[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
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Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Wednesday, 02 December 2015 09:30.
The Turkish airforce shot down a Russian Su-24M last week, and since that time, critical examination of Turkey has brought a number of issues that people had been warned about before to light in the media, which until now had been mostly ignored.
I had intended to write an article at Majorityrights about this, but then I realised that the Independent was actually saying everything that I was going to write, so in the interest of saving time, I will just quote them verbatim:
The US is demanding that Turkey close a 60-mile stretch of its border with Syria which is the sole remaining crossing point for Isis militants, including some of those involved in the massacre in Paris and other terrorist plots.
The complete closure of the 550-mile-long border would be a serious blow to Isis, which has brought tens of thousands of Islamist volunteers across the frontier over the past three years.
In the wake of the Isis attacks in Paris, Washington is making clear to Ankara that it will no longer accept Turkish claims that it is unable to cordon off the remaining short section of the border still used by Isis. “The game has changed. Enough is enough. The border needs to be sealed,” a senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration told The Wall Street Journal, describing the tough message that Washington has sent to the Turkish government. “This is an international threat, and it’s coming out of Syria and it’s coming through Turkish territory.”
The US estimates some 30,000 Turkish troops would be needed to close the border between Jarabulus on the Euphrates and the town of Kilis, further west in Turkey, according to the paper. US intelligence agencies say that the stretch of frontier most commonly used by Isis is between Jarabulus, where the official border crossing has been closed, and the town of Cobanbey.
It has become of crucial importance ever since the Syrian Kurdish forces known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured the border crossing at Tal Abyad, 60 miles north of Isis’s capital of Raqqa in June. Turkey had kept that border crossing open while Isis was in control on the southern side, but immediately closed it when the YPG seized the crossing point. The Turkish authorities are refusing to allow even the bodies of YPG fighters, who are Turkish citizens and were killed fighting Isis, to be taken back across the border into Turkey.
The US move follows increasing international criticism of Turkey for what is seen as its long-term tolerance of, and possible complicity with, Isis and other extreme jihadi groups such as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham. Not only have thousands of foreign fighters passed through Turkey on their way to join Isis, but crude oil from oilfields seized by Isis in north-east Syria has been transported to Turkey for sale, providing much of revenue of the self-declared Islamic State.
Last week a Turkish court jailed two prominent journalists for publishing pictures of a Turkish truck delivering ammunition to opposition fighters in Syria. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that the weapons were destined for Turkmen paramilitaries allied to Turkey fighting in Syria, but this was denied by Turkish political leaders close to the Turkmen.
Turkey is now under heavy pressure from the US and Russia, with President Vladimir Putin directly accusing Ankara of aiding Isis and al-Qaeda. In the wake of the shooting down of a Russian aircraft by a Turkish jet, Russia is launching heavy air strikes in support of the Syrian army’s advance to control the western end of the Syrian Turkish border. The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a Russian air strike on the town of Ariha yesterday killed 18 people and wounded dozens more. Meanwhile Turkey said it had now received the body of the pilot killed when the plane was shot down and would repatriate it to Moscow.
The US demand that Turkey finally close the border west of Jarabulus could, if Turkey complies, prove more damaging to Isis than increased air strikes by the US, France and, possibly Britain. The YPG has closed half the Syrian frontier over the last year and defeated an Isis assault aimed at taking another border crossing at Kobani. Syrian Kurdish leaders say they want to advance further west from their front line on the Euphrates and link up with a Kurdish enclave at Afrin. But Turkey insists that it will resist a further YPG advance with military force. Instead, it had proposed a protected zone on the southern side of the border from which Isis would be driven by moderate Syrian opposition fighters.
The US has opposed this proposal, suspecting that the Turkish definition of moderates includes those the US is targeting as terrorists. It also appears to be a ploy to stop the YPG, heavily supported by US air power, expanding its de facto state along Turkey’s southern flank. US officials are quoted as saying that there could be “significant blowback” against Turkey by European states if it allows Isis militants to cross from Syria into Turkey and then carry out terrorist outrages in Europe.
Meanwhile in Iraq, officials said three more mass graves had been found in the northern town of Sinjar, which Kurdish forces backed by US-led air strikes recaptured from Isis earlier this month.
This is relevant to two flashbacks from last year, to stories that were made available in Al-Monitor via Taraf:
A man works at a makeshift oil refinery site in Raqqa’s countryside, May 5, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Hamid Khatib)
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has been selling smuggled Syrian oil in Turkey worth $800 million, according to Ali Ediboglu, a lawmaker for the border province of Hatay from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Speaking to Taraf, Ediboglu recounted the findings of his research on ISIS activities.
“ISIS is a terrorist organization that poses a global threat, a group that kills recklessly and believes that killing people is a ticket to heaven,” Ediboglu said. “One would expect such a group to engage in certain attacks in Turkey any time. Turkey’s cooperation with thousands of men of such a mentality is extremely dangerous. You can never know what demands they could make to Turkey, a country whose regime they consider to be un-Islamic. No one can guarantee they will not repeat the massacres they commit in Iraq today or carry out similar attacks in Turkey tomorrow.”
Oil revenues
Ediboglu said: “$800 million worth of oil that ISIS obtained from regions it occupied this year [the Rumeilan oil fields in northern Syria — and most recently Mosul] is being sold in Turkey. They have laid pipes from villages near the Turkish border at Hatay. Similar pipes exist also at [the Turkish border regions of] Kilis, Urfa and Gaziantep. They transfer the oil to Turkey and parlay it into cash. They take the oil from the refineries at zero cost. Using primitive means, they refine the oil in areas close to the Turkish border and then sell it via Turkey. This is worth $800 million.”
Is Turkish intelligence helping fighters?
Ediboglu further stated: “Fighters from Europe, Russia, Asian countries and Chechnya are going in large numbers both to Syria and Iraq, crossing from Turkish territory. There is information that at least 1,000 Turkish nationals are helping those foreign fighters sneak into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is allegedly involved. None of this can be happening without MIT’s knowledge.”
Taraf’s earlier report on diesel smuggling
Last Aug. 20, Taraf carried a report headlined “Smugglers riding on a billion dollars.” It reported that Turkish soldiers clashed with and repelled hundreds of horse riders and thousands of foot smugglers at the Syrian border on a daily basis. It pointed out that the biggest fight between the [Syrian Kurdish] People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra in Rojava [northern Syria] was over the revenues from the sale of the region’s petroleum products to Turkey.
The report noted that some 2,000 oil wells exist in the Rumeilan region, which lies on the other side of the border stretching between [Turkey’s] districts of Cizre in Sirnak province and Nusaybin in Mardin province. “The region’s oil is being smuggled to Turkey. The daily amount of smuggled diesel fuel has reached 1,500 tons, which corresponds to 3.5% of Turkey’s consumption,” it added.
A vehicle carrying supplies stands at a checkpoint of the Islamist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria’s Deir al-Zour countryside, July 27, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Karam Jamal)
During the 2½ years of clashes in Syria, there has been constant debate about how Turkey’s borders were crossed. There were reports that Islamic groups going to fight regime of President Bashar al-Assad — first and foremost al-Qaeda, which has supporters in Turkey — were crossing over the Turkish border.
Interesting claims
To find out more, we met with people close to al-Qaeda in Istanbul. These people are shopkeepers who live in the Fatih district of Istanbul, but who won’t give their names. They have interesting things to say about the Syrian war. These sources told us that following the eruption of war in Syria, al-Qaeda elements from Europe, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and North Africa began crossing into Syria via Turkey. These sources also had interesting things to say about the clashes with the Kurdish PYD and how the border is crossed.
Met by intelligence officials
O.E., one of our sources, said he crossed the border and went to Syria before the Jabhat al-Nusra-PYD clashes. He crossed from an unsupervised area on the Turkish side to the Syrian side controlled by the PYD. O.E. said, “We told the PYD we were there for Jabhat al-Nusra and they let us pass.” O.E. said many people cross the same way: “Fighters coming via Chechnya and Afghanistan are met at the Syrian border. There are intelligence officials there. Those crossing the border inform the intelligence people of their affiliation and under whose command they will be. Then, they cross the border and report to their units.”
Treated in Turkey
O.E. said those heavily wounded in clashes are brought to Turkish hospitals. He added, “Some return to their countries by the same route. There are al-Qaeda mujahedeen from Afghanistan and the Caucasus fronts who come with their families. Most of them settle in Syria. There are hundreds of militants who come the same way from Northern Africa, the Caucasus, Europe and Afghanistan. They simply cross the Turkish border and join the fight.”
1,000 Chechens to Syria
O.E. said Chechens are now one of the strongest groups in Syria. “Under their commander Abu Omar, about 1,000 Chechens came to Syria. First they were with Jabhat al-Nusra, but now they have moved over to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),” he said.
There are also Turks
O.E. said many Turks had gone to Syria to fight. “Some were martyred. Some stayed for a while and returned. Some couldn’t resist going back to Syria. A retired policeman who is a friend of mine went to Syria to fight. He trained fighters in weapons. Several of us went to Syria before the fighting between the PYD and Jabhat al-Nusra broke out. Without being asked anything on the Turkish side, we just crossed to an area of Syria controlled by the PYD. We told them we came to [fight with] Jabhat al-Nusra and they let us enter,” O.E. said.
The ISIS fans the clashes
O.E. claimed that it was the ISIS that was flaming the clashes with the PYD. “The ISIS declared that Jabhat al-Nusra was its subordinate organization. Jabhat al-Nusra commanders refused this claim and said they were under al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri. These claims caused disputes within the organization. Chechen groups under Abu Omar in Syria split from Jabhat al-Nusra and joined the ranks of the ISIS. It was the ISIS fighters who provoked the recent clashes with the PYD. Reports said the ISIS entered and opened fire in PYD-controlled villages to disrupt the non-hostility agreement between the PYD and Jabhat al-Nusra,” he concluded.
Syria-bound trucks operated by MIT were searched in January 2014 after prosecutors received tip-offs that they were illegally carrying arms to Syria. (Photo: DHA)
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday seemingly validated claims previously made by critics who alleged that the Turkish government was sending weapon-filled trucks to radical groups in Syria by sarcastically asking, “So what if the MIT [National Intelligence Organization] trucks were filled with weapons?”
Pro-government figures had previously claimed that trucks belonging to MIT that were intercepted en-route to Syria contained “humanitarian aid” for the Bayir-Bucak Turkmens who live just over the border from Turkey’s southern Hatay province. Many claims were made by the opposition and Turkish media that the trucks were, in fact, transporting weapons to radical factions in Syria.
Early in 2014, an anonymous tip led to the interception of a number of trucks on the suspicion of weapons smuggling. The first operation took place in Hatay on Jan. 1, 2014. Another anonymous tip led to three more trucks being stopped and searched in Turkey’s southern Adana province on Jan. 19, 2014.
Speaking to a room full of teachers on Tuesday gathered for Teachers’ Day, Erdogan said, “You know of the treason regarding the MIT trucks, don’t you? So what if there were weapons in them? I believe that our people will not forgive those who sabotaged this support.”
Erdogan was speaking just hours after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 aircraft near the Syrian border on Tuesday morning after, Ankara has said, it violated Turkish airspace despite repeated warnings.
Erdogan accused the prosecutors investigating the MIT trucks of denying Turkmens the power to defend themselves. “Those [MIT] trucks were taking aid to the Bayir-Bucak Turkmens. Some were saying, ‘Prime Minister Erdogan said, there were no weapons inside those trucks;’ So what if there were?”
Justice and Development Party (AK Party) officials called the 2014 investigation of the MIT trucks “treason and espionage” on the part of the prosecutors because the trucks were claimed to be transporting humanitarian aid to the Bayir-Bucak Turkmens.
Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, said during a television program immediately after the interception of the trucks became public knowledge that the trucks were carrying aid supplies to Turkmens in Syria.
Many high-level Turkish officials, including then-President Abdullah Gül, said the trucks’ cargo was a “state secret,” which led some to speculate that the trucks were carrying arms.
However, Syrian-Turkmen Assembly Vice Chairman Hussein al-Abdullah said in January 2014 that no trucks carrying aid had arrived from Turkey.
The recent military operation of the Syrian government, backed by Russian air strikes, in the rural area of Latakia, inhabited by Bayir-Bucak Turkmens has caused thousands of Turkmens to flee to the Turkish border. A Turkmen brigade commander called for Turkey’s assistance and expressed his frustration that Turkey’s helping hand had not been extended far enough.
Turkmen Commander Ömer Abdullah of the Sultan Abdülhamit Brigade, who is fighting against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al- Assad, recently called on Turkey to help the Turkmens being pounded with cluster bombs by the Syrian regime and Russian forces.
“We are trying to survive under unbearable brutality and we need Turkey’s help,” said Abdullah. Expressing criticism of the AK Party, Abdullah said: “Every day our Turkmen brothers are dying. We expect the government to support us. Why have they abandoned us? Our martyrs fall every day. Why are we being left alone? I don’t understand.”
Abdullah’s claim pokes an important hole in the AK Party’s claims, while also posing the question of to whom the MIT trucks, now widely accepted as transporting weapons, were sent.
CHP leader says they told AK Party not to send weapons to Syria
Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu said on Wednesday that Turkey had become a country importing terrorism from Syria.
“We told them [the AK Party] not to. They said they were sending humanitarian aid. Later the documents were revealed [refuting these claims].”
Kiliçdaroglu was referring to the Cumhuriyet daily’s headline story in May which discredited AK Party and Erdogan’s earlier claims that the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmens. The article showed photos from the search of the MIT trucks which were revealed to be carrying heavy munitions. Kiliçdaroglu consequently asked to whom the trucks were going, if not to Turkmens.
After the publication of the stills as well as video, Erdogan lashed out at Cumhuriyet and its editor-in-chief, Can Dündar, for publishing the evidence, publicly vowing that Dündar would “pay a heavy price” for his report.
According to the report, there were six steel containers in the trucks which contained a total of 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. All of this is registered in the prosecutor’s file on the MIT truck case, the report said.
Erdogan personally sued Dündar and is requesting that he be given a life sentence, an aggravated life sentence and an additional 42-year term of imprisonment on charges related to a variety of crimes, ranging from espionage to attempting to topple the government and exposing secret information.
Following the Cumhuriyet report, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that it is “none of anybody’s business” what the trucks contained. Speaking in a live broadcast on the Habertürk news station, in May, Davutoglu said, “This is a blatant act of espionage.”
Tugrul Türkes, who made it into the AK Party cabinet on Tuesday after switching from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in September, said in June that the trucks were not destined for Syrian Turkmens. Speaking on CNN Türk in June, Türkes said: “I swear that those weapons were not sent to Turkmens as they [Erdogan and other government officials] claim. We [the MHP] have connections with Turkmens [in Syria].”
Prosecutor admits 2,000 truckloads sent to Syria
A pro-government prosecutor who was appointed to the MIT trucks case inadvertently admitted in May that weapon-laden trucks made 2,000 trips to Syria, according to the lawyer of one of the defendants in the case.
Hasan Tok, the lawyer for former Adana Provincial Gendarmerie Regiment Commander Col. Özkan Çokay, who was involved in the search of MIT trucks in January 2014, said that he learned that there had been at least 2,000 trips made by MIT trucks to Syria from the prosecutor, Ali Dogan.
Dogan, known as a government loyalist, filed for a verdict of non-prosecution regarding the investigation after he was appointed to the position of Adana chief public prosecutor. According to Tok, Dogan had asked the defendants in a previous hearing, “2,000 trucks have passed [into Syria], why was this one specially chosen?”
“We didn’t know 2,000 trucks had passed into Syria; may god bless Ali Dogan,” said Tok.
Of course, the weapons did not go to the Turkmens. The weapons on those trucks actually went to groups like the FSA 10th Coastal Brigade which has conducted operations in line with Jahbat Al-Nusra and Ahrar Al-Sham. It’s also reasonable to speculate that significant amounts of those supplies also found their way into the hands of ISIL.
Turkey’s intense protectiveness about Russian interactions with their border, may have been due to the fact that they didn’t want the Russians to be able to do air interdiction against what was an ongoing logistics operation taking place across that border.
It’s a depressingly ridiculous sequence of events which gives Russia the ability to create a media narrative about how ‘only Russia’ is ‘fighting the terrorists’ with real determination, because Turkey is a part of NATO and is basically embarrassing NATO with its duplicitous behaviour.
There is a silver lining to these dark clouds, though. Up until just recently, Russia had been seeking to work with Turkey on the provision of oil and gas pipeline projects into Europe, which would have increased European dependence on Russian energy companies. Thanks to this sequence of events, Russia and Turkey are now at odds with each other, and Russia is seeking to suspend those projects and to place sanctions on Turkey.
All of this has not worked out too badly. Not only has Turkey’s duplicity finally come to light in a way that makes it impossible for anyone in western governments to avoid dealing with it, but additionally the Russian government is now politically incapable of partnering with Turkey against the European Union’s geostrategic interests with regards to energy concerns, at least in the near term, as negotiations on the Turkish Stream pipeline project are suspended.
This gives more time for the effects of the Iran deal to come into play, since Iran was able to enlist Russian assistance in the P5 negotiations to make the case for sanctions being removed, while at the same time positioning itself against Russia as an alternative energy supplier for Europe, which would be able to substitute its natural gas in place of Russia’s and increase the diversification of supply. This would in turn lessen Russia’s political influence in Europe.
Iran’s infrastructure would not be ready to supply Europe in the near term, and so the near term quarrel between Russia and Turkey, gives the European Union more time to coordinate that infrastructure development with Iran, and potentially tilts the tables by making Russia appear less reliable as a supplier.
From that perspective, all of this is a win for the North Atlantic.
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
France is to opt out of some aspects of the European Human Rights Convention while the state of emergency declared after this month’s Paris attacks is in force. As well as raids on mosques and Islamic charities, police have swooped on radical environmentalists since the measure was introduced.
Some of the measures taken because of the state of emergency are “likely to necessitate exemption from some of the rights guaranteed” by the convention, the French authorities have told Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland.
States are allowed to opt out in case of war or a danger “threatening the life of the nation”, although they cannot be exempted from certain provisions, including bans on torture and cruel and inhuman treatment.
Exemptions can be challenged at the European Court of Human Rights.
There have been 1,616 searches of premises, 211 arrests, 161 people charged and 293 weapons seized since the state of emergency was declared.
Among the premises raided have been mosques, prayer rooms and shops targeted because “radical Islamists” were said to frequent them or because some sermons given were judged extreme.
But others have been on the homes of people who have taken part in environmental protests and occupations, such as the camp at the site of the proposed airport near Nantes in western France and one aiming to stop a dam in the south-west where a protester was killed.
Several activists have been placed under house arrest, apparently for fear that they might have defied the ban on demonstrations ahead of the Cop21 climate conference, which opens on Sunday 29 December.
“Special measures are necessary for the conference’s security” and there have been calls for “violent actions”, according to warrants seen by Le Monde newspaper.
On Tuesday a group of intellectuals published an appeal to defy the state of emergency in Libération newspaper and a Facebook page calling for “disobedience” of the ban on Sunday’s planned march for the climate had attracted 4,700 participants on Friday.
A person might be tempted to laugh, and indeed I myself am laughing. But at the same time, you have to think soberly to yourself, “How many people had to die in order to reach this point?”
Is it actually the case that European civil society is re-learning what ‘being in a conflict’ is about, the hard way?
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 16 November 2015 07:41.
“Hostages killed ‘one-by-one’ at Bataclan theatre.”
...some reflections on the events. It is salient that these killings were more personal and more directed at European peoples. That makes this, in an important sense, even worse, even more of an affront than 9-11. In 9-11, they went after symbols of Capitalism [World Trade Center] and the Military Industrial Complex [Pentagon] behind Liberal Democracy [Capitol building (i.e., tried to hit it, but failed, with the jet going down in Pennsylvania)]. Civilian casualties, though far more numerous, were incidental and not personally targeted.
In the case of the French attacks, however, not only did they choose to target the implicitly White culture of The Eagles of Death Metalfans [at Bataclan theatre], the implicitly White culture of football [Germany-France match], attended by the President of France, along with football’s not so implicit, but semi-explicit White culture [of football hooligans (as Jimmy Marr noted, hooligans tend to be nationalistic)]. They also went after the implicitly White cultural area of Paris in their targeting [the haute-bourgeoisie section (as noted by Kumiko)]. But not only did they contrast from 9-11 to narrow their target to these people demographically [implicitly White], in the case of the Bataclan theatre, they focused their attack still more, targeting them, [a death metal audience (or what they may as well have thought was one)] as personally as they could [holding them hostage] and shooting them [one by one].
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sunday, 25 October 2015 11:55.
Oh, hey, has anyone in Europe noticed that Sweden is not Vietnam?
I’m going to do something interesting which might be new to some readers, but which I think is a necessary part of cornering liberals so that they cannot continue to wear the masks of various other political groupings. I’m going to criticise the situation in Sweden, but I’m going to do it in a polemical form and it will be done from the left. It will be done so that people can see what that might look like.
Sometimes people talk about how a country is destroyed ‘in slow motion’, and you have to watch trends develop over a very long period of time in order to find out what the tricks of the reactionaries look like. Other times, you can find the template by just watching for a matter of a few weeks, as the pattern of behaviour exhibited by the reactionaries is just a sped-up version of the long-term template that they have been using all along.
As Sweden backslides into becoming one of the most reactionary and frankly dangerous European countries to live in, we can see a microcosm of how that disaster is fomented in a single snapshot of just the past eight weeks.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden will propose that the European Union set up more legal ways for refugees to arrive in the country, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Monday, announcing a push to make the Nordic country more welcoming for asylum seekers.
Lofven said the EU must introduce a permanent and obligatory redistribution mechanism for when disasters trigger drastically higher numbers of refugees seeking entry into the bloc, and that the EU should increase its number of quota refugees to about 100,000 from the 22,000 that the EU had earlier agreed.
Sweden has received more asylum seekers per capita than any other nation in Europe, giving weight to its voice over the crisis, which has intensified in recent days as thousands of migrants, many refugees from Syria, arrive mostly in Germany.
“Sweden, Germany and a few other countries have for a long time been alone, taken their responsibility. That’s not good enough,” Lofven told a news conference. “All countries in the EU must stand up for human values and do their duty.”
On Tuesday, Lofven will travel to Berlin to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the European migration crisis. He will also meet the Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann.
[...]
The reactionary bourgeoisie calls for even more migrants to enter the country because of their desire to knock down organised labour by using a reserve army of labour. They are completely out of control because the broad mass of the population has failed to establish institutional structures that would keep them in check. The labour unions have been totally co-opted by liberal-capitalists and the union bosses are on their payroll and can no longer be trusted. Clearly, someone needs to establish new labour unions that are independent from the control of the Swedish political establishment.
The reactionary bourgeoisie are even now passing laws that ‘allow the migrants to integrate into the labour market’, by which they mean setting up a multi-tier labour arrangement. What does that mean? It means that the migrants and low-skilled Swedish workers alike all will find themselves thrown into a semi-feudalist mode of production despite living territorially inside of a so-called ‘advanced’ economy. It will be a subordinated mode which the reactionary bourgeoisie would maintain by implementing enforced stagnation.
If that is allowed to continue, automation and mechanisation of the economy would be stalled, and in fact would go backwards, because there would be no incentive to develop productive forces further. Automation and mechanisation is usually spurred by a shortage of cheap labour, not a glut of it.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden will increase spending on better integrating immigrants into the labor market and increase compensation for municipalities where refugees settle, the government said on Thursday.
Next year, the added spending measures will total 1.8 billion Swedish crowns ($214 million).
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said the government would oblige all municipalities to accept refugees. The new spending includes a roughly 50 percent increase of the yearly compensation from the central government to 125,000 crowns per person up to the age of 65, it said in a statement.
Labor market measures include more money to validate foreign exams taken by immigrants and to the Swedish Public Employment Service for finding jobs quicker.
In its latest forecast, in July, the Swedish Migration Agency expected 74,000 asylum seekers this year, but an official told daily Dagens Nyheter on Thursday the figure would likely be revised upwards to above 80,000.
That money to ‘increase spending’ is not going to come from the pockets of the haute-bourgeoisie and their banking associates. Instead, it will come from the income taxes and regressive sales taxes that are imposed by the liberal-capitalist state against the broad mass of the people.
In other words, the taxes to pay for that ‘increase in spending’ will be collected from the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie. They will be asked to pay for their own enslavement, and pay for their own harassment by clerical-reactionaries in Muslim dress, and pay for their own impoverishment, and pay for the rising crime as Muslims rape their children. They’ll be told to accept this, because otherwise, someone might call them ‘racist’. And everyone knows how people are afraid of social ostracism like how cats are afraid of water. Probably.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden will need to borrow more money and cut costs across the board to meet the expense of record numbers of asylum seekers arriving in the country, Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Thursday.
“It is going to take longer for us to get back to balanced public finances,” Andersson told reporters. “It also going to mean that we are going to need to borrow money.”
Earlier in the day, the Migration Agency said it expected up to 190,000 asylum seekers to arrive in Sweden this year.
The Swedish haute-bourgeoisie would like to thank you for accepting 10,000 migrants. Oh, sorry, they mean 22,000. No wait, they meant 74,000. Or was that 80,000? No, they really meant 190,000. But it might be even more later.
The cuts enacted by the state onto itself will not be a cut in the amount of money being funnelled toward servicing debts and bailing out banks, but rather will be a cut to the quality of social services, hospitals, and schools for the broad mass of ethnic Swedish people.
The haute-bourgeoisie who run the Swedish government should no longer be permitted to call themselves ‘progressive’, nor should they be allowed to call themselves ‘leftists’.
For maximum irony and maximum punishment, the Swedish haute-bourgeoisie should instead be forced to experience an actual left-nationalist revolution right in their face which will utterly dispossess them of everything that they purport to own, so that they can see what actual leftism looks like.
And now before you readers start asking me if I’m trafficking in pure heroin in this post, just stay with me for a moment and actually engage in this thought experiment. It’s just a thought experiment, but I’m doing this so that you understand a particular point here.
Kumiko’s left-nationalist thought experiment for Sweden:
It is precisely at the very time when the haute-bourgeoisie are frenziedly accommodating terrorism and facilitating economic privations the likes of which have never before been seen in a European country, that Swedish progressives, socialists, and nationalists, formerly working separately, have united into a single party, the Socialist Workers Party of Sweden, to lead the revolutionary struggle of the entire people.
The Socialist Workers Party of Sweden is now founded. It is the party of the working class. By correctly formulating a mass line based on a mass perspective, it will help the proletariat lead the revolution waged for the sake of all oppressed and exploited people. From now on, you should join the party, and assist the vanguard in implementing the following goals:
1. To overthrow the Swedish liberal-capitalist government and to overthrow the ideological state apparatuses of the haute-bourgeoisie;
2. To abolish the Swedish monarchy;
3. To establish a Swedish worker-peasant-soldier government which caters to the needs of the broad mass of the people, facilitating the development of productive forces and the maintenance of an advanced and progressive culture;
4. To confiscate the assets of all banks and all other enterprises belonging to the reactionaries and put them under the actual control of the worker-peasant-soldier government;
5. To confiscate all the land in the northern zone of the country belonging to the reactionaries and re-distribute it back to the poor Sami peasants;
6. To implement a 6-hour working day and guaranteed annual income (GAI);
7. To abolish the forced buying of government bonds, abolish all taxes that are used for maintaining mass migration, and abolish all unjust taxes hitting the poor;
8. To deport all clerical-reactionaries from the country, and to shut down all ecclesiastical authorities, turning all Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues into secular community centres;
9. To dispense education to all the Swedish people, and maintain it at the highest quality, ensuring that it is laicist so that no religion may be taught;
10. To maintain equality between man and woman, with absolutely no exceptions;
11. To commit to the responsible maintenance of a market economy until its historical necessity is exhausted. The market economy would undergo an extended period of transition with several steps of development utilising mixed social and economic structures in which socialist factors are gradually strengthened and made dominant, so as to lay the groundwork for the transformation away from the market economy and into socialism.
Obviously, the following groups will not be able to accept even the thought of such a programme, as it effectively confiscates all of their property and outlaws them:
Swedish reactionaries.
Arab and African migrants.
Jews.
That would be fortuitous, given that all three of those subversive miscreant groups could then be hunted down and arrested by the military or secret police, and then they could be sent to a detention facility and subsequently deported from the country.
Now, what is the point of this thought experiment? Well, I invite any of the Swedish readers of Majorityrights, to find some Swedish so-called ‘leftists’ in your neighbourhood. Propose my thought experiment programme goals to them with a straight face and with a seeming seriousness of intent, and then see how they react to it.
If the so-called ‘leftists’ react to the programme with horror and loathing because it harms the pro-immigration agenda, then you can say to them, “Oh, I see, you aren’t really leftists at all, you’re actually just a bunch of liberals who love getting cucked by black and Arab men”.
And you yourself will have also learned an interesting political lesson at the same time, from that whole experience.
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Saturday, 24 October 2015 03:22.
Yes, the North Atlantic was completely destroyed, but for a wonderful moment in time we had no Islamophobic comments on Facebook!
There are few things in politics more fulfilling than seeing greed and fear—which are not ‘bad’ emotions, it’s all about context—combine to create genuinely good performance art, a kind of art that is a work of genuine originality. That’s how it is with the Facebook censorship story, it just gets better by the day.
The law firm Jun Lawyers, which specialises in IT Law and is headed by Jun Chan-jo, has seen an opportunity for publicity and profit. It is going to be found through the fact that between Angela Merkel, Heiko Maas, Anetta Kahane, Eva-Maria Kirschsieper and Mark Zuckerberg, they have virtually no capability at all of actually policing all the ‘hate speech’ that now exists on Facebook due to the reaction of a sizeable number of German citizens to the migrant influx that Angela Merkel herself invited into Germany.
The continued existence of ‘hate speech’ all over Facebook means that the liberal government is violating its own laws and its own constitution. Since Facebook is also possibly violating those same laws, and since none of them can do a single thing about it without installing something akin to the ‘Great Firewall of China’ or the ‘Great Keyword Filter of South Korea’ —except aimed at the all-pervasive ‘Far Right hate speech’ rather than say, ‘reactionaries’, or ‘Far Left Marxists’, or ‘anarchists’—Jun Lawyers can be sure that the German legal tangle is a gift that will keep on giving. The liberal government has effectively promised to win at whack-a-mole, has made it illegal to lose, and is now finding itself unable to stop losing.
Now finding themselves trapped in a forest of the censorship laws of their own making which they are legally obligated to enforce, and with social media being used to propagate messages of ‘hate’ toward everyone and everything, the liberal-capitalist occupied German government is considering suing Facebook, the German court system is considering whether to find the German government to be in violation of its own constitution, while the Jun Lawyers firm is suing both the liberal government and Facebook simultaneously.
I would urge all ethno-nationalists out there not to be angry with Jun Chan-jo. His name will appear a lot in the media going forward, but it is prudent to regard him as the ‘Gordon Gecko’ of IT Lawyers, and to take a tolerant stance toward him. I’ve heard some unfortunate stories about people sending him hateful emails and tweets which insult him on the basis of his Korean ethnicity and so on. Please do not do this to him. It’s just business, isn’t it? Jun Chan-jo should not be regarded with hatred, he should be regarded with love, because he’s just doing his job and he’s doing it very well.
Let’s remember the relevant section of that famous speech that Gordon Gecko made in the 1987 film ‘Wall Street’:
Gordon Gekko, ‘Wall Street’, 1987:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
The aggregate effect of the self-serving actions of Jun Chan-jo is that he’s basically calling the liberal government and Facebook on their own bluff and forcing them to try to follow through on their own laws. He’s performing the socially useful and totally logical function of holding the liberal government and the clique of Jews who own Facebook to account for the laws that they themselves committed to. But the government can’t comprehensively follow through on these laws, because it’s operationally impossible for them to police all of the things which are being said about Muslim migrants daily on social media in Germany. All the state apparatus can really do is strike a small number of ‘offenders’ randomly, and then when this proves ineffective, it turns on itself to play internal blame-games in response to legal challenges.
Look for yourself at the circular firing-squad which has manifested:
Chastened by its Nazi past, Germany long ago banned incitement of racial hatred
Refugees crisis has prompted posts that many feel violate those laws
Posters have been charged, and Facebook officials might be
BERLIN—The anti-refugee post on Facebook by a 29-year-old Berlin woman last spring seemed little different from many of the hate-filled rants that pop up on social media sites.
“Let’s get rid of the filth,” she wrote. Then, referring to a series of arson fires that have destroyed refugee housing under construction across Germany, she continued: “many more refugee centers will burn, hopefully with the doors boarded up.”
But there was a difference between her words and many others that appear online: She was a German, posting in Germany. And while social media globally might assume a more American character of erring on the side of free speech over censorship, Germany does not share this view when it comes to hate speech.
The woman was charged with violating Germany’s hate speech law, convicted and sentenced to five years of probation. She’s not the only poster to have run afoul of the law: A 25-year-old man from the small town of Passau in Bavaria was fined 7,500 euro (about $8,500) for a Facebook post offering to deliver “a gas canister and hand grenade, for free,” to a group of asylum seekers. A 34-year-old Berlin man was fined 4,800 euro (about $5,500) for posting: “I’m in favor of reopening the gas chambers and putting the whole brood inside.”
Now, with the swelling number of refugees prompting still more such posts, German prosecutors are considering going after Facebook itself for acting as a home for posts that advocate racial hatred and violate laws against neo-Nazi speech.
German prosecutors are investigating possible charges against three Facebook managers, prompted by a complaint that they failed to act against racist comments about Europe’s refugee crisis.
The complaint came from German attorney Chan-jo Jun, of Wuerzburg. In it, he claimed to have flagged more than 60 Facebook entries that would violate German hate-speech laws. In an interview in Die Welt newspaper, he noted that the posts he flagged – some even featuring Nazi insignia and people posing while giving a Nazi salute – are strictly forbidden by German law.
But, he said, Facebook responded to his complaints by saying the content didn’t violate Facebook’s community standards, and the posts were not removed. He made copies of the posts and sent them to Facebook’s German managers by registered mail.
“We need to put an end to the arrogance with which some companies try to translate their system of values to Europe,” he said.
In the complaint he filed, he noted, “Facebook Germany encourages the dissemination of offensive, punishable content through its actions in Germany.”
Germans have complained for years about what they see as warped morality on Facebook and other U.S.-based social media sites, where nudity is strictly controlled but posters are allowed to spout hate-filled screeds that Germany outlawed after the Nazi reign of Adolf Hitler.
German Justice Minister Heiko Maas recently announced that Germany would establish “a task force to combat hate speech on social media platforms, notably Facebook, and a number of social networks, including Facebook, are to take part.”
“Racist, inciting statements are inconsistent with our system of values and cannot be justified under any imaginable aspect,” he said. “One thing is clear: If Facebook gets complaints about racist and xenophobic messages that violate criminal laws, then the company must react and delete such posts quickly and reliably. . . . There must be as little space in social media for racism and xenophobia as there is on the street.”
Facebook has agreed to take part in and partially fund the task force, but for many it’s showing too little concern about a matter Germans take seriously.
Facebook has announced measures to counter hate speech. However, in the past it has also noted that the site “allowed discussions on the network to be conducted using robust diction.” Overall, German officials claim they have received word from Facebook that it prefers a policy of “discuss, not delete,” in many cases.
German news stories have quoted German Facebook policy manager Eva-Maria Kirschsieper as defending her company’s policies by noting that Facebook reaches a billion users far beyond Germany’s borders.
“It is a constant challenge to balance the interests of this diverse community and we are constantly working to adjust our policies and procedures to be even more effective and sensitive to the concerns of local communities,” she said.
Konstantin von Notz, a member of the Green party who is considered the group’s top expert on the Internet, questioned whether Facebook is following its own anti-hate speech guidelines. He noted that members of his party have been attacked on Facebook and have filed criminal charges. “Some of what is being posted not only goes against German law but also against Facebook’s own terms of business,” he said.
This week, the German tabloid Bild ran a two-page spread of nothing but hateful Facebook comments, complete with user names and profile photos. The comments were directed at the large number of refugees seeking asylum in Germany, and those who support them.
“Green pig, hang them all,” said one post directed at Claudia Roth, a pro-refugee Green politician. Another was more general: “A bullet for every Muslim and their supporters.” “Muslims are worse than cockroaches. We don’t want Islam in Germany and Austria,” read another. Another poster, identified as Silvio Bettin, asked, “Aren’t we all a little Nazi?”
The best thing that can happen is for this chaos to continue. It’s an unlimited and unwinnable censorship battle which the liberal-capitalist occupation government in Germany has plunged itself into. About 35 million migrants in total may be heading toward Europe, and Germany is refusing to permit political discussion of Angela Merkel’s monstrous open-doors policy to take place on the public political stage. So, the conversation persists on the internet, and then the liberal government chooses to include such conversation under the rubric of the enforcement of its ‘racial hatred’ censorship laws.
If the liberal occupation government wants to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward ‘hate speech’ and if they promise to follow through on that impossible task, then I give my warmest regards and a jaunty salute to anyone who is able to engage in culture-jamming or legal-jamming actions to put that ridiculous censorship system under stress. The liberal occupation government might as well be trying to censor discussion of the weather.
To all the patriotic Germans out there, I encourage you to keep posting ‘offensive’ things, and to keep organising and engaging in street actions, and in so doing, keep jamming up the liberal censorship system.
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Tuesday, 20 October 2015 10:10.
Dutch TV subtitle: “The European Union and Turkey together will accelerate Turkey’s accession.”
Even the title of this article does not do enough to convey the scale of the stunningly disingenuous ‘negotiation’ that Angela Merkel engaged in on Sunday. It was not a negotiation, it was Merkel just taking Europe’s queen piece and both rook pieces off of the chessboard and tossing them through the window as Turkish mouths widened in grotesque delight.
As is well known, many of the migrants that are flowing into Europe at Angela Merkel’s own invitation—and because of the perverse incentives created by governments like Germany and Sweden—make their transit through Turkey before arriving in Europe. At the same time, Merkel has been facing an internal party revolt as various opportunists are taking the crisis as a chance to challenge her leadership. Some others are revolting against her because the number of migrants that their regions are being asked to accept are more than their infrastructure can ever hope to efficiently handle.
Under these pressures—particularly the pressure arising from the fact that Merkel’s concept of ‘no upper ceiling to migration’ was bound to clash with material constraints eventually—Merkel then found herself thrust into a negotiation with Turkey. The European Union had attempted to bribe Turkey with 3 billion euros, but the Turks decided that it was not enough.
So Merkel went to Turkey and offered them a faster track toward EU accession and visa-free travel, in addition to the bribe that had been previously offered.
Predictably, Erdogan and Davutoglu immediately decided to retract their side of the pseudo-informal ‘agreement’ as soon as Merkel went home. They have clarified that they actually made no promises to stop the migrants within their territory from travelling into Europe, ultimately. In fact, they have no intention of doing anything to stop the migration wave itself either:
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that an agreed sum of 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in return for Turkey’s cooperation in stemming the flow of migrants in Europe would not be regarded as sufficient.
Speaking on Turkish television one day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Istanbul on Sunday, Davutoglu said that the money would come from the “IPA” fund - money already earmarked for Turkey as an EU membership candidate . He said that Turkey wanted additional cash.
The 3 billion euro IPA fund proposal is no longer on the table, as we have said we will not accept it,” Davutoglu said. “As for fresh resources, we’re talking about a 3 billion euro amount in the first stage. But we don’t want to fixate on this because the requirements may go up, and the assessment for this would need to be done annually.”
Tit-for-tat diplomacy
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday offered Turkey the prospect of support for faster progress on its bid to join the European Union as well as an accelerated path to visa-free travel for Turks. This followed the summit in Brussels last week where EU leaders had agreed on a migration “action plan” with Turkey, where the figure of 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) had been discussed.
Chancellor Merkel on Sunday had hailed as “very promising” progress on an EU-driven “action plan” after talks in Istanbul with Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both Turkish President Erdogan and Davutoglu, whose ruling AK Party faces a general election on November 1, appeared keen to avoid any impression of weakness in dealing with European nations. They said earlier the EU had only recently realised Turkey’s value in the crisis.
Davutoglu: Turkey ‘not a concentration camp’
Prime Minister Davutoglu caused further controversy on Monday, saying that his country was “not a concentration camp” and that it would not host migrants permanently to appease the EU.
“I said this to Merkel too. No one should expect Turkey to turn into a concentration camp where all the refugees stay in,” Davutoglu said.
The talks had however resulted in a “positive response” to the government’s request for visa liberalization, he said.
His comments came as the flow of people along the so-called “Balkan Route” into Europe via Turkey continued, with thousands of people streaming Monday into the Balkans, where tighter border controls forced people to sleep in freezing temperatures. More than 630,000 people have landed on Europe’s shores so far this year, most of them making risky sea crossings from Turkey to Greece.
ss/msh (Reuters, AFP)
All of those events were actually absolutely unnecessary from a straight power perspective. Why? Because, while Turkish politicians have a lot of bluster, and while they can deploy the threat of unleashing the migrants, the Turks were nevertheless negotiating from an extremely weak position.
Despite having had historical cultural connections to the regional groups to their west, south, south-east and east, Turkey has spent the past 20 years burning all of its bridges in all directions. In summary—and it is definitely a summary—Turkey’s position looks like this:
Westward, they’ve been unable to make much of an advancement toward European integration, and still have infamously bad relations with Greece over the issue of Cyprus and a variety of other issues.
To their south-east they are faced with an increasingly Kurdish population which is territorially coincident with the ancient land that they refer to as part of ‘Kurdistan’. By the year 2050, both Turks and Kurds will have gone through a population correction—a decline which must take place—but the asymmetric nature of that decline will be characterised by a change in the ratio of Turks and Kurds. The overall number of Kurds will have increased relative to the number of Turks, so that about 50% of the people in Turkey by then will be residing in homes where Kurdish is the first language. The geographic area where those Kurds are and will be living, is a place which also happens to potentially have a significant amount of oil play under it and comprises almost 40% of the territory of Turkey.
To their east, Turkey had been more or less ignoring Central Asia and letting it sit in squalor until China decided to start making economic inroads there which are only becoming more integrated, at which stage Turkey made the monumental mistake of funding Uigyur Islamic terrorists in Xinjiang province to destroy Chinese infrastructure. China immediately responded by threatening to fund and arm Kurdish Marxist-Leninist terrorists to erode the territorial integrity of the Turkish state. Since Turkey did not stop funding the Islamists in Xinjiang, China seems to have gone forward with its threat, as the new presence of Chinese weapons among the PKK arsenal would indicate. Evidence of such a presence would be that a year after the warning had been given, 1690 of the machineguns and 40 of the rocket launchers that Turkey had captured from the PKK were of Chinese origin. The Turks have also recently taken to impotently complaining about how sympathetic the western media is to the PKK. Overall, the net gain for Turkey in that area has been somewhere in the range of nil.
Turkey is not some shrewd player. It’s one of the most clownish and absurd players in the world at the moment, and although it has experienced some significant economic growth internally, its foreign policy is a complete shambles and it is nowhere near to being a serious world power.
Should we really believe that Merkel is so stupid that she could not find anything to use to twist the arms of the Turks? The Turks should never have been in a position to be the ones making any demands there.
Any European negotiator who wanted to really play the game the tough way could have given a variety of responses that could twist the arms of the Turks based on the above facts, such as:
“Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just don’t talk to you about EU accession ever again, until you remove the remnants of the Turkish Army from Cyprus?”
“Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we cancel all the NATO events that are on the calendar concerning Turkey?”
“Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we continue using the National Endowment for Democracy to assist your domestic political opponents so that they can erode your electoral powerbase and replace you with someone who will run Turkey in the way that we want?”
“Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just ignore you and hedge against you demographically on a 30 year time frame, cultivating links with Kurds in the eastern part of your country so that we can encourage them to defy Ankara later and block you from having political control over a large section of your domestic energy resource base?”
“Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just close the border between Turkey and the European Union, and build a giant fence surmounted by barbed wire and security cameras? The amount that it costs to take care of the migrants for a week is probably the same amount as it costs to build the fence.”
Those kind of responses from a European negotiator, would have been the correct signalling and would have likely produced a much more satisfactory response from Turkey.
Rather than doing anything like that, Merkel instead went in and sat down on a golden throne next to Erdogan, and followed the exact choreography that the architects of Erdogan’s election campaign wanted her to follow. She let Erdogan—a man who literally has been implicated in electoral fraud multiple times and is presiding over a ramshackle failure of a foreign policy—look strong, let him look competent, let him look like he was in charge, and gave him absolutely everything he wanted, absolutely for free.
No one is that absurdly fucking stupid by accident. Merkel had to have been doing that on purpose. That is the only reasonable conclusion that can be reached. It really is.
Furthermore, whose idea was it to send Merkel—a person who actually wanted the migrants to enter Europe in the first place—to have a negotiation with Turkey to try to keep the migrants out of Europe? I would love to know who was responsible for that absolutely stupid idea. Who on earth in their right mind would send Merkel to negotiate for the defence of Europe’s borders while knowing about all the pro-migration actions that she had engaged in prior to that?
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Wednesday, 14 October 2015 03:21.
Controversy ahead.
Summary:This interview was with Tomislav Sunic about the migration problem in Europe. Kumiko Oumae was hosting, standing in for Guessedworker, along with DanielS as co-host.
The issues which we covered were:
The idea that part of the reason for the migration wave is psychological rather than strictly structural.
Discussion on whether the words ‘migration’ or ‘crisis’ were really appropriate descriptions of what is happening.
Discussion of weaknesses of Christianity in the face of an enemy.
The relationship between countries in South Eastern Europe.
Cases of religion being used as a cultural-historical identification rather than as a belief system.
The influx of migrants and the terrorist threat posed by them to the European Union.
The advantages which the defenders have over the invaders, given the disparity in average IQ.
‘Better is worse’, and how a deteriorating security situation can be a catalyst for total structural change in the case where all else fails.
I think it was a fantastic interview, I was really honoured to have Tomislav Sunic on our show, and I hope to have him back again as soon as possible. He’s really one of the best ethno-nationalist speakers alive.
