According to
“China, the West and the Uyghurs
Abd. Halim Hadi/Shutterstock
ARTICLE & PODCAST OF INTERVIEW
Phil Taylor interviews veteran Canadian trade unionist Omar Latif. Latif
visited the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, and debunks the absurd
propaganda that China is conducting a genocide of Uyghurs there. We also include the photos Omar Latif took while in Xinjiang and the article he wrote following his visit, and which refers to in his article.”
By Phil Taylor
Published on the Taylor Report, Feb 21, 2021”
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According to https://newcoldwar.org/anti-asian-racism-never-stopped-being-an-outgrowth-of-u-s-imperialism/
“The U.S. mainstream has caught up with the existence of racism toward Asians in America, mainly because it has become harder to ignore. Violence directed at Asian Americans has skyrocketed since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Asian American Bar Association of New York, more than 2,500 cases of anti-Asian “hate incidents” have been reported across the country between the months of March and September of 2020. Notable cases include the January assault of an elder Thai man in San Francisco and the stabbing of a Chinese man in New York’s Chinatown last month.
“Violence directed at Asian Americans has skyrocketed since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The wave of violence has caught the attention of the Biden administration, the corporate media,
and prominent celebrities. Former NBA and current G-League player Jeremy Lin took a strong stance against anti-Asian racism in late February. Lin’s post on Facebook came in response to
being called “coronavirus” on the basketball court. His statement ended with a question: “Is anyone listening?” While more has been said in recent weeks about the rise of anti-Asian racism and the urgency to address it, scant attention has been placed on the context of anti-Asian racism and its roots in the history of U.S. imperialism.
The United States was a willing participant in China’s “Century of Humiliation” following the Opium Wars of the early to mid-19th century. Prominent capitalists such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather Warren Delano enriched themselves from the sale of opium, an industry imposed on China by way of treaties that massively displaced and impoverished the population.
American gunboats sailed along the Yangtze protecting U.S. interests for nearly a century prior to the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Migrant Chinese workers in the United States were dehumanized as “coolies” to justify the white supremacist violence leveled against them, even by a large section of organized labor .
The dehumanization of peoples of Asian descent is often isolated and disconnected from the white supremacist violence experienced by Black and indigenous peoples in the United States. Yet the U.S.’s original sins of racialized slavery and settler colonialism helped form the material basis for the rise of anti-Asian racism. During the decade and a half-long U.S. occupation of the Philippines, U.S. soldiers justified mass slaughter and plunder by routinely equating the Filipino people with the same racist tropes used to describe Black Americans and Indigenous nations. Eventually, a unique language of racism was deployed to normalize not only the destruction of the Philippines but also the internment of Japanese residents and the brutal wars of aggression waged in Korea, Vietnam , Laos , and Cambodia . As Black Americans faced the violence and exploitation of Jim Crow, the scope of white supremacy was widening in service of the U.S. project of imperialist domination.
“The U.S.’s original sins of racialized slavery and settler colonialism helped form the material basis for the rise of anti-Asian racism.”
However, U.S. imperialism has also required white supremacy to constantly shape shift to fit the interests of its ruling class. State violence and economic dislocation has unevenly affected the various nationalities that make up the “Asian American” umbrella. A concerted effort to “diversify” the U.S. mainstream with popular movies and programs highlighting of “Asian” riches has intensified the identification of Asian America as a privileged stratum far closer to white America on the class ladder than the U.S.’s oppressed and super exploited Black and Indigenous populations. The U.S. corporate media and political establishment has reinforced this generalization by paying close attention to forces in Asian American communities calling for more
law enforcement protection against racist violence.
All of this combined has divorced anti-Asian racism from its roots in the development of U.S. imperialism. The separation of anti-Asian racism from U.S. imperialism has both encouraged a potential reliance on the state to resolve the very racist violence it commits with regularity and the systematic erasure of the real reasons behind the rise in anti-Asian racism in the United States. Just as the United States deployed racism to justify its empire-building in the Asia Pacific during the 20th century, so too has the U.S. ruling class intensified a deep skepticism of China amid the
devastating spread of COVID-19 on the U.S. mainland. While the corporate media has
acknowledged the role of Trump’s scapegoating of China for the spread of COVID-19, it hasn’t explained why the U.S. is so hostile toward China in the first place.
“U.S. imperialism has required white supremacy to constantly shape shift to fit the interests of its ruling class.”
The truth is that “Kung Flu” and other racist tropes peddled by Trump and his legions are only one aspect of a larger U.S. campaign to contain the rise of China. China is set to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy within a decade and has garnered favorable international attention for its containment of COVID-19 and its efforts to curb extreme poverty and climate breakdown . The rise of China has placed the hegemony of U.S. imperialism into question on the highest stage possible: that of the fundamental relations between nations and economies. This has spurred a U.S.-led New Cold War against China led by all sections of Washington’s establishment, including its most left-leaning elements.
The New Cold War on China is first and foremost a military campaign comprised of four hundred U.S. military bases, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and over sixty percent of all U.S. naval assets stationed in the Asia Pacific. But the U.S. strategy to contain China includes political and economic sabotage. Sanctions have been placed on Chinese officials and tech corporations and the U.S. has waged an endless campaign of interference in China’s internal affairs relating to Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the city of Hong Kong. Both corporate and so-called
progressive media such as Democracy Now have obsessively focused on the reproduction of negative stories that mirror the U.S. Department of State’s official posture toward China. The endless stream of anti-China propaganda has been effective; eighty percent of all Americans currently view China unfavorably, according to recent polls.
“The U.S. strategy to contain China includes political and economic sabotage.”
The only difference between the recent wave of intense anti-Asian racism and that which has endured over the course of U.S. history is the stage of the imperialist system. The U.S is no longer a rising empire. Rather, U.S. imperialism has entered a state of decay decades in the making and can only speak the language of military, political, and economic violence. The struggle against anti-Asian racism thus cannot be left to the militarized police forces terrorizing Black American communities or to the larger U.S. political apparatus that honed anti-Asian racism as a weapon of imperialist expansionism. Instead, U.S. hostility toward China and the peoples of the East should be seen as an opportunity to develop the broadest popular front possible toward the cause of peace, self-determination, and liberation from the oppressive rule of imperialism.”
These six Western nations have made themselves enemies of China on the false ground that China is a human rights abuser in Xinjiang. The truth is China has succeeded in winning the war over Islamic terrorists where human rights and justice did not exist, only murders, rapes and lawlessness reigned in Xinjiang. Today the Chinese Xinjiang composed of various ethnics groups living in peace and harmony and enjoying prosperity is such an achievement which the West could not do. America and its allies have fought against Taliban the Islamic terrorists for more than 20 years and failed, but killed millions of innocent people, and shamelessly now trying to make peace with Taliban. As regards Hong Kong which the evil British empire by force took it from China in 1842 after the First Opium War and never practiced so-called democracy or human rights in the colony. United Kingdom did not apologize nor pay compensations to China; to the contrary, they plotted with America and financially supported Chinese traitors and terrorists to cause riots and lawlessness with intentions to turn Hong Kong into a Western colony again. Chinese government did the right thing to establish the sovereignty and security in the Constitution and only Chinese patriots are empowered to rule Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a jewel and world financial center beyond the reach and robbery of the West. The Western nations who were behind the Hong Kong riots and terrorists have no shame or morality.
This article does not mean there is only something wrong with America. There are many wrongs with every nation on earth. There are many things wrong with the world. I have written much about the darkness of the world, the dark forces of the world. I do not belong to the world. The world cannot be saved. But being an American citizen, I am obliged to do something for America. If you see your own house is set on fire, you do not shout FIRE and do nothing? Will you not shout? Since I am not elected or appointed nor paid to do a job, why should I bother for nothing? Wasting my time and efforts for nothing but trouble? I cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth.
· HOME
“‘Independent’ report claiming Uyghur genocide brought to you by sham university, neocon ideologues lobbying to ‘punish’ China
US media hailed a Newlines Institute report accusing China of Uyghur genocide as a “landmark” independent analysis. A look beneath the surface reveals it as a regime change propaganda tool by interventionist operatives at a sham university.
By Ajit Singh
Published on the Grayzone, Mar 17, 2021
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Throughout March 2021, headlines in corporate media outlets from CNN to The Guardian blared about the release of the “first independent report” to authoritatively determine that the Chinese government has violated “each and every act” of the United Nations convention against genocide, and therefore “bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs.”
The report, published on March 8 by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, follows a last-minute accusation made in January by the outgoing Trump administration, along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the US government-backed World Uyghur Congress, and which alleged that there is a “credible case” against the Chinese government for genocide.
CNN, The Guardian, AFP, and the CBC hailed the March 8 Newlines report as an “independent analysis” and a “landmark legal report” that involved “dozens of international experts.” Samantha Power, the Biden administration’s nominee to direct the US Agency for International Development (USAID), also promoted it: “This report shows how this [genocide] is precisely what China is doing with the Uighurs,” the notorious humanitarian interventionist stated.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, the UN’s first human rights treaty, defines genocide as attempted destruction of a group. This report shows how this is precisely what China is doing with the Uighurs.
Examine the evidence for yourself: https://t.co/MfOTT8XUF6
— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) March 11, 2021
The report’s authors have insisted that they are “impartial” and are “not advocating any course of action whatsoever.” But a closer look at the report and the institutions behind it reveals its authors’ claims of “independence” and “expertise” to be a blatant deception.
Indeed, the report’s principal author, Yonah Diamond, recently called on the Biden administration to unilaterally “confront,” and “punish” China for supposedly committing genocide, and expand sanctions against the country. Meanwhile, the think tanks behind the report have advocated fervently for the West to “combat” and sanction China, and have promoted US regime change policies targeting Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.
A majority of the report’s “expert” signatories are members of the Newlines Institute and the Wallenberg Centre. Others are members of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, former US State Department officials, and ardent supporters of US military interventionism. The report relies most substantially on the “expertise” of Adrian Zenz, the far-right evangelical ideologue, whose “scholarship” on China has been demonstrated to be deeply flawed, riddled with falsehoods and dishonest statistical manipulation.
The reliance on the voluminous but demonstrably fraudulent work of Zenz is not surprising, given that the report was financed by the Newlines Institute’s parent organization, the Fairfax University of America (FXUA). FXUA is a disgraced institution that state regulators moved to shut down in 2019 after finding that its “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses”, academic quality was “patently deficient,” and plagiarism was “rampant” and ignored.
Just days before the Newlines Institute published its “expert” report accusing China of genocide, an advisory board to the US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of FXUA’s accreditor, placing its license in jeopardy.
“New” report regurgitates old, discredited “evidence”
The Newlines report presents no new material on the condition of Uyghur Muslims in China. Instead, it claims to have reviewed all of “the available evidence” and applied “international law to the evidence of the facts on the ground.”
Rather than conducting a thorough and comprehensive review of “the available evidence,” the report restricted its survey to a narrow range of deeply flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by US government-backed lobbying fronts for the exiled Uyghur separatist movement. It was upon this faulty foundation that the report applies legal analysis related to the UN Genocide Convention.
Newlines’ report relies primarily on the dubious studies of Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia, and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress. These three sources comprise more than one-third of the references used to construct the factual basis of the document, with Zenz as the most heavily relied upon source – cited on more than 50 occasions.
Many of the remaining references cite the work of members of Newlines Institute’s “Uyghur Scholars Working Group”, of which Zenz is a founding member and which is made up of a small group of academics who collaborate with him and support his conclusions.
As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who has said he is “led by God” against China’s government, deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions. A careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is concocted through fraudulent statistical manipulation, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations. His widely-cited reports were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions, but rather, by a DC-based CIA cut-out called the Jamestown Foundation and “The Journal of Political Risk,” a publication headed by former NATO and US national security state operatives.
Trump & Biden admins base their accusation of genocide against China on the bunk research of Christian extremist @adrianzenz
Here’s Zenz on the show of anti-gay, Islamophobic @FRCdc Pres. Tony Perkins: “I was actually being prepared by God for this work.” https://t.co/00ZWvHBTE7 pic.twitter.com/dT8nG5oFlC
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 12, 2021
As his academic malpractice comes to light, Zenz has faced increasing scrutiny and embarrassment, as evidenced by his threat to take legal action against his scholarly critics.
In order to shore up the report’s credibility, and to deflect from its essential reliance on Zenz’s reports, its authors have emphasized their supposed “independence” and “impartiality.”
“This [is] not an advocacy document, we’re not advocating any course of action whatsoever”, stated Azeem Ibrahim, Director of Special Initiatives at Newlines Institute. “There were no campaigners involved in this report, it was purely done by legal experts, area experts and China ethnic experts.”
However, just weeks before the publication of the report, its principal author, Yonah Diamond, penned a bellicose call for the Biden administration to eschew the UN (which Diamond deems to be “beholden to the Chinese government”) and unilaterally confront China. Following the Trump administration’s declaration that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang, Diamond argued that the US is legally obliged to “punish” China and that “the Biden administration must now take concrete action to that end together with U.S. allies”.
The report attempts to construct an appearance of broad expert consensus supporting its conclusions, including a list of 33 “independent expert” signatories. Unsurprisingly, this list consists of individuals pushing for a New Cold War and confrontation with China, and who support separatist efforts to transform the mineral-rich, geopolitically important region of Xinjiang into a NATO-oriented ethno-state:
Irwin Cotler and Helena Kennedy — co-chairs, along with Marco Rubio, of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). Composed almost exclusively of white Western lawmakers, IPAC formed in 2020 in order to mount a “common defence” against the “rise of the People’s Republic of China.” Members of the World Uyghur Congress executive, Erkin Ekrem and Rahima Mahmut, sit on IPAC’s advisory board and secretariat; Adrian Zenz also sits on the advisory board.
David Scheffer, Beth von Schaack, and Gregory H. Stanton — Scheffer and Schaack are both former US State Department Ambassadors-at-Large, while Stanton is a former US State Department official.
Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock — the former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Canadian UN Ambassador, respectively.
Adrian Zenz –– founding member of Newlines Institute’s “Uyghur Scholars Working Group”
Rather than consult a wide range of authorities and academic experts, or subject its study to peer review, Newlines relied entirely on a narrowly focused community of like-minded ideologues. A majority of the signatories are members of the two think tanks behind the report, the Newlines Institute and the Wallenberg Centre. Far from “independent”, these organizations are deeply partisan, self-described “campaigners” that align closely with US and Western foreign policy goals, advocating for sanctions and intervention against China and other non-aligned nations across the Global South.
Newlines Institute: A collection of regime-change ideologues and “Shadow CIA” operatives
The supposedly independent report accusing China of genocide was published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy based in Washington, DC and known formerly as the Center for Global Policy. Founded in 2019, the think tank’s stated aim is “to enhance US foreign policy” with a “specialization in Muslim states and societies.”
With extensive ties to the US regime-change establishment, the Newlines Institute is a reliable repository of anti-China material. For example, it has featured the ramblings of Robert Spalding, the former Senior Director for Strategy to President Trump and one of the architects of the Trump administration’s 2018 national security doctrine, which formally reoriented US foreign policy from a focus on the so-called “global war on terror” towards great power competition with China and Russia.
The leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the “shadow CIA” private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues. Its contributors represent a who’s who of Syria regime changers who cheerleaded for US military interventionism while intimidating and bullying any prominent figure that dared present a critical perspective on the proxy war.
Hassan Hassan, Director; Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Newlines Magazine — Ardent supporter of US imperialism, including wars on Iraq, Libya, Yemen and especially Syria. Along with Newlines contributor Michael Weiss, Hassan called for the US military to balkanize Syria, permanently occupy its oil-rich Jazira region and turn the country into “an American security protectorate.”
Azeem Ibrahim, Director — Adjunct Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. Ibrahim is a co-author of the Newlines report.
Kamran Bokhari, Director — Previously served as the Central Asia Studies Course Coordinator at US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute
Faysal Itani, Deputy Director — Former resident Senior Fellow at the US State Department-funded Atlantic Council, which functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington, DC.
Michael Weiss, Senior Editor – A veteran Israel lobbyist, neoconservative activist and anti-Muslim agitator-turned advocate of Islamist insurgents in Syria, Weiss has branded himself as an expert on Russia despite having never visited the country and speaking no Russian.
Michael Weiss with jihadist rebels in Aleppo, Syria in August 2012
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Senior Editor – In 2016, Ahmad phoned Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal unsolicited before Blumenthal published a two-part investigative exposé on the Syrian White Helmets, threatening him with severe consequences if he went ahead. (Listen to a recording of Ahmad’s threatening call here). A lecturer on digital journalism at Stirling University in the UK, Ahmad recently attacked Democracy Now! for hosting scholar Vijay Prashad for a discussion on the danger of a new Cold War with China.
Rasha Al Aqeedi, Senior Analyst — Iraq-born pundit who formerly worked as a research fellow at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a neoconservative think tank originally founded by white supremacists and Cold War hardliners that has honored Iraq war advocates John Bolton and James Mattis. Like her colleague Ahmad, Aqeedi dedicates a significant portion of her time to smearing anti-war figures on social media.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, Non-Resident Fellow — Previously worked for a number of neoconservative and establishment think tanks, including the Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy Research Institute and Freedom House. Tsurkov served in the Israeli military, during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon. Throughout the Syrian proxy war, Tsurkov maintained friendly contacts with members of the Saudi-backed jihadist militia, Jaish al-Islam, and boasted about links both she and Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus maintained with Syria’s armed opposition.
Nicholas A. Heras, Senior Analyst — Previously a research associate at the US Department of Defense’s National Defense University, Heras is also a fellow at the arms industry-funded Center for New American Security. There, he proposed using “wheat [as] a weapon of great power…to apply pressure on the Assad regime.” In other words, Heras advocated for the mass starvation of Syrian civilians by occupying their wheat fields, a US policy that is currently underway in the country’s northeastern region.
Caroline Rose, Senior Analyst — Previously served as an analyst at Geopolitical Futures, headed by Stratfor founder, George Friedman. Stratfor is a private spying and intelligence firm commonly referred to as a “Shadow CIA.” It has contracted extensively with the US government, and has trained the radical wing of Venezuela’s opposition and advised them on destabilization tactics.
Robin Blackburn, Managing Editor — For 12 years, Blackburn served as a writer and editor with Stratfor.
Robert Inks, Editor — Previously served as Director of the Writers Group and Special Projects Editor at Stratfor.
Daryl Johnson, Non-Resident Fellow — Served in the US Army and previously worked as a senior analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. He is the founder of DT Analytics, a private consulting firm for police and law enforcement.
Eugene Chausovsky, Non-Resident Fellow — Lectures on the “geopolitics of Central Asia” at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Previously worked as Senior Eurasia Analyst at Strat for for over a decade.
Imtiaz Ali, Non-Resident Fellow — Previously worked as a curriculum specialist at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.
Ahmed Alwani is the founder and president of the Newlines Institute. Alwani previously served on the advisory board for the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) and is the Vice President of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT); his father, Taha Jabir Al-Alwani was one of IIIT’s founders.
Newlines Institute recently took steps to counter rumors of IIIT’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. In an internal email obtained by The Grayzone, dated November 17, 2020, Newlines Director Hassan Hassan addressed the “accusation” against the then-Center for Global Policy. Hassan wrote that while a different “older entity” was funded by IIIT, “[t]he current one has no relation to IIIT.” Hassan attempted to assuage concerns by downplaying Alwani’s connection to IIIT, claiming that Alwani “inherited the International Institute for Islamic Thought as Vice President as a sort of legacy”, following his father’s death in 2018.
Newlines Institute overseen by disgraced sham “university”
Newlines Institute is a branch of a disgraced educational institution that has repeatedly violated state educational standards, raising further questions about the quality of the think tank’s work.
Newlines Institute’s parent institution is Fairfax University of America (FXUA), a school also founded and led by Alwani, and formerly known as Virginia International University. FXUA is a private university in Fairfax, Virginia. Founded in 1998, FXUA’s short track record has been riddled with numerous academic scandals and efforts by state regulators to shut the institution down.
In 2019, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia initiated proceedings to revoke FXUA’s (then known as Virginia International University) certificate to operate. The move came after state regulators found widespread noncompliance with state educational standards.
According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, auditors determined that “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses”, the academic quality and content of classes were “patently deficient”, and student work was characterized by “rampant plagiarism” that went unpunished.
“Unqualified students regularly submit plagiarized or inferior work; faculty turn a blind eye and lower grading standards (perhaps to avoid failing an entire class); and administrators do not effectively monitor the quality of online education being provided”, the audit said.
“That such substandard coursework could continue with no complaints from students, faculty or administrators raises concerns about the purpose of education at VIU [Virginia International University].”
A review of Fairfax University/VIU by an anonymous employee
Indeed, signs point to FXUA/VIU serving as a “visa mill” rather than a legitimate educational institution. As Inside Higher Ed explains, the term “visa mill” refers to a sham operation where an institution “offers little by way of educational value,” but instead lures international students through its ability to offer access to student and work visas, while exploiting them by charging exorbitant tuition costs. FXUA/VIU’s accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), has long faced accusations of certifying such institutions.
In 2019, Inside Higher Ed reported that FXUA/VIU’s “appears to exist primarily to enroll international students,” finding that over the previous five years, “the percentage of students from North America varied between 1 and 3 percent”. Auditors found that the the student body was largely comprised of international students with an “abysmally poor command” of the English language. The students were charged $2,178 per graduate class and $1,266 per undergraduate class to receive their “patently deficient” education.
Although Virginia International University reached an agreement with state regulators that allowed it to continue operating and has rebranded itself as Fairfax University of America, significant concerns remain about the university, along with its subsidiary Newlines Institute.
Just days before Newlines Institute’s report on China was released, its FXUA’s accreditation was once again in potential jeopardy. On March 5, an advisory board to the US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition for ACICS. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity voted 11-to-1 to recommend that ACICS lose the federal recognition it needs to operate.
The advisory committee made the same recommendation in 2016, leading to the ACICS’s recognition being revoked under the Obama administration, before recognition was restored to the troubled accreditor in 2018 by then-President Trump’s Secretary of Education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos.
The Wallenberg Centre: A haven for anti-China hawks and regime-change lobbyists
Newlines Institute published its report in collaboration with The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. The report’s principal author, Yonah Diamond, is legal counsel for The Wallenberg Center, and many of the report’s signatories hold affiliations with the organization.
Based in Montreal, The Wallenberg Centre was founded by Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. While often touted as a “human rights champion”, Cotler is, in fact, a champion of the “responsibility to protect” and “humanitarian intervention” doctrines, regularly invoked by Western states in order to justify imperial interventions in the global south.
Cotler routinely levels propagandistic accusations of human rights abuses, atrocities, and genocide in service Western imperialism, including interventions in Libya and Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, where Cotler served as legal counsel for far-right, US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Leopoldo López. Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, holds an advisory position at The Wallenberg Centre.
Cotler is also active in Haiti, serving as the Minister of Justice in the Canadian administration that worked with the US and France to help overthrow former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. In 2014, Cotler invited Maryam Rajavi, leader of the exiled Iranian MEK cult, to speak on Canada’s parliament hill. Four years later, he nominated US and UK-funded Syrian White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize.
When the OAS brought Irwin Cotler to town to advance its fraudulent human rights campaign against Venezuela, I confronted him on his hypocritical defense of apartheid Israel’s inalienable right to gun down protesters in Gaza & bombard their refugee camps https://t.co/WX5ffMEf9b
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 26, 2020
Cotler is an ardent supporter of Israeli apartheid and longtime advisor to Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the Israeli military. Cotler has played significant role in the Canadian government’s efforts to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and smear the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
Cotler has long harbored hostile sentiments towards China. For a number of years, Cotler served on the international legal team for Chinese anti-government dissident Liu Xiaobo, a right-wing ideologue who called for the privatization and “Westernisation” of China, ardently supported former President George W. Bush, and cheered on US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
More recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, Cotler echoed calls of right-wing US lawmakers for international legal action and sanctions to punish China for supposedly causing the coronavirus pandemic.
In its mission statement, the Wallenberg Centre outlines its right-wing, Western imperial outlook in detail, explicitly identifying China, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia as countries that it is pushing to “combat” with sanctions.
The Wallenberg Centre has become a haven for anti-China hawks, including Senior Fellows David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, and David Matas, senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, a right-wing organization that describes itself as dedicated to “Israel advocacy”.
Kilgour and Matas have extensive ties to the far-right, anti-China religious cult Falun Gong. Both men are regularly contributors to the group’s propaganda arm, The Epoch Times, a media network that The New York Times has described as an “anti-China, pro-Trump media empire” and “leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation”. In 2019, an NBC News exposé found that The Epoch Times spent over $1.5 million on approximately 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in just six months, “more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.”
In 2006, Kilgour and Matas were commissioned by Falun Gong to author a report which made sensational accusations that the Chinese government was secretly conducting a mass campaign of live organ harvesting Falun Gong disciples. In 2017, an investigation by The Washington Post determined that the claims made by Kilgour and Matas were unfounded, with experts commenting that their allegations were “not plausible” and “unthinkable.”
As Washington advances its new Cold War strategy, it has amplified accusations of genocide and other atrocities against the Chinese government, all focused on Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang. To broaden support for the dubious narrative, the US government has turned to a series of pseudo-academic institutions and faux experts to generate seemingly serious and independent studies.
Any critical probe of the reams of reports on Xinjiang and the hawkish institutions that publish them will quickly reveal a shabby propaganda campaign dressed up as academic inquiry. Western media’s refusal to look beneath the surface of Washington’s information war against China only highlights its central role in the operation.
Ajit Singh is a lawyer and journalist. He is a contributing author to Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Brill: 2019). He tweets at @ajitxsingh”
I. AMERICA
As an American, I want to tell you there are many good things in America although they are dwindling already. There was American dream, it is dead now. I used to earn the minimum wage of $1.25 an hour and worked long and hard my way through college. I worked so hard to earn B.A. and Master’s degree from a top American university without owing one penny to anyone. After obtaining my Master’s degree, the university asked me to go on for Ph.D. and I didn’t have to do anything, they would take care of everything. I declined because I had been poor and tired for so many years.
Writing what is wrong with America is a great risk and telling the truth is in real danger of being targeted as anti-America, unpatriotic, communist, and other dirty names. America is doomed if the great silent majority of Americans do not stand up and speak up and act now.
To make the military-industrial-security complex very rich and live in luxuries, the U.S. national debts has exceeded $28 trillion dollars.
“Pentagon Audit Shows $21 Trillion Unaccounted For, as Trump Attacks Sanders on “Socialism”
Ralph Lopez majored in Economics and Political Science at Yale University. He is an advocate of “impact journalism.”
While Donald Trump in his State of the Union address took a thinly-veiled swipe at Bernie Sanders when he declared that America would never, ever, fall victim to “socialism,” analysts were aghast at a recent General Accounting Office report that the Pentagon was forced to make up to $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments,” more than the entire size of the US economy, in 2019.
Socialism is just not the American way, declared Trump. Sanders is now leading the pack by 14% in the upcoming, all-important California primary, 22% ahead of Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Media describing the report, such as Bloomberg News, carefully stressed that most of this amounted to double, triple, and even quadruple-counting billions from one account to another. “The same money as it got moved between accounts,” according to Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This double-counting gives the impression, in the Bloomberg piece, that it pretty much all balanced out, with not much missing. Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood explained “how the dollar figures multiply”:
“Sherwood said recognizing $800 million due a contractor in previously unrecorded payments ‘requires multiple accounting adjustments that net to $0 but could total over $5 billion’ in movement between accounts.”
But, and here is the big fat “but,” buried in the 13th paragraph of the Bloomberg piece. Sherwood says:
“What’s most important to an auditor is whether the adjustments ‘are properly supported’ because ‘properly supported adjustments ensure financial statement values are accurate. We have made significant progress in reducing the number and dollar value of unsupported adjustments by over 30% and 70%, respectively.'”
If you are sitting in an audit with the hated taxman, poring over your returns for your say $80,000 a year job, “properly supported” means you need, for example, to come up with a receipt from the Boston Marriott if you want to write it off as a business expense.
“Properly supported” means, in short, you can prove where the money went. Otherwise it could have gone anywhere. To another bank account. To the Playboy Club. To your brother. If you can’t show that the item is properly supported, you can’t take the deduction.
What Happened to the Trillions Unaccounted For?
Make sure you hear me now. 70% of $35 trillion is, let’s see, about $25 trillion that has been “properly supported,” give or take. Fine and dandy. Good job.
Oh wait. That still leaves $10 trillion that is not properly supported. And $20 trillion the year before that, according to the report. The entire defense budget is shy of $800 billion a year. 10 trillion? The American taxpayer could be getting robbed blind and never know it.
Loans could even be taken out on Pentagon credit cards and papered over, with $10 trillion or $20 trillion in unsupported adjustments for the papering. That’s room for a lot of “creative accounting,” a term that came into fashion during the Enron Scandal.
To put it in the simplest terms possible, an “unsupported” adjustment means no one knows where the money went. If you can’t support an adjustment, you don’t make it.
The main spin in the Bloomberg piece is that it’s all just kind of a crazy, big mess, “sloppy accounting,” as could be expected from the Pentagon because it is so big. Right. Crazy like a fox.
One thing we do know. The rich have been accumulating an ever-increasing share of the overall pie over the last 40 years, while the middle class has been losing it. Just like Bernie has been saying ad nauseam. The wealthiest one percent of the population has gone from holding less than a quarter of all U.S. assets in 1980, to more than a third of those assets now. In the same time period, ninety percent of the population has gone from holding a third of the assets, to less than a quarter.
We know the rich have been getting richer, in terms of asset ownership, for reasons we don’t fully understand. There’s a huge party going on, and you’re not invited.
Who Benefits From This Situation?
It is the politically connected who would be on the receiving side of any “unsupported adjustments.” And if you want to be a billionaire in America, you are probably politically connected.
The GAO report does not say if any of those receipts—”support”—ever came through.
So here comes old Bernie railing not so much that we need socialism, but that it shouldn’t only be for the well-connected rich, what Occupy Wall Street called “crony capitalism.” The dirty little secret is there is already plenty of socialism in America. But it only gets attention when it’s for you.
No congressman ever warns about “socialism” when it’s for oil company shareholders through the Oil Depletion Allowance, for Berkshire Hathaway, or for bank bailouts which, contrary to popular belief, never got paid back.
To his credit, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet has consistently said he does not need any more favors from the government, even though he kept the $29 billion windfall he received in 2017 as a result of the tax bill Congress passed. Saying: “I sure don’t think it’s good for a society where there’s a ton of inequality to start with.”
When the world’s third-richest man is more worried about the growing social divide in this country than about his own net worth, the rest of us should sit up and listen. But all that may be dwarfed by a huge party at the Pentagon, members only.
American leaders and politicians, the military-industrial-security complex are benefited by the American current situation and wars.
Public corruption
Public corruption, the FBI’s top criminal investigative priority, poses a fundamental threat to our national security and way of life. It can affect everything from how well our borders are secured and our neighborhoods protected to how verdicts are handed down in courts to how public infrastructure such as roads and schools are built. It also takes a significant toll on the public’s pocketbooks by siphoning off tax dollars—it is estimated that public corruption costs the U.S. government and the public billions of dollars each year. The FBI is uniquely situated to combat corruption, with the skills and capabilities to run complex undercover operations and surveillance.
Overview
The Bureau’s Public Corruption program focuses on:
- · Investigating violations of federal law by public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government;
- · Overseeing the nationwide investigation of allegations of fraud related to federal government procurement, contracts, and federally funded programs;
- · Combating the threat of public corruption along the nation’s borders and points of entry in order to decrease the country’s vulnerability to drug and weapons trafficking, alien smuggling, espionage, and terrorism.
- · Addressing environmental crime, election fraud, and matters concerning the federal government procurement, contracts, and federally funded programs.
In 2008, the FBI created the International Corruption Unit (ICU) to oversee the increasing number of investigations involving global fraud against the U.S. government and the corruption of federal public officials outside of the continental U.S. involving U.S. funds, persons, businesses, etc. The ICU’s tasks include:
- · Overseeing the Bureau’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and antitrust cases;
- · Maintaining operational oversight of several International Contract Corruption Task Forces, which investigate and prosecute individuals and firms engaged in bribery, illegal gratuities, contract extortion, bid rigging, collusion, conflicts of interest, product substitution, items and/or services invoiced without delivery, theft, diversion of goods, and individual and corporate conspiracies on every level of U.S. government operations.
No other law enforcement agency has attained the kind of success the FBI has achieved in combating corruption. This success is due largely to the cooperation and coordination from a number of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to combat public corruption. These partnerships include, but are not limited to the Department of Justice, Agency Offices of Inspector General; law enforcement agencies’ internal affairs divisions; federal, state and local law enforcement and regulatory investigative agencies; and state and county prosecutor’s offices.”
Types of Corruption
Prison Corruption
The FBI’s prison corruption initiative, which began in June 2014, addresses contraband smuggling by local, state, and federal prison officials in exchange for bribe payments. Through this initiative, the Bureau works to develop and strengthen collaborative relationships with state/local corrections departments and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General to help identify prison facilities plagued with systemic corruption and employ appropriate criminal investigative techniques to combat the threat. Prison officials and staff being co-opted, even if unwittingly, betrays the public trust, threatens the integrity of the justice system in the U.S., and threaten national security interests overall.
Schemes to corrupt prison officials come in a variety of forms, including:
- · Testing: An offer of simple items, like prison commissary goods, is made to prison officials. If accepted, the inmate confirms the official’s administrative misstep, then urges the official to smuggle contraband under threat of reporting the official’s misconduct.
- · Active recruiting: Civilian gang members with no prior criminal history are recruited by incarcerated gang members to apply to become correctional officers, with promises of additional income paid by the inmates’ criminal enterprise.
- · Empathy: Prison inmates study corrections personnel working in the facility and determine whether particular staff members are susceptible to exploitation. This ploy typically results in improper interpersonal relationships and the corrupted official’s integrity being compromised to the benefit of the inmate.
- Border Corruption
The federal government is responsible for protecting approximately 7,000 miles along the U.S. border and 95,000 miles of U.S. shoreline, and every day, over a million people visit the U.S. and enter through one of the more than 300 official ports of entry into the U.S., as well as through seaports and international airports. The FBI recognizes the very real threat public corruption at our nation’s borders and all other ports of entry pose.
Common acts of border corruption involve drug trafficking and alien smuggling. Throughout the U.S., the FBI has investigated corrupt government and law enforcement officials who accept bribes and gratuities in return for allowing loads of drugs or aliens to pass through ports of entry or checkpoints; protecting and escorting loads of contraband; overlooking contraband; providing needed documents, such as immigration papers and driver’s licenses; leaking sensitive law enforcement information; and conducting unauthorized records checks.
Border corruption potentially impacts national security as well—corrupt officers might believe they are accepting a bribe simply in return for allowing a carload of illegal aliens to enter the U.S., when they might actually be facilitating the entry of a group of terrorists. Or a corrupt official who expedites immigration paperwork or helps obtain an identification document in return for a bribe or gratuity might actually be facilitating an operation of a terrorist cell, foreign counterintelligence network, or criminal enterprise.
Oftentimes the Bureau brings its expertise to bear on joint investigations with its partners in federal, state, and local law enforcement. Many of these investigations involve FBI border corruption task forces and working groups located in nearly two dozen cities along our borders. Members of these task forces and working groups stand shoulder to shoulder to combat corrupt officials, both operationally and through the sharing of intelligence and information, along with the use of trend analysis, lessons learned, and best practices.
Federally, the FBI coordinates investigative efforts along the borders with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General; Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs; Transportation Security Administration; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-Office of Professional Responsibility.”
International Corruption
The FBI’s International Corruption Unit (ICU) is the leading investigative entity in combating foreign corruption. ICU manages five programs:
- · Foreign Bribery/Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
- · Foreign Corruption/Kleptocracy Program
- · Antitrust
- · International Fraud Against the Government
- · International Corruption of Federal Public Officials
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
ICU has management responsibility and program oversight for FBI investigations under the FCPA. The 1977 legislation has two main provisions. The first deals with bribery of foreign officials, and the second deals with accounting transparency requirements under the Securities Exchange Act. The dual elements were designed to facilitate parallel criminal and civil enforcement to stem corruption and promote fair business practices worldwide. The anti-bribery provision makes it illegal for U.S. companies and certain foreign companies to bribe foreign officials to obtain or retain business. The bribes can be in the form of money or any other items of value. The accounting provision of the FCPA focuses on the Securities Exchange Act requirements applying to all foreign companies whose securities are listed on the U.S. stock exchanges and U.S. companies.
The United States cannot charge the foreign official under the FCPA; rather, the United States works together with international law enforcement partners to investigate U.S. subjects who are complicit in paying bribes to foreign officials. The supply and demand equation of bribe paying and receiving illustrates the FCPA and kleptocracy violations as two sides of the same coin. For more information, see this detailed FCPA Resource Guide.
Kleptocracy
Kleptocracy, literally meaning “the rule by thieves,” is a form of political corruption in which the ruling government seeks personal gain and status at the expense of the governed. Through graft and embezzlement of state funds, corrupt leaders amass tremendous wealth at the expense of the broader populace. Some of the most egregious examples have occurred in countries with very high rates of poverty. The inherent challenge for corrupt leaders is covertly expatriating and holding money in secure locations where it can be accessed in the future. Generally, that requires international movement of funds. When transfers occur in U.S. dollars or transit the U.S. banking system, federal money laundering jurisdiction is established. The FBI initiates money laundering investigations to trace the international movement of assets and, in conjunction with foreign partners, forfeit and repatriate assets back to legitimate authorities in victim countries.
Antitrust
ICU has program management responsibility for the FBI’s antitrust investigations, both domestic and international, which target conspiracies among competitors to fix prices, rig bids, or allocate markets or customers. These conspiracies deprive U.S. consumers of true competition, an economic bedrock of our free and democratic society. Perpetrators often operate in multinational companies that bask in illegal profits at the expense of U.S. consumers. Stolen by cartels, the ill-gotten gains and competitive advantages reduce supply, eliminate incentives to compete by offering better and more innovative products and services, and destabilize economic markets.
International Contract Corruption
ICU has program management responsibility over cases involving international fraud against the government and international corruption of federal public officials. The FBI was a co-founder of the International Contract Corruption Task Force, which was created in 2006 with the goal of addressing contract fraud concerns. These concerns stemmed from overseas U.S. government spending during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These cases typically involve bribery, gratuities, contract extortion, bid rigging, collusion, conflicts of interest, product substitution, items/services invoiced without delivery, diversion of goods, and corporate and individual conspiracies at various levels of U.S. government operations.
ICU’s program extends beyond the war effort to include worldwide contingency operations involving U.S. military actions, foreign aid and development, and humanitarian aid in any international region. Spending on these programs is highly susceptible to corruption and fraud by those wishing to take advantage of the chaotic circumstances surrounding these benevolent endeavors. Misuse of U.S. funds overseas poses a threat to the United States and other countries by promoting corruption within the host nation, damaging diplomatic relations, inadvertently supporting insurgent activity, and potentially strengthening criminal and terrorist organizations.
International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre
The FBI works with multiple law enforcement partners from around the world as part of the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC). Established in 2017, the IACCC is a coordinated and collaborative effort to provide information, assistance and other support to agencies investigating public corruption offenses.”
ICU Initiatives
ICU oversees two large initiatives: the program management of four international corruption squads dedicated to investigating FCPA, kleptocracy, and antitrust cases and the development of a robust private sector outreach program.
International Corruption Squads
The international corruption squads (ICS), based in Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and Washington, D.C., were created to address the national impact of foreign bribery, kleptocracy, and antitrust schemes. These schemes negatively affect U.S. financial markets and economic growth when inadequately addressed. They are unique in nature in that they are international matters with the overt criminal acts typically occurring outside U.S. borders. Without these dedicated resources, it was difficult for FBI divisions to investigate international matters that did not directly affect their area of responsibility as clearly as other violations; therefore, the FBI created four international corruption squads to enable a focus on international corruption matters without draining resources from the field.
The ICS are a vital resource to combat international cartels and corruption. The violations addressed by the ICS are equally recognized by both DOJ and the FBI as risks to U.S. national interests. These squads not only lend additional resources to a global threat, but they also allow the FBI to attack the matters and use sophisticated investigative techniques that have long been successfully utilized by the FBI to address complex criminal matters.
Private Sector Outreach
In an effort to combat international corruption and cartels, the FBI’s ICU created a proactive strategy that places an emphasis on strengthening existing relationships and forging new partnerships in the private sector. This is not new to the FBI. We have leveraged relationships throughout our 100+ years of investigations—from fighting organized crime to combating terrorism. Nonetheless, we believe by fostering these vital relationships, the FBI will be able to effectively fight international corruption to ensure a fair and competitive global market environment for companies resulting in a strong U.S. economy. ”
“War Crimes
Top Ten American War
Criminals Living
Freely Today
Rense Exclusive
By Douglas Herman
12-14-5
| “A war crime is a punishable offense, under international law, for violations of the law of war by any person or persons, military or civilian. Every violation of the law of war is a war crime. Also, war crimes are those committed during wartime in violation of international conventions intended to protect civilian populations and prisoners of war. You will note that many on this list, categorized as war criminals, ironically, are among the most powerful and wealthy US citizens 1. Robert McNamara. Former US Secretary of Defense, helped kill approximately 2-3 million, mostly poor Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. Not to mention a sizeable portion of the 58,000 dead US servicemen pressed into that war. Not to mention that equal number of US veterans who committed suicide in the years to follow. McNamara is an Elder Statesman now, walking around freely today. 2. Henry Kissinger. Former US Secretary of State, had a hand in the killings mentioned above. Plus condoned thousands of additional killings in Chile, under the sponsorship of US foreign policy. Won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Elder Statesman, walking around freely today. Died in 2023. 3. Bill Clinton. Former, disgraced US President. Initiated bombing raids against Yugoslavia and Iraq, neither country able to defend itself, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Conducted punitive sanctions against Iraq, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Presided during Waco Massacre and Oklahoma City Bombing, thinly-disguised war crimes against US citizens.. Elder Statesman, walking around freely today, amply rewarded for book deals and speaking engagements. 4. George HW Bush. Former super spy, former US President, the first to graduate from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into the presidency and bring lessons learned at CIA headquarters directly into US policy. While serving under Ronald Reagan, helped encourage the Iraq-Iran war, resulting in deaths of one million people, allowing US oil and arms dealers to profit greatly. During the ‘Eighties, helped encourage US sponsored military dictators in Latin America, guilty of extermination of thousands of ordinary citizens, via US-trained “death squads.” Conducted pre-emptive war with Panama, resulting in 1,000-4,000 deaths, simply to topple former CIA henchman and drug lord, Manuel Noriega. Elder Statesman, walking around freely today, basking in limelight.5. Madeline Albright. Former US Secretary of State under Clinton. Condoned the punitive sanctions against Iraq that resulted in an estimated 500,000 deaths of children. Remarked that such sanctions were “worth it.” Elder Stateswoman, walking around freely today.6. George W. Bush. Two term US president, elected using electronic, “black box” voting methods that permit no verification of actual vote count. Conducted two pre-emptive wars, resulting in excess of 100,000 US. Iraqi and Afghani deaths. Condones the use of torture as US policy. Condones rejection of the Geneva Convention, becoming the first US president to openly do so. Considers the US Constitution “A Goddamned piece of paper.” Embattled Statesman, walking around freely today7. Dick Cheney. Former US Secretary of Defense, and signator of the PNAC, and current Vice President. Accused mastermind of the 911 “terrorist” attack against the US (unproven), Cheney has been called “The Vice President For Torture” by the Washington Post. A staunch supporter of the Middle Eastern War Without End, Cheney, like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld bears particular responsibility for the conduct of the war. Elder Statesman, walking around freely today. 8. Paul Wolfowitz. Former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and architect of the Middle Eastern War Without End. Casualties in two pre-emptive wars now exceed 100,000 deaths, not including the estimated 2,000+ US deaths and 15,000 wounded. Won a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work and a promotion to the head of the World Bank. Elder Statesman, walking around freely today. 9. Donald Rumsfeld. US Secretary of Defense during the Middle Eastern War Without End. A signator of the PNAC document that calls for pre-emptive hostile acts of US imperialism conducted by overwhelming military means (War) against weaker nations possessing scarce resources. Aside from the estimated 100,000 Iraqi deaths, the estimated 15-20,000 US casualties (dead and injured), and the untold tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands (millions?) who will suffer from the effects of depleted uranium in the years to come, Rumsfeld remains convinced the “war on terror” is just. A long time political appointee, Rumsfeld is an Elder Statesman, walking around freely today.10. Ruppert Murdoch. Token American. Media baron. Never met a war he didn’t like. Responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and untold millions of refugees through media encouragement of harsh, US foreign policy. Owns a sizable chunk of the US news media. Murdoch is the most visible Godfather of the Mainstream News Mafia (MNM). Elder Statesman and multi-billionaire news baron, walking around freely today.Former USAF veteran (Honorably Discharged) and Elder Statesman, Douglas Herman writes regularly for Rense and is the author of The Guns of Dallas” |
As God is my witness, American democracy is a farce and fiasco. The US Constitution does not stipulate that the sovereignty of America is vested in the hands of American citizens. The American leaders and politicians do not want to vest sovereignty in American citizens, that way they will lose all power and authority. They are also afraid of a national referendum as a vehicle to express the majority rule.
The recent uncertainty and chaos of the presidential election, the Capitol riots, the divisiveness between federal government and state governments, the hostilities between the two political parties and the paralysis of the Congress, the demonstrations and protests against government injustice all over the country, the fear and unrest among Americans, etc. all point to the failure of American democracy. Since the end of World War II, the whole world knows leaders of which country have been liars, killers, and robbers.
In America, an American is free to be shot dead, to be raped, to be robbed, to be assaulted or mugged, to be falsely accused or charged, to be defrauded and overcharged by healthcare system, to be overtly and covertly discriminated, to be unemployed, to be homeless, to be abused by police brutality, to be mistreated, to be terrorized, etc. the government cannot and does not protect you. No one protects you. The sole superpower with all its huge high quality and quantity of nuclear weapons cannot and does not protect its citizens.
Since the change of the Soviet Union into Russia, Russia has been a decent and respectable Republic. President Putin has the highest approval rate of his people the Russians than any leader in the world. President Putin is no killer, but a great leader of world peace. Russia is not a problem. American imperialism and its allies, the resurgent Japanese militarism and Islamic terrorism are the problems of the world. Russia is no threat, China is no threat to the West or the world. The American empire and its allies are illegally and unlawfully sanctioning Russia and China. Gullible Americans have believed that American wars and killing innocent millions are justified to preserve peace and freedom. In fact, American empires, EU, UK and their allies have been waging unjust wars and bloody killing in order to continue American and European dictatorship and domination of the world. Americans and its allies are waging ideological and hegemonic wars since the end of World War II to maintain and preserve its power and privilege and preeminence in the world, contrary to democracy, freedom, and justice. The handwriting is on the wall about American, European and Japanese war crimes and atrocities.
I do not have vested or special interest, I am telling you the truth in Christ. The American form or model of democracy does not work for Americans, and cannot work anywhere in the world. I hold the opinion that the U.S. President, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court do not serve the American national interest. The two American parties, the Democratic and the Republican also do not serve the American interests. The two political parties are held hostages by special interests. You can find the clear evidence and many indisputable proofs. You say you cannot see them. Well, I have no power to open the eyes of the blind. Only God can do that.
1. The chaos and fiasco of the last presidential election.
2. The Riots of the Capitol Building by so-called patriotic Americans.
3. The fear and unrest of American people.
4. The Federal and State governments do not have unity.
5. No one or entity is responsible or accountable for anything happening in America.
“CMS: US health care spending will reach $4T in 2020”
No one believes CMS is working for the interest of American patients.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
If included the private insurance, it is estimated the total health care costs in America in 2020 already exceeds $8 trillion. American hospitals and doctors are very smart about manufacturing health care costs for each patient, if you look at and examine the unintelligible pages and pages of hospital and medical bills, you may have a glimpse of them.
The coin of justice has two sides, the face justice and the tail injustice. America has failed on both counts. Police brutality is only one facet of injustice, it has been practiced a long time in America. The recent incident of a white police in public and on TV killed a black suspect does not speak well of American justice before the world at large. The fact that the wrong doing of a white police for killing a black suspect penalized the residents of Minnesota for $27 million is another facet of injustice of the American legal system. You have to ask the question what was the black arrested for? What was his occupation? Did he have criminal record? How much he was making or earning a month? Not anybody’s life is worth $27 million. The residents of Minnesota are not responsible for the crime of any police or official. The residents of Minnesota do not have to pay for the crime of any police or official. Every person is responsible for his/her crime. If a police is guilty of a murder, he is responsible and liable to pay for his crime, not the residents of any city or state. It is a great injustice to make the residents of Minneapolis or Minnesota to pay penalty or damages for the crime of a police white or black. There is something seriously wrong about the criminal justice system in America. The American jury system is a travesty of justice; it should be replaced by 3 independent judges who know the law and the facts of life in America.
The three independent judges criminal trial proceeding
eliminates the issue of bias within the justice system on ground the judges are knowledgeable of the law and the facts of life in America. I served on jury before, it was a pain and burden because I had a paid profession and had job responsibility. Jury system disturbed citizen’s normal life and that is a wrong way to perform civic duty. The impartiality of the three independent judges is guaranteed because the verdict is disclosed and a partial judge can be impeached. Besides the verdict of the three independent judges may be reviewed by a higher court. False convictions are unlikely because the majority decision is required. A juror does not need to reason his decision and there is no penalty for his wrong decision, but judges are. A jury system wastes a lot time because ignorance of the law and the idiosyncrasy of each juror. Jury trials create financial hardships for the people who serve; while judges are paid to do their job.
According to https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/good-morning-show/fact-or-fiction-outrageous-jury-awards/83-402755494
For instance, a woman throws her drink at her boyfriend. Then, slips on the ice and wins a $113,500 judgment against the restaurant.
A woman who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. The motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned. The jury awarded her, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home.
According to
“A Texas state court was the jurisdiction offering a recent textbook example that demands reversal.
In March of last year, a jury in San Antonio inexplicably awarded a $706 million decision in favor of tech startup HouseCanary, Inc., and against Amrock, Inc., a title insurance and real estate valuation provider.
Here’s the backstory. The verdict actually stems from a fairly unexceptional 2016 lawsuit by Amrock (which back then went by the name Title Source, Inc.) against House Canary for breach of contract. In a nutshell, the two parties had entered into a contractual arrangement whereby Amrock would utilize House Canary’s real estate data, appraisal software and automated valuation models. House Canary is one among several companies that attempt to automate the home appraisal process, which traditionally relied upon manual accumulation and home inspections. Amrock sued for $5 million, alleging that the product provided by House Canary was so incomplete as to be unworkable.
House Canary countersued, alleging that Amrock improperly used House Canary’s technology to create its own automated valuation model and downloaded House Canary’s home valuation reports in order to reverse-engineer its own product.
That’s where things went haywire, in the form of the jury’s incomprehensible award in favor of House Canary.
Specifically, the jury awarded $706 million to House Canary, which included $471 million in punitive damages and $235 million for trade secret misappropriation. ”
“May 27, 2020 · A Black man who yelled “I cannot breathe” as a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him down with his knee in the US state of Minnesota died late on Monday, police confirmed, drawing outrage…
According to
No life matters $27 million if you correctly count a man’s earning power over a life time. Besides, the Black man was not a hero, he was only a victim and a suspect which no information was disclosed. When a white Minneapolis police officer asphyxiated him with his knees on TV in public, the police chief did not order to stop it. The mayor did not give an order to stop it. The governor did not give an order to stop it. This is a blatant and outrageous jury award which was not connected to justice and reality. This is a great injustice to the residents of Minneapolis, the council members should take money out of their own pockets and salaries. When a police official or any official commits a crime, he/she is solely responsible. The city cannot be responsible for the crime of an officer or official. The officer or official is liable and accountable for his/her crime, the city or the state is not. That is the most outrageous case of injustice. It is a giant step and trend toward injustice. That is the major reason to abolish the jury trial.
For the same reason Affirmative Action is illegal and unconstitutional. When a single racial group is awarded or granted special treatment or favor under the law, all other groups suffer injustice consequently.
By telling all the truths about America, not intended to offend anyone, but intended to save America. Millions of Americans have been doped and hypnotized and fooled, and not realizing one bit that America needs to be saved now. In fact, no one except God can save America. I only proclaim the truth pointing out the major American problems one by one, hoping the American leaders and politicians, and the silent majority may wake up, rise up, and do something.
There is actual racial discrimination in America as attested by my own and others’ experiences. Because I am endowed with abilities and qualifications, with high intelligence, pleasant personality and correct values, I was lucky to suffer only employment and promotion discrimination. I never encountered police brutality; when police listened to my communication, they never abused me. I never encountered shopping discrimination, big department stores treated me with great respect. I never had problem in renting apartments. I did not encounter social problems because I chose my own friends. In fact I turned down many offerings of friendship from White people just as I also turned own the Chinese people. However, at a junior college my future was threatened by Black students riot. President Richard Nixon came to my help and rescue and the rest was history. Also America has religious freedom for sure. I also believe America has freedom of speech, but more and more censored and opposed by radicals. I think Orange County, California, is the best place to live in America or for that matter in the world; however, a retired person cannot afford the high cost of living and renting and the most costly and fraudulent healthcare in the world and without a convenient subway.
After the departure of President Nixon, I am convinced America is led astray and going in the wrong direction. I have written quite a few articles, hoping American leaders and politicians will wake up from the nightmare of an empire of wars and weapons of mass destruction, and return to the right path of peace and a respectable and decent Republic.
II. BRITISH EMPIRE
According to
History | February 4, 2014
“10 Evil Crimes Of The British Empire
1. The British Empire
The British Empire was “the empire on which the sun never sets.” It had colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia, Australia, New Zealand and even Antarctica. At its height, it covered more than 33,700,000 km2 (13,012,000 sq. mi), almost a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. The British had rivalries with the French, the Irish, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as dealing with insurrections in their colonies. After World War II, Britain began a policy of decolonization, and the end of the Empire as such came in 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China. Some former colonies continue to be part of the British Commonwealth, now called “The Commonwealth of Nations,” which is made up of 53 nations under the umbrella of Queen Elizabeth II as “Head of the Commonwealth.”
This article has presented 10 great European empires that made a name for themselves via imperialism, warfare, religion and size. Maybe an even greater empire still awaits us. Question for students (and subscribers): Might the European Union be considered an empire? Do you believe empires still have a place in the twenty-first century? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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At its height, the British Empire was the largest to have ever existed. Aside from covering most of the globe, it was responsible for some of the greatest advances in engineering, art, and medicine that the world will ever know. The Empire gave us steam engines, penicillin, radar, and even television.
However, life under the British wasn’t all just incredible inventions. Alongside the good stuff the Empire did sat a whole ream of not-so-good stuff, and alongside that a whole load of other stuff so evil it’d make Dick Dastardly balk.
10 The Boer Concentration Camps
We all now know about the horrors of concentration camps, but during the time of Boer Wars, rounding up tens of thousands of innocent people and detaining them in camps seemed like a stroke of genius. The British needed the South African populace under control and had the means and manpower to detain them. What could possibly go wrong?
Try just about everything. Pitched under the white hot African sun and crawling with flies, the camps were overcrowded, underequipped, and lethally prone to disease outbreaks. Food supplies were virtually non-existent, and the callous guards would dock people’s meager rations for the slightest perceived offense. The result: sickness and death spread like wildfire, killing women by the thousands and children by the tens of thousands. In a single year, 10 percent of the entire Boer population died in the British camps—a figure that gets even worse when you realize it includes 22,000 children.
But the atrocity didn’t stop there. While rounding up the Boers, the British also decided to detain any black Africans they encountered, 20,000 of whom were worked to death in slave labor camps. All told, British policy in the war killed 48,000 civilians. That’s 18,000 more than the number of soldiers lost on both sides.
Aden’s Torture Centers
Photo credit: Brian Harrington Spier
The Aden Emergency was a 1960s scramble to control the once-vital port of Aden in modern Yemen. Although the port had long been under British rule, a nationalist wave sweeping Yemen led to strikes, riots, and a general desire that the Brits leave as soon as possible. A desire the British decided to quell by opening torture centers.
Harsh and brutal, these centers housed the sort of horrors that would make Kim Jong-Un feel ill. Detainees were stripped naked and kept in refrigerated cells, encouraging frostbite and pneumonia. Guards would stub their cigarettes out on prisoner’s skin and beatings were common. But perhaps worst of all was the sexual humiliation. Locals who had been detained could expect to have their genitals crushed by guards’ hands, or to be forced to sit naked on a metal pole; their weight forcing it into their anus.
By 1966, an Amnesty report on these abuses had caused global outrage. Faced with international condemnation, the British apologized. They then kept right on using the torture centers for another full year.
The Chinese “Resettlement”
Photo credit: L joo
In 1950, the Empire had a problem. Armed Communist insurgents were trying to take over Malay and most of the population seemed willing to let them do so. Reasoning that their forces stood no chance against a hidden army that could call upon the peasants for supplies, the British hit upon an ingenious solution. Rather than fight, they’d simply imprison all the peasants.
Known as “New Villages,” the camps constructed to house Malay’s poor were heavily fortified and watched over by trigger-happy guards. Inmates were forced to do hard labor in return for scraps of food, and contact with the outside world—including family—was forbidden. Once in a village, you lost all right to freedom and privacy. At night, harsh floodlights flushed out the shadows to stop clandestine meetings. Expressing any political sentiment could get your rations docked.
But perhaps most uncomfortable of all was the racist nature of the camps. Of the 500,000 people detained during the decade-long Emergency, only a handful were anything other than ethnic Chinese. Outside the barbed wire walls, another half a million Chinese were meanwhile being deported, sent into exile, or forced from their homes. In short. it was a racist policy that harmed nearly a million people, all so the British could cut off supplies to a handful of rebels.
The Amritsar Massacre
On April 13, 1919, thousands of peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British rule in Amritsar, India. Men, women, and children all descended on the walled Jallianwala Gardens, hoping to make their voices heard. What happened next was one of the lowest points in British history.
At 4.30pm, troops blocked the exits to the Garden and opened fire on the crowd. They kept firing until they ran out of ammunition. In the space of ten minutes, they killed between 379 and 1,000 protesters and injured another 1,100. A stampede caused a lethal crush by the blocked exits. Over 100 women and children who looked for safety in a well drowned. Rifle fire tore the rest to shreds.
When the news reached London, Parliament was so shocked it recalled the man who ordered the massacre, Brigadier Reginald Dyer. In a depressing twist of fate, the British public labeled him a hero and raised £26,000 (around $900,000 in today’s money) for “the man who saved India.” He died peacefully, convinced right to the end that his mindless slaughter had been morally justifiable.
The Cyprus Internment
The big myth of the British Empire is that it nobly withdrew from its colonies when it realized the days of Imperialism were over. Yet one look at Cyprus proves the myth to be just a feel-good fairy tale. Between 1955 and 1959, the British responded to a Cyprus rebel bombing campaign by rounding up and torturing 3,000 ordinary Cypriots.
The victims of this internment campaign were often held for years without trial and violently abused for being “suspected” terrorists. Detainees received regular beatings, waterboarding, and summary executions. Children as young as 15 had burning hot peppers rubbed in their eyeballs, while others reported being flogged with whips embedded with shards of iron. Those found guilty of rebel sympathies were relocated to London, where a UK opposition party inspection found inmates with their arms broken and jagged scars running across their necks. In short, it was an appallingly sadistic policy, one that showed the British to be even lower than the terrorists they were meant to be fighting.
Crushing The Iraqi Revolution
In 1920, the newly-formed nation of Iraq was tiring of British rule. Charged with guiding the new state towards independence, the Empire had instead installed puppet leaders. turning the place into a de facto colony. Fed up with their imperial overlords, the Iraqis turned to revolution, only for the British to unleash wave after wave of atrocities against them.
First the RAF conducted nighttime bombing raids on civilian targets. Then they deployed chemical weapons against the fighters, gassing whole groups of them. But the real horrors came in the aftermath, when the victorious British decided to use collective punishment against the offending tribes.
From that point on, any tribe that caused a fuss would have one of its villages randomly annihilated. Specific orders were given to exterminate every living thing within its walls, from animals to rebels to children. Other villages were subject to random searches. If the British found a single weapon, they would burn the place to the ground, destroy the crops, poison wells, and kill livestock. They’d sometimes target weddings to terrorize the population. In short, the British deliberately targeted civilians in a campaign that lasted the better part of half a decade, all because a few Iraqis had dared to ask for their country back.
The Partitioning Of India
As a servant of the British Empire in 1947, Cyril Radcliffe has the distinction of killing more people with the stroke of a pen than anyone else in history. With almost zero time to prepare himself, Radcliffe was tasked with drawing the border between India and newly-created Pakistan that would split the subcontinent forever along religious lines. It was a tricky task, one that had the potential to cause massive displacement and ethnic violence even if handled carefully. Radcliffe, on the other hand, was asked to make some of the most-important decisions during the course of a single lunch.
The result was a border that made no ethnic or geographical sense. Terrified of being caught on the wrong side, Hindus in modern Pakistan and Muslims in modern India upped sticks and ran. The result was 30 million people trying desperately to escape one country or the other, a situation that quickly spiraled into mind-numbing violence.
Gangs of armed Muslims held up border trains and slaughtered any non-Muslims onboard. Hindu mobs chased and battered Muslim children to death in broad daylight. Houses were ransacked, villages burnt, and half a million people killed. It was a ridiculous waste of life, one that could have been largely avoided simply by giving the unfortunate Cyril Radcliffe enough time to do his job properly.
Exacerbating The Irish Famine
If you want to see why large parts of Ireland still despise anything remotely British, look no further than the Irish Famine. What started out as an ordinary if brutal famine soon became something more like genocide when London sent the psychopathic Charles Trevelyan to oversee relief work.
A proud Christian who believed the famine was God’s way of punishing the “lazy” Irish, Trevelyan was also a fierce devotee of Adam Smith. How fierce? Well, he passionately felt that government should never, ever interfere with market forces, to the extent that he refused to hand out food to the starving Irish. Instead, he instituted a public works program that forced dying people into hard labor building pointless roads so they could afford to buy grain. The only problem was he refused to control the price of grain, with the result that it skyrocketed beyond what the road builders could afford. Trevelyan thought this would encourage cheap imports. Instead it led to a million people starving to death.
To cap it all off, Trevelyan also launched a PR blitz in Britain that encouraged people to blame the Irish for their own poverty. Suddenly Irish emigrants looking for work found themselves unemployable and subject to violence, even as their friends and families starved to death back home. Because fate laughs in the face of justice, Trevelyan was later officially honored for his “relief work.”
The Kenyan Camps
Photo credit: La Salle University
In the 1950s, the people of Kenya decided they wanted their nation back. Unfortunately, the people they wanted it back from just happened to be the same guys responsible for every other atrocity on this list. Fearing a countrywide rebellion, the British rounded up 1.5 million people and placed them in concentration camps. What happened in these camps will turn your stomach.
Under slogans like “labor and freedom” and other variations on ” Arbeit macht frei,” inmates were worked to death as slave labor filling in mass graves. Random executions were not-uncommon and the use of torture was widespread. Men were anally raped with knives. Women had their breasts mutilated and cut off. Eyes were gouged out and ears cut off and skin lacerated with coiled barbed wire. People were castrated with pliers then sodomized by guards. Interrogation involved stuffing a detainee’s mouth with mud and stamping on his throat until he passed out or died. Survivors were sometimes burned alive.
The official body count is under 2,000, but more reliable estimates place the total dead in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Most of them were civilians or children, detained on vague, trumped-up charges of aiding the rebels. And it was all for nothing. Kenya was declared independent in 1963. In using those camps, the British lost both their African outpost and their souls.
The Bengal Famine
In 1943, a deadly famine swept the Bengal region of modern East India and Bangladesh. Between one and three million people died in a tragedy that was completely preventable. At the time, the extent of suffering was put down to an incompetent British government too busy dealing with a war to look after its empire properly. But in 2010 a new book came out claiming the lack of famine relief was deliberate and that the deaths of those millions had been intentionally engineered by one man: Winston Churchill.
According to the book, Churchill refused to divert supplies away from already well-supplied British troops, saying the war effort wouldn’t allow it. This in itself wouldn’t be too damning, but at the same time he allegedly blocked American and Canadian ships from delivering aid to India either. Nor would he allow the Indians to help themselves: the colonial government forbade the country from using its own ships or currency reserves to help the starving masses. Meanwhile, London pushed up the price of grain with hugely inflated purchases, making it unaffordable for the dying and destitute. Most-chillingly of all, when the government of Delhi telegrammed to tell him people were dying, Churchill allegedly only replied to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.
If all this is true—and documents support it—then Winston Churchill, the British war hero who stood up to the Nazis, may well have starved to death as many innocent people as Stalin did in the Ukrainian genocide. Could the man who held out against Hitler really be capable of such an atrocity? Judging by the rest of this list, it wouldn’t be surprising.”
Morris M. is Listverse’s official news human, trawling the depths of the media so you don’t have to. He avoids Facebook and Twitter like the plague.”
British leaders seem to be oblivious to the threatening crisis that Ireland and Scotland want to be free from the United Kingdom. Not only the sun already sets on the British empire, the fate of the United Kingdom looks dim and dark. Probably the British empire was the most evil empire in the last 500 years. British leaders and politicians do not repent of their war crimes and sins and reform the kingdom, instead of causing so much trouble in the world and with malice and hostility toward Russia and Chin.
III. European Union
The European Union is a group of 27 countries in Europe, they are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark,
Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden. I used to like Norway, wondering why Norway is not a member of EU, probably that is a smart decision.
European imperialists and colonists had done so much genocides, war crimes, abuses of human rights, and evil deeds in the past 500 years and they have not repented of their sins and crimes. Now they have the gall to accuse China of genocide and human right abuses based on unfounded lies and false accusations.
Since the exit of the United Kingdom, compounded and confused by the power and pressure of the United States, NATO has no reason to exist. NATO exists only to wage war and threaten the security of Russia. The future of EU does not look bright because consequently they cannot work together, resentment and dissatisfaction are already brewing and burning. The only way to save EU is to stay out of the shadow of America, and to come out clean in the sunshine of truth by former European empires to pay fair and just compensations to its victimized colonies and to have normal relations with Russia and China. If EU blindly follows the U.S., it is doing so to its own peril. EU won’t last long before it disintegrates and dissolves.
“Top 10 European Empires
By John Creech August 15, 2014 4 Comments
A Brief History
On August 15, 1947, India became an independent country, thereby making George VI of the United Kingdom the last British emperor of India and signalling the end of one of history’s largest empires. No leader has ever conquered the entire world. Some have conquered whole countries, while others have taken over the greater half of continents. Europe has been one of the most densely populated continents for centuries. The first humans arrived in Europe approximately 1.75 million years ago. Prehistoric Europe consisted of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations that collapsed around 1,200 BC. The majority of early European history comes from what is now modern-day Greece and its neighboring countries. Most parts of Europe have, at one point, belonged to one of the major below-mentioned European empires whose ranking in this article is based on military presence, imperialism and population, as judged by the author.
Digging Deeper
10. The Celtic Empire
The Celts were an ethnolinguistic group of tribal societies in the Iron Age and Medieval Europe that spoke Celtic languages while having similar culture throughout western Europe. Though predominant in the British Isles (Great Britain and Ireland), their reach also extended over what is now modern-day Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Italy. The Celts first appeared in Central Europe around 1,200 B.C.; from there they moved westward. Their expansion was aided by their weaponry and brutal battle techniques. Classical writers such as Strabo and Dionysius described them as “wild beasts.”
In Book XIV of Roman Antiquities, Dionysius described their fighting as, “… being in large measure that of wild beasts and frenzied, was an erratic procedure, quite lacking in military science. Thus, at one moment they would raise their swords aloft and smite after the manner of wild boars, throwing the whole weight of their bodies into the blow like hewers of wood or men digging with mattocks, and again they would deliver crosswise blows aimed at no target, as if they intended to cut to pieces the entire bodies of their adversaries, protective armour and all.”
The Celts also had a strong art culture and later, despite their hedonistic appearance, adapted Christianity to replace their Paganism.
9. The Viking Empire
The Vikings were Norse seafarers who, from the late 8th to middle 11th centuries, would travel away from their homeland to trade, explore and sometimes raid areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands. Although the Vikings did not conquer mainland Europe like the Celts, they did travel to the Middle East and Russia and even traded with China. There is strong evidence that they even reached North America and had settlements in the modern Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador. Along with their ability to expand, the Vikings were also known for their brutish warfare and violence as motivated by their Norse religion. One war tactic even consisted of deploying troops who had ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms or massive amounts of alcohol.
8. The Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire began during the Age of Exploration in 1496 and would reach its peak as the foremost global power under the House of Habsburg. In the 16th century, Spain was exploring and colonizing half of North and South America, parts of Africa and even some islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Spaniards were an uncontested naval power until King Phillip II sent his Spanish Armada to invade England in 1588; its crushing defeat by the English paved the way for English expansion and colonialism.
7. The Portuguese Empire
Although it started as a small and relatively insignificant European country, Portugal would go on to have one of the largest and richest empires; its colonies including Brazil, coastal regions of Africa and trading posts in Asia. Known more as traders than warriors, the trade route from Portugal to India, founded by Vasco da Gama in 1498, introduced spices and other exotic new foods to Europe. In 1580, Philip II of Spain inherited the Portuguese crown, thereby beginning a 60-year union between Portugal and Spain.
6. The French Colonial Empire
For nearly 1,000 years, France has had a long-standing rivalry with England. Naturally this rivalry extended to their colonies as well, especially during the American Revolution. Though the French did establish colonies in the Caribbean, India and North America, after the sale of Louisiana, a territory that today is actually comprised of 15 modern-day U.S. states, to the U.S. in 1803 and the conquest of Algiers in 1830, they concentrated primarily on their colonies in northwestern Africa, Madagascar, French Guiana and select areas in southeastern Asia. By World War II, the French colonial empire, including France, had a population of 110 million.
5. The Roman/Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the eastern half of the Roman Empire after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 473, and lasted from its inception in 330 until its own fall in 1453, though with a gap from 1204 to 1261 caused by Western European Crusaders occupying its capital, Constantinople. Its capital, Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul, Turkey, was considered “The New Rome.” For most of its existence, this empire was the most powerful economic, cultural and military force in Europe. It eventually fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
4. The Russian Empire
The Russian Empire, which existed from 1721 until it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917, stretched over three continents and was only surpassed in size by the British and Mongol empires. At its peak, it was comprised of present-day Russia, Mongolia, Alaska and other territories around the Eurasian Peninsula. The expansion of the Russian Empire also allowed for the spread of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In this article it is ranked over the French Empire because it was the Russians who thwarted Napoleon’s plans to take over and control all of Europe. Replaced by the USSR, the former Russian Empire achieved a new sort of “empire” status as the Soviets gained hegemony over many European and Central Asian territories before being dismantled in 1991.
3. The Third Reich
This empire, although controversial and hated, was responsible for World War II and is still fresh in our minds. Known as Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, and ruled by Adolf Hitler, it only lasted from 1933 to 1945. It was a fascist totalitarian state that controlled almost all aspects of life. Particularly keen on promoting racism, German Nationalism and especially anti-Semitism, Hitler and the Nazis believed Aryans to be the master race. Jews and others deemed not up to Hitler’s expectations and standards were persecuted and/or murdered. Nazi Germany occupied most of Europe, with much of the rest being under the control of their allied “puppet states.” The Nazis eventually lost the war, and their empire was lost along with it.
2. The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire lasted from the Middle Ages until its dissolution in 1806. It was multi-ethnic and comprised of the territories of Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Burgundy. The emperor was traditionally elected and then crowned by the Pope. Throughout its early history, Catholicism was the main religion in its territories, but with the Reformation, new Protestant churches, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism, were introduced. After its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, the empire was defeated and dissolved soon afterwards.
1. The British Empire
The British Empire was “the empire on which the sun never sets.” It had colonies in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia, Australia, New Zealand and even Antarctica. At its height, it covered more than 33,700,000 km2 (13,012,000 sq. mi), almost a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. The British had rivalries with the French, the Irish, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as dealing with insurrections in their colonies. After World War II, Britain began a policy of decolonization, and the end of the Empire as such came in 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China. Some former colonies continue to be part of the British Commonwealth, now called “The Commonwealth of Nations,” which is made up of 53 nations under the umbrella of Queen Elizabeth II as “Head of the Commonwealth.”
This article has presented 10 great European empires that made a name for themselves via imperialism, warfare, religion and size. Maybe an even greater empire still awaits us. Question for students (and subscribers): Might the European Union be considered an empire? Do you believe empires still have a place in the twenty-first century? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
If you liked this article and would like to receive notification of new articles, please feel welcome to subscribe to History and Headlines by liking us on Facebook and becoming one of our patrons!
Historical Evidence
For more information, please read…
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. Basic Books, 2004.
The featured image in this article, a map by The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick of the territories that were at one time or another part of the British Empire, with the United Kingdom and its accompanying British Overseas Territories underlined in red, has been released into the public domain worldwide by the copyright holder of this work.”
European imperialism and colonialism have been the worst offender of everything including genocide, human rights abuses, brutality and atrocity, exploitation in the world history in the last 500 years.
IV. Canada
According to
“Prominent Activist Writers Quit Left-wing Canadian Journal, Citing Bias against China, Russia
Three Canadian writers have resigned from the editorial board of Canadian Dimension, a respected left journal established in 1963, citing its coverage of Russia’s recent election and of the Canadian parliament’s vote to convict the China Government of ‘genocide’.
Resignation letter published on Dimitri Lascaris’ Blog, March 18, 2021
_______________________________________
Three Canadian writers have resigned from the editorial board of Canadian Dimension (CD), a respected left journal established in 1963, citing its coverage of Russia’s recent election and of the Canadian parliament’s vote to convict the China Government of ‘genocide’.
When the US and its allies are on a dangerous offensive, CD has aligned itself on only one side of two key debates,’ they state in a letter to CD’s editor, reproduced below. ‘The “About” page on its website states that “For more than half-a-century, CD has provided a forum for lively and radical debate” and that it is “an independent forum for left-wing political thought and discussion.” In rejecting legitimate pieces on two key issues sorely in need of debate and discussion, the board has opted to cease implementing this stated policy.’
‘History amply demonstrates that the U.S. government and its allies routinely disseminate misinformation about the West’s official enemies in order to generate public support for a bellicose and militaristic foreign policy,’ said Dimitri Lascaris. ‘Given the extraordinary risks to humanity of military conflict between nuclear-armed states, it is vital that independent journalists maintain a healthy level of scepticism when evaluating U.S. government allegations about human rights abuses by the West’s official enemies.’
‘We deeply regret this outcome,’ said Radhika Desai, who co-edits the www.newcoldwar.org news and analysis blog with Alan Freeman, ‘’CD’s pioneering role in Canadian left publishing attracted us to join the board, which we regarded as an honour. We hope those who remain will reflect and reconsider their course. Meantime, we cannot be party to the suppression of legitimate critiques of the Government and the Mainstream, to which the Left and the Canadian public sorely needs access.’
‘Canada is suffering a damaging and worsening information deficit,’ said Alan Freeman. ‘Our work brings us in touch with an extensive world network of journalists and scholars, who are rarely heard in Canada. We will work with alternative outlets to give Canadians access to the voices that their own Government and Media are suppressing.’
The letter of resignation, which was addressed to Canadian Dimension’s founding editor Cy Gonick, can be read here:
Dear Cy,
With great regret, we write to tell you that we are leaving the editorial board of Canadian Dimension.
When the US and its allies are on a great and dangerous offensive, CD has aligned itself on only one side of two key debates: around Navalny and the Russian election, and around the Canadian parliament’s decision to brand China’s government as a genocidal regime. Having published, without discussion, an article voicing support for Navalny, an anti-immigrant racist, CD refused to publish John Ryan’s piece raising serious and legitimate questions about the Western narrative surrounding Navalny and his alleged poisoning by the Russian state. It further failed to re-post, despite agreement to do so, a Grayzone piece powerfully and legitimately exposing the leading proponents of the genocide allegation against China.
The journal has thus broken with its stated mission. The ‘About’ page on its website states that “For more than half-a-century, CD has provided a forum for lively and radical debate” and that it is “an independent forum for left-wing political thought and discussion – including just about the entire range of what passes for the left in Canada”. In rejecting legitimate pieces on two key issues sorely in need of debate and discussion on the Canadian Left, the board has opted to cease implementing this stated policy.
Its working practices rule out the possibility of correcting this defect in the foreseeable future. This could easily be done; the board need only act on its published guidelines by opening up its differences to the public. Instead, the bulk of submissions go through on the nod without informing us, whilst submissions that are opposed by a minority of the board are filibustered out of publication on allegedly technical grounds which, it is now clear to us, are simply excuses for refusing to publish any view this minority disagrees with. The decisions of the last board meeting, which simply formalize these practices, give us no reason to suppose any change can be expected.
Our objection is not to anything CD has published, but to its suppression of important currents on the left. We have never opposed, and will not oppose, publishing articles consistent with the mainstream left narratives about the West’s official enemies; we ask only that the board gives its readers access to articles that rigorously critique those narratives. After a long and honourable life in Canadian politics, CD faces a choice. Will it live by its avowed purpose by offering its readers a diversity of views and letting them make up their own minds? Or will it transform itself into the journal of a single, sectarian viewpoint on the key issues now facing Canada.
We fear that, with the decisions at the last meeting, CD may well be embarked on the latter course, a course to irrelevance. Certainly, with the suppression of the Ryan and Grayzone pieces we are unable to justify our continuing presence on its editorial board, either to our consciences, or to the Canadian Left.
The authors of this letter can be contacted at:
Radhika Desai: Radhika.Desai@umanitoba.ca
Alan Freeman: alan.freeman@umanitoba.ca
Dimitri Lascaris: alexander.lascaris@gmail.com”
· Canada must not ignore Indigenous ‘genocide’, landmark …
· https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/03/…
· As many as 4,000 Indigenous women and girls are believed to have been killed or gone missing in Canada over the past 30 years – although the true number of victims is unlikely ever to be known.
V. Australia and New Zealand
According to
Australia’s Centuries-Long Genocide Against Aboriginal People
By Richard Stockton
Published November 16, 2016
Updated January 26, 2021
“For nearly two centuries, Australia pursued deliberate policies of extermination against the native people that have left scars visible to this day.
Wikimedia Commons
Writing about the two months he spent in Australia during the around-the-world voyage of the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin recollected this about what he saw there:
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result…
Darwin happened to visit Australia at a bad time. During his 1836 stay, all of the indigenous people of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand were in the midst of a catastrophic population crash from which the region has yet to recover. In some cases, such as that of the native Tasmanians, no recovery is possible because they’re all dead.
The immediate causes of this mass death varied. Deliberate killing of native people by Europeans greatly contributed to the decline, as did the spread of measles and smallpox.
Between disease, war, starvation, and conscious policies of kidnapping and re-education of native children, the Australian region’s indigenous population declined from well over a million in 1788 to just a few thousand by the early 20th century.”
Wikimedia Commons
The first humans we know of arrived in Australia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. That is an immense amount of time – at the upper end, it’s ten times longer than we’ve been farming wheat – and we know next to nothing about the bulk of it. Early Australians were preliterate, so they never wrote anything down, and their cave art is cryptic.
We do know that the land they traveled to was extremely harsh. Highly unpredictable seasons have always made Australia hard to live in, and during the last ice age huge carnivorous reptiles, including a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, inhabited the continent. Giant man-eating eagles flew overhead, venomous spiders scurried underfoot, and clever humans took the wilderness head on and won.
By the time British explorer James Cook’s expedition reached Australia in 1770, over a million people – virtually all descendants of those first pioneers – lived in almost complete isolation, just as their ancestors had for a thousand generations.
The consequences of breaking this airlock were immediate and devastating.
In 1789, an outbreak of smallpox nearly wiped out the indigenous people living in what is now Sydney. The contagion spread outward from there and destroyed whole bands of Aborigines, many of whom had never seen a European.
Other diseases followed; in turn, the native population was decimated by measles, typhus, cholera, and even the common cold, which had never existed in Australia before the first Europeans came along and started sneezing on things.
Without an ancestral history of coping with these pathogens, and with only traditional medicine to treat the sick, the indigenous Australians could only stand by and watch as plagues consumed their people.
The Press for Land
Wikimedia Commons Farmland near Bruce Rock in the Western Australian wheat belt.
With the first large tracts of land cleared by disease, the London-based planners thought Australia seemed like an easy spot to colonize. A few years after the First Fleet dropped anchor, Britain established a penal colony at Botany Bay and started shipping convicts to farm the land there.
Australia’s soil is deceptively fertile; the first farms sprouted bumper crops right away and kept on producing good harvests for years. Unlike European or American soil, however, Australia’s farmland is only rich because it had tens of thousands of years to stockpile nutrients.
The land’s geological stability means there’s very little upheaval in Australia, so very few fresh nutrients get deposited in the dirt to support long-term agriculture. The bounteous harvests of the first years, therefore, were effectively gotten by mining the soil of non-renewable resources.
When the first farms gave out, and when colonists first introduced sheep to graze the wild grasses, it became necessary to spread out and cultivate new land.
As it happens, the children of those who survived the first epidemics occupied the land. Because they had a low population density – partly because of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and partly because of the plagues – none of these Stone Age nomads were in a position to resist settlers and ranchers with horses, guns, and British soldiers for backup.
As such, countless Aborigines fled land that their ancestors may have inhabited for thousands of years, and colonists simply shot numberless tens of thousands others to keep them from hunting sheep or stealing crops.
No one knows how many Australian natives died in this way. While the Aborigines had no way to keep records of the killing, the Europeans seem not to have bothered: Shooting an “abo” became so routine that accurate records are impossible to come by, but the death toll must have been immense as vast new tracts of land opened up to replace exhausted soil every few harvest cycles.”
According to
“Colonial Frontier Massacres
in Australia, 1788-1930
“From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance. As a result thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed. This site presents a map, timelines, and information about massacres in Australia from 1794 when the first massacre was recorded until 1930. Only events for which sufficient information remains from the past and can be verified are included. The map also includes information about massacres of British colonists and others in Australia in the same period. After 1930 the massacres continued but are not included here.”
· Australia’s PM urges parliament to ‘get this house in …
· https://www.rt.com/news/518877-australia–sex–scandal–parliament
· Also on rt.com ‘Sex act on female MP’s desk’: Leaked graphic imagery shows staffers performing lewd acts in Australian parliament, one now sacked. The explosive leak has further fueled the ongoing sex scandal that has been rocking the Australian government for weeks already.
· After more than 150 years, New Zealand recognises ‘extinct …
· https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/14/…
· After more than 150 years, New Zealand recognises ‘extinct’ Moriori people This article is more than 1 year old Polynesian settlers of the Chatham Islands sign treaty to have their status …
According to
“War changed the face of New Zealand in the 19th century. Tens of thousands of Māori may have died in the intertribal Musket Wars between the 1810s and the 1830s. Muskets revolutionised intertribal warfare, decimating some tribes and drastically shifting the boundaries of areas controlled by others. Thousands fled their traditional lands, complicating questions of ownership and opening large areas to potential Pākehā (European) settlement.
Between the 1840s and the 1870s British and colonial forces fought to open up the interior of the North Island for settlement in conflicts that became known collectively as the New Zealand Wars. Sovereignty was contested on the ground despite the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and Māori became less willing to sell land to the rapidly growing European population. Many Māori died defending their land; many other Māori allied themselves with the colonists for a variety of reasons, sometimes to settle old scores.
Most of the several thousand people killed during the New Zealand Wars were Māori, and the land of many of the survivors was subsequently confiscated. ”
· Shocking sex images from Australian Parliament thrust PM …
· https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/…
· Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison addresses the latest scandal. … and MPs used a Parliament House prayer room to have sex, and alleged that sex workers had been brought into the building …
IN CONCLUSION
It must be made clear. I do not speak for China. I do not represent China. I do not work for China. I am not even a Chinese citizen, China is the land of my ancestors; and because I am an American. However, facts are facts which lie cannot overthrow. There never has been genocide, forced labor, abuse of human rights in China. Instead China has succeeded in eliminating Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang, produced a harmonious society, a productive and happy work force, and a progressive and prosperous good land. China has eliminated the terrorists and followers of Dalai Lama and made Tibet a good and prosperous land. China has succeeded in eliminating the foreign agents and Chinese terrorist traitors in Hong Kong, consolidated the government under Constitutional security, made Chinese traitors and terrorists on the run, AND preserved Hong Kong as a viable and prosperous autonomous region of China which the West failed to colonize again. Only Taiwan which legally belongs to China but is in fact a colony of America. American policy on Taiwan is altogether stupid and wrong. If President Richard Nixon were alive, he would gladly return Taiwan to China with an apology. America has wronged China historically too many times. The traitors of Taiwanese regime should all be executed once Taiwan is liberated. The sooner the better. Please read the article Why America Must Not Engage War With China: https://williewongthought.hpage.com/why-the-united-states-must-not-have-war-with-china.html
However, more than anything else I am a disciple and servant of Jesus Christ. I write this article because of the truth and I know the truth. I cannot let enemies of the truth to suppress the truth. I cannot surrender to let lies rule the world. It is my duty to speak the truth, to practice the truth, to testify to the truth, to stand in the truth, to rejoice in the truth, to proclaim the truth, to obey the truth, to love the truth, to believe the truth. I cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. I must be straightforward about the truth.
China, like all other nations in the world, is not a perfect country. China has many problems, but China is not an abuser of human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet or Hong Kong much less committing genocide. As a matter of fact, China is the only nation in the history of the world which has lifted out 770 million peasants from abject poverty. No nation has ever done this before. Democracy is doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people. Instead of sanctioning China on false charges, the West should support China. Or at least leave China alone. It is most absurd and ridiculous to treat and force China to be a rival or competitor. China does not want to compete with America or any nation. China only competes with itself to restore the past glory of China a 1,000 years ago.
The US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are hypocrites and liars for a long, long time. American and Western leaders have gone astray from the truth, claiming they have democracy, human rights, freedom, and justice while they do not. They oppose the truth because what they really want is to continue to dictate and dominate the world in everything. They deceive the world and deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them. They are not walking in the truth when they want to eliminate Russia and China so that they can solely rule the whole world without opposition. Lies and not truth prevail in the six nations, for they proceed from evil to evil. They are not Christian nations.
China and Russia are no real enemies of the West, but the Western powers want to make Russia and China their enemies. The West must not turn away from the truth, what they must do is to seek a just and lasting piece for the world as President Richard Nixon did.
When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand repent of their genocide, abuses of human rights, crimes and sins? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand stop being hypocritical and self-righteous? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand right the wrongs of their past and pay fair and just compensations to their victims? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand stop shamelessly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand stop lying, killing and robbing other nations and peoples? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand stop seeking absolute military superiority and world domination? When will the West stop preparation for the Nuclear War and seek a just and lasting peace for the world? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand stop discriminating and sanctioning Russia and China? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand mind their own business and stop interfering in the internal affairs of other nations? When will the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand start speaking the truth and practicing the truth?
Why the American leaders and politicians are not interested in solving so many American pressing problems at home, wasted money and efforts in wrongfully accusing and sanctioning Russia and China for fake and false charges, is beyond the imagination of any patriotic American.
According to https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/boulder-shooting-colorado-king-soopers-grocery-store/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab4c
“That group’s president, John Feinblatt, called it “absolutely heartbreaking.”
“This is yet another in a long string of horrific tragedies, from Boulder today to Atlanta last week to the dozens more people in the United States who are shot every day, but whose stories do not make the headlines,” he said. “To save lives and end these senseless killings, we need more than thoughts and prayers — we need federal action on gun safety from the Senate and the administration, and we need it now.”
These are indisputable and unquestionable, numerous, established, documented, historical facts and proofs that European imperialists and colonialists, American imperialists and Japanese militarists have committed war crimes and atrocities for hundreds of years. If you say you are Christians, are you not afraid to face God in the judgment to come?
Leaders and politicians of THE WESTERN NATIONS cited above HAVE BEEN LIARS, KILLERS, AND ROBBERS for a long, long time only God knows. According to the Word of God, liars, killers and robbers will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They will all go straight to Hell to suffer eternal punishment for their sins, crimes, and evil deeds.
I sincerely urge America and the Western nations to live in peace and love and practice the truth — that is the good and right way to please and serve God, the Lord of the Universe.