Fascism and Dictatorship - American Power Unmasked
By Finian Cunningham
April 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "Sputnik"
- American sponsorship, simultaneously, of Neo-Nazis waging ethnic cleansing in
Ukraine and of Arab dictators bombing an impoverished Yemen is stark testimony
to the true nature of US power. Unmasked from unctuous vanity and virtuous
pretensions, the ugly face of Washington is fascism and dictatorship.
Ukraine and Yemen, to some, may seem disconnected theatres. Not at all. The
American-backed lawlessness and barbarity running amok in both countries are an
integral function of how US power really operates in the world; not as a recent
aberrant phenomenon, but rather going back to the fundamentals of how the
American ruling class functions under capitalism.
Let's survey America's
partners in practice: first in Yemen, then
in Ukraine, and finally integrate the
systematic connections.
As the death toll
among civilians mounts in Yemen, aid
agencies are warning of a humanitarian
catastrophe in the Arab Peninsula country.
Rundown hospitals can't cope with the droves
of injured, many of them children suffering
severe burns.
Yet this week Washington
announces it is stepping up its weapons
supplies to the coalition of Arab states led
by Saudi Arabia that has been bombing Yemen
for nearly two weeks.
US Army Colonel Steve
Warren announced that the weapons are "a
combination of pre-existing orders to our
partners [sic] and some new requirements."
The American "partners"
among the Saudi-led blitzkrieg on Yemen
include the Persian Gulf monarchies
of Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United
Arab Emirates, as well as Jordan and Egypt.
All of them dictatorships
where human rights and freedom of speech are
brutally suppressed.
Just this week, Saudi and
Bahraini state forces hauled many of their
own people into prisons in a vicious
crackdown simply because they were voicing
protests against the bombing of Yemen.
Among the US-supplied
weapons to its "partners" murdering Yemeni
children and families — in the name
of regional security – are ammunition, bombs
and precision-guided missiles. The latter
ordnance is "to compensate for the absence
of Saudi-allied soldiers in Yemen to provide
targeting information," according to a
McClatchy news report.
That's an oblique admission
that the US-backed foreign air raids have
little or no mandate from within Yemen. So,
this bombing campaign is simply what it is:
naked foreign aggression — the supreme war
crime, as defined during the 1946 Nuremberg
Trials of Nazi war criminals.
The arrival of more
American "precision-guided missiles"
in Yemen will also hardly bring much
consolation to families whose homes have
been destroyed over the past two weeks. This
week a family of nine was obliterated when a
Saudi air strike reportedly hit their home
in Anat, Saada Province, in northern Yemen.
Just one case of countless innocent victims
being slaughtered by American weapons.
US aircraft tankers are
refuelling the hundreds of American-supplied
F15 fighter jets pounding Yemen. However, a
Pentagon spokesman told media this week that
the tankers were refuelling Arab-flown
warplanes "outside Yemeni airspace" — as if
that distinction somehow mitigates American
involvement in the murderous aggression.
It's the inane equivalent of former
President Bill Clinton once admitting
to smoking dope, but he "didn't inhale".
"Yes, we're refuelling bombers, but we're
not inhaling Yemeni airspace."
In addition to bombs and
missiles, Tony Blinken, the US deputy
foreign secretary, was in Saudi capital
Riyadh this week to firm up "intelligence
sharing" with the Saudi-led bombing
coalition. The newly setup American "joint
fusion centre" in Saudi Arabia to "oversee
the air campaign" is being headed by Marine
Major General Sam Bundy. That shows, if
further proof were needed, that Washington
is the real brains behind this international
gang-rape of Yemen.
"Saudi Arabia is sending a
strong message to the Houthis [rebels] and
their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen
by force," said Blinken while being
entertained by the House of Saud, a regime
that imprisons or decapitates anyone who
dares to voice criticism of its despotic
rule.
A fair response to Blinken's
"strong message" that rebels cannot overrun
Yemen by force is: "Why not?" After all,
America overruns countries all the time
by force, killing millions of people in the
process, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya;
and its Saudi partners have tried to do the
same "overrunning by force" for the
past four years in Syria by sponsoring
head-chopping Wahhabi terrorists.
In any case, the Houthi-led
uprising against the US, Saudi-backed puppet
former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi has
widespread support among the Yemeni
population. Hadi fled the country two weeks
ago to avail of luxurious sanctuary in the
House of Saud, from where he is calling
for air strikes on his own country,
allegedly to "defeat the Houthis".
This puppet has no mandate
and no credibility other than the fraudulent
image bestowed on him by his patrons
in Washington and Riyadh. The people
of Yemen kicked him out and don't want him
back. As even the London-based Financial
Times reported this week: "Yemen anger grows
as absent president cheers attack".
So that's the dictatorship
arm of Washington's global power. It's other
limb is Neo-Nazi fascism, as patently seen
in Ukraine — provided, that is, you don't
read or watch the Western news propaganda
services.
This week the
Western-installed regime in Kiev, which came
to power in an illegal coup in February
2014, appointed the leader of the fascist
paramilitary Right Sector as "chief advisor"
to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This
elevation is in spite of the fact that
Dmitry Yarosh is on Interpol's wanted-list
for crimes committed by the Nazi SS-styled
Right Sector against civilians in eastern
Ukraine over the past year.
Yarosh and his
paramilitary shock-troops, as well as senior
political figures in the Kiev regime,
including the prime minster and president,
venerate and glorify Ukrainian fascists
of earlier times. Those "hero" fascists
collaborated with the Nazi Wehrmacht in the
extermination of millions of fellow
Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Roma, Jews,
Russians and others during the Second World
War.
Now the Kiev-run secret
police, the SBU, has also openly announced
that it is adopting organisational methods
that were once used by the
Nazi-collaborating Organisation of Ukrainian
Nationalists, formerly led by Stepan
Bandera.
Furthermore, the
Western-sponsored oligarch-president Petro
Poroshenko is moving to adopt "special
powers" under martial law that will allow
his security forces to detain, en masse,
ethnic Russians within Ukraine who are
deemed a "terror threat". This follows
Poroshenko's recent decree to ban all
Russian-language films, documentaries and
news media.
This
is all because the regime that Washington
installed in Kiev, with CIA murderous dirty
tricks in the infamous sniper shootings
on February 20, 2014, has an ideological
hatred toward Russia and Russians.
This is consistent
with the same fascist ideology of its
Ukrainian "heroes" during WWII whose mission
was to exterminate Russian "sub-humans"
as part of the Nazi Final Solution.
The US government is
supplying weapons, equipment and military
trainers to the fascist armed forces that
are under Kiev's command. These forces are
continually undermining the fragile
ceasefire that is currently in place
in eastern Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov has accused Washington of,
in effect, aiding and abetting ceasefire
violations.
The suspicion is that the
US wants its de facto Neo-Nazi foot-soldiers
to resume hostilities in eastern Ukraine
with the long-held, bigger-picture strategic
view of destabilising Russia and eventually
eliciting "regime change" in Moscow — just
as Washington arrogates to do against any
state, anywhere in the world that dares
to oppose its unbridled hegemony.
Today, these are the
unmistakeable dark forces whom Washington is
fully integrated with — openly and
unreservedly — fascism and dictatorship.
For many people around the world, this
historical alignment may seem
disorientating. They will respond
incredulously and plaintively: "But surely
America is the land of the free, the
defender of the free world, and the
proclaimer of democracy, international rule
of law and human rights?"
Well, it's time to unplug
from the chronic brainwashing. The United
States has always been a plutocratic,
imperialist behemoth that has relied
on fascism and dictatorship to achieve its
geopolitical objectives of total hegemony.
The extermination of the North American
natives was but the opening salvo, carried
on by genocide of African slaves and their
descendants, leading to the early colonial
conquests of Mexico, Central America, the
Caribbean and the Philippines.
Later, the American
capitalist elite worked surreptitiously
with European fascism, including Nazi
Germany, during the 1920s and 30s
to suppress socialist movements and maximise
profits. That covert policy was interrupted
for necessary tactical reasons during WWII
to defeat its rogue fascist clients. But it
was promptly resumed at the end of the war
with the American sponsorship of fascism
in Greece, Turkey and behind enemy lines
in the Soviet Union, primarily in Ukraine.
The
CIA recruited Wehrmacht agents and
collaborators to deploy as saboteurs and
terrorists against the Soviet Union
during the 1950s and 60s. The present-day
American sponsorship of Neo-Nazis in Kiev is
therefore nothing other than a continuation
of systematic policy.
Washington worked
with fascists and military dictators
in every corner of the globe during the Cold
War, from Latin America to Africa to Asia.
Subversion
of democratically elected governments and
the brutal suppression of pro-democracy
movements were standard operating procedure
for the American "master race". The American
self-proclaimed "exceptional nation" of
"manifest destiny".
The presumed Cold War
antagonism against the Soviet Union was
but the cover story for the real, core
narrative of ruthless pursuit of American
hegemony, no matter at what nefarious price
to democratic and human rights.
American historian William
Blum enumerates that Washington was involved
in the overthrow of more than 50
constitutional governments around the world
during the five decades of the Cold War,
resulting in over 25 million deaths
from US-engendered civil wars, wars
of aggression, dirty counterinsurgency wars,
and despotic repression, as currently seen
in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and
other US "partner" dictatorships.
When we see the "partners"
that Washington consorts with today, it must
be understood that this is not some mere
unfortunate quirk of history, alien to "true
Americanism". It is totally in line with the
real nature of American power and how it has
always operated. Fascism and dictatorship
are the true, ugly face of America.
The final irony perhaps is
that it is the vast majority of ordinary
people within the US who are now beginning
to learn the harsh truth about their
much-vaunted "American democracy" — and they
are learning it the hard way.
It's a cruel awakening
to the reality of rampant police state
violence, the collapse of democratic rights
and the untrammeled hedonism of its
super-rich militarised oligarchy.