offguardian--2020-06-15--Beware the hijacking of US protests into a ‘Color Revolution’

The May 25th killing of George Floyd , an unarmed African-American man , at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis , Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union , all in the midst of a global pandemic .
In the Twin Cities , what began as spontaneous , peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism , arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers .
Within days , the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation ’ s capital , with US President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil , federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case .
The debate over the catalyst for the uprising into its period of lawlessness has drawn a range of theories .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the proximity of numerous protest sites have spurred rumors of sabotage by everything from white supremacist groups to “ Antifa ” to law enforcement itself .
Predictably , liberal hawks such as Susan Rice , the former National Security Advisor in the Obama administration , made ludicrous assertions suggesting “ Russian agents ” were behind the unrest , a continuation of the narrative that the Kremlin has been behind inflaming racial tensions in the US that began during the 2016 election .
While Democrats like Rice and Senator Kamala Harris of California @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Civil Rights movement of Moscow exploiting racial divisions in the US , Trump and the GOP have similarly resurrected the ‘ outside agitators ’ myth attributed to segregationists of the same era .
Hypocritically , many of those claiming to be in support of the protests have denounced the latter theory while endorsing the former , when both equally show contempt for the legitimate grievances of the demonstrators and deny their agency .
However , both false notions overlook the more likely hidden factors at play attempting to hijack the movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or not , there could be a kernel of truth in accusations coming mostly from the political right as to the possible role of the notorious liberal billionaire investor and “ philanthropist ” George Soros and his Open Society Foundation ( OSF ) .
Ironically , if any of the right-wing figures of whom Soros is a favorite target were aware of his instrumental role in the fall of communism staging the various CIA-backed protest movements in Eastern Europe that toppled socialist governments , he would likely not be such a subject of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s institute , like other NGOs involved in US regime change operations such as the National Endowment for Democracy ( NED ) , is largely a front for the CIA to shield itself while destabilizing US adversaries , the spy agency ’ s preferred modus operandi since the exposure of its illicit activities in previous decades by the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee in the 1970s .
In the post-Soviet world , nations across Central Asia , Eastern Europe , the Middle East and beyond have become well acquainted with the political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ network .
In particular , governments that have leaned toward warm relations with Moscow during the incumbency of President Vladimir Putin have found themselves the victims of his machinations .
Under Putin ’ s predecessor Boris Yeltsin , Soros made a killing off the mass privatization of the former state-run assets in the Eastern Bloc , as journalist Naomi Klein explained in The Shock Doctrine : In contrast , the Putin administration over a period of two decades has since restored the Russian economy through the re-nationalization of its oil and gas industry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Rosneft , are state-controlled companies serving as the basis of the state machinery ‘ s reassertion of control over the Russian financial system , a move that has gotten Mr. Putin branded a “ dictator ” by the West .
As a result , most of the notorious Russian oligarchs enriched overnight during the extreme free market policies of the 1990s have since left the country , now that such rapid accumulation of wealth to the rest of the nation ’ s detriment is no longer permitted .
While economic inequality in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ near that of the Yeltsin era where the average life expectancy was reduced by a full decade .
In the last decade , the United States has gotten its own taste of the incitement and agitations that have previously fallen upon governments across the global south .
Instead , domestically the CIA cutouts in the non-profit industrial complex have played a pivotal counterrevolutionary role in co-opting and ultimately derailing such uprisings meant to bring systemic change to the US political system .
In late 2011 , the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s financial district against the deepening global economic inequality following the Great Recession and the protests quickly spread to other cities and continents .
In just a few months , the sit-in was expelled from Lower Manhattan and the anti-capitalist movement itself largely was diverted towards reformism and away from its original radical intentions .
It was also revealed the origins of OWS and its marketing campaign were traced to Adbusters , a media foundation that was the recipient of grants from the Democratic Party-connected Tides Foundation , a progressive policy center which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ George Soros and the OSF .
Emerging just two years later , the roots of Black Lives Matter were not just in community organizing but partially took inspiration from the Occupy movement .
Unfortunately , the similarities between them were not limited to a shared lack of clarity in their demands but facing the same dilemma of being absorbed into the system .
While OWS was quickly suppressed after hopeful beginnings , the BLM leadership became career-oriented apparatchiks of the Democratic Party and left grass-roots organizing behind .
Through the non-profit industrial complex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ various social movements under its management on behalf of Wall Street in order to funnel public funds into private control through various foundations .
Along with the Ford Foundation which has given BLM enormous $ 100 million grants , Soros and the OSF have been one of the principal offenders .
Still , many who correctly identify right-wing protests such as the Tea Party movement and the recent ‘ anti-lockdown ’ demonstrations as the work of astro-turfing by the Koch Brothers and Heritage Foundation seldom apply the same scrutiny to seemingly authentic progressive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ figure who mysteriously appeared on the scene in the early days of OWS connected to Soros was the Serbian political activist Srđa Popović , the founder of Otpor !
( “ resistance ” in Serbian ) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies ( CANVAS ) political organizations which led the protests in 2000 which ousted the democratically-elected President of Serbia , Slobodan Milošević , known as the “ Bulldozer Revolution.
” Not long after Popović ’ s consulting of activists in Zuccotti Park , Wikileaks documents revealed the Belgrade-born organizer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through the global intelligence platform Stratfor ( known as the “ shadow CIA ” ) , exposing the real motives behind his involvement in US politics of outwardly supporting OWS while trying to sabotage the popular movement .
Since their role as instruments of US regime change in Serbia , Otpor !
and CANVAS have received financial support from CIA intermediaries such as the NED , OSF , Freedom House and the United States Agency for International Development ( USAID ) , as well as the Boston-based Albert Einstein Institute founded by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Despite ostensibly professing to use the same civil disobedience methods of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King , Jr. , Gene Sharp ‘ s manual for “ non-violent resistance ” entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy has been the blueprint used by political organizations around the world that have only served the interests of Western imperialism .
Beginning with the Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia , the successful formula which ousted Milošević spread to other Central Asian and Eastern European nations overthrowing governments which resisted NATO expansion and the European Union ’ s draconian austerity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
These were widely referred to in the media as ‘ Color Revolutions ’ and included the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia , the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and its 2014 Maidan coup d ’ état follow-up , as well as the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan , among others .
Subsequently , Srđa Popović and CANVAS also lent their expertise in Egypt during the predecessor to its Arab Spring in the April 6 Youth Movement which appropriated Otpor !
’ s raised fist logo as its emblem .
In preparation for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activists poured over Gene Sharp ’ s work in coordination with Otpor !
whose fingerprints can be found all over the Arab Spring uprisings which began as protests to remove unpopular leaders in Egypt and Tunisia but were carefully reeled in to preserve the despotic Western-friendly systems that had put them to power initially .
Where Sharp ’ s “ non-violent ” template failed , countries with US adversaries in power such as Libya and Syria saw their protests rapidly morph into a resurgence of Al-Qaeda and a terrorist proxy war with catastrophic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exported to Latin America in attempts to remove the Bolivarian government in Venezuela , with self-declared ‘ interim president ’ and opposition leader Juan Guaido having received training from CANVAS .
While the right seems to have a bizarre misconception that the parasitic hedge fund tycoon is somehow a communist , there is an equal misunderstanding on the pseudo-left where it has become a recurring joke and subject of mockery to naively deny Soros ’ s undeniable influence on world affairs and domestic protest movements .
Less certain , however , are the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supporter of “ Antifa ” which Trump wants to designate as a domestic terrorist organization , a dangerous premise given the movement consists of a very loose-knit and decentralized network of activists and hardly comprises a real organization .
Various autonomous chapters and groups across the US may self-identify as such , but there is no single official party or formal organization with any leadership hierarchy .
While the original Antifa movement in the 1930s Weimar Republic was part of the Communist Party of Germany ( KPD ) , the current manifestation in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black bloc anarchism ( even inverting the colors of the original red and black flag ) , though it is really made up of a variety of amateurish political tendencies .
Amidst the ongoing nationwide George Floyd protests , the demonstrations in Seattle , Washington culminated in the establishment of a self-declared “ autonomous zone ” by activists in the Northwestern city ’ s Capitol Hill neighborhood — known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone ( CHAZ ) .
In response , Trump doubled down on his threats to quash protests with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anarchists ” in “ Antifa ” for the unrecognized commune occupying six city blocks around an abandoned police precinct .
Anyone who has paid close attention to the war in Syria for the last nine years will find this highly ironic , given the US military support for another infamous “ autonomous zone ” of Kurdish nationalists in Northern Syria ’ s Rojava federation .
The Kurdish sub-region and de facto self-governing territory purports to be a “ libertarian socialist direct democracy ” style of government and has been the subject of romanticized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact that the autonomous administration ’ s paramilitary wing , the People ’ s Protection Units ( YPG ) , were until recently a cat ’ s paw for American imperialism as part of the US-founded coalition , the Syrian Democratic Forces ( SDF ) .
Not coincidentally , many of those who use the Antifa vexillum are enthusiastic supporters of and even volunteer mercenaries fighting with the YPG/SDF in an ‘ International Freedom Battalion ’ which claims to be the inheritors of the legacy of the International Brigades which volunteered to defend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Spanish Civil War .
Unfortunately , these cosplayers forgot that the original International Brigades were set up by the Communist International , not the Pentagon .
Meanwhile , despite their purported “ anti-fascism ” , there are no such conscripts to be found defending the Donetsk or Luhansk People ’ s Republics of eastern Ukraine against literal Nazis in the War in Donbass where the real front line against fascism has been .
Instead , they fight alongside a Zionist and imperial proxy to help establish an ethno-nation state while the US loots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s decision last October to withdraw troops from northeastern Syria which preceded a Turkish invasion , Ankara and the US repeatedly butted heads over Washington ’ s decision to incorporate the Kurds into the SDF , since the YPG is widely acknowledged an off-shoot of the Kurdistan Workers ’ Party ( PKK ) , the militant and cult-like political group regarded as a terrorist organization that has been at war with Turkey for over forty years .
It is also no secret that jailed PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan ’ s theories @ @ @ @ @ @ @ influenced by the pro-Zionist Jewish-American anarchist theorist , Murray Bookchin .
So when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told Trump that there were links between the US protests and the PKK , there was a tiny but core accuracy in his exaggerated claim .
As Malcolm X said , “ chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad.
” The George Floyd protests , like previous uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore , certainly began spontaneously , nor does any of this discount the legitimate issue of ending the militarization of US @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Nevertheless , time and again we have seen how bona fide social movements become political footballs or quickly go to their graves .
Like BLM , it is practically inevitable the protests will become a partisan tool for the Democratic Party in the coming 2020 election when it has no concrete political articulations of its own , even if it does bring substantive change to domestic policing .
In January , Trump was impeached for temporarily withholding security aid to the Ukraine and Democrats advocated his removal because he is regarded as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they have actively diverted all opposition to Trump into their own reactionary anti-Russia campaign and soft-coup attempt in the interests of the military-intelligence community , a shared agenda with Soros .
When all of corporate America , the media , and even the NED have publicly declared their support for a movement , it is no longer just about its original cause of getting justice for Mr. Floyd , whose funeral became a virtual campaign rally for Trump ’ s opponent , Joe Biden .
It is too early to say determinedly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US is indeed a ‘ Color Revolution ’ , but by the time we realize it may too late .
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst .
His writing has appeared widely in alternative media .
Max may be reached at

Max Parry
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic.
In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers.
Within days, the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation’s capital, with US President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil, federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case.
The debate over the catalyst for the uprising into its period of lawlessness has drawn a range of theories. The suspicious placement of pallets of bricks in the proximity of numerous protest sites have spurred rumors of sabotage by everything from white supremacist groups to “Antifa” to law enforcement itself.
Predictably, liberal hawks such as Susan Rice, the former National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, made ludicrous assertions suggesting “Russian agents” were behind the unrest, a continuation of the narrative that the Kremlin has been behind inflaming racial tensions in the US that began during the 2016 election.
While Democrats like Rice and Senator Kamala Harris of California have revived an old trope dating back to the Civil Rights movement of Moscow exploiting racial divisions in the US, Trump and the GOP have similarly resurrected the ‘outside agitators’ myth attributed to segregationists of the same era.
Hypocritically, many of those claiming to be in support of the protests have denounced the latter theory while endorsing the former, when both equally show contempt for the legitimate grievances of the demonstrators and deny their agency. However, both false notions overlook the more likely hidden factors at play attempting to hijack the movement for its own purposes.
Believe it or not, there could be a kernel of truth in accusations coming mostly from the political right as to the possible role of the notorious liberal billionaire investor and “philanthropist” George Soros and his Open Society Foundation (OSF).
Ironically, if any of the right-wing figures of whom Soros is a favorite target were aware of his instrumental role in the fall of communism staging the various CIA-backed protest movements in Eastern Europe that toppled socialist governments, he would likely not be such a subject of their derision.
The Hungarian business magnate’s institute, like other NGOs involved in US regime change operations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is largely a front for the CIA to shield itself while destabilizing US adversaries, the spy agency’s preferred modus operandi since the exposure of its illicit activities in previous decades by the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee in the 1970s.
In the post-Soviet world, nations across Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and beyond have become well acquainted with the political disruptions of the international financier and his network. In particular, governments that have leaned toward warm relations with Moscow during the incumbency of President Vladimir Putin have found themselves the victims of his machinations.
Under Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Soros made a killing off the mass privatization of the former state-run assets in the Eastern Bloc, as journalist Naomi Klein explained in The Shock Doctrine:
George Soros’s philanthropic work in Eastern Europe — including his funding of (Harvard economist and economic advisor Jeffrey) Sachs’s travels through the region — has not been immune to controversy. There is no doubt that Soros was committed to the cause of democratization in the Eastern Bloc, but he also had clear economic interests in the kind of economic reform accompanying that democratization. As the world’s most powerful currency trader, he stood to benefit greatly when countries implemented convertible currencies and lift capital controls, and when state companies were put on the auction block, he was one of the potential buyers.
In contrast, the Putin administration over a period of two decades has since restored the Russian economy through the re-nationalization of its oil and gas industry. Its two energy giants, Gazprom and Rosneft, are state-controlled companies serving as the basis of the state machinery‘s reassertion of control over the Russian financial system, a move that has gotten Mr. Putin branded a “dictator” by the West.
As a result, most of the notorious Russian oligarchs enriched overnight during the extreme free market policies of the 1990s have since left the country, now that such rapid accumulation of wealth to the rest of the nation’s detriment is no longer permitted. While economic inequality in Russia may persist, it is nowhere near that of the Yeltsin era where the average life expectancy was reduced by a full decade.
In the last decade, the United States has gotten its own taste of the incitement and agitations that have previously fallen upon governments across the global south. Instead, domestically the CIA cutouts in the non-profit industrial complex have played a pivotal counterrevolutionary role in co-opting and ultimately derailing such uprisings meant to bring systemic change to the US political system.
In late 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged at Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district against the deepening global economic inequality following the Great Recession and the protests quickly spread to other cities and continents. In just a few months, the sit-in was expelled from Lower Manhattan and the anti-capitalist movement itself largely was diverted towards reformism and away from its original radical intentions. It was also revealed the origins of OWS and its marketing campaign were traced to Adbusters, a media foundation that was the recipient of grants from the Democratic Party-connected Tides Foundation, a progressive policy center which receives significant endowments from none other than George Soros and the OSF.
Emerging just two years later, the roots of Black Lives Matter were not just in community organizing but partially took inspiration from the Occupy movement. Unfortunately, the similarities between them were not limited to a shared lack of clarity in their demands but facing the same dilemma of being absorbed into the system. While OWS was quickly suppressed after hopeful beginnings, the BLM leadership became career-oriented apparatchiks of the Democratic Party and left grass-roots organizing behind.
Through the non-profit industrial complex, the Democratic Party has mastered bringing various social movements under its management on behalf of Wall Street in order to funnel public funds into private control through various foundations. Along with the Ford Foundation which has given BLM enormous $100 million grants, Soros and the OSF have been one of the principal offenders.
Still, many who correctly identify right-wing protests such as the Tea Party movement and the recent ‘anti-lockdown’ demonstrations as the work of astro-turfing by the Koch Brothers and Heritage Foundation seldom apply the same scrutiny to seemingly authentic progressive movements assimilated by corporate America.
One figure who mysteriously appeared on the scene in the early days of OWS connected to Soros was the Serbian political activist Srđa Popović, the founder of Otpor! (“resistance” in Serbian) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) political organizations which led the protests in 2000 which ousted the democratically-elected President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, known as the “Bulldozer Revolution.”
Not long after Popović’s consulting of activists in Zuccotti Park, Wikileaks documents revealed the Belgrade-born organizer’s significant ties to US intelligence through the global intelligence platform Stratfor (known as the “shadow CIA”), exposing the real motives behind his involvement in US politics of outwardly supporting OWS while trying to sabotage the popular movement.
Since their role as instruments of US regime change in Serbia, Otpor! and CANVAS have received financial support from CIA intermediaries such as the NED, OSF, Freedom House and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the Boston-based Albert Einstein Institute founded by the American political scientist, Gene Sharp.
Despite ostensibly professing to use the same civil disobedience methods of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Gene Sharp‘s manual for “non-violent resistance” entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy has been the blueprint used by political organizations around the world that have only served the interests of Western imperialism.
Beginning with the Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia, the successful formula which ousted Milošević spread to other Central Asian and Eastern European nations overthrowing governments which resisted NATO expansion and the European Union’s draconian austerity in favor of economic ties with Moscow.
These were widely referred to in the media as ‘Color Revolutions’ and included the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and its 2014 Maidan coup d’état follow-up, as well as the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, among others.
Subsequently, Srđa Popović and CANVAS also lent their expertise in Egypt during the predecessor to its Arab Spring in the April 6 Youth Movement which appropriated Otpor!’s raised fist logo as its emblem. In preparation for the organization of anti-government demonstrations, the activists poured over Gene Sharp’s work in coordination with Otpor! whose fingerprints can be found all over the Arab Spring uprisings which began as protests to remove unpopular leaders in Egypt and Tunisia but were carefully reeled in to preserve the despotic Western-friendly systems that had put them to power initially.
Where Sharp’s “non-violent” template failed, countries with US adversaries in power such as Libya and Syria saw their protests rapidly morph into a resurgence of Al-Qaeda and a terrorist proxy war with catastrophic consequences. This recipe has also been exported to Latin America in attempts to remove the Bolivarian government in Venezuela, with self-declared ‘interim president’ and opposition leader Juan Guaido having received training from CANVAS.
While the right seems to have a bizarre misconception that the parasitic hedge fund tycoon is somehow a communist, there is an equal misunderstanding on the pseudo-left where it has become a recurring joke and subject of mockery to naively deny Soros’s undeniable influence on world affairs and domestic protest movements. Less certain, however, are the claims from conservatives that Soros is a supporter of “Antifa” which Trump wants to designate as a domestic terrorist organization, a dangerous premise given the movement consists of a very loose-knit and decentralized network of activists and hardly comprises a real organization.
Various autonomous chapters and groups across the US may self-identify as such, but there is no single official party or formal organization with any leadership hierarchy. While the original Antifa movement in the 1930s Weimar Republic was part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the current manifestation in the US has a synonymous association with black bloc anarchism (even inverting the colors of the original red and black flag), though it is really made up of a variety of amateurish political tendencies.
Amidst the ongoing nationwide George Floyd protests, the demonstrations in Seattle, Washington culminated in the establishment of a self-declared “autonomous zone” by activists in the Northwestern city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood — known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
In response, Trump doubled down on his threats to quash protests with the use of the military while blaming “anarchists” in “Antifa” for the unrecognized commune occupying six city blocks around an abandoned police precinct. Anyone who has paid close attention to the war in Syria for the last nine years will find this highly ironic, given the US military support for another infamous “autonomous zone” of Kurdish nationalists in Northern Syria’s Rojava federation.
The Kurdish sub-region and de facto self-governing territory purports to be a “libertarian socialist direct democracy” style of government and has been the subject of romanticized praise by the Western pseudo-left despite the fact that the autonomous administration’s paramilitary wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), were until recently a cat’s paw for American imperialism as part of the US-founded coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Not coincidentally, many of those who use the Antifa vexillum are enthusiastic supporters of and even volunteer mercenaries fighting with the YPG/SDF in an ‘International Freedom Battalion’ which claims to be the inheritors of the legacy of the International Brigades which volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic from fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Unfortunately, these cosplayers forgot that the original International Brigades were set up by the Communist International, not the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, despite their purported “anti-fascism”, there are no such conscripts to be found defending the Donetsk or Luhansk People’s Republics of eastern Ukraine against literal Nazis in the War in Donbass where the real front line against fascism has been. Instead, they fight alongside a Zionist and imperial proxy to help establish an ethno-nation state while the US loots Syria’s oil.
Prior to Trump’s decision last October to withdraw troops from northeastern Syria which preceded a Turkish invasion, Ankara and the US repeatedly butted heads over Washington’s decision to incorporate the Kurds into the SDF, since the YPG is widely acknowledged an off-shoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the militant and cult-like political group regarded as a terrorist organization that has been at war with Turkey for over forty years.
It is also no secret that jailed PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan’s theories of “democratic confederalism” are heavily influenced by the pro-Zionist Jewish-American anarchist theorist, Murray Bookchin. So when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told Trump that there were links between the US protests and the PKK, there was a tiny but core accuracy in his exaggerated claim. As Malcolm X said, “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad.”
The George Floyd protests, like previous uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, certainly began spontaneously, nor does any of this discount the legitimate issue of ending the militarization of US law enforcement which disproportionately victimizes black Americans. Nevertheless, time and again we have seen how bona fide social movements become political footballs or quickly go to their graves.
Like BLM, it is practically inevitable the protests will become a partisan tool for the Democratic Party in the coming 2020 election when it has no concrete political articulations of its own, even if it does bring substantive change to domestic policing. In January, Trump was impeached for temporarily withholding security aid to the Ukraine and Democrats advocated his removal because he is regarded as insufficiently hawkish toward Moscow.
Since 2016, they have actively diverted all opposition to Trump into their own reactionary anti-Russia campaign and soft-coup attempt in the interests of the military-intelligence community, a shared agenda with Soros. When all of corporate America, the media, and even the NED have publicly declared their support for a movement, it is no longer just about its original cause of getting justice for Mr. Floyd, whose funeral became a virtual campaign rally for Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden.
It is too early to say determinedly whether what is taking place in the US is indeed a ‘Color Revolution’, but by the time we realize it may too late.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at [email protected]


offguardian--2020-06-17--AUDIO: The Collapse of the COVID-1984 Narrative

Gary Null interviews James Corbett for his radio program on the dramatic collapse of the coronavirus narrative .
Now that @ @ @ @ @ COVID panic are admitting that the virus is not an existential threat and the lockdowns @ @ @ @ @ does this mean for the future of the COVID-1984 police state and the ushering in @ @ @ @ @ ” paradigm ?
For links , sources and show notes click here .

Gary Null interviews James Corbett for his radio program on the dramatic collapse of the coronavirus narrative. Now that the major institutions pushing the COVID panic are admitting that the virus is not an existential threat and the lockdowns were not necessary, what does this mean for the future of the COVID-1984 police state and the ushering in of the new “biosecurity” paradigm?
For links, sources and show notes click here.


offguardian--2020-06-16--Can We Talk About JK Rowling?

Can We Talk About JK Rowling?

JK Rowling ’ s June 10 blog post about the downsides of trans rights activism — including the erosion of the legal definition of sex and its replacement with gender — has been met with outrage by trans activists and with joy by those seeking open dialogue .
Rowling is continuing to speak up despite receiving cancellations , and a torrent of hate and violent threats since entering this fraught arena nearly two years ago .
In her blog post she describes how much is at stake , from freedom of speech to women ’ s rights .
“ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ period I ’ ve experienced , ” she writes .
“ … Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now ” by people ranging to the sexual predator who ’ s US president to “ the trans activists who declare that TERFs [ trans-exclusionary radical feminists ] need punching and re-educating , ” Rowling comes across as having great empathy for trans people and deep understanding of the issues , not as being a transphobe .
I ’ m not transphobic either .
And Rowling ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — because the consequences of not doing so are far more terrifying than the risk of being verbally or physically assaulted .
In fact I believe that COVID-19 and strident trans rights activism are both part of an all-out assault on women ’ s rights .
The hysteria surrounding COVID-19 is herding us towards compulsory vaccination .
It ’ s adding unprecedented force to the years-long World Health Organization- , Bill Gates- and Big Pharma-backed push to turn public-health officials and physicians into vaxx-aholics .
This removes among other things women ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our bodies and into our children ’ s bodies .
For their part , trans rights activists ( TRAs ) are attempting to make women believe “ that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves , ” writes Rowling .
In the process , the trans movement is “ doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘ woman ’ as a political and biological class.
” In her inimitable prose , Rowling says , “ It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow .
There ’ s joy , relief and safety in conformity .
As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote , ‘ … without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one ’ s liberation ; the dead , too , are better suited to the earth than the living.
’ ” I know that cocoon of conformity all too well : in the past I ’ ve marched alongside others chanting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are women !
” I ’ ve experienced first-hand how easy it is to believe tidy narratives about oppression and injustice without questioning whether one is being used as a pawn .
As a same-sex-attracted woman , activist and investigative journalist , I knew vaguely that there are holes in the TRAs ’ narrative .
But I paid scant heed until last fall .
That ’ s when Meghan Murphy was scheduled to speak at a public library in Toronto , Ontario , where I live .
Murphy is the founder and editor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speak by Radical Feminists Unite .
Toronto ’ s head librarian , Vickery Bowles , staunchly defended Murphy ’ s right to speak .
This resulted in a furor among TRAs that received media coverage around the world , similar to but not as high-profile as the reaction to Rowling ’ s writings on the topic .
After quickly looking more into the issue , I decided to speak in favour of Bowle ’ s stance at a library-board meeting a week before Murphy ’ s talk .
“ In society we see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too many issues , ” I said in my impromptu deputation .
“ … There should be some room for some thought , and not just closing down and saying , ‘ Nobody can question trans rights.
’ ” My words and those of the few others brave enough to publicly support Bowles and Murphy were met with outraged cries from the dozens of TRAs at the meeting .
The event went ahead seven days later .
I didn ’ t have a ticket to it but went to the library anyway and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protesters outside .
It didn ’ t go well .
For example , the provincial parliamentarian for my riding was aghast that I was supporting Murphy and called her “ a bigot.
” And I had to flee not long after that because the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy and everyone was screaming in unison , “ TERFs Go Home !
” Murphy ’ s talk wasn ’ t transphobic .
But the next afternoon Toronto ’ s city council passed a motion to review all of the city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the “ egregious and unacceptable ” airing of “ harmful transphobic views ” at the library the previous evening .
I tweeted my dismay .
And freedom of expression is far from the only major issue at play : another is the medicalization of adolescence .
I ’ m very familiar with the corrupting influence of Big Pharma on the medical establishment because I have an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and was a freelance medical writer and journalist for trade publications for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four years ago , after getting very tired of being lied to every time I interviewed physician and medical scientists about their studies and clinical guidelines .
They always claimed they were free of bias – but I always detected the influence of the corporate funders .
So it doesn ’ t surprise me that physicians are being told today that they must accept and affirm the gender identity of children and adolescents who present with gender dysphoria ( GD ) ( defined as marked incongruence between one ’ s felt gender or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sex ) and refer them for diagnosis of GD as quickly as possible .
This is followed routinely by starting these youngsters on puberty blockers , or skipping this step if they ’ re 16 or older , and then prescribing hormones of the opposite sex ( cross-sex hormones ) .
Many youth are then referred for sex-reassignment surgery involving double mastectomies for transboys/men and/or removal and replacement of reproductive organs .
( The usual very high bar for allowing removal of healthy tissue and organs has been all but waived for medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as exploring the underlying causes and conditions of these young people ’ s distress and also ‘ watching and waiting ’ ( that is , holding off on irreversible and invasive treatments until the youth have finished adolescence ) were the mainstay for children and adolescents until relatively recently .
This is because the majority with gender dysphoria shed these symptoms without intervention as they pass through puberty .
But this non-invasive approach is increasingly viewed as unethical and transphobic .
In fact there are moves in countries such as the UK and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moves conflate talk therapy for gender identity with conversion therapy for sexual orientation .
And academics or others who question the medical approach and other aspects of the TRA narrative often have their work retracted or significantly altered by scientific journals ’ editors .
The medical approach is recommended by the powerful World Professional Association for Transgender Health ( WPATH ) .
WPATH ’ s Standards of Care ( SOC ) for people who are transsexual , transgender or gender non-conforming , published in 2011 , is widely used in the UK , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ WPATH ’ s SOC is funded by “ an anonymous donor ” and by the Tawani Foundation .
The foundation was created by Jennifer Pritzker , a trans woman .
She and other members of her very deep-pocketed and politically-connected family own Squadron Capital , which controls several medical-company-financing and medical-device firms .
Following the money is always instructive .
The very rapidly rising rate of medical transitioning – greatly boosted by the controversial new phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria — means there ’ s a ballooning market for hormone prescriptions , surgeries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become permanent medical patients .
The SOC uses language of equality , tolerance and human rights , making the underlying medicalization of puberty highly palatable .
For example , it warns that : The SOC also deems ‘ fully reversible ’ the use of puberty blockers and ‘ partially reversible ’ the use of cross-sex hormones , even though these claims are very disputable and both types of treatment have significant adverse events .
The document includes a list , on page 46 , of possible adverse events from these treatments , ranging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ destabilization of psychiatric disorders , ” to cardiovascular disease .
The SOC mentions a pair of long-term studies found that very elevated rates of suicide and other causes of death in people who underwent gender-reassignment surgery compared to those in the general population – but largely dismisses them and simply says they point to the need for more long-term psychiatric care and studies .
The list of adverse effects includes male sexual dysfunction — but it isn ’ t discussed anywhere else in the text .
And the list doesn ’ t include @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that most of the medical treatments in the SOC can render people permanently unable to have children without outside interventions such as in vitro fertilization .
In fact the word ‘ infertile ’ isn ’ t mentioned once in the SOC .
And ‘ infertility ’ is only mentioned twice ( and neither time is in the context of saying the recommended treatments can cause infertility ) .
The SOC instead simply includes a section on the range of medical options for preserving sperm and eggs before medical treatments proceed .
Many medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But at least one analysis points to fatal flaws .
These flaws include recommendations that are completely non-evidence-based and not reviewed for safety or efficacy .
Also , the chair of the guidelines committee and several other members having their positions funded by the Tawani Foundation .
Nonetheless , medical treatments for gender identity are widely supported in the mainstream press .
This ‘ Journalist ’ s Resource ’ article asserts there are very few drawbacks to these invasive surgeries ( and at the bottom of the page there ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grants from various organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ) .
WPATH is active in flexing its muscles in other ways .
For example , it issued a call in 2015 for legislation to be passed around the world allowing people to switch genders very easily .
And countries are obeying that call – despite the negative implications such as the possibility of violent predators easily gaining access to women ’ s prisons .
Such predators are few in number and are not trans .
But they solely seek to victimize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do so .
The same goes for the men who self-identify entering women ’ s and girls ’ washrooms and dressing rooms to spy on females or expose themselves for their own sexual pleasure .
In July 2015 the Irish Gender Recognition Act was passed .
It allows anyone over 18 to self-declare as a different gender and immediately gain legal recognition for their adopted gender .
Scotland ’ s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is poised to do the same thing .
So were the proposed reforms to the UK ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Minister Boris Johnson ’ s government reportedly backed down a few days ago ( the government apparently also has decided to preserve female-only spaces but will ban conversion therapy , which it defines as including non-medical treatments for gender identity ) .
In addition , several countries allow minors , including those who haven ’ t yet entered puberty , to receive these treatments without parental consent if they are considered capable of giving informed consent themselves .
This is being challenged in the UK .
And more and more healthcare professionals are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this approach because of , among other things , its often-irreversible nature and large number of serious adverse effects .
They are proferring other pathways to health for people with gender dysphoria .
In addition , groups like the UK ’ s Royal College of General Practitioners have called for a more objective examination of the outcomes and unintended consequences of medical transitioning .
“ I never forget that inner complexity when I ’ m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people .
All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want – is for similar empathy , similar understanding , to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse , ” Rowling writes at the end of her blog post .
Count me among those millions .
We need calm , objective discussion and evaluation of evidence , just as many of us strive for with COVID-19 .
Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 22 years .
She is now an independent investigative journalist .
You can watch her June 15 interview on The Corbett Report , read her articles on Off-Guardian and follow her on Twitter .

Rosemary Frei
JK Rowling’s June 10 blog post about the downsides of trans rights activism — including the erosion of the legal definition of sex and its replacement with gender — has been met with outrage by trans activists and with joy by those seeking open dialogue.
Rowling is continuing to speak up despite receiving cancellations, and a torrent of hate and violent threats since entering this fraught arena nearly two years ago.
In her blog post she describes how much is at stake, from freedom of speech to women’s rights.
“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced,” she writes. “… Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now” by people ranging to the sexual predator who’s US president to “the trans activists who declare that TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] need punching and re-educating,”
Rowling comes across as having great empathy for trans people and deep understanding of the issues, not as being a transphobe.
I’m not transphobic either. And Rowling’s blog entry galvanized me to speak up — because the consequences of not doing so are far more terrifying than the risk of being verbally or physically assaulted.
In fact I believe that COVID-19 and strident trans rights activism are both part of an all-out assault on women’s rights.
The hysteria surrounding COVID-19 is herding us towards compulsory vaccination. It’s adding unprecedented force to the years-long World Health Organization-, Bill Gates- and Big Pharma-backed push to turn public-health officials and physicians into vaxx-aholics. This removes among other things women’s right to determine what gets injected into our bodies and into our children’s bodies.
(A progressive Toronto politician said at a meeting last fall of the city’s board of health, when I and dozens of others spoke against this, that bodily autonomy no longer exists. His reasoning? Pathogens and pollution invade the body from the moment of birth, making bodily autonomy “a false dream.”)
For their part, trans rights activists (TRAs) are attempting to make women believe “that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves,” writes Rowling. In the process, the trans movement is “doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class.”
In her inimitable prose, Rowling says, “It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, ‘… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.’”
I know that cocoon of conformity all too well: in the past I’ve marched alongside others chanting slogans such as, “Trans women are women!” I’ve experienced first-hand how easy it is to believe tidy narratives about oppression and injustice without questioning whether one is being used as a pawn.
As a same-sex-attracted woman, activist and investigative journalist, I knew vaguely that there are holes in the TRAs’ narrative.
But I paid scant heed until last fall. That’s when Meghan Murphy was scheduled to speak at a public library in Toronto, Ontario, where I live. Murphy is the founder and editor of Feminist Current and was invited to speak by Radical Feminists Unite.
Toronto’s head librarian, Vickery Bowles, staunchly defended Murphy’s right to speak. This resulted in a furor among TRAs that received media coverage around the world, similar to but not as high-profile as the reaction to Rowling’s writings on the topic.
After quickly looking more into the issue, I decided to speak in favour of Bowles’ stance at a library-board meeting a week before Murphy’s talk.
“In society we see too much narrowing of the debate on too many issues,” I said in my impromptu deputation. “… There should be some room for some thought, and not just closing down and saying, ‘Nobody can question trans rights.’”
My words and those of the few others brave enough to publicly support Bowles and Murphy were met with outraged cries from the dozens of TRAs at the meeting.
The event went ahead seven days later. I didn’t have a ticket to it but went to the library anyway and tried to talk to some of the protesters outside. It didn’t go well. For example, the provincial parliamentarian for my riding was aghast that I was supporting Murphy and called her “a bigot.”
And I had to flee not long after that because the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy and everyone was screaming in unison, “TERFs Go Home!”
Murphy’s talk wasn’t transphobic. But the next afternoon Toronto’s city council passed a motion to review all of the city’s facilities’ room-booking policies in the wake of the “egregious and unacceptable” airing of “harmful transphobic views” at the library the previous evening. I tweeted my dismay.
And freedom of expression is far from the only major issue at play: another is the medicalization of adolescence.
I’m very familiar with the corrupting influence of Big Pharma on the medical establishment because I have an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and was a freelance medical writer and journalist for trade publications for 22 years.
I quit that work four years ago, after getting very tired of being lied to every time I interviewed physicians and medical scientists about their studies and clinical guidelines. They always claimed they were free of bias – but I always detected the influence of the corporate funders.
So it doesn’t surprise me that physicians are being told today that they must accept and affirm the gender identity of children and adolescents who present with gender dysphoria (GD) (defined as marked incongruence between one’s felt gender or gender identity and one’s biological sex) and refer them for diagnosis of GD as quickly as possible.
This is followed routinely by starting these youngsters on puberty blockers, or skipping this step if they’re 16 or older, and then prescribing hormones of the opposite sex (cross-sex hormones). Many youth are then referred for sex-reassignment surgery involving double mastectomies for transboys/men and/or removal and replacement of reproductive organs. (The usual very high bar for allowing removal of healthy tissue and organs has been all but waived for medical trans procedures.)
Non-medical therapies such as exploring the underlying causes and conditions of these young people’s distress and also ‘watching and waiting’ (that is, holding off on irreversible and invasive treatments until the youth have finished adolescence) were the mainstay for children and adolescents until relatively recently. This is because the majority with gender dysphoria shed these symptoms without intervention as they pass through puberty.
But this non-invasive approach is increasingly viewed as unethical and transphobic. In fact there are moves in countries such as the UK and Canada to render it criminal; these moves conflate talk therapy for gender identity with conversion therapy for sexual orientation. And academics or others who question the medical approach and other aspects of the TRA narrative often have their work retracted or significantly altered by scientific journals’ editors.
The medical approach is recommended by the powerful World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH’s Standards of Care (SOC) for people who are transsexual, transgender or gender non-conforming, published in 2011, is widely used in the UK, Europe, North America and elsewhere.
WPATH’s SOC is funded by “an anonymous donor” and by the Tawani Foundation. The foundation was created by Jennifer Pritzker, a trans woman. She and other members of her very deep-pocketed and politically-connected family own Squadron Capital, which controls several medical-company-financing and medical-device firms.
Following the money is always instructive. The very rapidly rising rate of medical transitioning – greatly boosted by the controversial new phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria — means there’s a ballooning market for hormone prescriptions, surgeries and fertility treatments for youth, who become permanent medical patients.
The SOC uses language of equality, tolerance and human rights, making the underlying medicalization of puberty highly palatable. For example, it warns that:
Refusing timely medical interventions for adolescents might prolong gender dysphoria and contribute to an appearance that could provoke abuse and stigmatization. As the level of gender-related abuse is strongly associated with the degree of psychiatric distress during adolescence (Nuttbrock et al., 2010), withholding puberty suppression and subsequent feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy is not a neutral option for adolescents.
[…]
[H]ormone therapy and surgery have been found to be medically necessary to alleviate gender dysphoria in many people (American Medical Association, 2008; Anton, 2009; World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 2008).
The SOC also deems ‘fully reversible’ the use of puberty blockers and ‘partially reversible’ the use of cross-sex hormones, even though these claims are very disputable and both types of treatment have significant adverse events.
The document includes a list, on page 46, of possible adverse events from these treatments, ranging from weight gain, to “possible destabilization of psychiatric disorders,” to cardiovascular disease.
(Females who take testosterone for any significant period of time are well known to have much higher risk of heart attack and males who are on estrogen for years are at elevated risk of blood clots and strokes. But the SOC doesn’t admit this.)
The SOC mentions a pair of long-term studies that found very elevated rates of suicide and other causes of death in people who underwent gender-reassignment surgery compared to those in the general population – but largely dismisses them and simply says they point to the need for more long-term psychiatric care and studies.
The list of adverse effects includes male sexual dysfunction — but it isn’t discussed anywhere else in the text.
And the list doesn’t include infertility. This is despite the fact that most of the medical treatments in the SOC can render people permanently unable to have children without outside interventions such as in vitro fertilization.
In fact the word ‘infertile’ isn’t mentioned once in the SOC. And ‘infertility’ is only mentioned twice (and neither time is in the context of saying the recommended treatments can cause infertility). The SOC instead simply includes a section on the range of medical options for preserving sperm and eggs before medical treatments proceed.
Many medical associations are following WPATH’s SOC. But at least one analysis points to fatal flaws.
These flaws include recommendations that are completely non-evidence-based and not reviewed for safety or efficacy. Also, the chair of the guidelines committee and several other members having their positions funded by the Tawani Foundation.
Nonetheless, medical treatments for gender identity are widely supported in the mainstream press. This ‘Journalist’s Resource’ article asserts there are very few drawbacks to these invasive surgeries (and at the bottom of the page there’s a note saying the website is funded by grants from various organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
WPATH is active in flexing its muscles in other ways. For example, it issued a call in 2015 for legislation to be passed around the world allowing people to switch genders very easily.
And countries are obeying that call – despite the negative implications such as the possibility of violent predators easily gaining access to women’s prisons. Such predators are few in number and are not trans. But they solely seek to victimize women and take advantage of gender-identity legislation to do so. The same goes for the men who self-identify entering women’s and girls’ washrooms and dressing rooms to spy on females or expose themselves for their own sexual pleasure.
In July 2015 the Irish Gender Recognition Act was passed. It allows anyone over 18 to self-declare as a different gender and immediately gain legal recognition for their adopted gender. Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is poised to do the same thing.
So were the proposed reforms to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act. However, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government reportedly backed down a few days ago (the government apparently also has decided to preserve female-only spaces but will ban conversion therapy, which it defines as including non-medical treatments for gender identity).
In addition, several countries allow minors, including those who haven’t yet entered puberty, to receive these treatments without parental consent if they are considered capable of giving informed consent themselves.
This is being challenged in the UK.
And more and more healthcare professionals are pushing back by issuing powerful critiques of this approach because of, among other things, its often-irreversible nature and large number of serious adverse effects. They are proferring other pathways to health for people with gender dysphoria.
In addition, groups like the UK’s Royal College of General Practitioners have called for a more objective examination of the outcomes and unintended consequences of medical transitioning.
“I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people. All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse,” Rowling writes at the end of her blog post.
Count me among those millions. We need calm, objective discussion and evaluation of evidence, just as many of us strive for with COVID-19.
Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and was a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist. You can watch her June 15 interview on The Corbett Report, read her articles on Off-Guardian and follow her on Twitter.


offguardian--2020-06-17--The Sword of Damocles Over Western Europe

In Part 1 , we left off in our story at the SIS-CIA overthrow of Iran ’ s Nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 .
At this point the Shah was able to return to Iran from Rome and British-backed Fazlollah Zahedi , who played a leading role in the coup , replaced Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran .
Here we will resume our story .
An Introduction to the ‘ Shah of Shahs ’ , ‘ King of Kings ’ One important thing to know about Mohammad Reza Shah was that he was no fan of British imperialism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s independence and industrial growth .
That said , the Shah was a deeply flawed man who lacked the steadfastness to secure such a positive fate for Iran .
After all , foreign-led coups had become quite common in Iran at that point .
He would become the Shah in 1941 at the age of 22 , after the British forced his father Reza Shah into exile .
By then , Persia had already experienced 70 years of British imperialism reducing its people to near destitution .
Mohammad Reza Shah had developed very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FDR , who at the behest of the Shah , formed the Iran Declaration which ended Iran ’ s foreign occupation by the British and the Soviets after WWII .
His father , Reza Shah came into power after the overthrow of Ahmad Shah in 1921 , who was responsible for signing into law the infamous Anglo-Persian Agreement in 1919 , which effectively turned Iran into a de facto protectorate run by British “ advisors ” and ensured the British Empire ’ s control of Iran ’ s oil .
Despite Reza Shah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into exile during his reign ) , he had made significant achievements for Iran .
Among these included the development of transportation infrastructure , 15 000 miles of road by 1940 and the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway which opened in 1938 .
Mohammad Reza Shah wished to continue this vein of progress , however , he would first have to go through Britain and increasingly the U.S. in order to fulfill Iran ’ s vision for a better future .
In 1973 , Mohammad Reza Shah thought he finally found his chance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s sixth industrial power ” in just one generation… OPEC and the European Monetary System vs the ‘ Seven Sisters ’ In 1960 , OPEC was founded by five oil producing countries : Venezuela , Iraq , Saudi Arabia , Iran and Kuwait in an attempt to influence and stabilise the market price of oil , which would in turn stabilise their nation ’ s economic return .
The formation of OPEC marked a turning point toward national sovereignty over natural resources .
However , during this period OPEC did not have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the main reason being the “ Seven Sisters ” which controlled approximately 86 % of the oil produced by OPEC countries .
The “ Seven Sisters ” was the name for the seven transnational oil companies of the “ Consortium of Iran ” cartel which dominated the global petroleum industry , with British Petroleum owning 40 % and Royal Dutch Shell 14 % , giving Britain the lead at 54 % ownership during this period .
After 1973 , with the sudden rise of oil prices , the Shah began to see an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saw the price increase as a way to pull his country out of backwardness .
To the intense irritation of his sponsors , the Shah pledged to bring Iran into the ranks of the world ’ s top ten industrial nations by the year 2000 .
The Shah understood that in order for this vision to become a reality , Iran could not just stay as a crude oil producer but needed to invest in a more stable future through industrial growth .
And as it just so happened , France and West @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 1978 , France and West Germany led the European community , with the exception of Great Britain , in the formation of the European Monetary System ( EMS ) .
The EMS was a response to the controlled disintegration that had been unleashed on the world economy after the fixed exchange rate became a floating exchange rate in 1971 .
French foreign minister Jean Francois–Poncet had told a UN press conference , that it was his vision that the EMS eventually replace the IMF and World Bank as the center of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unaware of the devastation that the IMF and World Bank have wreaked upon the world , refer to John Perkins ’ Confession of an Economic Hit Man…the situation is 10X worst today .
As early as 1977 , France and West Germany had begun exploring the possibility of concretizing a deal with oil producing countries in which western Europe would supply high-technology exports , including nuclear technology , to the OPEC countries in exchange for long-term oil supply contracts at a stable price .
In turn , OPEC countries would deposit their enormous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could be used for further loans for development projects… obviously to the detriment of the IMF and World Bank hegemony .
The Carter Administration was not happy with this , sending Vice President Walter Mondale to France and West Germany to “ inform ” them that the U.S. would henceforth oppose the sale of nuclear energy technology to the Third World…and thus they should do so as well .
West Germany ’ s nuclear deal with Brazil and France ’ s promise to sell nuclear technology to South Korea had already come under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shah had started a closer partnership with Iraq and Saudi Arabia cemented at OPEC meetings in 1977 and 1978 .
In a press conference in 1977 the Shah stated he would work for oil price stability .
Together Saudi Arabia and Iran at the time produced nearly half of OPEC ’ s entire output .
If an Iran-Saudi-Iraq axis established a permanent working relationship with the EMS it would have assembled an unstoppable combination against the London world financial center .
Recall that France and West Germany had already ignored British calls to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and therefore , there was no indication that they were going to follow suit with Britain and the U.S. this time either .
As far as London and Washington were concerned , the Shah ’ s reign was over .
British Petroleum , BBC News and Amnesty International as Servants to the Crown Were we to select a date for the beginning of the Iranian revolution it would be November 1976 , the month that Amnesty International issued its report charging brutality and torture of political prisoners by the Shah of Iran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the secret police under the Shah from 1957 to 1979 , was established and pretty much run by the SIS ( aka MI6 ) , CIA and the Israeli Mossad .
This is a well-known fact , and yet , was treated as somehow irrelevant during Amnesty International ’ s pleas for a humanitarian intervention into Iran .
For those who haven ’ t already discovered Amnesty International ’ s true colors from their recent “ work ” in Syria…it should be known that they work for British Intelligence .
Gruesome accounts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the London Times , the Washington Post and other respected press .
Within a few months , President Carter launched his own “ human rights ” campaign .
With this , the international humanitarian outcry got bigger and louder demanding the removal of the Shah .
The Shah was caught between a rock and a hard place , as he was known not to be strong on “ security ” matters and often left it entirely up to the management of others .
Once Amnesty International sounded the war-cry , the Shah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the undefendable SAVAK in the public arena but continued to trust them entirely .
It would be his biggest mistake .
With the international foment intensifying , the British Broadcasting Corporation ’ s ( BBC ) Persian language broadcasts into Iran fanned the flames of revolt .
During the entire year of 1978 the BBC stationed dozens of correspondents throughout the country in every remote town and village .
BBC correspondents , often in the employ of the British secret service , worked as intelligence operatives for the revolution .
Each day the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of alleged atrocities committed by the Iranian police , often without checking the veracity of the reports .
It is now acknowledged that these news reports helped to fuel and even organise the political foment towards an Iranian revolution .
In 1978 , British Petroleum ( BP ) was in the process of negotiating with the government of Iran the renewing of the 25 year contract made in 1953 after the Anglo-American coup against Mosaddegh .
These negotiations collapsed in Oct 1978 , at the height of the revolution .
BP rejected the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NIOC ) demands , refusing to buy a minimum quantity of barrels of Iranian oil but demanding nonetheless the exclusive right to buy that oil should it wish to in the future !
The Shah and NIOC rejected BP ’ s final offer .
Had the Shah overcome the revolt , it appeared that Iran would have been free in its oil sales policy in 1979 – and would have been able to market its own oil to the state companies of France , Spain , Brazil and many other countries on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hardly a single line was published about the Iranian fight with BP , the real humanitarian fight for Iranians .
The “ Arc of Crisis ” is a geopolitical theory focused on American/western politics in regards to the Muslim world .
It was first concocted by British historian Bernard Lewis , who was regarded as the leading scholar in the world on oriental studies , especially of Islam , and its implications for today ’ s western politics .
Bernard Lewis was acting as an advisor to the U.S. State Department from 1977-1981 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Advisor , would announce the U.S. ’ adoption of the “ Arc of Crisis ” theory by the American military and NATO in 1978 .
It is widely acknowledged today , that the “ Arc of Crisis ” was primarily aimed at destabilising the USSR and Iran .
This will be discussed further in Part 3 of this series .
Egypt and Israel were expected to act as the initiating countries for the expansion of NATO into the Middle East .
Iran was to be the next link .
Iran ’ s revolution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ Arc of Crisis ” , and NATO had its “ humanitarian ” cause for entering the scene .
However , the fight was not over in Iran .
On Jan 4th , 1979 , the Shah named Shapour Bakhtiar , a respected member of the National Front as Prime Minister of Iran .
Bakhtiar was held in high regard by not only the French but Iranian nationalists .
As soon as his government was ratified , Bakhtiar began pushing through a series of major reform acts : he completely nationalised all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an end to the martial law , abolished the SAVAK , and pulled Iran out of the Central Treaty Organization , declaring that Iran would no longer be “ the gendarme of the Gulf ” .
Bakhtiar also announced that he would be removing Ardeshir Zahedi from his position as Iran ’ s Ambassador to the U.S. An apple that did not fall far from the tree , Ardeshir is the son of Fazlollah Zahedi , the man who led the coup against Mosaddegh and replaced him as Prime Minister !
Ardeshir was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the events surrounding the Iranian revolution and it was typical that he spoke to Brzezinski in Washington from Teheran over the phone at least once a day , often twice a day , as part of his “ job ” as Ambassador to the U.S. during the peak of the Iranian revolution .
With tensions escalating to a maximum , the Shah agreed to transfer all power to Bakhtiar and left Iran on Jan 16th,1979 for a “ long vacation ” ( aka exile ) , never to return .
However , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the damage was too far gone and the hyenas were circling round .
It is known that from Jan 7th to early Feb 1979 , the No .
2 in the NATO chain of command , General Robert Huyser , was in Iran and was in frequent contact with Brzezinski during this period .
It is thought that Huyser ’ s job was to avoid any coup attempts to disrupt the take-over by Khomeini ’ s revolutionary forces by largely misleading the Iranian generals with false intel and U.S. promises .
Recently declassified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Iran confirm these suspicions .
During the Shah ’ s “ long vacation ” his health quickly deteriorated .
Unfortunately the Shah was never a good judge of character and kept a close dialogue with Henry Kissinger as to how to go about his health problems .
By Oct 1979 , the Shah was diagnosed with cancer and the decision was made to send him to the U.S. for medical treatment .
This decision was very much pushed for and supported by Brzezinski and Kissinger , despite almost every intelligence report indicating this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In Nov 18th 1979 , the New York Times reported : On Oct 22 , 1979 , the Shah arrived in New York to receive medical treatment .
Twelve days later , the U.S. Embassy in Teheran was taken over and 52 American hostages would be held captive for 444 days !
With the taking of the hostages , the Carter Administration , as preplanned under the “ Arc of Crisis ” , set into motion its scenario for global crisis management .
The hostage crisis , a 100 % predictable response to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shah into America , was the external threat the Carter Administration needed to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act , authorising the President to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to an extraordinary threat With this new authority , President Carter announced the freezing of all U.S.-Iranian financial assets , amounting to over $ 6 billion , including in branches of American banks abroad .
Instantly , the world financial markets were thrown into a panic , and big dollar depositors in western Europe and the U.S. , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to pull back from further commitments .
The Eurodollar market was paralyzed and most international lending halted until complex legal matters were sorted out .
However , the most serious consequence by far from the Carter Administration ’ s “ emergency actions , ” was in scaring other OPEC governments away from long-term lending precisely at a time when West Germany and France were seeking to attract deposits into the financial apparatus associated with the European Monetary System ( EMS ) .
In addition , the Carter Administration ’ s insistent demands that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against Iran was like asking them to cut their own throats .
Yet , the raised political tensions succeeded in breaking apart the economic alliances and the slow blood-letting of Europe commenced .
Within days of the taking of the hostages , the pretext was given for a vast expansion of U.S. military presence in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean .
The message was not lost on Europe .
In a Nov 28 , 1979 column in Le Figaro , Paul Marie de la Gorce , who was in close dialogue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that U.S. military and economic intervention into Iran would cause “ more damages for Europe and Japan than for Iran.
” And that those who advocate such solutions are “ consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger.
” During the 444 day hostage crisis , a full-scale U.S. invasion was always looming overhead .
Such an invasion was never about seizing the oil supply for the U.S. , but rather to deny it to western Europe and Japan .
If the U.S. were to have seized the oil supply @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the western European economies would have knocked out the EMS .
Thus , during the 444 day holding of American hostages , this threat was held over the head of Europe like the sword of Damocles .
It is sufficed to say that today ’ s ongoing sanctions against Iran can not be understood in their full weight and international ramifications without this historical background .
This is part 2 of a planned three part article , originally published at Strategic Culture .
You can read part one here .

Cynthia Chung
In Part 1, we left off in our story at the SIS-CIA overthrow of Iran’s Nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. At this point the Shah was able to return to Iran from Rome and British-backed Fazlollah Zahedi, who played a leading role in the coup, replaced Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran.
Here we will resume our story.
An Introduction to the ‘Shah of Shahs’, ‘King of Kings’
One important thing to know about Mohammad Reza Shah was that he was no fan of British imperialism and was an advocate for Iran’s independence and industrial growth. That said, the Shah was a deeply flawed man who lacked the steadfastness to secure such a positive fate for Iran. After all, foreign-led coups had become quite common in Iran at that point.
He would become the Shah in 1941 at the age of 22, after the British forced his father Reza Shah into exile. By then, Persia had already experienced 70 years of British imperialism reducing its people to near destitution.
Mohammad Reza Shah had developed very good relations with the U.S. under President FDR, who at the behest of the Shah, formed the Iran Declaration which ended Iran’s foreign occupation by the British and the Soviets after WWII.
His father, Reza Shah came into power after the overthrow of Ahmad Shah in 1921, who was responsible for signing into law the infamous Anglo-Persian Agreement in 1919, which effectively turned Iran into a de facto protectorate run by British “advisors” and ensured the British Empire’s control of Iran’s oil.
Despite Reza Shah’s problems (Mosaddegh was sent into exile during his reign), he had made significant achievements for Iran. Among these included the development of transportation infrastructure, 15 000 miles of road by 1940 and the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway which opened in 1938.
Mohammad Reza Shah wished to continue this vein of progress, however, he would first have to go through Britain and increasingly the U.S. in order to fulfill Iran’s vision for a better future.
In 1973, Mohammad Reza Shah thought he finally found his chance to turn Iran into the “world’s sixth industrial power” in just one generation…
OPEC and the European Monetary System vs the ‘Seven Sisters’
In 1960, OPEC was founded by five oil producing countries: Venezuela, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait in an attempt to influence and stabilise the market price of oil, which would in turn stabilise their nation’s economic return. The formation of OPEC marked a turning point toward national sovereignty over natural resources.
However, during this period OPEC did not have a strong voice in such affairs, the main reason being the “Seven Sisters” which controlled approximately 86% of the oil produced by OPEC countries. The “Seven Sisters” was the name for the seven transnational oil companies of the “Consortium of Iran” cartel which dominated the global petroleum industry, with British Petroleum owning 40% and Royal Dutch Shell 14%, giving Britain the lead at 54% ownership during this period.
After 1973, with the sudden rise of oil prices, the Shah began to see an opportunity for independent action.
The Shah saw the price increase as a way to pull his country out of backwardness. To the intense irritation of his sponsors, the Shah pledged to bring Iran into the ranks of the world’s top ten industrial nations by the year 2000.
The Shah understood that in order for this vision to become a reality, Iran could not just stay as a crude oil producer but needed to invest in a more stable future through industrial growth. And as it just so happened, France and West Germany were ready to make an offer.
In 1978, France and West Germany led the European community, with the exception of Great Britain, in the formation of the European Monetary System (EMS). The EMS was a response to the controlled disintegration that had been unleashed on the world economy after the fixed exchange rate became a floating exchange rate in 1971.
French foreign minister Jean Francois–Poncet had told a UN press conference, that it was his vision that the EMS eventually replace the IMF and World Bank as the center of world finance.
For those who are unaware of the devastation that the IMF and World Bank have wreaked upon the world, refer to John Perkins’ Confession of an Economic Hit Man…the situation is 10X worst today.
As early as 1977, France and West Germany had begun exploring the possibility of concretizing a deal with oil producing countries in which western Europe would supply high-technology exports, including nuclear technology, to the OPEC countries in exchange for long-term oil supply contracts at a stable price.
In turn, OPEC countries would deposit their enormous financial surpluses into western European banks which could be used for further loans for development projects… obviously to the detriment of the IMF and World Bank hegemony.
The Carter Administration was not happy with this, sending Vice President Walter Mondale to France and West Germany to “inform” them that the U.S. would henceforth oppose the sale of nuclear energy technology to the Third World…and thus they should do so as well. West Germany’s nuclear deal with Brazil and France’s promise to sell nuclear technology to South Korea had already come under heavy attack.
In addition, the Shah had started a closer partnership with Iraq and Saudi Arabia cemented at OPEC meetings in 1977 and 1978. In a press conference in 1977 the Shah stated he would work for oil price stability. Together Saudi Arabia and Iran at the time produced nearly half of OPEC’s entire output.
If an Iran-Saudi-Iraq axis established a permanent working relationship with the EMS it would have assembled an unstoppable combination against the London world financial center.
Recall that France and West Germany had already ignored British calls to boycott Iranian oil in 1951 under Mosaddegh, and therefore, there was no indication that they were going to follow suit with Britain and the U.S. this time either.
As far as London and Washington were concerned, the Shah’s reign was over.
British Petroleum, BBC News and Amnesty International as Servants to the Crown
Were we to select a date for the beginning of the Iranian revolution it would be November 1976, the month that Amnesty International issued its report charging brutality and torture of political prisoners by the Shah of Iran.
Ironically, the SAVAK which was the secret police under the Shah from 1957 to 1979, was established and pretty much run by the SIS (aka MI6), CIA and the Israeli Mossad. This is a well-known fact, and yet, was treated as somehow irrelevant during Amnesty International’s pleas for a humanitarian intervention into Iran.
For those who haven’t already discovered Amnesty International’s true colors from their recent “work” in Syria…it should be known that they work for British Intelligence.
Gruesome accounts of electric shock torture and mutilation were printed in the London Times, the Washington Post and other respected press. Within a few months, President Carter launched his own “human rights” campaign. With this, the international humanitarian outcry got bigger and louder demanding the removal of the Shah.
The Shah was caught between a rock and a hard place, as he was known not to be strong on “security” matters and often left it entirely up to the management of others. Once Amnesty International sounded the war-cry, the Shah made the mistake of not only defending the undefendable SAVAK in the public arena but continued to trust them entirely. It would be his biggest mistake.
With the international foment intensifying, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Persian language broadcasts into Iran fanned the flames of revolt.
During the entire year of 1978 the BBC stationed dozens of correspondents throughout the country in every remote town and village. BBC correspondents, often in the employ of the British secret service, worked as intelligence operatives for the revolution.
Each day the BBC would report in Iran gory accounts of alleged atrocities committed by the Iranian police, often without checking the veracity of the reports. It is now acknowledged that these news reports helped to fuel and even organise the political foment towards an Iranian revolution.
In 1978, British Petroleum (BP) was in the process of negotiating with the government of Iran the renewing of the 25 year contract made in 1953 after the Anglo-American coup against Mosaddegh. These negotiations collapsed in Oct 1978, at the height of the revolution. BP rejected the National Iranian Oil Company’s (NIOC) demands, refusing to buy a minimum quantity of barrels of Iranian oil but demanding nonetheless the exclusive right to buy that oil should it wish to in the future!
The Shah and NIOC rejected BP’s final offer. Had the Shah overcome the revolt, it appeared that Iran would have been free in its oil sales policy in 1979 – and would have been able to market its own oil to the state companies of France, Spain, Brazil and many other countries on a state-to-state basis.
In the American press hardly a single line was published about the Iranian fight with BP, the real humanitarian fight for Iranians.
The Sword of Damocles
The “Arc of Crisis” is a geopolitical theory focused on American/western politics in regards to the Muslim world. It was first concocted by British historian Bernard Lewis, who was regarded as the leading scholar in the world on oriental studies, especially of Islam, and its implications for today’s western politics.
Bernard Lewis was acting as an advisor to the U.S. State Department from 1977-1981. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor, would announce the U.S.’ adoption of the “Arc of Crisis” theory by the American military and NATO in 1978.
It is widely acknowledged today, that the “Arc of Crisis” was primarily aimed at destabilising the USSR and Iran. This will be discussed further in Part 3 of this series.
Egypt and Israel were expected to act as the initiating countries for the expansion of NATO into the Middle East. Iran was to be the next link.
Iran’s revolution was perfectly timed with the launching of the “Arc of Crisis”, and NATO had its “humanitarian” cause for entering the scene.
However, the fight was not over in Iran.
On Jan 4th, 1979, the Shah named Shapour Bakhtiar, a respected member of the National Front as Prime Minister of Iran. Bakhtiar was held in high regard by not only the French but Iranian nationalists. As soon as his government was ratified, Bakhtiar began pushing through a series of major reform acts: he completely nationalised all British oil interests in Iran, put an end to the martial law, abolished the SAVAK, and pulled Iran out of the Central Treaty Organization, declaring that Iran would no longer be “the gendarme of the Gulf”.
Bakhtiar also announced that he would be removing Ardeshir Zahedi from his position as Iran’s Ambassador to the U.S.
An apple that did not fall far from the tree, Ardeshir is the son of Fazlollah Zahedi, the man who led the coup against Mosaddegh and replaced him as Prime Minister!
Ardeshir was suspected to have been misinforming the Shah about the events surrounding the Iranian revolution and it was typical that he spoke to Brzezinski in Washington from Teheran over the phone at least once a day, often twice a day, as part of his “job” as Ambassador to the U.S. during the peak of the Iranian revolution.
With tensions escalating to a maximum, the Shah agreed to transfer all power to Bakhtiar and left Iran on Jan 16th,1979 for a “long vacation” (aka exile), never to return.
However, despite Bakhtiar’s courageous actions, the damage was too far gone and the hyenas were circling round.
It is known that from Jan 7th to early Feb 1979, the No. 2 in the NATO chain of command, General Robert Huyser, was in Iran and was in frequent contact with Brzezinski during this period. It is thought that Huyser’s job was to avoid any coup attempts to disrupt the take-over by Khomeini’s revolutionary forces by largely misleading the Iranian generals with false intel and U.S. promises. Recently declassified documents on Huyser’s visit to Iran confirm these suspicions.
During the Shah’s “long vacation” his health quickly deteriorated. Unfortunately the Shah was never a good judge of character and kept a close dialogue with Henry Kissinger as to how to go about his health problems. By Oct 1979, the Shah was diagnosed with cancer and the decision was made to send him to the U.S. for medical treatment.
This decision was very much pushed for and supported by Brzezinski and Kissinger, despite almost every intelligence report indicating this would lead to a disastrous outcome.
In Nov 18th 1979, the New York Times reported:
The decision was made despite the fact that Mr. Carter and his senior policy advisers had known for months that to admit the Shah might endanger Americans at the embassy in Teheran. An aide reported that at one staff meeting Mr. Carter had asked, “When the Iranians take our people in Teheran hostage, what will you advise me then?”
On Oct 22, 1979, the Shah arrived in New York to receive medical treatment. Twelve days later, the U.S. Embassy in Teheran was taken over and 52 American hostages would be held captive for 444 days!
With the taking of the hostages, the Carter Administration, as preplanned under the “Arc of Crisis”, set into motion its scenario for global crisis management.
The hostage crisis, a 100% predictable response to the U.S.’ decision to accept the Shah into America, was the external threat the Carter Administration needed to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, authorising the President to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to an extraordinary threat
With this new authority, President Carter announced the freezing of all U.S.-Iranian financial assets, amounting to over $6 billion, including in branches of American banks abroad. Instantly, the world financial markets were thrown into a panic, and big dollar depositors in western Europe and the U.S., particularly the OPEC central banks, began to pull back from further commitments.
The Eurodollar market was paralyzed and most international lending halted until complex legal matters were sorted out.
However, the most serious consequence by far from the Carter Administration’s “emergency actions,” was in scaring other OPEC governments away from long-term lending precisely at a time when West Germany and France were seeking to attract deposits into the financial apparatus associated with the European Monetary System (EMS).
In addition, the Carter Administration’s insistent demands that western Europe and Japan invoke economic sanctions against Iran was like asking them to cut their own throats. Yet, the raised political tensions succeeded in breaking apart the economic alliances and the slow blood-letting of Europe commenced.
Within days of the taking of the hostages, the pretext was given for a vast expansion of U.S. military presence in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
Sound familiar?
The message was not lost on Europe. In a Nov 28, 1979 column in Le Figaro, Paul Marie de la Gorce, who was in close dialogue with the French presidential palace, concluded that U.S. military and economic intervention into Iran would cause “more damages for Europe and Japan than for Iran.” And that those who advocate such solutions are “consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger.”
During the 444 day hostage crisis, a full-scale U.S. invasion was always looming overhead. Such an invasion was never about seizing the oil supply for the U.S., but rather to deny it to western Europe and Japan.
If the U.S. were to have seized the oil supply in Iran, the body blow to the western European economies would have knocked out the EMS. Thus, during the 444 day holding of American hostages, this threat was held over the head of Europe like the sword of Damocles.
It is sufficed to say that today’s ongoing sanctions against Iran cannot be understood in their full weight and international ramifications without this historical background.
This is part 2 of a planned three part article, originally published at Strategic Culture. You can read part one here.