- The Worst Man In Modern History
Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
It seems extraordinary that in defiance of all factual history and philosophical knowledge anyone should celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx. More than anyone, through wrong-headed ideas, he bears responsibility, indirectly admittedly, for the deaths of an estimated one hundred million people in the last century, and the severe suppression though economic and social servitude of fully one third of the world’s population. And if you also include those who have suffered under the yoke of Marxist-inspired modern socialism, the philosophy that says the state is more important than the individual, you could argue nearly the whole world is influenced by Marxian philosophy today.
That might seem an extreme statement, but you only have to ask almost anyone anywhere, which do they consider is more important, the individual or the state, to see if this supposition is correct. The only explanation for the continued adoration of the man is that with such universal influence, there are bound to be legions of supporters remaining, ignorant of and blind to the reality. However, during his lifetime – he died in 1883 – he was hardly known. It wasn’t until the Russian revolution thirty-four years later that Marx began to be taken seriously.
How did Marx achieve this powerful posthumous position? It was not through his economics, though they are often quoted and form the core principles of his Communist Manifesto, but through his philosophy, old ideas from forgotten men such as Hegel (1770-1831), which he rehashed into a socialist philosophy that is still accepted by many today, despite the accumulated evidence against it. The difference with Hegel is Hegel strove to establish that historical evolution would lead to increasing individual freedom, while Marx strove to prove the individual played no role in historical evolution.
Hegel argued that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories and can be reduced to a synthetic unity by dialectic reasoning within a system of absolute idealism. In plain English, he concluded we all take our cue from our social and cultural surroundings and circumstances, and that they in turn are set by historical events. This became the basis for Marx’s extreme philosophy of class structure, which, in common with Hegel, denied any role to the independence of human thought.
His philosophical stance was comprehensively set out in his book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859. The fundamental principle behind Marxism is stated early in the preface, where he defines his deduction from the Hegelian dialectic: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” In other words, social organisation takes precedence over the individual, and it therefore follows that the individual is subordinate to the social organisation.
It follows from this logic, Marx argued, that the classes that formed on the back of material interests forces members of those classes to think and act in their narrow class interests and not independently in their personal interest, there being no such thing. For Marx, ideologies evolved on class lines, where the interests of the minority, the bourgeoisie, dominated. And as the bourgeoisie profits from the labour of the proletariat, it is in their interest to keep the proletariat suppressed. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie was entirely due to the exploitation of the proletariat.
Marx’s world was a black and white one of haves and have-nots, the exploiters and the exploited. As Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) had said, “If one man has more than necessary, another man has less”. The only way this apparent wrong could be righted would be through the collapse of the capitalist system, which led to these imbalances in the first place. The final solution was a classless society of the proletariat, handing them the means of production administered on their behalf by a revolutionary government.
If proof was needed, it came for Marx in the increasingly disruptive economic slumps over the course of his lifetime. Slumps hit the proletariat hardest, leading to unemployment and starvation. Initially, Marx was convinced that with the slumps getting progressively worse, a communist revolution would eventually be triggered, and the socialists (i.e. Marx himself) would take command from capitalist governments on behalf of the proletariat. Unfortunately for Marx, this never happened, and he increasingly turned in favour of a violent revolution to hasten the ultimate solution, reflecting his growing impatience and desperation.
Above all, Marx despised, even hated other socialists with an irrationality that can only have been fuelled by fear of competition. This hatred remains with us today, with communists loathing all forms of national socialism. Marx’s line of reasoning also freed him from criticism, because dissenters were always labelled bourgeoise, and were therefore dismissed as arguing on class lines. They were unmasked as bourgeoise, whatever their dissenting view, and therefore not qualified to comment on matters that affected the wider proletariat. The only answer was for the bourgeoisie to join the proletariat or to be made to do so, then their interests would be forcibly aligned.
We cannot gloss over the inconsistencies here, where on the one hand the bourgeoisie can only pursue a rigid class interest, yet its members are capable of the independent interest required to migrate to another class. And we must also mention that Marx himself, along with his supporter Engels, was a member of his so-called bourgeoisie, so according to his own strict doctrine, was unable or unqualified to align himself to the proletarian interest.
Marxian dogma was riddled with such inconsistences. Partly, this was due to the state of human knowledge at that time, and which formed the basis of any dialectical debate. Darwin contemporaneously proposed his evolutionary theory, pronouncing that humans evolved from the apes, and therefore were merely a higher form of animal, not a species apart favoured by God. This played neatly into Marxian philosophy.
It was also before the development of psychology by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. It was believed that all human brains were the same, just as we have other internal organs with specific functions within the corpus. The concept, that humans differed in their intelligence, their acuity, was unknown. Even mental illness was believed to be a disorder emanating from the body. To Marx the philosopher, drawing on Hegel’s dialectical approach, it could have seemed logical that we are all the same, and that the obvious social differences are down to our upbringing in one or the other class.
He never defined class, which is too slippery a concept to pin down. Instead, he separated humanity into the exploited majority, the proletariat, and the minority that controls the proletariat, the bourgeoisie. He expected the proletariat to eventually rebel, forcing the bourgeoisie into the lower class, to be ruled over by a socialist administration. He believed that this would happen, because under capitalism, the impoverishment of the workers was inevitable, leading to a workers’ revolution. Yet, at the same time, he believed in the iron law of wages, most associated with David Ricardo. According to this law, wages were set by the availability of labour and the payments required to subsist. Higher wages than this basic level would lead to an increase in the availability of labour over time, while lower wages would reduce the labour pool. In this way, the cost of labour was expected to rebalance at a subsistence level. Labour was regarded as a simple commodity, whose supply was regulated by its demand. However, Marx’s belief in the iron law of wages is at odds with his supposition that the proletariat would be gradually impoverished. You cannot subscribe to both.
Subsequent improvements in economic knowledge have disproved both theories anyway. Marx’s approach was to arrogantly assume workers are unthinking work-slaves, which they are not. They are individuals with individual aspirations, and as Freud and Breuer showed later, they have brains separate from the corpus, with individual mental abilities that govern the corpus. Marx even despised the trade unions of the day, arguing that striking for higher wages was colluding with members of the bourgeoisie by negotiating with them, when instead they should be seeking their destruction. His thinking had evolved from the proposition that the destruction of the bourgeoise class would occur naturally in time, to encouraging a violent class revolution to bring it about. Workers going on strike compromised both alternatives.
Marx also cooked up a theory of dialectical materialism, a concept based on Hegelian dialectics and the materialist philosophy of Ludwig von Feuerbach (1804-72), whereby the material productive forces were meant to propel society through the class struggle towards socialism. Materialism, in this sense, is the doctrine that all changes are brought about by material entities, processes and events, and that all human ideas, choices and value-judgements can be reduced to material causes, which one day will be explained by the natural sciences.
Marx, the man, and Engels, his financial backer, came from the bourgeoisie, and had nothing in common with the proletariat. Their motivation was fundamentally dishonest. After expecting the destruction of the bourgeoisie through an evolution out of capitalism, they actively sought a violent revolution, and there can be little doubt that they impatiently expected to emerge as the leaders of the new order. They despised other socialists, who were seen as rivals. Far more famous in Marx’s time was Ferdinand Lassalle (1824-64), who shared the basic Hegelian philosophy, but helped Bismarck defeat the liberals in Prussia. To Marx, this cooperation with a government was anathema, just as national socialism was to Marxists in the next century.
To Marx, world communism could only have one leader and other socialists must be denounced. As von Mises wryly put it, the worst thing for a socialist is to be ruled by a socialist who is not your friend.
Marx and Engels despised both nationalism and national socialism, because they sought a global revolution so there was no place for national characteristics or cooperation with governments. It was, in effect, their bid for world domination, cooked up in the reading room of the British Library. A decade after the Communist manifesto was published, Marx stopped advocating peaceful revolution, in favour of civil war in all countries to destroy the bourgeoise class. Marx and Engels sought to provoke and benefit from it. The plotting with Engels increasingly took that direction and Engels studied military science in preparation for his role as commander-in-chief.
Despite Marx’s theories and subsequent plotting with Engels, Marxism was exposed by events, even from the outset, as a failure. In the years following the publication of the Communist Manifesto until his death in 1883, despite the boom and bust cycles following the middle of that century, the lot of the proletariat improved immeasurably. Something was going horribly wrong with Marxist predictions, and the chief architect had passed away into obscurity. He had, however, set the template for Lenin, who took up the Marxist banner with the Russian revolution thirty-four years later.
We now know what happened, though much of it was kept from us until the Berlin Wall was dismantled. Just as Marx strove for a global communist revolution, destroying nation states as well as the bourgeoisie, Lenin had the same Marxian objective. It persisted into the post-war era, with the annexation of Eastern Europe, and persistent attempts to undermine Western Europe. Soviet spies were everywhere. Not only did we have the Cambridge five, and left-wing economics professors promoting socialism in the top universities, but even Harry Dexter-White, a very senior US Treasury official who founded the IMF and the World Bank, was a Soviet spy.
Marx was a dead-beat plotter, who should have simply sunk into obscurity. But like Keynes in the following century, he made his half-truths sound eminently plausible. His training as a philosopher imparted a respectability to his theories. Even at his graveside, Engels eulogised him thus:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc….”
How can you not respect, even adulate a man expressed in these terms? You cannot say that a philosopher, who discovered the law of development of human history, who recognised that man needs food, water, shelter and clothing is wrong, or bad. This is in strict contrast with the title of this short essay, that Marx was the worst man in modern history. If it hadn’t been for developments long after his death, this epitaph would not be worth challenging. There have been far worse perpetrators of human misery in their lifetimes, with a roll call that goes back to the beginning of recorded history.
No, the reason Marx was a thoroughly bad man, even evil, was he plotted not just the domination of one country, but the whole world by advocating the destructive forces of civil violence. He was a poor parody of a Bond villain. And as is the case with all socialists, he wanted total domination. You could take the view that he was a latter-day Don Quixote, delusional and mad, and that Engels was a sort of financial Sancho Panza without the wit. This would be incorrect. Marx was a failure as a philosopher, and instead of rethinking and recanting, he moved from a position of preparing himself for a leading role in what he saw as inevitable, to advocating violent social destruction.
It was Marx’s wrong-headed philosophy that led to the deaths of a hundred million souls, perpetrated by those he inspired, as well as the enslavement of most of the population of the Eurasian land-mass. And if we are to identify his catastrophic error in the simplest terms, it was the brief sentence in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, referred to above. If instead he had correctly concluded that,
“It is the consciousness of men that determines their existence, and not their social existence”
the world would be a far better place today, with ordinary people free to have delivered economic progress to their fellow men and women without bearing the burden of Marx’s failed philosophies.
He is my nomination for the worst man in the modern history of humanity, and we should remember this and only this on the bicentenary of his birth.
- US Public Support For Iran Deal Reaches All-Time High
Since the implementation of the Iran Deal, especially Conservative Americans have been in strong opposition to the lifting of sanctions against the Middle Eastern state.
It had been one of Trump’s electoral pledges to either renegotiate or abandon the heavily criticized agreement between Iran, the members of the UN Security Council and Germany.
As Iran rejected any renegotiations, the president soon favored to nix the agreement and reimpose sanctions, and this week President Trump officially withdrew from the Iran agreement. As Statista’s Patrick Wagner notes, through the so-called snapback mechanism, a whole battery of sanctions will immediately come into effect again.
However, as this graphic shows, President Trump does not have a lot of public support for his decision…
You will find more infographics at Statista
Since its implementation, citizens increasingly favored the agreement, reaching an all-time high before Donald Trump abandoned it.
Is this just more #RESISTance? We wonder just how many of those survey respondents know anything about the actual deal? And what suddenly accounts for the surge in support in the last few weeks?
- Army Major Warns Don't Poke The Dragon, War With China Would Be An Unnecessary Disaster
Authored by Major Danny Sjursen via AntiWar.com,
The Non-Options: 4 Wars the Military Prepares for But Shouldn’t Fight: Volume II
There’s nothing military men like more than obsessively training for wars they will never have to fight. The trick is not to stumble into a conflict that no one will win.
Let’s everyone take a breath. Yes, China presents a potential threat to American interests in the economic, cyber, and naval realms. The U.S. must maintain a credible defensive and expeditionary posture and be prepared for a worst case scenario. What we don’t need is to blunder into a regional, or, worse still, all-out war with the Chinese dragon. Not now, probably not ever.
And yet, in Washington today, and within the Trump administration in particular, alarmism seems the name of the game. This is risky, and, ultimately, dangerous. In his 2018 National Defense Strategy, Secretary of Defense Mattis, a known hawk, refers to Russia and China as “revisionist powers,” and announces that the US military must now pivot to “great power” competition. Look, I’m all for extricating our overstretched armed forces from the Middle East and de-escalating the never-ending, counterproductive “war on terror.” What doesn’t make sense, is the reflexive assumption that (maybe) dialing down one war, must translate into ramping up for other, more perilous, wars with nuclear-armed powerhouses like Russia or China.
The usual laundry list of Chinese threats is well-known: China is (how dare they!) building a sizable blue-water navy and (gasp!) patrolling around sandy islands in the South China Sea. They conduct cyber-attacks (so do we) and steal intellectual property. They are planning a new “Silk Road” to integrate much of Eurasia into a China-centric trade and transportation system. No doubt, some of those items may be cause for measured concern, but none of the listed “infractions” warrants war!
Bottom line: China, like Russia, possesses neither the capacity nor intent for global domination or the subjugation of the United States. Period.
Let’s start with the capacity problem. China has a growing military. That is to be expected of one of the world’s top-two economies and a nation with more than 1 billion people. Don’t act so surprised. Still, China spends only one thirdas much as the US on defense. It has one leaky, outdated former Russian aircraft carrier and is building a few more. The US has about a dozen and our local Asian partners (India, Japan, Australia, and South Korea) – count another nine between them.
China has 14 foreign powers – some hostile – on its land borders. One of those is Russia, with whom the Chinese have a long history of border disputes. The last thing the US should want to do is drive those two unnatural allies into each other’s arms with overly bellicose rhetoric and military posturing. Another Chinese neighbor is India, which is strengthening its own military and also has 1+ billion citizens (and a much higher birthrate than China).
Then there’s the intent issue. China is not after global domination and no longer possesses a true internationalist communist ideology. It wants regionalsuperiority and a measure of global respect to make up for its perceived (and actual) embarrassment by European and American imperialists in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It wants a powerful trade block across Eurasia and a measure of control of its own “lake” – the South China Sea. Is that so unreasonable? The US has outright supremacy in its bordering seas, such as the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Pacific. The US military has even sponsored coups and conducted outright invasions of nearby islands that didn’t sufficiently march to Washington’s tune.
Switch places with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a moment. How would Trump(or Obama) respond, if the Chinese insisted they had a right to supremacy in the Caribbean? My guess: outright war.
Finally, there are the reasons not to fight, the reasons why a war would be catastrophic for both sides. China is huge, both in landmass and population(of 1.3 billion!). We’ve all heard the (accurate) trope warning against starting a land war in Asia. There’s good reason for that. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is huge and is capable of bogging the relatively small, all-volunteer US military in a nightmarish quagmire.
Nor could the US count on an easy projection of its naval and airpower into, say, the Taiwan Strait. China (and other competitors) have invested heavily in A2AD (Anti-Access, Area-Denial) systems that could thwart such attempts, inflict heavy casualties, or, at the least, maintain standoff. This would force the US military to preemptively escalate with attacks on Chinese homeland defenses. There is very little opportunity, therefore, to wage a limited war. Any fight with China will force the US”all-in” as a matter of course.
Furthermore, China’s booming and growing economy is both its strength and a sort of financial doomsday device. The US, European, and Chinese economies are by now inextricably linked. Hot war means trade war; and that would likely result in a cataclysmic global financial collapse. The US military is the most well-funded and equipped force on earth. Still, the backbone and foundation of that military rests with the power of the US economy. A new crash and potential depression would permanently damage our economy (along with China’s, no doubt).
Most importantly, China maintains an arsenal of at least 250 nuclear warheads. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to America’s 6000+ weapons, but more than enough to deter any serious invasion. Here’s the trick: never to fight a nuclear power, so long as it can be avoided. Anything else is insanity – ever heard of Nuclear Winter? Yea, it’s a real thing! The lesson: tread lightly, be cautious, and avoid unnecessary brinksmanship. That’s called statesmanship, something the US seems to have forgotten about these last 17 years.
Truth is, most of this threat inflation is really about cooking the books to justify gross overspending and a profits bonanza for the military-industrial complex. That’s a concern in itself, because a $700+ billion military budget is unsustainable, requiring either tough cuts to domestic programs, increased taxes, a ballooning national debt – or all of the above.
The real danger, though, is military brinksmanship. And the inescapable fog of war. It’s not impossible to imagine a dispute in the distant South China Sea (7000 miles from California) resulting in combat and casualties between the US and China. This could quickly escalate out of control. And remember, we both have loads of nuclear weapons!
It’s time to realistically weigh US interests, display some humility and craft a sober strategy for the Pacific. The sea coast of China cannot forever remain an “American lake.” We would never accept a foreign power in the Caribbean and can’t expect China – with over a billion citizens and a growing economy – to cede their local waters to a distant American Navy in perpetuity.
The US must appeal to local Asian partners based on our (ostensible) shared values of open trade and open society – a challenge to the more authoritarian Chinese value system. After all, soft power goes a long way, especially when all-out war is a non-option! That, of course, will require more consistency from the US We’ll have to walk the walk on our values and quit backing our “partners’” military campaigns – Saudis in Yemen, Israel in Gaza, etc. – when they often add up to veritable war crimes.
Remember, we owe the Chinese a lot of money. That gives them leverage, but it also gives us leverage. They want to be paid back and Beijing knows it needs the American market for its goods. Besides, our economies are actually highly intertwined. XI doesn’t want a major war with the US He is playing the long game, a chess match as compared to our bumbling checkers!
If there is a war in the Pacific with nuclear-armed China it will most likely not be of XI’s doing. Only American hubris can lead to what would inevitably be a disastrous war.
Given our recent track record – an Icarus-syndrome par excellence – that seems frighteningly likely.
* * *
Read The Non-Options: 4 Wars the Military Prepares for But Shouldn’t Fight, Volume I
Danny Sjursen is a US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.
- China Builds Warning System To Detect Earthquakes 3 Weeks In Advance
China is building a monitoring system that will help it predict earthquakes up to three weeks in advance, according to a story in the Global Times, a mouthpiece for China’s Communist Party. The machinery will monitor for upcoming quakes by measuring “X-ray” or “CT scanners” which create an image of seismic activity.
“The real-time image generated from sensors will help the public forecast earthquake of magnitude above 5.0 as easily as reading a meteorological cloud image,” the Global Times said.
The technology will first be implemented in China’s Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in the country’s southwest, where some of China’s most devastating earthquakes have taken place. After that, it will then be rolled out across the country. Eventually, the sensors will be placed at 2,000 monitoring stations across the earthquake-prone region.
The equipment will monitor for “stress and energy dynamics” between eight and 20 kilometers underground, according to Dr Wang Tun. Typically, the most destructive quakes originate more than 8 kilometers below the earth’s surface. While China already has an early earthquake warning system, it only covers 650 million people – about half the country’s population – and can only detect quakes seconds before they occur by measuring so-called “P-waves”. During one recent quake in Chengdu, the capitol of Sichuan province, citizens received messages on their mobile phones some 71 seconds beforehand.
Schools received the warnings some five to 38 seconds before the quake struck.
Eventually, the current EEW system and the new more advanced system will work in tandem, because the new monitoring system can’t predict the exact timing of a quake, according to Wang.
“And it only can tell a rough location instead of an exact site where the earthquake will occur.”
The first station for the new system was unveiled in Wenchuan, Sichuan this past week. The town was the epicenter of a 7.9 magnitude quake that killed 80,000 people back in 2008.
- Mapping Erik Prince's Private Mercenary Empire
Authored by Ty Joplin via Albawaba.com,
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Erik Prince is the modern architect of private military firms
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His latest venture is in training security personnel in China
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But he’s been all over the world, outsourcing militaries to cheap labor markets
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Al Bawaba has provided a partial map to track Erik Prince’s activities over the years
Erik Prince, the brain behind the infamous private military firm Blackwater, is now in China training security forces.
Prince is partially responsible for modernizing the private army for the post 9/11 world, outsourcing militaries to cheap, specialized labor pools and skirting traditional regulations meant to ensure accountability for armed forces.
His journey from hiring mercenaries to help bolster the U.S. occupation in Iraq to China is long, dizzying and includes stops around the world to train Colombian mercenaries to help make a private army for the U.A.E. and outfitting crop duster planes with missiles to be fired at Armenians.
He has become a global figure, roaming between conflicts zones to sell various governments his expertise on private armies.
To document his journey thus far, Al Bawaba has compiled a partial list of countries/regions in or for which he has done business.
United States
Prince’s trip around the world starts in the United States.
Born in an affluent Michigan family, his family maintained deep ties to the Republican establishment and several conservative, religious organizations like American Values. His sister, Betsy DeVos, married into one of the most influence political families in the Midwest, the DeVos’s, and began helping to run the Republican party machine in Michigan.
That marriage, which tied the Prince and DeVos family together, has given Erik unprecedented political access into the federal government. His list of close allies including Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist. His sister gives him a direct line of access to Trump himself.
Erik became a Navy SEAL and then established his own private military firm in 1997, Blackwater.
Once the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Blackwater received billions in contracts from the U.S. government to help supplement the official mission with private boots on the ground, relatively free from accountability or laws from any particular government.
Iraq
Damaged and bloodied car in Nissour Square, Iraq, 2007 after the Blackwater massacre (AFP/FILE)
Blackwater’s activities in Iraq are infamous and account for Prince’s self-imposed exile from the United States.
Apart from harassing Iraqi civilians and running them off of roads with their armored personnel carriers, they also indiscriminately gunned down 14 innocent people in Baghdad in 2007, drawing an investigation and heavy criticism from media outlets around the world.
The incident stands as a cautionary tale for when mercenary groups such as Blackwater are able to operate without sufficient legal or logistical oversight. Facing a wave of scrutiny, Prince left Blackwater and the firm changed its name twice (to Xe and then Academi) to escape the heat.
Many thought they had seen the end of Erik Prince, but he resurfaced later at the helm of a different private military company.
U.A.E.
A satellite image of the camp in the U.A.E. built to train Prince’s 800-member mercenary battalion (Google Earth/New York Times)
In 2011, Erik Prince was appointed by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to make a secret, private army. For this, he was paid $529 million.
In documents obtained by the New York Times, the mission of this privately commissioned battalion included “intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations ‘to destroy enemy personnel and equipment,’ and crown-control.
Prince hired Colombians and nationals of other countries thousands of miles away to fill his ranks from two reasons. First, Prince was looking to pay them as little as possible. Second, they weren’t Muslims. Prince surmised that Muslims could not be trusted to kill other Muslims.
A few years later in 2015, Saudi Arabia began its military intervention in Yemen and recruited a host of other Arab nations to join its coalition. Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, business partner to Erik Prince, Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, signed up for the cause in order to destroy any creeping Iranian influence in the war-torn nation.
Yemen
Erik Prince and his U.A.E. private military firm helped recruit and train over 1,000 soldiers from Latin American countries. Then, their bodies started appearing on battlefields in Yemen.
A single missile reportedly killed 45 mercenaries from the U.A.E.
Prince’s initial battalion of 800 soldiers had blossomed into almost 2,000 specialized troops hired mostly from Latin America to do the U.A.E.’s business.
Although officials say Erik Prince’s formal business role with the U.A.E. had ended several years before the intervention into Yemen, his corporate blueprint to partially outsource the U.A.E.’s military is doubtlessly still in use.
The U.A.E. keeping and even expanding Prince’s blueprint for a private, outsourced army demonstrates just how influencial he and his mercenary business model has become.
Azerbaijan
A militarily-modified crop duster, called the T-Bird (LASA Engineering)
After his stint in the U.A.E., Prince began doing more business with Chinese executives at the Frontier Services Group (FSG), which he heads.
On this new enterprise, Prince said it “is not a patriotic endeavor,” rather, it is intended “to build a great business and make some money doing it.”
Interestingly enough, Prince’s business with FSG took him to Azerbaijan, where he was paid by the government to help it deal with its Armenian problem. Armenians are concentrated into Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, which seceded from Azerbaijan and formed a semi-recognized, de facto state.
Azerbaijan called on Erik Prince and FSG to help it keep watch on the Nagorno-Karabakh region, also called the Republic of Artsakh. In response. Prince wanted to show the government two crop duster planes meant for agricultural use but refitted for military purposes. The planes were meant to be outfitted with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and were supposedly able to fire missiles.
They never made it to Azerbaijan after an investigation shut the sale down.
This is because the deal may have broken several laws. The Washington Post found that “executives were concerned that the company might be skirting U.S. law — known as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) — requiring Americans to obtain special permits before defense-related technology can be transferred to foreign countries.”
In response to this controversial arms trade, all but two Americans on the FSG executive board quit due to concerns that he was not serving U.S. interests. This has freed Prince to deal more closely with the Chinese.
Eastern Africa
FSG’s ‘focus region’ (Frontier Services Group)
FSG’s public focus is on providing security and logistical help to eastern African countries such as South Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and the DRC.
“When you want logistics done in Africa, you call DHL,” said Sean McFate, a former military contractor in Africa and current expert on mercenaries at the Atlantic Council. “When you want muscle, you call Erik Prince.”
One of FSG’s ventures appears to help oust the extremist militant group, Al Shabaab, from southwest Somalia—an area it has largely controlled for years. “We have brought together strong international business leaders to team-up with talented Somali entrepreneurs to make development in South West Somalia a reality,” an FSG statement reads.
“The project will include an integrated solution of air-land-sea logistics capabilities and advanced security management.”
China
FSG’s headquarters is in Hong Kong, and though it publicly states that its focus is on eastern Africa, FSG is now reported to be doing domestic work on behalf of the Chinese government.
FSG is partially owned by CITIC, a Chinese-government own investment firm. CITIC is slowly taking more and more control of FSG and is reportedly already the dominant shareholder, meaning it has greater power than Prince to determine the company’s vision and business deals.
“The Chinese are gradually taking more control” of the company. CITIC is now playing a larger role as Frontier’s dominant shareholder, said Xin who heads the International Security Defense College that trains security personnel and is overseen by FSG.
“Prince’s share is decreasing. The Chinese are in charge, so it won’t matter.”
One of FSG’s most recent missions has been to train thousands of security personnel in China’s northwest Xinjiang province, where millions of ethnically Turkic Muslims called Uyghurs live.
Uyghurs are routinely targeted by the state due to continuous attempts by some to break away from China and form an independent state.
Thousands of Uyghurs are part of an extremist group called the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), whose leaders are hiding in Pakistan and whose members have a heavy presence in Syria fighting against the Syrian regime.
Human Rights Watch accused the Chinese government of “deploying a predictive policing program,” using massive surveillance technology and a web of high-tech surveillance cameras and compulsory data collection.
They’ve also reportedly sent thousands of Uyghurs to Chinese ‘re-education’ camps.
The Mercenary Prince
Erik Prince (AFP/FILE)
This list only details a few of Erik Prince’s ventures, and does not include an attempt by Prince to send thousands of mercenaries into Afghanistan and reform the political structure of the entire country to essentially be a colony for the United States.
However, Prince has transformed battlefields everywhere and fundamentally altered the way governments construct security apparatuses.
Iran is heavily reliant on outsourced Afghani mercenaries to be cannon fodder in the war in Syria. Russia is supplementing its own intervention into Syria with mercenaries hired by the state-backed Wagner Group who also sends troops to Ukraine. To beat back the nascent extremist group Boko Haram, Nigeria hired private, Apartheid-era security forces from South Africa to do the job.
Thanks to Erik Prince, outsourcing military and intelligence labor is now the norm.
Currently Prince appears to be under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, thanks to meetings he had arranged with a close aide to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles Islands, a place its own government explains is “the kind of place where you can have a good time away from the media.” The meeting was allegedley to set up a backchannel between Trump and Russia in order to facilitate clandestine communications.
McFate told Al Bawaba that Prince’s use of mercenaries allows countries to enter into and escalate conflicts without having to report it to their citizens; his tactic gives governments “plausible deniability” to anything that the mercenaries do.
According to Dr. P.J. Brendese, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and expert on democratic accountability, private military firms “have greater independence to exercise their own prerogatives and ‘we the people’ don’t get a say. That’s the most dangerous thing, because they’re profiting–their motivation is not God and country; their motive is money.”
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- Boston Dynamics Unveils "Terrifying" Robot That Can Run, Jump And Climb
The robot uprising is right on schedule as evidenced by Boston Dynamics’ latest “nightmare inducing” videos of their autonomous creations. In one, their humanoid robot Atlas can be seen running through a field as if in hot pursuit of John Connor, while another video shows “spot mini” prancing around – going up and down stairs, ominously.
“During the autonomous run, SpotMini uses data from the cameras to localize itself in the map and to detect and avoid obstacles,” reads the video description.
“Once the operator presses ‘GO’ at the beginning of the video, the robot is on its own.”
This can’t be good…
And after suffering years of abuse at the hands of Boston Dynamics engineers, one wonders exactly what sentient future robots will think when they see this:
Anyway Boston dynamics is terrifying and we’re all gonna die pic.twitter.com/I33Comdi54
— Sally Kuchar📚📬☕️👩🏻💻💋 (@sallykuchar) May 11, 2018
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This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams… https://t.co/0MYNixQXMw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 26, 2017
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Even Boston Dynamics founder, Marc Raibert, admitted that the robots are creepy in a February 2017 demonstration of a wheeled robot, saying “This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot if you’re anything like me.“
The company was sold by Google to Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank for an undisclosed sum last year, and has not revealed its plans. Needless to say, Japan is now making robots that may or may not be able to be equipped with shoulder-mounted lasers and miniguns, and are most definitely kamikaze.
Dear Boston Dynamics – do you want the Matrix? Because this is how you get the Matrix.
- We're All Trespassers Now In The Face Of The Government's Land Grabs
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
We have no real property rights.
Think about it.
That house you live in, the car you drive, the small (or not so small) acreage of land that has been passed down through your family or that you scrimped and saved to acquire, whatever money you manage to keep in your bank account after the government and its cronies have taken their first and second and third cut…none of it is safe from the government’s greedy grasp.
At no point do you ever have any real ownership in anything other than the clothes on your back.
Everything else can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, public interest, etc.).
The American Dream has been reduced to a lease arrangement in which we are granted the privilege of endlessly paying out the nose for assets that are only ours so long as it suits the government’s purposes.
And when it doesn’t suit the government’s purposes? Watch out.
This is not a government that respects the rights of its citizenry or the law. Rather, this is a government that sells its citizens to the highest bidder and speaks to them in a language of force.
Under such a fascist regime, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declares that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” has become yet another broken shield, incapable of rendering any protection against corporate greed while allowing the government to justify all manner of “takings” in the name of the public good.
Practically anything goes now.
Relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, entire neighborhoods have been seized and bulldozed to make way for shopping malls, sports complexes and corporate offices.
Indeed, little has prevented the government from bulldozing its way through the Fifth Amendment in an effort to take from the middle and lower classes and fatten the coffers of the corporate elite.
For instance, consider the government’s pipeline projects.
All across the country, power companies have been given the green light to build massive gas and oil pipelines that crisscross the country, cutting through private and public lands, as well as unspoiled wilderness.
“Yet despite oft-repeated claims by politicians and oil executives about the danger of relying on foreign oil, this U.S. petroleum renaissance never was designed to make America energy self-sufficient,” points out journalist Sandy Tolan. “A growing amount of that oil will end up in China, Japan, the Netherlands, even Venezuela.”
So much for the public use, huh?
These pipeline projects which are getting underway in a dozen states have stirred up a hornet’s nest of protests. Not all of the protests that have arisen in response to these pipeline projects hinge on environmental concerns.
Some of the protesters are landowners, simple farmers and homeowners who merely want the government and its corporate partners-in-crime to keep their grubby paws off their personal property.
In Virginia, for instance, activists have taken to tree sitting—living for weeks on end in platforms suspended above the ground in trees—as a form of protest over the devastation that is being wrought by these pipelines.
These acts of civil disobedience come at a costly price.
Pipeline and forestry officials have been working hard to make life as difficult as possible for the protesters, allegedly blocking their access to food and water and medical supplies, shining floodlights into the trees at all hours of the night, creating ground disturbances to dislodge their nests, and urging the courts to levy heavy fines for each day that the work to clear the forests for the pipeline is delayed.
Here’s what one resident of Roanoke, Va., wrote to me about the manner in which the Mountain Valley Pipeline is being inflicted on his community:
Our small community has been invaded by private security and a fully militarized local police department. Mountain Valley Pipeline has begun cutting trees and has brought in private military contractors similar to what was used in North Dakota. They are basically using the power of government to steal this land for private profit. The residents and land owners of Bent Mountain now find themselves subject to arrest for walking in their own driveway, taking pictures of the pipeline companies ever-changing survey lines and path of destruction, or in more than one case, for confronting MASKED ARMED MEN ON THEIR PROPERTY IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. One of my neighbors was accosted on his own back porch by police for photographing the MVP surveyors continually moving the corridor of their easement. I have even had armed private security trespassing on my property miles away in neighboring Floyd County.
It takes a lot of gall to trespass onto someone’s private property, tear up their land, cut down their trees, pollute their air and water, prevent them from moving freely on their own property, threaten them with fines and arrests for challenging the intrusion, and then force them to pay (by way of taxes) to retain ownership of the property or sell it cheaply or at a loss so it can be torn down and used for some purpose that the government deems more beneficial to its bottom line.
That’s how little respect the government has for our rights.
Unfortunately, American taxpayers have become trespassers on their own property thanks to the government’s ongoing land grabs and utter disregard for property rights.
More than 200 years after early Americans went to war over their right to life, liberty and property, “we the people” have been reduced to little more than serfs in bondage, indentured servants, and sharecroppers. And the lines between private and public property have been so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant in bondage to an inflexible landlord.
So where does that leave us?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the battle to protect our private property has become the final constitutional frontier, the last holdout against our freedoms being usurped.
After all, the American dream is about gaining sovereignty over one’s life and property. Without this sovereignty – this unshakeable guarantee of ownership and dominion, even over one’s own life – there can be no true liberty or freedom.
- Meanwhile, At A Bar In Tehran…
- The 2017 Statistics Just Came Out… And The "War On Cops" Is Officially A Myth
Authored Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.com,
Though right-wing commentators continue to decry the ‘war on cops,’ the latest data released by the country’s top law enforcement undermines that alarmist narrative.
According to the FBI’s annual Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report, released this week, there were fewer police deaths in 2017 than in 2016. In 2016, 118 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty while in 2017, that number was 93.
More telling is the type of death the officers suffered. Last year, 46 officers were killed “feloniously” on the job while 47 died in accidents. As the FBI’s press release noted, “Both numbers have decreased from 2016, during which 66 officers were feloniously killed and 52 were accidentally killed, for a total of 118 line-of-duty deaths.”
The data is collected from “local, state, tribal, campus, and federal law enforcement agencies from around the country, as well as organizations that track officer deaths.”
A closer look at the statistics reveals further just how nonexistent the war on cops actually is. Of the 46 officers feloniously killed on the job, five were ambushed (defined as “entrapment/premeditation” by the FBI) and 3 were victims of unprovoked attacks. Twenty-one died during “investigative or enforcement activities,” which include traffic stops, investigating suspicious persons, or tactical situations.
In other words, they were killed doing the jobs they signed up to do (consider the popular refrain that ‘cops risk their lives’ — that’s part of the job description), though police officer does not even crack the top ten most dangerous jobs in the United States.
The takeaway here is that while some officers die on the job – and that is unfortunate – the deliberate sentiment to kill officers simply because they are police officers is not on the rise.
Thirty-five officers died in car accidents — more than four times the number killed by ambushes and unprovoked attacks (eight) — and according to the FBI, “of the 29 officers killed in automobile accidents, 12 were wearing seatbelts, and 15 were not,” though two of the officers not wearing seatbelts were sitting in parked cars. Regardless, more officers died in car accidents while not wearing seatbelts (a violation of the laws they enforce, as it happens) than died as a result of flagrant attacks on their lives isolated from situational circumstances.
Further, the total number of officers killed by accident far dwarfs the number killed in ambushes or unprovoked attacks, and the total is still greater than all law enforcement deaths recorded in the annual report.
Further still, the number of cops killed feloniously was higher in 2016, 2014, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009 than it was last year, suggesting the rate of cop murders is subject to fluctuation and not consistently on the rise.
In another relevant detail, zero federal law enforcement agents were killed in 2017. In 2016, one was killed.
Despite the ongoing claims that police are under assault (as they continue to assault the public) — and despite congressional action to designate killing police officers a hate crime — for yet another year, this war on cops notion is proving to be nothing more than a myth.
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