Gandhi 'peace' statue will be erected in London (so why was the announcement made the day after UK signs £250m arms deal with India?)

The Independent

William Hague and George Osborne have unveiled plans for a statue of peace icon Mahatma Gandhi – a day after confirming a £250m arms deal with the Indian government.

The Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor, in Delhi for a meeting with their Indian counterparts and to see the country’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said the statue would be built in London’s Parliament Square.

“Gandhi’s view of communal peace and resistance to division, his desire to drive India forward, and his commitment to non-violence left a legacy that is as relevant today as it was during his life,” said Mr Hague, during a visit to the site of Mr Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu extremist in 1948. “He remains a towering inspiration and a source of strength.”

In a statement, the ministers said it is hoped the statue of Mr Gandhi will be paid for by charitable donations and sponsors.

“As the father of the largest democracy in the world, it’s time for Gandhi to take his place in front of the mother of parliaments,” said Mr Osborne. “He is a figure of inspiration, not just in Britain and India, but around the world.”

The announcement of plans for the statue came a day after Mr Osborne confirmed a £250m deal for British manufacturers to provide missiles to the Indian Air Force. Reports said the Indian authorities will receive the air-to-air missiles from MBDA, a weapons maker that is a joint venture between BAE Systems, the Franco-German group Airbus and Finmeccanica of Italy.

The two senior British ministers are also promoting the sale of the Eurofighter Typhoon jet, which is partly built in Britain. India is looking to buy 126 fighter jets and had identified the French Rafale as its preferred choice. Yet repeated delays on signing the deal have left Britain hopeful that India may yet opt to buy the Typhoon.

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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

‘Russian agents captured in Ukraine? Show them!’ – Lavrov

Strategic Culture.org

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has dismissed as “not serious” reports of Russian agents captured in Ukraine. He accused US politicians of distorting facts and wrongfully interpreting the Geneva agreement on de-escalation.

Lavrov lashed out at western politicians while speaking at a young diplomats’ forum in Moscow. The minister accused his counterparts in the EU and the US of making unsubstantiated statements.

"Kerry has many times mentioned that Ukrainian intelligence captured Russian agents,” Lavrov said. 

“So, show them to the people, have them on TV. Kerry says they don’t want to disclose the identities of those people who are engaged in the captures. This is not serious.”
While the west is accusing Russia of not following through on the Geneva agreement, Lavrov believes the attitude stems from misinterpretation of the de-escalation agreement.
“Representatives of the US State Department, Victoria Nuland in particular, claim that in Geneva we agreed upon ‘separatists’ leaving the occupied buildings,” Lavrov said. “This is a lie, this could not have been written, because we were promoting the approach that ensures the simultaneity of processes and equal responsibilities of the sides when it comes to vacating illegally occupied buildings and disarming illegal groups.”

Lavrov said that Russia would not allow the distortion of the text of the Geneva agreement. He also questioned assertions made by John Kerry a day earlier concerning Kiev’s full compliance with the Geneva agreement. Kerry said authorities in the Ukrainian capital were “removing the barricades in the Maidan and cleaning up the square.”

“Instead of tires, they are now setting up concrete blocks there,” Lavrov said. “No one is going to clear the place.”

Lavrov complained that his western counterparts were not abandoning the language of slogans, even in one-on-one telephone conversations.

“If you think that when John Kerry, William Hague or Laurent Fabius call me, they speak differently in those personal contacts and say something you don’t know from their public speeches, you are mistaken,” Lavrov said, adding that he was still making attempts to have a real constructive dialogue with the officials he mentioned.

All kinds of sanctions against Russia are a sign of Western states having “got lost in their own game,” he said.

“The West generally wants – and the whole thing started with that – to capture Ukraine, with the intention being solely based on geopolitical ambition, not on the interests of the Ukrainian people.”

When the West realized it couldn’t get it its own way, it grew frustrated, Lavrov said. The frustration has been revealed in the “hard efforts on the sanctions trackway.”

Owen Jones: The hypocrisy of the Great Powers is on display again in Ukraine

Anti-war protester demonstrating against Russia's intervention in Ukraine arrested in Moscow.

Stop the War Coalition 
Owen Jones

“Rogue state” is not a term that applies to countries that violate international law, says Owen Jones, but rather to those that have failed to bend to the will of the West.

A mushroom cloud of testosterone has descended on social media; would-be Dr Strangeloves are even demanding military action against Russia, otherwise known as “stage 1 of the nuclear extermination of the human race”. The approach of Western governments, thankfully, has been rather more restrained, though hardly for peace-loving reasons: the City of London-funded Conservative party wants Russia’s money to keep flowing into financial institutions, and the German government wants its gas.

But bluster and self-interest aside, Russia’s invasion helps hold up a mirror to the West’s foreign policy, however much that makes us flinch. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson was reported to have said in 1918; in the Ukrainian crisis, the first casualty has been irony. “You just don’t invade another country on a phoney pretext in order to assert your interests,” declares John Kerry, Secretary of State for a country which infamously did just that almost exactly 11 years ago. “The world cannot say it’s OK to violate the sovereignty of another nation in this way,” solemnly proclaims William Hague, who merrily waltzed through the division lobby in support of the Iraq war in 2003.

Let’s just think through how both the Russian government and Russian civilians are rationalising aggression in Ukraine. A democratically elected government has been violently overthrown. Prominent among the victorious uprising are right-wing extremists, who have been handed key government posts. There was an attempt to scrap Russian as an official language, moves to ban political parties, and unelected oligarchs have been imposed on Ukraine’s regions, indicative of a growing threat to the Russian minority, many of whom have Russian passports. Russia’s security needs are informed by the fact it has been repeatedly – and catastrophically – attacked from the West, and an agreement with Ukraine allows for the stationing of thousands of troops in Crimea.

Such rationalisations can be easily challenged, of course. A democratic mandate does not grant a government carte blanche to act as it wishes. This was not a coup, but a genuinely popular uprising in the country’s western and central regions, if not in its east and south. It is true that the AK-47-wielding far-right Right Sector did play a decisive role in the revolt’s success, and won respect from more moderate factions for doing so: there is a frightening tradition of conservatives and liberals helping fascists into power.

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Hague calls for Syria to end crackdown after UN statement

Hague has shown himself to be an idiot in the past and no more so in the present due to his constant parroting for the anglo-american elite. So, this pious pleading for Syria to stop their human rights violations is pretty rich. 

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Guardian

The UN security council has condemned human rights violations and use of force against civilians by Syrian authorities Link to this video

 

Foreign secretary William Hague urged the "discredited" Syrian regime to end its violent repression as the United Nations security council adopted a statement condemning attacks on civilians and widespread human rights abuses.

Prompted by an intensification of the three-month-old bloody crackdown against anti-government protests, the international body agreed the wording – with only Syria's neighbour Lebanon dissociating itself from the text.

Hague said: "I welcome the UN security council presidential statement on Syria.

"The support for this statement throughout the security council demonstrates the rising international concern at the unacceptable behaviour of the regime and shows that President Assad is increasingly isolated. It comes on top of a fourth round of EU sanctions put in place earlier this week."

The UN security council finally broke through months of indecision over the bloodshed in Syria on Wednesday night to pass a near-unanimous statement condemning Bashar al-Assad for unleashing his forces on civilians and violating human rights.

Though the presidential statement has no teeth and was less than the full security council resolution that had been pressed for by the US, UK and France, it is an indication of growing impatience within the international community towards the Syrian crackdown. 

Syrian forces are continuing to attack the city of Hama where protests have been intense, with troops loyal to the government engaging civilians with tanks and gunfire. 

Hague said: "As I have made clear, it is vital that the violence and repression by the Syrian regime stops. The Syrian people are calling for peaceful change. I call on President Assad's regime to end its violence and to allow genuine political reform.

"Until it does, the regime will be discredited amongst its own people and facing increased pressure internationally." [...]

William Hague: Following in Churchill’s footsteps By William Bowles

williambowles.info

“I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” – Winston Churchill 1920

Now let me get this straight: In order to save civilian lives (the infamous ‘Right to Protect’), the Empire, through its Rottweiller NATO, not only deindustrializes Libya but it also causes a mass exodus of refugees hundreds of whom drowned and many thousands more were left stranded, attacked and abused. The Pirates attempted to assassinate Gaddafi but succeeded in killing women and children instead. The Pirates bomb educational infrastructure, communications, power, agriculture and terrorize the population from the air and sea with the combined military might of the most powerful countries on the planet. So this is what humanitarian intervention looks like?

The reality of it is that in the ‘good old days’ they made no bones about the issue of keeping the natives in their place, phrases like humanitarian intervention would have made Churchill laugh. Though perhaps, just as with our current leaders and its lapdog mass media, Churchill would have appreciated the propaganda value of ‘humanitarian intervention for domestic audiences.

And after all, the Libyans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Somalians, Yemenis and Serbians don’t need to be told what ‘humanitarian intervention’ really is.

Check out the following to get an idea of how the Pirates viewed the ‘peasants’ back in 1920:

…On 19 February, 1920, before the start of the Arab uprising, Churchill (then Secretary for War and Air) wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard, the pioneer of air warfare. Would it be possible for Trenchard to take control of Iraq? This would entail “the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death…for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.”
Churchill was in no doubt that gas could be profitably employed against the Kurds and Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): “I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” Henry Wilson shared Churchill’s enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to sanction the use of a weapon that had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War. Churchill himself was keen to argue that gas, fired from ground-based guns or dropped from aircraft, would cause “only discomfort or illness, but not death” to dissident tribespeople; but his optimistic view of the effects of gas were mistaken. It was likely that the suggested gas would permanently damage eyesight and “kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes.”
Churchill remained unimpressed by such considerations, arguing that the use of gas, a “scientific expedient,” should not be prevented “by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly”. In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with excellent moral effect “though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties” – ‘British Use of Chemical Weapons in Iraq‘

So what’s the difference between the Pirates of today and those of yesteryear? None as far as I can see, all that’s changed is that these days, our rulers have to be more prudent and work a lot harder to sell us the idea of recolonization, disguising the entire sordid affair as ‘humanitarian intervention’. And, if it wasn’t for the direct collusion between the Pirates and the media, I’m certain it would be a lot more difficult to pull off such an outrageous stunt.

To bring it up to date, Churchill’s modern-day equivalent, British foreign secretary William Hague would no doubt be saying that the use of ‘bunker buster‘ bombs on the people of Libya was a ‘scientific expedient’, though no doubt we’ll have to wait fifty years (if at all) before we get to read Hague’s private thoughts on the subject.

And what’s more, Churchill’s view that “only discomfort or illness, but not death” would result parallels the current notion that ‘precision targeting’ and ‘smart weapons’ somehow know the difference between military combatant and civilian. Aside from the sheer imbecility of the idea, it is, just as with ‘humanitarian intervention’, designed to make the notion of blowing people to bits, more palatable to domestic audiences.

In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with the BBC’s view of ‘humanitarian intervention’. In a puff piece for the invasion, the BBC tells us that following a visit to Benghazi William Hague was “‘inspired’ by Libyan rebels”. The piece goes on:

“”But we are also encouraging the National Transitional Council to put more flesh on their proposed transition, to lay out in more detail this coming week what would happen on the day that Gaddafi went. Who would be running what, how a new government would be formed.”"– ‘William Hague ‘inspired’ by Libyan rebels‘, BBC Website, 5 June 2011.

Hague’s statement that he needs to know “Who would be running what, [and] how [would] a new government be formed”? reveals the real nature of the invasion and especially of the Empire’s view of its so-called allies in Benghazi.

The bottom line is that in the ninety years that has passed since Churchill ranted on about gassing “uncivilized tribes” not a damn thing has changed except the language used to describe and justify such barbarism. The BBC is quite at home glorifying the use of such gruesome weapons as the following ‘news’ items illustrate:

VIDEO: Preparing Apaches for action in Libya
UK Apache attack helicopters have been used over Libya for the first time, Nato has confirmed. BBC News 04/06/2011

or,

RAF to get Libya ‘bunker busters’
The addition of 2,000lb “bunker busting” bombs to the weaponry of the Royal Air Force is set to boost capabilities for missions over Libya, the Ministry of Defence. BBC News 29/05/2011

How easily the warfare state’s mantras roll off the BBC’s slick tongue. Blowing people up is now “boost[ing] capabilities for missions”. Any idea that this means blowing people to pieces has been surgically removed by the slick media meisters in the BBC’s propaganda/editorial department, espousing views that would not be out-of-place in the England of the 1920s (or even the 1820s!).