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The United States Is in the Refugee-Creation Business, by Shane Smith

Posted on December 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Shane Smith at antiwar.com:

Most of us in the United States have a vague awareness of a Second Iraq War. There was invasion, devastation, death, “victory”, and the catharsis that seemed to flood over the nation after the lynching of a Third World dictator. Satiated revenge, finally, for 9/11, was the implicit mood of many. Even after enough people shouted that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers, there still remained the belief that that war just had to happen. Saddam had to go, because he was a bad guy, because he murdered his own people, et cetera. Regardless of rationalizations after the fact, the 2003 Iraq War was an act of nationalistic revenge. As was Afghanistan. There was an attitude that we were entitled to our own bloodbath, since one had been visited upon us. The attackers died in their attack, so no one was left in our immediate vicinity to quench our bloodthirst. The Iraq War solved that problem, at least temporarily. But while many are aware of the war, and aware of Saddam’s broken neck, few care about what really happened since the invasion, and what negative consequences may have arisen because of the invasion.

The reality of what happened has been the total destruction of Iraq as anything resembling a nation. The Iraq War has been directly responsible for the displacement of 3.5 million to 5 million or more Iraqis, according to MIT’s Iraq: the Human Cost. These are lives that, while not snuffed out, have been completely destroyed by the disintegration of Iraqi society following the invasion. The Iraqi refugees spread out to neighboring states, like Jordan and Syria, but since the U.S.-backed destabilization of Syria, the Iraqis were forced to find a new refuge. Iraq was indeed Ground Zero for the beginning of the refugee crisis, as Al Jazeera correspondent, Imran Khan, noted in a September 5th column:

“What no one talks about is the invasion and occupation of Iraq…

March 2003 was the pivotal point. Based on controversial evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the war drums beat loudly.

What the Iraq war did was allow space for anger at the unjustified actions of the Western coalition to be moulded into a hardline movement of fighters who would join al-Qaeda in Iraq and other groups.

Before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, radical and violent movements were tiny in number. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were the only real threat.”

Ignoring the self-evident long-term consequences of an Iraq invasion has proven costly.

To continue reading: The United States Is in the Refugee-Creation Business

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Europe Is Toast, by Robert Gore

Posted on December 2, 2015 | 10 comments

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) will someday be regarded as the spire placed atop a towering edifice of mendacity and hubris. It will momentarily reward the vanity of those who built it, but it will seem as out of place with the time and events that followed as the newly constructed Empire State Building must have seemed to New Yorkers during the depths of the Great Depression. While the aspirational quality of the Empire State Building was incongruous with the bleak Depression, at least that building contributed, and continues to contribute, to human well-being, and its soaring lines remains aspirational. The figurative UNCCC tower is like the Dark Tower in Lord of the Rings, an obsidian monument to the nether regions of the human soul, erected on a foundation that will eventually crumble.

It is ironic that the UNCCC is being held in Paris, a font of European civilization, a little over two weeks after terrorists plunged the city into chaos and bloodshed. Participants will congratulate themselves for—among many self-evident virtues—their intrepid refusal to submit to fear, neither canceling nor moving the conference, thus denying terrorism a symbolic victory. Only a curmudgeon would point out the incongruity: a gathering of egos and powers who believe they can control the world and its climate contrasted to the recent carnage, yet another demonstration of their impotence.

The command and control paradigm is being stretched to its breaking point everywhere, no place more than Europe. The continent’s intellectual elite has always looked with condescension on the American “fetish” for individual rights and liberty. Europe is the birthplace of Marxism, welfare-statism, National Socialism, Fascism, and Keynesianism. Whatever the “free trade zone” rhetoric that attended the establishment of the European Union, it was envisioned by its originators as the gateway to pan-European supranational governance.

After World War II, Europe’s non-Warsaw Pact nations made a Faustian bargain: under NATO they would outsource their defense to the US, but give up much of their autonomy in foreign and military affairs. With minimal defense spending, the European nations funded lavish welfare states. Economies were extensively regulated by national governments, and the European Union evolved into another set of bureaucrats promulgating rules. Labor regulations are particularly stultifying, making it difficult and expensive for companies to reorganize, close money-losing operations, and fire unnecessary or unproductive workers. Trend growth rates in Europe have been below those of the US and Asia. Notwithstanding the implicit US defense subsidy, many European nations run deficits and their ratios of debt to GDP have steadily climbed.

Most European nations have played a subsidiary role in the US’s war on terror. Even those that have refused to join the US have not publicly opposed it. Unfortunately for Europe, its history—from the Crusades to its acquiescence to US intervention—puts it in Islamist crosshairs. Hatred of Europe runs as deep as hatred of the US, with a special animus for the French, British, and Russians. They carved up the region for their own advantage after World War I and share a legacy of colonialism and backing corrupt puppet regimes.

Even before the latest refugee influx, many European nations had substantial Islamic populations. The percentages will inexorably grow; Muslims have far higher birthrates than native Europeans. The debt burdens, regulatory strangulation, and welfare state benefits that have driven youth unemployment rates above 50 percent in some countries have also kept many Muslims, young and old, out of the labor force, on the dole, and living in ghettos. This is not a recipe for satisfaction. Resentment has been magnified by the tendency of many of the migrants to reject assimilation and to embrace violent and often apocalyptic Islamic ideologies. The swelling flood of refugees fleeing lands that have been made uninhabitable by war and chaos stoked by US and Europe intervention, some attracted by welfare state benefits, some vowing jihad, throws nitroglycerin on the fire.

Leaders of countries who are—confronted with slow-to-no-growth economies plagued by debt, unemployment, regulatory overkill, and unaffordable benefits; playing host to hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees joining combustible local Muslim populations and placing further demands on already strained-to-the-breaking-point immigration, police (not all of the immigrants are law-abiding), and social services; faced with the understandable and increasingly virulent backlash all this engenders—will somehow solve the problem of global climate change, a problem for which it has not been established that humanity is the cause nor that it can be the solution. Sure they will. Long before the polar ice caps melt, coastal regions submerge, and equatorial regions become uninhabitable frying pans—if any of these things ever occur—the continent as we know it will collapse. Europe is toast.

These so-called leaders have met the looming disasters (and there will be a multiplicity) with politically correct gobbledygook orchestrated by the continent’s preeminence, Angela Merkel. Big-hearted Europe can open its borders and wallets to the refugees. (It can’t; it’s bankrupt and there are millions more coming.) They’re here to work, not soak up benefits. (Some are, but even those who want to work find it tough sledding in Europe’s sclerotic economies.) They are refugees, not terrorists (True of many, but not all, and it only took a few to wreak havoc in Paris. One does not have to accept Matthew Bracken’s nightmare scenario to concede that an appreciable percentage of refugees pose a danger.) In the long run, they will assimilate and become part of Europe’s rich and diverse culture. (Who knows? In the short run, thugs among them are robbing, beating, raping, murdering, and otherwise terrorizing local populations.)

Europe has no monopoly on hubris, ideology-induced myopia, and grandiose visions detached from reality. The American representative at the UNCCC is, after all, Barack Obama. While an ocean physically separates Europe and America, they are next-door neighbors philosophically. The US is following European footsteps: intervening in the Middle East and its historic enmities and conflicts, inserting itself in myriad unsavory machinations and intrigues, and establishing ostensible puppets that invariably end up pulling the strings of their supposed puppet masters. The US marches down Europe’s ruinous economic path as well.

There is a point of no return, when the consequences of actions taken pursuant to fallacy, pretension, and venality overwhelm those who have taken them. Europe has passed that point—its fate is sealed—and fences, walls, lock downs, identity cards, surveillance, segregation, deportation, and military retaliation will not shut the Pandora’s box of evils it has opened on itself. There is no assurance that if the US leaves the Middle East and Northern Africa the flow of refugees will abate or the threat of terrorism diminish, although those outcomes are quite plausible. However, the status quo guarantees escalation, and guarantees that the US will eventually share Europe’s fate.

WHY SETTLE FOR LESS?

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Sweden: “No Apartments, No Jobs, No Shopping Without A Gun” by Ingrid Carlqvist

Posted on December 1, 2015 | 3 comments

From Ingrid Carlqvist of the Gatestone Institute via theburningplatform.com:

• The Swedes see the welfare systems failing them. Swedes have had to get used to the government prioritizing refugees and migrants above native Swedes.
• “There are no apartments, no jobs, we don’t dare go shopping anymore [without a gun], but we’re supposed to think everything’s great. … Women and girls are raped by these non-European men, who come here claiming they are unaccompanied children, even though they are grown men. … You Cabinet Ministers live in your fancy residential neighborhoods, with only Swedish neighbors. It should be obligatory for all politicians to live for at least three months in an area consisting mostly of immigrants… [and] have to use public transport.” — Laila, to the Prime Minister.
• “Instead of torchlight processions against racism, we need a Prime Minister who speaks out against the violence… Unite everyone. … Do not make it a racism thing.” — Anders, to the Prime Minister.
• “In all honesty, I don’t even feel they [government ministers] see the problems… There is no one in those meetings who can tell them what real life looks like.” – Laila, on the response she received from the government.

The week after the double murder at IKEA in Västerås, where a man from Eritrea who had been denied asylum grabbed some knives and stabbed Carola and Emil Herlin to death, letters and emails poured into the offices of Swedish Prime Minister (PM) Stefan Löfven. Angry, despondent and desperate Swedes have pled with the Social Democratic PM to stop filling the country with criminal migrants from the Third World or, they write, there is a serious risk of hatred running rampant in Sweden. One woman suggested that because the Swedish media will not address these issues, Löfven should start reading foreign newspapers, and wake up to the fact that Sweden is sinking fast.

During the last few decades, Swedes have had to get used to the government (left and right wing parties alike) prioritizing refugees and migrants above native Swedes. The high tax level (the average worker pays 42% income tax) was been accepted in the past, because people knew that if they got sick, or when they retired or otherwise needed government aid, they would get it.

Now, Swedes see the welfare system failing them. More and more senior citizens fall into the “indigent” category; close to 800,000 of Sweden’s 2.1 million retirees, despite having worked their whole lives, are forced to live on between 4,500 and 5,500 kronor ($545 – $665) a month. Meanwhile, seniors who immigrate to Sweden receive the so-called “elderly support subsidy” — usually a higher amount — even though they have never paid any taxes in Sweden.

Worse, in 2013 the government decided that people staying in the country illegally have a right to virtually free health and dental care. So while the destitute Swedish senior citizen must choose between paying 100,000 kronor ($12,000) to get new teeth or living toothless, a person who does not even have the right to stay in Sweden can get his teeth fixed for 50 kronor ($6).

The injustice, the housing shortage, the chaos surrounding refugee housing units and the sharp slide of Swedish students in PISA tests — all these changes have caused the Swedes to become disillusioned. The last straw was that Prime Minister Löfven had nothing to say about the murders at IKEA.

Gatestone Institute contacted to the Swedish government, to obtain emails sent to the Prime Minister concerning the IKEA murders. According to the “principle of public access to official documents,” all Swedes have the right to study public documents kept by authorities — with no questions asked about one’s identity or purpose. The government, however, was clearly less than enthusiastic about sharing the emails: It took a full month of reminders and phone calls before they complied with the request.

What follows are excerpts from emails sent from private citizens to Prime Minister Stefan Löfven:

To continue reading: Sweden: “No Apartments, No Jobs, No Shopping Without A Gun”

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The Impulsiveness of US Power, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on October 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Paul Craig Roberts, on a guest post on theburningplatform.com:

Washington’s impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world. Arrogant Washington politicians and crazed neoconservatives are screaming that the US must shoot down Russian aircraft that are operating against the US-supplied forces that have brought death and destruction to Syria, unleashing millions of refugees on Europe, in Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

Even my former CSIS colleague, Zbigniew Brzezinski, normally a sensible if sometimes misguided person, has written in the Financial Times that Washington should deliver an ultimatum to Russia to “cease and desist from military actions that directly affect American assets.” By “American assets,” Brzezinski means the jihadist forces that Washington has sicced on Syria. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43059.htm

Brzezinski’s claim that “Russia must work with, not against, the US in Syria” is false. The fact of the matter is that “the US must work with, not against Russia in Syria,” as Russia controls the situation, is in accordance with international law, and is doing the right thing.

Ash Carter, the US Secretary for War, repeats Brzezinski’s demand. He declared that Washington is not prepared to cooperate with Russia’s “tragically flawed” and “mistaken strategy” that frustrates Washington’s illegal attempt to overthrow the Syrian government with military violence. http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/oct/07/ash-carter-russia-us-syria-airstrikes-video

Washington’s position is that only Washington decides and that Washington intends to unleash yet more chaos on the world in the hope that it reaches Russia.

I guess no one in hubristic and arrogant Washington was listening when Putin said in his UN speech on September 28: “We can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world.”

The intolerable state of affairs is the chaos that Washington has brought to the Middle East, chaos that threatens to expand into all countries with Muslim populations, and chaos from which millions of refugees are flooding into Europe.

To continue reading: The Impulsiveness of US Power

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The Real Reason for the Refugee Crisis You Won’t Hear About in the Media, by Nick Giambruno

Posted on October 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Nick Giambruno at theburningplatform.com:

There’s a meme going around that the refugee crisis in Europe (the largest since World War II) is part of a secret plot to subvert the West.

I completely understand why the locals in any country wouldn’t be happy about waves of foreigners pouring in. Especially if they’re poor, unskilled, and not likely to assimilate.

It leads to huge problems. Infrastructure gets strained. More people are sucking at the teat of the welfare system. The unwelcome newcomers compete for bottom-of-the-ladder jobs. Things easily turn nasty and then turn violent.

But the idea that the refugee crisis in Europe is part of a hidden agenda – rather than a predictable outcome – strikes me as strange. And it’s a notion that conveniently deflects blame away from the people and factors that deserve it.

Interventions Destabilize the Middle East

The civil war in Syria has turned the country into a refugee-maker.

Syria’s neighbors have reached their physical limit on their ability to absorb refugees.

That’s one of the reasons so many are heading to the West.

Lebanon has received over 1 million Syrian refugees. That’s an enormous number for a country with a population of only 4 million – a 25% increase. Jordan and Turkey also have millions of Syrian refugees. They’re saturated.

The number of refugees heading to the West, by contrast, is in the hundreds of thousands. So far.

But it’s not just Syria that’s sending refugees. Many more come from Iraq and Afghanistan, two other countries shattered by bungled Western military interventions.

Then there are the refugees from Libya. A country the media and political establishment would rather forget because it represents another disastrous military decision.

Actually, it’s not just Libyan refugees. It’s refugees from all of Africa who are using Libya as a transit point to reach Europe.
Before his overthrow by NATO, Muammar Gaddafi had an agreement with Italy, which is directly to Libya’s north, across the Mediterranean Sea. Gaddafi agreed to prevent refugees heading for Europe from using Libya as a transit point. It was an arrangement that worked. So it’s no shocker that when NATO helped a coalition of ambitious rebels overthrow the Gaddafi government, the refugee floodgates opened.

When there’s war, there are refugees. It’s a predictable outcome.

It’s like kicking a bees’ nest and being surprised that bees fly out. Nobody should be surprised when that happens. And nobody should be surprised that people are fleeing war zones in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

To continue reading: The Real Reason for the Refugee Crisis

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Cancel Hope, Cry Havoc, by Robert Gore

Posted on October 5, 2015 | 6 comments

The snap is coming. We’ve all had days where disappointment and frustration mount until a minor provocation triggers a hugely disproportionate reaction. You blow up at your spouse or kids, kick the dog, slam doors, or shout at the television; you make an ass of yourself and feel immediately embarrassed and ashamed. Societies, too, have their breaking points, and by all indications we’re getting close. The catalyst may be seemingly trivial, but it will be the camel’s spine-snapping straw after a decades-long cumulation of presumption, pretense, ineptitude, lies, and corruption in high places.

The explosion won’t be because of any diminution of ignorance: average citizens paying more attention to politics, economics, and world affairs and newly enraged, vowing to change things. Rather, decisions and actions made by remote, unaccountable powers will impinge upon their lives in ways that finally become intolerable. As circumstances are reduced, dreams deferred or destroyed, lives permanently upended, and loved ones senselessly killed, many will conclude they have nothing to lose. They’ll take actions beyond what are piously termed the permissible bounds of free expression. Crying havoc, they will let slip the dogs of riot, revolution, anarchy, and war. Looking back, the wonder will not be that they did so, but that it took them so long.

The Middle East and northern Africa have already snapped. The refugee stream into Europe is a result of US government failure. Ignoring the Sunni-Shiite schism that has defined the region for centuries, the US has blundered into various conflicts, supporting both sides, sometimes simultaneously, and conjuring a side that doesn’t exist: moderates whose passion is not their Islamic sect, but rather plurality, democracy, and human rights (“Not the Biggest Kid on Every Block,” SLL, 9/28/15). In Syria this fanciful Thomas Jefferson brigade, a product of the fervid imaginations of US neocons and their media toadies, was going to take out Bashar Assad, always the real goal of the US and its Sunni allies, then take out Sunni ISIS, the goal of US ally Shiite Iraq and US enemy Shiite Iran. All sides would be happy as a new era of peace, inclusion, and freedom dawned in Syria.

In reality, Thomas Jefferson brigades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and now Syria haven’t worked out well for the US (“The Pentagon’s Syria Debacle,” by Philip Ewing and Austin Wright, SLL, 9/18/15, and “US-trained Division 30 rebels ‘betray US and hand weapons over to al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria’,” by Nabih Bulos, SLL, 9/23/15). They have no commitment to the values of our illustrious founding father, except in some instances slavery (“The Rape of Afghanistan,” by Justin Raimondo, SLL, 9/23/15). US policymakers know this; they’re looking for puppets, not statesmen. However, to quote Vladimir Putin: “[w]ho’s playing who here?” Obviously the US has been played, and hard. Now, hundreds of thousands of refugees, rejecting perpetual war and terror, are voting with their feet.

Putin understands the game and has come down on the Shiite side, supporting Assad in Syria, allying with Iran, and bolstering beleaguered Iraq. The balance of power in the Middle East has been decisively altered; the Shiite nations now have their Russian big brother watching out for them. If Russia, Iran, and Iraq make short work of ISIS—not a sucker bet—the US will look even more foolish and venal that it already does, but there will be one silver lining: it should diminish the refugee flow from Syria.

Which would be a good thing for Europe. While the snap there has yet to come, the branch is breaking. The European Union’s governing institutions have become, in the way governments do, sclerotic bureaucratic monstrosities run by unaccountable elites. The Greek soap opera illustrates the EU golden rule: the country with the gold (Germany) gets to make the rules. In any welfare state there is always a fissure between those who make and those who take, and Greece has turned it into a chasm. The recent election in Catalonia, a referendum in support of independence from Spain, reflects the growing sentiment among the more prosperous: We’re getting screwed! The welfare state has become an unaffordable luxury, further strained by the refugees. Growth, never robust, has slowed to a crawl. Despite more debt from over-indebted governments—which the ECB has monetized while suppressing interest rates—deflation and contraction are taking hold. Sky high youth unemployment rates and rigid labor markets offer little hope for the younger generation.

The US knows all about immigration problems, over-indebted government, and unaffordable welfare state programs. Somehow a period in which real incomes are lower than they were in 2000, the poverty rate has increased, the labor force participation rate has dropped to its level in 1977 (before women entered the labor force en masse), and total US debt is at a record has been christened a “recovery.” If it is a recovery it has been tepid, a few tweaks of seasonal adjustments and price indexes away from being a continuation of the recession that began in 2008.

Old people are getting screwed by Fed-promoted microscopic interest rates. Their labor force participation rate is the only one that has bucked the trend, increasing as they cancel retirement and fill Walmart and McDonald’s jobs to keep the wolves at bay. Young people are getting screwed, burdened with college debt and a job market that throws off jobs waiting tables, crafting caffeinated concoctions, and tending bar, but not the kinds of higher paying positions that would require their degrees and allow them to pay their debt, start families, and buy houses. They are waking up to who’s on the hook for massive government debts and unfunded liabilities. Anyone younger than fifty with a three digit IQ also understands that their receipt of promised benefits is “problematic,” which is powers-that-be speak for “bend over.”

Destroy people’s hopes for a better life and you make riot, revolution, anarchy, and war inevitable. There is no way to predict which spark sets off which conflagration, but the world’s $200 trillion-plus debt load will provide abundant kindling. It’s hard to hold out much hope for the future when your future has been mortgaged. What we are seeing now—the refugee crisis, commodity collapse, financial perturbations, Greece, China, Catalonia, the rise of Putin, the US’s Syrian fiasco, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders—are mild pre-tremors before a massive seismic shock. When the big one arrives, upended political orders in Washington, Ottawa, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Riyadh, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, and Brasilia are conceivable aftershocks. Few of their billions of long-suffering victims will mourn the fates of powers that be who become powers that were. Now unthinkable, judicial proceedings, disgrace, imprisonment, and even worse will be the order of the day.

TOO GOOD TO IGNORE

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Blame America? No, Blame Neocons! by Ron Paul

Posted on September 21, 2015 | 2 comments

The people who shout that critics of US foreign policy always “Blame America First” do the same thing as critics of negotiations who shout “Munich!” and critics of anticommunism in the 1940s and 50s who shout “McCarthyism!” It’s always easier to shout slogans than to examine the evidence and consider the arguments. Ron Paul makes short work of these brain deficients, from antiwar.com:

Is the current refugee crisis gripping the European Union “all America’s fault”? That is how my critique of US foreign policy was characterized in a recent interview on the Fox Business Channel. I do not blame the host for making this claim, but I think it is important to clarify the point.

It has become common to discount any criticism of US foreign policy as “blaming America first.” It is a convenient way of avoiding a real discussion. If aggressive US policy in the Middle East – for example in Iraq – results in the creation of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, is pointing out the unintended consequences of bad policy blaming America? Is it “blaming America” to point out that blowback – like we saw on 9/11 – can be the result of unwise US foreign policy actions like stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia?

In the Fox interview I pointed out that the current refugee crisis is largely caused by bad US foreign policy actions. The US government decides on regime change for a particular country – in this case, Syria – destabilizes the government, causes social chaos, and destroys the economy, and we are supposed to be surprised that so many people are desperate to leave? Is pointing this out blaming America, or is it blaming that part of the US government that makes such foolish policies?

Accusing those who criticize US foreign policy of “blaming America” is pretty selective, however. Such accusations are never leveled at those who criticize a US pullback. For example, most neocons argue that the current crisis in Iraq is all Obama’s fault for pulling US troops out of the country. Are they “blaming America first” for the mess? No one ever says that. Just like they never explain why the troops were removed from Iraq: the US demanded complete immunity for troops and contractors and the Iraqi government refused.

To continue reading: Blame America? No, Blame Neocons

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Europe’s Refugee Crisis Blowback—-Even Sweden’s Socialists Are On The Run, by Pater Tenebrarum

Posted on September 19, 2015 | 1 comment

Sweden goes Trump! Next thing you know Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter will top Swedish best seller lists. SLL has long maintained that open borders and welfare states are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but not both. Sweden is finding out the hard way, and the Swedish people are starting to rebel. From Pater Tenebrarum at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

A Sharp Turn in Swedish Politics

When we recently discussed Europe’s refugee crisis, we mentioned that a sizable political backlash was to be expected and that unfortunately, extreme nationalist parties were likely to be among the main beneficiaries. We also mentioned the situation of Sweden, where the mainstream political parties in an ongoing fit of political correctness bordering on lunacy have apparently decided to transform Sweden into a province of Mesopotamia.

We now have an opportunity to draw these two threads of the narrative together, so to speak. In Sweden’s 2006 general election, the “Sweden Democrats”, a political party founded in 1988 and considered “right wing fringe” up to that point (it self-describes as “social conservative with a nationalist foundation”), managed to make large gains in a number of Swedish municipalities. In the 2010 national election, it finally crossed the 4% threshold needed to obtain seats in parliament, polling 5.7% (this gave it 20 seats).

In the 2014 election, the party received 12.9% of the vote, winning 49 seats (14% of the total). In Scania County, its share of the vote (22.16%) put it in the lead before one of the two major established mainstream parties for the first time. In the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, the Sweden Democrats are “isolated”, as the other parties refuse to cooperate with them in any shape or form. We suspect that this underdog role has actually solidified support for the SD as the “only alternative”.

Similar to France’s Front National, the SD’s (relatively young) leadership began “mainstreaming” the party by excluding members thought to hold too extremist views (back in the 1990s, a few members of the party were caught prancing about in Nazi uniforms, which is definitely not a sign of respectability). Without a doubt it has succeeded in creating a more moderate image. However, its old slogan “Bevara Sverige Svenskt” (Keep Sweden Swedish) remains in use.

On August 20 of this year it became clear that “business as usual” is over for good in Sweden. This was the day when polls established for the first time that the SD was now the leading party in the country, receiving the support of more than 25% of voters (the poll question was: “which party would you vote for if elections were held today”).

To continue reading: Refugee Blowback in Sweden

 

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Lies, Damnable Lies, and Syria, by Robert Gore

Posted on September 19, 2015 | 15 comments

The photo of the three-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, dead, face down on a Turkish beach, will be remembered not just for its emotional impact, but because once and for all it revealed the grotesque and deadly motives of those who press for, and profit from, the never-ending expansion of Western war-making in the Middle East. In a triumph of opportunistic cynicism over truth, restraint, or good taste, they quickly blamed Kurdi’s death on the failure of the US and European governments to depose Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad (“Abusing Dead Syrian Children,” by Daniel McAdams, SLL, 9/4/15).

What is really going on in Syria? SLL posted a good background report, “Unmasking ISIS,” by Washington’s Blog on September 13. Ostensibly, Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is trying to fend off a revolution led by Sunni ISIS, which now controls a large chunk of land in eastern Syria and western Iraq. Who controls ISIS, how much support is it getting from allies outside Syria, who are those allies, why are they supporting ISIS, who is supporting or opposing Assad, and why are they supporting or opposing him, are questions that, once answered, reveal the duplicity of those stumping for “more Western involvement.”

ISIS is a creature of US involvement in Iraq. After defeating and deposing Sunni Saddam Hussein, the US led coalition inflicted democracy, which in majority-Shiite Iraq meant a Shiite government. Justifiably claiming that they were being persecuted, disaffected Sunnis became the base for the establishment of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was responsible for much of the guerrilla warfare directed at the Iraqi military and occupying US forces. Significant numbers of both the leadership and rank and file of ISIS come from Al Qaeda in Iraq, many having been radicalized during incarcerations in US prison camps.

The other fountainhead of ISIS has been the Syrian rebellion, which began as protests during the “Arab Spring” of 2011 and morphed into a full-scale civil war. The Sunni Arab regimes—Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey—have long been hostile to Alawite Shiite Assad. Their hostility goes beyond the sectarian difference. Syria has been allied with the Soviet Union since the 1960s and is now allied with Russia and Shiite Iran, while the Sunni regimes have been in the US orbit. Assad, at the behest of his Russia ally, has blocked construction of a natural gas pipeline from Qatar, through Syria, to Turkey, which would supply Europe and allow it to lessen its dependence on Russian natural gas.

The US has dreamed of regime change in Syria since Assad’s father, Hafez Assad was president and cozied up to the Soviet Union. Father and then son have been on the neoconservative hit list with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Iran’s government since the early 1990s. An Arab spring rebellion in 2011 appeared to present the perfect opportunity for the regime changers in the US government. Like it had with other “spontaneous” uprisings against regimes it didn’t like, the US government supported the rebels in their effort to topple Assad.

There was one problem with the plan: the groups that were spearheading the rebellion were al Qaeda and allied offshoots, including the embryonic ISIS branch in Syria. It would have been a bit unseemly if the US teamed up with the al Qaeda, responsible for the 9/11 tragedy and number one on the terrorist organization most wanted list. Lacking an ally that would pass muster in the US, the neoconservatives and their allies in the Obama administration simply made one up: moderate Syrians who despised both Assad and Islamic extremists! The Free Syrian Army (FSA), led by a group of Syrian Army defectors, would take down Assad, set up a US-backed democracy, and keep the radical Islamic groups at bay. Senator John McCain showed up in Syria and got his picture taken with members of the FSA, our guys.

The US directly supplied these “moderate” rebel groups with weapons, training, intelligence, and other forms of support. In Iraq, ISIS had commandeered weaponry left by the US, and as it expanded into Syria, it ended up with much of the weaponry ostensibly meant for those imaginary rebels. Out of fear, opportunism, or ideological affinity, most of those upon whom US hopes rested joined ISIS and brought their US-supplied weapons with them. Senator McCain’s photo-op mates signed up with ISIS!

After a three-year, half-a-billion dollar effort to find, vet (recruits had to swear on a stack of Korans that they were good, US-friendly, Muslims, not those barbaric, US-hating Muslims) and train a moderate force that was to number 5,000, the US managed to muster 54 approved Syrian moderates to fight the forces of Assad and ISIS. By the end of this summer they had all been captured or killed, or had deserted. Even McCain has admitted that this fiasco is “a bad, bad sick joke” (“The Pentagon’s Syria debacle,” by Phillip Ewing and Austin Wright, SLL, 9/12/15).

An effective, moderate Syrian fighting force was nothing more than a neoconservative fantasy. Now, they’re boxed in by reality. As it has been since it started, the real fight there is between Shiite Assad’s Syrian government and the Sunni extremists led by ISIS. The primary aim of US allies in the region—the Sunni states and Israel—is to depose Assad (Israel does not like Assad because he supports Hezbollah in Lebanon). The Sunni states have provided funding, weapons, and other support for ISIS, but they swear they’ll go after them once Assad is taken out. Under the pretext of fighting ISIS, Turkey, long plagued by Kurdish separatists, is bombing Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, who are, with Assad’s Syrian army, the only effective fighting forces against ISIS.

Vladimir Putin has deftly illuminated the dissembling behind US policy in Syria. He is sending military advisers and weaponry to help Assad fight ISIS, and he has offered to work with the US. It would be sensible to make common cause with Russia against ISIS (“Putin: Friend or Foe in Syria?” by Patrick Buchanan, SLL, 9/18/15), but such an alliance would severely diminish the likelihood of realizing the neoconservative dream: deposing Assad, installing a puppet more to the liking of the US, the Sunni states, and Israel, and loosening Russia’s grip on Europe’s natural gas supply with the Qatari pipeline through Syria. So the neocons are left muttering about Russia’s dark designs in the Middle East, although Russia, unlike the US, learned its lesson in Afghanistan and has shown no desire to get stuck on the Middle East tar baby. Further mutterings about the dark designs of Assad ally Iran are thrown in for good measure, usually in the same breath as condemnation of the nuclear agreement.

The neoconservatives ultimate goal—US garrisons in Shiite Iran, Iraq, and Syria, puppet governments, and a Middle East made safe for oil interests, Israel, and the repressive Sunni states—would require World War III. To stump for such a war would not play well with a US public grown weary and disgusted after fourteen years of maladroit US adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

Aylan Kurdi will only take you so far. The public has no more enthusiasm for war in Syria now than it did when Assad supposedly crossed President Obama’s red line, and wider conflict is out of the question. So presidential candidates make hay condemning Obama’s irresolution and lost opportunities in the Middle East, but do not specify what they would do there, other than be “tougher” on Assad, ISIS, Iran, Russia, terrorists, and anybody else who doesn’t like the US. Fourteen years of such toughness has killed millions, cost trillions, and prompted a refugee wave that threatens to overwhelm Europe. The looming danger is that one of these tough guys or gals, upon election, puts up rather than shuts up, for putting up could lead to world war. Then there would be no winners and a lot more dead three-year-olds.

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A Refugee Crisis Made in America, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on September 13, 2015 | 1 comment

If you read the previous post, “Unmasking ISIS,” then nothing in this article will come as any surprise. What is surprising is where the article was published, on a site called The American Conservative, from the American Ideas Institute. For those of us who have come to equate conservative with neoconservative, this piece is a breath of fresh air. From Philip Giraldi at theamericanconservative.com:

On April 29th, 2008 I had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment. I had flipped open the Washington Post and there, on the front page, was a color photo of a two year old Iraqi boy named Ali Hussein being pulled from the rubble of a house that had been destroyed by American missiles. The little boy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had on his feet flip-flops. His head was hanging back at an angle that told the viewer immediately that he was dead.

Four days later on May 3rd a letter by a Dunn Loring Virginia woman named Valerie Murphy was printed by the Post. Murphy complained that the Iraqi child victim photo should not have been run in the paper because it would “stir up opposition to the war and feed anti-US sentiment.” I suppose the newspaper thought it was being impartial in printing the woman’s letter, though I couldn’t help but remember that the neocon-dominated Post had generally been unwilling to cover anything antiwar, even ignoring a gathering of 300,000 protesters in Washington in 2005. Rereading the woman’s complaint and also a comment on a website suggesting that the photo of the dead little boy had been staged, I thought to myself, “What kind of monsters have we become.” And in truth we had become monsters. Bipartisan monsters wrapped in the American flag. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions was “worth it.” She is now a respected elder statesman close to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I had another epiphany last week when I saw the photo of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach like a bit of flotsam. He was wearing a red t-shirt and black sneakers. I thought to myself that many Americans will shake their heads when looking at the photo before moving on, more concerned about Stephen Colbert’s debut on the Late Show and the start of the NFL season.

The little boy is one of hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to get to Europe. The world media is following the crisis by focusing primarily on the inability of unprepared local governments to deal with the numbers of migrants, asking why someone somewhere can’t just “do something.” This means that somehow, as a result, the vast human tragedy has been reduced to a statistic and, inevitably, a political football.

To continue reading: A Refugee Crisis Made in America

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