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Comments on current events and recent news headlines.
| UN CALL TO BAN SPACE WEAPONS |
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Thursday, November 29 2007 @ 08:17 AM EST
UN Conference Calls for Treaty Prohibiting Weapons in Space
By Carla Stea
November 28, 2007
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| read more (7454 words) |
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| Christie Brinkley at UN calld for nuclear abolition |
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Wednesday, October 24 2007 @ 10:20 AM EDT
Remarks by Christie Brinkley
for the panel event,
“Amplifying the Moral and Practical Missions of the United Nations:
Parliamentarians, Diplomats and Engaged Citizens Working to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons,”
Hosted by the Global Security Institute and the Parliamentary Network for
Nuclear Disarmament
United Nations, Conference Room 6
October 11, 2007
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| read more (1409 words) |
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| Russia: Islam's Nuclear Sword - Carla Stea |
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Saturday, April 14 2007 @ 07:36 AM EDT
NUCLEAR WEAPONS, RUSSIA, AND “ISLAM AS SWORD”
By Carla Stea January 1, 2007
In a remarkable, but little remarked article by New York University Professor Stephen F. Cohen, published in the July 10, 2006 issue of "The Nation,” Professor Cohen begins:
"Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented development that most U.S. policymakers have recklessly disregarded, as evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both parties, against post Communist Russia during the past 15 years.... the gap between the poor and the rich Russian, experts tell us, is becoming 'explosive'.....The top business and administrative elites, having rapaciously 'privatized' the Soviet states' richest assets in the 1990's, are particularly despised. Indeed, their possession of that property, because it lacks popular legitimacy, remains a time bomb embedded in the political and economic system. Experts differ as to which danger is the greatest - proliferation of Russia's enormous stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological materials, ill-maintained nuclear reactors on land and on decommissioned submarines, an impaired early warning system on hair-trigger alert; or the first-ever civil war in a shattered superpower, the terror-ridden Chechen conflict. But no one should doubt that together they constitute a much greater constant threat than any the United States faced during the Soviet era.”
On April 29, 2006, Russian Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"accused the United States of launching a military campaign to encircle Russia and turn it into a NATO chattel." "Replying in writing to questions from the weekly Moscow News, the 87 year old former Soviet dissident said military action by the United States in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan underlined the menace to Russian sovereignty. 'Though it is clear that present day Russia poses no threat to it whatsoever, NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its' military apparatus in the east of Europe, and is implementing an encirclement of Russia from the south.' "He also attacked western support for recent revolutions that toppled Moscow-backed regimes in Ukraine and Georgia. 'All this leaves no doubt that they are preparing a complete encirclement of Russia which will be followed by the deprivation of her sovereignty' he said. He praised the efforts of Mr. Putin 'to salvage the state from failure.'"
Though Solzhenitsyn's alarm has been described by some as "19th century Russian paranoia," by contrast, in another remarkable work by National Book Award winner James Carroll entitled "House of War, The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power," (James Carroll is the son of the founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Joseph Carroll), on page 162 Mr. Carroll writes:
"As the historian Marshall T. Poe puts it: 'the paranoia theory hardly seems credible (and indeed seems somewhat deluded itself) given the cold, hard historical facts of Russian-European relations. Those relations were marked for centuries by assaults on Russia from, precisely, the West.'" "Between 1654 and 1667 Polish armies invaded Russia in territorial conflicts over what is now Ukraine; in the 1670's the invaders were from the Ottoman Empire; at the end of that century they were the Swedes, who came again a decade later, as did the Ottomans. The Austrian too came in the eighteenth century. In 1812 the French invaded, followed by the British in 1853 - and again by the Ottomans later in the century. In the twentieth century the Germans came twice with devastating effects both times. Paranoia? No nation on earth has faced such continuous and deadly military pressure.'"
And no nation on earth possesses such vastly rich oil, gas and other priceless mineral reserves as is possessed by Russia, especially in her territory east of the Volga, in Siberia. On July 12, 2006 in The New York Times, Steven Lee Myers and Andrew E. Kramer report:
"Deep beneath the thick forests of Siberia, near Lake Baikal, lies a vast deposit of natural gas known as Kovykta, a field so large it could supply all the United States needs for three years. But Russia has so far refused to allow the private companies developing the field to build a pipeline to export the gas...Kovykta is a small thrust in President Vladimir V. Putin's singleminded drive to put the reins of the country's vast natural resources in the Kremlin's hands. It is part of his strategy to enrich the state and recover Russia's claim to superpower status, lost in the Soviet collapse.....Mr. Putin in pre-G-8 summit television interviews suggested that criticism of Russia's energy policies, of its' foreign affairs and of its' version of democracy sprang from outdated cold-war competition and even misguided colonial-era arrogance. 'If we go back 100 years and look through the newspapers, we see what arguments the colonial powers of that time advanced to justify their expansion into Africa and Asia,' he told a French Channel, TFI. 'They cited arguments such as playing a civilizing role, the particular role of the white man, the need to civilize 'primitive peoples'. 'If we replace the term 'civilizing role' with 'democratization' then we can transpose practically word for word what the newspapers were writing 100 years ago to today's world and the arguments we hear from some of our colleagues on issues such as democratization, and the need to ensure democratic freedoms.'"
President Putin's analysis underscores the hypocrisy underlying the Bush administration's lectures about human rights. Recent United States Congressional passage of legislation legitimizing torture, defiance of the Geneva Conventions, and rescinding of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, together with the extension of the Patriot Act's emasculation of the constitutional protections of democratic rights and freedoms of United States citizens, not to mention our government's illegal surveillance of United States citizens, should make conspicuously clear that the United States is in no position to lecture Russia about human rights and democratic freedoms.
On October 19, 2006, John Hoffmeister, President of Shell Oil Company confirmed that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shell spent 20 billion dollars exploring the huge oil reserves off Sakhalin Island. Shell's eagerness to grab a share of Russia's huge oil reserves predated Shell's interest in exploring the riches of Caspian Sea oil, which Shell did not begin investigating until 1997, according to Hoffmeister.
Returning to Professor Cohen: (U.S. government)
"interventionary impulse has now grown even into suggestions that Putin be overthrown by the kind of United States' backed 'color revolutions’ carried out since 2003 in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and attempted this year in Belarus. Thus, while mainstream editorial pages increasingly call the Russian President 'thug,' 'fascist' and 'Saddam Hussein,' one of the Carnegie Endowment's several Washington crusaders assures us of 'Putin's weakness' and vulnerability to 'regime change.' (Do proponents of 'democratic regime change' in Russia care that it might mean destabilizing a nuclear state?)"
At this point, it is important to consider the historic context of these apparently contradictory and perilous developments. In Robert Dreyfuss' detailed history of United States government exploitation of militant Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism to further the United States' geopolitical 'interests,' (a masterpiece entitled "Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,") Dreyfuss traces the pattern, from the 'Devotees of Islam' (a 'violent, assassination-prone Islamist group from Iran,) who worked with the CIA in toppling (the democratically elected) Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, through the more recent and current incitement of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian conflagrations by Islamic extremists. The architect of the more recent use of this strategy was President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. On page 251 Dreyfuss writes:
"At the National Security Council Brzezinski assembled a team of aides and consultants who wanted to exacerbate conflicts inside the Soviet Union in order to hasten its' fall. According to Robert Gates, (then) a senior CIA official who later became the CIA's director, the State Department was cautious about getting involved in supporting dissident minorities in Central Asia. 'Brzezinski, on the other hand was deeply interested in exploiting the Soviet nationalities problem' wrote Gates, in his memoirs. 'He wanted to pursue covert action.'"
According to Gore Vidal in "Dreaming War, Blood for Oil” (2002)
"The Polish born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Adviser to President Carter. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering oil-rich Central Asia, are the two main powers threatening American hegemony in that area. He takes it for granted that the U.S. must exert control over the former Soviet republics of Central Asia...'Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world's GNP and three-fourths of the world's known energy resources'" "Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented, open-ended militarization of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarization campaign." (page 19, Vidal)
Dreyfuss, page 255 describes further:
"The twin Islamic movements, in Iran and Afghanistan, inspired Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser, and Bill Casey, President Reagan's CIA director to pursue the Islam-in-Asia theme aggressively - most emphatically during the holy war in Afghanistan....The U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan, which cost $3 billion dollars and several hundred thousand lives, took America's decades long alliance with ultra-conservative political Islam to a new, more aggressive level. Until Afghanistan the dominant idea was "Islam as bulwark," that is, that political Islam was a barrier against Soviet expansion. But in Afghanistan the paradigm was "Islam as sword." The Islamic right became an offensive weapon, signaling a significant escalation in the policy of cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; the Saudi-Arabia led Islamic bloc and other elements of political Islam.....The Afghan war created a new cadre of Islamists skilled in guerilla warfare, intelligence tradecraft, assassination skills, and the making of car bombs..."
On page 264 Dreyfuss writes:
"In his oft quoted 1998 interview with 'Le Nouvel Observateur,' Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed a secret behind a secret, that the CIA's assistance to the mujahideen in Afghanistan began before, not after the Soviet invasion: 'According to the official version of history (said Brzezinski), CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 2, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.' In the interview, 'Brzezinski admitted that his intention all along was to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - even though after the Soviet invasion occurred U.S. officials expressed shock and surprise. 'We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,' said Brzezinski."
“Richard Pipes once wrote that Soviet Muslims would explode with 'genocidal fury' against Moscow."
"In January, 1980 Brzezinski visited Egypt to mobilize Arab support for the Afghan jihad... The so-called Arab Afghans included bin Laden himself, Ayman A-Zawahiry and tens of thousands of jihadists from the Arab states, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chechnya and other far - flung corners of the Muslim world...They were the guerillas who, after the war was over, went home to Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and to Central Asia to continue the jihad. Many, of course, learned terrorism skills - assassination, sabotage, car bombs - at the hands of the United States and its allies." "Much of this training in assassination, car bombs and the like found its' way to the Arab volunteers who eventually became Al Queda's foot soldiers....The CIA and Pakistan's ISI were providing stealth-like explosive devices to the mujahideen, including bombs disguised as pens, watches, cigarette lighters and tape recorders.... 'Do I want to order bicycle bombs, to park in front of an officer's headquarters,' said CIA official Gus Avrakotos. 'Yes, that's what spreads fear.' Among the targets of mujahideen bombs were soft targets such as Kabul cinemas and cultural shows.'"
Dreyfuss' work is brilliant, and I have quoted extensively from it because, as it is said, the past is prologue, and a detailed study of the intrigues and machinations of the last half of the twentieth century is crucial for an understanding of what follows.
Putting aside the historically virulent hatred between Catholic Poland and Russian Orthodox Christianity as a possible motive, Brzezinski's advocacy of 'Islam as Sword' both covertly and overtly facilitated the ultimate control, long sought and coveted by the United States, of the bonanza of incredible riches of Caspian Sea oil, formerly within the territory of the Soviet Union, and for which the miraculous "deus ex machina" of the events of 9/11 provided the (rather transparent) excuse for the permanent U.S. military presence in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, surrounding the Caspian Sea and its' oil riches. Under the masquerade of fighting that very army of militant Islamic extremists that the United States funded, trained and armed throughout preceding decades, 9/11 made possible a rationalization for the immediate implementation of Brzezinski's agenda, and the permanent U.S. military involvement in Central Asia, also making possible the construction and recent completion of the pipeline exporting oil from Baku to Tblisi to Ceyhan, thereby evading Russian control over the priceless resources of her former territories in Central Asia. In Daniel Yergan's "The Prize," he writes, on page 334: In the economic field Hitler's obsession was oil...Albert Speer said: ‘the need for oil certainly was a prime motive of the decision to invade Russia.'"
On July 4, 1994 Time Magazine's article entitled "Black Gold Rush" states, page 54:
"It is here, on the steppes of Central Asia, that Chevron has staked much of it's future and doubled it's potential worldwide oil reserves by the stroke of a pen on a contract....Over the next 40 years, the company and the Kazakh government plan to invest $20 billion to develop the vast Tenzig field near the Caspian Sea which contains some of the richest sources of oil and gas on earth...The oil saturated rock formations are two or three times the thickness of anywhere else in the world,’ estimates a senior official of the U.S. Department of Energy. 'We're talking about trillions of dollars of revenues from the 30 billion to 60 billion barrels of oil. Chevron's foray into Kazakhstan is part of the biggest global oil rush since energy explorers moved into the Middle East after World War II. Starting with the end of the cold war a few years ago, immense stretches of oil and gas lands - from the Arctic circle to China's Tarem Basin to the waters of Vietnam have opened up to multinational firms.”
In 1992, following the collapse of the Najibullah government in Afghanistan, and while I was working as a reporter in Moscow, a Russian Foreign Ministry official suggested to me the possibility that Russia's territory might eventually be reduced to the size of France: from Ukraine to the Volga.
That was two years before the brother of Moscow parliamentarian Ruslan Khasbulatov was murdered in the Russian republic of Chechnya, in October, 1994, and a group of Islamic fundamentalists began terrorist activities aimed at severing Chechnya from Russia, and instituting, within Chechnya Islamic Sharia law, the amputation of hands as punishment of anyone accused of stealing, stoning to death persons accused of adultery, and flogging to tortured shreds anyone caught drinking alcohol or wine, or failing to observe the obligatory obeisance to Allah five times each day. The Chechen war was instigated by Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, many of whom were produced and trained by Brezezinski's boys in Afghanistan, and escalated into a full scale military conflagration with Russia, bleeding the Russian economy and peoples as the very stability of the Russian nation was jeopardized, and in the name of Islam thousands of innocent Russian civilians were murdered. In Beslan, in 2004, “Islam as sword" kidnapped more than one thousand Russian civilians, and slaughtered innocent Russian schoolchildren, as the murderers screeched "Allah is great!” Western human rights groups consistently blamed Russia for human rights abuses, entirely ignoring the context in which that war was incubated. Not incidentally, Chechen “independence” and the severing of Chechnya from Russia would severely impede Russian access to Caspian Sea oil riches formerly one of the priceless assets of the Soviet Union, and resources desperately needed by Russia to stabilize her country.
January 10, 1996: Nanette vander Laan and Robert Fox in Moscow report in the "Telegraph":
"Though he has almost no outright sympathizers throughout the civilized world, Dudayev has fought a brilliant publicity campaign in his pursuit of Chechen independence. This began in 1991, when he was elected president of the small republic with a population of 1,308,000, mostly Chechens and Inguish. Dudayev dissolved his parliament and declared himself as sole ruler in 1993.
January 10, 1996 Alan Philps near Kizlyar and Robert Fox in "Telegraph":
"Chechen rebels seized 2,000 hostages yesterday when they stormed a hospital during a raid on the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan. They threatened to shoot captives and turn the town of Kizlyar into a 'burning hell' if their demands were not met."
Alan Philps near Pervomaiskoye, "Telegraph":
"Chechens deal new blow to Russia….masked gunmen from the rebellious Russian republic of Chechnya seized a Turkish ferry with 165 people on board last night, killed one passenger and threatened to kill all the Russians on board - one every 10 minutes... Predominantly Muslim Turkey has a Chechen community of about 25,000 and sympathizes with the largely Muslim republic's three year drive for independence. But it has kept a relatively low profile to avoid offending Russia."
In February, 1996, in Moscow, I was granted a personal interview with the distinguished President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Arkady Volsky, who had worked together extensively and effectively for many years with parliamentarian Ruslan Kasbulatov (of Chechen ethnic derivation) and with former Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi The charismatic Volsky stated to me, unequivocally, "Your country, the United States, seldom acts directly. The United States usually acts indirectly, through their proxies and allies, and the United States is aiding and arming the Chechen terrorists through Turkey, your country's NATO ally." Subsequent information and evidence confirmed Volsky's allegations, as undisguised Turkish support for the Chechen separatists was disclosed, in articles in the Moscow Times, and later, The New York Times described extensive financial support and training given the Chechen terrorists from organizations based and originating within Turkey.
Volsky also quoted Kissinger, who had allegedly stated: "Russia was, is, and always will be a competitor and a threat.”
On September 6, 1994 I attended a luncheon at the Raddison Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow, where the (then) U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright stated: "the dilemmas posed by civil strife are nowhere more evident than in the New Independent Republics of the former Soviet Union. If conflicts spread, Russia has the resources, the direct interest and the leadership required to help solve the problems in this region. History and geography have established enduring linkages between Russia and the other newly independent states."
On November 11, 1994, Sergei Chyornykh wrote, in "Komsomolskaya Pravda":
"The situation in the region changed radically on September 20, 1994 with the signing of an oil deal which will involve major firms from the United States, Great Britain and Turkey in developing Azerbaijan's oil reserves. Military units in Karabakh will now be tempted to strike against the oil pipelines leading from Baku to the Georgian ports of Batumi and Poti. Such an action however could well lead to the introduction of 'third country’ troops. No one has forgotten how the United States defended it's oil interests in Kuwait...If the Tbilisi-Baku connection pans out, Russia will lose its' influence in the region once and for all...This situation opens up a wealth of possibilities for interested outsiders. All the signals say: ‘Take what you want. It's a beautiful area - oil, fertile land and enviable geo-political situation. And just a couple of weeks ago (October 1994), speaking at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright stated boldly: 'Russia's interests must not extend beyond its' borders.'"
By October, 1994, Madeleine Albright had made a 180 degree reversal of her position on September 6, 1994, and her latter statement was characterized by the then Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Grigory Karasim, as "unethical." And by November, 1994 the war in Chechnya had begun, severing Russia's ready access to Caspian Sea oil.
As a highly placed diplomatic source said to me in February, 1995, "outside interests are fueling this war in Chechnya.” A highly placed Russian government official confirmed for me that Saudi Arabia was also supplying the Dudayev government in Chechnya.
With Russia tied down and hemorrhaging from its civil war on its' southwest territory in and around Chechnya, losing no time, on September 4, 1995 Time magazine's cover was titled "The Rape of Siberia," and subheaded inside on page 43: "The Tortured Land, Now the World's Capitalists Covet It's Vast Riches"
"Bob Logan, an economist at the University of Alaska, has made trips to Yakutia to study the region's economic prospects, which he describes as "staggering... as much as 20% of the territory is known to have oil and gas deposits that could make it the Saudi Arabia of the North. The area is one of the world's leading sources of diamonds, and Logan notes that 80% of the gold produced there comes from riverbeds and ancient gravel banks, an indication that the republic has barely begun to tap it's underground veins. The world looks upon all these resources and salivates. Texaco, Exxon, Amoco, Norsk Hydro and other transnational oil companies are setting up joint ventures to tap into the enormous oil and gas reserves scattered through Siberia, including the Timan Pechora basin above the Arctic Circle (where the recoverable reserves are estimated at nearly 4 billion bbl.)"
ISLAM AS SWORD
The Islamic territories of the former Soviet Union had, for decades lived peacefully with Russian, Buddhist and other ethnic groups integrated socially, economically and politically within that former superpower (indeed, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was disastrous for the economies of Uzbekistan, Kazakhistan, Tadjikistan, Georgia and the other mineral rich "stans"), and, indeed, Chechnya was a peacefully integrated republic within the Russian Federation for decades following World War II, sharing the benefits of free education and health care made available to Soviet citizens, and with it's ethnically Islamic population frequently intermarrying with Russians, or living peacefully alongside peoples of various ethnic and religious backgrounds, until the conflagration begun in 1994 by militant Islamic extremists who had been trained, funded and armed by "outside" powers, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Afghanistan and the United States. Indeed, in 1996, a diplomat from Tadjikistan confided in me that the collapse of the Soviet Union had caused such devastation to the former republics of that superpower, that had the Nazis won World War II, the shattering of the former Soviet republics would not have been much worse.
Despite the United States’ blustering about the threat of a new ‘caliphate,’ and the catastrophic blowback of 9/11, covert ties with and continued cooperation with and exploitation of Islamic extremists continues, curiously rationalized by former CIA analyst Graham Fuller in the case of Algeria. Quoting again from Dreyfuss’ work:
“The FIS is likely to welcome U.S. private sector investment in Algeria and to undertake close commercial relations with the United States…Fuller’s monograph was written and sponsored by the U.S. Army…To Fuller the FIS movement in Algeria was a grand experiment, and one that the United States ought not to turn away from, and his views were certainly influential during the Clinton Administration. But many Algerians, especially veterans of the revolution that ended in 1962, were not so ready to abandon secularism and socialism for free-market Islamism. ‘It’s fine for others to talk about conducting a grand political experiment in Algeria, said Maloud Brahimi, former head of Algeria’s League of Human Rights. ‘But what do we look like – white rats?”
On page 246 Dreyfus remarks:
“There is a direct line between the war in Afghanistan, and the current U.S. military presence deep into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other parts of oil rich Central Asia. It was a conflict that brought the United States into a part of the world which, until the 1980’s lay outside the U.S. sphere of influence. That began in the 1980’s when Afghan jihadists took U.S., Chinese, Israeli, and other weapons to fight the Red Army. It continued into the 1990’s, when the United States cooperated with the rise of the militant Taliban movement. It lasted on into the present, when yet another Afghan war has facilitated a massive U.S. entanglement in the newly independent Muslim Central Asian republics. The United States has seamlessly linked its’ Middle East and Persian Gulf empire, complete with an archipelago of military bases in the Gulf, the Indian Ocean and points west, with a new necklace of bases encircling Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. If the conflicts of the twenty-first century pit the United States against either Russia or China or both, in a struggle for control of the oil and gas resources of southwest Asia, the United States already has the upper hand.”
CONNECTING THE DOTS…FOLLOW THE OIL
In its ‘News of the Week in Review” section on November 17, 2005, The New York Times devoted a full page to “The Cross and Sickle Moon”:
“There are now an estimated 14 million to 23 million Muslims in Russia, as much as 16 percent of the population. They are in the majority in Russia’s turbulent South, but live more quietly in places like Tatarstan and Bashkortistan on the Volga river and in virtually every city.” “Russia is a Slavic nation, and historically an orthodox Christian one. But it is also Islamic, and since the fall of the Soviet Union 14 years ago, Islam has grown increasingly visible and influential. This is worrisome to some Slavic Russians, who fear not only Muslim extremists, but the possibility that Russia could one day become a majority Muslim state. Still, if the threat – and reality – of conflict exists, it is also true that in many places Muslim and Christian cultures are peacefully adapting to each other.”
The caption below three photographs states:
“Hopeful Signs. In Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, Muslims and Christians have lived peaceably since the fall of the Soviet Union, even as Islam has revived among the deeply traditional Tatars. ‘For the Muslims of our country, living side by side with Christians, Buddhists, Jews is an experience centuries old,’ said Ravil Gainutdin, Chairman of Russia’s Council of Muftis, who is from Tatarstan.”
The caption below three photographs at page right states:
“Signs of Storm. Islam’s revival in the north Caucasus, on Russia’s southern frontier, has led to tension, and in Chechnya, war.”
Russians have reason to fear worse than becoming an ethnic minority in their own country. On
October 11, 2004, an article by Michael Specter in “The New Yorker” states:
“In 1991, on the day the Soviet Union was dissolved, Russia’s population stood at a hundred and forty-nine million. Without the huge wave of immigration from the former Soviet republics which followed, the country would have lost nearly a million people since then. If Russia is lucky, by 2050 the population will have fallen by only a third, to a hundred million. That is the most optimistic government scenario. More realistic predictions suggest that the number will be closer to seventy-five or eighty million – a little more than half the current population. Even without AIDS as a factor, working age people are starting to disappear. (in the United States, fifteen per cent of men die before they retire; in Russia nearly 50% die)…From Tambov, the old Soviet breadbasket to the port city of Vladivostok, and even in Moscow, which has become a world showcase for conspicuous displays of wealth, Russians are dying in numbers and at ages that seem impossible to believe. Heart disease, alcohol consumption and tuberculosis are epidemic. So is addiction to nicotine. You won’t see many pregnant women in the streets. Russia has one of the lowest peacetime birthrates in modern history…In the past decade, life expectancy has fallen so drastically that a boy born in Russia today can expect to live just to the age of fifty-eight, younger than if he were born in Bangladesh. No other educated, industrialized nation ever has suffered such a prolonged, catastrophic growth in death rates.”
It seems clear that capitalism may be accomplishing what Adolf Hitler wanted to accomplish, but failed to do: the extermination of the Russian people. Yet nowhere in the West is there acknowledgment or concern expressed about the de facto “ethnic cleansing” of the Russian people, who are in danger of becoming an ethnic minority in their own country, or extinct, despite their having made colossal contributions to Western civilizations, and having possessed an intellectual and cultural grandeur unsurpassed even by the Italian Renaissance; from the incomparably great literature of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Yevtushenko, to the sublime music of Tschaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, the supremely beautiful art of Ilya Repin, Surikov, Ivanov, and, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, having produced 25 percent of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists and mathematicians, even to the very present moment, with the solution by a Russian mathematician, Dr. Gregory Perelman, of the “famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincare conjecture, about the nature of space” (New York Times August 15, 2006). As a result of Perelman’s work “there is a growing feeling they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.”
Within the context of all that has preceeded, a small, little remarked column on page 20 of The New York Times on October 9, 2005 has implications which are sinister, and potentially terrifying. Filed by C.J. Chivers from Kara – Suu Kyrgyzstan, the article, entitled “A call for Islamic Revolt Spreads in Central Asia,” recounts the following:
“For a man who is a member of an illegal cell of Islamic revolutionaries, and works to overthrow his government, Akhmed Dzhalilov appears to live an unworried existence… He is a member of Hizbut Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, which seeks to replace the existing governments of the Muslim world with an Islamic theocracy that would operate outside the reach and influence of Western life…Founded in the Middle East in the 1950’s, the party and its’ activities returned to the public discourse after the suicide bombings in London in July, when Prime Minister Tony Blair said he planned to ban the party as part of a broader crackdown on groups that preach intolerance and hate… The group is classified as a terrorist organization in Russia, and an extremist organization here in Kyrgyzstan. Pakistan banned it in 2003. It is proscribed in several Arab states and throughout Central Asia, where Uzbekistan began arresting its’ members in the 1990’s. Germany has also banned it since 2003, citing its’ anti-Semitism. Its’ oratory is often chilling; its’ intolerance nearly total. The few Hizbut Tahrir representatives who speak in public often lace their speech with screeds against women’s rights, homosexuals and Jews. The United States has thus far refrained from designating it a terrorist organization, although there have been signs of greater scrutiny.” “In all the party claims to have operations in more than 100 nations, and it has found fertile ground – and recruits – in the combination of endemic poverty and resurgent interest in Islam in Central Asia since the last years of the Soviet Union… In the last year there have been more reports of its leaflets appearing in northern Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and in several Russian republics, including Tartarstan, where Mr. Dzhalilov boasted that he had recently had clandestine meetings with Russian members… …Egypt accused the party of attempting a coup in 1974, and Alsher Khamidov, who studied the group for the Brookings Institution has warned that the party is unstable and may be spawning splinter groups.”
Recalling The New York Times caption on November 27, 2005, quoting Ravil Gainutdin, chairman of Russia’s Council of Muftis, who is from Tatarstan, stating: “For the Muslims of our country, living side by side with Christians, Buddhists, Jews is an experience that is centuries old”, it appears obvious that “clandestine meetings” in Tatarstan with Mr. Dzhalilov of Hizbut Tahrir, a group described as ‘totally intolerant,’ would portend ominous consequences for anyone hoping to avoid further civil conflict in Russia, and the uncontrollable bloodshed resulting from newly incited ethnic and religious hatreds resulting inevitably in warfare, and “one, two, three, many” Chechnyas throughout Russia. Hizbut Tahrir “operates with shadowy finances and secret cells.”
Historically, Islamist extremist and terrorist groups have been exploited to further U.S. oil company “interests.” Currently peaceful Tatarstan is of enormous strategic importance, located East of the Volga, with its’ capitol, Kazan located at the mouth of the Volga, the gateway to the Urals and to the staggering wealth of resources in Siberia, especially oil and gas, diamonds, steel and gold. The Time magazine cited earlier declared: “Now the world’s capitalists covet Siberia’s vast riches.” During World War II the Volga was the Achilles Heel of the Soviet Union, when, according to the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Harrison Salisbury: “The Germans began to drive with rapidly increasing momentum toward…Stalingrad. The unfolding of the summer warfare was taking a far more dangerous shape than that envisaged by Stalin…there was every sign that a new and critical battle would be fought in which the stakes were no less that the cutting of Russia in two….”
United States’ policy provoked the USSR into invading Afghanistan in 1980. The hemorrhage of the war in Afghanistan contributed to the fatal demise of the Soviet Union. Militant Islamic extremists incubated in Afghanistan provoked a bloody civil war on Russia’s southern flank, causing Russia another major hemorrhage which resulted in her reluctantly squandering desperately needed resources essential for rebuilding the infrastructure, destroyed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, necessary to support the lives of the inhabitants of Russia. And now, if we are to learn anything from history, we should be concerned that Western oil companies’ coveting Siberia’s oil and gas, will likely lead, once again to the use of “Islam as sword,” for the plundering of oil producing territories East of the Volga. Infiltration and probable provocation, by intolerant militant extremist organizations, such as Hizbot Tahir could infect peaceful Tatarstan, and eventually Bashkurtistan (which together comprise 8 million Muslim inhabitants, hitherto peaceful and tolerant), could lead to virulent civil warfare similar to the war in Chechnya, as wars incited by militant Islamic fundamentalist groups metastasize elsewhere in Siberia among hitherto peaceful Turkic inhabitants, trapping Russia simultaneously in at least two, and possibly numerous devastating wars, intended to obstruct Russia’s access to her own oil riches so indispensable for stabilizing Russian society and halting Russia’s dangerous deterioration into chaos. The prospect of a Russia simultaneously hemorrhaging in numerous covertly instigated civil wars surrounding the center should alarm us, as that would threaten the very survival of Russia. Both Napolean and Hitler miscalculated in underestimating Russia, a fatal mistake for both the French and German empires. And that was before Russia possessed the huge nuclear arsenal it commands today. The arrogance and greed of world power blinded and ultimately doomed two of the most formidable dictators in human history. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia renounced its policy of “no first use of nuclear weapons,” a policy which had been created and adhered to by all Soviet leaders. Russia today is a wounded lion, and Russian roulette is a dangerous game.
The imperialistic lust for oil has driven United States’ policy since World War II. It continues today, and Siberia is in the sights of the oil companies. Even disbelievers are beginning to acknowledge that our use of fossil fuels has so devastated the earth, that the survival of this planet in any form conducive to human life – or, indeed, any other form of life is uncertain. At the Clinton Global Initiative, in September, 2006, Sir Richard Branson made a dramatic gesture to change course, investing in the development of alternative sources of energy so that, as he repeatedly said, his children will be able to enjoy this beautiful earth that has nurtured us. The suicidal escalation of the decimation of the earth may well take place east of the Volga, in Siberia, with the oil companies’ weapon of choice, again, the “Sword of Islam.” Alexander Solzenitsyn, who was so deified and heeded when his words contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now being ignored when his words are a plea for global sanity. Ignoring him now could result not only in the destruction of Russia, but in the end of life on this planet.
When Russia was invaded and provoked to the most horrific war in history, during World War II, the Nazis pressed the Soviet soldiers to the very limits of human endurance at Stalingrad. With their backs to the Volga, but with the colossal energy of a tightly compressed spring suddenly released, the Soviet soldiers suddenly burst forward, and ultimately obliterated the German army at Stalingrad, on the Volga, the turning point of World War II, leading, ultimately to the annihilation of Hitler’s German empire. Two centuries before, Russian soldiers, facing obliteration at the battle of Borodino, astounded the gluttonous Napoleon, and his invading army, with their courage and indomitable spirit, and that decisive battle, immortalized by Tolstoy in “War and Peace” led, ultimately to the annihilation of Napoleonic France. History tends to repeat itself, if we do not learn from it.
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| Bush/Cheney '04 Bumper Stickers |
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Tuesday, January 20 2004 @ 02:00 PM EST
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Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough |
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| We Can Break the Vice of the Great Unmentionable: Language Cements a Child's Class Destiny Into Place in its First Three Years |
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Friday, January 02 2004 @ 02:26 PM EST
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Class is the great taboo. Politicians don't talk about it: it is the great unmentionable everyone conspires to pretend is a thing of the past, laughing at the old upstairs/downstairs hierarchies as if class itself had vanished along with domestic service. |
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| Ten Lessons Of The Iraq War |
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Monday, December 15 2003 @ 03:59 PM EST
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There are always lessons to be learned after a war. Often governments and pundits focus only on lessons having to do with military strategies and tactics, such as troop deployments, engagement in battles, bombing targets and the effectiveness of different weapons systems. There are, of course, far bigger lessons to be learned, and here are some of the principal ones from the Iraq War. |
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| We Finally Got Our Frankenstein... and He Was In a Spider Hole! |
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Sunday, December 14 2003 @ 04:41 PM EST
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Thank God Saddam is finally back in American hands! He must have really missed us. Man, he sure looked bad! But, at least he got a free dental exam today. That's something most Americans can't get. |
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| America Should Not Be Rome: The USA Patriot Act As An Expression Of Empire |
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Monday, December 01 2003 @ 03:25 PM EST
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Democracy is at risk in the United States. In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the oft-cited rationale for just about every U.S. Justice Department policy promulgated by the Bush Administration has been used to shred the nation's Constitution. Under the guise of the USA Patriot Act, the Executive Branch under Bush as well as the vast majority of congressmen brazenly defaulted on their oath of office.
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| Feminism, the Body, and the Machine |
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Wednesday, August 06 2003 @ 01:39 PM EDT
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Some time ago Harper's reprinted a short essay of mine in which I gave some of my reasons for refusing to buy a computer. Until that time, the vast numbers of people who disagree with my writings had mostly ignored them. An unusual number of people, however, neglected to ignore my insensitivity to the wonders of computer enhancement. Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment. |
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| Disgracing America, Failing Iraq |
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Tuesday, July 15 2003 @ 01:06 PM EDT
Editor's note: Following is the full text of Sen. Edward Kennedy's address to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies July 15.
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