Benazir Bhutto

Episode 33 The New Pakistan

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

Zfikar Ali Bhutto

Following the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the populist socialist Zfikar Ali Butto became its first civilian martial law administrator after setting aside General Yahya Kahn (disgraced after losing one third of his army in Bangladesh – see East and West Pakistan Following Partition from India. Butto would set up his own paramilitary Federal Security Force to help keep the Army in check.

Calling his program Islamic Socialism, he nationalized numerous industries, utilities and hospitals and broke up large landed estates (except for his own family estates), clamped down on burgeoning trade unions and strengthened Pakistan’s alliance with Maoist China. He also launched Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons program.

After forming the Pakistan People’s Party, he organized Pakistan’s second national election in 1977. The PPP’s phenomenal electoral success (95% of the legislative seats) led to accusations of electoral fraud (including assassination of Bhutto’s opponents) and another military coup. The coup leader General Zia Mahajir had Bhutto arrested, tried for murder and other crimes and ultimately executed.

The Regime of General Zia Mahajir

The 1979 the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan significantly empowered Mahajir’s regime after the CIA involved him in recruiting the Muslim freedom fighters for the Mujhahadeen,* routing arms and supply shipments to the freedom fighters and starting Madrasa (strict Wahabi Islamic schools) to train future Islamic terrorist.**

Zia’s regime is also known for instituting a federal Shariat Court with the power to overrule un-Islamic laws and court rulings and for creating Islamic business banks following Islamic anti-usury principles.***

In 1979, Zia also adopted the Hudood Ordinances, establishing Sharia punishments, such as whipping, stoning for adultery and amputation of the right hand.

The Rise of Benazir Bhutto

Zfikar Ali Butto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto (who had been educated at Radcliffe and Oxford) was imprisoned along with her father prior her to her 1984 release to receive medical treatment in Britain.

After working at a distance for two years to revive the Pakistan Peoples Party, in 1986 she returned to Pakistan and was greeted by massive crowds wherever she went. In 1988 General Zia’s death in a suspicious plane crash led to a power vacuum, leading to Benazir’s election as prime minister later that year.

The Rise and Overthrow of Nawaz Shariff

In 1990, Pakistan president Ghulam Ishaq Khan invoked the 8th amendment removing her from office. Nawaz Shariff would replace her as prime minister until he himself was removed from office (via the 8th amendment) for incompetence and corruption. See  Hidden History of the Coup Against Imran Khan.

Starting in 1993, Ghulam Ishaq Khan ran the country as president for four years, resigning favor o Sharrif in 1993. In 1999, Sharif was overthrown in a military coup led by army commander General Pervez Musharraf. In 2000, the latter had Sharrif tried on charges of murder, hijacking and terrorism (for refusing to allow Musharraf’s plane to land). Sentenced to life imprisonment, Sharif’s sentence was commuted after he agreed to leave Pakistan (for Saudi Arabia) for 10 years.

Musharraf’s Military Coup

In 1999, Musharraf launched his own military coup, receiving major US support after 9-11, as Pakistan once again became a major conduit for delivering arms and supplies to US troops in Afghanistan. In 2007 Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspend the constitution. After head Supreme Court justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry proclaimed Musharraf’s actions illegal, the military leader alternatively suspended, restored and suspended him, resulting in massive lawyer protests across Pakistan.

Asif Ali Zadari and The Return of Navaz Shariff

At great risk to herself, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan the same year. Following multiple assassination attempts, was finally killed in December 2007. A wave a sympathy following her murder led to Musharraf’s impeachment and the election of her husband Asif Ali Zardari as president in 2008. After the Supreme Court ordered Zardari prosecuted, Shariff was given leave to stand for office and was re-elected prime minister in 2013.

*Many of the CIA-recruited Mujahadeen were Pakhtun Afghans who fled war-torn Afganistan for refugee camps in Pakistan.

**Employing textbooks printed in Pashto (with CIA funding) at University of Nebraska. See https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768089 and Afghan Freedom Fighter Cherish Old American Textbooks

***When an Islamic bank grants a loan, they acquire shares in the business rather than charging interest. LIkewise instead of interest, bank depositors receive shares in the bank. Islamic banking was never universally adopted in Pakistan.

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

, https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/366254/366235

Dr Mercola

Story at-a-glance

Offguardian

Eris – the most recent “Covid variant” – is supposedly causing spikes in cases all over the world. The story goes that England, Ireland and US are all being hit hard, it’s reached Australia too.

In yet another blow to the “BRICS will save us” crowd, India and China are playing along.

“Scientists” are even clamoring for the return of masks.

We’ve already been over everything you need to know about “Eris” here. Long story short, “Covid” is just another made up name for the flu, and the “variants” are coats of paint they slap on the narrative to try and keep it looking fresh.

In that same article I theorised Eris’ existence was a need to keep Covid alive, and that is part of it…but I also missed something obvious: The next round of Covid “vaccines” hits the shelves next month.

For those who have lost count, I think we’re up to six or seven shots now.

This “updated vaccine” is nothing to do with Eris, of course, as much as the language in the headlines implies it’s been “adapted” for the latest variant, it hasn’t. It was in the works before Eris was even said to exist.

Moderna had the brass neck to claim that they did a “trial” showing their updated vaccine protects against Eris. Considering Eris first hit the headlines just a few weeks ago it looks like Moderna may have broken their own record in terms of speedy “trials”.

It’s just the same old slop it always was.

Hell, let’s be honest, it could be water. It could be ANYTHING.

The content of the syringe was never the important part. After all, what you were being injected with wasn’t the point, the point was that you got injected because they told you to.

It was about forcing obedience, setting the vaccine mandate precedent and seeing how effectively people could be gaslit into taking a shot that they’d already been told they don’t need and doesn’t work.

Well, that and governments handing over VAST amounts of cash to pharmaceutical companies, obviously.

But they already have the money, and most people (allegedly) took the vaccine…so why are they still going?

You have to appreciate the huge amount of effort that went into hypnotizing millions – maybe billions – of people into acting against their own best interests, it’s a spell that’s easier to maintain than restart. If they start letting people forget, then soon they’ll have to begin the ritual all over again.

And the magic is already wearing off.

Consider that, allegedly, over 200 million Americans took the first dose in 2021, and that by the time boosters were coming out in the fall of 2022 it was down to 50 million. That’s a 75% drop-off in only a year.

The power is slipping away, and as they scramble to get it back you can probably expect “Eris” to get a lot worse.

[…]

Via https://off-guardian.org/2023/08/18/is-this-the-real-reason-eris-cases-are-spiking/

Gary D Barnett

LewRockwell.com

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

H.L. Mencken

Throughout our history, and today, little, if any defense of this country or its people, has been necessary or warranted. The true enemy of the people of America is, and has always been, its own government. The real enemies are most all the politicians, regardless of party, the courts, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the IRS, the entire military industrial complex, and in general, the federal and state police forces. In other words, all the ruling class and it pawns in government, its enforcers, and all their institutions and bureaucracies, are the real threat to this populace and its natural freedoms. The ludicrous notion of national defense, and that government forces actually “defend the country,” is an outright lie; propagandized by the State and its mouthpieces in media, simply as a way to gain great power in order to own and control society.

Many will take offence to these statements, mostly due to the fact that since birth, they have been inundated and indoctrinated by false ‘authority’ figures, to believe that they cannot survive and prosper without restrictive laws and rule, and worthless government schooling, all kept in check by severe coercive State prosecution. They are taught (schooled) to abandon their individuality in favor of the so-called ‘greater good’ of a collective society, to depend on and trust others in power to protect and sustain them and their families throughout their lives. This breeds only ignorance and passivity in the face of State terror. Independence, a supposed hallmark of this nation-state and its residents, is literally vilified, and even prohibited in many instances, causing personal sovereignty to be discarded in the name of unified slavery.

We live in a country that has warred aggressively against fictitious enemies, meaning without cause or necessity, more than any other country on earth. It is stated, and supported, that the United States has been at war for at least 93% of its entire existence. I firmly believe this number to be much higher, and with proper consideration, it is likely closer to 100%. If one is to determine the actual damage done, the actual harm due to direct war, proxy war, what is insanely considered ‘collateral damage,’ what is the horrid long term cost to human life in the aftermath of this terror, the total number of causalities, including the dead, would be tens if not hundreds of millions of innocent people. But what is sold to the wrongly named ‘public, is that this country is and has been the savior of ‘democracy,’ a completely evil and failed ideology, which is a gross lie beyond the imagination of any sane and thinking human being.

Yes, the truth hurts, but without acceptance of truth, what is left is a deceitful lie; a manufactured myth so atrocious as to have caused an entire nation’s abhorrent and hostile policies to be supported by the masses to such an extent, as to have caused the most broad-based, aggressive, and egregious destruction of humanity in history. This should be the epitaph upon the death of this empire.

At this time in our lives, aggressive war by this government and all who support its heinous deeds, has graduated from its main objective of slaughtering innocent men, women, and children, in addition to the other devastation, in other countries most everywhere on earth, to include the entirety of this country’s population as well. The major war currently is against all of us who live and work in the U.S. by those who continue to claim to be our protectors. This contradiction is absurd, but is still little understood by the average American, as can be evidenced by the terroristic treatment inflicted, and with little if any resistance, on this society these past few years.

At a time when this country and the world are steeped in madness and hate, more and more atrocities continue to take place, with almost zero empathy evident by the political class. The last evil ‘ruler,’ just one among all, ‘chosen’ by the ‘people,’ was Biden, and this was his response to the State’s complicit murder of those in Lahaina just recently, after a very suspicious and devastating fire had destroyed an entire town and its residents. He had the audacity to offer these poor people who lost everything, including many family members, a one-time $700 payment per household. This was in the midst of giving over $200 million more to Ukraine’s political criminals recently, with plans to give many more billions; this after more than $113 billion has already been paid to enrich the newly rich politicians in Ukraine. (Apparently, blackmail garners payment more than actual need of Americans) This alone should be enough for everyone in this country to grasp how little this government cares about its own, and how worthless all in the governing system have become. To depend on, or trust this scum to defend you from harm, is asinine beyond explanation.

Who will defend you from harm? Who will defend you from foreign invasion, although that has never once happened in this country’s history, not even including the pre-planned setup called the Pearl Harbor attack? Who will defend you from hyper-inflation and the resulting extreme prices for goods? Who will defend you from mass censorship and constant surveillance? Who will defend you from food shortages, energy shutdowns, and extensive restrictions on all transactions and travel? Who will defend your children from the consuming perversion being forced on them at every opportunity with this government’s blessing? Who will defend you from aggression and tyranny? Who will defend you from yourself?

It will never be the evil State that defends you, nor will it be its ‘national defense systems,’ its enforcers in the military and police, the politicians, the banking cartels, the large corporate monsters, or any government at any level. There is only one legitimate defense, and that is self-defense. Only you, each of you, has the ability and desire to defend himself. No other and no State entity can or will ever be your savior.  Until that is accepted, expect total serfdom to become your voluntarily accepted way of life.

Much more tyranny is coming. Lockdowns, fake ‘viruses,’ bioweapons, threats and totalitarian measures based on bogus ‘climate change, central bank digital currency, social credit restrictions, more inflation, destruction of money, health mandates, curfews, travel shutdowns, food shortages, transhuman promotion, among many other atrocities, including perpetual war.

National defense is an outright lie, and can never protect you, it can only harm you. There is but one enemy, and that enemy is the State! There is but one defense against this demon called government, and that is when individuals, or individuals working together en masse, abolish all rule. The responsibility for you is you, and any dependence on government whatsoever can only lead to despair, hopelessness, disaster, and enslavement. Defend yourself from this evil State, and break the chains that bind you.

[…]

Via https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/08/gary-d-barnett/the-only-national-defense-needed-in-this-country-is-defense-against-the-real-enemy-the-ruling-class-and-the-u-s-government/

Sputnik Global

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office tried to “silence” scientists who called into question the effectiveness of the ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) policy promoted by the head of the city, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.

Shirley Rodrigues, the London Mayor’s deputy for environment and energy, told in emails to Imperial College London professor Frank Kelly that she was “really disappointed” by scientists publishing results that cast doubt on the effectiveness of Ulez, the newspaper reported, adding that the corresponding complaint was sent in November 2021.

In particular, Rodrigues said that she was “deeply concerned” about the damage done to the credibility of the Mayor’s office and Ulez. In response, Kelly promised to write a Ulez-friendly report, the report added.

The report stated that since 2021, Kelly’s research group has received over 800,000 pounds ($1.018 million) from the mayor’s office. However, the publication by scientists led to a cooling in their relations with the London city hall. This, in turn, caused the reluctance of representatives of the scientific community to write any new materials about Ulez, the newspaper noted.

The Ulez initiative was first announced by then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson in 2015. Later, Khan launched an initiative that included, among other things, the installation of special traffic signs and cameras. Since 2020, the London authorities have had to spend over 850,000 pounds to rebuild infrastructure for the initiative, which has been repeatedly damaged by vandals.

[…]

Via https://sputnikglobe.com/20230820/london-city-hall-tries-to-put-pressure-on-scientists-who-doubted-climate-policy—report-1112734212.html

Episode 32 West and East Pakistan

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

As of 2016 (when this lecture was recorded), Pakistan had experienced only one democratic transition between democratically elected governments.

In August 1947 when India and Pakistan declared independence, Pakistan’s first governor general (Muslim League Mohammad spokesperson Ali Jinnah) envisioned Pakistan as a secular state with religious freedom. Owing to his death from tuberculosis a year later, he was unsuccessful in fully implementing this vision. At present, Pakistan is officially a Sunni Islamic state. Its current federal Shariat court has the power to override any law that conflict with its interpretation of Islamic law.

Pakistan’s Main Provinces

• Punjab – had the largest population and was also Pakistan’s main agricultural area.
• Sindh – somewhat less important agriculturally, Sindh was dominated by the majority Urdu-speaking Muhajir community who moved from India to Sindh during partition. There they assumed ownership of wealthy Hindu lands following their expulsion during partition.  Their community became the country’s first political and military hub. Its largest city Karachi became Pakistan’s first capitol.
• Bengal – there were were tensions between West and East Pakistan (aka Bengal province),* from the outset, especially after Jinnah declared Urdu (instead of their native Bengali) as the official language of East Pakistan.
• Balochistan – the largest region geographically with the richest mineral resources, including natural gas. It’s majority Baloch population has been in conflict with the Pakistani government for more than seven decades, in part because they receive no financial compensation for their rich resources and in part because Balochs in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan have been fighting for seven decades (with major support from the CIA*** and British and Indian intelligence) for their own autonomous region.
• Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – Pashtun speaking Pakhtuns straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are also seeking their own independent state. Historically FATA is outside Pakistani government control and govern themselves via Sharia law.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – also self governing under Sharia law. According to Fisher, the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS all have a major presence there.
• Kashmir – currently disputed. Although Pakistan only controls one-third of Kashmir (Azad Kashmir), they claim the entire province owing to its large majority of Muslim residents.

Pakistan’s Heads of State

There were no direct national elections in Pakistan until 1958. The members of Pakistan’s first constituent assembly were originally elected to the Constituent Assembly of Undivided India and retained their posts following partition. Its members elected Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan’s first prime minister, while George VI appointed Jinnah Pakistan’s first governor general.** As the constitution had yet to be written, Khan proclaimed Pakistan a Muslim society that protected minority religions. He was assassinated in 1951.

Following Khan’s assassination, Pakistan’s third governor general (Jinnah died of TB in 1948) Gulam Muhammad dismissed its Constituent Assembly and appointed himself Khan’s successor.

In 1955, Muhammad was forced out by Iskandar Ali Mirza, a retired general, who was subsequently appointed governor general by Elizabeth II. Following his implementation of Pakistan’s constitution, he was unanimously elected president by the new constituent assembly (elected indirectly by the main political parties, rather than popular vote). In 1958 he declared martial law and dismissed constitution assembly but was subsequently forced into exile by General Ayub Khan, who went on to rule Pakistan as a military dictatorship for the next 11 years.

In 1961, Khan wrote a second constitution that concentrated wealth in the hands of the elite, gave the army greater supervisory authority over government and moved the capitol to a new planned city called Islamabad. Khan also entered into a military treat with the US, under which Pakistan provided bases for U2 spy planes. In 1965, he declared war against India (over Kashmir) with US equipment against Soviet-equipped India.

Pakistan’s failure to win control over Kashmir, as well as worsening economic conditions, led to increased popular unrest and a second military coup in 1969. General Yahya Khan become president, suspended the constitution and the judicial branch of government and dissolved the constituent assembly.

The single civilian he brought into cabinet Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who had studied in the US and at Oxford). Bhutto, who went on to create the Pakistani Peoples Party, was elected president in Pakistan’s first popular election in 1970. His party won all the seats in West Pakistan, and no seats in East Pakistan. Because East Pakistan had a much larger population, their candidate Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League won the most votes overall.

After nullifying the election and dismissing the constituent assembly, Khan dispatched the Pakistani army to “restore order” in East Pakistan. In Operation Searchlight he arrested and killed large numbers of Awami League activists, while 10 million fled as refugees into India.

India would help organize the male refugees into Mukti Bahini to wage guerilla warfare against the Pakistani army. Together with the Indian army, they captured the entire Pakistani army posted to East Pakistan (100,000 troops), enabling the province to declare independence as Bangladesh.

Following Khan’s disgrace in East Pakistan, Buttho set him aside to make himself martial law administrator prior to being elected president in 1971.

*East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971.

**As a dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations, Pakistan views the British monarch as their sovereign, and all laws passed by the Parliament must receive royal assent (via the British-appointed governor general).

***The US goal was to increase their control over the Middle East and South Asia (as they did Yugoslavia). The map below was originally published in the Armed Forces journal in an article entitled Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look.

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

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366233

Commentary by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times

A great new country music song comes out, by a completely unknown performer, and takes the #1 spot in charts. The mainstream press decries the artist and song as “far-right.”

An exciting movie based on a true story of child trafficking blasts forward to earn more than the expected blockbuster. The mainstream press denounces the film as “far-right.”

An insurgent campaign in Argentina by an economist rocks the election primaries. The candidate wants to crush the central bank and level state bureaucracies that interfere with freedom. The press universally decries him as “far-right.”

Your favorite newspaper covers facts that matter with tremendous accuracy. It’s called The Epoch Times. But your social circles says this paper is “far right.”

You get the message? Anything that rocks the boat these days is called “far-right. The point of the phrase is to recall Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, maybe even Torquemada and Attila the Hun, and conjures up images of shock troops, black boots, goose stepping, and the darkest forms of intolerance and coercion.

It’s all rather strange because each of the above is not about any of that. They are about the opposite. They are calling for ending oppression, curbing government, revealing the truth behind official lies, draining the swamp, ending corruption, and restoring freedom and dignity to the people against the elites.

What in the world is this “far-right” thing the press has going on? It is designed to broadcast the message that anything that is not conventional or left-of-center is necessarily flirting with some dark interwar catastrophe. That is to say, it is a smear.

The smear is so habitual at this point that it probably can’t be stopped. No journalist gets in trouble for deploying it. It cannot be challenged with defamation law, though it probably should be.

In fact, the phrase “far-right” is so opaque, unfalsifiable, and still damaging that it is flung around with abandon by anyone threatened by the slightest change in society’s relationship to the state and its allied interest groups.

Permit me a brief examination of the roots.

If looking to the roots of right and left, historians often consider France. On the right side of the parliament sat the monarchists, established business interests, the ecclesiocrats, and champions of the Ancien Régime. On the left sat the reformers, the liberals, the free traders, the republicans, and the proponents of religious liberty.

Is this where we get the idea? Not really. America didn’t really deploy the concepts of right and left in national parlance until the 20th century. Here the influence was not France, at least not directly, but Germany, especially the 19th century political debates between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the rise of Otto von Bismarck. It was during this time, particularly in the 1880s and 90s, that U.S. elite intellectuals frequently traveled to Germany to study under the fashionable gurus of the time.

We are not talking about American popular culture but intellectual culture, a world set apart but ultimately decisively influential over the commanding heights of civilization itself. The U.S. Ivys were all invaded rather dramatically by a Prussian spirit: historicist, elitist, and thoroughly statist.

Here is where we find the origin of American Progressivism. It was a Prussian/German import. And what was German politics and philosophy about in that period? The poet of the entire German intellectual scene was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher who came to prominence in the 1820s for his forecast of the inevitable return of the German empire and the unity of society, church, and state.

At least that’s what the old Hegelians wanted, and Bismarck was their champion. They wanted a giant welfare state, a central bank, a powerful military empire, society organized as a unified family, an economically self-sufficient nation, and a state with overweening power to dominate the social order. In music, the leader was of course Richard Wagner: nationalistic, romantic, idealistic, and fundamentally statist. This was the right, or, one might say, the far-right (and yes anti-Semitism and racism were part of that).

The left was more complicated because it was split between the old liberals as represented by champions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johannes Brahms, who had nothing to do with Hegelianism, and the rise of the Marxists, on the other. The Marxists were the successors to the French socialists who appropriated Hegel to weave into the cockamamie economics a deterministic view of history, which ended up being called dialectical materialism.

It’s a wonder this gibberish ever caught on but there is something strange about the Hegelian virus and the German academic mind. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, it utterly wrecked German academia for a century and a half. More than that, it had a profound impact on 20th-century politics. Marxism spread from Russia to China to Latin America, and Nazism engulfed Europe and painted the map brown.

Do you see where this is going? The Hegelians broke into two large branches: left for the Marxists and right for the nationalists, who ended up following Hitler to the doom of the entire project. That is a more precise way to understand the left and right as it came to be understood in the U.S. context from the turn of the 20th century and forward.

Indeed, the American Progressives were themselves split into left and right, with the left pushing great scientific planning over economic life and the right wanting to deploy national power in war and unifying society in a single familial model that forced women not to work and large-scale industry to replace agriculture.

In other words, in this parlance, left and right were both versions of statism, a basically insane confidence that experts with power, resources, and intelligence will improve the whole over what essential freedom would yield. They are two flavors of the same poison, both accusing each other of various forms of evil.

It’s always the same thing: confidence that intellectuals can outsmart everyone else in the peoples’ evaluation of their own problems, risks, issues, faith, and solutions. The heck of it is that it is never true. And this truth invalidates centuries of dangerous ideological fantasies which invalidate both left and right.

So when the media complains that people doing normal things and making justifiable complaints against the system as it is are “far-right,” what they are really confessing is their own ideological commitments. They are leftists in what they imagine to be a grand ideological struggle against the right. In this struggle, they want no one to be independent.

The tragedy comes when people take the bait. They believe that because the left is so nuts, they themselves must associate with the right. I’m telling you that none of this is necessary. You can be independent. You can reject both flavors of top-down rule.

[…]

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/political/far-right-bit-getting-old