HASKELL WEXLER WORLD FOCUS MARCH 22 MARCH 27, 2015

00:00:40 BONPANE: Hello this is Blaise Bonpane with World Focus, produced by The Office of The Americas and coming to you from KPFK Los Angeles. We're podcast and available 24 seven at kpfk.org, where we're heard internationally. Well friends I'm happy to say, in spite of the weather, the spring demonstrations have begun. They began at the White House yesterday, Saturday, March 21st, the rally was preceded by three days of activities including a concert, a lobbying tour of war sites on March 19th, and teach-ins the evening of the 19th and all day on March 20th.

00:01:23 Spring Rising is intended as an antiwar intervention into the world capital of war making. The United States has spread its military across the globe, has now engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and via drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. The US government is provoking Russia in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, pushing for another coup in Venezuela, and expanding its military presence in Asia and Africa.

00:01:59 The one war the US President seems interested in avoiding, with Iran. A group of Senators has now taken it upon themselves to strive to bring that into being. Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to authorize more war making, while the President has made it clear the wars will continue regardless of Congress and the United Nations, and the rule of law, strategic commonsense or, of course, basic human morality.

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00:02:32 So Cindy Sheehan says, she's there now in Washington, "I've been encouraged and inspired here in the homeland by the unrest opposing the apparent impunity with which white cops get to murder unarmed black men. I support these protests and tactics a hundred percent, but my question is, with the US war of terror raging against Arabs, Muslims all over the Middle East and Africa, what will it take for the same kind of protests opposing the crimes of Empire to arise?"

00:03:06 Spring Rising is that opportunity, to show our solidarity with the world, and David Swanson comments, "An intervention is needed in Washington when the debate ranges all the way from sending US ground troops into Iraq and Syria into sending US planes and somebody else's ground troops, and with both sides openly admitting that their plan won't work. If the definition of insanity is expecting a different result from the same behavior, the definition of mindlessness should be expecting the same horrible result but continuing anyway."

00:03:49 So we have Spring Rising and together with that, a massive gathering planned in the city of New York. Why? Well, we have now over 16,000 nuclear weapons remaining in the world's arsenals, many on high readiness to use, even the use of one nuclear weapon in a populated area could create a catastrophic humanitarian consequence lasting for generations. So governments will be meeting at the UN from April 27th May 22nd, to discuss nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.

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00:04:34 Civil society is joining together in a global mobilization, calling on governments to abolish nuclear weapons and reinvest the hundred billion dollar global nuclear weapons budget into areas of social need such as eliminating poverty, addressing climate change, and ensuring basic health care and education worldwide. So the objective of this gathering in New York is the following.

00:05:07 The abolition of nuclear weapons, economic justice, including moving the money from the Pentagon to human needs. Racial equality and the demilitarization of policing, environmental justice and urgent responses to the climate crisis, and a just and peaceful resolution to global wars and confrontations. Friends, the humanities are now a thousand years.

00:05:45 Let's put it this way, if we started with the great, well first of all what are the humanities? All right. The humanities include literature, philosophy, religion, musicology and also frequently the social sciences, and history, archeology, anthropology, all of these things that are the art of being human. This is what we need and philosophers have known this for years. Being human is an art, playing the guitar is an art, living a human life is an art.

00:06:22 How far is the art of being human behind our technological Frankenstein of a world at this time? I'd say about 10,000 years. So our need is to focus on the humanities and take the opportunity to let the humanities catch up with the technology, for example, in a human world, the very production of a

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 4. stealth bomber would be a crime, which of course it is. But it would be stated as a crime of attempted murder. This is absolutely forbidden.

00:07:06 So, but we have, we're not there yet, we're a long way from it but I think we're ready to start focusing on the great need for this to happen. And here we have someone shouting wolf about Iran and this is a very serious thing, that Iran is very, very dangerous, it's very worrisome because it does not have nuclear weapons. Oh, it does not have that. Oh that's interesting. Well, there is, a victim of media propaganda should know, that the Middle East has a nation with massive nuclear weapons and an arsenal.

00:07:56 This, friends is a nation that refuses to join the International Atomic Energy Agency. This nation will not submit to inspection, and has a long history of aggressive war against its neighbors. And friends, that is why Israel is a nation most apt to start a nuclear disaster, and they're crying wolf about Iran which has no such weapon? So this is why the people have said the greatest threat to war is the United States, and of course, tagged on there, joined at the hip is Israel.

00:08:42 So is there some reason why the commercial media doesn't get it? Well all of Israel is so excited about the election of Netanyahu. Well I say that, not meaning it really. We can look at Haaretz, that's a very popular newspaper in Israel, there's an article by Bradley Burston. It says, "This week push came to shove. This week we saw how things really work. How our Prime Minster really thinks, what he's really willing to do, how far he's willing to go,

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 5. how many of us he's willing to sell out, slander, abuse, for the sake of hanging onto the thing that matters to him more than anything, his job.

00:09:39 After this week, we can never again say that we didn't quite know who Benjamin Netanyahu is. As an Israeli I am ashamed that my Prime Minister is a racist. On election day, knowing that the whole country would see it or hear about it, he warned, on a range of social media, 'The rule of the right is in danger. The Arab voters are moving in droves toward the polling places, the NGOs of the left are bringing them in buses.' How should Jews respond to the threat of Arab hoards advancing on ballet boxes? The posts were explicit. Rush to the polling places, grab your loved ones, and get them there as well to vote Likud.

00:10:33 'With your help, and with God's help, we will put up a nationalist government which will safeguard the state of Israel.' Lest there be any question of how we should view this, when he took the stage for his victory speech last Tuesday night, Netanyahu invited singer Amir Benayoun to come up and join him. The Prime Minister's message was clear, if you are religious and write a racist song, which refers to Arabs as scum and murders, a song so incendiary that the President feels he must revoke your invitation to the President's residence, your place is right here, right now by my side.

00:11:25 I'm ashamed to know that the Prime Minister of Israel is either a racist, which is a horrible thought, or that he incites racism in others for the sake of votes, which is worse. I'm ashamed that my Prime Minster is a cheat, I'm angry that in order to win, on the eve of election, his campaign defied a

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 6. judge's ruling knowingly, defrauded thousands of Israeli into thinking that the rival Kulanu party leader, Moshe Kahlon, was messaging them to switch their vote to Netanyahu.

00:12:02 I'm ashamed that my Prime Minster can humiliate and exploit Moshe Kahlon, an earnest and honorable man and get away with it. As an Israeli I'm ashamed that the Prime Minster is a liar, a huckster, a calculating, desperate coward, a schmaltz merchant. We finally know what he meant last October, when he told President Obama that he remained committed to the vision of peace of two states for two people.

00:12:32 He explained it all on Monday night, standing behind bulletproof glass, in the square where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. He addressed a rally of thousands of rightwing Jews, many of them bussed in from the West Bank at the expense of Israeli taxpayers. Just after telling the crowd that they should avoid incitement, that he was Prime Minster even of Israelis who don't agree with him, and that we pride ourselves in upholding the unity of Israel, he made it all clear.

00:13:08 There are already two states for two people, there are the people of us, that is the Zionists, which is to say Jews who are rightwing, who prize settlements above all else, and who resist all compromise forswear any concession, oppose all negotiations, and who will vote for Benjamin Netanyahu when he declares that there will not be one settler uprooted, even from outposts in which Israel itself has declared illegal.

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00:13:41 And then there are the people of them, all the rest of us. People he calls anti-Zionist, people whom he describes as haters of Israel, dark forces, treacherous, in league with foreigners", and you know how bad foreigners are, my goodness. "Yes, the uber-secular Prime Minister told the crowd, suddenly putting himself forward as a pious, commandment-keeping Jew explaining who we are. 'We keep the traditions of Israel.' Then the man, who was bought and paid for by a gambling billionaire, took it up a notch.

00:14:26 'We have the people, they have the money, but we have something more important.' He concluded, 'It won't be money that decides this, rather, it will be heart, soul, belief, we're all going to need it.' I'm ashamed that my Prime Minister believes, and is quietly pleased, that young people who love their country, and who have served their country, have endangered their lives for our sake, but who are not part of us, not settlers, not ultraorthodox, not rightwing and in many cases, not Jewish, will solve their own problems of housing, and providing for a new family, by leaving Israel.

00:15:12 I'm ashamed that my Prime Minster perceives, and accepts, that many people who are indigent, elderly, chronically ill, will meet the challenges of a neglected and failing healthcare system by dying. I'm ashamed that my Prime Minster declaring that millions of Palestinians are unentitled to rights, beginning with the right to have a say as to the kind of government and country they live in. Most of all, I'm ashamed that my Prime Minster, what my Prime Minster does, works, I'm ashamed that racism works here with my people.

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00:15:52 As a Jew, I believe that if all we are left is, with is bigotry and fear, it will be the end of us. All this week, Benjamin Netanyahu made us one consistent promise. In his coming year, as Prime Minister, there will be no hope." Thank you Haaretz for publishing this statement which represents how many Israelis feel at this time, to say nothing about the rest of the people in the world. And Israel isn't the only place where there's a problem.

00:16:42 They're our surrogate states of course but the problem is mainly with us, the problem is mainly our standing by, the collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the massacre of people in Gaza, the ongoing hatred and racism that continues. But we don't confine that to Israel. Foreign policy is dictatorial. Well the racism in Israel toward Arabs smells like Berlin in 1938, we see the same problems with our own foreign policy. Why do I say it's dictatorial?

00:17:27 Because we have nothing to say about it, there is no democratic components involved, it is really a dictatorial thing, and sometimes it helps for us to see what some of the great journalists are saying. This is an era of great journalism, many such journalists of course are in prison, just as the people who speak out against the fact that we’re on the verge of a nuclear holocaust. Here we have an 84 year old nun imprisoned in a Brooklyn jail hell hole for breaking into a nuclear facility and exposing the security flaws, and reminding us that we are about ready to have a nuclear war and people don't care to talk about it, that's Sister Megan Rice, these are our heroes.

00:18:23

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People like Sister Megan and the great journalists that we have at this time, one of which is John Pilger, and I'd like to share some of his thoughts that have appeared in CounterPunch, and why there is such a danger of fascism because of the foreign policy of places like the United States and Israel. So he begins with something very important, and of course I will add a few comments on the way, I'll try to tell you when.

00:18:58 He states, "The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our own consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as a flickering footage of goose-stepping black shirts, they're criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed, for it is their fascism."

00:19:52 Here's the law. 'To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, and let Israel and the United States hear this, 'Is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains, within itself, the accumulated evil of the whole.' Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened.

00:20:32 Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, a million people would be alive today, and the Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 10. surreal theater known as news. Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome, thanks to the omnipresent, repetitive media, and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

00:21:28 In 2011, NATO launched 9,700 strike sorties against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used, the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and UNICEF reported that 'Most of the children were under the age of ten.' The public sodomizing of the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi with a rebel bayonet, was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words, 'We came, we saw, he died.'

00:22:22 His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie. 'He was planning genocide against his own people. We knew that if we waited one more day' said President Obama, 'Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, would suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.' " Now these are very similar to the words uttered when we invaded that terrible threatening country of Grenada.

00:23:01 The news said we got there just in time. That was just in time before the Grenadians killed everybody. This is really unbearable. Well, anyway. "This, of course the statement was a fabrication, the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 11. would be 'A real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.' Reported March 14, 2011. The lie provided the first spark for NATO's inferno, described by David Cameron as a 'Humanitarian intervention.'

00:23:50 Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the rebels would become IS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers. For Obama, Cameron, Hollande, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence, and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's great oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power.

00:24:36 Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank, and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to enter Africa and bribe African governments with military partnerships." Friends, I've got to observe here that what Gaddafi had hoped to do was what Latin America has done, that is he hoped to create a new currency, he hoped to integrate Africa.

00:25:25 He was far, far away from it of course, Latin America is a done deal and all of the nations of Latin America are united in opposing US Imperialism, they made it very, very clear, they’ve excluded Canada and the United States from their organization. Gaddafi was not that far along, but the very fear

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 12. that he might be able to imitate the integration, economic and political, of Latin America, was unacceptable.

00:25:57 "Following NATO's attack, under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama confiscated 30 billion dollars from Libya's Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank, and the African gold backed dinar currency. The so-called humanitarian war against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media.

00:26:36 Think of the other examples. 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, 'The Serbs were committing genocide against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.' David Scheffer, US Ambassador-at-large for war crimes, claimed that as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59, might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust, and the spirit of the Second World War.

00:27:20 The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone." Well that was very thoughtful and very nice. "With the NATO bombing over, much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries, the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the holocaust.

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00:28:03 The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing, 'A semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.' A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of dead in Kosovo, 2,700. This included combatants on both sides, Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA, there was no genocide. The holocaust was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.

00:28:49 Behind the lie, there was a serious purpose. Yugoslavia was uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation, that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially to newly united Germany, which had begun a drive to capture its natural market in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia.

00:29:31 By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, to lay their plans for the disastrous Eurozone, a secret deal had been struck, Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as an imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo Peace Conference in Rambouillet in France, the Serbs subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day.

00:30:26

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This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of Nazi occupation, and the implementation of a free- market economy, and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this, punishment followed swiftly, NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country, it was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya and the Ukraine."

00:31:09 Foreign policy friends, is dictatorial. We have nothing to say about it. This has to stop. "I would say since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations, 69 countries, have suffered from all of the following at the hands of America's modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed, their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as sanctions.

00:31:56 The British historian Mark Curtis estimates that the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie, deployed. 'Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.' These were opening words of Obama's 2015 State of the Union address. The fact that some 10,000 troops, and 20,000 military mercenaries remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. 'The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,' said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records.

00:32:56 The majority have been killed, civilians and soldiers, during Obama's time as President. The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indonesia. It

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 15. is lauded in the much quoted book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that, if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, 'It cannot sustain a popular democracy, because the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion.' " Well that's a nice fascist statement.

00:33:56 "Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter's National Security Advisor, demonstrating his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan's first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history? In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime.

00:34:51 In 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan formed a government, and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women, and social justice for ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed, and police files publicly burned. The new government in Afghanistan introduced free medical care for the poorest, peonage was abolished, mass literacy programs was launched, for women, the gains were unheard of.

00:35:39 By the 1980s, half the university students were women in Afghanistan, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan's doctors, a third of civil servants, and the majority of teachers. 'Every girl,' recalled Saira Noorani, a

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 16. female surgeon, 'Could go to high school and the university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujahidin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny, and sad, to think these were the people the West supported.'

00:36:37 Yes the government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, 'There was no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the revolution.' Alarmed by growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that, if Afghanistan was to succeed, its independence and progress would offer the 'Threat of a promising example.' " Let's take a musical break.

00:38:33 BONPANE: This is Blaise Bonpane with World Focus, produced by The Office of The Americas and coming to you from KPFK Los Angeles. We're podcast and available 24 seven at kpfk.org, where we're heard internationally. Friends today, with the help of one of our incredible, great journalists, John Pilger, we are reviewing the amazing history of how democracy was destroyed in Afghanistan.

00:39:06 And, not only there, but in so many other places, and that we have to realize that our foreign policy is dictatorial, and that it simply is doing far much more harm than good. So looking at this history, we see that, "July 3rd, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal fundamentalist

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 17. groups, known as the mujahidin, a program that grew to over 50 million dollars a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government.

00:39:54 In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that the United States' larger interests would be served by the demise of their government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. The mujahidin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and IS. They included Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar's specialty was trafficking in opium, and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

00:40:44 In London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a freedom fighter. Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia, and so undermine secular political liberation, and destabilize the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, 'A few stirred up Muslims.' His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region.

00:41:33 In 1985, the CIA and Pakistan's Intelligence Agency, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. A Saudi multi-millionaire, Osama bin Laden, was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone.

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00:42:15 Its success was celebrated in 1996, when the last PDPA President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah, who came, had gone before the US General Assembly and pleaded for help. He was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban. The blowback of Operation Cyclone and its 'Few stirred up Muslims', was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the war on terror, in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan, to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.

00:43:23 The enforcer's message was, and remains, the same, 'You are with us or against us.' Well that's very interesting, that's just what Foreign Minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman, said when he announced the need for ethnic cleansing, 'You're either for us or against us. Those of you against us, we should cut off your heads.' That's the Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his ethnic cleansing comments. Yes, we're correct here to say that the rise of fascism is once again the issue.

00:44:14 "The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its free fire zones, body counts and collateral damage. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians 'gooks', were murdered by the US, yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror, marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces.

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00:45:09 The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot. Today the world's greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals, these are Obama's victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA kill list presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. Then he then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile, carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone.

00:45:53 These roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each hit is registered, on a faraway console screen, as a bug splat. 'For goose- steppers,' wrote the historian Norman Pollack, 'Substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer blithely at work, planning and executing assassinations, smiling all the while.'

00:46:40 Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. 'I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,' said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was a Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, 'The sovereign is he who decides the exception.' This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology.

00:47:23

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That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, and presented, wittingly, as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that destroyed most of the Nazi war machine at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers.

00:48:09 By contrast, US losses, including the Pacific, were 400,000. It's horrible, but Hollywood reversed this. The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the tragedy of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places, just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood's violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar for his movie the American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase.

00:48:54 The New York Times described it as, 'Patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening day.' There are no heroic movies about America's embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America and Britain went to war against Greeks, who had fought heroically against Nazism, and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism in 1967.

00:49:27 The CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens, as it did in Brazil, and most of Latin America, Germans, and East Europeans, who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity, were given a safe haven in the US, many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun, the father of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 21. space program", the same person. "In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to the Nazi movement in the Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated, and its new wave hailed by the enforcer as nationalists.

00:50:45 We reached its apogee in 2014, when the Obama administration splashed out five billion in a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Wing Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders included those who had called for a purge of the 'Moscow-Jewish Mafia and other scum' including gays, feminists and those on the political left. These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government.

00:51:29 First Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, is a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14th, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington, 'To get the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.' If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia. No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe, with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine.

00:52:20 At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for its opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 22. referred to German Defense Minister as 'A minister for defeatism.' It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert Kagan, a leading neo-con luminary, co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney. Nuland's coup did not go to plan.

00:53:07 NATO was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm water base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea, illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular, and internationally observed. There was no invasion. At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing.

00:53:49 Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner and form of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid siege to cities and towns, they used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping the violence caused by the Russian invasion.

00:54:18

The NATO commander, General Breedlove, whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, announced that 40,000 Russian troops were massing. In an age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none." Friends. I want to thank John Pilger for most of what I've brought to you today, bringing to our minds the clarity of rising

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 23. fascism which is related to the fact that foreign policy is dictatorial, and that we have to deal with this and that's why these great demonstrations taking place in Washington, and in New York City are so important and we're very proud of the fact that this is happening now this month and certainly next month as well.

00:55:18 So it's so important that we understand history rather than the absolute audacity and lies of much of our media. There seems to be absolutely no journalism at Fox News, and not much at various other places as well. So we have to look to the great journalist of our day, like John Pilger, for helping to see this in the context of history, actual real live history, rather than jingoistic, militaristic propaganda which has no basis in truth.

00:55:59 The music for this program was written and sung by my son, Blaise Martin. I want to thank my engineer Stan Mizrahi. World Focus is produced by the Office of The Americas. You can download World Focus at OfficeoftheAmericas.org. With the fond hope that we all may be agents of justice and peace, peace on earth, with goodwill to everyone, thanks for listening, please stay tuned for Ian Masters and Background Briefing, this is Blaine Bonpane.

00:56:33 ARMOUDIAN I am Maria Armoudian and host of The Scholar Circle heard every Sunday at noon right here on KPFK. The Scholar Circle brings you cutting-edge research and intelligent analysis that helps us understand the issues facing our nation and the world today. Each Sunday we bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines to talk about how their

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 24. research explains what has brought us to where we are today. From science to statesmanship, faith to philosophy, love to longevity, conflict to cooperation, we touch it all in plain everyday language. Join me for The Scholar Circle every Sunday at noon right here on Southern California's Pacifica radio KPFK.

00:57:09 IBRAHIM Hello I'm Nagwa Ibrahim.

00:57:11 CHANDLER And I'm Estee Chandler, cohosts of Middle East in Focus. Not sure you're getting the whole story about the Middle East from the mainstream media?

00:57:18 IBRAHIM Neither are we. The mainstream media may spend a lot of time showing image of violence but we prefer to highlight nonviolence.

00:57:25 CHANDLER Middle East in Focus brings you voices from, and perspectives on the Middle East, that corporate media is just not going to.

00:57:32 IBRAHIM Join me, Nagwa Ibrahim.

00:57:33 CHANDLER And me, Estee Chandler, on Middle East in Focus.

00:57:36

Transcript Provided by Flying Fingers Transcripts www.FlyingFingersTranscripts.com 818-557-0580 World Focus March 22 - 25.

IBRAHIM Sunday afternoon at one o'clock right here on KPFK 90.7.

00:57:40 QUINLAN Hello my name is Kathleen Quinlan, and you are listenging to KPFK radio powered by the people, 90.7 FM Los Angeles, 98.7 Santa Barbara, 93.7 San Diego, 99.5 Ridgecrest China Lake KPFK.

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