(We) can do better

Order The Kapetanios (1772) by Dominique Eudes from Monthly Review Press for US$20.00 + postage.

I think the ABC Radio National program, Rear Vision, (see inside) owes to the Greek people and to its Australian audience to tell the truth about Greek history. The account of the Greek Civil War (see Appendix 1) is untrue. The Greek Communist Party led the resistance to the German occupation and had overwhelming support of the Greek people. In 1944, the British tricked the Communist partisans into disarming whilst they secretly re-armed those who had collaborated with the Germans against fellow citizens. They were able to do this because of the betrayal of the Greek Communist Party and the unquestioning support for Stalin by the Greek Communist Party. The Greek Communist Party abused its support from the Greek people to convince then to lay down their weapons. The result was a massacre of the most patriotic Greeks by former German collaborators whilst the British looked on. At this time, the heroic partisan leader Aris Velouchiotis was murdered by collaborators. He died in the knowledge that the Greek Communist Party leaders that he supported had denounced him as a traitor for refusing to lay down his arms.

This was originally posted to the ABC Radio National Rear Vision website on 17 July 2011 as a comment in response to a documentary "Greek Tragedy". This article was originally posted to candobetter, but not on the front page, on 14 Nov 2014. See also: IMF vs Greece: History of the Greek Civil War (part iii) and Episode 055 (6/12/14 - 25 min) of Sputnik by George Galloway on RT._{#fnGCW1" id="fnGCW1txt"> 2}

One of the placards at the mass Greek protests in October 1944 against the British read: "The Germans are back".

Patriotic Greeks could have so easily beaten the British and the former German collaborators in the war of 1944 and the subsequent civil war from 1946-1949 if they were not so appallingly misled by the Greek Communist Party (KKE).

For a truthful account of the Greek Civil War please read "The Kapetanios - Partisans and the Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949" written in 1973 by Frenchman Dominique Eudes. Copies can be order from The Monthly Review Press, "Alibris, or Amazon

Update, 31 dec 2014: The transcript of the program, copied from the ABC Radio National page, to which the above is a response, has been moved to this page. An excerpt is below in #appendix1">Appendix 1 - JS

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix 1: ABC Rear Vision's "Greek Tragedy" misleading account of the Greek Civil War

"Greece fought the Italians and then the Germans during World War II and when the war ended in 1945, a bitter civil war between communists and anti-communists, ultimately won by the right, created social tensions that would last in Greece for the next 30 years. Dr David Close is a historian in the School of International Studies at Flinders University."

David Close: "1945 was Year Zero in Greece, like in much of Europe, because under the German occupation everything had been destroyed: the whole economic system, the physical infrastructure, the political system. The Germans had encouraged a growing civil war, as well, which got worse in the few years after the war. The driving force was a pro-soviet communist party, which grew very powerful under the German occupation, because it dominated the Resistance. And the opposing forces were backed first by the British and then by the Americans, and American backing enabled them to triumph in the end, so they won a decisive victory in 1949."

James Sinnamon's comment: The principle 'driving force' of the Greek Civil war was not the Greek Communist Party (KKE). It was the British Army led by General Scobie and Greeks who had collaborated with the Nazi collaborators.

Josef Stalin had instructed the KKE to welcome his British allies as liberators and to follow their instructions. After they landed the British demanded that the partisans disarm. The Greek Communist Party leaders did their utmost to ensure that resistance fighters disarmed. For its part, the British army protected former collaborators from a vengeful Greek population, claiming to have put them in custody, whilst secretly re-arming them.

This made possible the bloody civil war which was won by the fascists. This defeat caused Greece to remain a dictatorship for more than three more decades. As Nana Mouskouri explained tonight on Q and A, parliamentary rule was not re-established until 1975.

Appendix 2: Other pages about the Greek Civil War

Episode 055 of George Galoway's Sputnik _{#fnGCW2" id="fnGCW2txt"> 2} program on RT referred to in #fnGCW1">footnote 1.

#GreekCivilWar Twitter pages.

Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret (30/11/14) on The Guardian - linked to from the Twitter page above. 1010 readers' comments are included.

Footnotes

#fnGCW1">1#fnGCW1txt"> ↑ The Greek Civil War is discussed in the first half of that episode of Sputnik. In that segment Galloway interviews Judy Cotter, a British woman, who as a student activist in 1973, courageously helped Greek students being imprisoned and tortured by the Greek military junta. That was the same junta which came to power in 1944 as a result of the betrayal of the resistance fighters in 1944 by Stalin and Churchill. The above article was also posted as a comment on Jan 2014 to Sputnik.

#fnGCW2">2#fnGCW2txt"> ↑ George Galloway's Sputnik program on RT should not be confused with the Russian Sputnik International web-site.

On April 4, 2015 the ABC and other new services reported on fierce 'clashes' as a newly formed organisation turned up in large numbers to oppose rallies in several states by a political group called Reclaim Australia.

"Organiser Mel Gregson [1] said No Room for Racism was formed with the express purpose of shutting down the 16 rallies across Australia planned by Reclaim Australia. The Reclaim Australia members, on their facebook page, describe their mission as "We as patriotic Australians need to stand together to stop halal tax, sharia law & islamisation.""

Gregson also campaigned against the Melbourne Tunnel Project.

Reclaim Australia.

So is Gregson, and all who support her, denying people the right to demonstrate peacefully about something they believe in, thereby displaying intolerance and bigotry? If she was at an anti-nuclear demonstration, would she cry "evil capitalism" if thugs hired by the nuclear power lobby turned up for a hostile confrontation against her?

Oxford Dictionary Definitions: (Additional observations in bold)

Racism:
Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Xenophobia:
Dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries. Does this mean the Aborigines who threw spears at the invaders of the First Fleet were xenophobic?

Does the banner "No Room for Racism" prejudge that Reclaim Australia is made up of racists without even understanding the meaning of the word? Is denying people the right to peacefully express a (non racist?) point of view in a public gathering analogous to autocratic imposition of martial law denying those people their rights?

This is not an argument about one side being right and the other side being wrong. This is an objective criticism of the motives and moral legitimacy of No Room for Racism.

No Room for Racism was chanting:
"The Reclaim members sang renditions of Advance Australia Fair, but the anti-racism protesters’ chants of “immigrants are welcome, racists are not” could also be heard throughout the CBD."

2014-15: Migration program set at 190,000 places; humanitarian intake 13,750 places. SOURCES: Department of Immigration; Australian Bureau of Statistics.

So is No Room for Racism not only confused about the meaning of the term racism but also confused about immigration and its impact on infrastructure expansion and the capacity to accept refugees in preference to relatively wealthy migrants? Isn't lack of population growth management driving the infrastructure expansion that Mel Gregson also opposes? Are Gregson and her supporters totally confused about the differences between refugees, mass migration and population growth management? Is this the kind of confusion that is endemic in Australian society as a direct result of the ABC (and other media) suppressing public policy debate of population growth management? Is this a form of confused "socialism" which is actually acting against global social equity by supporting exactly the same values as globalisation and right wing extremism?

Is a valid conclusion that Australia should have "No Room for Duplicitous, Self-Righteous, Incoherent Bigots" whose confused logic is carefully nurtured by dishonest taxpayer funded ABC broadcasters?

NOTES

[1] Mel Gregson is a member of the Socialist Party of Australia. See http://fightback.org.nz/category/general/events/page/3/ and http://links.org.au/node/3095

Why do Medecins Sans Frontieres (MFS), Avaaz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation push the claims of insurgents and their supporters?

On 19 March 2015, #10;<p><a href=" http:="">Al-Jazeera provided details about the alleged attack from Sarmin’s ‘local coordinating committee’, which claimed three children, their parents and grandmother suffocated to death after a ‘barrel bomb attack in the town’. The activist group ‘said chlorine gas had been used’.

The “National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces” draws attention to the call for a no-fly zone by Avaaz, following the alleged attack.

It is vital that detective work is done in regards to allegations such as these since they can be used to support an escalation of the war and terror in Syria.

Contributors to the website "A Closer Look on Syria" probe the claims and the 'evidence' in regards to this 16 March 2015 ‘chlorine attack’.

Below is some of the discussion from the "A Closer Look on Syria" page. This discussion relates to a video purportedly showing a helicopter dropping a barrel bomb with chlorine onto Sarmin. Like so much of the video 'evidence' presented by the militarized opposition in Syria or their supporters, the evidence in this video is questionable.
.

Extract from Closer look on Syria list discussion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apH795JpL7I Claims to show a barrel bomb attack, posted March 17, filmed in full daylight. Looks legit. Helicopter, right-shaped bomb, large blast. Might well be a recycled video, apparently too late to matter directly to the attack on the night of the 16th. I was tempted to try and geo-locate it in Sarmin, but only if it seems worthwhile (partly because I may only be able to rule it out, after lots of looking) --Caustic Logic (talk) 08:34, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

The video is titled "Throw explosive barrels on the city of Daraa Angel 17 32 015". Uploader LCCMedia seems to show videos from all over Syria --Charles Wood (talk) 20:00, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
Okay, will leave that to illustrate the dangers of taking suggested videos without proper scrutiny. :) --Caustic Logic (talk) 22:38, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
There are plenty of structures there to cue on, so if it's Sarmin, geo-locating might be easy. A couple of points—

1. Is that a barrel? Maybe the term has a broader definition in Syria.

2. It's falling through a slate-grey sky, but the ground shots show a complex sky w/ cumulus clouds against bright blue.

3. The camera is very steady but begins jerking around at 0:21 but the bomb doesn't land until 0:26. I don't have ear buds w/ me at the moment -- maybe the audio explains why all the pre-impact jerking.

4. There have been so many airbases over-run or almost over-run in the last 3 years. Does anybody have an inventory or guess as to what type aircraft and how many the insurgents (incl IS) are flying now? Pierpont (talk) 20:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
Just to reiterate the video is completely unrelated to the alleged attack in Idlib. The video is from Daraa. Given that I think it's two spliced videos that may not be related.

The currents state of play with the insurgent 'airforce' is they have got two L-39 trainers to the point of being able to taxi on a runway, but there is no evidence they have ever flown. I've not seen any helicopters that have been repaired enough to fly. As I recall, the two L-39s have now been captured from moderates by either DAESH or Jabhat al-Nusra. I forget which. Expect perhaps a suicide bombing at some stage -- Charles Wood (talk) 01:20, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

On the webpage, there is more discussion and analysis of the victims of this alleged attack as well as mention that some of the videos related to the attack have been uploaded by Al-Nusra.

There is also reason to question the objectivity and intentions of MFS and Avaaz, two prominent NGOs disseminating the allegations about chlorine or gas attacks. Both NGOs have much closer links with insurgents and their supporters than with Syrian people who support the Syrian army.

For example, in August 2013, MFS worked with doctors in rebel-held Ghouta, Damascus, and it was those doctors through MFS that provided details about hundreds of alleged victims of a sarin attack, allegedly by the Syrian army. MFS presentation of the allegations gave the claims some credence, yet later investigations and reports by highly regarded professionals in the west raise serious doubts about the Syrian army being responsible.

By working with doctors and medical personnel who operate only in rebel-held territory in Syria, MFS presents a blinkered and partisan view of the war. It should be noted that a co-founder of MFS, Dr Bernard Kouchner, was French Minister for Foreign and European Affairs Minister (2007 – 2010) under President Sarkozy, a president who was to give strong backing for foreign intervention in Syria. (In 2010, Kouchner was listed by The Jerusalem Post as number 15 in their list of the 50 most influential Jewish people in the world.) And interestingly, Dr Kouchner and MFS were involved in controversy in October 2008 when MFS protested comments made by Kouchner in Jerusalem. Kouchner said at a press conference, “Officially, we have no contact with Hamas, but unofficially, international organization working in the Gaza Strip – in particular, French NGOs – provide us information.”

As for Avaaz, a Guardian article indicates how heavily involved Avaaz is on the ground in Syria to support the insurgents. Another article by Jillian York, who heads the Electronic Frontier Foundation, provides another critique of Avaaz and its man in Syria (who is Lebanese), but it should be noted that Jillian York and the EFF actively support the insurgency in Syria, so her article is not as damning as it could be.

MFS, Avaaz and EFF seem to have the same Syrian brief: support the insurgents, damn the army and government, and ignore millions of Syrians who want peace and no foreign interference.

It should be noted that the sources of funding for both Avaaz and EFF are similar in that they are mostly 'establishment' sources, and there are links between George Soros / Open Society and both EFF and Avaaz, (This could be researched a lot deeper than is done here. One link between Avaaz and George Soros that is noted in articles involves Res Publica .)

A simple web search shows Soros has close ties with MSF , even if they are only socially and professionally supportive ties.

It is pertinent if Soros has links with groups such as Avaaz and MSF as he is a supporter of the 'revolution' in Syria and funds many other NGOs that take a partisan stand on Syria, e.g. HRW, Amnesty, Reporters without Borders).

The 2012 Guardian article "the Syrian Opposition: Who's doing the talking?" is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the war against Syria and the role of the US State Department, NGOs and other groups and individuals such as Soros who provide funding and support for opponents of the Syrian government (and the secular state?).

This article in New Republic is interesting in regards to the conclusion it draws after examining some of the actions Avaaz has purportedly taken in Syria:

…the temptations of power and fame seem to have encouraged Avaaz to sacrifice one of its most fundamental principles: That truth is an activist’s greatest weapon

The New Republic article also makes mention of the inevitable rivalries between activist groups.

Another more critical report on Avaaz is this one: "Avaaz: Empire Propaganda Mill Masquerading as Grassroots Activism".

CONCLUSION

Are there any humanitarian groups in the west that support peace and present the viewpoints of the general public in Syria, i.e. over 20 million people?

Presumably the vast majority of Syrian people put their trust in the Syrian Army to defend the state, as Syrian activist Edward Dark attested in a recent article. (Dark had originally supported the ‘revolution’.)

If Syrians don’t support their army, what is the alternative? Anonymous 'activists' and insurgents funded by the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Yet it is insurgents and their supporters whom MFS, Avaaz and EFF support. Why?

For any chance of peace, such questions must be asked by us.

On Wednesday April 1, 2015 at Yarmouk Palestinian camp in the outskirts of Damascus, a ceremony was held, organized by the Syrian Ministry of Reconciliation. However, the camp was attacked by elements from the nearby village of Hajar al-Aswad, allied with some ex-militants of Hamas who first joined the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and who have now joined Daesh. [ISIS.]
During several hours, heavy fighting between Daesh and the various Palestinian militias, including their former comrades of Hamas. By late evening, the jihadists controlled most of the camp. But during the night, the Syrian Arab Army deployed reinforcements and Daesh withdrew completely.This article republished from Voltaire Network, 3 April 2015 Underneath is a second Voltaire.net article which alleges the presence of Israeli Mossad agents provocateur in Yarmouk.

The "Yarmuk" and "Palestine" camps are not tent camps or slums as in other Arab states, but concrete cities, built to Syrian standards. Traditionally, the Syrian Arab Republic administers them in link with Palestinian political parties.

At the end of 2012, militiamen loyal to Hamas Khaled Meshaal allowed jihadists from the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and Israeli Mossad officers into the camp in an attempt to assassinate the leaders of Fatah and the PFLP [#nb1" class="spip_note" rel="footnote" title="“Mossad agents in the Al-Qaeda unit that attacked the Yarmouk camp”, Voltaire (...)" id="nh1">1] . The Syrian Arab Republic immediately, via SMS, called the 160 000 inhabitants to flee. 120,000 of them had been relocated within 48 hours in schools and hotels of the capital. The Syrian Arab Army had then stormed the camp with the support of the Palestinian Authority. Ultimately, as a result of heavy fighting and a terrible siege, a political agreement had led to "freeze" the camp where 18 000 people remained. Yesterday’s ceremony should have marked the reconciliation between firstly the Syrian Arab Republic, the PFLP and Fatah and the other branch of Hamas and the al-Nosra elements.

For two years, Palestinian groups opposed to the Syrian Arab Republic attacked any food supply convoys entering the camp, confiscated the goods and then sold them at 3.5 times their price to the other inhabitants of the camp. To feed itself the population is thus forced to join these groups which then pay them a salary in dollars.

The Gulf press has launched a propaganda campaign accusing the Syrian Arab Army of starving and bombing the Palestinians, as Israel does in Gaza.

Syria is the only Arab state to provide absolute legal equality for Palestinians and free access to its schools, its universities and its social services. Several generals of the Syrian Arab Army are Palestinians.

Translation: Roger Lagassé

Mossad agents in the Al-Qaeda unit that attacked the Yarmouk camp

Source: http://www.voltairenet.org/article177039.html Voltaire Network | 2 January 2013.

The battle that raged starting December 9 in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp (south of Damascus) has revealed new alliances.

The strategic objective was to involve Palestinians in the war in Syria, mobilizing them on a sectarian basis (they are mostly Sunni) against the secular regime. But the refugees did not allow themselves to be manipulated, no more than in Lebanon in 2007, when the mercenaries of Fatah al-Islam tried to mobilize the Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared against Hezbollah.

Elements of Hamas loyal to Meshaal allowed fighters of the Al-Nousra Front (Levantine branch of Al-Qaeda) to enter the camp where they mainly clashed with men of the PFLP (nationalists and Marxists).

It now appears that the al-Qaeda fighters were not only made up of Muslim extremists, but also included Israeli Mossad agents. They had specific plans to corner the leaders of other Palestinian factions and eliminate them. Not finding them, they allowed the other members of Al-Qaida to systematically loot the empty apartments of these leaders.

After a week of heavy fighting, elements of al-Qaida, Mossad-included, retreated and the camp was declared a "neutral zone." Of the 180 000 inhabitants, about 120,000 had fled the camp at the request of the Syrian authorities and were relocated by them to Damascus.

Video and transcript inside: Three days ago I heard a casual report, lasting maybe two lines, on SBS or ABC news, that ISIS militants had taken over a suburb of Damascus six kilometers from the Presidential Palace. Although this sounded really awful, the lack of detail was suspicious. One could imagine the United States using such a half-baked report as an excuse to attack the area from the air and kill the Syrian president, so I tried to find out more by going outside Australian and US/NATO news sources. The Syrian government has since driven ISIS out of the area. [1] Below this introduction is a video interview with Alaa Ibrahim, and my transcript of it. From Voltaire.net [1] I learned were that Yamouk refugee 'camp' is not a camp with tents but a fully fledged built-up suburb of Damascus, mostly inhabited by Palestinian refugees, to whom Syria grants full rights to housing, free education and health, like ordinary citizens. Palestine, as readers would be aware, no longer exists on the map, but it used to be next door to Syria, on its southern border, in the area now occupied by Israel. Syria is the only Arab state that provides legal equality to Palestinians and it administers their areas in conjunction with Palestinian leaders. Something like seven million of Syria's population before the current war were refugees from, as well as Palestine, the nearby war-torn states, notably Iraq. (It is amazing that the Australian refugee advocate movement and our anti-war movement - such as it is - does not appear to have realised this.)

On 2 April 2015, political analyst Alaa Ibrahim was interviewed by RT news about how Islamic State fighters seized Yarmouk Refugee area in South Damascus, 6.4km from the city center.

Alaa Ibrahim: "We now have an effective ISIS presence in that area. The camp has been under rebel control since 2012 and it has been under the control of two rebel factions, ... ? and Moktus. Two of these groups have very radical Islamic ideology, but nonetheless, the presence of ISIL has a political significance because it is the first time we have seen a stronghold of ISIL (or ISIS) so close to the Syrian capital.

Yarmouk has been the closest point the rebels have ever got to the Syrian capital, Damascus. If you have a look at the geography of the place, areas around the Yarmouk camp which were all under the control of rebels, have recently in the past few months had signed settlements - which the Syrian government calls a 'national reconciliation agreement' - between the Syrian Government and the local rebel factions in these areas and, as a result the Syrian government has fortified its presence south of Damascus and further secured the perimeter of the capital.

The only real chance to achieve a breach in this perimeter of Damascus is through the Yarmouk area. The Syrian government has been avoiding attacking the Yarmouk camp because it knows many - estimates say between 15 and 20,000 - Palestinian refugees live in that area, so it would be a political embarassment for the Syrian government if it carries attacks there and surely civilians would die as a result of these attacks so I think they [Syrian Government] decided to avoid the camp, which created a weak point in their parameter around the capital, Damascus.

Also, there's another development that comes into play: the fact that the Nusra Front, which is very strong in the camp, wanted to fortify its position against the other rebel factions, so it brought in ISIL in a rear alliance between the two organisations, hoping to prevent any local rebel factions from signing any agreement or agreeing with the Syrian government to surrender or give the camp back to the control of the Syrian government."

Interviewer: " The logistics of what has happened aside, what is it going to mean for these many thousands - as you've just been saying - of the refugees inside this camp? What's it going to mean for their safety and security? "

Alaa Ibrahim: "Well, they don't have a very good situation to begin with. The camp is completely dependent on humanitarian aid delivered to the camp on a monthly basis by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees ... and by the Syrian government. The situation in the camp was very bad to begin with. There is an infestation of diseases ..."

Interviewer interrupting: "Are they safe from ISIS?"

Alaa Ibrahim: "No, they're not safe from ISIS/ISIL. They were not safe in the first place, when they lived under battling rebel factions, including al Queida and Syrian Muslim Front."

[1] ISIS driven out of the area per a report from Voltaire Network, 3 April 2015, republished at http://candobetter.net/node/4354.

Originally published under the title of "Iran's deputy FM: Yemen's president uses terrorists to fight rebels," this is the transcript, with links to the video, of Sophie Shevardnadze's interview with Iran Deputy Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The beginning of the video is particularly instructive, as Hossein Amir-Abdollahian gives a run-down on what is happening from Iran's very close perspective. Among other things, it becomes clear that Iran does not believe that the United States is trying to stop IS. Saudi Arabia has said that it is going to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says it will not let this happen. It also says that it will not let Syria fall. The Minister says that the reason the United States wants to wreck Syria is that then it will have destroyed the main Russian foothold in the Middle East and that will allow the United States to dominate the region and maintain world hegemony. See also this Crosstalk episode where US realpolitik intentions and consequences and rhetoric are discussed in a very informed manner, particularly in relation to Yemen.

Iran's deputy FM: Yemen's president uses terrorists to fight rebels

Date of publication on RT at http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/245101-yemen-terrorists-rebels-isis/ March 30, 2015 08:30.

Transcript and Video

Yemen has turned into another battlefield, raging across the region. ISIS is prospering on the ruins of state. The flames of war grow brighter with Saudi Arabia and its allies joining the combat on the side of the Yemen’s government forces. But is that a solution? Hasn’t the method of intervention discredited itself - just inspiring more violence? We look at the issue with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Sophie&Co.

Follow @SophieCo_RT

Discussing a possible pre film lunch with a friend tomorrow, I pointed out that there will probably be no cafes open because it is Good Friday. My friend answered that she thought that it was completely ridiculous in our “multicultural “ society for shops and cafes to be closed on Good Friday. I have heard this multicultural argument before and I don’t buy it.

I took the opposite viewpoint, saying that if we do not have days that are different from others, then every day will ultimately be the same, and every hour in the day will also. I am taking advantage of the cinema being open but I would not object if it were closed for the day. Although I am not religious, I have sufficient relevant education to know that “Good Friday” is the most sombre day in the Christian calendar and one which some Christians may want to observe and they may welcome the opportunity to have a break from commerce.

"Australians take too many holidays"

My friend did not accept this and said that she thought people in Australia had too many holidays (!) I said I did not agree and that I believed that people worked more now than they did in the past because now two breadwinners and mortgage or rent payers are needed in most households, whereas 50 years ago, one was enough. She answered that couples are doing this in order to purchase more luxuries. I said that they are forced to do this because of the burden of housing debt or rent payment. She finally acknowledged this was true.

What was interesting to me was that multiculturalism in my friend’s mind was the reason that “Good Friday” should not be observed by businesses (well at least not by places that should be serving us lunch!!) One could argue that multiculturalism should mean more closures of work places as more and more different festivals and holy days need to be observed and acknowledged, not fewer!

Where would my friend’s idea have come from?

Easter penalty rate complaints

Recently there has been a debate in the media about penalty rates for working over Easter. Businesses have complained how expensive it is for them to pay staff to work at double rates or whatever they get. But take away penalty rates and then every day is the same. Should this be so? Should every hour of every day be treated the same? Should a person working on night shift which is very hard on the body be paid the same as someone on day shift which is congruent with a natural diurnal rhythm ?

I think it is a mistake to dismiss the pause that holidays such as Easter allow the nation as simply part of an arcane observance for only part of the community and which has an element of political incorrectness. Seasons are what give daily life an awareness of the passing of time. Easter is said to have its origins in Pagan festivals around the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. It’s the autumn equinox in Australia, but it’s still the equinox and thus a change of season. I believe it is commercial interests that would seek to abolish deference to Good Friday and absolutely nothing to do with inclusiveness of those to whom the Easter festival is not relevant.

Multiculturalism should mean more holidays, not fewer

Let’s claim all the additional holidays that different cultures have on offer rather than abolishing the ones we have enjoyed for over 200 years in Australia. Let’s not allow anyone to persuade us to create an undifferentiated, unending total focus on work, business and profit - year in, year out.

Candobetter.net Editor comment: Employees in Japan and India have the highest number of public holidays while those in the UK, Netherlands and Australia, the least, according to a global comparison of statutory public holidays. See http://totallyexpat.com/articles/global-comparison-employee-statutory-and-public-holiday-entitlements/

The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

I am fed up.

I am fed up with the fact that nearly all the air time on local ABC radio is filled with discussion of the symptoms of rapid population growth and human overpopulation with scarcely a passing reference to the actual cause. For example, today I caught a discussion of wind farms on the Basalt Plains in Western Victoria. A woman called Jon Faine’s program with a concern that there are only 500 brolgas left in the area and that wind farms impinge on the birds’ territory by around an 8kms margin from each wind farm. Host, Jon Faine as devil's advocate pointed out that the brolgas could go somewhere else as the wind farms were not really taking up a lot of space. The next caller ridiculed the brolga advocate with the opposite argument that if coal continued to be used to generate electricity then there would be no environment for brolgas or anything else. Neither caller mentioned that with increasing population, more and more electricity needs to be generated either by coal or by wind farms or whatever will do the trick. The human environmental footprint in Victoria is growing from a size 10 to a size 14 with no end in sight.

I’m also fed up that the Leader newspaper was delivered to my letter box this week with the front page headline “Please ease squeeze” plastered over a photo of South Yarra railway station exit/entrance presumably at peak hour in the afternoon as the crowds are walking away from the station. According to the article the station is a daily bun fight with too many passengers for the capability of the station. Prahran State Greens MP, Sam Hibbens “has lodged a Freedom of Information request with the department of transport to find out what improvements are being considered for the bustling hub.” This same MP in 2010 as a Federal candidate was invited to reply (both in writing and by phone) to a questionnaire on population for Sustainable Population Australia but no reply was received. In a nutshell, Hibbens is calling for improvements in the station to accommodate an “extra 5000 people expected to move into the Forest Hill precinct adjacent to the station in the next 15 years.” I feel exasperated to know that it is already overcrowded, so the improvement would have to provide an enormous increase in capacity if it were to accommodate the continuous increase in population which is expected. This increase in population ensures continued discomfort and stress for passengers. This is a big deal as it is an essential part of their daily lives and we only get one life each, as far as I know. Governments don’t seem to be about improving lives at all, only talking about it, staving off complaints, and controlling what should be uproar about the completely avoidable destruction of the reasonable lives we used to lead and could have continued to have led.

I am equally fed up with the articles in the daily media such as The Age in Melbourne (several this week) about booming population growth as though it is news. To me it is just a constant feed of reminders to the readership of a decreasing quality of life due to socially engineered population hyper-growth.

Turning to the radio, the function of chat shows especially on the ABC seem to be to inveigle the audience into complicity in this terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to feel they are being heard by calling in with suggestions and their views on whether they’d like distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B. Alternatively, the programs feature trivial topics as a brief distractions from the reality of where we are heading. (As I write this, the program I can hear is dedicated to personal coincidences.)

I’d love to know what instructions the columnists of the daily newspapers are given to guide them in their articles on population growth. It must be something like “Make sure that you don’t let anyone know that high population growth is a government choice. Make it sound like a trend you are following and reporting on that has no rhyme or reason."

The full transcript in this article has been republished from the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA). (On occasions, in recent days, it has not always been possible to view SANA from Australia. - Ed) another full interview (behind paywall) (20/1/15), by of the American magazine Foreign Affairs, has been republished as President Assad’s Full Text Interview on American Journal: Israel, Turkey Supports Terrorist Organizations in Syria (26/3/15) on Islamic Invitation Turkey.

This interview shows the Syrian President to be a moral and intellectual giant. Nonetheless, even a people so resilient and resourceful as the Syrians, cannot indefinitely defend themselves against hordes of killer sociopaths from every corner of the globe. If Syria is to survive, the people of the United States, Australia and their allies must hold their leaders to account for their shameful actions. Then Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, for his part, imposed additional sanctions against Syria and expelled the Syrian ambassador in June 2012 using the fraudulent claim that the Syrian government had massacred its own citizens at Houla in May 2012 as a pretext.

Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad made an interview with Charlie Rose of the U.S. CBS News. Following is the full text, which was not made available by CBS The YouTube video Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on 60 Minutes, which presumably, is what 60 Minutes broadcast on 29 March 2015 is only 13:34 minutes long. The following is copied from the Syrian Arab News Agency. It has also bee published on the Free Syrian Free Press and the embedded YouTube video is the full interview of length 56:43 minutes.

Question 1: Mr. President, thank you for allowing us to come here. We asked for this interview because your country's been at war for four years. It is a humanitarian crisis, perhaps the worst on the planet right now. 200,000 Syrians have died, four million refugees, ten million have left their homes, life expectancy is down, 50% of your country is occupied by hostile forces. It's become a battleground for outside forces. What's next? Because we have seen since I last visited you the rise of ISIS, we have seen Hezbollah in here, we have seen the United States becoming increasingly concerned about ISIS, so much so that the President, and especially the Secretary of State, have said that there's a need for a negotiated settlement.

President Assad: Actually, the beginning of your question is exaggerating the number a little bit, but that's not the issue. I always invite the media and the West and the officials to deal with those numbers not as spreadsheets and numbers and counter; actually it's bereaved families who lost their dear ones. It's a tragedy that's been going through, every Syrian family lost someone, lost their livelihood, and so on. Whether it's a few thousands or hundreds of thousands, it's a tragedy. What's next? Actually, every conflict should end up with dialogue, with a political solution between the different parties, and that's what we have been doing in Syria for the last two years; dealing directly with the militants, and we succeeded in making some reconciliations.

Regarding the rise of ISIS, in the context of events in Syria during the last four years, ISIS didn't rise suddenly. It's impossible for such – bigger than what we call an organization and smaller than a state – to appear suddenly with all these resources, financial resources, human resources, without support from the outside and without being prepared gradually or incrementally for a long time before the sudden rise during last summer. So, the rise of ISIS is not a precise word because it didn't happen suddenly; it was a result of events that happened at the beginning of the conflict that we mentioned in our statements many times, but no-one in the West has listened to. If we want to mention the statement of Kerry regarding the dialogue, I would say that we have in Syria so far is only a statement, nothing concrete yet, no facts, no new reality regarding the political approach of the United States towards our situation, our problem, our conflict in Syria. But as a principle, in Syria we could say that every dialogue is a positive thing, and we're going to be open to any dialogue with anyone including the United States regarding anything based on mutual respect, and without breaching the sovereignty of Syria, and as a principle I would say that this approach, the new approach of the United States towards not only Syria, towards anyone, to make dialogue regarding any issue, is a positive thing, but we have to wait for the reality.

Question 2: What kind of communication is there between your government and the American government?

President Assad: There's no direct communication.

Question 3: None at all?

President Assad: No, no.

Question 4: No kind of conversation about what kind of settlement might take place, no conversations about how to fight ISIS?

President Assad: Nothing yet. That's why the United States-

Question 5: Nothing yet?

President Assad: Nothing yet. Till this moment, no.

Question 6: Would you like to have that happen?

President Assad: Any dialogue is positive, as I said, in principle, of course. Without breaching the sovereignty of Syria, especially regarding the fighting of terrorism. The way we defeat terrorism, that's an important issue for us at this moment.

Question 7: But the question is what are you prepared to do? It is your country that is suffering. What are you prepared to do in terms of negotiations? If part of that is to see a transition government, of which you would give up power, would you be willing to do that?

President Assad: Anything regarding the Syrian internal politics should be related to the Syrian people, not to anyone else. We're not going to discuss with the Americans or anyone what are we going to do regarding our political system, our constitution, or our laws, or our procedures. We can cooperate with them regarding fighting the terrorism and making pressure on different countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and some of their allies in Europe that support the terrorists politically and financially and by military means.

Question 8: This cannot end militarily. Do you agree with that?

President Assad: Yeah, definitely. Every conflict, even if it's a war, should end with a political solution.

Question 9: But then draw me a roadmap that you have for a political solution. What does it look like?

President Assad: You have different levels. You have the internal levels, you have the regional, you have the international, and you have different means at the same time. The most important part is the local. The local part should have two things: a dialogue between the Syrians about everything; the political system, and any other details that could be beyond this, about the future of the country, of course. Second, make direct dialogue with the militants as we did during the last two years in order to give them amnesty and to give up their armaments and go back to their normal lives.

Question 10: When you say militants, who do you mean?

President Assad: Some of them are terrorists, some of them are people who were implicated by the events for different reasons, so, whoever carries a gun and tries to destroy the public infrastructure or attack the people or cause any harm or breach the law in Syria. That's the militant.

Question 11: But so much of the power is in your hands to engage in the process. I mean, if they demand that you step down before they negotiate, that's unacceptable to you.

President Assad: By the militants, you mean?

Question 12: No, I mean by the United States, and Russia, and parties to the conversation.

President Assad: No external party has anything to do with the future of Syria, with the constitution or president or anything like this. We're not going to discuss it with them. This is a Syrian issue. Whenever the Syrian people want to change their president, it should be changed right away, in the same day… even if we exaggerate, it should be through a political process, through a constitutional process. That's how we change presidents, not through terrorism and external intervention.

Question 13: Some say that ISIS was the best thing that happened to you, and that even some of the things that you have done have benefitted ISIS, that because of what ISIS has done and because of your fight against the moderates in your country who, in terms of the Arab spring, wanted to see more democracy here. That you, in the effort to crush them, allowed ISIS to grow.

President Assad: Let's go back to what President Obama said in one of his interviews recently; when he said that the moderate opposition in Syria is illusive. That's very clear by President Obama, and we always said there's no moderate opposition. So, the rise of ISIS wasn't sudden, again. The evisceration, the amputation, eating the hearts of the victims started from the very beginning, and even beheading started from the very beginning of the conflicts. It started with what they called moderate opposition, then it continued with al-Nusra, then with ISIS. So, what happened with those three, including ISIS, they attacked military bases, they killed our soldiers, and they destroyed our economy. According to this logic, how could that be the best thing that happened to me? In what logic? To lose? To destroy the country? To kill your supporters and to kill others, and to kill civilians? In what sense could that be the best thing that happened to me or to the government? That's illogical, that's unrealistic, that's unpalatable.

Question 14: Again, I come back to the idea of how, now, with the new reality of ISIS, how it's changed the circumstances. As they have gained in strength, what new changes do you see in attitude towards you and staying and the Syrian government?

President Assad: Regarding the West, you mean?

Question 15: Yes.

President Assad: I think the West has changed its calculations after the rise of ISIS, but that doesn't mean that they changed their approach to the conflicts in Syria, in Iraq, and in our region. I don't think they've learned the lesson well, and that, as a result, will not change the course of events, because, the very beginning of the problem, from the Western perspective, is to change the system or the president or the government that they don't like, and they're still moving in the same direction. That's why nothing concrete has changed yet; only the appearance and the priority. Their priority is to fight ISIS, but that doesn't mean that their priority is to get rid of ISIS.

Question 16: How can you see the United States cooperate with Syria regarding ISIS?

President Assad: There's no direct cooperation.

Question 17: But how do you see the future?

President Assad: The future, you mean. In the future, there must direct dialogue to fight terrorism, because the terrorism is on our ground, on our soil, they cannot defeat it without our cooperation, without having our information, because we lived with this and we know the reality and how to defeat it.

Question 18: Most people believe there is cooperation unofficially, and it goes through Iraq, and that somehow Syria knows when airstrikes are taking place by the United States, because they get that information from Iraq.

President Assad: From another third party, not only Iraq. More than one country told us that they're going to start this campaign.

Question 19: How does that work?

President Assad: What do you mean?

Question 20: You do you get information?

President Assad: In the campaign?

Question 21: Yes.

President Assad: How does it work on the ground regarding ISIS?

Question 22: Yes. How do you get information, about American airstrikes, so that it can coordinate with what you're doing, so that they're not bombing Syrian troops.

President Assad: Through a third party, and it was very clear that their aim is to attack ISIS, not the Syrian Army, and that is what happened so far.

Question 23: A third party means Iraq, and who else?

President Assad: Iraq, another country, Russian officials.

Question 24: Russian officials, Iraqi officials?

President Assad: Iraqi officials.

Question 25: Communicate to you the American intentions?

President Assad: Exactly. In the details that I mentioned now.

Question 26: What's the level of that information? Is it just about airstrikes, is it about other activities on the ground that are taking place?

President Assad: No, no details, only the headlines, and the principle that they're going to attack ISIS in Syria and Iraq during the next few days. That is what we have heard, nothing else.

Question 27: When you shot down an American drone, did you know it was an American drone?

President Assad: No, because any drone, any airplane, any aircraft, will not tell you that “I'm American.” So, when you have a foreign aircraft, you shoot it. These are the rules, the military rules.

Question 28: How much of benefit are you getting from American airstrikes in Syria, reducing the power of ISIS?

President Assad: Sometimes it could have local benefits, but in general if you want to talk in terms of ISIS, actually ISIS has expanded since the beginning of the strikes, not like some Americans want to sugarcoat the situation as to say that it's getting better, ISIS has been defeated, and so on. Actually, no, they have more recruits. Some estimate that they have 1,000 recruits every month, in Syria and Iraq, they are expanding in Libya, and many other Al Qaeda-affiliated organizations have announced their allegiance to ISIS. So, that's the situation.

Question 29: How much territory do they control in Syria? ISIS controls how much territory, 50%?

President Assad: It's not a regular war, you don't have criteria. It's not an army that makes incursions. They try to infiltrate any area when there's no army, and when you have inhabitants. The question is how much incubator they have, that is the question; how much hearts and minds they won so far.

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Question 30: How do you measure that?

President Assad: You can't measure it, but you can tell that the majority of the people who suffered from ISIS, they are supporting the government, and of course the rest of the Syrian people are afraid from ISIS. I don't think they win; I think they lost a lot of hearts and minds.

Question 31: They've lost a lot?

President Assad: They have lost, except the very ideological people who have Wahhabi states of mind and ideology.

Question 32: Explain to me why are people fleeing to go to refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey. What are they fleeing from? The Syrian Army?

President Assad: No, those camps started being built before there was any real conflicts in Syria, so it was premeditated to be used as a humanitarian headline and title, to be used against Syria to be a pretext a military intervention. That's how it started. Later, they started giving incentives to people to flee there. Now, the majority of those, they fled because of the terrorism, and I'll give you an example. In the elections, the presidential elections, most of the refugees in Lebanon, for example, and even in Jordan, they voted for the president, not against the president. That's a concrete indicator, you cannot ignore it. So, they did not flee the Syrian Army; if they fled from the Syrian Army, they will be in the other-

Question 33: I have interviewed some of them in the Jordanian refugee camps, and they were fearful of the Syrian Army. And they were fearful of repercussions if people knew they were being interviewed, so they were reluctant to give their name and where they were from, but they had fled in fear of the Syrian Army.

President Assad: That could happen. Of course, you have different kinds of people, you have different perceptions, you have that perception. We don't say that everybody fled just because of the terrorists. Some people fled just because of the situation, not from the Syrian Army not from the terrorists, they want to go to a safer place. So, they have different reasons for the refugees.

Question 34: There is another number that is alarming to me. It is that 90% of the civilian casualties, 90%, come from the Syrian Army.

President Assad: How did you get that result?

Question 35: There was a report that was issued in the last six months.

President Assad: Okay, as I said earlier, the war is not a traditional war, it's not about capturing land and gaining land; it's about winning the hearts and minds of the Syrians. We cannot win the hearts of the Syrians while we are killing Syrians. We cannot sustain four years in that position as a government, and me as a president, while the rest of the world, most of the world, the great powers, the regional powers, are against me, and my people are against me. That's impossible. I mean, this logic has no legs to stand on. This is not realistic, and this is against our interest, as a government, to kill the people. What do we get? What is the benefit of killing the people?

Question 36: Well, the argument is that you… there are weapons of war that have been used that most people look down on. One is chlorine gas. They believe that it has been used here. They said that there is evidence of that and they would like to have the right to inspect, to see where it's coming from. As you know, barrel bombs have been used, and they come from helicopters. The only people that have helicopters are the Syrian Army. And so, those two acts of war, which society looks down on, as-

President Assad: Let me fully answer this, this is very important. This is part of the malicious propaganda against Syria. First of all, the chlorine gas is not a military gas, you can buy it anywhere.

Question 37: But it can be weaponized.

President Assad: No, because it's not very effective, it's not used as a military gas. That's self evident. Traditional arms are more important than chlorine, and if it was very effective, the terrorists would have used it on a larger scale. Because it's not very effective, it's not used very much.

Question 38: Then why not let somebody come in and inspect and see whether it was used or not?

President Assad: We allowed.

Question 39: You'd be happy for that?

President Assad: Of course. We always ask that a delegation, an impartial delegation, to come and investigate, but I mean logically and realistically, it cannot be used as a military. This is part of the propaganda, because, as you know, in the media, when it bleeds, it leads, and they always look for something that bleeds, which is the chlorine gas and the barrel bombs. This is very important, the barrel bombs, what are barrel bombs? They say barrel bomb as a bomb that kills people indiscriminately, because it doesn't aim. This is not realistic for one reason: because no army uses a bomb that doesn't aim, and the proof to what I'm saying is that, you don't talk about the shape of the bomb to call it a barrel or cylindrical or whatever. The state-of-the-art drones, American drones, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, in Yemen, with state-of-the-art precision missiles have killed more civilians and innocents than killing terrorists. So, it's not about this bomb that doesn't aim, that kills people indiscriminately; it's about the way you use it.

Question 40: But you're acknowledging then that you do use it? You do use barrel bombs?

President Assad: No, no. There's no such thing called barrel bombs. You have bombs, and any bomb is about killing, it's not about tingling people.

Question 41: Most people understand what a barrel bomb is. I mean, they understand how it's put together, what's put inside of the barrel, and they understand how it's dropped from helicopters.

President Assad: No, we have had a very good military industry for years, for decades, in Syria. We don't have to make bombs, very primitive ones, very malicious ones. This bomb, this term, was used only to demonize the Syrian Army. That's it. This is part of the propaganda.

Question 42: If barrel bombs were used by the Syrian Army, would you order the Syrian Army to stop using barrel bombs?

President Assad: Again, what is this term, what is the barrel bomb? I mean do you describe the missile that you have by-

Question 43: It's a bomb that inflicts terrible civilian casualties.

President Assad: Any bomb and missile and even bullet is made to make casualties, but not civilian. There's no military means made in order not to kill. But how you use, it's again about the way you use it, it's not about the bomb. I mean, if you want to talk about casualties, that's another issue. Every war is malignant, every war is bad. You don't have benign war. That's wars are bad because you always have casualties. That is not related to certain kinds of bombs or bullets or whatever. This is completely another issue.

Question 44: So in fact, are you denying that barrel bombs are being and inflicting great casualties.

President Assad: Again, I always say, we use a bomb, we use missiles, we use everything, we use bullets. You don't describe what we use by the shape, whether it called barrel, spherical, cylindrical missile, you don't describe it this way. You use armaments, if you have casualties, it's a mistake that could happen in every war, but you aim always to kill terrorists, not to kill your people, because you have support by your people, you can't kill them.

Question 45: But you acknowledge that they come from helicopters, barrel bombs.

President Assad: This is a technical issue, a military issue. How to throw-

Question 46: But only one-

President Assad: No, no. You can throw bombs by any airplane. You can throw them by missile. You don't have to use helicopters, you can use them anyway you want.

Question 47: But, if I hear you correctly, you acknowledge that barrel bombs are being used, but they're like other bombs in your judgment, and they are not necessarily any different than other weapons. That is what you seem to be saying.

President Assad: We don't have a bomb that is called barrel bomb. This came from the media, we don't have it. What you call our bombs, that is related to the media. And that is used by the militants, then adopted by the West, in order to demonize the Syrian Army. We don't have something barrel bombs that kill indiscriminately. If you have a strong bomb or weak bomb, or whatever, I mean you could call it whatever you want. I mean, we have regular bombs, traditional armaments. That's what we have.

Question 48: What do most people consider barrel bombs more brutal than others?

President Assad: You have to ask the one who created that term, as I said, for the media, for the propaganda. This is part of the propaganda. If you want to refute the propaganda that's been going on for four years, you have many things to refute.

Question 49: You have often spoken about the danger of a wider war in the Middle East. Let me talk about the parties involved, and characterize how you see them. Let me begin with Saudi Arabia.

President Assad: Saudi Arabia is an archaic autocracy, medieval system that is based on the Wahhabi dark ideology. Actually, I say it's a marriage between the Wahhabi and the political system for 200 years now. That is how we look at it.

Question 50: And what is their connection to ISIS?

President Assad: The same ideology, the same background.

Question 51: So ISIS and Saudi Arabia are one and the same?

President Assad: The same ideology, yes.

Question 52: The same ideology.

President Assad: It's the Wahhabi ideology. Their ideology is based on the books of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.

Question 53: So you believe that all Wahhabis have the same ideology as ISIS.

President Assad: Exactly, definitely. And that's not just by ISIS; by al-Qaeda, by al-Nusra. It's not something we discovered or we try to promote. I mean, they use the same books to indoctrinate the people.

Question 54: What about Turkey?

President Assad: Turkey, let's say, it's about Erdogan. He's a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic. That doesn't mean that he's a member, but he's a fanatic.

Question 55: President Erdogan is…?

President Assad: A Muslim Brotherhood fanatic. And he's somebody who's suffering from political megalomania, and you think that he is becoming the sultan of the new era, of the 21st century.

Question 56: You think he could stop the border if he wanted to?

President Assad: Yes, of course, definitely. He doesn't only ignore the terrorists coming to Syria; he supports them logistically and militarily, directly, on daily basis, and if you take the example of Kobani, what you call Kobani, we call it Ayn al-Arab, the city where the Kurds were fighting ISIS and where the campaign started, the American military campaign started there. It took them four months to liberate that small city, not only because the airstrikes were cosmetic as we said, but because of the direct support of the Turks to ISIS.

Question 57: They were supporting them directly?

President Assad: Directly.

Question 58: You were quoted as saying that the Syrian Army could have eliminated ISIS in Kobani in three weeks.

President Assad: Actually, similar cities with the same terrain and the same size were liberated in a few weeks, without even using the airstrikes.

Question 59: Why have you spent more time attacking Aleppo than Raqqa?

President Assad: We didn't attack Aleppo. We try to get rid of the terrorists everywhere.

Question 60: Were they terrorists in Aleppo, or were they moderates?

President Assad: In Aleppo? No, you don't have any moderate militants in Syria.

Question 61: No moderate militants in Syria? So the definition of a terrorist is what?

President Assad: Of terrorism? Whenever you hold a gun, and kill people, and destroy public buildings, destroy private properties, that's terrorism.

Question 62: So, anyone who opposed your government in Syria, and used military tactics, was a terrorist.

President Assad: With military tactics, or without?

Question 63: Using weapons to-

President Assad: The word opposition, everywhere in the world, including your country, is a political opposition. Do you have military opposition in the United States? Would you accept it? You wouldn't, and we wouldn't. No-one accepts military opposition.

Question 64: It's one thing to say to say there's military opposition. It's another thing to call them terrorists.

President Assad: Military opposition is terrorism. Whenever you hold a gun, a machinegun, and you try to destroy and kill and threaten, this is terrorism, by every definition in the world. It's not my definition. Whenever you want to make opposition, it's going to be political opposition, like your country, you have the same criteria, we don't have different criteria from the one you have in the United States or in Europe or anywhere else.

Question 65: If there's a negotiation, would you accept as part of the negotiation and share power in Syria with anyone who is in opposition to you now, whether they are moderates, whether they are terrorists, but if in fact they lay down their arms and say we want to be part of a future government, a transitional government, in Syria?

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President Assad: Whenever they lay down their arms, they're not terrorists anymore.

Question 66: Even ISIS?

President Assad: ISIS will not. This, how to say, virtual. For ISIS to lay down their arms, this is virtual, because their ideology is they want to fight and to be killed and to go to heaven, to go to paradise. That's how we look at it. They won't negotiate anyway. So, we don't have to answer something which is virtual, not realistic. The realistic one is that many of the militants laid down their arms and are working with the government now. This is reality. I'm not talking about what is going to happen in the future. That is happening, and that is part of the reconciliations. Some people are interested in politics, they can take that track, and some people are interested only to going back to their normal lives and work any job, not being part of the politics. Of course we are open. Whenever there is political opposition, we are fully open to deal with them.

Question 67: As you know, Secretary Kerry has called you a brutal dictator. Secretary Kerry! Other people have said worse. Does that bother you? Is that an accurate description of you?

President Assad: You want the rest of the world to know the reality, of course you won't be happy to hear something that is a far cry from the reality, but at the end, this kind of description to an official wouldn't be really important unless the Syrian citizens said this word. And because the Syrian people still support you, it's a dictator, killing your people, and have the support of the people. It's a contradiction.

Question 68: It's interesting to have that conversation, but with respect, it is said that there was a time, several years ago, in which you were in a very difficult place, and some people thought the government might fall, even suggestions that you were planning to leave, and then the Iranians came in, and Hezbollah came in, and the tide began to turn. Is that a fair appraisal of the circumstances? Because if it's true, it means that the Syrian people were not supporting you, because before foreign forces came in, you were about to lose.

President Assad: First of all, the Iranians never came in during the conflict. Never.

Question 69: General Suleimani was here, in Damascus.

President Assad: He's always here, for decades. This kind of cooperation, like you say, no we have-

Question 70: He was here for the same reason that he is in Iraq right now. He was advising Hezbollah and-

President Assad: You have cooperation, as America, with different countries. You send experts, you have a kind of cooperation. That's different from sending troops. Is that correct? Different, sending troops is different from having cooperation on higher levels.

Question 71: It doesn't matter where they came from. If they are under your command, so to speak, I mean if you are giving direction to Hezbollah… but the central point I want to-

President Assad: No, what you mentioned, I mean your question implied that Iranians are fighting in Syria. That's completely incorrect. Not correct, definitely. If they come here, we would announce, we don't have a problem. We have the right to bring allies to fight with us. At the same time, we announced that Hezbollah is in Syria, we didn't deny this. So, why deny Iran and not deny Hezbollah? We don't.

Question 72: But my argument with you, and you are an artful debater, my argument is, and I'm asking questions, I have no position here, my question is: if the Syrian people supported you, why when the so-called Arab spring came, were you almost about to lose power until outside forces came in. It's self evident that the Syrian people were not supporting you if you were facing that kind of-

President Assad: If you have a real Arab spring today, neither Iran nor Russia, not even Hezbollah can help you. The difference in the situation that you mentioned earlier, between the beginning of the crisis and today, is that we are more gaining support by the Syrian people, because they discovered the truth. At the very beginning, many people weren't… I mean the vision wasn't clear for many Syrians. Now, it's very clear, and we have support even from many people in the opposition against terrorism. So, the main factor, why the situation has changed, is not Iran or Hezbollah; it's the Syrian incubator, the Syrian population. That was the difference. Hezbollah is not a big army. It cannot play that role all over Syria.

Question 73: But the game on the ground didn't change until they came here.

President Assad: No, that's not true.

Question 74: So you didn't need them?

President Assad: No, we needed them, of course. That's alliance, we need them. They play an important part. But what has changed, the balance that you mentioned, when you talk about 23 millions in Syria, when you have Arab spring, let's say a few thousand fighters from Hezbollah wouldn't change the balance. What has changed the balance is the incubator that moved toward the government. That is what has happened.

Question 75: Here is what is also clear, that even though Secretary Kerry has suggested you are part of the problem or part of the solution, and they want you to be part of the solution, but they have not yet changed their mind that you have to agree to share power or give up power. They don't want you in power.

President Assad: First of all, they didn't try to make negotiations or dialogue with us, so they don't know what we want.

Question 76: That's why I'm here. See, that's why I'm here, to have you tell me what you want, that's exactly why I'm here. Tell me what you want.

President Assad: What we want is whatever the Syrian people want. As I said, as a president, to stay or not to stay-

Question 77: But the Syrian people supporting you, you have a relationship with them, you know what they want. So what do you want?

President Assad: Now, we want, in such circumstances, we always ask for two things: first of all, dialogue. Second, sharing, sharing of power, by any political entity that represents Syrian people, not a political entity that has been forged in the United States, the CIA, or in France, or in Qatar. By patriotic Syrian opposition that represents the Syrians. And we have it, we have in Syria-

Question 78: So what do you mean by sharing power?

President Assad: I mean if you want to go back to constitutional procedures, they should go to elections, they can share in the parliament, in the local administration, in the government, in everything, and to be part of the decision in the government, like any country.

Question 79: You, and your father, have held power in Syria, for how many years? The combination, of you and your father, how many years?

President Assad: Is it a calculation of years, or public support? There's a big difference. Years, it doesn't matter how many years, the question is-

Question 80: Well, it does matter.

President Assad: No, what matters for us is do the Syrians support these two presidents? Doesn't matter if they are father and son. We don't say George W. Bush is the son of George Bush. It's different. He's president, I'm president, he had support from that generation, I have support from these generations now. That is the question. It doesn't matter how many… it's not the family rule, as you want to imply.

Question 81: It's not?

President Assad: No, it's not. It's not a family rule. It has nothing to do with me being president. When he died, I was nothing. I was just in the army. I wasn't, let's say, a high-ranking official.

Question 82: You know your family much better than I do, but conventional wisdom is after your older brother died, your father wanted you to come back, because he wanted you to be able to assume power when he left.

President Assad: Actually, the reality is the opposite; he wanted me to stay as a doctor and go back to London and I refused. That's the reality.

Question 83: He didn't want you to come back?

President Assad: No, never. He didn't want me to be part of the politics.

Question 84: Then why did you become part of the political process when you were a doctor?

President Assad: We live in a political family, we live in a political environment, and in the army, I'm a doctor in the army, and the army during the history of Syria has made the history and the reality in this country.

Question 85: Because he was such a significant political figure in the Middle East, would he have done things differently, if he was President of Syria today?

President Assad: That's a virtual question, I cannot answer on his behalf. That's a virtual question, nobody knows.

Question 86: You think he would agree with what you have done?

President Assad: Definitely. He wouldn't allow the terrorists to take over, wouldn't obey or submit to external intervention. And he would have defended his country like he did during the Muslim Brotherhood. The same happened on a smaller scale in the eighties, late seventies, early eighties, when the Muslim Brotherhood started assassinating, killing, and destroying, and burning, and he fought them. That is his mission as a president. That's what you have to do. To leave terrorists killing your people, that's your mission?

Question 87: Is it a fair appraisal of what you believe, that everything must be done, and the ends justify the means to stop terrorism in Syria, as you define it?

3

President Assad: No, it's not the ends justify the means, this is a Machiavellian principle. You should have values and principles. You have constitutions, and you have interests. So according to your values, you have to defend your people, the population, the Syrian citizens, you have to defend your country. For your interests, you have to get rid of terrorists. So, that's how we think, not only in a Machiavellian way.

Question 88: Tell us what the Russians want. They are a strong ally of you. What do they want?

President Assad: Definitely, they want to have balance in the world. It's not only about Syria; it's a small country. It's not about having huge interests in Syria, they could have it anywhere else. So, it's about the future of the world. They want to be a great power that has its own say in the future of the world.

Question 89: And what do they want for Syria?

President Assad: Stability. They want stability and a political solution.

Question 90: And what does Iran want.

President Assad: The same. Syria and Iran and Russia see eye-to-eye regarding this conflict.

Question 91: And what is your obligation to both of them?

President Assad: What do you mean, obligation?

Question 92: What you owe them.

President Assad: Yes, I know, but they didn't ask for anything. Nothing at all. That's why I said they don't do that for Syria; they do it for the region and for the world, because stability is very important for them, because if you have conflicts here, it will burn somebody else there. If you want to talk about terrorism, terrorism has no boundaries. It sees no borders, no political borders. It's much more difficult to take any procedure to face it due to the internet, which is difficult to control. When you have ideology, it could cross everywhere, it could reach Russia, it could Turkey, anywhere. So, they have the same interest. Russia, and Iran, and many other countries that support Syria, not because they support the president, not because they support the government, but because they want to have stability in the region.

Question 93: Let me present an alternative argument which the Untied States may very well believe, that they support you because they had a longstanding relationship. They support you because they want access to Lebanon. They support you because it's part of the larger conflict between Sunni and Shi'a.

President Assad: You mean the Iranians or the Russians?

Question 94: The Iranians, and because they've supported you militarily and financially.

President Assad: No. The way the Iranians look at the Shi'a-Sunni issue or conflict, is that this is the most detrimental thing that could happen to Iran.

Question 95: To Iran? This conflict is the most detrimental thing?

President Assad: Anything related to Sunni-Shi'a conflict is detrimental to Iran. That's their point of view, and that's how we see it. We agree with them. So, actually they are going the other way. They want always to have reconciliation, unification between the Muslims, because that's very good for Iran. They don't want to be part… they don't look at the issue in Syria as a part. They know that Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis, they want to instigate this conflict, in order to bring more of the Muslims to their side.

Question 96: As you know, there are many people who look at the Middle East today beyond Israel, and say within the Islamic world, it's all about the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and choose your sides.

President Assad: That's what the Israelis want to promote.

Question 97: No, some analysts look at the Middle East today and say, it is a competition between Iran on the one hand, Shi'a nation, Iraq, Shi'a, you here, Sunni majority, and Saudi Arabia. These two are mortal enemies, fighting for influence in the Middle East.

President Assad: That's not precise for one reason, because it looks like Iran wants to attack the Sunni and Saudi Arabia wants to attack the Shi'a. It actually started with Saudi Arabia after the revolution in Iran in 79. So, it didn't start from Iran. Iran never interfered in any other nation's internal issues, including Syria. We have good relations with them, they never tried to interfere. Actually, it's Saudi propaganda. I mean the whole issue of Sunni-Shi'a conflict is a Saudi initiative and propaganda. It's reality, but because of the Saudis, not because of the Iranians.

Question 98: But in Syria, they are on opposite sides, Saudi Arabia and Iran are on different sides.

President Assad: That's what Saudi Arabia wants to promote, and that's what ISIS wants to promote, and that's what al-Nusra wants to promote. In their political discourse, they always mention the sectarian issues.

Question 99: I'm now talking about how you see, here, the region and what is happening now. One, is the rise of ISIS here, the rise of ISIS and affiliated groups in Iraq. When you look at Iraq, Iranians are supporting Shi'a militia in Iraq, and they've been a very effective fighting force. The United States is engaged in airstrikes. They just had an airstrike yesterday in Tekrit which the Iranian militias have captured, correct.

President Assad: Not everything is correct. It's not only Shi'a militia who are fighting. Many others joined, so it's a mixture now.

Question 100: What's the possibility of Iranian-American cooperation?

President Assad: Regarding fighting ISIS?

Question 101: Yes.

President Assad: I don't think anyone trusts or believes that the American administration wants to really fight this kind of terrorism, because, I mean if you look at the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, the whole 60 countries launch much less airstrikes than only the Syrian Army does on the daily, much less, so they're not serious. Second, they only attack the northern part of Iraq. I mean, they attack the terrorists in the northern part of Iraq, not the rest of Iraq. Why did they join now? They want to get part of the cake, if there's a victory against the terrorists, just to say that we fought terrorists and we defeated ISIS? Where were they during the last few months? They suddenly wanted to attack?

Question 102: So what do you think Iran wants in Iraq?

President Assad: They want to get rid of the terrorists, definitely, and to have stability.

Question 103: How long do you think that will take?

President Assad: Nobody has any idea, because you know, you have support from the outside, you have the support of the petrodollar, of ISIS, and many extremists in Iraq, and in Syria. So, how long that support will continue, we cannot tell.

Question 104: When you look at the future, and you look at the battle ahead, what the end result to Syria? How much of this can Syria take? How much of the conflict that is here today can the Syrian government withstand? How much, the Syrian country, the civilian loss? Will there be anything left in Syria?

President Assad: Of course, Syria is still here. It's not the first kind of crisis that we've been facing here in history.

Question 105: But nothing like this.

President Assad: No, during the history, you have many similar crises. Damascus and Aleppo have been destroyed many times, but, I mean, it's about the population. The Syrian population are determined to survive and to protect their country, and to rebuild it. How much do we tolerate? That is about the potent power that every population has, and the Syrian people proved that they have strong potential in that regard. Anyway, we don't have any other option. What option do we have? Whether we suffer, whether we pay a high price or a lesser price, what options do we have but to defend our country, but to fight terrorism. We don't have any other option.

Question 106: I asked the question because many asked it; what's the cost to Syria, what it's going through, and how to put the pieces together? Whenever there is finally, an end this, how will you put the pieces back together, and who will put the pieces back together?

President Assad: There's a misconception in the West that what's happening in Syria is a civil war. This is where you can ask that question. What is happening in Syria is not a civil war. When you have civil war, you should have, how to say, clear lines separated between different sects or ethnicities or different components. That's not what we have. What we have are terrorist-infiltrated areas, and people are suffering from the fighting and from the terrorism of those terrorists. So, you don't have division in the society now. You don't have the sectarian issue now. Actually, you'd be surprised if I tell you that the sectarian situation in Syria today is better than the sectarian situation, let's say, before the crisis. People are more unified now regarding the conflict, regarding the unity of the sects, religions, and so on. So, we cannot talk about how can you rebuild, let's say, the society. The society is suffering from the humanitarian aspect of the problem, but it's not divided anymore, and that's very important, and that's why we're assured, that, I mean, even this conflict, which is a very bad conflict, as you say, every cloud must have a silver lining, and this is the silver lining in this crisis, that the population is more unified now. So we don't have a problem as long as the society is unified and homogenous, regardless of some dark part of this society, ideological corners in our society that support the Wahhabis, support ISIS, and support the extremists, but this is not the general situation in our society.

Question 107: Why do you think that they, people in the West, question your legitimacy?

President Assad: This is intervention in Syrian matters. I don't care about to be frank, I never care about it as long as I have the public support of the Syrian people, that's my legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from the inside. But why? I will tell you why, because the West is used to have puppets, not independent leaders or officials in any other country, and that's the problem with Putin. They demonize Putin because he can say no, and he wants to be independent, and because the West, and especially the United States, don't accept partners. They even accept followers. Even Europe is not a partner with the United States. Best to be very frank with you. So, this is their problem with Syria. They need somebody to keeping saying yes, yes, and a puppet, a marionette, and so on, somebody they can control by remote control.

Question 108: There are those who argue that you feel now that you're militarily stronger, that the advent of Hezbollah and Iranian advisors and American airstrikes and coalition airstrikes, that you feel militarily stronger, and therefore you're less willing to negotiate.

President Assad: Any war can deplete the strongest power, even the United States. When you go to war, you will be depleted in every sense of the world, and we are a small country, we'll be depleted more than a great country. So, you cannot say that you are militarily powerful, this is again the reality, but you can say that you are politically powerful, because when you win the hearts and minds of the people, more support from the population, this is where you become more powerful. So, what we achieved militarily, not because we are stronger militarily; because we have more support.

Question 109: And how much do you believe you may have some opportunity to win the minds and hearts of the Syrian people because they fear ISIS more than anybody?

President Assad: We cannot ignore this reason.

Question 110: Then ISIS has changed the circumstances?

President Assad: We cannot ignore that factor, we cannot ignore it. We don't say no, this is a factor, but there are other factors. When you're transparent with the citizens, with the people, when you're patriotic, you work for their interests, they will support you even if they disagree with you politically. So, we don't have support now from the traditional supporters. We don't have support because they don't oppose us. We have opposition who oppose our government in many aspects; economy, politics, political systems, and so on. But they know that we are working for this country, and when you have a war, it's time for unity, not time for division for recriminations and so on. That's why I said we can have more support, and we already had it recently.

Question 111: What circumstances would cause you to give up power?

President Assad: When I don't have the public support, when I don't represent the Syrian interests and values.

Question 112: And how do you determine that?

President Assad: I have direct contact with the people.

Question 113: So, you determine whether they support you?

President Assad: No, I don't determine; I sense, I feel, I'm in contact with them, I'm a human. How can a human make a direct relation with the population? I mean, the war was a very important “lab” for this support. I mean, if they don't support me, they could go and support the other side. They didn't. Why? And that's very clear, that's very concrete.

Question 114: Some have argued to me that the majority of Syrians support neither the government nor ISIS.

President Assad: Some that don't support either? If you don't, I mean this is like saying that ISIS is like the government. I don't think that this is realistic. Even people who oppose the government, they oppose ISIS, that's how we look at it.

Question 115: That's the question, isn't it? Even those who oppose the government oppose ISIS, and the question is, how do you bring those two together, and what are you prepared to do, and what are they prepared to do, and how will you get those people that have a vested interest here, like the Russians and the Iranians and the Americans, to-

President Assad: Because very simply, they cannot put the government and ISIS on the same level, so it's not difficult for them to choose. They didn't choose… I mean, not to support the government doesn't to support ISIS. It means automatically they're going to be with the government against ISIS, but not with the government in other issues. It's opposition, I mean, you have points of view, but as I said, it's not time for division. Now, you support the government. When you get rid of ISIS, then you oppose the government in your own way, you use political means. But you cannot compare a government with the terrorists.

Question 116: Which raises the question: can you destroy ISIS without coming together with a united plan, a common purpose?

President Assad: On the local level, you are correct. You cannot destroy terrorists, not only ISIS, you have al-Nusra Front, which is as dangerous as ISIS. You cannot destroy them unless you are unified as a society. But, again, ISIS now is not the Syrian case. ISIS is in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. So, it's not enough to be unified on the local level; it's on the regional level and on the international level, something we don't have yet. That's why defeating terrorism is going very difficult because of that situation.

Question 117: Something we don't have yet. So, that's the question: you don't have it yet, and how do you get it? Because that's the future.

President Assad: You are talking about more than one party. You are talking about the international parties, first of all the United States, regional parties, first of all Turkey which is our neighbor and plays a very negative role, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the local parties. We would like to see this cohesion in fighting terrorism, but how can we convince them? We tried, maybe not directly, because we don't have any direct channels with them, but that's how it should be. If they could see the reality and the future in clearer vision, they would make dialogue with every country including Syria, not because they support the Syrian President or the Syrian Army, we don't need their support internally; it's about only fighting terrorism. You need to make dialogue. You cannot kill them and defeat them from the air. That's a foregone conclusions.

Question 118: That's true in Iraq or here, you can't do it from the air.

President Assad: Anywhere, no you cannot.

Question 119: Do you want to see another conference, like the Geneva conference that failed?

President Assad: Yes, that's the aim of Moscow conference. The next one.

Question 120: That's it?

President Assad: Yes.

Question 121: And what might happen there?

President Assad: that depends on different parties. I mean, I cannot talk on behalf of every party. For us as Syria, you should have principles, to agree about, let's say, some principles like unification of Syria, denouncing terrorism, something like this, and then-

Question 122: Sharing power?

President Assad: Sharing power, that's in the constitution anyway. I mean, sharing power is about how much grassroots you have, how much of the Syrians you represent. You don't come and share power just because you want to share power. You should have public support.

Question 123: You have to be a forced to share power.

President Assad: Exactly, exactly, you have to represent them. So, maybe if we reach a conclusion and we reach agreement in Moscow, it could be as preparation to go to Geneva 3, for example, but it's still early to tell.

Question 124: I came here after Secretary Kerry made his remarks. My impression once I got here is that when you heard those remarks, you were optimistic. The State Department backed a little bit, and said we still think there needs to be a new government, but you were optimistic after you heard that. You believe there is a way for your government and the American government to cooperate and coordinate?

President Assad: That's not the main point. I mean, regarding that statement. I think the main point, we could have a feeling, and we hope that we are right, that the American administration started to abandon this policy of isolation, which is very harmful to them and to us, because if you isolate a country, you isolate yourself as the United States from being influential and effective in the course of events, unless you are talking about the negative influence, like making the embargo that could kill the people slowly, or launching a war and supporting terrorists that could kill them in a faster way. So, our impression, let's say, we are optimistic, more optimistic. I wouldn't exaggerate. That at least when they're thinking about dialogue, doesn't matter what kind of dialogue, and what the content of the dialogue is, and even doesn't matter what their real intentions are, but the word “dialogue” is something we haven't heard from the United States on the global level for a long time.

Question 125: But you just did, from the Secretary of State: we need to negotiate. That's dialogue.

President Assad: Exactly, that's what I said. I mean, that's why I said it's positive. That's why I said we're more optimistic. I mean, when they abandon this policy of isolation, things should be better. I mean, when you start dialogue, things will be better.

Question 126: Why don't you reach out to Secretary Kerry and say, let's talk.

President Assad: Are they ready to talk? We are always open. We never closed our doors. They should be ready for the talks, they should be ready for the negotiations. We didn't make the embargo on the United States. We didn't attack the American population. We didn't support terrorists who did anything to the United States. Actually, the United States did. We always wanted to have good relations with the United States. We never thought in the other direction. It's a great power. Nobody, not a wise person would think of having bad relations with the United States.

Question 127: But can you have a good relationship with a country that thinks you shouldn't be in power?

President Assad: No, that's not going to be part of the dialogue as I mentioned earlier. This is not their business. We have Syrian citizens who can decide this, no-one else. Whether they want to talk about it or not, this is not something we are going to discuss with anyone.

Question 128: Mr. President, thank you.

President Assad: Thank you.

See also: 1 in 10 wild bees faces extinction in Europe, study warns (25/3/15)

The only remaining population in the world of Mallee Emu Wren occurs at a single area in north-western Victoria. They became extinct in South Australia last summer after wildfires burnt them out.

“The fact that we lost several significant bird populations in fires linked to a single heat wave event highlights just how vulnerable many of these species are,” says ecologist Dr Rohan Clarke from Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences.

(image: Mallee Emu-wren)

“There is nothing left of an emu-wren after a fire, not even a pile of ash,” says Professor Michael Clarke, head of Life Sciences at La Trobe University. These tiny birds are unable to flee an approaching fire, and any that survive the flames have nowhere to live after the fire has passed. He says that “the Mallee region, which is home to less than 3 per cent of the state’s at-risk population, has been repeatedly targeted for planned burns in recent years, with up to 17 per cent of the program being held in that area“. Ironically, the Mallee does not have high human populations! Government agencies will choose the least risky areas and the more convenient areas to burn, to complete their target, rather than protect human lives and property.

According to Birdlife Australia, the Victorian Government (Lib) stands accused of all but guaranteeing the extinction of threatened Mallee birds as a consequence of its bushfire prevention policy. The Mallee emu-wren, in particular, was just one fire away from being wiped from the planet. At the end of last year, 2014, there were at total of 314 in Australia – and five of them, including the Victorian Murray Mallee, are in danger of losing the species for which The Mallee was one of the most important sites for birds in the world!

In 2006, it was estimated that less than 3000 Mallee Emu-wrens remained and are mainly restricted to conservation zones. With a highly fragmented habitat, each of the five or six isolated populations is particularly vulnerable to being wiped out by fire.

After the devastation of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission set a yearly target to burn five per cent of public land to reduce bushfire risk across the state.

Birdlife Australia’s head of conservation, and Guy Dutson, a world authority on birds of the south-west Pacific region, says “cannot be reburnt for at least 15 to 20 years”.

The Mallee Emu-wren is about 10 to 15 cm in length and has a mass of 4 to 6.5 g. The adult male has a black bill and the adult female has a dark brown bill, but both sexes have dark-brown irides and pinkish-brown legs and feet. The Mallee Emu-wren occurs in mallee regions south of the Murray River, in south-eastern South Australia and north-western Victoria. The decline of the Mallee Emu-wren has mainly been due to the extensive loss, degradation and fragmentation of its habitat caused by broad-scale clearing and fire.

Despite the listing of the Mallee emu wren under the Flora and Fauna Act, the Victorian Coalition failed to develop an action plan for its protection despite a massive expansion of native forest burning under the banner of “hazard reduction” burning! In fact most of the Mallee burning in remote areas contributes little to improving the safety of lives and property, but is about fulfilling government targets!

BirdLife Australia welcomed the announcement in February this year that the Federal Government will fund a program to protect the birds. The announcement builds on the outcomes of an Emergency Summit which BirdLife Australia hosted last year. The program will create an insurance population could be a lifesaver. Mallee Emu-wren and Black-eared Miner (VIC) got $110,000! However, a captive “insurance” population can’t replace species living where they naturally live, to further be extinguished on release by fires! It’s a band-aid, politically-motivated token, rather that the holistic approach of actually protecting the birds in their natural habitats!

Australian wildlife, along with insects, and fungi,once played a key role in ensuring ‘cool’ burns rather than the all-devastating wildfires. The loss of leaf eating moths, dung beetles and a variety of leaf and coarse woody debris recycling insects is contributing to a potentially high frequency fire cycle. The torching of wildlife, assumed to be collateral damage to keep “us” safe, is barbaric, anthropocentric, and will fuel more fires by working against Nature, rather than with it.

Habitat clearance and degradation has been the major threat to Black-eared Miners. Old growth mallee is the preferred habitat of Black-eared Miners, and they prefer habitat that has not been burnt for 40 years or more.

ACOSS has come to the amazing and unprecedented conclusion that for "an increasing number of Australians, housing affordability is a serious problem that affects their ability to work". A quarter of people battling with housing stress regularly skip meals in order to pay their rent.

"There's a lot of overcrowding, people are bunking up, living in inappropriate forms of housing which are not good for anybody," chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service Dr Goldie said. (Article republished from comment to front page article.)

Surely this explosion of logic, the profound cognitive process that drew to this conclusion is well overdue? The conclusion is surely obvious, that homelessness is more than a product of "domestic violence" as it's usually portrayed.

Our cities are becoming hostile to our living standards, and the vulnerable are the first to fall between the cracks.

Our real estate and housing-construction based economy means more congestion, and negative social impacts. On any given night, more than 7000 people sleep in crisis accommodation, while more than 105,000 identify as homeless. This is in a country that touts our living standards and wealth all over the world, to lure more people to migrate here!

Dr Goldie, instead of addressing the major cause of poverty, unemployment and unaffordable housing - population growth - she's endorsing funding for the homeless, and urged a bipartisan commitment to increase housing supply to help vulnerable people afford a place to live. To "increase housing supply", or putting more heat on the housing market frenzy, won't produce "affordable housing". With budget constraints, and heavy cut-backs to public services, there's nothing set aside for more social housing either.

ACOSS have no population policy, but their methods are more funding, more more more - of fixing symptoms and not addressing the cause - greed and growth!

Housing affordability driving homelessness SMH

Secretary General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has said that the true motivation behind the Saudi aggression on Yemen is the desire of Al Saud to dominate and subjugate it after they failed and lost any control over it, as they sensed that it now belongs to sovereign forces that cannot be dominated.

For the most up-to-date news about Yemen, visit the Twitter feeds #YemenUnderAttack, #YemenAttack.

See also: Israeli Fighter Jets Join Saudi Arabia in War on Yemen, Yemen: Ansarullah will not adhere to the Saudi 'House of Obedience', Houthi's fighters urge a 'general mobilization', Houthi Militia Takes Over Taiz as Yemen Descends into Civil War, PressTV-'Foreign meddling ripping Yemen apart', Land Destroyer: US-Saudi Blitz in Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation, Syria News 26/3/2015, Flagrant aggression against Yemen led by Saudi regime & GCC countries - YouTube, The Objective of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. is the Invasion and Occupation of Yemen, PressTV-'Pakistan not to join Saudi-led alliance', PressTV-'Algeria not to join attacks on Yemen', Russian expert: Saudi Arabia may suffer defeat in Yemen | Russia Beyond The Headlines

In a speech on Friday, March 27, 2015, Nasrallah said it’s the right of the Yemeni people to defend themselves, calling for stopping the aggression and urging Arab leaders who will meet in Egypt to work towards that and push towards a political solution instead of being partners in shedding blood and destroying Yemen.

He noted that the Arab states that took part in the raids on Yemen remained idle throughout decades of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian and Arab people, and didn’t take the slightest action to stop Israel’s aggression.

Nasrallah said that the main problem with the Saudi regime is that it treats other people as if they were mere subjects, and that the Saudi regime and intelligence agencies are responsible for sending ISIS terrorists to Syria and Iraq, funding and arming these terrorists to destroy the two states, adding that the Saudis are also working to prevent a political solution in Syria and persist in the complicity to the killing of its people.

Hazem Sabbagh

27/03/2015
Source Nasrallah Beirut, SANA -

I recently attended an ACF meeting. As the oldest environmental NGO in Australia they are doing a road tour seeking support. These people are fighting against the inevitable destruction of the Australian environment, which the ABC, our public broadcaster, on whom so many Australians rely for serious information, fully sanctions using pro population growth extremism. Unfortunately the argument put forth is akin to one where a driver, because he is wearing a seat-belt, believes that he now no longer needs to worry about travelling at high speed without brakes.

The ACF are unable to mention population growth in any of their 11 core campaigns, apparently because they are confused about what to do and how to do it. The ABC, on which Australians rely for much of their information, has partly driven this confusion through destructive propaganda which seeks to suppress discussion of the scientific truth about population growth.

Typically such Environmental NGO meetings are a combination of over 50s and younger people. A significant proportion of the older people recognise the population problem because they have the wisdom of the experience of rapid change iThe 20 somethings just can’t see how rapidly the degeneration is occurring because they lack that experience and remain uninformed by important broadcasters like the ABC.

I rang the ABC's RN Breakfast line yesterday again making a plea for impartial coverage of the population growth issue. A cause I have supported for the last 8 years and more.

I explained that refugees, migration and population growth management are related, but completely different, issues. What appeared to be a bigoted ABC fool on the other end of the line said she didn’t agree. To me this betrayed the reality of intolerance, prejudice and ignorance endemic at the ABC. Ever since the Pauline Hanson debacle the ABC has sought to confuse population growth management, which is a humanitarian and environmental issue, with anti refugee and anti migration attitudes.

Refugees are created by overpopulation, degraded environments and conflict over resources.

Migration, in Australia, is a government policy based on an outdated belief in population growth and a ‘populate or perish’ mentality that is a relic of a mid-20th century world with no limits to growth. Apart from the US and Canada, there are no other countries with longstanding mass migration policies. Such policies are in conflict with refugee policy. For example Australia's planned migration intake for 2014/15 is 190,000 while refugee intake is 13,750. And this is happening in the context of annual unemployment growth roughly 60% higher than annual population growth. The US has 50 million people below the poverty line and is arguably one of the most environmentally destructive, inhumane examples of capitalist malpractice on earth. Canada is similar to Australia because there is a delusion of no limits to growth there too; despite the evidence to the contrary.

Population growth management is essential for achieving for humanitarian and environmentally sustainable objectives. This is not a political issue; it is a scientific fact; just as global warming is a scientific fact.

Australia’s economy, in deteriorating more rapidly under the extreme population growth scenario, provides the proof of the unhumanitarian and unsustainable nature of extreme population growth. I have written at length about this scientific fact, explaining that Australia displays contempt for the risk management of this issue that any Australian business entity would be legally bound to apply based on WorkSafe legislation. All multinational corporations, including large mining and oil companies, follow guidelines similar to WorkSafe. The basis for these risk management strategies is based on maximising safe outcomes in an environment (the business environment) where there is a physical (and financial) limit to the available resources. This risk management strategy, if practiced by the Australian government, would lead to the following:

• Immediate evaluation of the impact of population growth on the economy to determine whether lower rates of growth would lead to better holistic financial outcomes
• If the evidence supports this conclusion this would lead to more money available for domestic and foreign aid to promote quality of life and family planning in the developing world (and in Australia)
• The simple risk management conclusion may be that moderating Australia’s rate of population growth will serve the greater good. This is why confusing such a strategy with anti-migration or anti-refugee attitudes is so destructive.

One analogy is a driver in a car wearing a seat belt. The seat belt represents renewable energy. The car represents population growth. The car is currently driving towards a brick wall at 100 km per hour. Unless the car slows down the seat belt will be of no use.

Or another driver in the car. The seatbelt represents government capacity to balance the budget. Same car, same population problem, same brick wall. Population growth denial doesn't work.

There have been many economic studies supporting the conclusion that rapid population growth is economically unsustainable due to the high cost of infrastructure expansion. Here is one example: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

The argument about reducing carbon footprints of the developed world is one thing. But if you are wearing a size 11 shoe in Melbourne you will need a size 0.08 shoe 200 years from now based on the current rate of population growth. That is because the current trend population growth in Melbourne will change today’s population of 4.25 million into 593 million in 2215.

We don’t have enough time left to continue with confused and bigoted ABC propaganda driving population growth denial.

David Packham, former bushfire CSIRO scientist, is urging more 'fuel reduction' burns to our precious bushland. But more and more people are noticing that wildlife are not 'bouncing back' after the constant burning in Victoria. The yearly target of burning five per cent of public land, purportedly to reduce bushfire risk in Victoria (after the 2009 bushfires), means that within 20 years or even less, there will be no viable bushland left in this state on public land if people allow this to happen. Forests and their inhabitants just do not recover from this kind of assault, despite common propaganda that this is 'normal' for Australia. Kooris have since denied that this was their practice. People need to ask themselves, 'Who benefits?" when they hear calls for even more burning. The forestry industry benefits by replanting rows of straight pines which provide little habitat for animals and are in fact very flammable. The property development industry also benefits when bushland is razed by fire.

After the devastation of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission set a yearly target to burn five per cent of public land to reduce bushfire risk across the state.

According to former CSIRO bushfire scientist, David Packham, forest fuel levels have worsened over the past 30 years because of “misguided green ideology”, vested interests, political failure and mismanagement, creating a massive bushfire threat.

He is arguing that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur”!

Rather than Victoria’s “failed forest management” being a threat, our State’s excessive and draconian response of 5% to be burnt each year is itself a threat to forest environments. We must live with Nature, not destroy it with draconian “management”.

This expert is failing to see the forests for the trees, and seems to think that the wholesale destruction of forests, with more burning, will “save” them – in a maligned effort to protect human lives and assets?

Many academics are promoting fire for forestry and mining. The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre shares a chairman with the cooperative Research Centre Mining and the forestry Co-operative research Centre based at Tasmania University.

State agencies will choose the easiest route of randomly burning sensitive environments, to fill quotas, and in the process kill off flora, fauna and habitat features as mere collateral damage!

Reports published by the CSIRO and BirdLife Australia cite “inappropriate fire regimes” as threatening more than 50 Australian mammal and 50 Australian bird species.

They concede that to some extent the old adage ‘fight fire with fire’ applies. Used well, fire is an effective, economical tool for land managers.

Reintroduction of occasional fire into some landscapes, and return to a finer mosaic of burning, will not prevent wildfires; it may, however, reduce their impact, by maintaining fire-dependent habitat and

protecting fire-sensitive birds. Kakadu National Park, subjected to decades of management burning, has all but lost its fauna from too frequent fire, which is likely the cause of the loss of the hollow dependent Gouldian Finch from vast areas of its frequently burned former range.

(image:”GouldianFinches” by Nigel Jacques (Kris) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons)

The original forests of Gippsland were not flammable, settlers of Fish Creek were not able to burn the forest to clear land until the railway line was cut through, bringing in a ‘draft’. This is a common story Australia wide in formerly wet forested areas.

Climate change is also said to be playing a role, with the biennial Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO State of the Climate Report 2014 finding that rising greenhouse gas emissions are causing fire seasons to lengthen and are contributing to an increase in the number of fire risk days, particularly in the south-east of Australia.

Bill Gammage is an Adjunct Professor at the Humanities Research Centre, studying Aboriginal land management at the time of contact. He has convinced quite a few environmentally concerned people through his book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ that regular burning is needed. It contains many fundamental flaws and represents ‘blind advocacy’ for repeated burning’ because ‘Aboriginal people did it’. Mooney et. al. examined over 200 sediment cores of 70,000 years or more of age to determine fire frequency. They found that fire frequency increased 50 fold with the arrival of Europeans.

However, more fires to fight fire is like using a sledge hammer to drive in a tack, or killing fleas on a dog with a shotgun!

Joel Wright, a Gunditjmara Linguist, has found no evidence of landscape burning in the Victorian western district but outlined the use of fire for smoke signals, and as an effective weapon against settlers. Research shows that fires have increased 50 fold since European settlement, so “fuel reduction” to make the bush less flammable seems to be having the opposite effect.

Natural ecological functions have always existed to limit fires, such as fungi, bacteria, insects, native species, high forest densities and tree canopies.

The Andrews government will review the minimum 5 per cent burning target in response to a Inspector-General’s report. Five years ago, both major parties backed the “minimum of 5 per cent” target, a key recommendation of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission held after Black Saturday.

Fire management needs to be multidisciplinary, and not simply about human welfare, stock and property assets. The timing of the burns should also take heed of breeding times and seasons for the species present, particularly those that are already rare or threatened due to the loss of habitat, food or human encroachment. We need to work out how we carry out our works without disturbing the nesting, roosting and breeding times for those animals in that immediate areas near human settlements.

Fire management needs to be optimised and based on where the greatest risks are, not on the metrics of hectares or percentages of Victoria’s landscape.

This article reproduces a leaflet written by Jim Quirk, who was my father. The leaflet advertised a 'Nature Show' at the lower Melbourne Town Hall in 1966. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and the Society for Growing Australian Plants sponsored the Nature Show to help the plight and status of the wombat in Australia. I wonder if the same results could be achieved today. Have we advanced at all? Reading of the particularly dire conditions for wombats in South Australia, it would seem not. And, think of the kangaroos who suffer so badly still at the wrong end of rifles and who are caught up so messily and tragically in urban development. The discursive nature of the account below may be a reflection of a time when conservation was a battle but our lives were not as stressed and rushed as they are today. We were more able to organise politically for causes in NGOs which were not then commercialised.

The Wombat

This animal, as all naturalists and most people in general know, is a marsupial, indigenous to Australia , including some Bass Strait islands. It is confined to Eastern and Southern Australia, including the great Australian Bight area. Fossil remains have been have been found in Western Australia, s,o apparently it inhabited that part of the continent.

Wombats are divided into five main species, although some naturalists concede only four distinct types. The most significant differences in the various species are size, fur and nose covering. The species best known to Victoria has a bare nose.,while others in Eastern Australia have hairy noses. Some have coarse hair; this applies to the Naked -nosed Wombat, while the southern , while the Southern Hairy-Nosed and Flinders Island species have soft silky fur. Size and weight for adults varies from about 2’ 6’ and fifty pounds, to 3’ 6” and eighty pounds or more. These figures apply to the small Flinders Island variety and the species familiar to Victorians respectively.

Wombats are, of course essentially nocturnal animals and as they burrow in the ground sometimes to the extent of 15 feet, are not frequently seen. They are herbivorous, feeding mainly on grass, the roots of a variety of vegetation and some fungi, almost entirely confining this activity to the hours of darkness.

These native animals are not prolific breeders, bearing only one young a year, about July. Tiny when born , the young remains with the parent for about 6 months. Wombats are credited with being the most intelligent of marsupials and the Flinders Island variety is regarded as being the most attractive of the species. It is on record that wombats have become most docile with friendly people and much liked as pets.

The wombat as with most animals and birds has suffered greatly with the advent of the white man to this country - very little is known of the hairy-nosed variety of South Queensland, and those inhabiting Southern New South Wales have been killed out over a large part of their range. By 1887, every wombat on King Island had been killed. This brings me to the “political" side of this animal, as affecting it in the State of Victoria.

Victorians have certainly been no exception to the incompatibility of native fauna and human settlement. The wombat early incurred the displeasure of settlers, when they erected fences to stop the movement of the introduced rabbit. These fences naturally came across the path of the wombat as it moved about to feed at night. Being a very strong animal and naturally adopted to burrowing and pushing obstacles aside, the wombat had no difficulty in getting through the fences . So the irony is that the introduced rabbit has indirectly been the death of probably hundreds of thousands of wombats: no rabbits, - no wire-netting fences - no holes made by wombats - and probably no entry to the Vermin List on which this otherwise harmless animal was placed by the State Government in 1906, at the behest of farming interests.

Of course human settlement would still have affected this creature as it has all forms of wild life, but possibly not as drastically, as in addition to being the only only native animal declared vermin in 1906, a bounty on its destruction was added in 1925. The operation of the Act was for municipalities to administer the bounty, but subsidised to the extent of 2/6 a “scalp” by the State Government. The subsidy was increased to 7/6 in 1949 with the local councils adding 2/6 which meant a reward of 10/- ($1.00) for each wombat killed by farmers and hunters. Municipalities concerned were mainly in northern Victoria, where the animals are most numerous.

The exact number of wombats killed in Victoria since Federation is not known, but in the past 6 years, bonuses have been paid in respect in respect to over 50,000. I consider the number slaughtered since the introduction of the bonus in 1925 must be at least 500,000, although exact figures are not available, as amounts paid in bonuses before 1960 also included dingoes, foxes etc. Many more before this though would have been slaughtered - as mentioned earlier, the animal was classified as vermin in 1906. No one knows the present Victorian wombat population - estimates vary between 2,000,000 and 500,000 - it could be much less than the latter.They are now practically confined to the “wilderness' area of Eastern Victoria being largely eliminated by settlement etc.

The Fauna protection Council was formed in 1959 to counter a widespread racket, prevalent then in the export of Australian birds. It obtained the affiliation of most of the natural history and animal welfare organisations in the State at the time. It was successful in its representations to the Federal Government not to further permit the export of native birds.

Many unsatisfactory aspects of the treatment of native fauna were subsequently discussed by the Council, prominent amongst them, the sad situation of the native wombat. As we considered its vices exaggerated, its treatment by authority unenlightened and not in accord with civilised society, it was decided in 1961 to try to persuade the then Minister for Lands to remove it from the vermin list and logically place it under the control of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, like other native species. Despite considerable efforts, we were unable to get the Minister to alter the decision made 55 years earlier.

In 1964, with a new Lands Minister in office, the council decided to again put in a plea for the wombat, and as a result had a deputation to the Minister in October of that year. With the aid of many other people and organisations, despite considerable opposition from political representatives of farming interests, some headway was made the Government giving consideration to the removal of the bonus system of control. It was then realised that this was the best we could hope for at this stage; after all, old customs die hard, they’d been shooting and trapping wombats for probably 100 years. It was accordingly decided to concentrate on this, which culminated in the Government passing a bill, after vigorous debate and opposition from a political segment, in April of this year to discontinue the payment of the $1.00 wombat bonus for a trial period of three years.

The morality of the bonus rankled strongly and the Council now feel that this is a most significant decision, although not all that was sought. Considerable destruction of the animal by fumigation and other methods will still be carried out by Lands department employees, if Gippsland farmers have their way, as this native animal is still classified as VERMIN. The Council will not be satisfied until the wombat is removed form the list of Vermin and placed under the control of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department. On the other hand, full note must be taken that the bounty has been removed for only a “trial' period of three years, and little mercy or sentimentality was shown in the parliamentary debates on the subject. In the three years we have, we will have to persuade the Government to sponsor some satisfactory research on the animal, so that more will be known about its numbers, natural increase and life cycle.

What has happened to the wombat over the years is an example of the ruthlessness and brutality of our dominant species towards other forms of life with which we share this world. What has been achieved in the last few months is an example of what an enlightened, determined public can achieve. It is an example that in the long run it is not the overwhelming mass of people or a few academics who are going to save wild life and habitat, but a persistent and informed section of the public, the more numerous the better, who are prepared to give their time and energy to persuade our legislators that it is good policy to adopt intelligent wildlife conservation measures - for it is the politicians who are eventually going to make these decisions, be they good or ill.

J.H Quirk

(August 1966)

The ABC reported today:

Mr Fraser — Australia's 22nd prime minister — was born into a wealthy pastoral family in 1930 and first entered Parliament in 1955 as its youngest MP. He spent nearly 20 years as a backbencher and in the ministry. He became opposition leader in 1975, facing off against Gough Whitlam and becoming prime minister in the wake of Mr Whitlam's dismissal.

From his first days in politics, Mr Fraser was an advocate of immigration as a means of boosting the population.

As a minister in the Gorton government, he became the first federal politician to use the word "multiculturalism" — an historic break from the Anglocentric past of his own party. Mr Fraser's multicultural conviction found shape in immigration policy in the post-Vietnam war push to bring refugees from mainland South East Asia to Australia.

"I believe we had a moral and ethical obligation," Mr Fraser later said. "If we had taken polls ... I think people would have voted 80, 90 per cent against us but we explained the reasons for it.

"We were also working to get people to understand that the idea and the reality of a multicultural Australia could be an enormous strength to this country, not a weakness."

"There is strength in this kind of diversity so long as we understand what it's about."

Nothing wrong with any of these sentiments. After declaring war on Vietnam, a humanitarian refugee intake was logical and ethical.

Note also Fraser's intimated "Populate or Perish" attitude to population growth. Fraser was supporting humane refugee intake from Vietnam on an ethical basis and mass migration to achieve population growth - based on his opinion that population growth was "a good idea".

The ABC loves pumping this kind of confusing muddle of refugee / immigration / population growth rhetoric to support its propaganda campaign for pro population growth extremism.

Since when are refugee intake, mass migration of the relatively wealthy, and population growth management the same issue? Even an ABC journalist should be able to understand that these are three separate issues. If you look at what Malcolm Fraser actually did it is as follows:

• "Believed in" Australian population growth in the early 70s, when the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" and Paul Erlich's "The Population Bomb" had just been published (in the late 60s). The concept of environmental limits was a fringe opinion at the time and Fraser's opinion was "conventional wisdom" that is now recognised as outdated. The constraints on population growth are physical (environmental) and economic constraints that have nothing to do with xenophobia or racism.
• Abhorred racism. This was always right and has nothing to do with population growth management. Physical and economic constraints are now far better understood than they were in the days of "no Limits to Growth".

But the ABC doesn't want to confront this contemporary reality because it is suffocated by confused, outdated and illegitimate phobias.

(Candobetter Ed: We are putting this article back on the front page because it is obviously relevant today.) Malcolm Fraser died today, March 20, 2014. Although loathed by a large section of the population because of his role in usurping Gough Whitlam, in what many believe was a CIA coup,[1] Malcolm Fraser since redeemed himself in many ways by advocating more thoughtful and responsible policy in Foreign Affairs. The current government and opposition are unlikely to acknowledge this most valuable role because it was critical of both of them. In recent interviews Fraser deplored the gung-ho and dishonest attitude of the west in pursuing wars and warned of the dangers to the world if the West continued to dismiss the legitimate concerns of Russia, the East and the Middle East. In this video and transcript, first published on 7 August 2014, Malcolm Fraser describes US/NATO moves on Ukraine as provocative. Russian stance justified. America feels it can break international law. The West should not, under any circumstances, involve itself militarily in the affairs of Crimea, Ukraine. Ukraine should be free to make whatever economic relationships it likes with other countries, whether with Russia or the West or both, but it should not become part of a defence bloc, a military block, and therefore [...] should not be eligible to join NATO, which Russia would reasonably interpret as provocative. Agrees that most Australian politicians showing poor judgement on Ukraine, Putin. Thinks this is partly influenced by mass media through deliberate slant. (First published on 20 March 2014.)

"Bombers in the channel and warships off Britain’s coast… If you believe the British media and some government ministers, it’s only a matter of time before the Red Army complete with snow on their boots turns up on a high street near you. How hot is the new Cold War going to get? Helping us to answer the question is the Guardian's associate editor Seumas Milne." - George Galloway, British MP interviews Seumas Milne.

Seumus Milne: I think in last few weeks and months it has reached fever pitch. You've got the level of media coverage of this crisis in Ukraine now 'Russia's role' in it and Russia's role in Europe and Putin in particular has become hysterical and completely unrelated to reality. And I think it is quite dangerous. I think they're whipping up a kind of war-fever and preparing people for a level of intervention that, you know, British people, people in this part of the world in Western Europe are actually not committed to at all. Nor in the United States. They're trying to lay the ground for a level of action in relation to Russia and the Ukraine that I think is (a) unjustified, and (b) not at all supported by public opinion. But these things have a momentum of their own. And you know, in the last few weeks, we've seen decisions to send American and British troops - in relatively small numbers - we're talking hundreds - but still troops - to Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, to a zone where there is conflict, in which there's a civil war going on, which Russia is supporting one side in that war and the United States, Britain, France and the other NATO powers are supporting the other side. A government that came to power in an illegal overthrow of an elected government.

And this is a dangerous situation which can spin out of control. So I think it's necessary for us in this part of the world to be actually much tougher with our own governments and our own military and our own media about the stories they're telling about the situation because it's something that can lead to disaster.

I don't think it's the intention of either Russia or the Western powers for this to [turn into a hot war] I don't think the West intends to fight in Ukraine, although it's clearly drawn the line in the NATO states that it's set up in the former Soviet Union - particularly the Baltic States. But, as we're talking about, these things have their own logic and they can lead to their own forms of escalation.

If for example, as there is incredibly strong pressure in the US from both main parties - Republicans and Democrats - to arm the Ukrainian government, which has been resisted up to this point, by France and Germany in particular. If that takes place and they send heavy weapons to Ukrainian forces - by the way, which include fascist militias fighting on the front line in Eastern Ukraine, with names like the Azov Battalion, where they have swastika-like symbols on their arms and belief in racial superiority and white supremacy. These are some of the forces that we're talking about arming and supporting, that the West is supporting at the moment. If that happens and the Russians then increase the level of supplies with heavy weapons to the rebel camp in Eastern Ukraine - You know, the potential for that conflict spinning out of control is very serious!

And, in fact, we've had British generals, you know, like the former British representative at NATO who has been speaking out last week, saying just this: that the potential for what he called total war is there and his argument is, you know, that the British Government and NATO must take this seriously, that military spending must be increased. And a lot of people are using this conflict as a way to try and protect the army and the armed forces from cuts and to, you know, spend more on weapons.

But if people like that themselves are saying it, I think we should take it seriously and wind down the conflict. And raise the pressure, in this country and other parts of the world to wind down this conflict, to de-escalate the conflict. We've got to - At the moment there's a cease-fire in Eastern Ukraine which is more or less holding and some of the heavy weapons have been pulled back from the front line as a result of this so-called Minsk Agreement that was signed last month. But the sending of troops by Britain and America to Ukraine to Kiev actually explicitly breaks that agreement that was signed - the ceasefire agreement. Article 10 in that ceasefire agreement - the Minsk Agreement - stipulates withdrawal of all foreign forces from Ukraine and that has been breached by our own government, by the United States government, directly. But, you know, that agreement is likely to break down again because it doesn't deal with the underlying causes and we're likely to see a new escalation in the months to come.

So we need to be promoting - I think quite seriously - and pressing for an alternative - and an end to this ludicrous anti-Russian propaganda, which is blinding people to the reality of what's going on and making a genuine debate and dialogue about what's taking place impossible because anything that contradicts the NATO line, the western line, which overwhelmingly dominates the western media, is immediately dismissed as Kremlin propaganda. Whatever the truth of it.

"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"." (John Pilger). Article republished with permission from author. First published 26 February 2015 at http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue

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.

"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.

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".

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."

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.

For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, 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".

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.

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 "collateral 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 Pollack, "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 cleansing. 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.

Video and transcript inside: Dr Karen Hitchcock: "My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position." Congratulations to the 7.30 Report, Karen Hitchcock and Quarterly essay for criticising the appalling depiction and treatment of Australia's elderly, implicitly and explicitly advocated by the growth lobby in the mainstream media and government. See, for instance, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" The negative message about the elderly has been so overwhelming that most of us find it exhausting to fight. The ABC has often also carried this message uncritically. Perhaps it took a woman-led news commentary program - the 7.30 Report - to try to break this mould. Dr Karen Hitchcock (who is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital) is a very effective ambassador for the elderly, although she is a young woman herself. Her work deserves our collective support and promotion.

Video and transcript originally broadcast and published from the ABC 7.30 Report at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4196703.htm on 12 March 2015.

Elderly 'have internalised' message they're a burden on society, says physician Karen Hitchcock

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: By 2050, about five per cent of Australia's population will be over the age of 85, with many of us expected to live to our mid-90s. The challenges of the ageing population are something we've been hearing a lot about in the past couple of weeks, since the Federal Government released its Intergenerational Report. The message is that more old people and falling budget revenues are going to put a huge strain on our health and welfare systems. But now one doctor is raising concerns about the way we're discussing the ageing population. She believes we're sending older Australians a message that they're an intolerable burden.

Karen Hitchcock is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a major public hospital in Victoria and she's written the latest issue of the Quarterly Essay. It's entitled Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly, she joined me from our Melbourne studio.

Karen, we've been talking a lot recently about the economics of health care as the country deals with an ageing population and declining budget revenue. When you listen to economists and politicians talk about the ageing population and the growing pressures on the budget and sustainability and so on, as a doctor, what do you hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK, PUBLIC HOSPITAL PHYSICIAN & AUTHOR: What I hear is that the fact of our ageing population is an overwhelmingly negative development. The elderly are portrayed as being a burden on their families and on the state and a drain on the economy.

LEIGH SALES: And what message do you think that the elderly hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Oh, I think that they've completely internalised this message that they're a burden. I see evidence of this every day on my hospital ward. Patients, elderly patients apologise for being sick, for being in hospital, for taking up a hospital bed that should be apparently for somebody else.

LEIGH SALES: How does that translate then in terms of the type of care that they want?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well, I think that sometimes it can mean that they feel reluctant to accept the care that they need.

LEIGH SALES: Like, give me an example of, say, a patient where you've seen that.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, well, I've - there's a lot of patients, but recently I looked after an elderly gentleman who said that he wanted to die and that he didn't want to be in hospital and that he was a nuisance and when I sat down and talked to him, it turned out that his wife had recently died, his dog that was his remaining companion had died and he felt that he had no place in society anymore and that he was a burden.

LEIGH SALES: And so how, as a doctor, did you address that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I called him a couple of weeks after he left hospital, given that he had said he never wanted to come back to hospital, just to try and work out a plan for him and he said to me that he says silly things when he's sick. Of course he wants to come back to hospital and that he was very, very happy because he'd managed to get another dog, go back to his part-time work.

LEIGH SALES: What's your attitude towards advanced care directive, which are documents that people sign giving instructions about the sort of treatment that they would like if they're faced with potential end-of-life issues, which of course is often things that older people sign?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: They're being heavily promoted at the moment as something that should be universally adopted and I think that they do have a place, particularly if people have advanced malignancy and are going to die imminently or particularly when people have particular treatments that they don't want to have. But I think that saying that every single citizen in Australia should have an advanced care directive is dangerous and I think that to say that they're unambiguously good sort of relies upon an understanding of the human subject that is breathtakingly simplistic. People change their mind. It's very difficult for us to know how we're going to feel as we become increasingly dependent and debilitated. I mean, my grandmother, for example, she was a fiercely independent woman who, in her 80s, developed a lung disease that meant eventually she was house-bound and oxygen dependent. And if someone had've asked her a year prior to that development whether or not she would rather die or be house-bound and oxygen dependent, she definitely would have said she'd rather be dead. But when it came down to it, she was very happy with her life. She still had her family. She said that she would play in her memories. She was very happy to be alive.

LEIGH SALES: So if you see this idea that we are giving elderly people the impression that they're a burden as being a problem, how would you like to see the debate around some of these issues and the discussion reframed?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well I think that our focus should be on how can we improve the life of our elderly patients, not that we should be so keen to offer them death.

LEIGH SALES: And so, practically, how would you go about doing that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, I think that we - it would be really helpful if we could somehow integrate medical and social services so that we can encourage elderly people to remain independent and in their communities. If we could somehow integrate services and offer preventative treatment before people need to come to hospital, that would be a really great development and there are international examples of care programs like this where there are community-based, what's called medical homes, that are staffed by GPs and specialists and full allied health to enable people to stay in the community longer and to stay well and independent.

LEIGH SALES: How about the interaction between nursing homes and hospitals, how well does that work?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: It works very poorly. Many elderly people come to hospital as a result of medication side-effects, having too many tablets or etc., and they come to hospital, we stop their tablets and they're discharged back to their nursing homes and they have to continue on the tablets that they were on prior to coming to hospital, sometimes the tablets that caused them to come to hospital, until they can get a doctor to come to the nursing home and rechart their medicine.

LEIGH SALES: You are a busy doctor, yet you've taken the time out to write this lengthy piece of work around these issues. What is the core message that you're hoping to get out there based on your experience working in hospitals?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position.

LEIGH SALES: Just before you go, Dr Hitchcock, there's been a lot of discussion around this week about sexism in medicine. A senior surgeon raised some concerns around the issue of sexual harassment and whether or not raising that impacts on female doctors' careers. Just in your experience, do you think that there is a problem in medicine with sexism?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I've obviously not worked with every doctor in every hospital in Australia and I'm sure there are individuals. However, one thing I do know is that there is certainly not a pervasive culture of sexism in medicine. I've never been discriminated against because I'm a woman in medicine. In fact I've been enormously supported and encouraged.

LEIGH SALES: Dr Hitchcock, thank you very much.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Thank you.

Update, 31 March 2015: 15:10min video of President al-Assad's interview (5/3/15, length: 15:10min) embedded here.

Other articles in support of Syria, 1 Apr 2015: Breakin News | President Assad: Russian initiative for Syria is positive(31/3/15), Syrian Free Press | Syrian Women's Commandos Actively Operating in Damascus Countryside: we are all with you, Syrian lionesses(31/3/15), SyrianFreePress | U.S. Senator Richard Black: "Syria fought terrorism successfully and will be victorious" (30/3/15), RT | 70 women, including 9 schoolgirls, left Germany to join ISIS – report (30/3/15), Global Research | Canada's Strikes against Syria. Violating International Law: The Canadian Recipe Against ISIS (28/3/15), PressTV | Iraqi FM in Syria to demand further mutual security cooperation against ISIL (25/3/15), SANA | Belgian politician: President al-Assad is an ally because he fights terrorism(31/3/15), SANA | President al-Assad: European states are making grave mistake allying with terrorism supporters(25/3/15), Land Destroyer | Rebranding AlQaeda's Jabhat Al Nusra as "Moderates" (23/3/15), Global Research | Syria's President Bashar al-Assad: "The West has no Desire to Combat Terrorism". West Channels "Money and Armaments" to ISIS, (6 Mar) - republished with video on candobetter.

MSM articles (mostly anti-Syria propaganda), 1 Apr 2015: Toronto Star | Tories won't say how much mission in Iraq, Syria will cost (1/4/15), NBC| Samantha Power: U.S. Seeking Culprit for 'Monstrous Weapon' in Syria (31/3/15) ('Monstrous' alleged weapon is chlorine gas - see more recent full 60 Minutes interview here), BBC | Syria donors pledge nearly $4bn at UN crisis meeting (31/3/15) - to lure hungry Syrians into terrorist-controlled regions, 'Analysis': Is Canada's ISIS mission ready for Syria's moral maze? (30/3/15), Wall Street Journal | Syrian Opposition Says It Has Taken Over Northwest Provincial Capital of Idlib (30/3/15), SMH | Arm of al-Qaeda seizes major city in northern Syria (30/3/15), BBC | Syria crisis: Idlib 'captured by Islamist groups' (30/3/15), Middle East Monitor | Syria: The Downward Spiral of Desolation (30/3/15), FP | The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight (30/3/15), Global News | Canada poised to begin airstrikes in Syria (30/3/15), Globe and Mail | Three scenarios Canada may face in Syria against Islamic State , Fox News | ISIS kills more than 40 in attack on Syrian village (31/3/15), Aljazeera | Syrian rebels capture Idlib city in joint offensive (29/3/15).

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: "I hope the first thing, which is very simple, just for the officials to tell their people the truth, the unbiased truth, without any preconceptions. Just tell your people the truth, and they’ll be able to analyze it." President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to Portuguese State Television, RTP, which displayed a good range of bias in its questions. The full text of the interview forms the article inside.Article first published on Global Research, March 06, 2015. Portuguese State Television, RTP and SANA Region: Middle East & North Africa Theme: US NATO War Agenda In-depth Report: Syria: NATO's next war? See http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrias-president-bashar-al-assad-the-west-has-no-desire-to-combat-terrorism-west-channels-money-and-armaments-to-isis/5434929

Question 1: In a few days, it will be 4 years since the protests began in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad. From then on it has been a massacre. More than 220 thousand people have died, and there are 4 million displaced people. The arrival of Daesh (Islamic State) has made the situation more grim. For this reasons, it’s important to speak to a key figure in all this process. Today, he gives his first interview ever to a Portuguese media outlet. The Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad. How do you describe your country today, Mr. President?

President Assad: Let me start by commenting on the number that you mentioned in your introduction, about the number of victims in Syria, which is 200,000, that’s been mentioned in the Western media recently, 220,000. That number is exaggerated. Always the West has exaggerated the numbers in Syria. Actually, it is not about whether they are hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands. Victims are victims, killing is killing, and terrorism is terrorism. Actually, it’s not about being a mere number represented on a graph, on a chart, like a spreadsheet. It’s about families that lost members, lost dear ones, lost relatives. It’s a human disaster we have in Syria.

This crisis has affected every part of Syria, every Syrian citizen regardless of his affiliation or allegiance. It affected his livelihood, food, medicaments, medical care, basic requirements like education. Hundreds of hospitals were destroyed, thousands of schools were destroyed, tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of students don’t go to school. All that will create the fertile habitat and good incubator for terrorism and extremism to grow. But despite all this hardship, the Syrians are determined to continue fighting terrorism, defending their country, and defying hegemony.

Question 2: Syria is not much of a country nowadays. The Syrian Army does not control all the borders, you have international coalition flying in your skies. On the grounds there are different entities. Is Syria as we have known it lost or finished?

President Assad: You cannot talk about a finished Syria when the people are unified behind their government and their army and fighting terrorism and still have institutions working. We still have subsidies, we still pay salaries, we pay the salaries even in some areas under the control of the terrorists themselves. We still have the-

Question 3: You send money to…?

President Assad: Exactly, we send salaries. Because they are employees, and have their own salaries. We send vaccines to those areas for the children.

Question 4: So you cooperate with the Islamic State?

President Assad: No, no. We don’t. We send them, and we deal with the civilians who are the mediators with the terrorists, or the militants.

But at the end, all these basic requirements reach those areas. So, we don’t have “Syria is finished” and we don’t have a failed state, actually. But if you want to talk about something different you mentioned in your question, which is the breaching of our airspace illegally by the alliance airplanes and by terrorists supported or working as proxy to regional countries-

Question 5: And borders.

President Assad: This is a failure of the international system, this international system that’s been represented by the United Nations and the Security Council, and that is supposed to solve the problems and protect the sovereignty of different countries and prevent war.

Actually, it has failed in doing so. So, what we have now is a failed United Nations; failed to protect international citizens including in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and in other countries.

Question 6: But you also failed. The Syrian Army also fails, because a lot of Christians have been abducted recently in the north.

The role of the Syrian Army, like any national army, is to protect every single citizen

President Assad: Actually, the role of the Syrian Army, like any national army, is to protect every single citizen, regardless of his affiliation, religion, sect, ethnicities, and so on. If you have mentioned this, I would say yes, we would like to and we wish that the Syrian Army would be able to help every Syrian since the beginning of the crisis. But the main obstacle why the Syrian army couldn’t do so, and as part of this couldn’t help the Christians a few days ago that have been kidnapped by ISIS, is the unlimited support that’s been offered to those terrorists by the Western and regional countries.

Question 7: What we have seen until now is several attempts to have a peace conference that all have failed. What we have until now, it’s talks about talks. What can break this deadlock, Mr. President?

President Assad: Do you mean in Geneva?

Question 8: Geneva 1, Geneva 2, the Russian initiative was a fiasco.

President Assad: The solution is political, but if you want to sit with someone or a party that doesn’t influence the situation on the ground, it’s going to be talk for the sake of talk, that’s correct. We didn’t choose the other party in Geneva. It was chosen by the West, by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. It wasn’t a Syrian opposition that we made dialogue with. You’re right; if you want to make dialogue, you have to make it with Syrian opposition, Syrian partner, Syrian people who represents Syrians in Syria, not who represent other countries.

So, what happened in Geneva wasn’t the model that we have to follow.

Question 9: But, what you are saying, is that an acceptable opposition for you, or…?

President Assad: Of course, any opposition that works for the Syrian, to defend its country, represents Syrians or part of the Syrian population…

Question 10: Within the framework of the Syrian state?

President Assad: No, no. Any opposition who works for the Syrian people. It’s not related to the state, it’s not related to the government.

Question 11: So, you’re excluding the Syrian National Coalition?

President Assad: I don’t exclude anyone as long as he’s Syrian. I’m talking about criteria. Anyone, or any party, who meet with these criteria, we can consider him as opposition. If the coalition is formed in the West or any other country, it’s not considered Syrian.

It doesn’t represent the Syrian people. The Syrian people won’t accept him.

Question 12: But are you able to discuss with them or not?

President Assad: Actually, what we have followed since the beginning of the crisis, we didn’t leave any stone unturned. We tried every possible solution in order not to allow anyone to say “if they didn’t do this, that would have happened.” So, we discussed even with the coalition, although we know in advance that it doesn’t represent Syrians, it represents the countries that formed it. And second, it doesn’t have any influence on the ground in Syria, even with the militants, even with the terrorists, even with anyone who is involved in the problem within Syria.

Question 13: So you’re saying that the “Free Syrian Army” doesn’t have influence on the ground? That only al-Nusra and Islamic State have influence on the ground?

President Assad: Even Obama said that, he said that the moderate opposition is a fantasy. Most of the world now knows, what they called moderate opposition, they called it “Free Syrian Army,” they have so many other names, all of them are fantasy. Actually, who is controlling the terrorism arena in Syria are either ISIS or al-Nusra, mainly, and some other smaller factions.

Question 14: So, in the end, the solution for Syria is a military solution, and not a negotiated peace?

President Assad: No, actually, what we have been doing recently, as long as we don’t have a party to make negotiations with who can influence the militants on the ground, we went to make reconciliation with the militants in some areas, and that worked, and this is a very realistic political solution. Actually, that is how you exclude the military solution, by discussing with them making a safe area.

Question 15: About the discussions, you have Geneva 1, Geneva 2, the Russian initiative, in all of that there are not, how shall I say, things in common. Is there anything, any issue that you know it is possible, why not start with them? Is there anything in common between you and them?

President Assad: If you want to talk about what happened in Moscow, it’s different from what happened in Geneva, because they invited some of the opposition, because we can’t talk about one opposition; we have many different oppositions. You don’t put them in one basket. You have some of them represent Syrians, some of them they don’t represent anyone, and so on. So, we have common things with some of the opposition that were invited to Moscow, so this is just the beginning of the dialogue. The dialogue may take a long time. But at the end, if you want to not talk about dialogue, talk about the end results on the ground, the question is, who of those parties that we call opposition, who of them represent Syrian people and can influence the militants on the ground in order to save Syrian blood? That is the question. We don’t have an answer yet, because they have to prove, we don’t have to prove. We know we have our army, the army will obey the government, if the government gives an order, it will follow the order. But what about the others? Who is going to control the terrorists? That is the question.

Question 16: You pointed out that some countries, like France, don’t want a peace conference to succeed. Why is that?

President Assad: Actually, you have two points, or two reasons, let’s say. First one is not related only to the French; it’s related to every official who is complicit and involved in the propaganda and the aggression against Syria during the last four years. It’s about the end of this war will unmask those officials in front of their public opinion, in a country where there is public opinion. I don’t mean Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where there is no public opinion anyway. But generally, they will be unmasked about the question “what is the revolution that you mentioned, that you talked about? How could a revolution collapse or fail if you have the support of the West, the support of regional countries, all this money and armaments and so on, and you supposed that he’s a dictator who is killing his good people, so the people are against him, regional countries are against him, and the West is against him, and he succeeded.It’s one of two options you’re either lying to us, or you’re talking about a superman. Because you don’t a superman, he’s a regular president, it means he could withstand for four years only because he has the public support. It doesn’t mean full public support, one hundred percent, or absolute public support, but definitely have support from a part, a large amount of the Syrian people.” So, this is a lie that the public opinion in the West and in other countries will ask the officials about. What about the Arab spring that turned out to be – instead of budding flowers – blood and killing and destruction? Is that the spring that you talked about? This is one reason.

The other reason is more specific towards France. Not limited, but more specific, let’s say. It’s about the financial relation between France and the Gulf states. Maybe because they have financial difficulties, I don’t know why. But this financial relations, and I don’t have any proof whether this is about the vested interest of some officials in France or if it’s about public interest, I don’t have any proof, but at the end, these financial interests push those officials in France to exchange their values of liberty and fraternity and democracy, all the things that they used to preach, the exchange those values for petrodollars. So now those French officials and some others in the West, they don’t practice what they preach anymore.

Question 17: But the tide seems to change a little bit. You had French MPs here. It was an organized visit, or it came as a surprise to you?

President Assad: No, no. It wasn’t a surprise, because it wasn’t the first delegation to come to Syria.

Question 18: French delegation?

President Assad: French and from other countries. Different kinds of delegations, activists, mediators, some officials came to deal with us under the table, not-

Question 19: This was organized with your government and…?

President Assad: Yes, it was officially organized, and they had a schedule when they came. It was weeks before, it wasn’t a surprise.

Question 20: With French diplomats as well or not?

President Assad: We had the impression, and it’s a strong impression, that most of the government, the main officials in the government, they know about it in advance, and they didn’t oppose.

Question 21: So, did they send you any message?

President Assad: No, there wasn’t a message, and they came to see the reality on the ground, and I think that’s the reflection – not just this delegation; the delegations that came to Syria recently from different countries, especially from the West, is a reflection of not believing, not taking in with the narrative, the insidious narrative about Syria in the West by their officials. They want to know the truth, I mean it’s a kind of suspicion about the whole propaganda in the West.

Question 22: So, in a sense, the tide is changing because probably there are some people thinking that even though it’s a bad solution, it’s better to deal with Bashar al-Assad than to deal with the worse solution which is going to be the Islamic State.

President Assad: I don’t think the general public thinks about the second part, it’s about the first part, about what’s happening and how everything we said in Syria at the beginning of the crisis they say later. They said it’s peaceful, we said it’s not peaceful, they’ve killing – these demonstrators, that they called them peaceful demonstrators – have killed policemen. Then it became militants. They said yes, it’s militants. We said it’s militants, it’s terrorism. They said no, it’s not terrorism. Then when they say it’s terrorism, we say it’s Al Qaeda, they say no, it’s not Al Qaeda. So, whatever we said, they say later. That created a lot of suspicion in the West. They want to come to understand this part. Why are you saying whatever Syria was saying in the beginning? Of course, in the West, the propagandists, whether officials or media, the added something only to the real story; that ISIS and al-Nusra was created of Assad, or it’s because of his policy, and so on.

Question 23: But you freed a lot of jihadists from the prisons that went to ISIS, to the Islamic State.

President Assad: No, that’s before the crisis. They were sentenced for a few years, and when the sentence ended, they left prison. We didn’t.

We never did. So no, we have institutions, we have a judicial system in Syria.

Question 24: Anyway, Europe is facing more and more threats of terrorism linked to jihadist movements, some of them with connections here in Syria, I mean Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. And the question here: is Syria able to help the European countries in fighting these threats of terrorism?

President Assad: This is like a building; you cannot build a building without having the foundation, so what is the foundation that you need in this this case? First, you need officials in Europe to have the will to fight terrorism. This is something that we don’t have to this moment. Second thing, to have prudent policies. We cannot have arrogant, stubborn officials that only adopted egotistical policies.

Third, which is very important, fighting terrorism should be a value, should become a value. It cannot be a sort of opportunism, like because now you are suffering in Europe from terrorism, you’re scared, you want to fight terrorism in this region. What about a few years ago? You didn’t suffer.

Question 25: But can you help the…?

President Assad: If they don’t help themselves first, we cannot. If they help themselves, we are ready to help. If you build this foundation, if you have this foundation, you can go to the building.

This is where you can talk about how to integrate the community in your country, how to have exchange of information with intelligence, you have many ways. Of course we can, but you need to have the foundation in order to succeed.

Question 26: Mr. President, let me quote, “the Syrian people aspire more freedom, justice, human rights. They aspire to more plurality and democracy.” Your Foreign Minister said this in the Geneva conference.

However, the state of Syria is perceived differently in the West. Till now, it’s perceived as brutal, ruthless, dictatorial, and it’s not just a question of image, so how is it possible to convince the people that…?

President Assad: This is illogical and unrealistic, because how can somebody who kills his people and oppresses his people be supported by the same people? How? Tell me about this contradiction. Look at it from the outside. Is it palatable, can you understand? It doesn’t.

Question 27: But, Mr. President, the reality is that if you allow me to go backwards, and try to-

President Assad: Before the crisis.

Question 28: Let me just try to… you started four years ago with peaceful demonstrators that were repressed, then you are blamed, your government is blamed, for a lot of allegations of human rights violations in your own ranks, repression. You have the Cesar reported, defected from the army, with photos of massacres, of torture of the opposition. You have allegations that you have used chemical weapons.

You have allegations of using the barrel bombs till now, and so, the human rights reports watcher about Syria, they are not very good for you, your government, and the Syrian Army.

President Assad: You are talking about massive propaganda for four years. We cannot answer every one in one interview, but I will say the demonstrations never were peaceful, because in the first week, we lost many of our policemen. How? How could a peaceful demonstration kill a policeman? It wasn’t peaceful, so, this is the beginning of the lies, it’s the beginning of the propaganda.

Question 29: All lies, all the time? Four years of lies, Mr. President?

President Assad: Exactly, that’s what happened. Because, how do you have ISIS? Suddenly? You don’t have ISIS suddenly, you don’t have armaments suddenly, you don’t have al-Nusra Front suddenly. It’s a long process, you can’t have it just in few weeks. Suddenly, everybody is talking about ISIS. Go back to our statements from the very beginning, and you can see that the evolution of the events was going in that regard from the very beginning, and we said that. They didn’t want to listen; they wanted to listen to their statements.That’s what I say. It’s impossible to only tell lies in the West. How can you tell the truth if you don’t have an embassy in this country? How can you tell the truth if you listen to Qatar and Al-Jazeera that were paying the money to those terrorists?

Question 30: So you blame Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia for being the backbone of the jihadists? You have the proof?

President Assad: Very simple; what is the ideology of ISIS? What is the ideology? It’s the Wahhabi ideology. Do we have it in Syria? Do we have it in Morocco? In the western Arab world? Actually, it existed in Saudi Arabia.

Question 31: It’s the same as in Saudi Arabia.

President Assad: Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the Wahhabi ideology.

Second, Erdogan is Muslim Brotherhood. He’s a very staunch advocate of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology which was the first organization in the history of Islam, in the beginning of the last century, who promoted violence in implementing political agenda. So, you have those, and that’s enough. Going back to the Western media, in the Western media, and the American media in particular, they say 80% of the terrorists are coming from Turkey. You have another realistic one, what you called in your media Kobani which is called Ayn al-Arab. It took four months to be liberated, in spite of the attack of the alliance. Why? Actually, a similar city, the same size, and the same terrain, it took the Syrian Army two to three weeks. Why? Because it was supported logistically through Turkey on the border. They send them everything, armaments, all kinds of support. The recent event when Turkey-

Question 32: Did you support the Kurds? Did the Syrian Army support the Kurds?

President Assad: Of course.

Question 33: Because they are also fighting the Syrian Army.

President Assad: Before the issue of Kobani. Before that, we did.

Before Kobani, we supported the Kurds, because it didn’t start there.

It started before, and before the alliance started supporting the Kurds, we did. We sent them armaments. Of course, they’re going to say no, because the Americans said “say no, and we will help you.” If they say yes, the Americans will be angry, just to be cautious, to take precautions about any statement they may say now that we didn’t, we have all the documents about the armaments that’s been sent to them, beside the air raids and so on and the bombardments and everything else.

Question 34: New Syrian troops are being trained in the framework of the “Free Syrian Army” supported by the Americans to fight against the Islamic State. Do you think you will have to fight them as well?

President Assad: You know, and I know, and everybody knows that those 5,000 were announced by the Americans, and this this is my proof that the Western officials don’t have the will to fight terrorism. That is the proof. I told you, the base, the foundation, is to have the will.

It means they don’t have the will. If Obama said the moderate opposition is fantasy, so who do you send the money and armaments to?

Reality. You don’t send to the fantasy, you send it to the reality, and the reality are the extremists. And those 5,000 are going to be another support to those terrorists, because the same grassroots of the organization that’s been supported by the West, by money and armaments, they joined ISIS with their armaments and with themselves.

Question 35: Two questions to finish this interview. This is your first interview with a journalist from a Portuguese-speaking country.

Do you expect anything from these countries?

President Assad: I don’t expect; I hope. I hope the first thing, which is very simple, just for the officials to tell their people the truth, the unbiased truth, without any preconceptions. Just tell your people the truth, and they’ll be able to analyze it. Second, we hope from Portugal as part of the EU to look at the Czech Republic. A small country, ten millions, but it was very wise in dealing with the crisis in Syria. They have their embassy, they can tell what’s going on on the ground, because isolationism is not a policy. When you isolate yourself, when you try to isolate a country by removing your ambassadors or closing your embassies, you isolate yourself from the reality. You shouldn’t isolate yourself, as Europe, from reality. We hope can play that role in the EU to shift this trend that started with the American administration of Bush; when they have a problem with somebody or some area, instead of being more involved, they cut their relation with it. This is not policy.

Question 36: Just one last question, Mr. President. You’re a key player for any possible peace deal. Don’t you feel sometimes doubts, anguish, with this tremendous responsibility? Don’t you feel what history might say about you?

President Assad: Of course, this is the most important thing that any politician or leader must think about, and it’s about, first of all, about having good will and good intention to help your country.

Whether you do mistakes or you do right, you do wrong; this is not the issue. People will judge you by your will, by how much you were related to your country, related to your country, how much you are a patriot, not a puppet or a marionette that’s being moved from the outside. This is the most important thing; how much you do, what’s the best you can do to protect your country and protect your people.

Question 37: Thank you, Mr. President, for this interview, and thank you for being with RTP.

President Assad: Thank you.

The Intergenerational Report is used to claim that we don't have enough workers, and imply that we need more – either migrant workers or people working longer. The reality is the opposite. (Originally published on Kelvin Thomson's blog at http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/victorias-record-underemployment.html.)

Victorian workers are struggling to find enough hours in record numbers, with our under-employment rate now at its highest level for almost forty years. 293,000 part-time workers are looking for and available to work more hours but can't get them. 9.5 per cent of Victoria's workforce is now classified as underemployed, the highest since the Bureau of statistics started keeping records in 1978.

So the real problem we have right now, not the imaginary problem we might have in the future, is nottoo few workers, but too many.

The Intergenerational Report's unsurprising and unremarkable finding that the population is ageing is used to claim that the workforce is constrained by the supply of workers, implying that there is work for all who offer themselves. As the figures above show, this is rubbish. It leads to a "blame the victim" approach in unemployment, welfare to work programs and job readiness training.

The Report is used to claim that population ageing in Australia will be a debacle. Will it?Helpfully, there are other countries with a noticeably older population than Australia, so we can compare our performance with theirs. The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan has done this in a chapter in the book "Sustainable Futures", recently published by the CSIRO.

Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and the United Kingdom all have a much greater old age dependency ratio than does Australia. Between 2000 and 2010 Australia's population grew at three times the rate of Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Finland, twice the rate of Norway's, and Germany didn't grow at all.

So with our much faster population growth and our younger workforce, we would have outperformed those countries, right? Wrong. Germany and the UK had the same per capita increase in income in the 2000-10 period, and Sweden and Finland had much higher growth in per capita income. And every one of those five countries performed much better than Australia in terms of the percentage of income received by the poorest quintile. This is important – income inequality in developed nations is strongly correlated with worse physical health, mental health, drug abuse, imprisonment, obesity,violence, and teenage pregnancy.

As Jane O'Sullivan puts it, in stable populations like Germany, people retire with considerable savings, and give more to the next generation than they receive from them. Their retirement opens up recreational opportunities for them and a job opportunity for a young person. In contrast, the vibrancy claimed for a rapidly growing population is often that of the crowded market place with more buyers than sellers, where recreation is something reserved for elites and foreign tourists.

As said by William Grey, from the University of Queensland, growth is the problem to which it pretends to be the solution.

This article by Professor Tim Anderson was previously published on Global Research on 8 Mar 2015. See also: US war on ISIS is a Trojan Horse (7/3/15) and Washington's Al Qaeda Ally Now Leading ISIS in Libya (9/3/15) by Tony Cartalucci. Reports that US and British aircraft carrying arms to ISIS have been shot down by Iraqi forces have been met with shock and denial in western countries. Few in the Middle East doubt that Washington is playing a 'double game' with its proxy armies in Syria, but some key myths remain important amongst the significantly more ignorant western audiences.

A central myth is that Washington now arms 'moderate Syrian rebels', to both overthrow the Syrian Government and supposedly defeat the 'extremist rebels'. This claim became more important in 2014, when the rationale of US aggression against Syria shifted from 'humanitarian intervention' to a renewal of Bush's 'war on terror'.

A distinct controversy is whether the al Qaeda styled groups (especially Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS) have been generated as a sort of organic reaction to the repeated US interventions, or whether they are actually paid agents of Washington.

Certainly, prominent ISIS leaders were held in US prisons. ISIS leader, Ibrahim al-Badri (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) is said to have been held for between one and two years at Camp Bucca in Iraq. In 2006, as al-Baghdadi and others were released, the Bush administration announced its plan for a 'New Middle East', a plan which would employ sectarian violence as part of a process of 'creative destruction' in the region.

According to Seymour Hersh's 2007 article, 'The Redirection', the US would make use of 'moderate Sunni states', not least the Saudis, to 'contain' the Shia gains in Iraq brought about by the 2003 US invasion. These 'moderate Sunni' forces would carry out clandestine operations to weaken Iran and Hezbollah, key enemies of Israel. This brought the Saudis and Israel closer, as both fear Iran.

While there have been claims that the ISIS 'caliph' al-Baghdadi is a CIA or Mossad trained agent, these have not yet been well backed up. There are certainly grounds for suspicion, but independent evidence is important, in the context of a supposed US 'war' against ISIS . So what is the broader evidence on Washington's covert links with ISIS?

Not least are the admissions by senior US officials that key allies support the extremist group. In September 2014 General Martin Dempsey, head of the US military, told a Congressional hearing 'I know major Arab allies who fund [ ISIS ]'. Senator Lindsey Graham, of Armed Services Committee, responded with a justification, 'They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn't fight [Syrian President] Assad, they were trying to beat Assad'.

The next month, US Vice President Joe Biden went a step further, explaining that Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia 'were so determined to take down Assad ... they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad ... [including] al Nusra and al Qaeda and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world ... [and then] this outfit called ISIL'. Biden's admissions sought to exempt the US from this operation, as though Washington were innocent of sustained operations carried out by its key allies. That is simply not credible.

Washington's relationship with the Saudis, as a divisive sectarian force in the region, in particular against Arab nationalism, goes back to the 1950s, when Winston Churchill introduced the Saudi King to President Eisenhower. At that time Washington wanted to set up the Saudi King as a rival to President Nasser of Egypt. More recently, British General Jonathan Shaw has acknowledged the contribution of Saudi Arabia's extremist ideology: 'This is a time bomb that, under the guise of education. Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money', Shaw said.

Other evidence undermines western attempts to maintain a distinction between the 'moderate rebels', now openly armed and trained by the US, and the extremist groups Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS. While there has indeed been some rivalry (emphasised by the London-based, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned, Syrian Observatory of Human Rights), the absence of real ideological difference is best shown by the cooperation and mergers of groups.

As ISIS came from Iraq in 2013, its Syrian bases have generally remained in the far eastern part of Syria. However Jabhat al Nusra (the official al Qaeda branch in Syria, from which ISIS split) has collaborated with Syrian Islamist groups in western Syria for several years. The genocidal slogan of the Syrian Islamists, 'Christians to Beirut and Alawis to the Grave', reported many times in 2011 from the Farouk Brigade, sat well with the al Qaeda groups. Farouk (once the largest 'Free Syrian Army' group) indeed killed and ethnically cleansed many Christians and Alawis.

Long term cooperation between these 'moderate rebels' and the foreign-led Jabhat al-Nusra has been seen around Daraa in the south, in Homs-Idlib, along the Turkish border and in and around Aleppo. The words Jabhat al Nusra actually mean 'support front', that is, support for the Syrian Islamists. Back in December 2012, as Jabhat al Nusra was banned in various countries, 29 of these groups reciprocated the solidarity in their declaration: 'We are all Jabhat al-Nusra'.

After the collapse of the 'Free Syrian Army' groups, cooperation between al Nusra and the newer US and Saudi backed groups (Dawud, the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Harakat Hazm) helped draw attention to Israel's support for al Nusra, around the occupied Golan Heights. Since 2013 there have been many reports of 'rebel' fighters, including those from al Nusra, being treated in Israeli hospitals. Prime Minister Netanyahu even publicised his visit to wounded 'rebels' in early 2014. That led to a public 'thank you' from a Turkey-based 'rebel' leader, Mohammed Badie (February 2014).

The UN peacekeeping force based in the occupied Golan has reported its observations of Israel's Defence Forces 'interacting with' al Nusra fighters at the border. At the same time, Israeli arms have been found with the extremist groups, in both Syria and Iraq. In November 2014 members of the Druze minority in the Golan protested against Israel's hospital support for al Nusra and ISIS fighters. This in turn led to questions by the Israeli media, as to whether ' Israel does, in fact, hospitalize members of al-Nusra and Daesh [ISIS]'. A military spokesman's reply was hardly a denial: 'In the past two years the Israel Defence Forces have been engaged in humanitarian, life-saving aid to wounded Syrians, irrespective of their identity.'

The artificial distinction between 'rebel' and 'extremist' groups is mocked by multiple reports of large scale defections and transfer of weapons. In July 2014 one thousand armed men in the Dawud Brigade defected to ISIS in Raqqa. In November defections to Jabhat al Nusra from the Syrian Revolutionary Front were reported. In December, Adib Al-Shishakli, representative at the Gulf Cooperation Council of the exile ' Syrian National Coalition', said 'opposition fighters' were 'increasingly joining' ISIS 'for financial reasons'. In that same month, 'rebels' in the Israel-backed Golan area were reported as defecting to ISIS, which had by this time began to establish a presence in Syria's far south. Then, in early 2015, three thousand 'moderate rebels' from the US-backed 'Harakat Hazzm' collapsed into Jabhat al Nusra, taking a large stock of US arms including anti-tank weapons with them.

ISIS already had US weapons by other means, in both Iraq and Syria , as reported in July, September and October 2014. At that time a 'non aggression pact' was reported in the southern area of Hajar al-Aswad between 'moderate rebels' and ISIS, as both recognised a common enemy in Syria: 'the Nussayri regime', a sectarian way of referring to supposedly apostate Muslims. Some reported ISIS had bought weapons from the 'rebels'.

In December 2014 there were western media reports of the US covert supply of heavy weapons to 'Syrian rebels' from Libya, and of Jabhat al-Nusra getting anti-tank weapons which had been supplied to Harakat Hazm. Video posted by al-Nusra showed these weapons being used to take over the Syrian military bases, Wadi Deif and Hamidiyeh, in Idlib province.

With 'major Arab allies' backing ISIS and substantial collaboration between US-armed 'moderate rebels' and ISIS, it is not such a logical stretch to suppose that the US and 'coalition' flights to ISIS areas (supposedly to 'degrade' the extremists) might have become covert supply lines. That is precisely what senior Iraqi sources began saying, in late 2014 and early 2015.

For example, as reported by both Iraqi and Iranian media, Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said in January that 'an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment to the ISIS group militants at the area of al-Dour in the province of Salahuddin'. Photos were published of ISIS retrieving the weapons. The US admitted the seizure but said this was a 'mistake'. In February Iraqi MP Hakem al-Zameli said the Iraqi army had shot down two British planes which were carrying weapons to ISIS in al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published of the wrecked planes. 'We have discovered weapons made in the US , European countries and Israel from the areas liberated from ISIL's control in Al-Baqdadi region', al-Zameli said.

The Al-Ahad news website quoted Head of Al-Anbar Provincial Council Khalaf Tarmouz saying that a US plane supplied the ISIL terrorist organization with arms and ammunition in Salahuddin province. Also in February an Iraqi militia called Al-Hashad Al-Shabi said they had shot down a US Army helicopter carrying weapons for the ISIL in the western parts of Al-Baqdadi region in Al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published. After that, Iraqi counter-terrorism forces were reported as having arrested 'four foreigners who were employed as military advisors to the ISIL fighters', three of whom were American and Israeli. So far the western media has avoided these stories altogether; they are very damaging to the broader western narrative.

In Libya, a key US collaborator in the overthrow of the Gaddafi government has announced himself the newly declared head of the 'Islamic State' in North Africa. Abdel Hakim Belhaj was held in US prisons for several years, then 'rendered' to Gaddafi's Libya, where he was wanted for terrorist acts. As former head of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then the Tripoli-based 'Libyan Dawn' group, Belhaj has been defended by Washington and praised by US Congressmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Some image softening of the al Qaeda groups is underway. Jabhat al-Nusra is reported to be considering cutting ties to al Qaeda, to help sponsor Qatar boost their funding. Washington's Foreign Affairs magazine even published a survey claiming that ISIS fighters were 'surprisingly supportive of democracy'. After all the well published massacres that lacks credibility.

The Syrian Army is gradually reclaiming Aleppo, despite the hostile supply lines from Turkey, and southern Syria, in face of support for the sectarian groups from Jordan and Israel. The border with Lebanon is largely under Syrian Army and Hezbollah control. In the east, the Syrian Army and its local allies control most of Hasaka and Deir e-Zour, with a final campaign against Raqqa yet to come. The NATO-GCC attempt to overthrow the Syrian Government has failed.

Yet violent destabilisation persists. Evidence of the covert relationship between Washington and ISIS is substantial and helps explain what Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mikdad calls Washington's 'cosmetic war' on ISIS. The extremist group is a foothold Washington keeps in the region, weakening both Syria and Iraq . Their 'war' on ISIS is ineffective. Studies by Jane's Terrorism and Insurgent database show that ISIS attacks and killings in Iraq increased strongly after US air attacks began. The main on the ground fighting has been carried out by the Syrian Army and, more recently, the Iraqi armed forces with Iranian backing.

All this has been reported perversely in the western media. The same channels that celebrate the ISIS killing of Syrian soldiers also claim the Syrian Army is 'not fighting ISIS'. This alleged 'unwillingness' was part of the justification for US bombing inside Syria. While it is certainly the case that Syrian priorities have remained in the heavily populated west, local media reports make it clear that, since at least the beginning of 2014, the Syrian Arab Army has been the major force engaged with ISIS in Hasaka, Raqqa and Deir eZour. A March 2015 Reuters report does concede that the Syrian Army recently killed two ISIS commanders (including Deeb Hedjian al-Otaibi) along with 24 fighters, at Hamadi Omar.

Closer cooperation between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah is anathema to Israel, the Saudis and Washington, yet it is happening. This is not a sectarian divide but rather based on some clear mutual interests, not least putting an end to sectarian (takfiri) terrorism.

It was only logical that, in the Iraqi military's recent offensive on ISIS-held Tikrit, the Iranian military emerged as Iraq's main partner. Washington has been sidelined, causing consternation in the US media. General Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran's Quds Force is a leading player in the Tikrit operation. A decade after Washington's 'creative destruction' plans, designed to reduce Iranian influence in Iraq, an article in Foreign Policy magazine complains that Iran's influence is 'at its highest point in almost four centuries'.

—

Select references

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya (2006) Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a 'New Middle East'

Seymour Hersh (2007) The Redirection

Al Akhbar (2011) Syria: What Kind of Revolution?

The New Yorker (2013) Syrian Opposition Groups Stop Pretending

RT (2014) Anyone but US! Biden blames allies for ISIS rise

Iraqi News (2015) American aircraft dropped weapons to ISIS, says MP

Washington Post (2015) Syrian rebel group that got U.S. aid dissolves

David Kenner (2015) For God and Country, and Iran, Foreign Policy

Reuters (2015) Syrian air strike kills two Islamic State commanders/p>

Weekend of 7-8 March 2015: Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) - Australia’s only environment group campaigning on the impact of human population - will examine the question “Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph?” in a half-day symposium to be held in Adelaide. “Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph” will be held on Saturday, 7th March at 1 pm, at the Hawke Centre, UniSA West Campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide. The public is welcome to attend and admission is free.

The SA-NT Branch President of SPA, Dr Michael Lardelli, says development lobby arguments for increased immigration to reduce the so-called problem of an ageing population will be taken apart. “For instance, the government likes to proclaim that the elderly will put huge pressures on the health system, but the truth is that whether a person lives to 50 or to 100 the last few months of their lives are likely to require more health resources. It really has little to do with age – the problem lies in treating chronic health problems for people of any age.”

“On Saturday SPA will have three specialist thinkers who will tell us that any apparent problems associated with ageing are all manageable”.

Dr Katharine Betts, Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Swinburne University, will be speaking on The Challenges and Benefits of an Ageing Population. She agrees that ageing presents some challenges but compared with the problems created by continual growth these are trivial. “The core benefit of an ageing population is that more human resources will be not tied up in the unavoidable labour of caring for the young. In the more mature age structure that is currently blossoming there will be many more real human resources available creating huge opportunities for work, for caring and for building strong communities”.

Dr Betts’ conclusion is that

“the ageing of the population is one of the best things to have happened to the human race in the last 10,000 years”.

Another of the speakers, Associate-Professor Phil Lawn from the Business School of Flinders University, whose topic will be Myths about Superannuation and the Intergenerational Debate says that an ageing population poses no fiscal problem for the Federal Government.

“The secret to providing for future retirees is boosting the productivity of the working population which requires adequate investment in education, training, health, natural capital and low-emissions and energy-efficient critical infrastructure” says Professor Lawn.

Dr Jane O’Sullivan, from the University of Queensland, will present to the symposium on the topic A Sustainable Future Cannot be Reached Through the Pursuit of Youthfulness. She says that the Intergenerational Report released yesterday by the government should be recognised as political spin and that it is deeply flawed.

“We have every reason to expect that future Australian workers will be more productive for longer, provided they are not shut out of the workforce by a flood of imported job-seekers. Population growth, the government’s preferred solution to ageing, is hugely expensive and detrimental to productivity”.

State President of SPA, Dr Lardelli, says that the public is welcome to attend and admission is free.

“Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph” will be held on Saturday, 7th March at 1 pm, at the Hawke Centre, UniSA West Campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide

Sustainable Population Australia
South Australian Branch
http://www.population.org.au

This article gives a 'good cop bad cop' analysis of Australia's two party history since the fall of the Whitlam Government. It looks at the evolution of economic theory and foreign involvement in wars over this period.

As United States whistleblower Christopher Boyce (aka 'the Falcon') revealed on SBS Dateline on 18 February 2014, after the CIA helped to destroy the Whitlam Labor government in 1975 it attempted to consolidate its victory by buying influence amongst newer leaders of the Labor Party.

Consequently, when Labor finally won office again on 5 March 1983, the reforms of the Whitlam government were abandoned. Instead the Labor government of former ACTU President Bob Hawke helped pioneer in Australia the adoption of neo-liberal 'free market' economic policies that would later be adopted around much of the rest of the world. Australian finance and industry was exposed to globalised international competition, including the removal of government control over the Australian dollar's exchange rate (i.e. the “floating of the dollar”) by then Treasurer Paul Keating in December 1983. Government services and the public servant numbers were reduced. Also publicly owned assets were privatised with no electoral mandate – QANTAS, TAA (the domestic air service), the Australian National Line shipping company and the Commonwealth Bank.

Since 1983, Labor governments have generally played the role of 'good cop' whilst Liberal/National Coalition governments have generally played the role of 'bad cop'. Prior to his defeat in March 1983, 'bad cop' Malcolm Fraser imposed a 12 month wages freeze during which the value of real wages fell 9.1% as a result of cost of living increases not being matched by wage rises. Subsequently the 'good cop' Hawke Labor government with the help of ACTU President Cliff Dolan imposed the Prices and Incomes Accord on the Trade union movement. The accord allowed restricted wage rises and promised increases in social spending.

Labor has also backtracked away from Gough Whitlam's opposition to war. In 1991 the Hawke government sent troops to fight in Operation Desert Storm after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been tricked into believing that the United States would not retaliate should Iraq take action against neighbouring Kuwait for slant-drilling into Iraq's oil fields. Sanctions imposed against Iraq after its 1990 invasion continued until until after Saddam Hussein was overthrown after the 2003 invasion. This continued even after bleeding heart' Paul Keating became PM in December 1991. Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result. One estimate puts the death toll at more than 1.5 million including 750,000 children under the age of 5. Other wars, which gained bipartisan support from the Labor Party include the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Libya in 2011.

Both sides of Australian politics, with a only a few honourable exceptions, are shamefully complicit in the United States' proxy terrorist war against Syria which started in March 2011. In that war, 210,000 Syrians have so far died at the hands of jihadist invaders from nearly every corner of the Muslim world and a number of other countries . Australia expelled the Syrian ambassador under the pretext that the Syrian government had allegedly massacred 108 of its citizens, including 34 women and 49 children at Houla on 25 May. This allegation that the Syrian government had massacred Syrians in a region particularly renowned for its strong support for the Syrian government is contrary to common sense and all credible eyewitness and forensic evidence.

Both sides of parliament have also sided with the neo-Nazi government of Ukraine which came to power in February 2014 as a result of a CIA-orchestrated coup. Both sides have also unquestioningly accepted the lying mainstream newsmedia narrative that the 298 passengers, including 27 Australians, aboard Malaysian Airways Flight MH17 were murdered by East Ukrainian self-defence forces with a BUK surface to air missile on 17 March 2014. This is contrary to all eyewitness and forensic evidence, including the photos of the pilot cockpits apparently riddled with cannon shells on both sides indicate that MH17 was shot down by 2 Ukrainian Sukhoi 17 fighters.

Both Labor and the Coalition have voted in Parliament to support dragnet collection of all our Intenet and telephone communication meta-data by our spy agencies. This is in spite of whistleblower Edward Snowden's warning that this has never prevented even one act of terrorism.

The above are only some examples of how corrupt Australian and global politics has become since 1975. However while there is still a free and open Internet, and a trade union movement with capable leaders we still stand a chance of reversing the damage and re-establish a quality of democracy comparable to what we once enjoyed.

You can help by using the Internet to help tell the truth, and by contributing an to http://candobetter.net and other alternative newsmedia sites and by spreading the word. This article is published at http://candobetter.net/node/4321 .

Ref: RN Breakfast interview with Joe Hockey on 26 February 2015

Traitor: "A person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle." Substitute "a nation of people" for "friend".......

Fran Kelly's interview with Joe Hockey provides yet another example of the "don't mention the population growth" policy of Government, all the major political parties and the ABC. This betrays the principles set out in the ABC Code of Practice. This betrays a cause, which is impartial discussion of humane and sustainable solutions for Australia and its international conduct. This betrays a nation of people.

Is the ABC's conduct an attack on causes including:

• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to maximise it's humanitarian support for the world's most needy people using responsible economic management that incorporates detailed analysis of the economic impact of extreme population growth?
• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to optimise its strategy for reducing carbon emissions by considering the impact of extreme population growth on these emissions and on the means (economic and technical) available for their reduction?
• Objective assessment of the impacts of extreme population growth on the Federal Budget and what measures, if any, might be taken to address these impacts?

Australians are a "Weird Mob". In Australian schools in the 60s Australian history lessons made very little mention of the convict origins of Australian settlers and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. Was this somehow due to shame and awkwardness?

Today we have Fran Kelly and her colleagues at the ABC using a far more destructive form of concealment and denial to bury the population growth issue. Are they ashamed and confused about the relationship between Pauline Hanson's perceived racism and xenophobic intolerance and the population growth management issue?

The interview with Joe Hockey displayed the contempt for logic we've come to expect from Kelly. She failed to ask Joe Hockey about a significant root cause of demand for real estate in the context of foreign buyers; which is extreme population growth.

The legacy of Pauline Hanson is a different issue to Population Growth Management for Goodness sake! Extreme Population Growth is like Convict Origins and Aboriginal Dispossession. It does exist!

There are three groups engaged in the population growth management debate:

• The inept, Pauline Hanson style, attacks on immigration which supported baser levels of resentment. This is analogous to an Aboriginal throwing a spear at someone from the First Fleet
• The ludicrous, ABC style, Government sanctioned, taxpayer funded, population growth denial
• The moderate, reasonable, scientific, humanitarian, intellectually competent group who may represent a majority of Australians who just want to see open, impartial, public policy debate of population growth management instead of an Intergenerational Report issued once every 5 years as a concocted justification for doing nothing to address the complex myriad of consequential issues

Without allowing the last group to have a voice on the ABC, Fran Kelly, and all who support her, are arguably traitors and criminals.

Politicians do not sign an oath of impartiality.

But the ABC is legally bound to act with impartiality and is therefore an unlawful organisation because it deliberately misrepresents or conceals (otherwise known as taxpayer funded fraud) what is arguably the most important humanitarian, social, environmental and economic issue facing modern Australia.

The United States has been gradually replacing its own military with military contractors to the degree now where they formed 50% of troops in Iraq and 70% of troops in Afghanistan deployed in its name. What happens to those business model troops when the US wants to wind down military activity in a particular place? They are private armies with power and money and the risk is that they will use it to extract a living, as in splintered Libya. The bigger risk is that they will form corporate military states in their own right - as ISIS pretends to. Professor Sean McFate spent some years - mostly in Africa - as a mercenary, largely because he was curious about this. "Mercenaries have always been there, where there is bloodshed going on. The times when whole armies of mercenary troops, or even personal regiments were bought and sold seemed to be long gone. But now, they are called Private Military Companies, and their popularity among the governments rises, with the US leading the trend of shopping at the market of force. Are we witnessing the end of the age of national armies? And why mercenaries are in such high demand these days? We put these questions to Professor Sean McFate, who once was a private military contractor himself." (Sophie Shevardnadze)

Follow @SophieCo_RT Transcript and video originally published here: http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/234639-mercenaries-army-us-leading/

Sophie Shevardnadze: Professor Sean McFate, former private military contractor, now author, thank you for joining us in our show. Now, with the rise of mercenaries, private armies, contractors - are we heading towards a global market of conflict, or does it exist already?

Sean McFate: It’s been existing now for about 10 years, perhaps longer, but we’re definitely on the trajectory of having a more open and free market for force around the world after Iraq and Afghanistan.

SS: How so?

SMF: Well, the private military industry has always existed, but for the last couple of decades it’s mostly been underground with lone, sort of, mercenaries in Africa, in the wars of decolonization, but in 99s we started seeing a rise of it, with companies like “Executive Outcomes” in South Africa which was a truly mercenary corporation, and that the U.S. government hired a couple of companies in the Balkans, likeMPRI, in 1999s. But it wasn’t until Iraq and Afghanistan that the U.S. government really started to invest heavily in the private military industry, and now that the U.S. is winding down in Afghanistan, the question is - where will this multi-billion dollar industry go? They’re not going to sort of fold-up shop and go bankrupt as some policy makers in Washington hope; they’re going to look for future clients, and those clients could be anybody.

SS: We’ll take about it in detail, a little bit later on, but I want to talk about you - let’s take a look back. How did you become a private contractor? Was it for the money or for a thrill and hunger for war?

SMF: I started off as a U.S. army paratrooper, I was an officer and a paratrooper in 82nd AirborneDivision, and like many in the private military industry I got my start in the U.S. military, many serve other national armies or Marines, and then after that, I switched over, if you will, to the industry side. I worked for a company called DynCorp - it’s one of the largest private security companies in the world, and most of my work actually was in Africa. I was actually not in the Middle East. I did it out of curiosity - I mean, the money is a little better, but it’s not as good as some media reports have made it out to be over the years. The true interesting thing about the industry is that you get to be innovative, in ways that you cannot in the bureaucracies of large militaries. It also was curious to me how this industry operates. It’s a lot more pervasive around the world than most people think, they think it’s just Iraq, they think it’s just Afghanistan, it’s everywhere, this industry.

SS: But what was your most dangerous assignment?

SMF: My most dangerous assignment...again, I was in Africa. There was small country called Burundi, in Central Africa, it is next to Rwanda and many of your viewers will recall 1994, there was a huge Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Rwanda, but actually it wasn’t just Rwanda, it was just the entire region, including Burundi. In 2004 U.S. government intelligence believed that a violent extremist Hutu group hiding in the eastern Congo was going to try to assassinate the President of Burundi. They believed, the rebel group, as did the U.S. government that if the Burundian president was assassinated, it could re-trigger the genocide of 1994, in sort of reprisal killings, Hutus would take revenge on Tutsis and Tutsis will then take further revenge on Hutus, and it will spiral into a full-scale genocide. There have been precedents for this in the past. The U.S. government hired DynCorp international, the company I worked for to prevent this, and I was the person who led this program and we successfully did.

SS: Alright, so that mission in Burundi, besides the goal you were assigned - you had to keep your involvement, meaning U.S. involvement, a secret - how did you manage to do that?

SMF: One of the strange things about this industry is that offers what they call “plausible deniability”. That means, if a mission is too dangerous or too risky politically, it sometimes easier for the U.S. government or for clients more generally, to hire company to do it than, say, send in U.S. army people to do it. If the U.S. army soldiers get captured or killed in places like Africa or Burundi, that can cause a great political upheaval, a lot of press attention. But if contractors get killed, people seem to care less. So, by sending in a company to do this, if things get horribly wrong, the government in some ways is insulated from political blow-back.

SS: Obviously, you were a soldier at DynCorp, you had to follow orders no matter what. Did you ever think about right and wrong, did you ever have to weigh your orders against your moral compass? What would happen if you moral compass told you “No”?

SMF: Interestingly enough, you actually have more exercise for your moral compass in the private sector than you do in the public sector. So,if you’re a public sector soldier, if you are in the U.S. army or another country’s army, and you’re given orders - you have to do it. But if you work in a company, you can just say - no way, I am not leaving, sue me. And you can do that. You actually have more control over you assignments and you destiny in some ways as a soldier, working for PMC, than you do working for the U.S. military - which is very appealing to some soldiers who have done several tours, for example, in Iraq, back to back and their family life is a disaster and they don’t know what to do. So, you know, a lot of them actually leave the U.S. army to go to the private sector for some more control over their life.

SS:v Now that you bring up Iraq, there were more contractors in Iraq, employed by the U.S., than there were U.S. soldiers. Have the PMC become indispensable to waging a war?

SMF: That’s a great question, Sophie. The answer is - yes, they have. I mean, in WWII, the U.S. hired about 10% of its workforce overseas, 10% of people in combat zones were contractors. In Vietnam, there was like 20%, in Iraq - it was 50%. So 1 to 1 ratio of contractors to soldiers. In Afghanistan, there was 70%, and the question now is, if the U.S. fights wars… in a generation from now, there will be 80%, 90% - will the U.S. be fighting its wars mostly using contractor labor? The trends indicate “yes”. Either way, we’ve discovered that contractors have proven indispensable for stability operation like Iraq, Afghanistan. Contractors are also very good at raising security forces. So, for example, if the U.S. wanted to help professionalise Iraqi security forces to fight ISIS - that’s a job contractors would do, and that’s a job that… you know, you can put contractors on the ground and not have to report them as “boots on the ground”, which is publicly important to the U.S. of America, for politicians, they don’t want to report too many boots on the ground in Iraq, but if you have contractors, they don’t seem to count. Also, if contractors get killed, nobody seems to care much about that either. They care a lot of if U.S. marines come home in body bags, but nobody’s keeping count of contractor deaths. So, yes, I think, the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on that industry.

SS: Except of the political implications that you’ve just cited, the former CEO of Blackwater, Erik Prince, told me mercenaries are more effective than the U.S. army. Are they, in your opinion? And also, if they are, what’s wrong with using them?

SMF: Well, in some ways, there are more effective. They are certainly cheaper to use. If you have a well-trained a relatively good disciplined private military company, it can leverage innovation in the marketplace, it can lever to lot of private sector good, if you will, to get a job done more cheaply, and using this industry is cheaper than using the U.S. army, there’s no question about that, both in the short-term and also in long-term, because, in the long-term, if you’re done with U.S. army unit, it comes home, you’re still paying salaries, etc; you just end the contract with PMC, you don’t pay anything. But there are long-term risks for it too. Historically, unpaid or unsupervised PMC or mercenaries tended to become predatory. They become bandits, they create conflict, arguably, they elongate conflicts profit. I mean, this is profit motive meets warfare. So there are a lot of long-term risks.

SS: Can you give me an example of where mercenaries, actually, in order to create demand for themselves, can start a conflict or drag on a conflict - can you give an example of that?

SMF: So, less so in Iraq and Afghanistan, because the U.S. government is still there, the Consumer-in-Chief if you will, they pay all the bills; but we’ve seen examples off of the coast of Somalia. So, Somalia is a free market for force, there are mercenaries and privateers, and privateers are basically mercenaries on the seaways, that were hired to counter pirates in Somalia. And one company called “SomCan”which means “Somalia-Canada”, a somalia-canadian counter piracy company, worked for one of the factions in Somalia, and when it had a payment dispute, it became a pirate itself. They started taking down fishing vessels off the coast of Somalia. It is an example out-of-work mercenaries, in this case privateers, became pirates, became the enemy.

SS: So, I want to talk a bit about the reluctance of using PMC services, even though you say that in the long run it’s cheaper and more effective. For instance, Executive Outcomes, a mercenary company from Africa, they offered their help to the UN in stopping Rwandan genocide, and they were rebuffed. They were cheaper, they were effective, and willing to act - so what’s wrong with the scenario like that? Why does the UN refuse to work with mercenaries?

SMF: That’s a great question, and the topic you’re talking about is in 1994, again, at the Rwandan genocide; Mercenary company called “Executive Outcomes” came to the UN and offered to put a halt to the genocide, long enough so that a larger UN peacekeeping mission can get on the ground, which takes usually 6 months to generate, and the UN famously said “No”, it said the world is not ready for privatising peacekeeping. Of course, the world wasn’t ready to 800,000 people to be dead either, but one of the concerns is, with markets of force, will these companies create war for profit? Again, there’s a lot of historical precedent from middle ages to suggest “yes”. When you have an industry, invested in conflict, going to the most conflict-prone places on planet, like Africa, like the Middle East, like South Asia, you’ll have more war, and you’ll have less governance on force. States are losing the monopoly on force, and now its becoming commoditised, conflict is becoming commoditized; In such a world, we’ll have the super-rich that will become superpowers, big corporations will become superpowers, anybody who can afford the means to war and to wage them will become superpowers.

SS: Right, I get what you’re saying, but what I am asking is that, you know, locally, if the UN is helpless, why can it just hire a PMC and solve the problem?

SMF: I think UN should consider it, actually. I think the UN can be in a position that the U.S. was several years ago, where it can become sort-of “consumer-in-chief”. Certainly, its peacekeeping missions are thinning, and are in need of peacekeepers and I think they should consider a way to use this industry to augment peacekeeping missions, but they should do it under strict regulation, they should create a scheme for vetting who the private contractors are, for the type of training that they have to receive, for having accountability and transparency, to do all those regulatory things that the U.S. and others had not done in the last 10 years. The UN is in a good position to do that, and if they could do that, they could also incentivise best practices within this industry; I think the industry is like fire - it can be a force of good, but it can also be a force of great destruction.

SS: But, not only the UN, with the situation we’re seeing today in Iraq and Syria, wouldn’t it make sense to hire the PMC to combat Islamic State? Why doesn’t the international community invest in that?

SMF: Well, that’s another great question. I think the fear is of control. You can take PMC and they are able to do some combat on the ground in Iraq and Syria, whereas the international community, like the U.S. is just giving air-support. We don’t really have troops on the ground, could contractors make up troops on the ground, because you need land forces to control territory. You can’t control territory from air, and if you want to defeat ISIS you have to have people on the ground, so it is possible, but the problem is this: who are the PMC? We don’t really know, and what happens after that contract is done? Are they going to stay in Iraq? Will they set up shop for themselves? Again, looking back to history, a lot of mercenaries sort of took over land and then installed themselves as kings, in Italy. So, the bigger question is what happens after ISIS is defeated, what will the contractors do? Will they stay there, will go into business for themselves… who knows?

SS: So, basically you are saying nation-states are losing their monopoly on use of force. So, who pays these contractors, the ones that are employed? Is it always the government, or could a rich person hire them, for instance?

SMF: Right now, it could be anybody. Rich people can hire them, in fact, in 2008, an actressMia Farrowfrom Hollywood considered hiring Blackwater to stop the genocide in Darfur that was going on. Now, Blackwater andMia Farrowdecided not to go through with that, but they could have. The question is, will that happen again in the future, and I think - absolutely, there’s no reason to assume it won’t happen. Oil companies are starting to use industry, humanitarian organisations, working in dangerous places are hiring this industry… This industry, right now, is operating mostly in the defensive capacity, defending people, defending property, but a lot of the industry has the capability to do offensive combat, using drones, they can make kamikaze drones, they get private air forces, if you will - they think the future of warfare will be increasingly privatised, and there’s no reason to assume that state will own that.

SS: All the drones and military warfare that you’re talking about - where are they getting all these supplies, because I was thinking, it is usually the state who supplies the company with the military equipment.

SMF: No, it’s actually very easy. Small arms and light weapons, there’s an international market, both black and non-black market for this. If you go to conflict zones, where these companies are going to be drawn to, there’s obviously a large black market of small arms sloshing around. When I was in Africa, you could buy an AK-47 in most bazaars, for $20-30. Drones are commercially available, you can order them on Amazon, and you can outfit them yourself. We’re not talking about these huge U.S. air force drones, we’re talking about smaller drones, and you could, you know, make them into a kamikaze drones. It wouldn’t take a genius to arm them with something and make them into flying bombs.

SS: Telll me something - could we see a conflict between private corporations, just going back to what you were saying earlier, like, for instance, if they hired PMC’s not for protection but to a battle for a piece of land, for instance. Microsoft vs Apple ground war? Is that possible?

SMF: Well, I don’t know if Microsoft and Apple will engage in that. I think, certainly, in the extractive industry - it’s a possibility, and it’s not just between companies. Extractive industry is, like, oil, gas, timber - they don’t have a choice as to where their asset is. They have to go, you know, if you’re mining you have to go where the gold, the ore is; and there may be other companies out there, that could be governments and there could be rebel groups to contend there as well. So, you can imagine conflict between several actors, companies, weak governments, rebel groups, separatist groups, etc, and they could all hire PMC, because once you hire one, there’s always a possibility of escalation, where the other sides then must get into a sort of mercenary arms race. So, we might be seeing a lot of PMC coming out of Afghanistan in a year, looking for marketplace, and that might be something that will attract them, very much.

SS: From talking to you, I got the sense that accountability is the most pressing issue surrounding the PMC industry. So, while those in the army operate by army rules, the PMC’s don’t have to follow those rules, right?

SMF: That’s right.

SS: How do you make sure they’re accountable for their actions? Is there any way to make them accountable for their actions and be sure that they will be accountable for their actions?

SMF: That’s a great question, Sophie, and after 10 years or more of using this industry, the U.S. has not created any sort of regulatory framework with any sort of enforcement, nor has international community, and the reason is simple: if you regulate this industry too much, it will simply move offshore, beyond the realm of regulations, just like companies move offshore for tax havens. Really, strong regulation is not the answer, even if you have a regulatory framework, it’s really hard to enforce it. I mean, who’s going to enforce it? Is the UN going to go off and then arrest a thousand private military contractors in the middle of Congo? It will be very difficult to do. I think the only way you can do it is by shaping the market. PMC respond to logic of the marketplace, so if you make good behaviour profitable and bad behaviour unprofitable, that’s, though not satisfying, may be the best we can do.

SS: So tell me something, is there a danger of one company becoming and uber-player on the market, for instance there’s this british G4S security firm, and it’s second biggest private employer in the world, second only to Walmart. What could happen if the private war market becomes monopolised?

SMF: That’s a good question too. We’re talking about a market for force, so market analysis matters. Now, in some ways, you’ll have what they call “balancing” going on, so big companies, other companies who are smaller, will sort of compete against that big company to keep it down, just a way great powers compete each other to keep one down. So, there’s that, but if a company becomes so powerful or so big that it becomes dominant - that would be a huge political player, a new type of superpower that we haven’t seen in a very long time, sort of like the British East India company. That would be problematic for a global security.

SS: Here’s another side to it: PMCs are corporations, and if their reputation is tarnished by working for bad guys or acting out while on a mission - that will hurt business, won’t it? So, won’t the market itself provide best practices?

SMF: It will. So, again, this industry responds to market forces, the logic of the marketplace, so if we could make good, best practices profitable, and bad practices not profitable, then we could shape the industry. I think the UN should it decide to use private peacekeepers, has the power to do it in consistent manner. Certainly, Blackwater, after it killed 17 Iraqis in 2007 in Baghdad - it was sort of bounced out of marketplace. So, absolutely, some market logic can be used as a tool of accountability to some extent within this industry.

SS: Thank you very much for this interesting insight, Sean. We were talking to professor Sean McFate, former private military contractor, now author, talking about modern mercenaries and why the business of private warfare is growing larger. That’s it for this edition of Sophie &Co, I will see you next time.

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the impossible demand from the Greek voters that both austerity ends and that they remain in the euro as currently arranged. They also look at a parallel “future-tax” crypto currency as a possible answer to Greece’s problems. In the second half, Max interviews Liam Halligan, editor-at-large at BNE.eu and columnist at the Telegraph, about the latest on the unpayable debt crisis in Greece. Liam suggests a Grexit will happen but that Greece won’t be the first European nation to leave the euro.

"My question is: what is gained by delisting SBBs? Will the government be able to save some money on fox and cat control and will developers receive the green light to build houses in bandicoot habitat? We certainly have not been told everything. To declare SBBs safe because in one or two areas where fox control slightly increased their numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Take that money away and see what will happen." If readers want to make their voice heard on threatened species the address is species.consultation[at]environment.gov.au

The Director
Marine and Freshwater Species Conservation Section
Wildlife, Heritage and Marine Division
Department of the Environment
PO Box 787
Canberra ACT 2601

Re: Delisting of the Southern Brown Bandicoot

I have been involved with Southern Brown Bandicoots (SBB) for more than 40 years. I live in Frankston where I remember finding SBBs all over the Mornington Peninsula, in the Frankston area and especially in the Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve where they were recognised as the largest and strongest colony in the region. Sadly, I have observed them gradually disappearing from all of these areas and in many of these places they have become extinct.

How could this be allowed to happen? Since 2001, when the species was put on the endangered list, a SBB recovery group was established and SBBs were selected as the flagship species in the Western Port Biosphere Reserve so that they would receive special attention. At least five major workshops were held involving hundreds of people, among them many scientists, government agencies, private consultants and landholders. In addition, countless meetings of the SBB recovery team were held at many different places. During the same time the Victorian government created strategy after strategy for the recovery and protection of them but so far, none of them work.

Sadly, no SBBs or habitat areas were recovered anywhere in this region. At the Pines, where some SBBs were still remaining, at least $120,000 was spent on fox and cat control. It was unsuccessful and the last SBBs were lost as well. It is now high time to admit to the grand failure in protecting this species especially in this region.

As for my understanding, SBBs are not a corridor living species by nature and need to be provided with habitat in large reserves as is the case at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne and can be in the Pines Reserve, Briars Park in Mt Martha and several other reserves that are surrounded by a predator-proof fence. We desperately need some insurance colonies before we gamble with the rest that still survive in the wild.

If not, and if this current scenario goes on much longer, we will soon reach the point where the species will come down in numbers as the Eastern Barred Bandicoot did when, at the lowest stage, only 50 animals survived and where captive breeding had to prevent them from becoming totally extinct on the mainland. Even after some numbers were increased, the government managed to make some huge blunders with them (long story). Why have we not learned from this?

My question is: what is gained by delisting SBBs? Will the government be able to save some money on fox and cat control and will developers receive the green light to build houses in bandicoot habitat? We certainly have not been told everything. To declare SBBs safe because in one or two areas where fox control slightly increased their numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Take that money away and see what will happen.

Hans Brunner
M. App. Sc. Deakin University