Scene of the Watergate break-in. [Source: cnn.com]

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace on the threshold of impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Two years earlier, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s re-election committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.

Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident and then published a book, All the President’s Men, that established them as heroes for having uncovered the corruption in the Nixon administration, which supposedly helped to restore the rule of law to government.

Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting prompted establishment of a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the “Watergate Committee”), headed by Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), which garnered testimony from, among others, former White House Legal Counsel John Dean.

He testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up and tried to order the FBI to halt the investigation.

To this day, most history textbooks repeat the official story about Watergate in which Nixon and his staffers are the villains, and Woodward and Bernstein and the Senate Committee, are the heroes.

Nick Bryant’s book, The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars (Trine Day, 2023), turns official history on its head. It details how Watergate may have been set up by the CIA as part of a far-right coup that empowered neo-conservatives contemptuous of Nixon’s détente policies toward Russia and China.

Author of a previous study on a child-sex trafficking ring in Nebraska that implicated high-level politicians, Bryant’s book builds off Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984), and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

Besides the CIA, Bryant shows the pivotal role in Watergate played by John Dean, whose wife Maureen appears to have been part of a prostitution ring/CIA blackmail operation run out of DNC headquarters about which the CIA was trying to prevent exposure.

At the outset of his book, Bryant quotes Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, one of the so-called “plumbers” working for Nixon, who said that “it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a C.I.A. setup. We were just pawns.”

Two key CIA operatives—E. Howard Hunt and James McCord—were part of “the plumbers,” along with a number of CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba.

The working relationship of Hunt and McCord went back to the early 1960s when both men reportedly participated in a clandestine venture designed to undermine Cuba’s Castro government.^[1] McCord had also been a cog in the branch of the CIA that perpetrated domestic spying. Bryant characterizes him as “the impish ringmaster to a very bizarre circus [Watergate],” and “catalyst to trigger the avalanche that engulfed and then overwhelmed Nixon.”^[2]

According to Bryant, there were two purposes to the Watergate break-ins. The first was to plant a bug in the phone of Spencer Oliver, the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen, and his secretary, Ida “Maxie” Wells, who was running a call-girl ring headed by D.C. madam Heidi Rikan that implicated Democratic Party politicians and other Washington power brokers whom the CIA could blackmail.^[3]

The second purpose was to create a political scandal that would bring down Nixon whom the CIA hated because of his a) détente policies toward the Soviet Union and China; b) relatively liberal domestic policies; and c) transformation of foreign policy decision-making power away from the CIA in favor of the National Security Council (NSC).

According to Bryant, McCord set up the Watergate burglaries so that the burglars would be caught. Afterwards, McCord was incarcerated for a mere three months and 21 days while the other “plumbers” received longer sentences.

Bryant wrote that McCord “hated Nixon and Kissinger for their friendly posturing towards both the Soviet Union and China.”^[4]

According to Bryant, an indication that the Watergate arrests were premeditated was the arrival of D.C. police officer Carl Shoffler, “a frothing at the mouth right-winger” who dressed like a hippie but had a “history of aiding and abetting the C.I.A. in various operations.”^[5]

Inexplicably, Shoffler had volunteered to work a second shift the night of the Watergate break-in even though it was his birthday and his family had driven down from Pennsylvania to see him.

Shoffler told his former superior at the Army Security Agency that the arrests of the Watergate buglars were “the result of a tip” he received from a “McCord lackey” named Alfred Baldwin.

Shoffler reportedly told his former superior that “his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel” if his actual role in Watergate were exposed.^[6]

Another sign of a set-up was that McCord proceeded with the break-in plans even though tape they had placed on the door lock was removed, demonstrating that someone was on to the burglary and that McCord was willing to risk arrest.^[7]

FBI Director L. Patrick Gray surmised that Watergate was a CIA operation after the FBI uncovered irregularities in a Watergate burglar’s bank account—of five checks deposited in his bank account, four came from Mexico.^[8]

Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the dirty tricks against the Democrats were underwritten by a secret fund controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell; however, Mitchell, who served 19 months in prison for Watergate-related offenses, never in fact controlled a secret fund that was used to bankroll intelligence operations.^[9]

Mitchell, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman could not secure a fair trial, as Nixon was viewed by the Watergate Special Prosecution team and Judge John Sirica as “the anti-Christ,” and the objective of the trial was “to extract a pound of flesh,” according to Bryant.^[10]

After the Watergate scandal broke, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord tried to shake down the Nixon administration, which may have been part of a ploy to further entrap Nixon and get him to commit more crimes.^[11]

During his sentencing, McCord wrote a letter to the judge exonerating the CIA and stating that he feared retaliation for coming forward to “tell the truth” about Watergate. McCord tried to make it look like he was a whistleblower facing persecution, when he was covering up a CIA operation.^[12]

Bryant suggests that this CIA operation started with a treasonous espionage campaign carried out in conjunction with the Army Joint Chiefs of Staff after the Nixon administration was infiltrated by military and intelligence “assets.”

The key figures in this operation were a) Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Alabama whom Bryant describes as a “frothing at the mouth anticommunist stunned by Nixon’s affable comportment towards the Russians and Chinese”;^[13] and b) Charles E. Radford, a Navy yeoman who served as a stenographer in the Joint Chiefs liaison office to the NSC, who pilfered top-secret documents from the NSC.^[14]

When the authors of Silent Coup asked Radford about the primary objective of the Joint Chiefs espionage, Radford replied “bringing down Nixon” and “getting rid of [Henry] Kissinger [Nixon’s NSC adviser and Secretary of State].”^[15]

Radford received a helping hand from Alexander Haig, a military aide to Kissinger appointed as Nixon’s chief of staff in May 1973, who sold out Nixon by giving him bad advice during the Senate Watergate hearings.

Haig also appointed J. Fred Buzhardt, a former aide to Strom Thurmond (R-SC), as Nixon’s special counsel for Watergate who released transcripts of conversations between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman to various congressmen that made them look bad.

Bryant suggests that Haig and Buzhardt may have been responsible for the erasure of White House tapes that made Nixon look guilty of a cover-up in the Watergate break-ins.^[16]

Bob Woodward’s intimate ties to Haig—a key figure in the Watergate coup—went back to his stint working for Admiral Moorer, the chief of naval operations in 1969-70, when he was Haig’s briefer at the White House, which Woodward covered up.

As a follow-up to All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein wrote The Final Days about a commander-in-chief [Nixon] freefalling into an abyss of madness who had the potential to trigger nuclear Armageddon—until super-hero Alexander Haig intervened and saved humanity.^[17]

Bryant quotes one of Woodward’s Yale history professors who said that Woodward had conservative political views that he would characterize as “crypto fascist.”^[18]

As a signal for his Watergate informant—FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat—Woodward claimed that he placed a red flag on his apartment’s sixth-floor balcony, and that the two would meet at 2:00 a.m. in an underground garage.

However, Felt lived in Fairfax, Virginia, some distance from Washington, D.C., and was forced out of the FBI well before Woodward said the meetings took place. Woodward’s balcony further was only visible from an alley where Felt would have been detected if he had gone there.^[19]

Felt was also said to have sent cryptic messages to Woodward in his daily copy of The New York Times; however, The New York Times was not delivered to Woodward’s apartment door, according to Bryant, but rather a stack of newspapers was left in the reception area—meaning that Felt’s message could have been read by other subscribers in the building and would not likely have been seen by Woodward.^[20]

Bryant suggests that Woodward was being instructed what to write by the CEO of the Robert Mullen Company, a PR firm and CIA front for which E. Howard Hunt worked.^[21]

The Watergate Committee’s senior Republican, Howard Baker, had a hunch that Woodward was affiliated with the CIA, and he directed one of the Watergate Committee’s lawyers to inquire about the association, though the inquiry was rebuffed by the CIA.^[22]

Woodward’s employer, The Washington Post, which published his Watergate scoops, had a close relationship with the CIA that was solidified during the period when Ben Bradlee was the executive editor (1965-1991). According to Bryant, Bradlee deployed every fabrication and resource at his disposal to ensure that his CIA affiliation was not exposed. Like his two ace reporters, Bradlee was “an unabashed liar.”^[23]

Regarding Woodward and Bernstein, Bryant wrote that they are “not the honorable knights for truth and justice depicted by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film All the President’s Men [1976 award-winning film]. Indeed their lives and their Watergate reporting are, unfortunately, a sprawling net of lies that are moored to the monolithic lie of Deep Throat.”^[24]

Another CIA connection to Watergate lies with Alexander Butterfield, a former aide to H.R. Haldeman, who coughed up to the Watergate Committee the secret taping system, which revealed Nixon’s involvement in efforts to cover up the Watergate break-ins and other activities. Butterfield had been an Air Force Colonel who served as the principal liaison between the military and CIA in Australia.^[25]

Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was yet another figure in the Watergate saga with covert CIA connections.

A former war crimes prosecutor in Germany after World War II who helped Lyndon B. Johnson escape voter fraud charges, Jaworski served as attorney and director of the Texas-based M.D. Anderson Foundation which funded medical research and covertly acted as a CIA conduit to disburse funds in the 1960s, including to the National Students Association.^[26]

Bryant writes that Nixon was “utterly blind to the fact that Haig would use Jaworski to raze his administration.”^[27]

The silent coup of 1974, abetted by Haig, Woodward, Jaworski, Butterfield, McCord and others, delivered the U.S. presidency to Vice President Gerald Ford, who appointed Haig as his Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney as his Deputy Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense.^[28]

Bryant wrote that “Bob Woodward and The Washington Post had enabled the neocons to have their first considerable taste of power. The hawks had triumphed over Nixon’s détente with the Soviets and China.”^[29

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/08/09/would-liberals-have-cheered-nixons-resignation-fifty-years-ago-if-they-knew-the-cia-was-behind-it/

Image source.

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

After the recent Microsoft Windows failed update by CrowdStrike that crippled computers worldwide, cyber security experts have been in high demand for journalists worldwide to report on just how serious and how likely it is that a cyber attack could cripple our society.

For those criminal elements who earn their living from cyber attacks and ransoms, this must be cyber heaven for them, because the corporate media is doing their jobs for them, for free!

The Daily Mail is a recent example, where they have almost literally published a blueprint on how to destroy America through a cyber attack.

EXCLUSIVE: How a cybersecurity attack would cripple America – after catastrophic Crowdsource glitch

Cybercriminals could cripple the US by targeting just 10 critical components in an electrical network, experts have revealed.

The attack would begin with ‘a series of cascading failures,’ first shutting down essential service providers, like 911 call centers and healthcare providers, and then spreading to critical infrastructure.

Americans would lose access to energy, water, financial services, public transportation and cell phone networks, resulting in severe ramifications.

Morgan Wright, a former senior advisor in antiterrorism at the US State Department, told DailyMail.com that ‘civil unrest’ and a ‘breakdown in the social order’ would soon follow.

The world had a taste of what a cyberattack could do when a flawed update was issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last month, causing 8.5 million Windows computers to malfunction.

The misstep impacted airlines, banks, supermarkets, TV stations, and many other industries worldwide.

Microsoft experienced a second outage on Tuesday, which impacted many of its services and companies that use its tech for about 10 hours.

The tech giant later admitted that its services were taken down by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that was ‘amplified’ by an error in the company’s cyber defenses.

Eric O’Neill, a former FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence operative, told DailyMail.com that foreign spies have spent over a decade looking for security holes in infrastructure to leverage for conducting catastrophic cyber attacks.

They have already found ways to disrupt America’s fuel, power, water, communications, and education systems as they look to exploit our reliance on these essential resources, he continued.

An attack of this kind would have dire consequences for US citizens, such as even killing Americans on their soil, warned Nicholas Reese, a cyber expert and adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.

He explained that a cyberattack on 911 call centers would deprive patients of urgent medical care.

Meanwhile, hospitals would see a disruption in intensive care units and operating rooms, causing medical equipment to falter and patient deaths. (Full article.)

Since similar warnings were also reported in Congress last week, this information is obviously not seen as a threat to national security, as it is obviously common knowledge.

In fact, just type in “cyber attack” into your favorite news search, and you will see that cyber attacks are already a daily occurrence, and gaining in frequency.

Here are a few examples just within the past couple of days:

McLaren confirms cyberattack across its 13 Michigan hospitals, physician network

For the second time in a year, cybercriminals have attacked McLaren Health Care’s technology platforms, the Grand Blanc-based health system said Wednesday afternoon, confirming the cause of a disruption earlier this week to all 13 of its Michigan hospitals, surgery, infusion and imaging centers along with its network of 113,000 medical providers throughout Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.

“McLaren Health Care can now confirm the disruption … was the result of a criminal cyber attack,” said a statement sent to the Free Press. “Our information technology team continues to work with external cyber security experts to analyze the nature of the attack and mitigate the impacts of the threat actors. At this time, we have not determined if any patient or employee data was compromised.” (Full article.)

Hacker group responsible for Columbus cyberattack claims 45% of data is published; ransom deadline extended

Mayor Ginther’s office said that as of 4 p.m. Wednesday, they have no evidence that any of the city’s data has been published.

The hacker group holding the city’s data for ransom now claims they’ve published about 45% of it and is threatening to release more if the city doesn’t pay the ransom by Thursday morning. However, Mayor Andrew Ginther’s office says there is no evidence that data has been published.

Hackers claim to have uploaded access to surveillance video, building information and personal information of employees on the dark web. (Full article.)

North Miami City Hall remains closed following possible cyber attack

The city of North Miami remains closed Tuesday as officials deal with a possible cyber breach.

A notice now appears on the city’s website alerting visitors to the “possible breach affecting its network system.”

Local 10 News has learned their IT department was notified of the breach on Sunday.

Residents are growing more frustrated as city business is unable to be conducted. (Full article.)

Hackers Allegedly Steal Billions of Personal Records From Fla. Security Firm

The stolen data includes Social Security numbers and physical addresses, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against National Public Data, which performs background checks.

A little-known company in Florida allegedly lost records on 2.9 billion individuals to hackers, according to a class-action lawsuit.

National Public Data specializes in background checks and fraud prevention. But the data it collects appears to have ended up in the hands of a hacking group called “USDoD.” It began selling access to the stolen data in April, claiming to have info on users in the US, UK, and Canada.

It has since been hit with a class-action lawsuit, Bloomberg Law reports. California resident Christopher Hoffman filed after his identity protection provider notified him that his personal data had been compromised in the breach.

The data leak might be one of the largest of all time, although the full scale of the incident remains unconfirmed. National Public Data didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in June, malware collection site VX Underground was able to review the stolen data, which was originally on sale for $3.5 million. (Full article.)

[…]

Via https://vaccineimpact.com/2024/daily-mail-shows-how-easy-it-is-to-cripple-america-via-a-cyber-attack-almost-ensuring-that-it-will-happen/

By Richard Abelson

Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Hindus continued in  Bangladesh after what many observers are calling a US-sponsored “color revolution”, apparently instigated by Former US Ambassador Peter Haas and Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu. India is evacuating its citizens from Bangladesh as Muslim death squads target Hindus and even their former Communist allies.

India began evacuating non-essential diplomatic personnel from Dhaka, flying 400 people from Dhaka to New Delhi on Wednesday August 7, 2024 on special flights.

Hindu houses and businesses were attacked and looted by mobs in at least 27 districts yesterday, The Daily Star reported. Close to 25 people have been killed and over 150 hospitalized in the fire at the Zabeer International Hotel, which was set on fire by protestors on Monday.

In a video, Islamists can be seen encircling a dead victim lying on the ground, checking the victim’s private parts for circumcision. “Shouting ‘Hindu, Hindu’ over the corpse, the crowd hovering over the dead body laughs, realizing that the man is a Hindu because he is not circumcised,“ OP India reported.

The home of Hindu music star Rahul Ananda, a 140-year-old house in Dhaka, was looted and set on fire by an Islamic mob Monday, destroying his collection of 3,000 handmade musical instruments.

“They’re Hindus, kill them all”, Muslim youths said as they attacked a family of 4 Hindus in in Rajkot district.

Muslim radicals Jamaat-e-Islami turned on their former allies of the Communist Party of Bangladesh, killing and mutilating their leaders.

[…]

Via https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/this-is-why-they-hate-us-biden-color/

By Saber Ammar

In recent months, discussions about green hydrogen in Tunisia have dominated the media, particularly concerning the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed on May 28, 2024,between TotalEnergies (a French multinational integrated energy and petroleum company), Eren Groupe (a French company specializing in renewable energy and resource efficiency), Verbund (Austria’s leading electricity company), and the Tunisian government. This MoU aims to explore the implementation of a large green hydrogen project named “H2 Notos.” The project is intended for export to Central Europe via the “SoutH2 Corridor” pipelines, which run from the Northern African coast in Tunisia through Italy, Austria, and Germany; it aims to produce 200,000 tons of green hydrogen annually during its initial phase, with the potential to scale up production to one million tons per year in South Tunisia. This infrastructure enables the supply of low-cost renewable hydrogen produced in the South to key European demand clusters and is expected to be fully operational as early as 2030.

Shortly thereafter, on May 31, 2024, another MoU was signed with the Saudi company ACWA. This agreement plans to produce 600,000 tons of green hydrogen annually in three phases, also for export to Europe. Tunisia is now experiencing a surge of interest in hydrogen. On July 29, 2024, Industry, Mines, and Energy Minister Fatma Thabet Chiboub signed six new MoUs with various foreign corporations from Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany. It’s as if the country is being swept up by a hydrogen fever.

Tunisia aims to position itself as a hub for green hydrogen production, with ambitions to export six million tons annually by 2050, as outlined in the Tunisian Hydrogen Strategy. Despite its renewable-energy potential, Tunisia currently faces a significant energy deficit, which stood at approximately 50 percent in 2022. Tunisian Secretary of State for Energy Transition Wael Chouchane has emphasized the potential of green hydrogen to address the country’s energy deficit and generate substantial employment opportunities.

However, rather than prioritizing domestic renewable-energy investments to generate green electricity to close this gap, the government plans to use this electricity to produce green hydrogen for export to the EU. This approach, while central to Tunisia’s energy transition strategy, mirrors similar initiatives in other African nations, such as Namibia, South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco.

Critics argue that the EU’s push toward a green hydrogen economy, touted as mutually beneficial for both the EU and exporting countries from the Global South, neglects several critical issues. These include the potential negative impacts on water resources, energy access, as well as concerns over land grabbing and displacement. Moreover, the economic gains for Southern countries may be limited, as they continue to import high-added-value technologies while exporting raw materials with lower-added value, reinforcing unequal trade relationships.

Despite EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’s assertion in her speech on June 16, 2022, that “the idea of spheres of influence are ghosts of the last century,” it appears that Africans are still operating within the sphere of the EU. It is clear that the EU, especially Germany, is pushing for a green hydrogen economy where they dominate the value chains and technologies while externalizing the socio-environmental costs to the peripheries (i.e., the Global South). This can be seen as a new form of energy imperialism, where European countries, or more broadly, the imperial cores, aim to use the continent as a battery for their needs.

There is nothing new here; it strongly echoes the colonial past. EU countries continue to have an essential need to extract resources and wealth from their peripheries, especially from Africa. The raw materials these regions possess, combined with an undervalued and disciplined labor force, continue to sustain the so-called developed world while causing a massive flow of wealth and resources from Africa to Europe. This pattern of exploitation and economic constraint is not new and strongly resonates with the arguments made by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. In this book, Rodney explains how European colonialism systematically extracted wealth from Africa and imposed structures that hindered the continent’s capacity for self-sustained development. The ongoing extraction of resources under the guise of projects like the green hydrogen initiative in Tunisia risks perpetuating this cycle of dependency and exploitation, undermining local energy sovereignty and development.

The green hydrogen pipedream was introduced to Tunisia by Germany following the signing of a MoU in December 2020. During the last four years, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) funded and shaped the national hydrogen strategy. By mid-2024, the first MoU for the production and export of green hydrogen by the private companies mentioned above was signed.

However these foreign-dicated neocolonial green hydrogen projects are not passively accepted by Tunisians but are questioned and scrutinized. There is even popular resistance. On April 24, coinciding with World Anti-Colonialism Day, a small protest took place in front of the GIZ Energy Cluster in Tunis. The protest was organized by a coalition of organizations, including the Stop Pollution Movement, trade unions, student unions, political parties, and pro-Palestine activists. These activists joined the protest as they wanted to highlight that Germany not only is pursuing neocolonial projects in Tunisia but is also complicit in and actively supporting the genocide in Gaza by being the largest European supplier of weapons to Israel, providing 30 percent of Israel’s weapons between 2019 and 2023.

During the protest, one of the main demands focused on blocking and stopping the planned water and land-intensive green hydrogen projects and denouncing the German organization’s control and influence over the Tunisian energy agenda. This explains the target and place of the protest in front of the GIZ Energy Cluster, rather than the nearby Ministry of  Industry, Mines, and Energy. Protestors believe that GIZ is the main decision-maker when it comes to renewable energies and green hydrogen.

The protestors called for energy sovereignty that is people-centric and a just energy transition that serves the country’s needs first.

According to the Tunisian national hydrogen strategy supported by GIZ, the plan is to use 248 million cubic meters of desalinated water by 2050, which equals the consumption of five million Tunisian citizens—approximately half the current population in a country considered one of the most water-scarce in the world. The planned green hydrogen production in Tunisia is also land-intensive, requiring 500,000 hectares (twice the area of Greater Tunis) to produce the renewable energy necessary for hydrogen production that will be exported. This land, referred to as the “hydrogen valley,” is located in the southern part of Tunisia, a region already suffering from severe water scarcity and some land conflicts.

The southern region is known for its communal land belonging to Tunisian tribes and locals who use it for pastoralism and small-scale farming. The hydrogen strategy fails to address how this land will be acquired, raising concerns about land grabbing. An article by the Working Group for Energy Democracy discusses this particular issue occurring in South Tunisia by profit-driven energy corporations, highlighting the disconnect between the strategy’s goals and the needs of local communities. Besides, it seems absurd that a country that imports its own food uses its land and water for hydrogen production to serve another country’s energy needs. After the signing of the two MoUs mentioned above, several social movements, including the Stop Pollution Movement and the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights, published statements. They consider green hydrogen production and export to be another mechanism of plunder that primarily serves the EU’s energy needs.

It is worth mentioning that the Tunisian parliament has been tasked to discuss a new draft law to encourage green hydrogen. However, this draft law primarily offers foreign investors harmful tax incentives and advantages. This means there is a pressing need to engage with parliamentarians on this issue as well. When there is resistance, there is hope. A just transition is possible for Tunisia and the entire African continent.

[…]

Via https://braveneweurope.com/saber-ammar-resisting-the-new-green-colonialism

Episode 10 Mongol Queens and the Contest for Empire

The Mongol Empire

Dr Craig Benjamin (2020)

Film Review

Following Ogedei’s death in 1241, all Mongol military commanders were expected to withdraw from their campaigns in Eastern Europe and China to attend the kuritai to appoint his successor. As those from the western front passed through the Venetian and Genoese colonies on the Black Sea, they exchanged their prisoners (who the Venetians and Genoese sold into slavery) for commercial goods. Many prisoners were sold as slave-soldiers (Mamaluks) to the Sultan who ruled Egypt.

According to Benjamin, Ogedei’s major achievements were

• establishing an empire-wide communication system
• establishing a magnificent capitol that became a major trade, cultural and religious center for Muslim, Buddhists, Daoists and Christians
• reestablishing the Silk Road linking Asia to Europe, enabling the transmission of new knowledge (most importantly of gunpowder, printing and paper) from China to Europe

Because the alcoholic Ogedei was often too drunk to conduct state affairs, he gave his wife Touragine immense administrative authority. Other Mongol military commanders also left their wives in charge of their minqans while they were away at battle. This meant, in effect, that women ruled the largest empire in history for approximately 10 years during the Khwarazmian campaign.

Following Ogedei’s death, Touragene became regent pending a new kuritai. She promptly dismissed the Persian administrators responsible for Ogedei’s new tax system, reappropriating tax revenues to support her campaign (via bribes) for her son Kuyuk to become Great Khan

The kuritai was delayed for five years because Batu, who opposed Kuyuk’s election as Great Khan, refused to return from the Kipchak Steppes. Prior to his death, Ogedei stripped his oldest son Kuyuk of his rank and exiled him to China for insulting his cousin Batu’s parentage.*

Batu eventually sent his two sons in his place, and in 1246 the kuritai elected Kuyuk the third Great Khan. Following the latter’s sudden death in 1248, his chief wife Oghue Qaimesh became regent.

Equally powerful was Chinggis Khan’s daughter-in-law Sorkaktani, who became the wife of Chinggis Khan’s youngest son Tolui when he was 13. Following Tolui’s death, Chinggis Khan gave her an estate in Zehngdinng in the former Jin empire. Her son would become Qubilai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty. She helped the former Jim empire recover from the ravages of war by setting up a farming estate system, reforming the tax system and creating numerous commercial ventures.

*His father Jochi, conceived his mother’s kidnapping, was only a stepson of Chinggis Khan.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/12373094/12373114

Waves of uprisings are spreading across the African continent and the masses are demanding freedom from imperialist powers and the comprador leaders that enable their ongoing exploitation. There are lessons to be learned from the past and current attempts at creating a unified Pan-African force that can free the continent from the clutches of empire.

Ferdinand Ibebuchi

David Miller – Via Vanessa Beeley Telegram

1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia movement established by that state. When his organisation, the English Defence League, was incorporated in 2011, two years after its inception, it was named the English & Jewish Defence League. The Jewish Defence League, a Zionist terrorist organisation, has been a key part of violent Islamophobic street thuggery in the UK over the past decade.

2. Yaxley-Lennon is one of the most high-profile actors in the State of Israel’s Online Influencers Programme in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm. He and others, like Oli London, Noa Tishby, Hen Mazzig, Arsen Ostrovsky and Emily Schrader (and many others) are paid to distribute Zionist propaganda, of which pushing back against pro-Palestine protests and sowing Islamophobia are two important and interlinked aims.

3. The recent Islamophobic riots in the UK should be seen as the latest phase of the State of Israel’s war on British Muslims, who it sees as originating the protest movement in the UK. These riots are designed to punish Muslims for their anti-Zionist sentiment after various other methods to suppress opposition to Zionism by the State of Israel have been thwarted. The State of Israel’s attempts to use its assets and operatives in the British political and media class — such as Suella Braverman and Michael Gove — to thwart pro-Palestinian protests have failed. Zionist counter-protests have failed to mobilise significant numbers. Sporadic Zionist thuggery and the use of other assets — such as Iranian secularist extremists — have also failed to intimidate Muslims. So now the State of Israel is weaponising its cannon fodder on the white nationalist far-right, who have greater numbers than either Zionist street thugs or Iranian monarchists and secularist extremists.

4. Finally, there are also questions about which actor authored the idea that Muslims were responsible for the ostensible triggers for these events. MI6 and its assets (eg Paul Mason) are desperately trying to pretend this was a Russian disinfo op. But the original stories did not come from Russia. Where did they come from?