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Pompeo’s ‘Pandora’s Box’
Pompeo’s ‘Pandora’s Box’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, taking advantage of political bedlam inside the Donald Trump White House, has busied himself with “regime change” in Venezuela. Pompeo, working with National Security Adviser John Bolton and Iran-contra felon and arch-neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, worked secretly with Venezuela’s self-proclaimed “interim president,” Juan Guaido, to overthrow that nation’s duly-elected president, Nicolas Maduro.
Pompeo, Bolton, Vice President Mike Pence, and Abrams have been secretly negotiating with Guaido and the right-wing governments of Presidents Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Ivan Duque of Colombia to stage opposition demonstrations in Venezuela following Maduro’s January 10 inauguration in Caracas to a second presidential term. Maduro was re-elected as president in May 2018 in an election boycotted by the opposition and not recognized by the United States and its allies. Pence, Bolton, and Pompeo’s conspiracy against Venezuela included a series of timed events: Peru and Paraguay closing their embassies in Caracas after Maduro’s inauguration; the staging of violent anti-Maduro protests outside the Venezuelan embassies in Lima, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Quito, Ottawa, and Madrid; holding a massive protest among right-wing Venezuelan exiles in Miami; and Argentina expelling all Venezuelan government personnel from the country.
Neo-conservatives always tend to take advantage of situations to fill political power vacuums and as Trump’s administration has been rocked by one scandal after another, war mongers and regime change activists like Pompeo, Bolton, and now, Abrams, have grabbed key positions within the Trump administration. On January 25, Pompeo announced that Abrams was being appointed as the special envoy overseeing US policy toward Venezuela. But that announcement came after Pompeo, Bolton, Abrams, and Pence had secret meetings with Guaido in mid-December 2018 in Washington to coordinate regime change activities to force Maduro from office after his January inauguration.
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The Global Plague of Nepotism: Political Monarchy Creation in Action
The Global Plague of Nepotism: Political Monarchy Creation in Action
Political nepotism is nothing more than nascent monarchism. And it is on an increase around the world with the rise of political dynasties exercising control over both government and business. These de facto monarchies mask themselves as democracies, however, they are turning some democracies into kleptocracies, where a select group of corrupt politicians loot the national treasuries, and kakistocracies, where a group of unqualified and corrupt individuals – sometimes related by birth and marriage – dominate politics and business.
In fact, the United States has, through its history, practiced some of the worse political nepotism on the planet. While not all political dynasties have been malevolent, with some, like the Roosevelts of New York, Kennedys of Massachusetts, Lincolns of Illinois, Browns of California, Gores of Tennessee, Grahams of Florida, and Cuomos of New York being quite beneficial to the people of the United States, the same cannot be said of the Bushes, Tafts, MacArthurs, du Ponts, Wallaces of Alabama, Romneys, Cheneys, and the newcomers, the Trumps. Whereas Abraham and Robert Todd Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy, Pat and Jerry Brown, and Mario and Andre Cuomo have generally sought to better the lives of US citizens, George H. W. and George W. Bush, William Howard and Robert Taft, Douglas MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur II, George and Mitt Romney, Dick and Elizabeth Cheney, and, more recently Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, have been set on reducing the commitment of government to serve the interests of the people.
The rise of malevolent democracies is pervasive in countries around the world. One of the most egregious examples of a kleptocracy is Malaysia, where that nation’s former prime minister, Najib Abdul Razak, is accused of siphoning between $700 million to $1 billion from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
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‘State-of-the-Art Weaponry’ Turns Out to Be Crickets
‘State-of-the-Art Weaponry’ Turns Out to Be Crickets
What was purported by the Trump administration to have been widespread illnesses of US diplomats in Cuba resulting from the use – by some nefarious state actor – of advanced acoustic warfare weaponry, turned out to be caused by the mating calls of crickets. In response to accusations that a sonic weapon was targeting US personnel in Cuba, the Trump administration withdrew half of its staff from the US embassy in Havana and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from their embassy in Washington, DC. During 2017, some 26 US diplomats complained of nausea, headaches, vision problems, cognitive disorders, and other maladies brought about by a high-pitched drone sound they experienced at their homes and hotels.
In fact, a detailed study of the phenomenon revealed that the culprits were not the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban intelligence services but Indies short-tailed cricket, scientifically known as “Anurogryllus celerinictus.” The male mating call of these pesky nighttime creatures is at 7 kilohertz, just the right frequency to cause discomfort and sleeplessness for some humans.
Two biologists – Dr. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata of the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom and Alexander Stubbs of the University of California – ran comparative studies of the recordings taken of the suspect sounds affecting the Americans in Cuba and those of the Indies cricket. The result is that the acoustic pulse repetition rate, frequency harmonics, and duration matched almost completely with those of the Indies short-tailed cricket. The slight variance between the sounds was due to recordings taken outside and those taken indoors, with echoes caused by walls and floors accounting for the slight difference. The two scientists’ initial findings received favorable peer reviews from their academic colleagues.
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Trump: the Resurgent Cold War President
Trump: the Resurgent Cold War President
Some of the world’s hottest points of conflict during the Cold War are, once again, in the headlines because of Donald Trump’s erratic and bombastic saber-rattling antics. Even a military pact between North and South Korea, one worked out between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at their third summit in Pyongyang in September is being actively opposed by Trump’s pompous Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. In remarks in the South Korean parliament, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung said that Pompeo wanted Seoul to go slow on its talks with North Korea. It is known that Trump wants another summit with North Korea’s Kim. Little resulted from the first Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, which was largely a much-ballyhooed photo op, but was heralded by some myopic Trump supporters as an epic event rivaling President Richard Nixon’s trip to China.
Trump is likely opposed to the inter-Korean agreement, which would see a moratorium on military drills, removal of land mines and guard posts within the Demilitarized Zone and establish a no-fly zone around it, and other major steps, because he was not part of the talks between the two Korean leaders that brought about the deal. No world leader who is interested in any sort of peace deal would want the bellicose and mentally-imbalanced Trump, a self-described “deal maker,” involved. Trump’s ego and his ignorance of world history and international relations serves as an impediment to any meaningful multilateral talks, whether they are between the two Koreas or further south between China and Taiwan.
Cross-Strait relations between China and Taiwan have grown tense since the Trump administration announced that it was increasing military relations with Taiwan.
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The Arabian Game of Thrones Heats Up
The Arabian Game of Thrones Heats Up
The reported torture, murder, and dismemberment of Washington-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate-general in Istanbul reminded the world that an intense power play is now taking place within the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and between them.
In November 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the arrest and detention at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton Hotel of over 200 members of the Saudi royal family, including eleven rival princes, as well as government ministers and influential businessmen. That came after an October 2017 meeting in Riyadh between MBS and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, conclave that lasted well into the early morning hours. At the meeting, Kushner is said to have turned over to MBS a list of the names of the Crown Prince’s opponents: leading figures of the Saudi royal house, government, and major businesses. The list may have also contained the name “Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi.”
The list of Saudi names was, reportedly, compiled by Kushner from top secret special code word documents he had specifically requested from the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency. The documents were specifically requested by Kushner, not because he was an expert in communications intercepts, but because he likely had a control officer who told him what files to obtain. The Kushner family have longstanding ties to the Israeli Likud Party, as well as the Mossad intelligence service. The Mossad enjoys a close working relationship with the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, which is now firmly committed to MBS after a previous purge of its upper ranks following MBS’s rise to the heir apparent position in the House of Saud.
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Hot Economic Warfare: Scrambling for Rare-Earth Minerals
Hot Economic Warfare: Scrambling for Rare-Earth Minerals
Just like the gold rushes of California between 1848 and 1855, Canada’s Klonike of 1896 to 1899, and Western Australia’s of the 1890s, the world is experiencing a frenzy to obtain mining rights in pursuit of today’s “gold,” namely rare earth minerals. Used for components of electric vehicle batteries, mobile telephones, flat-screen televisions, flash drives, cameras, precision-guided missiles, industrial magnets, wind turbines, solar panels, and other high-tech items, rare earth minerals have become the type of sought-after commodity that uranium and plutonium were during the onset of the atomic age.
Rare earth minerals do not easily roll off one’s tongue in the same manner as gold, silver, and platinum. For example, yttrium oxide and europium, while sounding unimportant, are what provide the red hue in color televisions.
Nations around the world are scrambling to secure reserves containing rare earth minerals. China, where one-third of the planet’s rare earth minerals are currently found, has severely restricted the export of the minerals to friends and competitors. One of the largest known reserves of rare earths is the Bayan Obo deposit in China’s Inner Mongolia.
China’s export restrictions have sent nations around the world on search missions to secure both known and untapped rare earth deposits. One such mother lode of rare earth minerals has been discovered in the eastern southern Pacific Ocean. The estimates are that the deep ocean region contains twice the amount of rare earths than found in China.
Some of these deposits are in undersea geologically active zones, where deep sea floor vents spew rare earth minerals from expulsions of lava and hot gases. The discovery that the South Pacific region is rich in rare earths has led European nations, including France and Britain, which maintain colonies in the area, re-staking their colonial footprints.
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Beware of the American Political Snake Oil Salesmen
Beware of the American Political Snake Oil Salesmen
The election engineering merchants of George Soros and other “one-size-fits-all” democracy templates may have been vanquished in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Myanmar, but they are, by no means, down and out. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have simply borrowed a page from international consultancies and gone quasi-private, racking up lucrative contracts as political advisers to pro-capitalist candidates around the world.
With the US Foreign Service largely neutered under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, there is virtually no one left at various US embassies in far-flung diplomatic posts to warn host governments about the modern version of American “snake oil salesmen” pitching their election assistance wares to unsuspecting candidates for office.
Take Vanguard Africa, a Washington, DC-based election campaign consultancy that seeks public contributions under the aegis of the Democratic Party’s fundraising organization, ActBlue. During a time when there are complaints in the United States of foreign interference in American elections, why is an outfit like Vanguard America involved in elections in The Gambia and Niger? What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.
If someone donates to ActBlue to elect more Democrats to the US Congress, state legislatures, and mayors’ offices, why is ActBlue, working with Vanguard Africa, involved in helping to elect in January 2017, Adama Barrow as president of The Gambia in West Africa? Vanguard Africa’s US leadership includes Joe Trippi, former Vermont Democratic Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign chairman, and former Democratic US Representative Al Wynn of Maryland.
Vanguard Africa unabashedly admits on its website that it mixes election engineering with lobbying in Washington: “Access to Influential Leaders – Opening lines of communication and building trusted, long-term relationships with key pro-democracy groups, civic leaders, elected officials and policymakers – in Washington, DC and internationally.”
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Stripping Away Local Governmental Powers: a Global Rising Tide of Fascism
Stripping Away Local Governmental Powers: a Global Rising Tide of Fascism
Fascists love strong central government control. On the other hand, local autonomy represents good governance, something that is anathema to fascists. Today, around the world, local governments at the municipal, provincial, and regional levels are finding themselves under siege by central governments exercising what can only be described as fascist grabs for unitary executive power.
Among the countries where local governmental political, judicial, and financial authority has been under attack, severely limited, or completely abolished are Australia, Antigua and Barbuda, Turkey, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States.
The Trump administration has threatened US municipal and state governments over everything from providing sanctuary to asylum-seeking immigrants, to cracking down on legalized cannabis, and moving to emaciate pubic health care and insurance services. When it comes to state’s rights, the Trump administration only supports them when they restrict a woman’s right to seek an abortion, codify institutionalized racism, and permit even the mentally-ill to own weapons. Moreover, the Trump administration has singled out for scathing personal attacks, mayors and city leaders in New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; New Orleans; Boston; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland, California; Denver; Pontiac, Michigan; Charlottesville, Virginia; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The only reason Trump lashed out the mayors is because they are Democrats and critics of wide-ranging Trump policies.
The Trump administration is also infringing on Native American tribal rights enshrined in legal international treaties signed between past US presidents and tribal chiefs. For Trump, Native American lands are ripe for exploitation of their natural resources. Trump, who owned casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, blames the failure of his casinos, in part, on the opening of casinos on semi-sovereign tribal reservations.
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Israeli Cyber-Election Meddling Is Its Newest Industry
Israeli Cyber-Election Meddling Is Its Newest Industry
Those US and British politicians who are bashing Russia for foreign “election meddling” could use a more honest set of talking points. It is Israel, not Russia, China, or North Korea, that hosts a blossoming industry of cyber-election meddlers who operate from corporate offices in Tel Aviv, Cyprus, London, Washington, and Tortola. Most, if not all, of these firms, received their start-up funds from Israeli government-backed business development venture capital funds, some of which are solidly linked to right-wing American financiers like Robert Mercer, Paul Singer, Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The US media, subjected to a constant barrage of pressure from the all-powerful Israel Lobby, has refrained from reporting that when it comes to provable election meddling, including social media campaigns to smear politicians, Israel has become the “go to” place for politicians to seek election victory through guile and deceit.
Israel “beta-tested” its social media manipulation software tools when, in 2006, it premiered “Give Israel Your United Support” (GIYUS) program and its associated Megaphone desktop computer article and commentary monitoring tool. The Israelis wanted to influence any bad press it received because of its 2006 surprise attack on Lebanon.
Pro-Israeli volunteers around the world, who became known as “hasbara trolls,” disrupted web sites take a number through various means. Options included the use of profanity on forums and chat rooms, especially toward the original poster of an item. But more than often, the infiltration took the form of posting extraneous information to detour the commentary thread away from uncomfortable subjects and promoting Israeli propaganda posted by dubious websites connected to the Israeli state.
Several Israeli companies decided to further monetize such digital dissonance by improving on Megaphone, mixing it with human intelligence tradecraft, and offering it to pro-Israeli politicians and political parties and movements around the world to affect the outcome of elections.
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NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21stCentury
NATO: a Promoter of Colonialism in the 21stCentury
Five NATO members continue to possess colonies. These NATO states have no intention of granting their territories independence any time soon. Not only does France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States insist on maintaining vestiges of their colonial pasts, but their colonies have been interwoven into NATO’s military infrastructure.
The continued presence of French, British, Dutch, Danish, and American colonies around the world extends what is officially called the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” to the South Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. If there was ever an organization guilty of blatantly deceptive advertising practices, it is NATO.
Recent attempts to secure more political autonomy in the French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, the latter the home of a French space launch facility having strategic importance, have been met with everything from indifference in Paris or extreme hostility. A January 26, 1968 SECRET Central Intelligence Agency report warned against Soviet attempts to establish space tracking facilities in French Guiana. That same year, the Guiana Space Center was established at Korou in the French colony. NATO ordered the suppression of independence moves by the people of Guiana to keep the center solely in the hands of France and the European Space Agency. In March and April 2017, populist tempers flared when Guianese protesters took over the Korou space facility over charges that France was ignoring the people of the colony. Youth unemployment, for example, is at a staggering 55 percent.
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British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition
British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition
When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American “cousins” and Britain’s Commonwealth partners – from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths. Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another – the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.
It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.
For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and “regime change.” IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly “The Daily Telegraph,” “The Times,” “Financial Times,” Reuters, “The Guardian,” and “The Economist,” ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).
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The Dawn of Psychographic Outcome-based Warfare
The Dawn of Psychographic Outcome-based Warfare
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Israeli intelligence-surveillance-military complex – perhaps, in a dozen or more highly-secured computer systems laboratories in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat Gan, and Petach Tikva – the idea was first stumbled upon. Borrowing from the psychographic tools developed by online marketing firms and coupling them with age-old propaganda methods and more-modern psychological warfare techniques used by military and intelligence services, it was determined that elections can be manipulated, not at the ballot box, but by influencing the voters. Welcome to the world of psychographic outcome-based warfare or “POW.”
It is no longer vogue to interfere with vote counting. Instead, psychographic warfare experts have decided that it is much more advantageous to influence the voters before they cast their votes. This form of information warfare was initiated in 2006 after the development of the Megaphone Desktop Tool, a software program designed to respond to what was considered anti-Israeli content on the web. Using RSS (Rich Site Summary) news feeds, Megaphone and an umbrella propaganda organization called Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) were able to martial support for Israeli policies by automatically casting votes in on-line polls, respond to comments deemed negative toward Israel in chat rooms and on-line forums, and directing email to various news organizations, including the BBC, Independent Television News (ITN), and Reuters. According to “The Register” in the United Kingdom, what Megaphone provided was “a high-tech exercise in ballot-stuffing.” Megaphone received the nickname of “lobbyware.”
In 2007, Megaphone was re-programmed for other uses and a revised version was marketed by Collactive, a firm that was at the center of providing spamming software to unscrupulous on-line marketers. The seed money for Collactive was provided by Sequoia Capital, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm active in financing high-technology ventures in Israel. It is no coincidence that Sequoia Capital’s headquarters is located a mere 7.5 miles from Facebook’s headquarters in East Palo Alto. The nexus of spamming software developers and deep data mining firms like Facebook and Google, the latter just 10 miles from Sequoia, would soon pose a significant threat to the conducting of democratic elections in over 100 countries and regions and provinces around the world.
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Regime Change, Anyone?
Regime Change, Anyone?
After Wayne Madsen’s comprehensive catalog of imperialist interventions, executed without the slightest hint of subtlety, to undermine and “change” displeasing regimes in every corner of the world, going back decades, the topic seemed all but exhausted.But that turned out not to be correct. A very important piece of that mosaic needs to be added. As this is being written, the provocatively and insolently misnamed and foreign sponsored Free Russia Forum is gearing up to leave its mark on Russia’s forthcoming presidential election.
As alert readers are probably guessing by now, contrary to its deceptive billing the Free Russia Forum is anything but an “independent” discussion group. It is, rather, a political project, a creature one could say, of the State Department. It was created in 2014 and meets twice a year in the Lithuanian capital, just across from the Russian border, to serve as a tool for interference in Russia’s internal affairs.
But good guys do not interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign countries, just as gentlemen do not read each other’s mail, right? Yeah, right.
The Vilnius gatherings (which have been going on for several years) are a biennial convention of the most militant specimens of Russia’s “non-system” opposition, under the chairmanship of the former chess champion Garry Kasparov. Officially, participants include “representatives of think tanks, academia, writers, politicians, civil society activists, philosophers and artists, for thoughts-provoking and off-the-record discussions on Russia”. That, however, is just the façade.
It turns out that the political common denominator of the Forum’s sponsors and managers is that the offensive struggle for the demise of Putin’s regime should be conducted by all available means and not necessarily considering the opinion of Russia’s citizens. Over the years the participants’ elitist consensus has been that engaging in the political education of the dull populace is pointless.
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US Meddling in Foreign Elections: A CIA Tradition Since 1948
US Meddling in Foreign Elections: A CIA Tradition Since 1948
In a shocking display of relative independence from the post-Operation Mockingbird control of the media by the Central Intelligence Agency, a recent article in The New York Times broke with current conventional pack journalism and covered the long history of CIA meddling in foreign elections. A February 17, 2018, article, titled, “Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too,” authored by Scott Shane – who covered the perestroika and glasnost for The Baltimore Sun in Moscow from 1988 to 1991 during the final few years of the Soviet Union – reported the US has interfered in foreign elections for decades. However, a couple of old US intelligence hands were quoted in the article as saying the US meddling was for altruistic purposes. The CIA veterans charged that Russia interferes in foreign elections for purely malevolent purposes. The belief that American interference in global elections was to promote liberal democracy could not be further from the truth.
The CIA never meddled in foreign elections for purposes of extending democratic traditions to other nations. The chief purpose was to disenfranchise leftist and progressive voters and political parties, ensure the veneer of “democracy” in totalitarian countries, and protect the interests of the US military bases and US multinational corporations.
In double-talk that is reminiscent of the Cold War years, the CIA considers its election interference to fall under the category of “influence operations,” while the same agency accuses Russia of “election meddling.” In truth, there is no difference between the two categories. Election interference represents intelligence service “tradecraft” and it has been practiced by many intelligence agencies, including those of Israel, France, Britain, China, India, and others.
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It’s Feeling Like the 1930s in Spain and France
It’s Feeling Like the 1930s in Spain and France
During the Spanish Civil War, many loyalist leaders and supporters of the Spanish Republican government fled into exile to wage their battle against the Spanish fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco from abroad. 2018 is beginning to feel like 1939. After the fall of the Second Spanish Republic to Franco, who was aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Spanish President Manuel Azaña and Prime Minister Juan Negrin fled to exile in France. Following the October 27, 2017 declaration of independence of Catalonia by the Catalan Parliament and the dissolution of the Catalonian government by Franco’s proto-fascist successor, Spanish Prime Minister Manuel Rajoy, key members of the Catalonian government fled into exile. The President of the Catalonian Generalitat (Prime Minister) Carles Puigdemont and four of his ministers fled to Belgium to avoid arrest by Rajoy’s security forces.
Other Catalonian leaders were imprisoned in Madrid, where they await trials on sedition and rebellion charges. The leader of the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidature (CUP), Anna Gabriel, attained political asylum in Switzerland, where she told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, “I will not go to Madrid . . . Since I will not have a fair trial at home, I have looked for a country that can protect my rights.” As with the loyalists imprisoned under Franco, the Catalan independence leaders, who enjoy a majority in the newly-elected Catalonian parliament, face decades in Spanish prison cells under Madrid’s EU-supported regime.
Rajoy, like Franco, appointed not a Catalonian but a Spanish Castilian, Deputy Prime Minister María Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría Antón, as acting President of the Generalitat in Barcelona. Rajoy, as was the case with Franco, has Galician roots. Franco’s rule was infamous for stamping out Catalonian government, language, culture, and national identity and Rajoy, whose Spanish People’s Party is the ideological and chronological heir to Franco’s Falangists, does his very best to emulate his party’s ideological forbearer.
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