CIA attempts to topple Ahmadinejad at SCO Yekaterinburg summit

[Paul Rigby]

MI6 in the building, Aunty?

MI6 never leave the building...

Always a pleasure to be corrected on such a topic!

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14018

Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, June 18, 2009

“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation... Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”
Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

Introduction

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes).

Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.

The Electoral Fraud Hoax

Western leaders rejected the results because they ‘knew’ that their reformist candidate could not lose…For months they published daily interviews, editorials and reports from the field ‘detailing’ the failures of Ahmadinejad’s administration; they cited the support from clerics, former officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites fluent in English, to prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the ‘voices of moderation’, at least the White House’s version of that vacuous cliché. Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris. Other academics claimed that the ‘youth vote’ – based on their interviews with upper and middle-class university students from the neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the ‘reformist’ candidate.

What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western media believed their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral process was described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their favored candidate would win.

The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad. Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the competing demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.

Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital – few venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition’s supporters were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street activities, while Ahmadinejad’s support drew on the majority of working youth and household women workers who would express their views at the ballot box and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics.

A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting behavior rather than other social or class interests.

A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and the middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt, obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

The careless and distorted emphasis on ‘ethnic voting’ cited by writers from the Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ‘s victory a ‘stolen vote’ is matched by the media’s willful and deliberate refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted by two US experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences than ‘generational life style’. According to this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian youth were too poor to have access to a computer and the 18-24 year olds “comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups” (Washington Porst June 15, 2009).

The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’, which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.

In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers’ opposition to the ‘reformist’ program, which included proposals to ‘privatize’ public enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening national security from US and Israeli threats in light of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan, which have killed scores of Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which has not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up to the elections.

What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad’s strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.

The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare system, with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by Western-oriented privileged youth who prize individual life styles over community values and solidarity.

The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income, free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working class, low income, community based supporters of a ‘moral economy’ in which usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition’s attack on the regime’s ‘intransigent’ foreign policy and positions ‘alienating’ the West only resonated with the liberal university students and import-export business groups. To many Iranians, the regime’s military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or Israeli attack.

The scale of the opposition’s electoral deficit should tell us is how out of touch it is with its own people’s vital concerns. It should remind them that by moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices that make life tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside the privileged gates of Tehran University.

Amhadinejad’s electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than 60% of the vote in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries prefer social welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with military empires.

The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an abandonment of Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium is not an existential threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow Israel’s lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an ‘illegitimate’ government in Tehran which ‘stole an election’.

Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.

The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response: Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should use the hoax of ‘electoral fraud’ to exert maximum pressure on the Obama regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad regime.

Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.

[Paul Rigby]

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14018

Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, June 18, 2009

“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation... Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”
Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22875.htm

Are the Iranian Election Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?

By Paul Craig Roberts

June 20, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- -A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the announcement of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs' lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad's attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.

Commentators are "explaining" the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad's win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.
It requires total blindness not to see this.

Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/ar...27782.html For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.

Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘color’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

[Richard Welser]

above and some of the linked articles ..... my general sense of what the American Hegemon does repeatedly tediously ... as well as Israel .... is precisely what happened in Iran.

The divisions some referred to in Iranian society may reflect differences exacerbated by U.S. et. al., cointelpro (as well as real dissatisfactions) and were very likely capitalized upon with this twitter deal. And Rafsanjani as Daddy Warbucks.

Magda refered to cui bono .... and that is consistently a guiding principle.

Personally, I prefer a robust Iran (whether more liberalized or not) standing steadfast against loss of autonomy by incorporation into the NWO.

[Magda Hassan]

I'm still waiting for the majority of US voters to realise that they have been caught up in their own colour revolution at home.

[Magda Hassan]

An interesting take on the Iran situation and the US belief in 'Democracy' by the same 'Charting Stocks' who researched the Twitter hoax used in Iran in a previous post. Most interesting to know is that Twitter has almost zero penetration in Iran according to Alexa figures. So it is US and Israelis twittering amongst themselves.

Do We Really Care About Democracy? #IranElection;

By Charting Stocks

June 20, 2009 "Charting Stocks" -- After being victims of multiple false and propagandistic media campaigns one would think that we would be able to read between the lines when our mainstream media sources act in lockstep with one another in marketing the agenda du jour.Have we already forgotten the “flowers and candy” which the gracious Iraqi people were going to greet us with? You know, as “Liberators.” The weapons of mass destruction? The fear campaign waged against us to surrender our national treasure to a few Wall Street firms? When the mainstream media moves together in uniform, repeating the same talking points, it’s time to get suspicious, not complacent.
As soon as Ahmadinejad was declared the victor in Iran’s election EACH of our mainstream media sources were ready to cry foul and dismiss the results as an “obvious” fraud (see links below). One might think that a functioning media would produce ONE inquisitive reporter that was brave enough to even entertain the idea that Ahmadinejad, the incumbent with extremely high support in the country’s rural and poor areas, actually won. Unfortunately, we don’t have reporters like that in our mainstream media (which is why their readership continues to plummet).
If you doubt that the Iranian election media bombardment was deliberate, ask yourself - Do you know who won last months Panamanian election ? Did you even know there was an election? It’s not your fault if you don’t. Actually, I don’t see how you could know without a functioning media.
Have you heard much about the democratic elections in Saudi Arabia lately? Of course not. They don’t have elections. Any media outrage for the people of Saudi Arabia? A country ruled by one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. But hey, they’re our allies. We don’t talk about them (and certainly won’t tweet it).
What about the 2006 (monitored) democratic election in Gaza in which the people resisted western threats and bribes and elected Hamas as their leader? We responded by punishing the people of Gaza and cutting aid to the region. Well, they committed a supreme crime. They voted the wrong way and must be punished for it. I’m waiting for a sympathetic #GazaElection hashtag on Twitter, though I won’t hold my breathe.
Have you heard ANYTHING from the mainstream media of the democratically elected governments that we REMOVED? The fact is that we don’t care about democratic elections.
Dr. Michael Parenti, is one of the nations leading political scholars. In his book “Against Empire,” Parenti tells us that “The United States has overthrown democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Guyana, The Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia, Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the US national security state.”
The #IranElection hype has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with effecting US public opinion. Why are “Iranian’s” microblogging in English and on Twitter (which they do NOT use)? According to Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles,“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero..here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.” The Alexa rankings confirm that Twitter’s penetration in Iran is nearly 0%.
The United States is the last country on earth that Iran wants attention from. They certainly don’t want us involved in their elections. We’ve already removed a democratically elected government in Iran during the 1953 coup d’etat of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. I’d venture to guess that most of the people expressing sympathy for the “Iranian Students” on twitter would have a hard time finding Iran on a map. Those that could would quickly realize that on either side Iran’s borders lies 2 countries which we are very familiar with - Iraq and Afghanistan. Both of which are militarily occupied by our armies. Both ruled by our puppet governments.
Ask yourself - If Iran’s army invaded and occupied both Canada and Mexico, would we want their “Help”? Would we find popular Iranian websites and keep them informed of our nation’s vulnerabilities in their native Farsi?
The media campaign, however obvious it is to some of us, has probably been successful. I’ll bet that if you poll the American people today (and they probably will), you’d find that 40-50% would support military involvement in Iran to “Help” with their elections. I’d also assume that those 40-50% are the same people (more or less) who believed we invaded Iraq because of 9-11, another testament to the effectiveness of propaganda marketing.
The Instant “Analysis”:
Reuters Iran’s election result staggers analysts
Hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated moderate challenger Mirhossein Mousavi by a surprisingly wide margin in Iran’s presidential election, official results showed on Saturday. Mousavi derided the tally as a “dangerous charade.’
Fox News: U.S. Monitoring Iran’s Election Results
U.S. officials are casting doubt over the results of Iran’s election, in which the government declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner Saturday…U.S. analysts find it “not credible [Notice the usual UN-NAMED "US Officials and Analysts]
MSNBC: Violence flares as Ahmadinejad wins Iran vote
Riot police battled with protesters Saturday as officials announced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won a landslide election victory. His opponent denounced the results as ‘treason’….Ahmadinejad had the apparent backing of the ruling theocracy.
CNN: Ahmadinejad wins landslide in disputed election
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the big winner in the country’s election, but his chief rival and supporters in the Tehran streets are crying foul.
NY Times: Ahmadinejad Is Declared Victor in Iran
The Iranian government declared an outright election victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday morning, and riot police officers fought with supporters of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who insisted that the election had been stolen.
Time Magazine: Protests Greet Ahmadinejad Win in Iran: ‘It’s Not Possible!
Iran’s Interior Minister announced Saturday that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the nation’s closely watched presidential poll. The announcement, greeted with widespread skepticism by Iranian opposition supporters and by foreign analysts, has brought thousands of people onto the streets where they have encountered a strong police presence and the threat of violence.
http://www.chartingstocks.net/2009/06/do...nelection/

[Peter Lemkin]

I'm still waiting for the majority of US voters to realise that they have been caught up in their own colour revolution at home.

What colour do you think is appropriate - funerial black or high-tech invisible?

[Peter Presland]

Apropos the 'Charting Stocks' piece and Richard Welser's observations, it seems to me that the term 'Democracy' has become just another of those knee-jerk buzz-words designed to enforce compliance with the official western narrative of events - 'NAZI', 'Anti-Semite', 'Holocaust-denier', 'Conspiracy-theorist', 'Terrorist', 'Militant' 'Taliban', 'Al-Qaeda' all have similar utility on the opposite side. A bit like shouting 'Atten-SHUN' to a parade of troops. There's no argument, let alone discussion or debate. You just fall in line or else.

As for western 'democratic standards'. Are we really in any position to lecture others? Rhetorical question that, since I'm sure nobody on this forum needs any lessons in just how phoney western 'Democracy' actually is - as in, for example, Reagan's 'National Endowment for Democracy'. Personally I cannot hear mention of that blood-soaked institution without cringing in shame and yet smiling faux-sincere western politicians invoke it with faux-pride time and time again in a sort of Orwellian parallel universe where in reality almost everything has the exact opposite meaning to that actually implied.

[Peter Presland]

Interviewed on BBC Newsnight Kissinger says that while the US will not intervene in the current crisis, if the coup fails and "a popularly based government is not installed, then we may conclude that we must work for regime change in Iran from the outside."

Watch it here - truly puke-inducing stuff. And he gets away with this kind of thing time and again without a word of comment or protest from the MSM - he's such a wise old statesman eh? Why can't they for example, just once ask him something like "...and are you working for regime change from outside Saudi Arabia" . or a dozen and more other US supported fascist dictatorships

[Paul Rigby]

Interviewed on BBC Newsnight Kissinger says that while the US will not intervene in the current crisis, if the coup fails and "a popularly based government is not installed, then we may conclude that we must work for regime change in Iran from the outside."

Watch it here - truly puke-inducing stuff. And he gets away with this kind of thing time and again without a word of comment or protest from the MSM - he's such a wise old statesman eh? Why can't they for example, just once ask him something like "...and are you working for regime change from outside Saudi Arabia" . or a dozen and more other US supported fascist dictatorships

Trust the heroic BBC to use a gnarled old war criminal to make the case...our license fee at work yet again. Did they pay money to this mass murderer, I wonder?

Still, there's always Polly Toynbee's next whitewash of the slime-ball BBC to look forward to...

[David Guyatt]

As for western 'democratic standards'. Are we really in any position to lecture others?

The arrogance of America and others in the west leaves me virtually breathless when it comes to the way they lecture and harangue other nations from their self proclaimed elevated position of moral superiority.

But I suppose we must understand that "democracy" for these people is, in reality, a successful fiction papering over the slime of dictatorial realities.

And speaking of slime, does Kissinger still have a French war criminal arrest warrant outstanding on him anyone know?