also destroyed several armoured tanks. Lyssenko has only confirmed the shooting down of the plane thus far.

In its attempts to take the city, the army is proceeding with extreme brutality. Residential districts have repeatedly come under fire. The authorities in Donetsk stated on Wednesday that since the beginning of hostilities in March, 951 civilians had been killed in the Donbas region. According to them, 1,748 people had been injured. On Wednesday alone, 52 civilians and Ukrainian soldiers and an unknown number of rebels were killed.

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Ferguson : Proof That America is Turning Into a Militarized Police State

Vigilant Citizen

Equipped with fatigues, assault weapons and armored vehicles, the police response in Ferguson, Missouri was proof that America is quickly becoming a militarized police state.

The shooting and killing of 18 year-old Michael Brown by a police officer sparked outrage in Ferguson, Missouri – a city that is predominantly Black but where the police force is overwhelmingly White. According to eye witnesses, the young man was shot about eight times, even though he was unarmed and had his hands in the air. Ferguson police officials stated that Brown was attempting to take a police officer’s weapon – a version of the story that was contradicted by various eye witness accounts.

The death of the young man at the hand of police caused protests which degenerated into looting and rioting. Far from attempting to calm the situation, local authorities turned Ferguson into an occupied war zone as police showcased its vast array of military equipment. Ferguson, an inner-suburb of the Midwest suddenly occupied by soldiers equipped with military fatigues, kevlar vests, helmets, tear gas and assault weapons, followed by armored vehicles topped by snipers. Some war veterans even noticed that “police officers” were better equipped than they were while serving in Iraq.

This kind of upsetting scene is becoming increasingly common in America as police forces across the country have been actively purchasing military equipment in the past few years.

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Hackers Learned Who Shot Down Boeing 777 In Ukraine

The Millennium Report

The hacker group “KiberBerkut” hacked personal correspondence of the Ukrainian officials regarding downed July 17 Malaysian “Boeing”. In the correspondence of two lieutenants of the oligarch and part time governor Kolomoisky, as well as the new defence minister of Ukraine Valery Geletey actively discussing Ukrainian fascist AF actions and how the local media should present the circumstances of the crash. Earlier conversations indirectly referring to the doctor who refused to remove organs from wounded Ukrainian National Guard soldiers in one of the hospitals.
Below Transcripts of the conversations.

(2 lieutenants)

25.10.2012 13:19
Svyatoslav Oliynyk
Анатолий Степанович, поздравляю вас с Днем рождения! Желаю вам крепкого здоровья, политических успехов, и вдохновения в вашей работе!
Anatoly Stepanovich, I congratulate you on your birthday! I wish you good health, political success and inspiration in your work!

28.10.2012 20:03
Анатолій Гриценко
Щиро дякую вам за теплі слова! Мені дуже приємно!
Thank you very much for your kind words! I am very pleased!

25.10.2013 18:59
Svyatoslav Oliynyk
Поздравляю вас с Днем рождения, Анатолий Степанович! Хочу пожелать вам счастья и здоровья! И пусть в ваших делах вам всегда сопутствует успех! Всего самого наилучшего!
Anatoly Stepanovich, I congratulate you on your birthday! I wish you good health, political success and inspiration in your work! … All the best wishes to you!

26.10.2013 12:17
Анатолій Гриценко
Слава, дякую за щирі вітання! Головне – це здоров’я та міцні нерви, а все інше ми завжди зможемо здобути своїми руками, головою та працею!..
Thank, thank you for the greetings! The main thing – it’s a health and strong nerves, and everything else we can always get with our hands, head and hard work! ..

26.10.2013 12:18
Анатолій Гриценко
Як життя? Ти не змінив місце проживання? Здається, ти хотів перебиратись із сім’єю до столиці?
How’s everything? Are still living in the same palce? I heard you wanted to move your family to the capital?

26.10.2013 12:47
Svyatoslav Oliynyk
Анатолій Степанович, в мене все гаразд! Ні, не змінив. Моя політична кар’єра в дніпропетровську є стабільною, а пропозиція Арсенія Петровича хоча і є цікавою але зараз я не готов кинути все заради того, щоб по суті починати все спочатку
Anatoly Stepanovich everything is fine! No, I didn’t move. My political career in Dnepropetrovsk is stable, although offer from ArsenyPetrovich [Yaitchenyukh], was interesting I’m not ready to give up everything in order to essentially start over.

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America Is Ripe For Authoritarianism

CJ Werleman
RINF

The pitiful state of the economy makes the U.S. vulnerable.

America is on the precipice of a fascist uprising. While liberals have consistently leveled the f-word against opponents on the right, much the same way conservatives have appropriated socialist or Marxist against those on the political left, there is now data showing that proto-fascist movements are on the rise.

The kindling for the fire of fascism has already been lit. While the Republican Party holds at least one branch of the federal government, America will never be able to deal intelligently and earnestly with the economic policies that have destroyed the working class and all but decimated the middle class. A GOP congress guarantees that Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage, reform the tax code and repair our crumbling infrastructure will be thwarted, all in the name of protecting the rich from paying their fair share.

Long-term unemployment promises to be the norm, as well stagnant and poverty-level wages, foreclosures, crippling personal debt and bankruptcies, the evaporation of savings and retirement funds, the outsourcing of jobs, the continued dilapidation of our schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and airports, and the regulations that safeguard our food, water, and clean air. All this comes courtesy of obscene profits, bonuses, taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and compensation being doled out to our corporate overlords.

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Was the Shootdown of the Passenger Jet Over Ukraine a False Flag?

Washington's Blog

Who Benefits?

Everyone agrees that the sniper attack in Ukraine which started the regime change was a false flag attack.

Eric Zuesse claims false flags are continuing to this day in Ukraine:

Writing at professorsblog.com, this great historian, Dr. de Noli, noticed that whereas in “Berlin 27 Feb 1933, Nazis set fire the Reichstag, and Adolf Hitler blames ‘pro-Russian gangsters’,” a chief instigator of the 22 February 2014 Ukrainian coup was a leading Swedish nazi, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, and that a remarkably similar tactic was used by Bildt and the Obama Administration to start the Ukrainian civil war. De Noli notes that this war was sparked and made inevitable when in “Odessa 2 May 2014, nazis set fire [to the Trade] Union building and Carl Bildt blames ‘pro-Russian gangsters’.” In both of the two instances (first, with Hitler, and then with Obama), a “false-flag operation” was employed in order to confuse onlookers regarding which side the perpetrators of these fires and explosions actually were on. For example, in the Odessa event, the thugs wore armbands with anti-nazi insignia but were actually from the two Ukrainian nazi parties, Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. They used those armbands in order to confuse onlookers to think that the people who were setting fire to the anti-nazis were themselves anti-nazis. This was a very carefully planned operation, and you can see here and here, video documentation of the thugs who did it and who are still doing violent false-flag operations inside Ukraine: these people are Ukrainian nazis, not German ones, but they model themselves upon the German original, as you can see from their own insignia, which are shown in those videos, and which insignia vary little from the swastika and the SS symbol. Ukraine’s nazis are rather bold about modeling themselves upon Hitler’s Nazis — the original  nazis.

False flag attacks have been carried out by countries all over the world … including Russia.

Was the murder of 300 innocent passengers when their plane was shot down today a false flag?  If so, who did it?

CBS reports in an article entitled “‘Big Question’ Is Why Plane Was Flying Over War Zone”:

During a phone interview with CBS News Thursday morning, Captain Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was questioned why Malaysia Airlines flight 17 would be flying over Ukraine’s border with Russia despite ongoing political unrest in the area.
Sullenberger, the veteran of the 2009 Miracle on the Hudson landing, is an aviation expert for CBS News….
“That is one of the big questions right now,” said Sully. “The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has barred U.S. Airlines from flying over this area for some time.”

***

The Danville resident said that, if air traffic control personnel were using both primary and secondary radar, it’s possible that an image of a missile could have been captured on screen, if in fact that is what took down the plane.

The Atlantic -in a report titled, “The FAA’s Notice Prohibiting Airline Flights Over Ukraine” – notes:

Did aviation authorities know that this was a dangerous area?

Yes, they most certainly did. Nearly three months ago, on the “Special Rules” section of its site, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration put out an order prohibiting American pilots, airlines, charter carriers, and everyone else over whom the FAA has direct jurisdiction, from flying over parts of Ukraine.

Zero Hedge asks:

• Who diverted Flight MH-17 over restricted airspace
• Why the videos look like they were faked

 
Who benefits?

Tony Cartalucci argues:

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The Neocons “Grand Plan” and Obama’s Blundering Foreign Policy: “An Actor Playing the Role of a President”?

Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research 

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” President Barack Obama, May 29, 2014 commencement speech at West Point.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”,  President Dwight Eisenhower, 1947 commencement speech at West Point.

“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies”, “one against all”, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

“…An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.” John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President

Am I alone in having the uneasy feeling, while listening to Barack Obama’s speeches, that we are witnessing an actor playing the role of an American president and carefully reading the script he has been given? As time goes by, indeed, Barack Obama seems to be morphing more and more into a Democratic George W. Bush. Those who write his speeches seem to have the same warmongering mentality as those who wrote George W. Bush’s or Dick Cheney’s speeches, ten years ago.

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Why I'm on the brink of burning my Israeli passport

The Independent

She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian - and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport. Because behind that wide-eyed innocent face lurks the Angel of Death.

Ayelet Shaked represents the far-right Jewish Home party in the Knesset. This means she is well to the right of Benyamin Netanyahu, just in case you thought such a thing was not possible.

On Monday she quoted this on her Facebook page:  “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

A week earlier, just before 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was snatched and burned alive, Shaked wrote: “This is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. The reality is that this is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started it.”
So even before the boy died horribly she declared him to be the enemy, and afterwards, without any apparent hint of guilt or remorse, she was calling for the deaths of innocent women and their unborn babies.

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Putin's economic advisor spells out joint Nazi-NeoCon strategy in Ukraine: 'U.S. militarizing Ukraine to invade Russia'

Target: Russia

sott.net 

Putin's economic advisor reveals the massive militarization of Ukraine, intended not only to crush Donbass, but to re-take Crimea, and be the puppets to start another world war for further consolidation of U.S. hegemony over Eurasia.

Read transcript

The European Union prepares the ‘solidarity clause’ framework for military use against citizens

Stratrisks 

See also: EU prepares the ground for military use against the citizens

The EU creates a legal framework for Europe-wide deployment of police and military units . At the same time, the EU Commission is working intensively on the creation of a single EU police unit as well as an EU public prosecutor (more here ).
The use of the “European Gendarmerie Force” (EUROGENDFOR) is made ​​possible by the “solidarity clause” as Heise reported. At the unit, headquartered in Vicenza, Italy, all EU Member States are involved, the Gendarmerien, so police forces with military status are used. One of the founding countries of the EUROGENDFOR include Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands. We provide our services to the police unit of the EU, NATO or the UN.
“The ‘solidarity clause’ is redundant, since the EU already has mechanisms for mutual assistance in case of disasters. Secondly, the clause amplifies the course to a militarization of domestic politics, since upon request military can be used in another Member State. 

“On Tuesday, the representatives of the EU Member States in the Council adopted a decision on the so-called ‘solidarity clause’. Were a disaster or a loosely defined crisis to occur, the organs of the European Union would be obliged to assist using all the instruments at their disposal. This includes military resources”, warned Member of the Bundestag Andrej Hunko.

The proposal on ‘arrangements for the implementation by the Union of the Solidarity Clause’ was jointly presented by the Commission and the EU High Representative in 2012. A country can invoke the “solidarity clause” if a crisis “overwhelms its response capacities”. Mention is made of operational, policy and financial instruments and structures.

Andrej Hunko continued:

“The adoption at the General Affairs Council took place in secret: the point was not mentioned on the agenda of  the meeting. The press was not informed. Yet this is one of the most controversial clauses contained in the EU treaties. That is precisely the reason why agreement on the details of the solidarity clause was postponed to a later point at the time of the signature of the Lisbon Treaty.

The ‘solidarity clause’ boosts the role of the two intelligence-service-style EU situation centres. But it also creates the legal framework for deployment of the special police units of the ‘ATLAS network’ being developed by the Commission. From Germany, the GSG 9 is involved; last year this Federal Police Special Forces unit was able to head a large-scale ATLAS exercise encompassing several countries for the first time.

The ‘solidarity clause’ is superfluous, since the EU already has mechanisms for mutual assistance in disaster situations. At the same time, however, the clause strengthens the course towards militarisation of home-affairs policy, since military personnel can be sent to another Member State on request. I am concerned that this is about the home-affairs version of the Article 5 clause on mutual defence: it would apply in situations which ‘may have an adverse impact on people, the environment or property’. Even politically motivated blockades in the areas of energy and transport and general strikes are covered.

The text explicitly refers to crises which originate outside the territory of the Member States. The Left Party parliamentary group rejects this blurring of the lines between internal and external security. Instead of militarisation of home-affairs policy through the deployment of military forces inside other Member States, we need reinforcement of the civilian mechanisms of solidarity within the EU.”

Press release of 24 June 2014 by the General Affairs Council:http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/EN/genaff/143353.pdf

The Truthseeker: NATO's 'Gladio' army in Ukraine

Comment: Well worth the reminder ...

The Rise of the European Right: Reaction to the Neoliberal Right

Boiling Frogs Post
Prof. James Petras

In the absence of a Left alternative, the working class voters have opted for two alternatives: Massive voter abstention & strikes.

The European parliamentary elections witnessed a major breakthrough for the right-wing parties throughout the region. The rise of the Right runs from the Nordic countries, the United Kingdom, the Baltic and Low countries, France, Central and Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean.

Most, if not all, of these emerging right-wing parties mark a sharp break with the ruling neo-liberal, Christian and Social Democratic parties who have presided over a decade of crisis.

The ‘new Right’ cannot be understood simply by attaching negative labels (‘fascist’, ‘racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’). The rise of the Right has to be placed in the context of the decay of political, social and economic institutions, the general and persistent decline of living standards and the disintegration of community bonds and class solidarity. The entire existing political edifice constructed by the neo-liberal parties bears deep responsibility for the systemic crisis and decay of everyday life. Moreover, this is how it is understood by a growing mass of working people who vote for the Right.

The so-called ‘radical Left’, usually defined as the political parties to the left of the governing Social Democratic parties, with the exception of SYRIZA in Greece, have failed to capitalize on the decline of the neo-liberal parties. There are several reasons that account for the lack of a right-left polarization. Most of the ‘radical Left’, in the final account, gave ‘critical support’ to one or another of the Labor or Social Democratic parties and reduced their ‘distance’ from the political-economic disasters that have followed. Secondly, the ‘radical Left’s’ positions on some issues were irrelevant or offensive to many workers: namely, gay marriage and identity politics. Thirdly, the radical Left recruited prominent personalities from the discredited Labor and Social Democratic parties and thus raised suspicion that they are a ‘new version’ of past deceptions. Fourthly, the radical Left is strong on public demonstrations demanding ‘structural changes’ but lacks the ‘grass roots’ clientelistic organizations of the Right, which provide ‘services’, such as soup kitchens and clinics dealing with day-to-day problems.

While the Right pretends to be ‘outside’ the neo-liberal establishment challenging the assumption of broad powers by the Brussels elite, the Left is ambiguous: Its support for a ‘social Europe’ implies a commitment to reform a discredited and moribund structure. The Right proposes ‘national capitalism’ outside of Brussels; the Left proposes ‘socialism within the European Union’. The Left parties, the older Communist parties and more recent groupings, like Syriza in Greece, have had mixed results. The former have generally stagnated or lost support despite the systemic crisis. The latter, like Syriza, have made impressive gains but failed to break the 30% barrier. Both lack electoral allies. As a result, the immediate challenge to the neo-liberal status quo comes from the electoral new Right parties and on the left from the extra-parliamentary social movements and trade unions. In the immediate period, the crisis of the European Union is being played out between the neo-liberal establishment and the ‘new Right’.

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In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia

The Guardian
John Pilger

hy do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".

The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.

Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent."

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."

In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?

www.johnpilger.com

Our People Massacre Civilians in Odessa, and Politico Blames Putin

Comment: See also: False Flag in Odessa

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Washington's Blog

Why are Americans puzzled that foreigners consider the U.S. to be the nation that’s the biggest threat to world peace?

Consider how we are being lied to by the propaganda media that pass for “news” media in our country.

Of course, there was the infamous example of how we were lied to about “Saddam’s WMD,” which lies caused us to support invading Iraq and replacing there a local tyrant with something that’s far worse for the Iraqi people. We don’t complain about having been deceived into wasting $3 trillion of our own tax dollars, and thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, in a venture that increased misery for Iraqis and that produced nothing of benefit to ourselves (but lots of business for American-owned firms). However, there are lots of recent examples, too, such as today’s civil war in Ukraine, which was caused by Barack Obama, but which our “news” media blame instead on Vladimir Putin.

Here is documentation that the regime that the U.S. put in place in Ukraine in February 2014 is massacring Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and here is more; and following here will be provided documentation that Obama did it:

Max Blumenthal at Alternet, headlined on February 24th, “Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?” and he provided evidence that the answer is yes.

On 16 March 2014, OpedNews had an exclusive news report from Ukraine, “The Nazis Even Hitler Was Afraid Of,” which documented that Obama was backing Ukraine’s neo-Nazis to take over that country.

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Why Neocons Seek to Destabilize Russia

Consortium News 

Now that the demonization of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is in full swing, one has to wonder when the neocons will unveil their plan for “regime change” in Moscow, despite the risks that overthrowing Putin and turning Russia into a super-sized version of Ukraine might entail for the survival of the planet.

There is a “little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly” quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.

If the Palestinians and Lebanon’s Hezbollah persist in annoying you and troubling Israel, you target their sponsors with “regime change” – in Iraq, Syria and Iran. If your “regime change” in Iraq goes badly, you escalate the subversion of Syria and the bankrupting of Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

Just when you think you’ve cornered President Barack Obama into a massive bombing campaign against Syria – with a possible follow-on war against Iran – Putin steps in to give Obama a peaceful path out, getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons and Iran to agree to constraints on its nuclear program.

So, this Obama-Putin collaboration has become your new threat. That means you take aim at Ukraine, knowing its sensitivity to Russia. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

You support an uprising against elected President Viktor Yanukovych, even though neo-Nazi militias are needed to accomplish the actual coup. You get the U.S. State Department to immediately recognize the coup regime although it disenfranchises many people of eastern and southern Ukraine, where Yanukovych had his political base.

When Putin steps in to protect the interests of those ethnic Russian populations and supports the secession of Crimea (endorsed by 96 percent of voters in a hastily called referendum), your target shifts again. Though you’ve succeeded in your plan to drive a wedge between Obama and Putin, Putin’s resistance to your Ukraine plans makes him the next focus of “regime change.”

Your many friends in the mainstream U.S. news media begin to relentlessly demonize Putin with a propaganda barrage that would do a totalitarian state proud. The anti-Putin “group think” is near total and any accusation – regardless of the absence of facts – is fine.

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It Was a US-instigated Ukrainian Coup

ICH
Nick  Wright

Once again the U.S. establishment is promoting another violent coup d’etat as a democratic uprising. Troops are moving, planes are flying, ships are advancing, war threats are being thrown. The governments of NATO and their media point fingers at Russia, but the provocation is fully hidden. Peace activists who should know better are buying this propaganda and spreading it.  

Peace activists must urgently act to illuminate the travesty of justice that is taking place. We spoke together to support negotiations with Iran. We must raise our voices now. 

Ukraine’s democratically elected president has been violently and forcibly removed with the financial and political support of the United States and European Union. The State Department did not just hand out cookies to a few protesters. It did not just select the replacement government. The U.S. spent $5 billion to instill Koch brothers democracy in Ukraine. The House has approved an additional $1 billion. What else? There are now two governments in Ukraine and the U.S./EU supported one is filled with neo-Nazis. 
We must not forget how anti-government protests in foreign countries have historically been instigated and/or used by the CIA for nefarious purposes.  

The CIA playbook has been repeated so many times – from Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1973 to Haiti 1991 and 2004, Yugoslavia in the 1990′s, Honduras in 2009, Libya, Egypt and Syria, Venezuela, among many others. Government overthrows result. How can we forget the devastation these coups bring? Sometimes the government being deposed is democratically elected, sometimes not, but in either case a government is targeted because it shows independence from U.S. foreign policy demands.

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