An Ongoing Disaster
Libya, Africa and Africom
By Dan Glazebrook
The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day...
Libya, Africa and Africom
By Dan Glazebrook
The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day...
Libyan resources are now being jointly
plundered by the oil multinationals and a handful of chosen
families from amongst the country’s
new elites; a classic neo-colonial stitch-up. The use of
these resources for giant infrastructure projects such as
the Great Manmade River, and the massive raising of living
standards over the past four decades (Libyan life expectancy
rose
from 51 to 77 since Gaddafi came to power in 1969) sadly
looks to have already become a thing of the past....
This is the
reality of the new Libya: civil war, squandered resources,
and societal collapse, where voicing preference for the days
when Libya was prosperous and at peace is a crime, but
lynching and torture is not only permitted but encouraged.
Nor has the
disaster remained a national one. Libya’s destabilisation
has already spread to Mali, prompting a coup, and huge
numbers of refugees – especially amongst Libya’s large black
migrant population – have fled to neighbouring countries in
a desperate attempt to escape both aerial destruction and
lynch mob rampage, putting further pressure on resources
elsewhere. Many
Libyan fighters, their work done in Libya, have now been
shipped by their imperial masters to Syria to spread their
sectarian violence there too.
Most worrying
for the African continent, however, is the forward march of
AFRICOM – the US military’s African command – in the wake of
the aggression against Libya. It is no coincidence that
barely a month after the fall of Tripoli – and in the same
month Gaddafi was murdered (October 2011) – the US announced
it was
sending troops to no less than four more African
countries – the Central African Republic, Uganda, South
Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo...
None of this
would have been possible whilst Gaddafi was still in power...Now he has
gone, AFRICOM is stepping up its work. The invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan showed the West that wars in which their own
citizens get killed are not popular; AFRICOM is designed to
ensure that in the coming colonial wars against Africa, it
will be Africans who do the fighting and dying, not
Westerners. The forces of the African Union are to become
integrated into AFRICOM under a US-led chain of command.
Gaddafi would never have stood for it; that is why he had to
go...
*
By Chris Marsden
The UN is well aware that Washington is
pursuing a deliberate policy of
destabilisation in Syria in order to justify
a war for regime change waged by its
allies—above all in Riyadh, Ankara and
Doha—with Washington’s military support.
Continue
*
By Eric Draitser
Neo-Imperialism by Faux-Democracy,
Terrorism, and Propaganda.
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*
Video
A gripping, deeply informative account of
the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of
plutocracy and empire; insightful,
historically grounded and highly relevant to
the events of today.
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