Showing posts with label Neocolonialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neocolonialism. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

South Korea: The Sad Chronicles of a US Vassal State

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law on December 3, 2024. Lawmakers voted against the move, and protesters gathered outside parliament. Yoon framed the declaration as "rooting out pro-North Korean forces", but it was strongly opposed by the parliamentary speaker and even Han Dong-hoon, leader of Yoon's own party, who has clashed with the president over recent scandals. Self-coup, martial law, dictatorship? Megalomania, nut-case, loony bin? Will we hear cries from the US State Department about human rights, democracy, and sanctions, or will they remain silent since South Korea (ROK) is the best-controlled and most diligent US vassal state in Asia, still occupied since 1945 by more than 24,000 US combat troops? South Korea doesn’t even command its own military; the Pentagon does. The American occupation regime systematically destroyed traditional Korean culture and identity. Today, the country is trapped in a death spiral, with the lowest fertility rate in Asia, 350,000 abortions annually, and the highest suicide rate in the world.
 
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol's approval rating 
fell to a mere 19% just days before he declared martial law.
 
Maximum dishonor, submission, and degeneracy:
Yoon sings 'American Pie' at Biden's
April 2023 state dinner.
 
» Martial law, to root out pro-North Korean forces. «
 
To better understand the realities in South Korea, the following list provides a brief overview of the political turmoil and challenges faced by South Koreans under US occupation since 1948:

1. Lee Seung-man (1948-1960) – The first president of South Korea; overthrown after student protests and widespread unrest.  
2. Yun Bo-seon (1960-1962) – The second president, whose term ended after a military coup.  
3. Park Chung-hee (1962-1979) – Seized power in a 1961 coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979.  
4. Choi Kyu-hah (1979-1980) – Served as president after Park’s death but was deposed by a military coup led by Chun Doo-hwan.  
5. Chun Doo-hwan (1981-1988) – Came to power through a coup, later sentenced to death (commuted to life imprisonment) after his presidency.  
6. Roh Tae-woo (1988-1993) – Former military leader and Chun’s ally, later convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison.  
7. Kim Young-sam (1993-1998) – The first civilian president in decades, he pushed for democratic reforms and prosecuted former military leaders.  
8. Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) – A former pro-democracy activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his policy towards North Korea; was imprisoned and sentenced to death before becoming president.
9. Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008) – Impeached (later reinstated), faced corruption investigations after his presidency, and tragically committed suicide.  
10. Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) – Former businessman, arrested after his presidency on corruption charges and is serving a sentence.  
11. Park Geun-hye (2013-2016) – South Korea's first female president, impeached over a corruption scandal, and sentenced to 24 years in prison.  
12. Moon Jae-in (2017-2022) – Elected after Park’s impeachment, a former human rights lawyer who focused on engagement with North Korea and domestic reforms.  
13. Yoon Suk-yeol (2022-present) – Ran on a hardline stance on North Korea, accuses the main opposition party of sympathizing with North Korea and declared martial law on December 3, 2024,
"to root out pro-North Korean forces".
   
»
He can’t even do martial law properly.«
Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Thursday, November 28, 2024

Trump’s Coming War on BRICS and the Global South | Pepe Escobar

The incoming Trump 2.0 administration is expected to intensify US economic and geopolitical strategies against BRICS and their growing global network. Trump's actions will likely resemble earlier colonial approaches, involving covert regime-change operations, military pressure and intervention, and economic incentives to undermine BRICS and protect US control over resources such as oil and rare earth minerals. The goal is to prevent the new, multipolar world order that reduces US hegemony. This will shape US-BRICS relations and have significant implications for the entire Global South. 
 
Trump's swampy 'realist' approach to international relations contrasts with Biden's 'liberal' approach, primarily in that Trump openly defines the national interest as global, full-spectrum American military and economic dominance, asserting that all wars, sanctions, tariffs, and 'great deals' benefiting his donor class and billionaire peers would also be acceptable to his MAGA crowd of 'hard-working Americans.'  
 
 Goodbye, America. The cheating game of YOU counterfeiters is over.

His administration will aim to sanction any country bypassing the US dollar in trade, targeting the de-dollarization trend supported by BRICS. The de-dollarization movement, gaining momentum, challenges US financial dominance, with BRICS countries increasingly using national currencies and the Petroyuan, and exploring alternative payment systems. 

Marco Rubio will attempt to overthrow the governments
of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia and seize control of their resources.
 
One of the major risks of a Trump 2.0 administration will be the attempt to destabilize the growing connectivity corridors across Eurasia, which are crucial for the strategic partnerships between Russia, China, India, and Iran. These corridors are part of two key axes: a horizontal one spanning across the Heartland from China to the West, including Central Asia, West Asia, and potentially extending to Europe (BRI), and a North-South axis connecting Russia, Iran, and India through the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). This development is critical to Eurasian integration. 
 
As the United States observes these emerging networks, and it sees its influence in Eurasia waning, particularly as BRICS and associated countries assert themselves. In the long term, this shift threatens America's presence and influence, not only in Eurasia but also in Africa. Africa and Latin America remain more complex due to entrenched regimes and comprador elites that support US interests. Overall, this represents a broader bipartisan struggle by Washington against the integration of Eurasia and the Global South, which undermines the unipolar world order that the US has historically maintained.

 
In Latin America, Venezuela, a quasi BRICS country, economically aligned with China, Russia, Türkiye, and Iran, remains a major obsession for the US, which is expected to escalate sanctions and covert actions to oust the Maduro government in order to gain access to the world's largest reserves of hydrocarbons, to gold, bauxite, iron ore, uranium, diamonds, and rare earth elements. Bolivia, which has the world's largest lithium reserves and is rich in natural gas, tin, silver, and copper, will be treated in a similar fashion by the US. Washington think tanks still consider Brazil a 'swing state,' and controlling the policies of South America's industrial giant remains central to US efforts to limit and sabotage BRICS in the region.
 
 Spotted in Caracas, October 2024.
 
However, in recent years, US attempts at assassinations, regime change, maximum pressure sanctions, hybrid wars of all sorts, and the installation of puppet leaders like Jeanine Áñez, Juan Guaidó, María Corina Machado, and Edmundo González have become increasingly unsuccessful (with Javier Milei or Daniel Noboa appearing more as temporary exceptions). And China, Russia, and Iran will not simply allow Venezuela being looted by Trump, Musk, Rubio, Prince, and other swamp creatures from South Florida.
 
»
Facts have proven that the US is the biggest source of chaos in the international system [...] From Afghanistan to Iraq, 
from Ukraine to Gaza, all these crises and conflicts are the result of the self-serving double standards of the US. « 
— Jing Jianfeng, Lieutenant General of China’s People’s Liberation Army, Singapore, June 16, 2024.
 
Saudi Arabia's shift toward full BRICS membership would mark a major change in global financial power. Trump will likely apply diplomatic pressure or sanctions such as asset-freezing to prevent this, as US influence over global oil markets is already diminishing rapidly. Africa will see intensified efforts to counter mainly China’s and Russia’s investments in infrastructure and energy. Also, Trump will likely increase sanctions and, eventually, together with the French and the British, support destabilization, e.g., by terrorist jihadis, as well as blackmail, assassination, and regime-change tactics to prevent further integration of African nations with BRICS.
 
»
The US is at war with the rest of the world [...] the war in Syria is a microcosm of World War 3  through proxies. «
— Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, November 28, 2024.
 

Monday, March 25, 2024

From Prison to Palace │ Senegal's Faye will destroy French Neocolonialism

Historical events are brewing in yet another West African country: Senegal is getting rid of the neocolonial dependence on its former metropolis France. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a charismatic opposition candidate who sought to break the treaty with France and improve relations with Russia won the presidential election last weekend. The 44-year-old was only freed from prison 10 days before. As part of his election campaign, Faye promised to review oil and gas deals with Western companies, including agreements with British Petroleum, Endeavor Mining and Kosmos Energy. The collapse of France's colonial empire in Africa continues. Hence the pitiful growl of Rothschild stooge Macron, who squandered the entire inheritance of the French colonialists.
 
 » The departure of Senegal from the CFA franc zone puts a final 
cross on the entire system of French neocolonialism. «

Faye advocates a radical revision of relations between Senegal and France. And as part of this, Faye is going to follow neighboring Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso to leave the French currency system by abandoning the CFA franc. And the French military will have to leave Senegal. Sensing something was wrong, Paris had already announced a little earlier that it was sharply reducing the military contingent in Senegal (probably so that it would not be so shameful later). In return, Faye promises to take a course towards rapprochement with Russia.
 

Thus, France's next major foreign policy defeat on the African continent looms on the horizon. Moreover, last year Senegal still was a servile French key player in the issue of the blockade of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, which had previously freed themselves from the influence of Paris. And the departure of Senegal from the CFA franc zone puts a final and fat cross on the system which brought huge profits to France and on which the entire system of French neocolonialism was essentially built. 
 

 » France is the equivalent of an overfed Chihuahua, and you don't want to get in the ring with the really 
beefed up Rottweilers, especially when they've been trained to eat overfed Chihuahuas their entire life. «
Scott Ritter - March 21, 2024.

And hence all of Macron’s current anti-Russian hysteria. He lost access to Niger's gold and uranium last year, and now, like a plucked rooster, understands that France is also losing to Russia. Ukraine for him is the last chance to spoil Moscow. He will be disappointed there too.
 

Saturday, September 9, 2023

Terminating French Neocolonialism & the CFA Zone in Africa | Ibrahim Traoré

African states are one by one falling outside the shackles of French neocolonialism. Six decades after 'independence' Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger reject France's uninterrupted domination of African financial, political, economic, and security affairs. It is absolutely impossible to understand Africa's current turmoil without understanding the nature of French neocolonialism. The key is the CFA franc, the colonial franc, introduced in 1945 in French Africa, which still rules over 14 African countries. 
 
» The slave that cannot carry out his own revolt deserves no pity. «
Captain Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso, July 2023.


The whole world remembers that after the 2008 global financial crisis, Libya’s Leader
Muammar Gaddafi was Chairperson of the African Union, and called for the establishment of a pan-African currency pegged to gold, the African Gold Dinar. By that time Gaddafi had developed Libya from one of the most miserable into the richest country in Africa. Libya was economically and socially stable, had a prosperous and educated people, its own currency, no obligations to the IMF, the World Bank nor the BIS, zero foreign debt and about 150 tons of gold, kept in its own fully sovereign central bank - not in London, not in Paris, and not in New York. Together with South Africa's gold the new pan-African currency would have had its own independent financial center in Tripoli, Libya, and a sovereign African Development Bank in Yaoundé, Cameroon. For scores of African nations that was the plan and strategy to finally jail break from the CFA and from the entirely fraudulent Western global monetary and financial system that was imposed at gunpoint on the 'decolonized' after 1945 by the new 'free world' champions: the US, the French and the British. 
 
What Libya still did not have was nuclear weapons, satellite-guided long-range missiles nor an efficient air defence. In March 2011 the first airstrike on Libya came from a French Mirage fighter jet. France's bombing campaigns on Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte - on water supply and electricity infrastructure, on public buildings and civilian living quarters alike - started even before simulated 'emergency talks' between western leaders in Paris ended. The US kept on bringing in through Cyrenaica tens of thousands of their Jihadists out of Syria and Iraq via US bases in Türkiye for the dirty work on the ground. In the course of the assault the French COS looted the central bank in Tripoli and airlifted all of Libya's gold to Paris while the EU Commission seized all Libyan assets in Europe (by the way, during the 2014 Maidan coup UKSF rushed out 40 tons of Ukraine's central bank gold to London and New York). After murdering Gaddafi in October 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognize a US-fabricated mercenary Jihadist 'National Transitional Council' as the legitimate government over a completely destroyed and dysfunctional Libya, contaminated by countless US, British and French Depleted Uranium projectiles. 
 
The African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was immediately cut off from all funds and cleansed from pan-African sovereign aspirations and diplomats by a concerted coup of the US, the British, the French and the EU Commission. The new head of the African Union became one of Jacob Zuma's ex-wifes, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Her agenda replaced formerly well funded programs for health, education, infrastructure, industrialization and pan-African trade with mass-vaccination and sterilization campaigns of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WHO-'Ebola' test runs for the Covid-19 plandemic, gender issues, CO2 reduction programs, WEF-Central Bank Digital Currency experiments, and an EU-funded African Union military intervention in Somalia, to name but a few of her achievements. When Zuma's term ended in 2017, any genuine purpose of the African Union had been erased. Since 2011 the neocolonial consortium of the US, the British, the French and the EU Commission had launched the so called 'Arab Spring', destroyed Libya, established some two dozens of additional military bases, fostered ethnic separatist movements, armed jihad fanatics, imposed bogus 'peace keeping' and 'humanitarian' military interventions and turned the Horn of Africa, the Great Lakes Region, and the Sahel from Mali to Sudan into quagmires of violence and misery. This triggered displacement and migration of tens of millions within Africa  - Egypt alone now hosts some 11 million refugees - as well as mass migration of epic proportion into Türkiye and Europe.  

The French CFA racket in Africa makes the Mafia look like street punks. The monetary policy of 14 African nations with a population of more than 120 million is controlled by the French Treasury in Paris. The Central Bank of each African nation was initially required to keep at least 65 percent of their annual foreign exchange reserves in an 'operation account' held at the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent to cover financial 'liabilities'. Even after some 'reforms' were enacted since 2005, these nations were still required to transfer 50 percent of their foreign exchange to Paris, plus 20 percent V.A.T. The CFA Central Banks impose a cap on credit to each member country. The French Treasury invests these African foreign reserves in its own name on the Paris bourse and pulls in massive profits on Africa's dime. More than 80 percent of foreign reserves of African nations in those  'operation accounts' are used by the French Treasury as if they were French capital and as collateral in pledging assets to French payments to the EU and the ECB. French conglomerate Bolloré controls ports and marine transport throughout West Africa; Bouygues/Vinci dominates construction and public works, water, and electricity distribution; Total has huge stakes in oil and gas. And then there is France Telecom and big banking - Societe Generale, Credit Lyonnais, BNP-Paribas, AXA (insurance), Areva - France's highest valued company (uranium) - and so forth. France de facto controls the overwhelming majority of infrastructure in Francophone Africa. It is a virtual monopoly. Policies are issued by the President of the Republic of France and his 'African cell'. They have nothing to do with parliament, or any democratic process, since the times of Charles De Gaulle. The 'African cell' is a General Command and uses the French military apparatus to install 'friendly' leaders and to get rid of those that threaten the system. 
 
ECOWAS = Of the Colonialist, by the Colonialist, for the Colonialist?

The French exploitation scheme became shaken to its core by the 2021 military coup of Colonel Assimi Goïta in Mali, the 2022 military coup of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, now President of a transitional government of Burkina Faso, and the recent military coup of General Abdourahmane Tchiani in Niger in July 2023. They are now counting on their own abilities and capacities and support from Russia and China. During the past twenty years China became Africa's biggest trading partner and foreign investor. No wars, no coups, no destabilization involved. Without a single shot. Bypassing the African Union and based on bilateral agreements, China built thousands of kilometers of railways and roads,
cargo trains, high speed trains, urban transportation systems, dozens of airports, sports stadiums, schools, universities, some twenty deep water ports, container hubs, hydroelectric dams, some eighty large power plants, tens-of-thousands of kilometers of power lines, hundreds of factories, mining projects and hospitals, sent twenty thousand Chinese medical workers providing free care to hundreds of millions of Africans, and had invited some one hundred fifty thousand Africans with all inclusive academic scholarships to China. Many African countries expect an increasing Russian engagement, mainly in order to promote their defense capacities and food security.

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