Afghanistan & the Taliban – The Return of America’s Frankenstein as another failed state beckons

 If the plight of Afghanistan’s women was of concern to the US & NATO then it would have backed the PDPA from 1978-1992 instead of the Mojahedeen

There is only one conclusion to be drawn from the United States’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and it is one that the pundits and imperialists are reluctant to draw. The NATO occupation of Afghanistan and its puppet regime hadvirtually no support from Afghans. 

Lindisfarne and Neale describe how the Taliban in 2001 were overwhelmingly Pashtuns and their politics was Pashtun chauvinists. In 2021 Taliban fighters of many ethnicities have taken power in Uzbek and Tajik dominated areas. They also describe a situation in 2001 in which

‘for two years there was no resistance to the American occupation. None, in any village. Many thousands of former Taliban remained in those villages.’

In 2001 the US invasion was conducted in concert with the Northern Alliance of warlords operating from Mazar-i-Sharif. Today Mazar-i-Sharif has also fallen.  The Northern Alliance is no more.

The United States had no opposition in the first two years and yet it failed in its declared aim to rebuild Afghan society. Instead it preferred to wage a drone war against the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan.

Another Scuttle

However according to the BBC and media the only conclusion to draw would be that the United States and NATO spent over $2 trillion trying to introduce democracy, women’s rights and civilisation to Afghanistan.  Unfortunately the Afghans, primitive savages that they are, prefer medieval Islam, cutting off hands and stoning of women. There are also some at home, like 5 Pillars, who are quite happy to echo this nonsense by singing the praise of sharia law and theocracy.

We should be under no illusions that an Islamic state under Sharia law will be a repressive and corrupt state. Those who rule will use religion to legitimise the oppression of Afghani workers and peasants. Such a regime will inevitably be a racist regime.

The purpose of the Western invasion was not to introduce democracy nor was it about the ‘war against terror’. The United States and its friend Saudi Arabia proved that when it backed jihadists in Syria and Libya, arming them to the teeth. It was about imperial control of the vast mineral resources of Afghanistan, (to which they look like losing out to the Chinese), an oil pipeline crossing it and above all about controlling a country occupying a strategic place between the Middle East and Asia. Afghanistan is bordered by Iran, Pakistan, China as well as 3 former Russian republics.

A Brief History of Afghanistan

Imperialism has never managed to control and occupy Afghanistan. The British fought 3 wars - 1839-42, 1878-1880 and finally 1919 when they finally gave up. Amanullah,  who became King, was a liberal reformer influenced by the emerging nationalist and modernist movements of the day. However with British subversion of southern tribes he was exiled in 1928 and there followed a period of stagnation.

In 1973 Amir Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud, with the support of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]. Afghanistan became a republic. This led to the growth of a small Islamic movement led by figures such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud. As Jane Challice wrote:

In 1978, Iranian followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini moved into Herat. Marxist army officers used this as an opportunity to overthrew Daud and installed a communist regime, which immediately moved to speed up the process of modernisation, demanding secular co-education and land reform. As part of the cold war strategy to weaken the Soviet Union, Jimmy Carter’s administration began covertly funding the Islamic opposition with the help of the Pakistani secret services, the ISI.

You would never guess from the coverage in the media that when the PDPA came to power in a coup in April 1978 the US supported the Mujahideen, the precursors of the Taliban.  The PDPA attempted to

replace religious and traditional laws with secular and Marxist–Leninist ones. Men were obliged to cut their beards, women could not wear a chador, and mosques were placed off limits. The PDPA made a number of reforms on women's rights, banning forced marriages and giving state recognition of women's right to vote. A prominent example was Anahita Ratebzad, .. a member of the Revolutionary Council (who) wrote the famous New Kabul Times editorial (May 28, 1978) which declared: "Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country ... Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention." The PDPA also carried out socialist land reforms and moved to promote state atheism. They also prohibited usury.

Unfortunately the PDPA employed mass terror itself. The base of the PDPA was in the cities and amongst the military and middling peasants. A reaction set in led by the war lords and landowners. Who did the West back? The Islamic fundamentalists.

The Taliban leaders

It was United States ally, Pakistan’s ISI which, from 1994 onwards, created the Taliban from the madrassah (religious schools) on the border with Afghanistan. Up to a third of their fighters were Pakistani themselves as well as thousands of Arabs and other Islamic fighters.

The US sponsored war against the Russians and the PDPA in Afghanistan was an integral part of the cold war against the USSR. The same had happened in Iran. As the BBC reported although in the official Iranian narrative of the revolution Ayatollah Khomeini defied the United States and defeated "the Great Satan" in reality, as newly declassified US government documents revealed,

Khomeini was far more engaged with the US than either government has ever admitted. Far from defying America, the ayatollah courted the Carter administration, sending quiet signals that he wanted a dialogue and then portraying a potential Islamic Republic as amenable to US interests.

The US tried, unsuccessfully, to engineer an international boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 in retaliation for the Russian decision to invade Afghanistan in support the PDPA the previous year.

Timothy Dalton as James Bond (left) with the West's Islamic heroes

That bell weather of imperialist politics, James Bond, even put out a film Living Daylights in which Timothy Dalton plays the role of a latter day Lawrence of Arabia.  The Mujahideen were noble savages. Strangely enough this is the one Bond film that the BBC never shows in repeats!

Timothy Dalton as a Lawrence of Arabia figure in James Bond

For the next 10 years the CIA funded thousands of Mujahideen fighters waging war against the Soviet occupation. In 1989 the USSR which was itself collapsing withdrew. The PDPA government lasted, unlike the United States’s puppet regime today, for a further 3 years. As Nick Wright observed in the Morning Star:

The present Taliban leadership have learned from their predecessors. During the 1989 fighting, when a mojahedin offensive which initially seized Jalalabad airport saw the insurgents defeated by fighting between the contending jihadi factions, the Afghan army proved its operational efficiency.

The Hezb-e Islami faction led by the CIA’s most favoured commander, the murderous and perennially treacherous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, infamous for throwing acid in women’s faces, had slaughtered fleeing civilians and surrendered Afghan soldiers which stiffened resistance and saw a strategic defeat for the mojahedin. Three years earlier Hekmatyar took tea with Thatcher at Number 10.

By the time that the USSR withdrew there had been 1.5 million deaths and an estimated 2 million refugees. In April 1992 rebel commander General Dostum and his Uzbek militias entered Kabul, arrested and executed Najibullah, the then ruler. Rabbani was installed as president, with Ahmed Shah Massoud as defence minister. However the Afghan war lords began waging war on each other. In November 1994 the Taliban captured Khandahar and in 1996 they captured Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan bar the Northern Alliance areas.

Within 10 days of 9/11 George Bush announced Operation Enduring Freedom the US began funding the Northern Alliance. Within 3 months the Taliban were ousted and John Simpson from the BBC was the first to enter Kabul in a British tank.

During their rule the Taliban massacred at least 15,000 Hazaris, a Shi’ite Iranian minority in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. That is the answer to those idiots who claim that all will be well under Sharia Law. Sharia is the excuse used by the war lords to legitimise the plunder, pillage and rape of whole communities.

Australian SAS executes unarmed Afghan civilian

The last 20 years of US occupation have been a time of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a corrupt US imposed regime notorious for its torture and murder. There were advances for women in cities such as Kabul but in the rest of Afghanistan there was little improvement other than in girls’ education and even that was minimal.

That didn’t stop the obscene spectacle of western feminists supporting the Afghan occupation in the name of Afghani women. Presumably the drones blowing them to pieces or the American massacres of Afghanis, women included, didn’t come under the rubric of feminism. Those women who did participate in NGO schemes to support women are now being abandoned

The most infamous example of feminist imperialism was when Amnesty International – USA, under former State Department official and Clinton supporter Susan Nossel, issued a poster ‘NATO – Keep the Progress Going’. Nossell was forced to resign six months later after coming under criticism from anti-imperialist feminists. See Amnesty International USA’s Support for Afghanistan War.

That the US/NATO invasion was bound to fail is a given. There was no prospect that the United States could ‘nation build’ in Afghanistan. That is not the job of imperialism. The American occupation rested on the same warlords that the Taliban have recruited to their cause. The US was incapable of supporting a genuinely progressive regime because US imperialism is, by its very nature, exploitative and repressive. Corruption is in its DNA. That is capitalism.

The US spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan yet very little of that went to Afghanis. It was used to line the pockets of US contractors, the military and the regime itself. Ashraf Ghani, the President, was quoted as having fled with

"Four cars (were) full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,"

The US having retreated with its tail between its legs the BBC, the Establishment’s faithful lapdog, is reporting on Taliban atrocities, such as that in Jalalabad where 3 demonstrators are said to have been killed. What the BBC hasn’t done is to put this in the context of the atrocities committed by the NATO forces in the past 20 years. Little matters such as the CIA Black Prison at Bagram Airbase where prisoners were ‘disappeared’ are not considered newsworthy.

The 4 Palestinians killed last week by Israel in Jenin went unreported by the BBC. That was left to Al Jazeera. Nor did the BBC report the murder of an 11 year old boy, Mohammad Abu Sara, sitting in his father’s car. If he had been Israeli it would have been considered newsworthy.

It remains to be seen, as Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale argue, whether the Taliban have seriously changed in 20 years. Whether or not they do now represent a national movement of all Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities. What does seem clear is that their attitude to the Hazaris has not changed. Last month the Taliban murdered nine ethnic Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht.

The present scenes of chaos at Kabul Airport are testimony to the abandonment of thousands of Afghan interpreters and security for the US and British forces. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab couldn’t even be bothered to telephone his Afghan counterpart whilst on holiday.

Neo-Liberal Criticism of the Withdrawal

Already delusion neo-cons are arguing that the United States should have stayed in Afghanistan and that the blow to US credibility will destroy its reputation elsewhere. Dan Crenshaw in the Wall Street Journal argued that

‘There are many options between nation building and giving up, and we had found a good one in Afghanistan before President Biden abandoned it.’ ... The “no more endless wars” crowd ... prefer to live in a dream world rather than face the reality that our enemies are ideologically opposed to Western civilization and will gladly stage another 9/11 if they have the opportunity and means. They are at war with us whether or not we are at war with them.

In other words we are in a clash of civilisations. The United States should stay in Afghanistan despite there being no popular support for them doing so. Afghani views are considered irrelevant.

A good representative of these die-hard imperialists is Tom Tugendhat, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and a former Afghan veteran, who told the House of Commons to:

stop talking about ‘forever wars’, let’s recognise that forever peace is not bought cheaply — it is hard. It is bought through determination and the will to endure. The tragedy of Afghanistan is that we are swapping that patient achievement for a second fire and a second war.

There will of course always be those who are not reconciled to the loss of Empire. Tughendhat is just the latest version of John Bull. However what is emerging is an imperialist consensus to add Afghanistan to the list of failed and war torn states. Presumably Syria, Libya and Yemen are not sufficient.

What other explanation can there be for the decision of the United States to steal (or ‘freeze’ in the robber’s jargon) $9.5 billion of Afghan money, in addition to the IMF doing the same.

Racist politicians  like Priti Patel will rail at the refugees who come as a consequences of their wars

There is no doubt that compared to the US regime under Ashraf Ghani the Taliban is relatively honest.  At least for now. That is why they have gained support in Afghanistan. Why pretend that the Taliban is not a legitimate regime? Because the US is now following a second strategy of destabilising Afghanistan. No doubt it will soon start funding rebel warlords as part of an attempted subversion of the Taliban regime. Indeed this may have already started. This will undoubtedly cause a further refugee crisis but keeping Afghanistan unstable serves the interests of Western imperialism.

Tony Greenstein

For further reading see:

Looking back over the ruins, Jack Conrad

Another Forced Scuttle, Daniel Lazare

Afghanistan: a brief history Jane Challice

Reasons for Afghan debacles – Daniel Lazarre

THE MASSACRE IN MAZAR-I SHARIF – Human Rights Watch

Afghanistan: The end of the occupation - Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Neoconservatives seize on Afghan debacle to celebrate military force and ‘war on terror -  Phillip Weiss

Killing Field – Australian troops in Afghanistan

The war on terror is, was and will be a veil for imperialist expansion Kevin Ovenden

US intervention in Afghanistan: Justifying the Unjustifiable? Leoni Connah

A Simple Guide to the Greek Debt Crisis

A highly amusing article from Business Insider UK about the Greek Debt Crisis and how the EU deliberately engineered the crisis by taking over the debt owed to private banks onto the shoulders of European tax payers.

It is an even greater reason why the Greeks should junk the debt and leave the Euro.

Below is also my Comment article that The Argus, a local Brighton/Sussex paper prints each week.

Tony Greenstein

GREECE JUST TAUGHT CAPITALISTS A LESSON ABOUT WHAT CAPITALISM REALLY MEANS

Jim Edwards Jul. 5, 2015

REUTERS/Stefanos Rapines A man casting his ballot at a polling station at the village of Anogeia in the island of Crete, Greece, on Sunday. Greeks voted overwhelmingly against accepting a bailout proposal from Greece's creditors.

Greece has effectively voted to default on its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union, and it is a massive defeat for Germany's Angela Merkel and the trio of creditors she led that insisted there was no way out for Greece but to pay back its massive debts.

The vote is huge lesson for conservatives and anyone else who thinks this is about a dilettante government of left-wing idealists who think they can flout the law while staging some kind of Che Guevara-esque dream:

Wrong.

This is what capitalism is really about.

From the beginning, Merkel and the EU have operated from the position that because Greece took on debt, Greece now needs to pay it back. That position assumed — bizarrely, in hindsight — that debt works only one way: If you lend someone money, that money is repaid.

But that is NOT how free markets work.

Debt is not a guarantee of future payments in full. Rather, it is a risk that creditors take, in hopes of maybe being paid tomorrow.

The key word there is "risk."

If you're willing to take the risk, you'll get a premium — in the form of interest.

But the downside of that risk is that you lose your money. And Greece just called Germany's bluff.

The IMF loaned Greece 1.5 billion euros, due back in June, and Greece isn't paying it back. Greece has another 3.5 billion due to the ECB in July, and that looks really doubtful right now.

This is how capitalism works. The fact that it took a democratically elected government whose own offices are adorned with posters of Lenin, Engels, and Guevara to teach this lesson to Germany is astonishing.

More astonishing still is that Merkel et al knew Greece could not pay back this debt before these negotiations started. The IMF's own assessment of Greek debt, published just a few days ago, states: "Coming on top of the very high existing debt, these new financing needs render the debt dynamics unsustainable ..."

"Unsustainable"! Germany's own bankers knew Greece couldn't pay this back. And yet Merkel persisted.

Take a look at Greek gross domestic product. To pay back debt, you have to have a growing economy. That's a basic law of economics. It's how credit cards work. It's how mortgages work. And it is how sovereign/central-bank debt works. But Greece's economy was never in a position to benefit from debt, because it has been shrinking for years:

Goldman Sachs

There is another key fact that the Greeks are keenly aware of (but that everyone else has forgotten). 
This debt was initially owed to private-investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs. But the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB) made the suicidal decision to let those private banks transfer that debt to EU institutions and the IMF to "rescue" Greece. As Business Insider reported back in April, former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet insisted that the debt transfer take place:

The ECB president "blew up," according to one attendee. "Trichet said, 'We are an economic and monetary union, and there must be no debt restructuring!'" this person recalled. "He was shouting."

The result was that the ECB made this catastrophically stupid deal with Greece, according to our April report:

And so there was no restructuring agreed for Greece. The country paid off its immediate debts to the private financial sector — investment banks, basically — and replacement debt was laid onto European taxpayers. The government agreed to a package of harsh government spending cuts and structural reforms in exchange for loans totalling €110 billion over three years.

Trichet made a colossal, elementary mistake. The right place for risky debt by definition is in the private markets, such as Goldman. The entire point of private debt investment is that those creditors are prepared for a haircut. The risk absolutely should not be borne by central banks that rely on taxpayer money for bailouts.

Had Trichet made the opposite decision — and left the Greek debt with Goldman et al — then Sunday's vote would be a footnote rather than a headline in history. "Goldman Sachs takes a bath on Greek debt." Who cares? Goldman shareholders and clients, surely. But it would not have triggered a crisis at the heart of the EU.

Italy, Spain, and Portugal are now watching Greece closely and thinking, hey, maybe we can get out of this mess, too.

Now, before we all start singing "The Red Flag" and breaking out old videos of "The Young Ones" in celebration, let's inject a note of realism. Greece isn't actually a country full of crazy socialists who don't understand how the foreign-exchange markets work. In fact, a huge chunk of the country's tax-collection problems stem from the fact that there are two and a half times more self-employed and small-business people in Greece than there are in the average country. And small businesses are expert at avoiding tax, Greece's former tax collector told Business Insider's Mike Bird recently.

Conservatives who hate paying taxes and urge small businesses to pursue tax-avoidance strategies take note: Your dream just came true in Greece.

If Greece were more socialist — more like Germany, with its giant corporations that have massive unionised workforces paying taxes off their payrolls — then tax collection would be a lot higher in Greece.

Greece is now most likely an international pariah on the debt markets. It may have to start printing its own devalued drachma currency. It will have no access to credit. Sure, olive oil, feta, and raki will suddenly become incredibly cheap commodities on the export markets. Tourism in Greece is about to become awesome. But mostly it will be awful. Unemployment will increase as Greece's economy implodes.

But the awfulness will be Greece's alone. Greece is now on its own path. It is deciding its own fate.

There is something admirable about that.

6 mind-blowing facts about Greece's economy

Greek People Reject the Dictatorship of Merkel, the IMF and European Central Bank

Democracy not Eurobureaucracy

celebrations in Athens

Democracy - an alien concept in the EU of bankers

The vote by Greeks to reject the blackmail of the European leaders should be welcomed by any democrat.  The Greek people have said a resounding 60% NO to the bankers and speculators.  It is no surprise that our own UKIP, the ‘anti-Europe' party has been so quiet, because of course they too are led by a banker.

Burning the EU flag in Athens

On Sunday the Greek people voted, despite all the pressure put upon them, to reject the ‘offer’ of the IMF and European Central Bank.  They had been told that a no vote wouldn’t mean a revised offer but Greek ejection from the Euro zone.  Despite this blackmail Greek people have refused to accept permanent austerity, further unemployment and savage cuts to pensions.

Even the IMF has finally accepted, that Greece’s debt of €340 billion cannot be repaid and that much of it needs to be written off.  Previous bailouts have, according to Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, been “about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Greece and devastated the country.  Today democratic Germany is using the banks to achieve the same objective.  When Martin Schultz, the German ‘social democratic’ President of the European Parliament, declared that the best outcome of the Greek referendum would be a technocratic government, he gave the game away.  Europe’s banks and leaders intention is to overthrow a democratically elected government.

The weakness of Syriza and Alex Tsipras is that they have not mapped out an alternative strategy to further negotiations and the present freezing up of the economy.  What Syriza needs to do is to make it clear that unless there is a debt write off and an end to austerity, then Greece will exit the straitjacket of the Euro and go back to a devalued Drachma with all debt written off.  It’s strange that given such a clear example of the undemocratic bullying of Greece there hasn’t been a word out of UKIP.  Maybe that’s the price of being led by a banker!

Given that the Greeks  have the ability to print Euros it is surprising that they haven’t already done so!  Either way, there is no alternative other than to resist the dictatorship of Hollande, Merkel et al.  It is a great pity that Varoufakis, the Greek’s motor biking Finance Minister, has resigned.  He showed great panache and style.

Below is an interesting article presenting an alternative analysis to that of the BBC’s Robert Peston and all the other financial pundits.

Tony Greenstein 

Greece – What You are not Being Told by the Media

Woman walks by No posters

According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.

July 5, 2015  Chris Kanthan | Nation of Change | Op-Ed

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Varoufakis votes

Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.

Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers. If you remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed securities” at a huge profit to various financial entities in countries around the world.

A big enabler of this criminal activity was another branch of the banking system, the group of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such as Tony Blair got paid by Big Banks to peddle these dangerous securities to pension funds and municipalities and countries around Europe. Banks and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.

But this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. There was much more profit to be made in the next three stages!

Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!

Vultures like Goldman Sachs and other big banks profited enormously in three ways: one, they could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual for pennies on the dollar. Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and insiders such as John Paulson (who recently donated $400 million to Harvard) had made bets that these securities would blow up. Paulson made billions, and the media celebrated his acumen. (For an analogy, imagine the terrorists betting on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub salt in the wound, the big banks demanded a bailout from the very citizens whose lives the bankers had ruined! Bankers have chutzpah. In the U.S., they got hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayers and trillions from the Federal Reserve Bank which is nothing but a front group for the bankers.

In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let that sink in for a moment – the supposedly irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers.

Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have unique strategies to weaken the immune system of the host. One of the proven techniques used by the parasitic international bankers is to downgrade the bonds of a country. And that’s exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end of 2009. This immediately makes the interest rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it more and more expensive for the country to borrow money or even just roll over the existing bonds.

From 2009 to mid-2010, the yields on 10-year Greek bonds almost tripled! This cruel financial assault brought the Greek government to its knees, and the banksters won their first debt deal of a whopping 110 billion Euros.

The banks also control the politics of nations. In 2011, when the Greek prime minister refused to accept a second massive bailout, the banks forced him out of the office and immediately replaced him with the Vice President of ECB (European Central Bank)! No elections needed. Screw democracy. And what would this new guy do? Sign on the dotted line of every paperwork that the bankers bring in.

(By the way, the very next day, the exact same thing happened in Italy where the Prime Minister resigned, only to be replaced by a banker/economist puppet. Ten days later, Spain had a premature election where a banker puppet won the election).

The puppet masters had the best month ever in November 2011.

Few months later, in 2012, the exact bond market manipulation was used when the banksters turned up the Greek bonds’ yields to 50%!!! This financial terrorism immediately had the desired effect: The Greek parliament agreed to a second massive bailout, even larger than the first one.

Now, here is another fact that most people don’t understand. The loans are not just simple loans like you would get from a credit card or a bank. These are loans come with very special strings attached that demand privatization of a country’s assets. If you have seen Godfather III, you would remember Hyman Roth, the investor who was carving up Cuba among his friends. Replace Hyman Roth with Goldman Sachs or IMF (International Monetary Fund) or ECB, and you get the picture.

Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.” For the debt that was forced upon it, Greece had to sell many of its profitable assets to oligarchs and international corporations. And privatizations are ruthless, involving everything and anything that is profitable. In Greece, privatization included water, electricity, post offices, airport services, national banks, telecommunication, port authorities (which is huge in a country that is a world leader in shipping) etc. Of course, the ever-manipulative bankers always demand immediate privatization of all media which means that the country gets photogenic TV anchors who spew establishment propaganda every day and tell the people that crooked and greedy banksters are saviors; and slavery under austerity is so much better than the alternative.

In addition to that, the banker tyrants also get to dictate every single line item in the government’s budget. Want to cut military spending? NO! Want to raise tax on the oligarchs or big corporations? NO! Such micro-management is non-existent in any other creditor-debtor relationship.

So what happens after privatization and despotism under bankers? Of course, the government’s revenue goes down and the debt increases further. How do you “fix” that? Of course, cut spending! Lay off public workers, cut minimum wage, cut pensions (same as our social security), cut public services, and raise taxes on things that would affect the 99% but not the 1%. For example, pension has been cut in half and sales tax increase to more than 20%. All these measures have resulted in Greece going through a financial calamity that is worse than the Great Depression of the U.S. in the 1930s.

After all this, what is the solution proposed by the heartless bankers? Higher taxes! More cuts to the pension! It takes a special kind of a psychopath to put a country through austerity, an economic holocaust.

If every Greek person had known the truth about austerity, they wouldn’t have fallen for this. Same goes for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and other countries going through austerity. The sad aspect of all this is that these are not unique strategies. Since World War II, these predatory practices have been used countless times by the IMF and the World Bank in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

This is the essence of the New World Order — a world owned by a handful of corporations and banks; a world that is full of obedient, powerless debt serfs.

So, it’s time for the proud people of Greece to rise up like Zeus and say NO (“OXI” in Greece) to the greedy puppet masters, unpatriotic oligarchs, parasitic bankers and corrupt politicians.

Dear Greece, know that the world is praying for you and rooting for you. This weekend, vote NO to austerity. Say YES to freedom, independence, self-government, sovereignty, and democracy. Go to the polls this weekend and give a resounding, clear victory for the 99% in Greece, Europe, and the entire western world.