Pepe Escobar — Why Jihadism Won’t Be Allowed to Die

Geopolitics and geostrategy.

Russia Insider
Why Jihadism Won’t Be Allowed to Die

Pepe Escobar

RT — ‘They are all spies’: Philippines’ Duterte speaks on US ambassador’s ‘destabilization blueprint’

The outspoken president of the Philippines has lashed out at the former US ambassador to the country, who reportedly left a ‘blueprint to destabilize’ the country’s government when leaving his post in November.

President Rodrigo Duterte said all ambassadors play a part in their respective countries' spying operations, but American ambassadors have a "forte" for undermining the government of their host countries.

"Most of the ambassadors of the United States, but not all, are not really professional ambassadors. At the same time they are spying, they are connected with the CIA," Duterte said in an interview with CNN Philippines.

Duterte was commenting on a Tuesday report in the Manila Times, which claimed that Philip Goldberg, who resigned in November his position as the US ambassador to the Pacific nation, has left behind a detailed plan on how to undermine the Philippines government and oust its president....

Duterte has been on bad terms with Goldberg for quite some time. On one occasion he infamously called the American envoy a "gay son of a bitch" for interfering with Philippines politics.…

Harsh.

RT
‘They are all spies’: Philippines’ Duterte speaks on US envoy’s ‘destabilization blueprint’

Robert Parry — How Neocons Destabilized Europe

Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind. (Hosea 8-7)

As Parry points out the pattern extends back decades and there is no reason to think that it is near over yet. The crazies are now in charge of US foreign policy and it is bipartisan.

Parry also reminds that a lot of the migration of Latin Americans to the US over the past several decades has also been due in part to neocon meddling.

There is much faux concern in some US quarters that terrorists are entering among the illegals across the Mexican border, with no evidence and little credibility. But it is hardly farfetched that ISIS is using the refugee crisis to infiltrate terrorists into Europe, and the right-wing in the US is touting it as a sure thing.

Consortium News
How Neocons Destabilized Europe

Robert Parry

John Feffer — Tomgram: John Feffer, Why the World Is Becoming the Un-Sweden

Today, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, offers a cunning bow to the convergence theorists of the Cold War era, a crew of thinkers who imagined that someday the two superpowers would merge into one conglomerate creature in strangely upbeat ways. In reality, as he points out, “convergence” (even in an era that lacks the Soviet Union) has turned out to be a dismally downbeat process. He does, however, skip the earliest convergence theorist of them all, who happened to be a novelist rather than an economist or a philosopher. I’m talking about George Orwell who, in his novel 1984 (published in 1948 just as the Cold War was ramping up to a low burn), imagined the convergence of the worst of West and East, of capitalist America and communist Russia, in a state so memorably malign that, almost seven decades later, everyone, including Edward Snowden, still remembers Big Brother.

The NSA's global surveillance state, revealed by Snowden, managed to put even the dreams of the totalitarian states of the previous century in the shade (and caused sales of 1984 to spike) -- and it's but one reminder of Orwell’s foresight. So many other details of our moment from black sites and kidnapping schemes to torture and assassination programs remind us that, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, convergence of a sort still seems to be in the cards. Here’s the strange thing, though: if a kind of eerie version of convergence is indeed underway, as Feffer so memorably suggests, in the organized precincts of what used to be called the First and Second Worlds -- the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China -- in the former Third World, or at least across vast stretches of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, a process that might be called divergence seems to be gaining strength. The power of states is weakening, fragmenting, or simply dissolving amid the growth of extremist organizations, sectarian or sectional militias, and terror groups.

As miraculous as Orwell was -- and in the earliest days of the television age he managed to conjure up a future world in which the screen would be omnipresent and everyone could be surveilled, tracked, and controlled through it -- he had no way of imagining such a strange form of divergence. Its origins seem to lie, at least in part, in a twenty-first-century American urge to take its much-ballyhooed role as the planet’s last remaining superpower to heart and essentially try to rule the world. This desire to create a planetary Pax Americana (and an American Pax Republicana) led the Bush administration to punch a devastating hole in the oil heartlands of the planet, setting off a storm of sectarian chaos within which old systems of control, already frayed, began to collapse and whose endpoint is, at present, beyond our ken.

Convergence and divergence, centralization and fragmentation: it’s a vision of a planet that’s not exactly Orwellian, but certainly represents a nightmare worthy of some still-to-be-discovered Orwell of our moment. In the meantime, while we await the novel 2051, let John Feffer tell you about the dark, converging world of 2015. Tom

Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: John Feffer, Why the World Is Becoming the Un-Sweden
John Feffer