War, Terrorism & the Global Economic Crisis in 2015: 99 Interrelated Concepts

By: Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Everything is interrelated: war, terrorism, the police state, the global economy, economic austerity, financial fraud, corrupt governments, poverty and social inequality, police violence, Al Qaeda, ISIS, media disinformation, racism, war propaganda  weapons of mass destruction, the derogation of international law, the criminalization of politics, the CIA, the FBI, climate change,  nuclear war, Fukushima, nuclear radiation, crimes against humanity, The China-Russia alliance, Syria  Ukraine, NATO, false flags, 9/11 Truth, ….  

An overall understanding of  this Worldwide crisis is required: the last section deals briefly with reversing the tide of war, peace-making, instating social justice and real democracy.

This article includes a compendium of relevant citations (from my writings) pertaining to different dimensions of this  global crisis. Citations from other authors are indicated in italics.

The hyperlinks in each of the paragraphs indicate the original source of the quotation.    

The Globalization of War. America’s Long War against Humanity 

1. The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace.

2. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

3. “[The] Five-year campaign plan [includes]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”  General Wesley Clark in “Winning Modern Wars” (page 130)

4. In 2005, former Vice President Dick Cheney hinted, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was “right at the top of the list” of the “rogue enemies” of America, and that Israel would, so to speak, “be doing the bombing for us without being asked”, i.e without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them “to do it”

9/11 and The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)

5. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalization is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

6. September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

7“The forbidden truth” is that Western governments including US, UK, France, NATO and Israel –while waging a self-proclaimed “Global War on Terrorism”– routinely provide covert support to the same terrorist entities which are the object of their “humanitarian wars” and “counter-terrorism operations”.

War and the Economic Crisis

8. In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people.

9. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a “war without borders” led by the United States of America and its NATO allies. The conduct of the Pentagon’s “long war” is intimately related to the restructuring of the global economy.

10. “The Pentagon’s ‘black’ operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside it, are roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan, and ten percent of the total.” (Tom Burghardt)

11. An outright “economic war” resulting in unemployment, poverty and disease is carried out through the free market. People’s lives are in a freefall and their purchasing power is destroyed. In a very real sense, the last twenty years of global “free market” economy have resulted, through poverty and social destitution, in destroying the lives of millions of people.

12. Vast amounts of money wealth are acquired through market manipulation. Often referred to as “deregulation”, the financial apparatus has developed sophisticated instruments of outright manipulation and deceit.

13. With inside information and foreknowledge, major financial actors, using the instruments of speculative trade, have the ability to fiddle and rig market movements to their advantage, precipitate the collapse of a competitor and wreck havoc in the economies of developing countries.

14. What is at stake is a process of  “financial cleansing” whereby the “too big to fail banks” in Europe and North America (e.g. Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, et al ) displace and destroy lesser financial institutions, with a view to eventually taking over the entire “banking landscape”.

15. The underlying tendency at the national and global levels is towards the centralization and concentration of bank power, while leading to the dramatic slump of the real economy.

Greece: Austerity Measures

16. The creditors will use Greece’s multibillion debt obligations as means to  impose deadly macro-economic reforms which will serve to destabilize the national economy and further impoverish the population. These are referred to by the IMF as “policy conditionalities’, which enable the creditors to essentially dictate economic and social policy.

17. The creditors are largely interested in acquiring real wealth within the national economy, namely the acquisition of Greece’s national banking institutions, its public enterprises, its agricultural land, etc.

Disinformation, Media Propaganda and the CIA

21 Al Qaeda-ISIS concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.

22. Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.

The Islamic State Caliphate Project (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh)

23 Those who ordered the bombing campaign are those who are behind the Caliphate Project.

24. The Islamic State militia, which is currently the alleged target of  a US-NATO bombing campaign under a “counter-terrorism” mandate, is  supported covertly by the United States and its allies.

25.  The ISIS terrorists are the foot soldiers of the Western alliance. While America claims to be targeting ISIS, in reality it is protecting ISIS. The air campaign is intent upon destroying Syria and Iraq rather than “going after the terrorists”.

26. A complex network of Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations overseen by US and allied intelligence agencies has unfolded, extending across the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Western China, South and South East Asia.

27. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a creation of US intelligence. 

Washington’s “Counter-terrorism Agenda” in Iraq and Syria consists in Supporting the Terrorists.

28. The incursion of the Islamic State (IS) brigades into Iraq starting in June 2014 was part of a carefully planned military-intelligence operation supported covertly by the US, NATO and Israel.

29. Without Western support, according to Vladimir Putin, the terrorists would not have been able to gain control over entire regions of the country. “The so-called Islamic State [ISIS] has taken control of a huge territory. How was that possible? (Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Valdai Conference, October 2015)

Western Special Forces are Assisting the Terrorists in Syria

30. Western special forces and covert intelligence agents including British SAS, French Parachutistes, CIA, MI6  and Mossad have integrated rebel ranks.

31 Their activities are not limited to training. They are routinely involved in overseeing the conduct of terrorist operations on the ground together with Turkish and Qatari special forces, as well thousands of mercenaries recruited from Muslim countries.

32.The French have been actively involved in Syria since the outset of the insurgency on the ground in liaison with their US, British and Israeli counterparts. In February 2012, 13 French military officers were arrested in Homs pointing to the presence of foreign troops on Syrian soil inside rebel ranks.

America’s Allies: Support to the Islamic State by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey

33 Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, Jordan, et al.  have been involved in recruiting, training and financing Islamic terrorists.

34. A  large number of ISIS mercenaries are convicted criminals released from Saudi prisons on condition they join the ISIL. Saudi death row inmates were recruited to join the terror brigades.  (January 23, 2013)

35 The practice of beheading civilians by ISIS operative in Syria emanates from Saudi Arabia.. The ISIL’s practice of beheadings is part of the US sponsored terrorist training programs implemented in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Israel and the Islamic State

36 Netanyahu does not deny that his government’s support of the terrorists in Syria.  The IDF top brass has acknowledged that  “global jihad elements inside Syria” are supported by Israel

37 The State of Israel collaborates with the French authorities in the Charlie Hebdo counterterrorism operation,  while also supporting the two main terrorist entities in Syria: the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Nusrah. 

The Criminalization of the State

38 The “Criminalization of the State”, is when war criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide “who are the criminals”, when in fact they are the criminals.

Wars of Aggression are in Violation of International Law  and the UN Charter

39  The US, France, Britain are the aggressor nations against Syria. They cannot under any circumstances invoke the Right of Self-defense.

40 In contrast, Syria is the victim of foreign aggression and has the Right to Self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter which states that: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of collective or individual self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations” ,

44. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails: a “Clash of Civilisations”. 

45. The West has a “Mission”: “We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.” The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims.

52. A large share of the World’s oil lies in Muslim lands. The objective of the US led war is to steal and appropriate those oil reserves. And to achieve this objective, these countries  are targeted: war, covert ops, economic destabilization, regime change.

US-NATO Threatens Russia and China

53.The “Communist threat” of The Cold War era has been replaced by the worldwide threat of “Islamic terrorism”.

54. Whereas Russia and China have become capitalist “free market” economies, a first strike pre-emptive nuclear attack is nonetheless contemplated.

55. China and Russia are no longer considered to be “a threat to capitalism”.  Quite the opposite. What is at stake is economic and financial rivalry between competing capitalist powers.

56. The China-Russia alliance under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) constitutes a “competing capitalist block” which undermines U.S. economic hegemony.

57. In May 2014, the  Russian Aggression Prevention Act (RAPA) was  introduced in the US Senate (S 2277), calling for the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States and the stationing of US and NATO troops on Russia’s doorstep

58. In Asia, the U.S. has contributed under its “Pivot to Asia” to encouraging its Asia-Pacific allies including Japan, Australia, South Korea, The Philippines and Vietnam to threaten and isolate China as part of a process of “military encirclement” of China, which gained impetus in the late 1990s.

64. “The conventional war would be lost by the US and the nuclear war is no alternative for anyone.  On the other hand, nuclear war would inevitably become global”

68 The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation. The crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war”.

69. In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami: “This time no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.”

78. The Azov Battalion -which “officially” displays the Nazi SS emblem is described by the Kiev regime as “a volunteer battalion of territorial defense”. It’s a National Guard battalion under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the equivalent of America’s Homeland Security.

79. The Azov battalion supported by its Western partners is not only involved in para-military operations in Eastern Ukraine. it is also running a Summer Camp military training project for young children as part of its broader training and Nazi indoctrination program.

80. With Svoboda and Right Sector political appointees in charge of national security and the armed forces, a real grassroots protest movement directed against the IMF’s deadly macroeconomic reforms, will in all likelihood be brutally repressed by the Right Sector’s “brown shirts” and the National Guard paramilitary led by Dmitri Yarosh, on behalf of Wall Street and the Washington consensus.

The Police State

81. Rather than addressing an impending social catastrophe, Western governments, which serve the interests of the economic elites, have installed a “Big Brother” police state, with a mandate to confront and repress all forms of opposition and social dissent.

82. The Department of Defense now authorizes the domestic deployment of US troops  in “the conduct of operations other than war”  including law enforcement activities and the quelling of “civil disturbances”.

83. The repeal of democracy is portrayed as a means to providing “domestic security” and upholding civil liberties.

84. An FBI department established in 2004 under the Bush administration was conducive to the integration of law enforcement and domestic spying. Its mandate was  essentially political, directed at curbing all forms of social and political dissent in America.

85. According to a 2004 Report of the Homeland Security Council, these domestic “conspirators” are said to be acting in coordination with “foreign terrorists”. The Report identified “domestic radical groups” and “disgruntled employees”.

The November 13, 2015 Paris Terror Attacks

86. The November 13 attacks were immediately followed by the enactment of a State of Emergency, the closing of France’s borders and the suspension of civil liberties as a means — according to president François Hollande– to safeguarding democratic values.

87. The tragic loss of life has been used by the Hollande government (with the support of the media) to harness the public into accepting the implementation of police state measures in the interest of French Republic, namely protecting France’s national security against an illusive self-proclaimed “Islamic State” based in Northern Syria, which happens to be a creation of US intelligence.

88. The measures also included procedures which enable the police to conduct arbitrary arrests and house searches without a warrant within the Paris metropolitan area opening up the development of a potential hate campaign directed against France’s Muslim population.

89. These drastic police state measures (including the repeal of habeas corpus) ordered by president Hollande were decided upon prior and in the absence of a police report.

Reversing the Tide of War, Building Peace, Democracy and Social Justice   

90 War propaganda has become increasingly pervasive. War is upheld as a peace-making operation.

Image:  War and Peace by Anthony Freda

91 When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer possible. An inquisitorial social system emerges. The consensus is to wage war. People can longer think for themselves. They accept the authority and wisdom of the established social order.

92 War however is not an inevitable process.

93 War can be prevented through mass social action.

94. The issue is not whether the war will inevitably take place but what are the instruments at our disposal which will enable us to shunt and ultimately disarm this global military agenda. 

95. War criminals occupy positions of authority. The citizenry is galvanized into supporting the rulers, who are “committed to their safety and well-being”. Through media disinformation, war is given a humanitarian mandate.

96. The legitimacy of war must be addressed. Antiwar sentiment alone does not disarm a military agenda. High ranking officials of the Obama administration, members of the military and the US Congress have been granted the authority to uphold an illegal war.

97. A significant segment of the antiwar movement has been co-opted. We are against war but we support the “war on terrorism”. We can rely on an ambiguous political discourse.

98. How does one effectively break the war and police state agendas?

99. Essentially by refuting the “war on terrorism” and America’s holy crusade against the “Islamic jihad” which constitute the very foundations of America’s national security doctrine.

100. Without the “war on terrorism”, politicians in high office do not have a leg to stand on. Once the Big Lie is fully revealed, their legitimacy collapses like a deck of cards.

101. How best to achieve this objective? By fully uncovering the lies behind the “war on terrorism” and revealing the fact amply documented that Western governments are supporting the terrorists, i.e. they are State sponsors of terrorism.

102. Media propaganda sustains the legitimacy of  ”war on terrorism”. “Evil folks are lurking”, the jihad is said to be threatening the Western World

103. The corporate backers and sponsors of war and war crimes must also be targeted including the oil companies, the defense contractors, the financial institutions and the corporate media, which has become an integral part of the war propaganda machine.

Regime Change in the West 

104. What is required is a grass roots antiwar network, a mass movement at national and international levels, which challenges the legitimacy of the main military and political actors, as well as their corporate sponsors, and which would ultimately be instrumental in unseating those who rule in our name.

105. This is no easy task. The first step is to break the consensus, and that is done through what we might describe as counter-propaganda. It is in this context that Truth becomes a powerful weapon.

106. The construction of this type of network will take time to develop. Initially, it should focus on developing a firm antiwar stance within existing citizens’ organizations (e.g. trade unions, community organizations, professional regroupings, student federations, municipal councils, etc.). In many of these, organizations, however, –which include NGOs such as Amnesty International–, the leadership has been coopted; many of these organizations are generously funded by corporate foundations. In turn, since 2003, the antiwar movement in Western countries is virtually at a standstill.

107. Breaking the Lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.