the burbank digest

The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis, part 1: The holocaust in history
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Online Journal Contributing Writer

1. “Hidden Holocaust”. As we are all aware, the term “Holocaust” is traditionally used to refer to the “systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The word “Holocaust” is a Greek word, which means “sacrifice by fire.” It conveys an event, the scale and horror of which, transformed the course of world history. Moreover, it’s often seen as a crime against humanity that is unparalleled and unique. This, we cannot dispute. The Nazi Holocaust was, indeed, a uniquely horrific genocide, whose enormity and systematic character is barely imaginable, designed to exterminate wholly the Jewish people, physically, socially, culturally, from the face of the Earth. ***

But what then, do we mean by a “hidden holocaust?” This term conveys the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale and enormity is such that one feels that the word “holocaust” does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is “hidden," in the sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially unacknowledged.

This “hidden holocaust," is escalating, accelerating, intensifying; according to all expert projections from the social and physical sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species, unless we take immediate drastic action, now.

2. “Civilizational Crisis”

Digest note: this amazing stand-alone story, apparently well-documented (though i haven't checked the sources) is in keeping with the U.S. past and present world-domination-or-destruction agenda for "manifest destiny":

"...depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World."
Henry Kissinger, National Security Memo 200, April 24, 1974

"From the depth of our heart -- thanks to The Israeli Defense Forces:, from Microsoft
Microsoft and the National Security Agency
http://killinghope.org/aer44.htm

The connection to Africa also coincides, though Engdahl doesn't mention it, with AFRICOM, a critical component of the bogus war on terror for U.S. "full spectrum global dominance" based on control of world's major oil/energy resources:

The Scramble for Africa's Oil
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...
by Christopher Thompson
The Pentagon is embarked on a massive effort to militarily secure African oil assets for the United States. Under cover of the so-called "war on terror," the U.S. is deepening its military ties to "friendly" African regimes, enhancing their capacity to deal with internal dissidents and external rivals. From the Horn of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea and the Niger Delta, the Americans bolster authoritarian regimes and flaunt U.S. air, naval and "special operations" power. Even the FBI has gotten into the act, performing interrogations of hundreds of "suspects" swept up in Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia and brutal suppression of internal foes.

Digest commentary:

This transparent face-saving "news", an admission of what the world has long-known, must be understood for what it is: a serious set-back for U.S. hegemonic plans that reflects its growing geostrategic political-economic and military weakness. The deep capitalist crisis behind the U.S. imperialist world war for the absolute global hegemony needed to resolve the crisis -- [restructuring the globe and finance capital by securing control of oil and other essential resources] -- has resulted in further exacerbating the crisis: Iran's refusal to be bullied into submission, the undefeatable Iraqi resistance emboldening other oppressed peoples and nations, increasing U.S defeat in Afghanistan, the unspeakable state terrorist crimes committed by U.S. and its zionist proxy, with severe and growing isolation, hatred and opposition threatening its supremacy in the face of Russian and Chinese and Latin American anti-U.S. hegemony capitalist bloc-building, plus the too-silent but spreading political disgust with its wars as the financial chickens come home to roost in the 'homeland' --- all this requires new U.S. tactics.

Do not be fooled: this does not indicate defeat for the bipartisan world domination agenda, nor is it an indication of strategic electoral party differences, because the agenda is necessary to the preservation of U.S. capitalist global power and profits, the mission of all electoral representatives. The infrastructural shift from liberal-to fascist capitalist mode will become more draconian under pressure. Any international policy shifts will be only tactical, as proscribed by Zbigniew Brzezinski et al, toward more successfully achieving, instead of sabotaging, U.S. capital's "global leadership".
[see earlier issues of the digest]

Operation Pliers succeeds...
Venezuela Hands Narrow Defeat to Chávez Plan
By SIMON ROMERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/americas/03venezuela.html?hp=&pa...
... It was the first major electoral defeat in the nine years of his presidency. Voters rejected the 69 proposed amendments 51 to 49 percent....The outcome is a stunning development in a country where Mr. Chávez and his supporters control nearly all of the levers of power. Almost immediately after the results were broadcast on state television, Mr. Chávez conceded defeat... “I congratulate my adversaries for this victory,” he said. “For now, we could not do it.”
The defeat slows Mr. Chávez’s socialist-inspired transformation of the country. Venezuela, once a staunch ally of the United States, has become a leading opponent of the Bush administration’s policies in the developing world. It has also taken the most profound leftward turn of any large Latin American nation in decades... The voting seemed to unfold largely without irregularities, though there were isolated reports of fraud and violence in parts of the country. Recounts are allowed under Venezuelan law, but would have to be approved by the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Mr. Chávez’s supporters.
In recent weeks, Mr. Chávez has adopted an increasingly confrontational tone with critics abroad, who have been multiplying even in friendly countries with moderate leftist governments like Brazil and Chile. In the days before the referendum, Mr. Chávez recalled his ambassador from Colombia and threatened to nationalize the Venezuelan operations of Spanish banks after Spain’s king told him to shut up during a meeting. Mr. Chávez said he would cut off oil exports to the United States in the event of American interference in the vote.

Digest Commentary
U.S. urgency is driven by a deep capitalist structural and conjunctural crisis. Historically such crises have been [temporarily] resolved by restructuring capital and the world map through imperialist world war: the current imperialist global war, the bogus "war on terror", is designed to expand and secure U.S. global supremacy before fast-rising capitalist rivals China & Russia, or revolutionary anti-imperialist-zionist liberation wars bury the u.s. political - economic system. This final solution fantasy of U.S. 'manifest destiny' jibes geostrategically with its zionist proxy's 'eretz israel' agenda: these two state terrorist powers are known and despised by most of the world as enemy#1.
This geostrategic context is the only way in which the issue of oil, deliberately obfuscated and misrepresented, can be correctly understood. Not 'a war for oil' in the populist sense of oil for domestic use, but as the key to world hegemony [temporarily] because control of the world's major energy/ oil resources, mainly belonging to Arab and African nations, is the linchpin for leverage over allies and enemies.
The calculated fascist war against Arabs, Muslims, Africans, Latino immigrants, peoples and nations of color across the globe and in the belly of this beast will only be as successful as its vile racist psywar hyper-nationalist amerikan propaganda is at continuing to whip up patriotic jingoist support for the worst criminal state in modern history. Psywar and military war, soft and hard power must be opposed and resisted.

Note: U.S. imperialist crusade for global domination has long been inseparable from, and impossible without, its zionist proxy-partner
On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Palestine to be partitioned between Arabs and Jews.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20071129.html

Sub-planting Palestinian Memory
By Dr. Elias Akleh

“If you look for Palestine on any modern map you will not find it. Palestine had been wiped off the map and replaced by Zionist Israel.”

“After the Jewish Holocaust the whole world cried “never again”. Yet the same victims of the Holocaust, and their descendents, are now perpetrating a similar Holocaust against the Palestinians …. The international slogan “never again” had thus become an empty cry.”

The attached report was presented to scholars at the 41st Oral History Convention in Oakland, California on November 27th, 2007. It has been slightly modified to fit publications.

Palestinians share one common experience with North and South American Native Indians, with Australian Aborigines, and with New Zealand Ma’oris. They all have been subjected to settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism, usually technologically and militarily more advanced, is based on the erasure of already existent people, their culture and their memory, and substituting it with new foreign national entity that builds new culture, new history and new memory. To do this, settler colonialists have to get rid of the native people, their physical evidence, their history and their memory. They have to wipe off their existence from the world collective memory.

In the case of Palestinians, the name of their country has already been wiped off the map. If you look for Palestine on any modern map you will not find it. Palestine had been wiped off the map and replaced by Zionist Israel.

The plan of wiping Palestine off the map originated within the First Zionist Congress in 1897, when a programme for the colonization of Palestine by Zionist settlers was approved to pave the way for the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state in the heart of the Arab World.

"I think that an objective analysis of events that are taking place on this earth today points towards some type of ultimate showdown. You can call it political showdown, or even a showdown between the economic systems that exist on this earth which almost boil down along racial lines. I do believe that there will be a clash between East and West. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation."
Malcolm X

Paying The Price: Killing The Children Of Iraq
A documentary film by John Pilger
Sanctions enforced by the UN on Iraq since the Gulf War have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, including over half a million children - many of whom weren't even born when the Gulf War began.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15385.htm

Pak Nukes Already Under US Control: Report
By Times Of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/The_United_States/Pak_nukes_alr...
In a stunning disclosure certain to stir up things in Washington's (and in Islamabad and New Delhi's) strategic community, the [private intelligence] journal Stratfor reported on Monday that the "United States delivered a very clear ultimatum to Musharraf in the wake of 9/11: Unless Pakistan allowed US forces to take control of Pakistani nuclear facilities, the United States would be left with no choice but to destroy those facilities, possibly with India's help."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18752.htm

US military strike on Pakistan advocated
Khalid Hasan, Daily Times

"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers.
Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006

Iraq: Call an air strike
Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak03.html

Amid the George W Bush administration's relentless campaign to "change the subject" from Iraq to Iran, how to "win" the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite, now means - according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus - calling an air strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it's to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran's Khuzestan province... The Pentagon - via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad - is relentlessly spinning there's now less violence in the capital, a "sustainable" trend. This is rubbish.

US-ISRAELI PSY-WAR PRESSURE -- OR NEXT MILITARY MOVE TOWARD FASCIST GLOBAL RULE FANTASY?
Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran
Uzi Mahnaimi, New York and Sarah Baxter, Washington
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1290331.ece
...Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action...
ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.
The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.
Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. “As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

"...Political Islam is not targeted by the United States -- what is targeted is resistance under any label. In South America and South East Asia the resistance takes a leftist form (FARC, the Filipino and Nepalese Communist parties), so the U.S. attacks them. In the Arab region, the resistance takes an Islamist form, so the U.S. attacks them... The common factor is resistance to Washington's hegemony and agenda for control, not Islam..."
As'ad al-Azzouni, Jordanian Marxist activist and writer

"...terrorism’ is a floating signifier attached at will to Western enemies... The vagueness and inconsistency of its definition is key to its political usefulness... for those rejecting U.S. domination and fighting to free themselves from U.S.-Israel occupation."
Eqbal Ahmad, Pakistani scholar

"Whether it be Afghanistan or Iraq, we got more work to do. We the free world has more work to do, and I believe those of us who live in liberty have a responsibility to promote forms of government that deal with what causes 19 kids to get on airplanes to kill 3000 students."
GWB
Video: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=37756

Deja Vu: The US is smearing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not finding evidence of Iranian nuclear weapons
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18658.htm
Foreign Ministry Director-General Aharon Abramovich criticized the International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed El Baradei, calling it a "hindrance" in the battle against the Iran's nuclear armament.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3468086,00.html

futile fascist fantasies of world domination...
Abizaid: Mideast wars may last 50 years
Associated Press