We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, April 22, 2017

RASHIDEEN MASSACRE: Children Lured to their Slaughter by NATO State Terrorists

Click here to access article by Vanessa Beeley from 21st Century Wire
On April 15th 2017, the people of Kafarya and Foua were attacked, their children mown down deliberately, by a suicide bomb or expolosive detonation, that targeted these innocent children who had been lured to their deaths by NATO and Gulf state terrorists, including Ahrar al Sham and Nusra Front (Al Qaeda). [my link]
This British woman who describes herself as an independent researcher, writer and photographer reports on the details of the horrific massacre of 200 civilians, including 116 children. The terrorist armies, two of which committed this crime, are sponsored, organized, supported, and trained by the US-led Empire, Turkey, Israel, and their associated medieval kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, etc, all of which have their own reasons for bringing down the Syrian government.

As far as I know the first terrorist army, the "Contras", was organized in Honduras by government agents of the US to terrorize the people of nearby Nicaragua because they had the temerity of electing a government which pursued independent policies which tried to serve the needs of their people and not corporations. In 1982 on a visit I saw first hand the destruction they wrecked on schools, clinics, and cooperatives organized by the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. After years of terrorist attacks by the Contras, the Nicaraguan people capitulated in the 1990 election which saw the election of people more acceptable to the US's ruling class. From Wikipedia:
After the U.S. Congress prohibited federal funding of the contras in 1983, the Reagan administration nonetheless illegally continued to back them by covertly selling arms to Iran and channeling the proceeds to the contras (the Iran–Contra affair), for which several members of the Reagan administration were convicted of felonies. The International Court of Justice, in regard to the case of Nicaragua v. United States in 1984, found, "the United States of America was under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by certain breaches of obligations under customary international law and treaty-law committed by the United States of America". During the war between the contras and the Sandinistas, 30,000 people were killed.
In the Nicaraguan general election, 1990, a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties (from the left and right of the political spectrum) led by Violeta Chamorro, the widow of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, defeated the Sandinistas. The defeat shocked the Sandinistas, who had expected to win. Commentators such as Noam Chomsky and Brian Willson attributed the outcome to the U.S.-contra threats to continue the war if the Sandinistas retained power, the general war-weariness of the Nicaraguan population, and the abysmal Nicaraguan economic situation.
Ruling class agents of the US learned the usefulness of such terrorist armies from this experience and together with their allies in the Mid-East are using various terrorist armies to bring down the Syrian government because they too do not serve the needs of the Empire and their collaborators in crime. Similar terrorist armies have been used by Empire agents in Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere to a lessor extent to overturn intimidate governments and breakup nations.