BARKING MAD THE LOT OF THEM!

By Stanley Collymore

If Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy together with all the other leaders of the United States’ client states in the EU and the rest of Europe are as they claim for human rights in Syria, Libya, Iran and every other country they don’t like, evidently for purely self-centred reasons or their own political agendas and nothing else, how come then that all of them are the best friends of those carrying out some of the most horrendous human rights violations contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all other relevant international laws and protocols in countries like Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the other corrupt dictatorial fiefdoms in the Persian Gulf, and of course their very own bête noire and enfant terrible Zionist apartheid Israel which with absolute impunity does whatever it likes with carte blanche immunity granted to it by these very same self-righteous but in reality depraved western entities?

Incidentally, in August 2011 the United States despite the continuing vicious and well-documented Saudi assisted repression in Bahrain by the Al-Kalifa family, that the United States and the west support by the way, nevertheless saw fit to sign a new and enhanced agreement with that dictatorial regime to have the US fifth fleet carry on being stationed in Bahrain to patrol the Persian Gulf and threaten Iran thousands of miles away from the United States own l territorial borders. Just imagine what the instinctive and aggressive response would be from these mind-boggling hypocrites were Iran or Syria mutually with countries located in the Americas or the Caribbean did the same there. We anxiously saw what happened when the then Soviet decided to set up a nuclear base in Cuba and the US response to that, this despite the fact that the United States had hordes of nukes in Europe encircling the USSR but most notably in Turkey which had a land border with the Soviet Union; Cuba is some 90 miles off the shores of the United States at its nearest point.

There will always be sections of the community that tyrannical governments or regimes or those with such dispositions can buy off to quell dissent internally in their states; Saudi Arabia did this to the tune of US $57 billion dollars with its people in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening. Similarly it’s entirely possible in any country with a disposition to flout the rule of law to cynically throw sand into sufficient peoples’ eyes, as we recurrently and quite sinisterly observe happening in several major western countries, to blind them with prejudices, racial or sectarian ones for example, whose primary purpose is to intentionally create an ongoing atmosphere of fear, hatred and division that enable the perpetrators of such infamies to gain or stay in power through divide and conquer tactics.

The United States and its proxy Saudi Arabia supported the Eritrean freedom fighters as they were called then when Ethiopia had a communist government; when this fell the US instantaneously and most cynically switched its backing to Ethiopia where it had installed a puppet, pro-western regime. This regime, thanks to the United States, is one of the most militarized in the world spending huge amounts of its GDP on western supplied arms that are employed not only to destabilize but also invade neighbouring states at the behest of the United States; props up the rump regime in Somalia that doesn’t represent the Somali people and basically controls only a section of the capital Mogadishu and in tandem with indiscriminate US drone attacks supposedly against the Somali Al-Shabab revolutionary fighters waging a war against western imperialism is a principal contributory factor to the unrest, instability, poverty and famine not only in Ethiopia that refuses to address these domestic issues but also the rest of the Horn of Africa where its militarization is crucially exacerbating and making matters worse.

There are 6000 Palestinians ranging from children to the very elderly and held for several years locked up in Israeli jails, large numbers of them not charged with or prosecuted for any offence but all part of Israel’s obvious arrogance to demonstrate what with absolute impunity it can do and not have to face any consequences for its criminal activities while the west as cheerleaders of this criminality say and do nothing. But there’s a single Israeli soldier, not a civilian like the vast majority of Palestinians in Israel’s prisons are, who is being held by the Palestinians and the same western hypocrites that have nothing to say about Israel’s past illegitimate actions vis-à-vis its detention of so many Palestinians as it brazenly carries on doing more of the same, are on the warpath about the incarceration of this one soldier; just as they continue to keep mum about and don’t condemn the CIA’s kidnapping of innocent people off our streets so they can be outsourced to secret gulags or well known health resorts like Bagram, Abu Grahib or Guantanamo Bay for rendition; that’s torture to you and me.

John Scarlett the United Kingdom’s ex MI6 boss and Jeremy Greenstock our erstwhile ambassador to the UN: both of them clandestine lobbyists for oil companies while still in public office, knowingly lied to the British parliament and our public (let’s call a spade a spade and not get ourselves embroiled in all that parliamentary claptrap and semantics on words about misleading since a lie is just that as far as I’m concerned) as they vigorously pushed for the Iraq war. They got their way and we’re all familiar with the consequences that stemmed from the United States and Britain’s decision to attack and illegally invade Iraq: 1.2 million Iraqi killed; 5 million displaced; the country’s infrastructure completely destroyed and all the rest of it, while the United States has created a mini-state within that country with its construction of the world’s largest embassy there with a private army of unaccountable mercenaries to protect it.

In the meantime Messrs Scarlett and Greenstock having vacated their employment with the British state have acquired even more lucrative jobs as highly paid executives with the same oil companies who they lobbied for that we should unreservedly go to war with Iraq. No punishment or even a suggestion of it though for their complicit crimes against humanity or the offence of incitement to a criminal act whose catastrophic outcome saw so many people, Iraqis as well as members of our armed forces, unnecessarily forfeiting their lives amid structural damage to Iraq incurring a cost of billions of Pounds Sterling; far more than the August 2011 unrest in England will ever amount to. Yet those that want to bring down hellfire and brimstone on the heads of those caught up in the impetus of English unrest were like John Scarlett and Jeremy Greenstock among the most sadistic, unyielding and highly impassioned supporters and cheerleaders for military action against Iraq.

Cheshire Police’s Assistant Chief Constable Phil Thompson in his quite uncompromising support for the swingeing but transparently and wholly disproportionate sentences handed down by magistrates and district judges overtly grandstanding and brazenly responding to rightwing political rhetoric in relation to the sentences that they handed out to those either wilfully involved or unintentionally were caught up in the English unrest of 2011 having fulsomely praised these law officers for what they did and are still doing, said that he was “quite comfortable with the sentences as they reflect the mood of the people.” Wasn’t this the same raison d’être that the Nazis of Europe and not just those of Germany but also a host of other countries across the entire European mainland, notably France, all the Baltic states, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, the Ukraine, supposed neutral Switzerland, Spain and Sweden just to name a mere fraction of them, contemptibly used in their sick justification for Europe’s holocaust which resulted in the horrific deaths of millions of Jews, Gypsies and others judgmentally regarded and revoltingly referred to as Die Untermenschen (The Undesirables)?

That too Phil Thompson was the public mood unambiguously expressed in the same way as it was aggressively encouraged and permitted to murderously go unchallenged. A very fickle beast is the public mood Mr Assistant Chief Constable in addition to being a two-edged sword. Because of my rather unique position I’ve spoken to and interviewed many of those that gratuitously cheered on the holocaust who are now utterly mortified by what they did; others though continue to live in a state of denial and absurdly claim they didn’t know what was going on in their communities or even on their doorsteps. But as dictator Benito Mussolini and his Romanian counterpart to their cost fatally discovered that same public mood they so assiduously nurtured and exploited for their own ends just as rapidly turned against them when circumstances and the tide of public opinion that accompanied it had altered. So be very careful what you wish for Phil Thompson for while it may make you feel self-righteous espousing what you do it also drably shows up your shortcomings in relation to having a prescient-minded appreciation or understanding of human nature; and for a top cop that’s inexcusable.

Barack Obama as the then Senator for Illinois speaking on contractors (mercenaries to you and me) said this at the time: “We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.” Curiously as President he now seemingly thinks a whole lot differently from way back then when he said those words, with the role of contractors in the United States’ wars having significantly increased and the victims of their crimes still begging for justice.

Without an ethical foreign policy all you do is attack oppressive states that irritate you while being nice to repressive ones that suck up to you. No one suggested during Stalin’s bloody reign that the west should attack the Soviet Union to bring about regime change even after it had marched into Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It didn’t happen either when China annexed Tibet and is one of the reasons that North Korea hasn’t been attacked and dialogue with it is preferred, because all three likely foes have nuclear weapons and could inflict immense damage on their assailants. And therein likes the mindset of the west’s posturing bullies.