What is the Difference Between Gilad Shalit and Avera Mengistu? One is White the other is Black

How Hamas got to capture Avera Mengistu and the circumstances surrounding it we do not know.  What we do know is that Hamas have captured another Israeli.  We also know, from the war crimes committed by Israel during Operation Protective Edge, when they literally flattened whole neighbourhoods in Rafah to kill their own soldier, Hadar Goldin, that they are determined, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive to prevent a repeat of the of Gilad Shalit, which resulted in the release of over a thousand prisoners (many reimprisoned) in exchange for him, even if it means killing the Israeli prisoner.

What we don't however expect is for Wikipedia to follow the lead of Israeli Wikipedia and meekly bow to Israeli censorship and a gag order that prevents people even knowing that there is a Gag Order in place.

The Poison Pill of Israeli, and Wikipedia Censorship

by Richard Silverstein on July 1, 2015

in Jews & Judaism, Mideast Peace

Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, IDF chief censor

One of the most interesting aspects of the Israeli national security state is the IDF military censor and the ways in which it stymies the free flow of ideas and information within Israeli society.  Unlike in the U.S., where the NSA and the covert side of the CIA operate in almost total secrecy (except when someone like Edward Snowden comes along), Israel is a place more uncertain and anxious about such things.  There the military censor even publicly addresses criticism of her role.  Not because she wants to (I would argue), but because the military constantly feels the need to justify the restrictions it places on Israelis and the sacrifices it forces them to accept.  One of the ten most powerful armies in the world has an inferiority complex that compels it to self-justify.

That explains a speech delivered by Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil at a conference on intelligence and special operations sponsored by the magazine, Israel Defense.  Her remarks were, as you might expect, self-serving, solipsistic and even racist.  She claims that she has developed an “innovative” set of censorship guidelines that are “responsive” to modern times.  I’ll let you be the judge after you finish reading her wit and wisdom here:

“Israel is a democratic, liberal, western society which protects its secrets through means which are draconian and at times even self-contradictory. 

We are a civilian society in which there is a critical public debate [about intelligence matters] and it’s difficult to maintain censorship and prevent the publication of secret material.  Today, a guy sees a terror attack from his balcony and sends a photo to the newspaper–how can we control that? 

…We in the military censor’s unit don’t hide information.  We protect information which is critical [to our defense] in terms of our enemies.  They don’t have the same abilities we do.  They don’t have Unit 8200 [Israel’s NSA].  They don’t have a Jewish brain.  Therefore the enemy relies to a great extent on publicly accessible information.  We, in the context of our democratic debate, offer a great deal of basic accessible information: the test succeeded or failed, budgets, order of battle, weapons, who guards what, technological developments.  We in the censor unit aren’t suited to stop it all.  We can only prevent [publication of] that which poses certain danger to national security…When I retire I won’t write a book because it can’t possibly pass military censorship.”

Of course the censor “hides” information.  Nor does it only hide information which might damage national security.  It censors information that might damage the reputation of the IDF or its senior officers.  Such behavior equates the army with the state (“l’etat, c’est moi“).

As an aside, I’m pleased to say that Vaknin-Gil views me as a thorn in her side and publicly made light of my work and the role I play in combatting Israeli censorship.

The real shocker in the above passage is Vaknin-Gil’s portrayal of Unit 8200 as a product of the Jewish mind.  It’s like saying the NSA is a product of the American mind.  I suppose in some ghoulish way you could argue that America’s technological sophistication enabled the creation of the frightening tools the NSA devised to spy on all of us.  But even if that’s the case, is this cause for celebration?

Only an army officer living in a non-democratic state could celebrate the army’s ability to spy on both its enemies and its own citizens as an extraordinary national achievement.  I should correct myself here since she doesn’t portray Unit 8200 as a product of Israel, but of Jewishness.  The term I translated as “Jewish brain” derives from the Yiddish, Yiddishe kop.  The term has a distinctly proud ring to it, and boasts of “Jewish genius” with an air of superiority.  What’s ironic about her choice of term is that she doesn’t celebrate the “Israeli brain,” because there is no Israeli or Hebrew equivalent for yiddishe kop.  That means Israel’s lethal espionage capabilities as represented by Unit 8200 become a proud Jewish achievement.

I for one want nothing to do with Unit 8200 as product of Judaism or Jewish identity.  This is once again a distortion introduced by Zionist ideology which deliberately conflates Israel with Jewishness.  There is nothing Jewish about signals intelligence.

Speaking of Unit 8200 as a product of Jewish genius, I note that I published a scoop in 2014 identifying the commander of Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Ehud Schneerson, as a distant relative of the Lubavitcher rebbe.  No doubt he earned his position due to his distinguished yichus and yiddishe kop!

Further, the idea that IDF intelligence capabilities somehow derive from Israel’s national genius is also troubling and racist.  The only reason Israel has such advanced capabilities is that it has made this a national priority since it’s founding.  Any Arab state which had done the same would have made the same achievements Israel did.  In fact, Iran is late to this game but shows every sign of being able, within a reasonably short period of time, to compete credibly with Israel in this field.  When it reaches this level there will be some Iranian censor boasting that the IRG’s intelligence units are a product of “Iranian genius.”

It’s all a bunch of malarkey foisted on nations by insecure generals who need to justify their own positions, influence and power.

Censored Wikipedia article on Avera Mengistu

Vaknin-Gil conveniently omitted another important element of Israeli opacity when it comes to national security.  If the censor doesn’t prohibit publication of sensitive material or information, the security services have another powerful tool: the gag order.  They go to a cooperative judge (usually judges who were IDF lawyers or worked for the security apparatus) and get a gag order which determines that publication of facts or information would either damage an investigation or the national security.

A perfect example of this is the case of Avera Mengistu, the Israeli-Ethiopian citizen who entered Gaza just after last summer’s war and has been detained there since then.  I was the first journalist to publish this story and did so in Mint Press News.  No Israeli publication may do so.  There is not just a gag order on this story.  There is a comprehensive gag order meaning that the media not only may not refer to Mengistu, but they may not even say there is a gag order in place preventing them from reporting the story.  It’s the most draconian form of judicial censorship of the media.

I’ve speculated in Mint Press about why Israel is so skittish about Mengistu’s story.  First, there is an element of racism involved.  Gilad Shalit was Ashkenazi and white.  Mengistu is Ethiopian and black.  Ethiopian-Israelis have little power in society.  They are second or third-class citizens akin to Israeli Palestinian citizens.  If Israel doesn’t have to acknowledge Mengistu it won’t; because doing so empowers Hamas to demand a high price for his return.  The truth is that Mengistu isn’t worth anything to the Israeli government, so it gags any reference to him.  Speaking his name will force its hand.

Israeli Ethiopians at Tel Aviv rally against racism wearing T-shirts with Avera Mengistu’s name and a question mark, a clear act of rebellion against the Israeli gag order on his case

In a related matter, an Israeli Wikipedia editor read my Mint Press story and created an article about Mengistu.  The censored article is displayed here (and as a Word doc here), the Talk page for the article, which was also deleted, is archived here.  Within a short time, an Israeli former reader and commenter at this blog who was banned (while here he used various nicknames, itself a comment rule violation, ‘dude,’ ‘journalist,’ and ‘tankist’) began a campaign to eliminate the Wikipedia entry.  At first he did this anonymously.  When I called him on this he began using the Wikipedia identity, kigelim.  I also noted he had a self-interest in censoring the article because he’d been banned from this blog.  Those participating in the Talk page for the article refused to acknowledge this fact as legitimate.

His first argument was that the article violated Wikipedia standards for journalistic credibility.  However, Mint Press is a respected online publication with high journalistic standards.  He never gave up on this argument. But other ones were developed as well.  Another group of editors claimed falsely that I’d authored the article using a different Wikipedia identity (sockpuppetry).  When I disproved this claim, they regrouped, beginning a campaign among fellow pro-Israel Wikipedia editors to delete the article.  There are internal pro-Israel Wikipedia discussion groups and kigelim alerted them to the article and they pounced on it.   Interestingly, an editor is not permitted to mount a public (i.e. outside of Wikipedia) campaign on behalf of editorial decisions.  But internal lobbying among Wikipedia groups and editors is perfectly acceptable.  A vote was held and those seeking deletion won.

In this way, pro-Israel elements working within Wikipedia achieved precisely the same outcome that Israeli censorship does inside that country.  They silenced a key world information source which is supposed to be open and accessible to all regardless of political or ideological belief.  They turned Wikipedia into a playground in which all the worst excesses of Israeli paranoia and anti-democratic tendencies are found.  They perverted this fabulous resource and imposed the worst excesses of Israel-style censorship.  Fools like these cheapen Wikipedia and betray its mission.

UPDATE: Kigelim has now threatened to report me to a “Wikipedia committee” and get me blocked from participating in Wikipedia unless I “apologize” to the “community” for my “baseless allegations.”  Actually, if he has the power to initiate such a proceeding I’d welcome it.  So bring it on.

UPDATE I: Poor Kugelmass (aka kigelim), tried to harrass me on Wikipedia and got shut down so quick his head spun.  And further, he was accused of being a “single-purpose account” created to stalk me.  Try again, buddy.  Oh, and I’m sorry your “butt hurts” (in joke, you have to read the link).

When Mengistu is finally released (this will take much longer thanks to the draconian impact of Israeli censorship and pro-Israel editors in Wikipedia), then the article will be restored and the naysayers will be exposed for the prejudiced pro-Israelists they are.

Last week, Israeli-Ethiopians protested against Israeli racism.  One of the chants heard in the crowd was the name of Avera Mengistu and another Ethiopian who was killed in a police beating.  Israeli and Wikipedia may silence the truth.  But you can’t silence an entire ethnic group when it knows it’s getting the shaft.

Israeli Government Abandons Ethiopian-Israeli Reportedly Held Captive In Gaza

Indeed, Israel has completely abandoned its responsibilities for almost all African refugees under international humanitarian law. But should that come as any surprise?

By Richard Silverstein | June 2, 2015

In this Friday, June 27, 2014 file photo, African migrants clash with Israeli soldiers after they left Holot detention center in southern Israel and walked towards the Border with Egypt near the southern Israeli Kibbutz of Nitzana.

In October 2014, just after Operation Protective Edge ended, an Israeli Facebook friend of mine reported a rumor that an Ethiopian-Israeli citizen crossed into Gaza and was detained there. The next day I confirmed the truth of the story through an independent Israeli source. Here is what I wrote then:

“An Israeli-Ethiopian from Ashkelon crossed the border into Gaza several weeks ago.  The man was allegedly mentally ill and no one knows what drove him to do this. He is being held by authorities in Gaza. Israel has placed a gag order on the incident and the media may not report it. His family has been told not to speak to the media as this might endanger him by raising his profile, though I’d venture to guess that the real reason is that it would embarrass the Israeli government and raise his value in a prisoner exchange.”

Smoke rises following what witnesses said were Israeli air strikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. (Reuters)

Another rumor was that he’d been swimming off the southern coast and a strong current had taken him from Israeli waters to Gaza. Once there, he was reportedly picked up by a vehicle, presumably security officials, and driven away. He hasn’t been seen since.

Hamas offered further circumstantial evidence via a billboard it erected in Gaza which featured images of Oron Shaul, an Israeli Defense Forces soldier, who Israel claims was killed during the war. Shaul’s image is displayed behind bars, indicating that Hamas claims he is alive. Another interesting feature on the billboard is an avatar with a question mark, which indicates Hamas claims it has a mystery captive, which points to the Ethiopian-Israeli.

The Hamas billboard alluding to the detention of Avera Mengistu (the picture next to Shaul Oron’s with a question mark)

Back in October, I tried diligently to follow up on this story without success. But an Israeli published an anonymous comment on my blog last week, naming the captive Ethiopian-Israeli as “Avera Mangisto.” I broadcast this name — probably more likely spelled “Mengistu” in English — via social media, asking if members of the Ethiopian community could confirm it. “O.” did so on Facebook. I asked her if she could help me contact the man’s family. We both did, and she succeeded in interviewing Avera’s divorced father, Aylin, and his brother, Netan’el.

Aylin was more willing to talk. He was saddened and frustrated by the experience. He’d almost lost all hope. Netan’el, after some halting discussions, refused to speak. He directed us not to contact his father either. But before we reached this impasse, O. held several conversations with both of them. They each confirmed that Avera, who is age 24, is being held by the authorities in Gaza.

Facebook photo of detainee Avera Mengistu.

The government instructed the family to remain silent on the matter. Officials told them they were doing everything possible to return him, yet they appear to have done little or nothing. O. said the government “brainwashed” them into believing it was doing something. She added that if Avera were “white” — her term — Israel would have treated him as it did Gilad Shalit, the Ashkenazi Jew for whom Israel exchanged 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

There is also a gag order on the story, which prohibits Israeli media from covering it. Even some Ethiopian journalists refused to speak with me, concerned about their own vulnerability in Israeli society.

Ethiopian Jews at anti-racism rally with Mengistu tee shirts and a question mark

Yesterday, for example, Haaretz quoted Israeli and Hamas officials denying that German foreign minister Franz Steinmeier was once again negotiating for a prisoner exchange which would return the remains of IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin to Israel.  Not a word in this story about an actual live Israeli held in Gaza.  The pernicious gag prohibits it.

This secrecy serves the interests of the Israeli government, but not the interests of the victim. If the public knew about this, they might demand the state do all in its power to free him — which would certainly include the exchange of Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli far-right detests freeing Palestinians it considers terrorists with “blood on their hands.” Whenever the government has freed such prisoners, the extremists have pummeled the ruling Likud party.  Netanyahu wishes to avoid this at all costs. And it is far easier to avoid such a situation when the prisoner is Ethiopian, since neither the government nor the public cares as much as it would for a Jewish Israeli prisoner.

The issue of prisoner exchange is indeed so fraught that Israel has instituted the Hannibal Directive, which calls for the army to kill its own soldiers when they are captured alive by Hamas in battle. The IDF would rather murder its own soldiers than have to give up 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to secure the return of a single live Israeli. This controversial policy was invoked several times during Operation Protective Edge.

I twice emailed Israel’s official negotiator assigned to secure the release of prisoners (dead or alive), Col. Lior Lotan, for a response to questions I posed to him about the negotiations. As of press time, I had not heard back from him. I tweeted to Paul Hirschson, a foreign ministry official, asking for help in identifying the Israeli official responsible for these talks. Instead of answering my question, he replied that Hadar Goldin had been buried, implying falsely that Israel was only negotiating about the return of what he called “some body parts.” A second MFA official, Eyal Lampert, whose profile claims he works at the foreign affairs ministry’s “Japan and Korea desk,” said the ministry didn’t pay him enough to deal with “twits [sic] like mine.” He added that neither he nor Hirschson works for “costumer [sic] services.” With such quality staff, it’s easy to understand why Israel’s reputation is what it is in the world.

Operation Solomon as hasbara

African refugees sit on the ground behind a border fence after they attempted to cross from Egypt into Israel as Israeli soldiers stand guard near the border with Egypt, in southern Israel.

Israel “rescued” thousands of Ethiopians in 1991 and brought them to Zion in Operation Solomon. While the nation basked in the good publicity generated by such a rescue, the reality on the ground was much different. Israel’s chief rabbi did recognize the Ethiopians (known at that time as Falashas) as Jewish, but they were treated little better than Palestinian-Israeli citizens. As polls of Jewish Israelis confirm, racist attitudes toward Palestinians, Mizrahim and Ethiopians are the norm.

Recently, an IDF soldier was walking the streets of Tel Aviv with his bicycle when he was accosted by a private security guard and a police officer. They ripped his bicycle from his hands and assaulted him in broad daylight despite the fact that he was wearing an IDF uniform. Video of the attack was major news on national TV. The country was embarrassed. It would not be unusual for an Ethiopian to be assaulted by the police, but an Ethiopian in an IDF uniform? That trespassed social norms. The police officer was fired from the force and faces a criminal charge — an unusual example of anti-African racism being firmly rejected.

A decade ago, Gabriel Dawit, an Ethiopian-Israeli, drowned, either accidentally or as a suicide in the aftermath of the suicide of his brother, off Nahariya on the northern coast. His body later washed up on the Lebanese coast and was retrieved by Hezbollah. Though the IDF Directorate of Military Intelligence and other security agencies knew this, for three years they didn’t tell the family. The family sued the state, demanding a $500,000 settlement for the suffering inflicted on them. Israel eventually agreed to pay $50,000.

Israel advocates will point out that Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, Miss Israel 2013, is an Ethiopian woman, who is proud of her country and participated in hasbara activities, even re-joining the IDF so she could participate in Operation Protective Edge on the international stage. But tokenism is not the same as true equality, which Ethiopians do not enjoy.

Israel violates international refugee protocols regarding African refugees

A Sudanese refugee family sit on the ground surrounded by Israeli army soldiers after they crossed illegally from Egypt into Israel. The Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011, to finance a $160 million program designed to staunch the flow of illegal African migrants into Israel by stepping up construction of a border fence and expanding a detention center to hold thousands of the new arrivals. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Israel also has 60,000 African refugees, who fled civil wars, famine and genocide in countries like Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia. Unlike the Ethiopians I mentioned above, the former do not have citizenship. In fact, Israel has refused to even offer them rights reserved for refugees under international law. Until recently, there was no provision for hearing asylum requests, and only 45 (.07 percent) such requests have been granted out of thousands of applications to date.

Recently, in violation of international protocols, Israel told many of these individuals that they must agree to “voluntary” deportation (there is a $3,500 “inducement” to agree to leave) or face imprisonment in Saharonim, a prison for violators of immigration laws. Haaretz has been reporting extensively on the plight of those who agree to deportation. These deportees are flown on a plane to Rwanda, whose dictator, Paul Kagame, agreed to accept them in return for economic assistance and arms deals that likely facilitate the genocide in neighboring Congo.

Four such Eritrean refugees from Israel, who were sent to Rwanda, ended up in Libya and were beheaded in the now-infamous Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beach executions.  Their relatives remaining in Israel confirmed both their departure and their execution, after watching the horrific video.

Galia Sabar, a Tel Aviv University professor, traveled to the African countries that receive these refugees and researched their living conditions and fate. Her findings, published in Haaretz, reveal that Rwanda has appointed someone who is essentially a smuggler who receives the names of deportees arriving at the Kigali airport from Israeli police. He meets them at the airport, drives them to a guesthouse, tells them they may not leave it, and eventually spirits them out of the country — all the while, taking a cut of all proceeds of their expenses and hiring new smugglers who take them across the Rwandan border into neighboring Sudan.

The refugees have no legal status in Uganda. They live there in squalor, paying hundreds of dollars per month for a rented room or more for a room in a private residence. Such expenses quickly eat up that bribe that Israel provided to persuade them to leave. For obvious reasons, many of these people see Europe as their next hope for refuge, which was how the Eritreans ended up in Libya.

Israel has totally abandoned its responsibilities for these individuals under international humanitarian law. Not that international law is a principle Israel respects in any event.

Richard Silverstein has published the Tikun Olam since 2003. It exposes the secrets and misdeeds of the Israeli national security state. He lives in Seattle.

Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue

The Lies of Imperialism Feed the Rise of Fascism

By John Pilger

 Activists of the far-right Ukrainian Svoboda party. 'In the recent elections [it] fell only 0.3% short of the required minimum of 5%' required to enter parliament. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

February 27, 2015 "ICH" - 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 consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their 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.

Obama and friend

"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "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. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and 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 surreal theatre known as news.

Andriy Biletsky, in black T-shirt, commander of Ukraine's Azov battalion (Tom Parfitt)

Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.

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 killed] were under the age of ten".

Fascist gang in Ukraine

The public sodomising 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." 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, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

Fighters of the Azov battalion say farewell to their first comrade to die in the war against
Russia-backed rebels (Tom Parfitt)

This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be "a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda". Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato's inferno, described by David Cameron as a "humanitarian intervention".

Secretly supplied and trained by Britain's SAS, many of the "rebels" would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.

Phantom, 23, a fighter in the Azov battalion, outside its HQ in the Ukrainian seaside town of Urzuf Photo: Tom Parfitt

For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi's true crime was Libya's economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa's greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. 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".

The Azov battalion uses the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf''s Hook) symbol on its banner (Tom Parfitt)

Following Nato's attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, "confiscated $30 billion 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 "humanitarian war" against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 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 [sic], 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". 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.

 converted truck with steel shutters used by the Azov battalion and known to the fighters as 'the Lump of Iron' (Tom Parfitt)

With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia's infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the "holocaust". 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 the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The "holocaust" was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.

Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had 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 newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. 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 recognise 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 imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer's duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation - and the implementation of a "free-market economy" and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.

Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - 69 countries - have suffered some or 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 and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as "sanctions". The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was 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. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (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. The majority have been killed - civilians and soldiers - during Obama's time as president.

The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and 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... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He is right. 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, demonstrated 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 in 1978. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, 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 female surgeon, "could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin 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."

The PDPA 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 the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the "threat of a promising example".

On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal "fundamentalist" groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that "the United States' larger interests... would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." The italics are mine.

The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin 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. Invited to 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 "destabilise" 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. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The 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". Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah - who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help - 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. The enforcer's message was and remains: "You are with us or against us."

The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its "free fire zones", "body counts" and "collatoral 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. 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. 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; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each "hit" is registered on a faraway console screen as a "bugsplat".

"For goose-steppers," wrote the historian Norman Pollock, "substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while."

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being," said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, "The sovereign is he who decides the exception." This sums up Americanism, the world's dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily 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 had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. 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 this year for his movie, 'American Sniper', which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a "patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days".

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, 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 safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the "father" of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.

In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in 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".

This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has 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. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington 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. 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 opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as "the minister for defeatism". It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading "neo-con" luminary and 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. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia's historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea - illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev 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 cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege 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". 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 the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.

These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine - a third of the population - have long sought a federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not "separatists" but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous "states" are a reaction to Kiev's attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.

On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as "another bright day in our national history". In the American and British media, this was reported as a "murky tragedy" resulting from "clashes" between "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) and "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).

The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington's new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims - "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Obama congratulated the junta for its "restraint".

If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine's top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: "The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army". There were "individual citizens" who were members of "illegal armed groups", but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev's Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for "full scale war" with nuclear-armed Russia.

On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell's fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America's most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, "No European government, since Adolf Hitler's Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West's media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established... If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason."

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack... In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons." In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. "Putin must be stopped," said the headline. "And sometimes only guns can stop guns." He conceded that the threat of war might "nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement"; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that "America has the best kit".

In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, "has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones." He lauded Blair as a "Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist". In 2006, he wrote, "Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran."

The outbursts - or as Garton-Ash prefers, his "tortured liberal ambivalence" - are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash's piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: "The F-35. GREAT For Britain". This American "kit" will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.

Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev's new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas "investment". She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden's son is on the board of Ukraine's biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine's rich farming soil.

Above all, they want Ukraine's mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia's long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country's economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.

The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.