Monday 11th of November 2024

obamaaaaaaa......


If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief.

— Barack Obama

If it can be said that one person is responsible for the awful death toll from the recent flooding in eastern Libya, Barack Obama should be named as the culprit. If nothing else, Obama certainly has a lot of nerve. The person who was determined to destroy the Libyan state did just that. His personal hench lady, aka Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, carried out the dirty work. Along with allies like the UK and France, she made the case for a “no fly” zone, which prevented Libya’s army from being protected by its air force. For good measure she whipped up a phony human rights case, complete with claims about troops taking viagra in order to commit mass rapes.

 

By Margaret Kimberley

 

The end result of these criminal machinations was a destroyed nation, a race war against African migrants and darker skinned Libyans, the murder of the president, and the beginning of a migration crisis which continues to this day. Obama can’t stop himself from commenting on that either. After the U.S. waged a war of aggression against Libya with the help of jihadist groups, the Obama administration then turned to Syria and tried to do the same thing. The Syrian state lives on but is diminished by the displacement of millions of people, sanctions, the U.S. theft of its oil, and its own migration crisis.

Citizens of western Asia and African nations flee instability on boats and rafts that are not seaworthy in hopes of reaching asylum in Europe. These risky trips result in terrible tragedies, as happened in June 2023 when an overloaded ship carried more than 700 migrants from Libya, trying to reach Greece. The boat sank and only 104 survivors were rescued.

There were no such conditions before the U.S. and NATO destroyed Libya, but Obama didn’t disappoint. He pondered why there was more news about the sinking of a small submersible at the site of the Titanic than about the migration tragedy. That question would be normal for anyone else, but not for a man who played a leading role in creating the conditions for some 20,000 people to die while trying to cross the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2023.

Right here off the coast of Greece we had 700 people dead, 700 migrants who were apparently being smuggled into here. It’s made news but it’s not dominating in the same way. In some ways it’s indicative of the degree to which people’s life chances have grown so disparate. It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth. And so part of my argument has been that unless we make people feel more economically secure and we’re taking more seriously the need to create ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that’s adapted to these new technologies and the displacements that are taking place around the world, if we don’t take care of that, that’s also going to fuel the kind of mostly far right populism, but it could also potentially come from the left that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared.

It isn’t just the Libya disaster that Obama opines upon as if he were uninvolved. In one fell swoop he managed to connect two disasters which were created entirely by him. Under his administration, the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing transferred more than $1.5 trillionto Wall Street banks, fattening the pockets of the 1% in the biggest transfer of wealth in history while working people languished in precarity.

Yes, people are scared of wars and unemployment and so they flee wherever they can. But if democracy is being undermined it isn’t because anyone departs from the two-party duopoly. Obama explained why the system is lacking in legitimacy but then points the finger elsewhere as if were uninvolved in all these crises.

Obama does what other former presidents do. He gives speeches and has a foundation and he is building a library. He also reappears when Biden needs cover for his disasters. When the Ukraine war was instigated by the U.S. in 2022, Obama was suddenly giving speeches in which he claimed concern for “disinformation” when he was really advocating for big tech censorship.

Obama can’t seem to be quiet. George W. Bush is also a war criminal who devastated Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the nations whose citizens are among those fleeing their homelands on rickety boats. But Bush paints pictures of puppies and acts like a grandfatherly figure. He doesn’t usually weigh in on the issues of the day. Aside from Donald Trump, who is now fighting a torrent of legal troubles, former presidents get a pass and are thought of in positive ways no matter how much damage they did.

Obama is made of sterner stuff than Bush or his other predecessors. He is dedicated to being the errand boy of the 1% for the rest of his life. He impoverished millions of people, destroyed countries, but now falsely appears bewildered about the conditions he brought about. He knows exactly what he is doing though. He has pledged lifelong devotion to capitalism and imperialism. Obama even stopped a nascent NBA strike in 2020, keeping Black athletes in line even in his quasi retirement.

We will never be rid of this man. As long as he lives, he will claim innocence and practice misdirection to keep millions of people confused about the cause of their travails. Those of us who pay attention know better. Barack Obama will always act like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It is up to everyone else to tell the truth about him.

 

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds. https://mronline.org/2023/09/21/why-barack-obama-cant-shut-up/  FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

destroying libya....

 

BY EVA BARTLETT

If the country’s infrastructure hadn’t been destroyed in the bombings of 2011, the dams may have held

 

Just over a decade ago, Libya was in the news, with Western leadership celebrating the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, following a months-long NATO bombing campaign, all in the name of protecting the Libyan people. Now, the destroyed North-African country is back in the news after a devastating hurricane and flooding.

Hurricane Daniel hit northeastern Libya on September 10. Subsequent extreme flooding has caused the deaths of a reported 3,252 people, according to Libya’s health ministry as of September 17, with the UN reporting that almost three times more may have died. Following the collapse of two dams, the city of Derna bore the brunt of the disaster. Another 40,000 people are reportedly displaced.

Many of the same Western leaders who brought about Libya's demise are now feigning concern for the people of the country they destroyed in 2011, and where they set the stage for an ensuing decade of chaos. Most notable is Barack Obama, whose foundation is raising money for Libya relief efforts. That’s very benevolent of him – might not have been necessary if NATO hadn't destroyed its infrastructure. It was, after all, Obama’s then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who cackled gleefully“We came, we saw, he died,” of the sodomizing and killing of Gaddafi.

 

NATO set the stage for Libya's current crisis

Only Western leadership and corporate media would have the audacity to not only pretend the 2011 bombing campaign never happened, but to blame Libya for the rupture of the dams near Derna.

The Washington Post did just that, stating“The volatility of recent years meant the country’s separate regimes and their feckless officials have left critical infrastructure in a state of neglect.” This included the dams, which, it wrote, experts warned could soon fail. While it did briefly mention the extended NATO bombing of Libya, the thrust of its article was to absolve NATO nations of responsibility.

More honest reporting in Media Lens pointed out that those dams in 2007 began undergoing maintenance—which was interrupted precisely due to the West's so-called humanitarian intervention. “These dams were built in the 1970s to protect the local population. A Turkish firm had been contracted in 2007 to maintain the dams. This work stopped after NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign. The Turkish firm left the country, their machinery was stolen and all work on the dams ended.”

The same article highlighted what nearly all Western corporate media obfuscated: That, prior to NATO’s war against Libya, it had been “one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education,” which it ceased to be when NATO destroyed it.

Death-toll estimates for the 2011 Libyan war and NATO intervention vary widely, with some researchers placing it at over 20,000, hundreds of them civilians killed in NATO airstrikes. What’s worse, having deposed (and, indirectly, killed) Gaddafi, the Western powers created a power vacuum and triggered years of infighting that plunged the country into chaos and left key infrastructure – a lot of which was already damaged or destroyed by those same airstrikes – in disrepair and requiring maintenance.

Now, perhaps in an effort to whitewash its crimes against the Libyan people, the US said it will send$11 million in humanitarian assistance to Libya, which, in contrast to the $1.65 billion the US reportedly spent destroying Libya in 2011, is peanuts. Insult upon injury.

 Typical propaganda

Canadian lawyer and journalist Dimitri Lascaris pointed out that Canada spent just shy of $350 million “to participate in NATO's destruction of Libya” and will now spend “a paltry $5 million to aid Libyans in their moment of dire need.”

The hypocrisy of NATO member states is entirely expected and not at all surprising. However, Canadian journalist Yves Engler explained why Western corporate media has largely omitted mention, much less serious emphasis, of NATO's destruction of Libya.

“To maintain public support for NATO’s proxy war with Russia, it’s important to erase its history of violence. The Canadian media’s refusal to mention NATO’s role in Libya’s instability partly reflects the requirements of Ukraine propaganda.”

 

Engler noted that Canadian media has done exactly this, whited-out NATO’s role in Libya. Particularly bold-faced is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) which, Engler wrote, did a ten-minute-long report basically blaming Libya and failing “to even mention NATO’s six-month war, which included Canadian fighter jets, naval vessels and special forces.”

Engler explains why global media and public figures have written NATO out of current reporting on Libya. “We’ve been bombarded with the claim NATO is a defensive alliance representing no threat to anyone. Repeated endlessly over the past 20 months, media personalities from Andrew Chang to Geoffrey York don’t dare mention NATO’s role in destroying Libya.”

Maintaining the “defensive alliance” myth goes hand in hand with propaganda supporting the proxy war in Ukraine: that Russia’s military operation there was an act of ‘unprovoked aggression’ and that Western powers hadn’t been aiding and abetting Kiev in its war against the people of Donbass in an effort to turn the country into a staging ground against Russia.

In the end, the Wests' wars are never, ever, about protecting the population in question, much less “bringing democracy” to the countries targeted. Just look at Iraq, Libya, Syria...or Ukraine.

 

 

https://www.rt.com/africa/583462-libya-flood-nato-bombing/

 

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