Trump dreigt met paramilitair geweld in de VS

Het is het beest Trump nu geheel en al in de bolle kop geslagen, de hufter durfde 13 maart jl. in een interview voor Breitbart te zeggen dat hij het leger, de politie en motorbendes aan zijn kant staan, maar dat ze gelukkig (nog) geen geweld plegen.....* (motorbendes: je weet, wel van die gewelddadig misdadige 'volwassen' jongens met veel te grote brommers en oude stinkauto's) Met andere woorden: als Trump z'n zin niet krijg, of men probeert hem af te zetten, is dat nog lang geen gelopen race, sterker nog die race zal niet eens van start gaan......

In feite dreigt Trump met een burgeroorlog mocht men hem proberen af te zetten, met de lullige toevoeging dat hij aan de sterke kant zal staan met paramilitaire troepen om zijn tegenstanders op te pakken, dan wel te vermoorden.....

Ben het overigens niet eens met wat Sasha Abramsky, de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, zegt over Putin: Rusland zit toch echt nog voor het stadium van een totale dictatuur. Bovendien hebben we aan Putin te danken dat het in Syrië niet volledig uit de hand is gelopen, wat betreft de andere wereldmacht, of beter gezegd terreurentiteit VS. Eén ding is zeker als Trump, of noem nog maar wat VS presidenten, op de plek van Putin hadden gezeten met hun administratie, waren we waarschijnlijk al in een wereldoorlog verwikkeld geweest >> WOIII.....

Steve King, een (fascistisch) ideologische partner van Trump en witte nationalistische ploert, hield vorige maand zijn volgers een cartoon voor en gaf ze de boodschap mee dat een burgeroorlog mogelijk is en dat dit een feest zou zijn voor conservatieven wapenfanaten, 'een feest' om slappe liberalen, 'die niet weten welk toilet ze moeten gebruiken', neer te schieten.....

Zoals gezegd: Abramsky is de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel dat o.a. verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH). Hij haalt het verleden erbij, o.a. de SA van Hitler, paramilitairen die tekeergingen tegen Joden, homo's, of beter gezegd wat we tegenwoordig Lgbt mensen noemen, maar ook tegen Roma, Sinti en linkse tegenstanders.......

Het feit dat Trump met paramilitaire acties dreigt is uiteraard te zot voor woorden, hiervoor zou hij afgezet moeten worden, niet voor het sprookje dat men Russiagate is gaan noemen, maar waarvoor niet één nanometer bewijs is gevonden, zelfs niet na 2 jaar diepgravend onderzoek........ (nieuws van deze dag: aanklager Mueller adviseert de zaak verder te laten rusten, ofwel hij heeft nul komma nada bewijzen voor Russiagate gevonden!)

Beste bezoeker, nog even dit: lullig misschien, maar wat mij betreft mag de pleuris uitbreken in de VS en wel zo erg dat het leger uit andere landen moet worden teruggetrokken, kan de wereld eindelijk een ademhalen, zonder de hete 'bloedige adem' van de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde in de nek te voelen.......

Het artikel verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH) en werd eerder gepubliceerd op truthout (nam het artikel over van ICH, de foto komt van truth):

Trump Threatens to Unleash Paramilitary Violence in the US

By Sasha Abramsky

March 21, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - This has been one of those whiplash weeks where so many particularly monstrous words have emanated from Donald Trump’s mouth and Twitter-fingers that it becomes almost dizzying.

Where to focus my outrage? Should I be most concerned about the fact that the supposed “leader of the free world” stumbled through a series of non-answers when asked about the growing threat of white nationalism in the wake of the grotesque massacre of scores of Muslims in New Zealand? Or the fact that last weekend, instead of tweeting sympathy to the victims of that massacre, Trump chose instead to tweet out insults and lies about a dead senator? Or the fact that he threatened to sic the Federal Communications Commission onto a comedy show he didn’t like, while at the same time stepping into the editorial fray to urge Fox News to stand behind two particularly noxious commentators whom he does like?

All these are bad, but none is as bloody awful as his musings on unleashing paramilitary violence if things go too wrong for him in the political arena. In his trademark “I didn’t say it” way, Trump talked in a March 13 Breitbart interview about how he had the police, the military and the biker gangs in his corner — and how wonderful it was that they weren’t violent … for now; the clear nudge, nudge, wink, wink, subtext being that all he would have to do is give a signal, and his armed proxies would go after his enemies. A few days later, white nationalist Rep. Steve King, one of Trump’s closest ideological soulmates on Capitol Hill, forwarded to his followers a cartoon about the possibility of a modern-day U.S. civil war, and how gun-toting conservatives would have a field day shooting down wishy-washy liberals who couldn’t even work out what public bathrooms they wanted to use.

None of this stuff is remotely funny, and it has no place in a functioning democracy. Of course, many U.S. politicians in the past have called out the hard-hat brigade when it suited them; segregationist Southern governors during the civil rights struggle routinely stoked white mob violence in an effort to block reforms. In 1968, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley unleashed the police against anti-war protesters with the intent of busting open as many heads as possible. In the Tammany Hall days, machine politicians weren’t averse to making unholy alliances with street gangs. More recently, demagogues from Louisiana politician Huey Long to Red Scare architect Joe McCarthy have all-too-well understood the power of the crowd and the potency of the threat of political violence in an already combustible situation.

But for the most part, presidents have tended to stay away from such a dark and dangerous path. They have done so not necessarily because of moral scruples, but out of an awareness of the ferocious (and ultimately uncontainable) forces that can be unleashed when a person with the power and reach of the president of the United States abandons all pretext of democratic governance; of respect for the rule of law; and of an understanding that the game of politics has to be bound by a set of rules or else it will degenerate into strong-man rule, and, eventually, the unfathomable horror of civil conflict.

Trump has, since he first announced his candidacy back in 2015, shown little patience for the limits, the nuance and the necessity of compromise that constitutional governance necessitates. He has, from the get-go, shown himself temperamentally to be an autocrat, a man with dictatorial ambitions who is far more comfortable in the presence of rulers such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, than democratic leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Over the last two years, the Trump regime — and it is far more a regime than an administration — has bent the GOP firmly to his will on this.

Were Trump’s outrageous comments about biker gangs and military intervention in domestic politics just the random utterances of an egocentric authoritarian, things would be grim enough. But over the last two years, various GOP organizations around the country have invited white supremacist groups including the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepersand the Proud Boys to either provide “security” at their rallies or to “spice up” their events with speakers who advocate violence. All of these groups are paramilitaries-in-the-making; all are — or at least were before being brought into the mainstream by Trumpite Republicans — on the far margins of the political process, their worldview more closely aligned with fascist visions of society than with what passed as GOP mainstream beliefs in the pre-Trump era.

Over these last few years, the GOP has increasingly come to resemble a political party whose raison d’étre is simply to nurture the cult of the personality around Trump rather than to contribute anything genuinely resembling ideas into the political discourse; a political party willing to embrace the most violent and thuggish elements for partisan advantage. The scale of this degeneration was on display last month, when Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz publicly threatened congressional witness and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and then blithely claimed he was just contributing to “the marketplace of ideas.”

Let’s be real. Publicly blackmailing a witness is no more about “the marketplace of ideas” than a mobster’s threat to make someone “sleep with the fishes” if they cooperate with the police. Using the presidential bully pulpit to goad an already angry and wrathful “base” to consider violence against political opponents is, again, no more simply part of the democratic rough and tumble, the contest for hearts and minds, than would be the burning of a cross on the lawn of a perceived enemy.

Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of power-hungry rulers turning to paramilitary violence when it was politically expedient. The Sturmabteilung (SA) were the backbone of early Nazi power in Germany. Their sadistic foot soldiers were unleashed against Jews, trade unionists, communists, LGBTQ folks, independent journalists, artists, academics and so on. In Latin America, paramilitaries were instrumental in the dirty wars that decimated a generation of progressives. Elsewhere, paramilitaries have been turned to in recent times by leaders such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as by genocidal leaders such as those in Rwanda and in the Balkan states in the early 1990s.

In his powerful essay, “In Defense of the Word,” written during a decade when most of Latin America had fallen to dictators backed up by paramilitary forces, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote that the combination of authoritarian leaders and armed militias had paved the way for “the development of methods of torture, techniques for assassinating people and ideas, for the cultivation of silence, the extension of impotence, and the sowing of fear.”

We think we are different; we are, after all, Americans, and in the U.S., we say to ourselves with a healthy dose of hubris, that we don’t do things that way. But how different are we really? How thin is our veneer? How vulnerable are we to the siren calls of political violence issued from the biggest dais on Earth and amplified by the instruments of social media?

Trump and his acolytes are now truly playing with fire. The more Trump’s legal woes mount up, the more he seems willing to embrace his own Götterdämmerung vision, a willingness to create maximum chaos simply to insulate himself from justice.

In an essay titled “Fascism in Latin America,” Galeano observed that, “In the slaughterhouses of human flesh, the hangmen hummed patriotic songs.” Trump, with his musings about the army, the police, the biker gangs, his literal hugging of the flag at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and his repeated conflation of dissent with treason, is humming loud and clear these days.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Originally from England, he now lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife, daughter and son. He has a masters degree from Columbia University School of Journalism, and is currently a senior fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank.

This article was originally published by "truthout" - 
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* Gezien het enorme en onevenredige geweld van de politie tegen gekleurde VS burgers en andere ambtenaren tegen vluchtelingen, is die uitspraak een gotspe!

NAVO naar Zuid-Amerika? Weg met dit agressieve, terroristische bondgenootschap, NU!!!

ICH bracht op 2 januari jl. het bericht, dat Santos de NAVO uitnodigt om in Colombia 'de misdaad' te bestrijden.......

Koenig, de schrijver van het artikel, betoogt dat president Santos van Colombia, 'de vredesduif'*,  geen vrede met de FARC wenst, zoals gezegd de NAVO moet 'de misdaad bestrijden' in Colombia, 'misdaad' gepleegd door de FARC..... Moorden door rechtse doodseskaders op simpele boeren, moeten de FARC verleiden de wapens weer op te nemen........ De NAVO naar Zuid-Amerika? Weg met dit uiterst agressieve bondgenootschap!

Overigens nogal vreemd, dat deze rechtse terreurgroepen in Colombia gewoon doorgaan met hun terreur tegen de arme bevolking, vooral buiten de steden..... Eén van de redenen zal zijn, dat deze doodseskaders voor een groot deel uit reguliere politieagenten en militairen van het Colombiaanse leger bestaan, waar deze doodseskaders worden gesteund door de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde: de VS......

Hier het artikel van Information Clearing House (onder het artikel kan u klikken voor een 'Dutch vertaling'):

Inviting NATO to Fight “Organized Crime”, A Menace for Latin America

By Peter Koenig

January 02, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Imagine, Mr. Manuel Santos, President of Colombia, Nobel Peace Laureate 2016, for achieving a Peace Agreement with the FARC “rebels” (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) – this same peace-loving Mr. Santos is inviting NATO to his country to help fight “organized crime”. As TeleSUR reports, this could jeopardize the recently signed (the ink is not yet dry) Peace Agreement between the Government and FARC.

Within the last few days, at least two leaders of ‘campesinos’ (peasant farmers) were found killed. “False flag”, as usual, with real people casualties? Provoking FARC to retaliate? – Which would be the end of the peace agreement.

Frankly, I never believed that the government was serious in negotiating peace, ending one of the longest civil conflicts’, with the longest peace negotiations in recent Latin American history. A four-year peace process was supposed to end 52 years of the leftist FARC militia fighting in defense of the rural poor, countering an elite of the rich, mostly urban dweller and latifundios, against government forces with support of the US military stationed in Colombia.  

Like the Europeans, the Colombian Government is a sheer puppet of Washington’s. Both Santos and his predecessor, Uribe, are CIA handlers. Having peace with FARC would be against the interests of the United States. So – what is the agreement all about? – It’s propaganda: Giving war-wearied people an illusion, false hope, that there is light at the end of the endless tunnel of assassinations and abuse – enhanced by the politically highly astute Swedish / Norwegian Nobel Committee. At the first sign of a FARC uprising, for example in protest of the (false flag) campesino killings, the agreement will be broken, and peace is what it was from the very beginning – a farce – a travesty to induce a new strategy for Latin America – bringing in NATO.

To disguise Washington’s role, President Santos is calling on NATO for help.

Everybody knows that NATO represents basically the US Pentagon with some token input from Washington’s European stooges. But NATO’s involvement in Colombia would have far wider implication than just fighting FARC, or as Santos calls it euphemistically, ‘fighting organized crime’ which is a reference to fighting drug cartels and linking the ‘fight’ to the infamous and controversial US Plan Colombia, the direct cost of which has exceeded 10 billion dollars since 2000, when it began. The total cost, including the destruction of infrastructure, housing and livelihoods, as well as the lives of at least 220 000 Colombians and close to six million people displaced, with the related hardship and suffering, is uncountable.

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported,

“Plan Colombia has become a catch-all phrase for several different strategies. It is most widely understood as a US aid package to Colombia which has totaled about $10 billion since 2000. More broadly, it was a joint US-Colombian strategy to strengthen the military, state institutions and the economy.”

“There is this idea that it is some vast orchestrated project, but Plan Colombia doesn’t exist as such,” says Winifred Tate, author of ‘Drugs, Thugs and Diplomats’, a study of US policymaking in Colombia. “Rather, it has been a series of programs whose emphasis has expanded and recalibrated over the years”, she says.

In fact, former Colombia President Andres Pastrana, under whom Plan Colombia started, admitted to The Guardian that the strategy was a turning point in the country’s decades-old war [against FARC]. “Before the Plan, security forces were on the defensive and on the verge of military defeat [by FARC guerrillas].”

Despite the Plan, coca production is higher today than in 2000, at the beginning of the Plan and Colombia remains the world’s top coca and cocaine producer. So, Plan Colombia has not worked. A “Strategy Change” is in order. In comes NATO, a multi-country military force, per se, to fight crime, kill farmers who do not ‘obey’ – continuing the fight against FARC ‘rebels’ who defend the peasants – and therefore break the highly deceptive Peace Agreement. A condition for the Peace Agreement was complete disarmament of FARC. In a new war, FARC would be extremely disadvantaged, risking to be easily eviscerated by NATO.

What is NATO? – NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a US led military force stationed in Europe.

It was created in 1949 by the United States and included Canada and several European countries. Its main official purpose was to defend Europe from the imaginary enemy, the communist Soviet Union. Implicitly it also meant that Europe wouldn’t need to build up its own defense. Big Brother would take care of it with – yes, NATO.

The only European leader with foresight and who saw through the sham, was General Charles De Gaulle. In 1966 he kicked NATO out of France. In 2009, 43 years later, French President Sarkozy, also a known CIA agent, reintegrated France into all structures of NATO.

At the foundation of NATO, as today, the US had and has a phobia against anything that has anything to do with socialism, let alone communism – which was a major justification for the arms race that enhanced the Cold War from the late 1950’s to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War was mostly a propaganda hype to make believe the Soviet Union, which historically never had expansionist ambitions, was a threat to European sovereignty. The Cold War justified an arms race that sustained a highly profitable war industry.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the justification for NATO effectively died. It had then 12 bases in Europe. The unilateral promise by the allied forces, expressed by then German Foreign Minister Genscher, was that NATO would not expand one meter to the east. Today NATO has 28 members and more than 30 bases throughout Europe, most of them clustering around the Russian borders, a threat to Moscow. That’s shows the honesty of western promises. This prolific character is typical for US-led military operations, in particular NATO. With this historic background, NATO in Colombia would be a real and present danger for all of Latin America. NATO, an alliance of Atlantists, has no business in Colombia, let alone in Latin America.

NATO in Colombia had an earlier beginning. 

President Juan Manuel Santos initiated the Colombia-NATO cooperation. Negotiations between the former Colombian defense Minister, Juan Carlos Pinzón, and NATO’s General Philip Breedlove, then NATO Commander in Europe, started in 2013 with the ‘benign’ purpose for Colombia to gain access to NATO’s “best practices in professional standards, integrity and transparency, as well as humanitarian operations.” Against obvious protests from Venezuela to having NATO infiltrated in her neighboring country, President Santos signed a “Cooperation Agreement” with NATO on 6 June 2013 in Brussels.

This was the beginning of a covert alliance between a key Latin American ally of Washington and NATO. Almost nobody noticed. Bringing NATO troops to Colombia would not only be a first in Latin America, it might wreak havoc among the non-aligned UNASUR nations, especially among Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

NATO in Colombia would be like a training ground for guerilla warfare, something the transatlantic forces are not used to – but will have to become familiar with in order to fulfill Washington’s plan to gradually proliferate throughout South America, preventing any attempts of left-wing uprisings. Once in strategically located Colombia, NATO would spread like brush fire throughout the Sub-Continent, being allowed by the neoliberal Latin American Governments now being implanted by Washington to build countless military bases. They would henceforth be called NATO bases. The unpopular term, US bases, would be a thing of the past.

Latin America, be aware and alert. Obama’s condescendingly calling Latin America ‘Washington’s Backyard’, could become quickly a reality with NATO in Colombia. As the famous late Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, wisely said, “Once American troops are in your country, you will never get rid of them.”

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

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* President Santos ontving de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede in 2016.........

Zie ook:
'9 'ex-FARC rebellen' vermoord door leger Colombia: FARC-EP opgericht'

'Mensenrechten- en milieuactivisten worden massaal vermoord in Brazilië en Colombia, waar het laatste land NAVO bases heeft.......'

'Koenders heeft vrijlating gegijzelde Spoorloos makers in Colombia bewerkstelligt....... AUW!!!'

'Paus Franciscus in Colombia om vrede te prediken......'

'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'

Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terugvindt, dat geldt niet voor de labels: Galeano, Santos en UNASUR.