The last fortnight has seen the gloves come off as the Bremain camp engages in increasingly desperate scaremongering. Vote Bremain headed by that doyen of anti-corruption David Cameron is frightened by the stubborn insistence of millions of British people to reject the EU on June 23.
Polls reveal how Vote Bremain and Vote Brexit are neck and neck despite the avalanche of fear warmongering propaganda directed at the British public by Prime Minster Cameron and his big business supporters.
Brexit raises chances of war in Europe
In the last week Cameron, that compassionate dove who ordered the humanitarian bombing of Libya that turned it into a haven for terrorists and warlords, has been lecturing us that if Britain leaves the EU it will increase the prospect of war in Europe again.
Such nonsense reveals his complete ignorance how wars are part and parcel of the capitalist system. As the famous theorist of war Carl Von Clauswitz once said, “Wars are merely the continuation of state policy by other means”.
The Nobel peace prize winning EU did not prevent the terrible bloodshed of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the EU has helped bring to power the ultra-nationalist Junta in Kiev which is killing its own citizens in the Donbass as you read this article.
The Minsk 2 ceasefire is in tatters as Ukraine’s heavy weaponry is not in designated storage sites but is stationed along the ceasefire line and firing into civilian settlements in the People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR). Take, for example, the May 9 report from the OSCE monitoring mission which recorded over 600 explosions in the Donetsk region. Why is the peace loving EU standing by while the Ukrainian army fires heavy artillery into heavy populated civilian areas in DPR controlled Svitlodarsk, Yasynuvata and Donetsk city centre?
Brexit raises chances of terrorist attacks
Cameron has repeatedly claimed that the Britain people are safer from the threat of terrorism by being part of the EU. Such scare tactics have been repeated ad nauseam by an endless parade of warmongers whose list includes five former NATO chiefs and 13 former US Secretaries of State and Defence. Meanwhile the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has ladled on her own doom and gloom warnings of how leaving the EU would present real risks to the safety and security of British citizens.
A cursory examination of the recent bloody history of the Greater Middle East reveals how Western Imperialist powers such as Britain and the US have committed acts of violence on a massive scale that have left millions homeless and over a million people dead. This massive use of state sponsored violence is a leading cause of the terrorist threat to ordinary people. The EU has been a mere bystander and done nothing to prevent these acts of mass murder.
We could start with the US/NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 which was not authorised by the UN Security Council and which Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at California’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has described as a “patently illegal use of armed force”. A recent study by the Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University estimates that total direct war deaths in Afghanistan stand at 91,991 people and nearly a hundred thousand injured by this illegal war. The resurgence of the Taliban poses a grave threat to the Western sponsored government in Kabul. Besides this is the continuing presence of Al-Qaeda and now groups affiliated to IS which provide support to global terrorist activity.
We could then move on to the US-UK illegal invasion of Iraq which various estimates hold responsible for the deaths of between 500,000 and a million Iraqis. This intervention based on lies and falsehoods helped shatter the countries infrastructure leaving behind the toxic legacy of sectarian civil war which rages to this day. The US-UK intervention in Iraq destabilized the country to such an extent that it is directly responsible for the emergence of the IS bogeyman which the media hysterically claims is a direct threat to our society.
We could then move on to the US/NATO intervention in Libya which has helped create a failed state. As Seamus Milne has observed the Western intervention in Libya while dressed up in humanitarian terms signally failed to save lives. In fact, it helped create a situation where the civil war that followed Gaddafi’s overthrow killed up to 50,000 people.
Islamic fundamentalist groups have flourished in Libya since the ‘humanitarian intervention’ of the Western Imperialist powers. These groups are fuelling the horrendous civil war in Syria and responsible for numerous massacres of civilians. Libya has now become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, Ansar Al-Sharia and IS, all of which are targeting Europe. .
We could then move on to the civil war in Syria where a myriad of Islamic fundamentalist groups are waging war against the forces of the Assad regime. These groups are financed and armed by the Gulf allies of Britain and America. This is something that Cameron’s government will not publicly acknowledge.
Yet IS and Al Nusra and the myriad of other Sunni terrorist groups that carry out massacres of civilians from different religious and ethnic groups in Syria are funded by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The British government turns a blind eye to the large sums of money poured into London real estate by the various Gulf dictatorships while it encourages British arms sales to the same dictators whose hands are covered in the blood of their own people.
Lord Dannatt, the former head of the British army summed it up nicely when he commented:
It is not acceptable, for example, to welcome large capital injections into prestige projects like The Shard in London while not exerting the strongest pressure on the Qatari Government to crack down on some of their own citizens. Such potential hypocrisy runs the risk of undermining many of the other political and military actions being taken to discredit and destroy the caliphate ambitions of the jihadists.
Meanwhile, the US and its British ally are back in Iraq carrying out air strikes against the very same terrorist groups that are financed and armed by our so-called Gulf allies. The hypocrisy of this is breathtaking. Never mind the fact that the air campaign has been a failure and is provoking opposition from the Shiite militias leading the fight against IS in Iraq.
The insanity of the war against IS is shown most clearly by the US/UK bombing IS while their NATO partner Turkey bombs Kurdish forces who have been the most effective opponents of IS on the ground. We should not forget that Turkey, a key NATO ally, is openly facilitating IS by allowing its supply lines to run across it border into Northern Syria and operate training/recruitment camps on its territory.
The US/UK guilty of war crimes and creating terrorist blow back
Cameron and the corporate puppets who make up the the majority of MPs in the House of Commons ignore the recent history of bloody interventions by the US and Britain into the Middle East which have left millions of people as displaced refugees and left over a million people dead.
In March of this year the medical-political peace organizationthe medical-political peace organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War issued a joint report Body Count:Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror’ which noted how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are responsible for the deaths of between 1 and 2 million people in the Greater Middle East. This massive use of violence that is responsible for death on a monumental scale has been ignored by the mainstream media and majority of our lawmakers in Parliament. The report made the salient point that:
A politically useful option for U.S. [and UK] political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of outside military intervention. As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributable to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate, or through self-censorship, has been key to removing the “fingerprints” of responsibility.”
The so called ‘War On Terror’ in which the UK has played an active role has led to death, destruction and suffering on a monumental scale. The numerous military interventions across the Greater Middle East have helped foster and create terrorist groups such as IS. The independent advocacy group CAGE observed that:
The British Government has always been reluctant to look to its own violence and policies in the Muslim world for inspiring Muslim violence. As such it cannot be a neutral arbiter in analysing and dealing with conflicts, as it is itself all too often a party to them.
To summarise, the apocalyptic warnings from camp Bremain that EU membership is vital to maintain peace in Europe and protect UK citizens from the threat of terrorism are completely bogus and lack any close scrutiny.
The British people need to get rid of war warmongering government’s that meekly obey their Washington overlord’s call to never ending war. As long as the British people put up with governments that remain committed to the American Empire’s insatiable drive for full- spectrum dominance over the plant then they will never be safe from terrorism and endless war.
On June 23, the ordinary people of Britain will have a choice: vote to stay in the EU and remain at the mercy of an unelected bosses club that is committed to defending the interests of the one per cent. However, they can vote to leave the EU and fight for an independent foreign policy that looks after the interests of the millions not the military-industrial complex and the banskter elites.