Walk Like an Egyptian

The comments are getting long and the conversation needs to continue. So, I am posting p's later comments as a post, to break it up into a more manageable state. It's lo0king like the "global revolution" meme that Half Past Human has been forecasting is beginning to manifest. It will be interesting to see how The Powers That Were will react. freeacre

From Palooka's Revenge (AKA: p)

quote: Hillary Clinton is on the MSM today talking about how the US is such a great defender of Democratic freedoms across the world.

part one...

in defending that freedom and democracy the west claims to be the leader of the world in the war on terror. and they tell its own peoples, hey, to keep you safe you're going to have to give up some of those very freedoms. this is exactly what ben ali told his people. does the end justify the means? good or bad, its still a form of repression. ironically, this is exactly what the subservives used to fire up the people to take bin ali down. it makes sense that even happy, well fed people don't like basic freedoms repressed and this makes them extremely vulnerable to being used by subservive forces. but really, when we dig even deeper into tunesia we have to question that even. we have to question that the whole thing is one big ugly charade.

happy? you bet. the people wanted better standards of living, education for their children, opportunities for themselves, peace and security and the right to worship in their own way without fear or intimidation. all that was written down in a national pact signed in '88. what the people wanted, the people got. as noted in sats 10 point list tunesia was a very successful country and one would think civil unrest would be the farthest thing from any citizin's mind and the last thing they'd be wont to do is overthrow the guy who brought them all this good forturne. these are the same happy people who re-elected him in 09 with an 80% majority. 2 out of his 3 opponents openly supported ben ali.

and what was the world being told? that ben ali and company were corrupt along with implications they were supporting islamic extremism. this in face of sats point #2 that tunesia was the least corrupt of any african nation and the fact that they'd thrown the extreemists out.

it should be clear by now; hillary et al are saying one thing and doing the opposite!! they know exactly what the cia is up to. they support it, they fund it with both white and black budgets. and they cover it up claiming defense of democracy. bullshit! the trojans had nothing over on this evil crowd. here's a slant we'll never hear from MSM for the truth would be more than most, who btw would say they share those same wants and needs, could stand...

traditional islam has had a high tollerance for other faiths for centuries. contrasting this one of the main weapons of islamic extreemism is to sow the seeds of hatred for other religions. so, to counter that bin ali and his policies ran the extremists out of the country. and in short order as reported in these 2 articles...

http://www.allbusiness.com/africa/1006537-1.html

http://www.aina.org/news/20070516103920.htm

(aangirfan's jan 18th entry touches on this as well.)

point is the solution to the terrorist problem and the hijacking of the country's traditional islam by islamic jihadists was also the solution to the country's social, economic, human rights, and poor standard of living problems. unfortunately it was not the solution to disarming the behind the scenes promoters of the jihadists. the very ones the so-called war on terror is 'sposed to be aimed at. its aimed all right. but the aim is to promote.

hardly a day goes by that a terrorist attack happens somewhere in the world and the MSM is all over it. most days there are multiple attacks. most of them happen in the arab countries. mano a mano. its been going on for years.

so it was in tunisia. when bin ali came to power he turned tunisa into a model for what to do about islamic extreemism and terrorism. extreem offensives demand extreem defensives. according to versi, "... Ben Ali stressed, as soon as he came into office, that the battle against terrorism would not be won simply by arresting and trying terrorists. It would only be won when conditions conducive to the growth of fundamentalism no longer existed."

and what are those conditions? he believed that: "Unless the breeding grounds of extremism were dealt with terrorism could never be wiped away. To defeat terrorism, the whole social, political and economic structures would have to be changed. The war on terrorism would also be a war on poverty and need, a war on ignorance, a war on despondency and marginalization, a war on disease, a war on inequality and a war on oppression. "

its amazing what was done toward achieving those goals in 20 years. when ben ali came to power tunisia had suffered from years of poverty, ignorance and so on and was under direct attack by islamic fundamentalism. the very religion of its own majority population.

versi... "As early as 1994, President Ben Ali had warned Western countries of the serious dangers of allowing fundamentalist terrorists to exploit the right of political asylum."

versi quoting ali... "Confronted by those who use religion to seize power by force," he told the (french) newspaper (Le Figaro), "and use violence to reach their ends, we have had recourse to a multi-dimensional policy: starting at the level of schools and going on to a wider policy which combines economic and social action at the level of the country's development."

versi... "He stressed that the goals of the fundamentalists were political and had nothing to do with religion - least of all Islam which is a religion of peace and tolerance and expressly forbids the taking of innocent lives for any reason. "The fact that the fundamentalists use violence and murder shows that their motivation is not religious but exclusively political," he said.
But he warned that fundamentalism had become a problem for the West whose countries "serve as rear bases for fundamentalist terrorists". Known terrorists, claiming human rights abuses and exploiting the political asylum system in the West, were setting up multi-national networks in order to destabilize legitimate governments in the Muslim world.

He gave a dear and, as events turned out, prophetic warning"Now fundamentalism is your problem," he said. "I mean that of Paris, London and Washington. France, Great Britain and the United States are being used as a safe haven by fundamentalist terrorists; in the name of freedom and democracy, asylum is granted to the enemies of that very freedom and democracy." "

all these are things ben ali was saying back in the 90's! on sept 11, 2001... well, we all know what happened as we, subsequently, listened to bushco tell us there was no warning. little has changed with the new administration. which has gotta leave us to highly suspect: are our leaders on behalf of we as a country presenting one thing and doing the opposite? or did we look in the mirror and fall in love with ourselves? WTF?? i think its BOTH!!

one thing is obvious, the best we get from our leaders toward any kind of "war on poverty and need, a war on ignorance, a war on despondency and marginalization, a war on disease, a war on inequality and a war on oppression" is lip service. i can jerk my own wanker thank you very much. but worse, the majority of US peoples on both sides of the political aisle,
each ate up with their own brand of self-proclaimed moral justice embedded in toxic narcisstic personality disorder, make the possible impossible.

Non Violent Resistance

More pie is in order...

Once again our brother, FB (or Spirit Across the Sea), has saved us, since murph's and my brains seem to have gone empty, and submitted a post.


Non Violent Resistance

From Belgium

Your average, run of the mill villain always reckons that they can spot the off duty copper in a bar and probably, since the advent of the internet, spooks have also been that much easier to pick out. This has not caused the CIA to abandon its roll and go skulking off into oblivion. It is alive and well and has now outsourced its field work to proxies.

Peter Ackerman is an immensely wealthy investor and board member of the premier U.S. foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations and is now the CIA’s privatised Grunt in Chief. Together with followers Gene Sharp who is generally credited with being the first person to study rigorously the techniques of mass civil disobedience and place them in the context of traditional military strategy and Robert Helvey, a 30 year veteran of the U.S. Army who served two tours of duty in Vietnam are the principal proponents of a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy goals. Ackerman and Helvey have been training a modern type of mercenary, who travel the world, often in the pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order to train local groups in regime change. What the CIA used to refer to as destabilisation had been rebranded and remarketed as Non Violent Resistance (NVR). This is a clever hijacking of Martin Luther King Jr’s phrase used to bring about policy change within the USA to the international arena. However NVR is strictly a foreign affair, seeking to overturn governments abroad that operate outside the system of U.S. imperial domination. It’s about taking power overseas, in order to bring resistant countries into the U.S. imperial fold. Ackerman and Helvey have simply taken over a CIA function, made it semi-overt, and created the illusion that it’s progressive. Ackerman defines NVR as the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience in addition to mass protests and even nonviolent sabotage, to disrupt the functioning of government and make a country ungovernable. Since strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience are traditional leftist techniques, NVR campaigns often garner the support of a large number of left-leaning people. But NVR isn’t about holding a demonstration, listening to speakers, and then heading home for supper. Neither is it pressuring elites — what most Western leftists set as the limit of their political activism. NVR is a political technique for overthrowing foreign governments. It’s not about making a point, it’s about taking power. Since the aim of NVR is to take political power abroad, NVR can be characterized as a form of Western warfare, employing nonviolent armies behind enemy lines.

Helvey witnessed armed opposition groups repeatedly fail in their attempts to overthrow the Myanmar government. The trouble was that rebel groups were going up against a regular army that could exercise overwhelming force. Sharp pointed out that governments have two sources of power: their ability to exact obedience coercively through their control of armies, police, courts and prisons; and their moral authority. Since a government can use overwhelming force to defeat most internal armed challenges, the key to taking power is to undermine the reason most people obey: because they believe their government is legitimate and has a right to rule. In Sharp’s view, most people obey, not because they’re compelled to, but because they want to. If a government’s legitimacy is undermined, people will no longer want to obey. That’s when they can be mobilized to participate in strikes, boycotts, acts of civil disobedience, even sabotage – anything to make the country ungovernable. Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle. NVR holds that destabilization works best when the target government is not supported by an entrenched party system that can claim a higher ideological purpose.

To buttress their efforts to undermine the moral authority of target governments, the destabilizers depend critically on the frequent use of the words “dictatorial” (to denote the governments they seek to bring down) and “democratic” (to denote the target government’s opponents.) It doesn’t matter whether the target governments are truly dictatorial or whether their opponents are truly democratic. What matters is these things are believed to be true. Getting people to believe target governments are dictatorial is done by repeating the charge incessantly, until the idea takes on the status of common knowledge, so widely accepted that proof is unnecessary. People can still be made to believe that four legs are good and two legs are bad or that Terrorism has declared war on the United States.

But what if the “dictator” has been elected, as is often the case in destabilization efforts? The destabilizers’ solution is to claim the elected leader came to power illegitimately, by means of electoral fraud but not in the USA of course where the moral high ground is kept green and lush. International monitors have shown that Ahmadiinejad’s presidential victory was legitimate. He was what the Iranian people (but not what the USG) wanted. The response of western propaganda apparatus was to repeat the opposition charge of electoral fraud over and over. Soon, the mass media and state propaganda apparatuses were singing out as one: the election was rigged. Likewise Mugabe in Zimbabwe was accused of election fraud even before the elections were held and as it happens he lost the election. The fact that he didn’t resign his government is an entirely separate issue.

Similarly, an important part of the destabilizers’ efforts to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic was to declare well before the first vote was cast in the 2000 presidential election that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Milosevic would win, illegitimately. In fact, Milosevic came second to the main opposition leader, who failed to win more than 50 percent of the vote. With no candidate commanding a clear majority, a run-off election was scheduled. The runoff never happened. Instead, Milosevic was overthrown with the help of forces trained by Helvey in the name of democracy. It is no accident that the main opposition party in Serbia, formed under the guidance of U.S. advisers, was called the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or that the main opposition party in Zimbabwe is called the Movement for Democratic Change, or that the main opposition party in Myanmar, Helvey’s pet project, is called the National League of Democracy. Western media reinforce this branding by frequently referring to opposition parties in countries undergoing destabilization as “the democratic opposition,” implying the governments they oppose are dictatorial.

Over a number of years, Helvey’s mercenaries trained an estimated 3,000 fellow Burmese from all walks of life including several hundred Buddhist monks in philosophies and strategies of non-violent resistance and community organizing. These workshops, held in border areas and drawing people from all over Burma, were seen as ‘training the trainers’ who would go home and share these ideas with others yearning for change. That preparation, along with material support such as mobile phones helped lay the groundwork for dissident Buddhist monks in September 2007 to call for a religious boycott of the junta, precipitating the biggest anti-government protests in two decades. For 10 dramatic days, monks and lay citizens poured into the streets in numbers that peaked at around 100,000 before the regime crushed the demonstrations.

Antiwar activists will find no ideological soul mates in Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp, who are conditionally against the use of violence, not out of moral principle, but because they believe violence is often an ineffective method of achieving what political violence is normally intended to achieve: the seizure of power. Ackerman’s affection for nonviolence has nothing to do with the tactic’s moral superiority. Movements that make a strategic decision to eschew violence, he argues, have a far better record of” success.

With debt servicing forming an increasing proportion of US GDP it is predicted that in coming years, defence spending will be reduced. We can expect therefore to see increased use of NVR. In other words, Sharp’s contribution to the peace movement is showing the U.S. ruling class it can achieve its imperialist goals by non-military means. Sharp and his disciples Ackerman and Helvey aren’t progressives at all. Nor are they advocates of the moral superiority of nonviolence. They’re imperialists who believe violence isn’t always the best policy in achieving imperial goals. However were it widely known that so-called “people power” movements are aided from abroad, their moral authority (and alleged home-grown character) would be called into question. In order to overcome this problem Havely says you need radios and the ability to produce and distribute information. You need to be able to train. You need to provide the activists with some income to take care of their families. When people get arrested, you need to take food to them in prison or the hospital. This is truly winning over your enemy’s hearts and minds. At the same time Washington applies multiple sanctions against and financially isolates countries that are the targets of NVR destabilization efforts: Zimbabwe, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar and Cuba. For instance, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation was not the result of Robert Mugabe being a thoroughly bad sort; it was because he would not hand over his country’s assets to the World Bank. Economic warfare, though nonviolent, wreaks terrible devastation, while providing immeasurable help to the destabilizers.

Ackerman equates democracy with capitalism. What he really wants to protect is the right of investors (himself included) to expropriate the fruits of other peoples’ labour. That might explain why he thinks the United States, the world’s premier champion of capitalist exploitation, has an awful lot to teach people around the world. The major proponents of NVR are not independent grassroots organizers, socialists or anarchists. They are, instead, members of the U.S. financial and foreign policy establishment, or are linked to them in subordinate roles through organizational and funding ties. NVR is hardly progressive; it is an imperialist project whose only redeeming feature is the possibility that it may stimulate Western leftists to think about how they too might use the destabilizers’ techniques to take power in their own country to win the authentic battle for democracy.

Tunisia

Now we know how it works let us now have a look at what the patriotic people of Tunisia have just thrown away as being undesirable.

1. In September 2010, Tunisia ratified the international treaty banning cluster munitions, becoming the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to do so.
Tunisia is not believed to have used, produced, stockpiled, or transferred cluster munitions.

2. The 2010 Corruption Perception Index was released by Transparency International on 26 October 2010. The report shows that Tunisia is the least corrupt country in North Africa.

3. August 2010: The 2010 report of the Oxford Business Group on Tunisia referred to the stability and social peace prevailing in Tunisia.

4. September 2010: Tunisia has the most competitive economy in Africa, according to the report on world competitiveness 2010-2011 published by the World economic forum of Davos. It thus moves ahead of numerous EU member states such as Spain (42nd), Portugal (46th), Italy (48th).

5. January 2010: Tunisia is ranked best Arab state as regards quality of life with 59 points out of 100, moving up 3 points compared with 2009, by "International Living'' magazine , out of 194 countries.

6. August 2010: US "Newsweek" magazine ranked Tunisia first in Africa in its "100 best countries in the world'' ratings based on social, economic and political data.

7. 2010: The report on human development published by the UNDP ranked Tunisia 7th out of 135 countries in terms of 'long-term development indicators'

8. September 2010: Tunisia is ranked first in the Arab region and 6th in the world as regards the access of handicapped people to ICTs, according to ratings announced in Vilnius (Lithuania) by the United Nations at the 5th forum on the governance of the Internet (IGF 2010).

9. July 2010 Tunisia's foreign trade registers 31.1% growth.

10. Tunisia has a very low crime rate. In 2002 Tunisia's murder rate stood at 1.22 /100 000, the lowest in Africa.

Now all of that is gone and things are very different. It is really quite a toppling act and must surely be a feather in somebody’s cap.

So what did Tunisia do that was so bad?

Russia's former ambassador in Tunisia Veniamin Popov commented on the situation in Tunisia as follows: "The protests of the Tunisian people remind me of the Iranian revolution in 1979, when the Shah's regime was overthrown." (Is Tunisia a messenger of a big crisis?)

The Shah was modernising Iran, giving land to the poor and cracking down on heroin. But he criticised Israel and he was not always cooperating with the USA on oil. The CIA wanted a feudal Islamic Iran that could be used against Russia so, the Shah had to be demonised and toppled.

Ben Ali made Tunisia the most successful country in Africa, but he was not cooperating fully with the USA.
Tunisia supported neither the 1991 Gulf War nor the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Ben Ali supported the Palestinians.
Ben Ali in Tunisia had to be demonised and toppled.
Ben Ali was popular, until there began a campaign of demonisation.
Now as a result of Ben Ali’s overthrow the US-Tunisian bilateral relationship is likely to remain unaffected.
After the start of the present overthrow Arab sources claim General Ammar "advised the President that his safety could not be guaranteed if he attempted to cling on to power. Gen Ammar subsequently withdrew the vast bulk of his forces from the capital. Walid Chisti, a political analyst, said: "He does not have to do anything, just watch and wait. He is an ambitious man."

Webster Tarpley has also made the following points:

1. The CIA hopes to overthrow or weaken the governments of Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and perhaps others.
They are also trying to remove Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi - because of his friendship with Putin and support for the Southstream pipeline.

2. Some History: The CIA's Roses revolution in Georgia became discredited by the warmongering of Saakashvili. The CIA failed with its Cedars revolution in Lebanon and its Twitter revolution in Iran. The CIA's Orange revolution in Ukraine was eventually rolled back.

3. Tunisia's Jasmine revolution was not primarily a matter of the middle class 'desire to speak out, vote, and blog. It started from 'the Wall Street depredations which are ravaging the entire planet.

Who are the destabilization operatives inside the US regime? Hillary Clinton, in Qatar last week, warned assembled Arab leaders to reform their economies (according to IMF rules) and stamp out corruption, or else be toppled

I know you were all wondering by now, what all of this had to do with Sun Tsu, the Chinese military strategist from 2500 years ago. Only that he declared that ‘deception’ was a legitimate strategy of any war.

*****************************************************

Sources:

Understanding Tunisia

Sun Tsu and Heads I win Tails you Loose

Document Provenance

Based on an article by Stephen Gowans entitled ”Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive” from his blog What’s Left dated August 2009 and subsequently re released on many other blogs.

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman’s-quest-to-do-what-the-cia-used-to-so-and-make-it-seem-progressive/

And also various articles from Aangirfan from Jan 13 2011 onward.

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2011/01/cia-nato-coup-in-tunisia.html

Let Us Review

These are pictures of the lake created near the home of Hot Springs Wizard in an area that is normally bone dry and the waters from the dam flooding the area.

by freeacre

We have been talking amongst ourselves for around three years now. We have anticipated the depletion of oil and other commodities and the real estate meltdown. We are now experiencing the financial coup that is diverting the wealth of the land into the pockets of the financial cannibal class. Real Unemployment is over twenty percent. Kids are graduating from college and moving back in with mom and dad - unemployed and deep into debt servitude. Prices on food and necessities are rising, while the equity in homes still falls. The average American is $7,000 in debt on credit cards. Several states are on the brink of insolvency. So they are in the process of cutting services and raising fees for everything. Nationally, we are trillions in debt to other sovereign nations. Our money supply is created by a cartel of International Banks we know as the Federal Reserve. We pay them interest on each of our dollars right from the jump. Then, they loan it to banks that also charge us interest on it.

We have transitioned from disgust with the Bush era, through hope that things would change, and now to despair since the Presidency has changed faces, but the power behind the throne has not. The corporate merger with the state continues. The loathsome financial scum continue to circulate from the central banks, from Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, K Street lobbyists, and onto the White House staff and a myriad of government and corporate entities. The miscreant merchants of death enrich themselves every step of the way. They thrive on the blood of the troops they send to enforce their corporate take-overs. No wonder the young now dream of vampires.

We have been appalled to see all the best that we believed about ourselves as Americans be betrayed and mutated in the name of “homeland security.” We can no longer in any way consider this a “free country.” Soon it will be illegal to even complain about any of this- the torture, the incarceration, renditioning, surveillance, the barrage of lies and managed corporate news.

We are being poisoned by the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, and the water that we drink – oh, yeah, and the drugs that we take to “manage” all our illnesses. And now we're going to have mandatory “health” insurance that will secure a steady stream of revenue into the coffers of the detestable insurance hounds from hell who escalated the cost of medical care to astronomical levels in the first place. Thanks a bunch.

Now, yet again, we mourn for the dead and pray for the wounded with the rest of the nation for the nice lady congresswoman, the little girl, the sweet old man, the helpful assistant, somebody's grandma and grandpa. Good people killed senselessly by a young man who lost his frigging mind and didn't get help. He fit the profile of an emerging schizophrenic to a T. A twenty year old kid, unable to communicate logically anymore. Having a hard time keeping his sentences on the page. Increasingly concerned, therefore with “grammar.” Imagine his frustration increasing as he is everywhere dismissed as a space case that nobody can understand. Angry now that he is human “currency.” Angry that his congressional representative can't fix the mess he and his peers find themselves in, without the ability to communicate coherently. The college system should be experts at identifying schizophrenia, since in most cases it develops at the age of most college students. The school told him he couldn't come back without a psych evaluation. Did they tell his parents that he needed that evaluation, and probably medication to think clearly again? Probably not. We mourn for the victims as the malicious brain trust continues to pick our pockets and lock down our lives.

“Ha! It's only a flesh wound,” screamed the Black Knight in In Search of the Holy Grail. “What else have you got?”

Well, there is massive flooding that is destroying whole states, towns, villages, crops, and people in Australia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Brazil, Columbia, Germany, Sri Lanka, and China. We've got ice and snow in the South and Northeast. We've got earthquakes increasing in both number and intensity all along the Pacific Rim. Islands are sinking, Ethiopia is cracking open, homes, automobiles, and coastlines are sinking into deep sink holes all over the world.

Glaciers that provide water for billions are melting away. Tundra containing methane that has been frozen through time is being released into the atmosphere. The Gulf of Mexico has been hideously contaminated, the fish and coral are dying, and now the Gulf Stream seems to be staggering around like a zombie. Oh, and there are the volcanos in Indonesia and Iceland. All of which could bring on a mini-Ice Age.

Other than that – we're good!

Does that about cover it? Not hardly, as I know you will soon point out when the conversation begins anew...

Of course, that's only one side of the balance sheet. The other side is that we are human beings and we have many strengths. We are not all asshats, dickweeds, fucktards and wankers. The Lamestream would have us believe that we are all glued to the tube watching Sex in the City , Homer Simpson and the Shopping Network. They wish.

“I sense a shift in The Force, young Luke.” People are waking up. Gardens are being planted, Bread is being baked. Supplies for the coming winters are being gathered. Connections are being made. Communities are being created. Ideas are shared. Resources are pooled. Priorities are changed. Imaginations are being stimulated. In times of great hardship, alliances are made, life-long friendships are formed. Ideas are empowered. Help is given. Love is alive.

Look within. We are change that we have been looking for.

Data sources:

www.urbansurvival.com

www.survivalacres.com

www.cryptogon.com

www.wikileaks.com