tortilla con sal, 17 de abril 2014

For over thirty years, the Western oligarch elites have steadily increased their aggressive attacks on their own peoples' fundamental rights. Over the last decade, faced with ever-stronger global rivalry from China and Russia supported by strategic, energy-rich regional allies like Venezuela and Iran, those attacks have intensified. Since 1945, the Western imperialist powers have replaced centuries of genocidal conquest, enslavement and colonial rapine with almost 70 years of of mass murder and neocolonial economic pillage.

Now, NATO country ruling elites are less and less able to externalize onto the global majority the cost of pretending that the Western oligarchies are democracies after all. At the same time as they intensify their economic assault on their own peoples, the Western élites promote military aggression and terrorism against the allies of their global rivals and any other country NATO governments regard as unhelpful. These global processes, so obvious now, were clearly in train through the first years of this century.

Antecedents include the April 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2002, of Iraq in 2003 and the 2004 coup in Haiti. All were clearly part of a process subsequently intensified under the administrations of US President Barack Obama. Events from 2009 to 2011 in Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay, in Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria confirmed that NATO country foreign policy, dictated by the United States, remains unchanged - neocolonial, cynical and sadistic as ever.

To the point of becoming practically irrelevant, the great majority of Western progressive and radical opinion has been equivocal about their countries' governments' double bait-and switch - attacks on basic civil and economic rights at home : neocolonial aggression overseas. Events in Venezuela and Ukraine may finally have prompted some urgent revision of that complacent failure of perspective. But most progressive and radical Western opinion persistently fails to acknowledge the implications of the link between reactionary domestic policies and imperialist aggression overseas.

Most progressive Western opinion submits constantly to an ideological agenda set by the very system it avowedly resists and seeks to change. Very few progressive Western intellectuals and media outlets have strongly criticised their governments' latest malevolent perfidy in Venezuela and Ukraine. Almost all those who have done so readily accepted the very same evil strategy of mendacious psychological warfare, terrorism and outright military aggression against the legitimate governments of Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria and their peoples.

They did so because they were morally and intellectually incapable of challenging absurd, crude and faithless manipulation of the motifs of civil and political rights by their governments and corporate propaganda media. Over the last five years, those Western governments and media have readily embraced and justified terrorist extremists in Libya and Syria and fascist gangs in Venezuela. Now, they make excuses for racist politicans and neo-nazi political movements in Ukraine.

Just when Western liberalism has run out of alibis, cue the carefully manufactured hyperbole around Edward Snowden's espionage revelations. These continue to be exhaustively manipulated by NATO Pulitzer-winning propaganda media like the Washington Post and the Guardian or by companion psy-warfare outlets like Der Spiegel in Germany. From the start, the Snowden affair has provided a malleable civil and political rights story to compensate Western corporate and alternative media's vicious psychological warfare against countries targeted by NATO country governments.

One clear example of this was Snowden's invitation to speak to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) at the same time that Assembly was making ridiculous false accusations against Russia over events in Crimea. Snowden, a centre-right libertarian US patriot, has stated explicitly that he wants to help strengthen the US government. Nowhere in his statements and interviews has Edward Snowden voiced any conscientious objection to his government's demented, psychotic foreign policy.

The intellectual managers who have manipulated Snowden's purposefully managed leaked material are deeply embedded in the Western NGO managerial class and in the corporate financial networks sustaining that class. Liberal strategists in the NATO country elites could hardly have crafted a better Trojan Horse than Edward Snowden. His handlers have astutely spread confusion among anti-imperialist opinion foolish enough to accept their version of events uncritically.

Snowden's supporters argue that he is a heroic isolated dissident. They say his revelations have transformed public understanding of global espionage by Western powers and will lead to significant legislative changes to protect civil rights. That evaluation has been shown to be hopelessly wrong. Snowden's position was equivocal when he was adopted by Human Rights Watch, became categorical when he joined the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and was sealed when he accepted the invitation to speak to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Other patriotic US dissidents prior to Edward Snowden – among others, Russell Tice, William Binney, Thomas Drake - had already revealed much of the information that Snowden and his intermediaries made available in detail. But despite this long record of revelations, no significant legislative changes defending people's civil rights against repressive mass surveillance have resulted. Nor is it probable that the situation will improve as a result of Edward Snowden's revelations either now under President Obama or under any likely presidential successor.

For the vast majority of people in North America and Europe, the matter hardly affects their daily lives. They ignore it. The result of all the media coverage of the Snowden affair has in fact been that stealthy mass surveillance practices by NATO's national security institutions have been consolidated and effectively legitimized. In any case, the affair is a mostly irrelevant footnote to the progressive decline of NATO countries' global power and influence accompanied by steadily greater domestic repression and elite corruption.

Effective defence of fundamental human rights, civil and political, social economic and cultural can only be based on the founding principles of the United Nations. The two most important of these are non-aggression between UN member states and the self-determination of peoples. Vindication of those principles now requires uncompromising anti-imperialist solidarity with the legitimate governments of Syria, Venezuela and Russia, with their peoples and with their allies against NATO country terrorism and military aggression.