The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake ‘White Helmets’ as Terrorist-Linked Imposters

21st Century Wire

September 23, 2016

by Vanessa Beeley

“I am a director not only of a Syrian Civil Defence Unit, but of brave human beings, volunteers who risk their lives, despite the terrorism that is invading Syria, to maintain security for Syria. I give thanks from my heart for the courage of my men who have lost their comrades in terrorist attacks but they keep working despite the risks. They are true soldiers, their equipment and their spirit are their only weapons”
~ Director of Tartous’ REAL Syria Civil Defence

Did I hear a pin drop?  The real Syria Civil Defence? Are the west’s iconized ‘White Helmets’ not the only emergency first-responders inside Syria?

For the REAL Syria Civil Defence you call 113 inside Syria.  There is no public number for the White Helmets.  Why not? Why does this multi-million dollar US & NATO state-funded first repsonder ‘NGO,’ with state of the art equipment supplied by the US and the EU via Turkey, have no central number for civilians to call when the “bombs fall”?

Before we introduce the real Syria Civil Defence, who are Syria’s real ICDO certified civil fire and rescue organisation, let’s first take a closer look at the imposters; terrorists in white hats, and agents of war – NATO’s pseudo ‘NGO’ construct, embedded exclusively in terrorist-held parts of Syria…

We’re told that the White Helmets routinely scale the walls of collapsed buildings and scrambling over smouldering rubble of bombed out buildings to dig a child out with their bare hands. Of course, never without a sizeable camera crew and mobile phone carrying entourage in tow.

Screenshot from one of the multitude of NATO’s White Helmets promotional videos, as per usual – with fans and camera crew in attendance.

So who, and what exactly are the White Helmets?

“Founded in 2013, the White Helmets, officially called the Syria Civil Defense, are often the only emergency first-responders available in rebel-held areas of Syria and claim to have saved more than 58,000 lives.” ~ The Slate

White Helmets ‘Team’ Photo: Screenshot from recent Soros funded, Netflix promotional documentary.

The western media mythology goes as follows:

“They are made up of former bakers, builders, taxi drivers, students, teachers, pretty much anything apart from rescue workers,” according to the much repeated phrase used by their British ex-military, USAR (Urban Search & Rescue) trainer, James Le Mesurier who specialises in outsourcing warfare – the kind of private security operations exemplified by the likes of Blackwater (now known as Academi) and DynCorp, and other well-known global suppliers of mercenaries and CIA outreach assassination experts.

“Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible.” ~ The Atlantic, 2012

White Helmets founder Le Mesurier, who graduated from Britain’s elite Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, is said to be an ‘ex’ British military intelligence officer involved in a number of other NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ theatres of war, including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, as well as postings in Lebanon and Palestine. He also boasts a series of high-profile posts at the UN, EU, and UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Not to mention his connections back to the infamous Blackwater (Academi).

The White Helmet network showing primary funding sources and James Le Mesurier connections back to deep state  (Image: UK Column)

The streaming giant, Netflix, recently launched the documentary meant to elevate the White Helmets to a Hollywood level of Madison Avenue-styled demagoguery. As an interesting aside: a major shareholder in Netflix just happens to be the Capital Research Global Investors who hosts a number luminaries of the military industrial complex on its books including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. In 2015, George Soros, billionaire, criminal hedge-fund manager, bought up 317,534 shares in Netflix said to be worth $32.79m.  Curiously in 2016 Soros, dissolved those shares.

For further information on the George Soros role as the anti-Syria NGO impresario read 21WIRE article: George Soros: Anti-Syria Campaign Impresario

Variation on the Netflix promotional poster for the NATO White Helmet documentary. Poster by: Cory Morningstar of WrongKindofGreen.

Later, in Part III of this article, we will go into depth concerning the recent awards, including an objectionable nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that have been bestowed upon this group of US, UK, EU backed fifth columnists, or as they would have you believe, “first-responders.”

With over $60 million in their back pocket courtesy of USAID, the UK Foreign Office and various EU nations like the Netherlands, this group is possibly one of the most feted and funded entities within the west’s anti-Syrian NGO complex, a pivotal part of the clandestine shadow state building enterprise inside of Syria.

Like many other ‘NGOs’, the White Helmets have been deployed by the west to derail the Syrian state, first  by undermining existing civic structures and by disseminating staged PR to facilitate regime change propaganda, through western and Gulf state media outlets. Despite the fact that they were started, and are still generously funded by NATO members states, particularly from the US and UK, the White Helmets’ official statement still claims categorically that they are somehow “fiercely independent” and “have accepted no money from governments, corporations or anyone directly involved in the Syrian conflict“. This is both farcical and deeply misleading.

RELATED: ‘Aleppo Media Centre’ Funded By French Foreign Office, EU and US

They claim they are not “tied to any political group in Syria, or anywhere else”, yet they are embedded with Al Nusra Front, ISIS and affiliated with the majority of US allied terrorist brigades infesting Syria.  In fact during my recent trip to Syria, I was once again struck by the response from the majority of Syrians when asked if they knew who the White Helmets were.  The majority had never heard of them, others who follow western media noted that they are a “NATO construct being used to infiltrate Syria as a major player in the terrorist support network.”

For further details on the White Helmets and their role in supporting US & NATO state-sponsored terrorism in Syria please refer to the compilation of articles contained in the 21WIRE article: WHO ARE SYRIA’S WHITE HELMETS?

The REAL Syria Civil Defence

Let us now focus upon the very real heroes inside Syria, the real Syria Civil Defence that have been usurped by the NATO mountebank White Helmets who also call themselves the “Syria Civil Defence” – a mere simulacra of the REAL Syria Civil Defence who have been saving lives in Syria, and further afield for decades.

The REAL Syria Civil Defence was established as an organisation, in 1953, some 63 years before the White Helmets were a glimmer in the eyes of CIA and MI6 operatives.

The REAL Syria Civil Defence is a founding member of the ICDO (International Civil Defence Organisation). Other ICDO partners include the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Secretarian of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG), World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations of Geneva (UNOG), Red Cross and the Red Crescent.

To our knowledge and according to the Head Quarters of the REAL Syria Civil Defence in Damascus, the White Helmets are NOT a member of the ICDO. The REAL Syria Civil Defence have received awards for their participation in the training of other member states in USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) and for their contributions to the Civil Defence community, prior to the NATO dirty war on Syria that began in earnest, in 2011.

Later in Part II, we will go into further detail regarding this affiliation with the ICDO and the role the REAL Syria Civil Defence has played in global civil defence developments for the last 63 years – which is tremendous, and something the White Helmets could never lay claim to in reality, despite all the superficial accolades being rained down upon them by the US and NATO fueled organisations, foundations and cosmetic award bodies.

This is an introduction to the unsung heroes who, unlike the counterfeit White Helmets, do truly risk their lives every day, working not only in government controlled areas, but forging deep into terrorist strongholds to rescue civilians living under the brutal US-NATO-backed terrorist siege and occupation that engulfs all of Syria.

When Syrian civilians are at risk, injured, or buried under the rubble of homes, schools and hospitals destroyed by terrorist mortar showers, it’s not Le Mesurier’s White Helmets who rush to their aid – it’s the REAL Syria Civil Defence, a real civic organization who, up until the publication of this article, have never been mentioned by any western media outlets.

The REAL Syria Civil Defence, stationed in Syrian government held West Aleppo (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 15, 2016)

The REAL Syria Civil Defence: Aleppo

My first stop on my investigation to discover the REAL Syria Civil Defence units in as many Syrian governorates as I could during my time in Syria, was Aleppo. I focused on those units that were in closest proximity to the terrorist held areas of Syria, particularly, Aleppo and Idlib. Damascus which is the home and headquarters of the REAL Syrian Civil Defence was my last port of call, and is surrounded on two sides by Jaish Al Islam, another US-NATO protected terrorist clique.

Because of the the encroachment of the US Coalition terrorist entities, Aleppo city has been carved into two cities with the major occupier of the eastern portion being the universally feared Al Nusra Front. Spurious attempts by the US to rebrand this organisation as a lesser evil in an attempt to separate them from their Al Qaeda affiliation, have failed. People in Syria from all walks of life refuse to accept any differentiation between the titles accorded the terrorist brigades, insisting there is no difference in the way they all kill, maim, torture, rape, behead and destroy at the behest of their paymasters and controllers in the US, NATO states, Turkey, Gulf States and yes, Israel.

Decimated areas of Sheikh Maqsoud, the northernmost, Kurdish held, entry point into the government held West Aleppo (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 14, 2016)

For further information about the real situation in Aleppo, my journey to this terrorist besieged city and the debunking of the fictional US-NATO narrative, please read Part I of my article published at Mint Press: Journey to Aleppo: Exposing the Truth Buried under NATO Propaganda.

On the 15th of August, I entered the work yard of Aleppo’s REAL Syria Civil Defence and was greeted by an exhausted team of about fifteen crew-members.  That morning from 11am until around 3 pm, just before our visit, they had been fighting a fire in a cement and plastics factory which had been ignited by Al Nusra Front mortar fire.

They were understandably wary, but they still gathered around us (my colleague and independent journalist, Eva Bartlett and our translator) in the searing arid summer heat. Over the course of this 5 years and 6 months of this dirty war against Syria, not one western media journalist had ever asked to speak to them.

This extraordinary omission and failure to follow the most rudimentary journalist text book rules by the western media is staggering, but hardly surprising considering the level of spin and propaganda employed daily by the likes of the BBC, CNN, FOX News, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post. Sadly, western media lap dogs end up simply wagging their tails to their masters voice and turning somersaults with the truth to merit reward.

Unfortunately for the Syrian people, western pundits have only reported on crucial and pivotal events in the war on Syria based largely on ‘evidence’ supplied by the US-UK-NATO construct, the White Helmets, who are ensconsed only in Al Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda and ISIS held areas.

As a result of western media outlets not bothering to make contact with the volunteer Syrians in the REAL Syria Civil Defence, western audiences never received a balanced view of the situation. Instead, western media only disseminates what amounts to a biased, one-sided view which mirrors anti-Syrian state and Syrian Arab Army rhetoric issued by the US State Dept and British Foreign Office.

I explained in detail, why I had come to talk with them, that my objective was to find out who were the real heroes inside Syria, the multi million NATO funded White Helmets created in 2013 or the Syrian Syria Civil Defence established in 1953.

Aleppo’s REAL Syria Civil Defence informed us there are 150 volunteers working across all units in Aleppo, the headquarters are in the Hamadaniya area which is one of the most severely targeted civilian areas, by Al Nusra Front Hell Cannon mortar fire and explosive bullets. The volunteers ages range between 25-45 years old, and the minimum age for training is 18.

All members of the crew were genuine volunteers. They spoke proudly of the intensive training process they undergo before they can be accepted into the unit. They are fully trained in urban search and rescue techniques (USAR).  They are also fully qualified paramedics.

A glance around their yard revealed that their equipment is tired and worn. The fire trucks were gleaming in the sun but showed signs of heavy use. Tattered jackets hung from the fenders and wing mirrors of the trucks and a Syrian flag had been draped across the radiator of one truck, perhaps in honour of our visit.

West Aleppo REAL Syria Civil Defence unit (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 15, 2016)

I was told immediately, that I would not be able to photograph the crew themselves or to use their names. Aleppo is a city under siege, not by “Assad and his army“, as the western media would have you believe, but by an assortment of up to 22 different terror brigades many of whom are armed, funded, and trained by the US, UK, France, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, to name only a few of the west’s ‘coalition.’ The REAL Syria Civil Defence crew-members are under constant threat of being targeted by any one of these terrorist brigades – including the White Helmets, as they later explained to us.

Chemical Attacks

MODERATE WEAPONS: ‘Rebel’ Terrorists in East Aleppo shell civilians indiscriminately with their crude munitions, and then blame it on “The Regime” via misleading social media imagery. 

The crew told us about a call out they had responded to on the 2nd August. There had been a terrorist Hell Cannon attack on the Old City of Aleppo, which lies right on the border with the Al Nusra front lines and is a regular target for their indiscriminate attacks. Terrorist Hell Cannons use an assortment of containers – gas canisters, water heater tanks packed full of explosives, glass, metal and any other limb-shredding materials.

As the crew entered the area, they said there was a pungent smell in the air that suggested the use of a toxic gas by Nusra Front, possibly chlorine. The concentrations were so high that they immediately experienced breathing difficulties and their flimsy paper oxygen masks were not sufficient to prevent the devastating effects of inhalation.

One of the crew, 36 year old Mohammed Ahmed Eibbish, succumbed to the fumes and eventually died while trying to rescue one of the 25 affected civilians. Both civilians and crew suffered with dizziness, nausea, burns on their body, spasms and respiratory difficulties. Four civilians died that day too, all women. This attack and many others like it, are being intentionally ignored by the western media agencies, politicians and partisan UN officials, desperate to attribute any such attacks to the Syrian government and its national army.

A very salient fact so often mislaid in the stampede to produce lies, is that the only chemical factory in Aleppo (producing chlorine among other substances) was actually captured by the Al Nusra Front coalition in 2012. It is located about 10km east of Aleppo’s airport on the road towards Raqqa.

“The chemicals factory was taken over by Nusra Front and allies three years ago, they emptied everything out of it including potential ingredients for use in chemical weapon attacks. Part of the facility was shipped to Iraq.  They destroyed the factory completely.” ~ Voice from Aleppo

Painful skin blisters caused by an ISIS chemical weapon attack in Northern Aleppo 17/9/2016 (Photo: Press TV article)

The crew told us that the worst injuries they have ever witnessed, are children who have been hit by the terrorist Hell Cannon mortars. Their little bodies are eviscerated and literally torn apart. At least 54 children had been killed and many others maimed by the Hell Cannon attacks in a two-week period alone, between the July 31st and August 14th. These figures were provided by the Aleppo Medical Association during our time in West Aleppo. In total, 143 civilians, 23 women, 54 children and 66 men, were killed by US-backed “rebels” occupying East Aleppo.

Aleppo REAL Syria Civil Defence Fire Engine parked in their yard (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 15, 2016)

The West Aleppo crew is forced to attend missions without the standard issue equipment and to deal with situations like chemical weapons attacks with only the ineffectual paper breathing masks.  This is another result of the EU-US sanctions being enforced against Syria, and effectively against the Syrian people. The REAL Syria Civil Defence is unable to replace equipment or replenish supplies, unlike the NATO White Helmets who enjoy an endless stream of kit and replacement materials via the Turkey supply chain that has remained unbroken for much of the four years that Aleppo has been under terrorist siege.

US EQUIPPED: White Helmets showing off their brand new equipment in Idlib (on borders with Turkey) supplied by US Equipment company, Bobcat (Photo: screenshot from White Helmet promotional video)

The White Helmets: Criminals, Kidnappers and Killers

When we got on to the subject of NATO’s White Helmets, the West Aleppo REAL Syrian Civil Defence crew became animated.  One of them, stepped forward and began to talk excitedly to our translator. He had been stationed in East Aleppo at a REAL Syrian Civil Defence unit based in an area that has since been overrun by Al Nusra Front and their associate terrorist gangs.

Again, we are unable, as we have said, to provide names of the men we spoke with. They are prime targets for the Al Nusra Front and company in East Aleppo. This crew member, lets call him ‘Khaled,’ described what happened when the terrorists (western media still call them “opposition” or “moderate rebels”) started to invade East Aleppo in 2012.

“They came in and they drove us out of our homes and they came to the Syria Civil Defence yard and they killed some of my comrades, they kidnapped others.  They wanted to force me to work with them.  I escaped at night.  I was forced to leave my teenage sons behind. They burned my house to the ground and they put my name on all the terrorist checkpoints so if I go back, they will kill me.”

Khaled went on to explain how those men who later became the White Helmets were among this first wave of terrorists:

“They are terrorists, not rescuers.  They stole our ambulances and three of our fire engines. They don’t do any rescue work.  They drive round with guns in the back of their car like any other terrorist.  Some are from East Aleppo, some are from Syria but not from Aleppo and some are even coming in from abroad.”

Granted, this might come as a shock to anyone who has already bought into the public relations image of the group that’s already been developed over three years by various agencies in New York, Washington DC and London, but these are the real accounts regarding what one might say is the true unmasked nature of the west’s White Helmets.

At this point other crew members interjected and told me that they had watched the White Helmet “rescue” videos.

“They are fake.  They don’t carry out any correct procedures, either as paramedics or as search and rescue experts.”

They described how the White Helmets use a heavy-duty power drill to dig down for civilians buried under the rubble of homes allegedly targeted by “Syrian or Russian airstrikes.”

“It’s the wrong equipment to use.  It is not sensitive enough and because it vibrates powerfully,  it can displace the rubble which is dangerous if anyone is genuinely buried beneath it.”

They went on to describe other aspects of the White Helmet videos that they believe contravene all standard procedures that are followed by genuine search and rescue experts, paramedics and first responders.

In the following very recent video made by a White Helmet camera crew, men pretending to be genuine rescuers attack an area of rubble where they seem to know where a body buried. They start with a mint condition JCB digger, which attacks the heap of rubble with gusto.  Then, alarmingly, they begin to pound the rubble with a heavy duty mallet without employing any devices to actually determine where the body is located, under the impenetrable concrete blocks. Finally, the JCB digger returns to the mound of rubble and enters the teeth of its bucket into the rubble without any hesitation, surely not standard procedure if there is a chance of a body being under the debris.

1.  How did the White Helmets know the bodies would be exactly where they found them?

2.  Where is this rescue being filmed?

3.  “Activists”, “citizen journalists”, the White Helmets and western media would have us believe that East Aleppo is under almost constant Russian or Syrian aerial attack yet the White Helmets make, on average, 4 or 5 films per day and we never see or hear any sign of an attack, only the “aftermath”. 

4. Where do these bodies come from? Are they victims of air strikes as we are told by these NATO funded “activists” and “first responders” or are they taken from among the thousands of “disappeared” that have been kidnapped by Nusra Front and other terrorist gangs in East Aleppo? Are they gruesome props being used inhumanely, to polish the image of this faux NGO embedded in East Aleppo, HQ for Al Nusra Front.

I would not ask these questions without good cause and that cause was given to me by the crew members of the REAL Syria Civil Defence, in West Aleppo, some of whom were driven from their homes in East Aleppo and whose families, left behind, remain under threat, while they are unable to return, for fear of being assassinated by the Al Nusra terrorists and their associates the White Helmets.

A further cause for this question is the previous proven use of props and crisis actors by the BBC (just one example) in one of their most dubious reports on Syria, Panorama’s piece entitled, “Saving Syria’s Children”.  Robert Stuart’s quite brilliant investigation into this chilling charade revealed some very disturbing evidence of the lengths to which, the mainstream media are prepared to go, to produce the propaganda required to execute yet another war on false pretenses. Propaganda that best serves the NATO and US intelligence agencies who continue toiling away to facilitate regime change and a ‘No Fly Zone.’

“Why do you do it?” I asked an obvious question of the REAL Syria Civil Defence, essentially, volunteers who survive on a paltry government salary or public donations, who work with dilapidated equipment, under terrorist, indiscriminate, shell, mortar and explosive bullet fire, and with no recognition for the heroic work they do from western media or ‘humanitarian’ NGOs.

“It is humanitarian work for our country. We were there in the good times, and we are here when the times are bad and we are needed most. It’s our duty”

No emotive, Manhattan based PR agency #hashtag headlines for these firefighters and life savers. Instead, we get simple words to convey a simple message.  They told me they often work 24 hour shifts, without sleep. One man sat on the wall behind me told me he had broken both legs falling from a collapsing building after terrorists had shelled the area. Another showed me that he had lost an eye in a Hell Cannon mortar attack. In the background, their uniforms billowed on the washing line ready for the next shout.

The badge of honour, the REAL Syria Civil Defence badge sewn on to the sleeves of the uniforms in West Aleppo (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 15, 2016)

My final question to the REAL Syria Civil Defence in West Aleppo,  was to ask them for their message to the outside world.  The world that is unaware they even exist, many of whom are blinded by the propaganda glare that surrounds the White Helmet media circus. They responded thus:

1. Please lift the sanctions so we can keep working and saving lives.

2. Stop the terrorists from entering Syria, and stop funding and arming them.

3. If terrorists keep entering Syria, eventually it will affect the world, not just Syria. There has been enough bloodshed. It needs to stop now.

The staple equipment of fire crews and first responders. Visit to the West Aleppo REAL Syria Civil Defence (Photo: Vanessa Beeley August 15, 2016)

The REAL Aleppo Medical Association

One of the other meetings we had during our time in Aleppo, was with the Aleppo Medical Association.  We met with the Director, Dr Zahar Buttal and Dr Bassem Hayak, who is in charge of the medical teams assessing refugees from East Aleppo who fled to West Aleppo via the Russian and Syrian state humanitarian corridors, created on the 29th July, which have allowed over 2000 people to escape the terrorist strongholds to safety, food and medical care in government-protected West Aleppo. These figures were given to us by the Aleppo Medical Association on the 15th August 2016.

One of the questions I asked Dr Hayak, who spoke good English, was what he knew of the White Helmets.  His response was concise and without preamble.  His family is still in East Aleppo and although he has not been able to get back into East Aleppo for the last year, his family have told him that the White Helmets are not known in East Aleppo.  I asked again to be sure, and was told again, people, civilians do not know of the White Helmets in East Aleppo. Any actual first response work is carried out by foreign workers from various countries, Pakistan and the Gulf region among them. These foreigners work with Syrian people who are not properly trained in first response. They might only receive 2 or 3 months training before being allowed to work.

Dr Hayak says, “Even with our relationship with WHO (World Health Organisation) and the UN, we still didn’t hear about the White Helmets.”

Are the White Helmets, NATO ghosts?

Dr Hayak also states quite clearly, he has a cousin, working as a surgeon in East Aleppo. ISIS and other terrorist factions have forced her to stay in East Aleppo by threatening to kill her family, should she leave for West Aleppo.

Dr Hayak also said that the majority of civilians in East Aleppo are “hostages”of the NATO/US allied terrorists.

In East Aleppo, civilians living under Al Nusra Front occupation, do not know the White Helmets. Watch:

It is not unreasonable to speculate that the White Helmets are not first responders at all, except when required to don the white hats for a staged photo or promotional video, or to produce western news propaganda for the likes of CNN or the BBC, courtesy of their ever-present film and media crew.

It is not unreasonable, based upon the statements given by eminent members of the Aleppo medical fraternity and crew members of the REAL Syria Civil Defence in Aleppo, to draw the conclusion that the White Helmets are nothing more than common terrorists, being paid to present themselves as respectable first responders when the need arises for “reports from inside Aleppo” or elsewhere in Syria.

Later, in Part II of this story, we will travel to the northwest Syria regions of Lattakia and Tartous and speak to REAL Syria Civil Defence units there, before finally visiting the Syria Civil Defence Headquarters in Damascus, right in the heart of Jaish Al Islam, terrorist strongholds in Jobar and the surrounding suburbs of Damascus.

Every one of these units has a tale to tell about NATO’s White Helmets and each tale is a further nail in the coffin of the west’s multi-million dollar White Helmet mythology – nails which can’t be extracted by any number of NATO sponsored prizes, awards or accolades.

In the end, the REAL Syria Civil Defence will be recognised as extraordinary “ordinary” human beings who deserve the title “Hero” and whose service to their people and their country will be applauded by all those who are not taken in by the by the obscene parody of terrorists dressed-up as saviours and saints.

The REAL “saints” do indeed come marching in….

The REAL Syria Civil Defence, Lattakia, next stop on the tour of the true heroes inside Syria. Photo: Lattakia Fire Brigade FB page

[Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.]

“White Helmet” “Save Aleppo” Protest Proves How Easy it is to Dress Up Actors as “War Victims”

Land Destroyer Report

October 3, 2016

by Tony Cartalucci

Recent protests held across North America and Europe staged by supporters of armed militants in Syria have staged scenes in Western streets eerily similar to those featured in the photos and videos of the US-European funded “Syrian Civil Defence” also known as the “White Helmets.”

Image: This is not Aleppo, Syria, but rather the streets of Europe where a recent “save Aleppo” protest was staged. Actors posing in fake dust and blood proved just how easy it is for anyone to create “war victims” anytime, anywhere.

The stalling talks between international powers on Syria – with Russia ramping up its air raid campaign – has ignited worldwide protests calling for an end to the horror in Aleppo.

Protestors in Turkey, France, Netherlands, America and Canada took to the streets opposing Bashar al-Assad’s and Russia’s crimes in Aleppo, carrying posters that read “Stop bombing Aleppo” and “Save Aleppo”.

Al Arabiya’s ironic hand-wringing over Syria as Riyadh devastates Yemen with its own aerial bombardment and ground incursion, attempts to portray eastern Aleppo as a horrific cauldron where“where more than 250,000 civilians are trapped without food or clean water.”

And while undoubtedly war is raging in eastern Aleppo, it should be noted that the vast majority of Aleppo’s population – 1.75 million in fact – live in the government-controlled majority of Aleppo.  But despite this reality, the West and its allies – including Saudi Arabia – have attempted to use their sway over international public opinion to exaggerate Syrian security operations and fabricate a “humanitarian catastrophe” to serve as yet another pretext for wider Western intervention.

Central to this appeal to public opinion has been the so-called “White Helmets,” also referred to as the “Syrian Civil Defence” despite the nation of Syria already having a legitimate, professional civil defense force.

Posing as an impartial rescue force, the “White Helmets” are transparently auxiliaries serving exclusively side-by-side armed militants including US State Department, UN, and EU designated foreign terrorist organizations. Their primary function is not “rescuing” anyone, but to manage a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public and political opinion, leveraging “humanitarian” sympathy worldwide.

Their primary means of doing this is publishing photos and videos of their members – wearing elaborate, matching uniforms and driving brand new ambulances – pulling dust and blood covered victims from rubble allegedly brought down upon them by Syrian and Russian airstrikes.

 
The veracity of their photos, videos, and many claims have never been independently verified, and in many cases, evidence suggests that much of what they present to the public across their extensive, well-funded social media presence has been fabricated.

The recent coordinated “save Aleppo” protests held across Europe and North America, perhaps revealed just how transparently fabricated and fictional the “White Helmet’s” work really is. During one protest, photos retweeted by the official “White Helmet’s” Twitter account showed actors dressed up as “war victims,” covered in fake dust and blood, appearing almost indistinguishable from the alleged “victims” the “White Helmets” regularly “save” in Syria.

The protest, staged in European streets far from the Syrian conflict, even included children – likewise covered in fake dust and blood – cradled in the arms of adults, posing with despondent looks upon their faces.  Also part of the staged scene were actors dressed like the “White Helmets” themselves.

Image: The only difference between admittedly staged scenes in European streets during a recent “save Aleppo” protest, and the daily output of the Western created and funded “White Helmets” acting  troupe in Syria is that in Syria, the devastation of war provides a much more convincing “set” for the actors to perform on.

While the acting troupe that organized this protest may have thought they were cleverly “bringing the conflict to the streets of Europe” to invoke global sympathy for their cause, what they really proved was just how easy it really is for the “White Helmets” to create “war victims” anytime, anywhere.

In Syria, where years of US-backed violence has left many parts of the country devastated, such staged scenes playing out with the devastation of war as a backdrop become all the much more convincing. With “White Helmet” videos heavily edited before reaching the public, they are able to create tragic scenes of war, anytime, anywhere – even in the streets of Europe thousands of miles away from where Syrian and Russian warplanes are operating.

Their primary goal and that of the special interests funding them tens of millions of dollars, is to manipulate the hearts and minds of the global public in support of Western-backed armed militants – not “save lives” nor bring peace to Syria.

WATCH: The Real Syrian Civil Defence | The Real White Helmets

UK Column

September 8th, 2016

UK Column’s Mike Robinson interviews Vanessa Beeley to deconstruct the origins, funding and “Purpose” of the White Helmets.

“For clarification, the White Helmets are literal terrorists who masquerade as humanitarians for press releases and propaganda : these people are guilty of actual war crimes and atrocities, as is evidenced by testimony from the ground in Syria.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDqr1hPRw0

WATCH: The White Helmets – Al Qaeda With a Facelift

Stranger Than Fiction: How to Keep an Antiwar Movement Down

manyfesto

by Emma Quangel

May 9, 2016

[“Emma Quangel is the woman who bravely contributed to the outing of Nazi murderer/”Last Rhodesian” Dylann Storm Roof’s blog, which probably spoiled Roof’s chances at the inexorably successful—for white supremacists—insanity defense.  After Quangel, an insanity verdict for Roof would be an insanity verdict for the U.S. white supremacist system: which is to say, in lieu of Aristotelian-bourgeois justice, Artaudian ritual magic, a self-reparative exorcism.”]

WHO ARE SYRIA’S WHITE HELMETS?

21st Century Wire

June 21, 2016

By Vanessa Beeley

The Collaborators

Medium

June 18, 2016

by Jay Taber

“We Mean Business”  [September, 2014, People’s Climate March]

In the summer of 1999, as I traveled by train through France for three weeks, I saw numerous memorials to the French Resistance. While staying in Cauterets, the entrance to the Pyrenees National Park, I observed a commemoration ceremony in front of town hall to these valiant volunteers—many of whom sacrificed their lives fighting fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Revered as these solid citizens of the French Republic are, there is a residue of resentment—well-deserved—for the opportunists who sold their souls to the fascists during that horrific fight for freedom. These were, and are, known as the collaborationists (a.k.a. the collaborators)—still a poignant term of derision in France today, particularly in Paris.

I was reminded of this recently, when looking at a group photo in my Jan. 2016 article Heart of Darkness at Wrong Kind of Green (under New World Order-Same Old Crimes) of Wall Street-funded NGO representatives to Paris 2015–where “the agenda of the financial elite at Paris was to subsume human rights to the all-encompassing ‘clean energy’/New Economy regime”. Reading the caption, I could not help thinking that these are the collaborators of climate change.

Video: The ideologies espoused by “We Mean Business” are transparent in the interview with Avaaz & Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans by We Mean Business. “We’ve been talking in a broader way about the future of consumer activism, of organizing people not as citizens but as consumers.”—Jeremy Heimans, Purpose, 2011

“The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) plays a fundamental role within the [We Mean Business] coalition, building on its policy and strategic work advocating for climate change solutions and leveraging the efforts of its EU and global business members.” [Source]

Coincidentally, I was simultaneously reviewing the art and manuscripts of the Situationist International (SI)–the artists, intellectuals and writers that precipitated the May 1968 uprising against capitalism that ‘brought the entire economy of France to a dramatic halt’. Perusing the writing of two principal leaders of SI, Michele Bernstein and Guy DeBord, I wondered what these members of the 20th Century avant-garde would have done at COP21, where the 21st Century architects of the final solution gathered to ‘carve up the world for capitalism’.

As I observed in the opening section by the same name in my article Netwar in the Big Apple, published at CounterPunch (July 2014),

For ubercapitalists like Bill Gates and their sycophants like William Jefferson Clinton—who promote the false hope of neoliberal globalization—terminating the collective ownership of Indigenous nations, in exchange for totalitarian corporate control of the planet’s resources, is a dream coming true. As architects of the final solution, they?—?along with the World Bank, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations—view the UN Millenium Development Goals as a blueprint for annihilation of the world’s Indigenous societies.

In Pathways to Spectacle/Consumerism as “Activism” (Feb. 2016), I noted that ‘The driving force behind privatization through social engineering is the non-profit industrial complex’. As I observed in Social Capitalists: Wall Street’s Progressive Partners (Feb. 2015), CERES-WE MEAN BUSINESS, TIDES & 350—opportunistic collaborators working for Wall Street ‘to dislodge the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations, and prevent enforceable rules governing the operations of multinational corporations’—‘received millions from Wall Street corporations and foundations’.

We Mean Business Twitter status, October 5, 2015

In Hijacking the Environmental Movement: Just Say No to 350 (April 2016), I wrote, ‘The “new economy” they promote is essentially what used to be called fascism’, and that “The ongoing social disintegration of industrial civilization that produces pseudo-citizens signing online petitions created by ruling class entities like Avaaz, Purpose and 350, is indicative of the unbridled power of seamless spectacle, begun in the era of television, and culminated in the reign of the Internet. Controlling Consciousness through public relations has generated a ‘discursive monoculture’, where self-organized democratic renewal is unimaginable”.

Six years ago, Cory Morningstar, in Suicidal Tendencies or Addiction: Earth Day Hijacked by Climate Wealth Opportunists, observed that Earth Day has ‘become nothing more than a day of greenwash opportunism and will mark the fall of the mainstream environmental movement’. As the French philosopher Guy DeBord observed in his 1967 treatise The Society of the Spectacle, we now live in a culture of imbeciles ‘in which advertising has become the only factor’.

[Jay Thomas Taber is an author, an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted Indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations.]

Culture-Jamming Social Media: A Public Health Measure

May 30, 2016

by Jay Taber

The financial backers of 350 and other Wall Street, hedge fund and private equity investors know from intensive studies that oil and gas use is going to continue increasing for a long time, so what we get by following the Break Free game plan is increased fossil fuel use, increased toxic pollution from solar cell manufacture, and an increased likelihood of nuclear power dependence.

The only workable plan is to decrease consumer demand for gasoline and petroleum-based plastic products, and to decrease military usage for wars used to maintain access and control of foreign mineral deposits. Anti-consumerism and anti-war campaigns are the two things that promise the largest climate change payback, and they are omitted from the 350 agenda.

There is, unfortunately, little public discussion about social engineering through social media, which indicates there is little learning taking place–when there is much to be learned.

In the digital era, we live in a society where thought control is consolidated to such a degree, that few recognize how pervasive social engineering has become in our lives. The constant drumbeat by corporate media (mainstream and alternative) to panic the multitudes into actions orchestrated by corporate NGOs, i.e. Avaaz, Purpose, and 350, stampedes many to react according to these campaigns–choreographed by these marketing agents on the payroll of the financial elite.

Public relations (PR) firms, such as 350, and corrupt alternative media such as Democracy Now!, adhere to the prescribed art of manipulating public opinion on behalf of the financial elite, without anyone questioning, for instance, how it is that millions of people–on several continents–could be reacting in exactly the same way, on the same date, chanting the same slogans. It is, I observe, because the herded are not self-organized, participating in action based on independent research and discussion. Rather, they have ceded their judgment to the central authority of NGOs funded by corporations, laundered through private foundations.

In this aspect, privatized activism subservient to Wall Street–just like government, academia, and media–comprises organizers in it for a career, not as a duty of citizenship, who cater to the agenda of corporate philanthropic funders. This is not democracy in action; it is social tyranny.

The Break Free quotes in the media are a mix of official organizers working for the corporations, and the followers that participated in the staged 350 events. For the most part, they repeat mantras about the salvation of ‘clean energy’ that are corporate fabrications, but widely and uncritically accepted, due to the network drumbeat. This is what Netwar (networked psychological warfare) is all about–drowning out other perspectives, and dominating all forms of communication.

This creates a sense of panicked urgency that, in turn, drives followers to believe they are on a holy mission–one that exempts them from both social conventions and the law, and that limits the choices for public response to those composed by corporate decision-makers, in order to benefit the corporations. What we need to do is take the time for more discussion, research and education–that doesn’t begin by adopting the assumptions prepackaged by the financial elite.

I think it might help to recount other examples where the public has been coerced or seduced by corporate PR firms into accepting or supporting actions contrary to the public interest, yet very much in the interest of those who pay the PR firms, that stand to profit from public ignorance or complacency. The Gulf War, Iraq War, War in Afghanistan, War in Libya, and War in Syria were all based on PR fabrications–intended to mislead public opinion, and to stampede public officials into urgent actions–that later turned out to be harmful to the public interest.

The same thing happened with the bank bailouts, and is now repeating itself in the false hope of 350s corporate-funded propaganda about climate change adaptation. One might get the impression from all this that the public never learns, has given up, or doesn’t care.

On the other hand, perhaps the majority of citizens are now either addicts, cynics or fanatics, resulting in an impossible organizing task for sober, constructive engagement in public affairs. Either way, culture-jamming social media–that promotes hysteria–is a public health measure.

[Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted Indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations.]

Ties Between White Helmet and Mosaic Syria

“MOSAIC SYRIA”: Another Actor in the Anti-Syria War Propaganda Theatre

In Gaza | The Real Syrian Free Press

by Eva Bartlett

In Nov 2014, the WH alliance created an animation video to further try to put forth the fairytale that they are “civilians” assisting “civilians” being bombed by the “regime”. The sheer, slick but obvious propaganda elements of the video aside, who are some of the key people involved in this propaganda piece?

According to the Youtube clip,”Story and directed by:Amjad Wardeh.”

Who and where is Amjad Wardeh?

According to his profile, he is a Syrian “is currently practicing art in Istanbul.” According to a June 2014 article on Wardeh, he has lived in Instabul since early 2013.

Interestingly, Wardeh has made prior propaganda videos, one of which, a 2 minute animation (‘War on famous canvas’) for which he was (translated from French), “one of three winners of the competition “Made in Med,” organized by Euromed Audiovisual, an EU program.”

An EU program. Of course, the EU has no interest in destabilizing Syria, right?!

Wardeh also participated in a 2013 London exhibition, “#withoutwords: emerging Syrian artists at the P21 Gallery,” which is described as “a collaboration between P21 and the charity Mosaic Syria”.

Mosaic Syria is yet another propaganda front, sloganeering against Syria. While its “Who We Are: Our Story” section describes the group as having “no political or ideological agendas…solely focused on humanitarian work of a charitable and unconditional nature” various posts and campaigns betray this lie. They use terminology like “brutal attacks of the regime,” “civil war”, and focus solely on baseless allegations against the Syrian government, with little to no mention of the documented crimes and murders of the never-“moderate” “rebel”-terrorists in Syria.

Their blog posts seem to have started in October, 2014, the first of which is a series of slick infographics designed both at fundraising and promoting the NATO narrative against Syria. Their section aptly categorized as “stories” contains further vague accounts with little details but much innuendo against the Syrian government, for example “the Story of Saba“.

Some of Mosaic Syria’s projects are based in terrorist-held areas of Syria, for example their al-Ghouta project, their Douma project, their field clinics in Turkey (whose border areas are known to be a conduit for terrorists into Syria, as well as training bases for NATO’s death-squads). Given Turkey’s role in funneling terrorists and arms into Syria, it would be more than interesting to see just who Mosaic Syria is treating in their Turkish field clinics. Are they they only treating Syrian refugees? Are they, as israel does, treating terrorists who are fighting in Syria?

An Aug 2015 Mosaic blog post both promotes the myth of the “Civil Defense” (WH) and also negates the presence of terrorist factions in Douma (on Douma, see Eric Draitser’s “The Douma Market Attack: a Fabricated Pretext for Intervention?“). Other blog posts further the “regime” is killing civilians narrative, the “refugee crisis” (with no mention of the fact that most refugees are IDPs being housed in Syrian government secured areas, like Latakia, Tartous, Damascus, Sweida. As noted earlier: “Re-visiting Syria in July 2015, Professor Tim Anderson recounted that Latakia alone “has grown from 1.3 million to around 3 million people – they come from all parts, not just Aleppo, also Hama, Deir eZorr, and other areas.” He also visited Sweida, a mainly Druze region, which has accommodated “135,000 families, mainly from Daraa – others from other parts”. Mainly Sunni families.”).

Mosaic Syria hasn’t been on my radar; but after looking into them, and their support for (if not ties with) the White Helmets, they are now, and will be included in the list of “Human Rights” front groups (“Humanitarian Interventionalists”) warring on Syria”.

As for the White Helmets, their history has been amply investigated, as early as at least September 2014, when in her “SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire” investigative journalist Cory Morningstar wrote:

“The New York public relations firm Purpose has created at least four anti-Assad NGOs/campaigns: The White Helmets, Free Syrian Voices [3], The Syria Campaign [4] and March Campaign #withSyria.”

Morningstar’s article is essential reading for those who wish to understand not only the role of the WH, but also the key HR players in the theatre of manufacturing anti-Syria propaganda. For example, she also looked at Purpose Inc, parent of the WH, and related Avaaz, online petition propgandists for Imperialism.

“Avaaz and GetUp co-founders Jeremy Heimans (CEO) and David Madden [2] are also founders of the New York consulting firm, Purpose Inc.

 

Avaaz was created in part by MoveOn, a Democratic Party associated Political Action Committee (or PAC), formed in response to the impeachment of President Clinton. Avaaz and MoveOn are funded in part by convicted inside-trader and billionaire hedge fund mogul, George Soros.

 

Avaaz co-founder James Slezak is also identified as a co-founder and CEO of Purpose at its inception in 2009.

 

The secret behind the success of both Avaaz and Purpose is their reliance upon and expertise in behavioural change.

 

While the behavioural change tactics used by Avaaz are on public display, double-breasted, for-profit Purpose, with its non-profit arm, sells their expertise behind the scenes to further the interest of hegemony and capital. Whether it be a glossy campaign to help facilitate yet another illegal “humanitarian intervention” led by aggressive U.S. militarism (an oxymoron if there ever was one), or the creation of a new global “green” economy, Purpose is the consulting firm that the wolves of Wall Street and oligarchs alike depend upon to make it happen.”

The behavioural change tactics Morningstar refers to are an important element of WH propaganda photos and videos. But back to WH’ parent, Purpose Inc:

“Purpose Inc. (with its co-founders) is a favourite of high-finance websites such as The Economist and Forbes and sells its consulting services and branding/marketing campaigns to Google, Audi, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many others that comprise the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions. In 2012, it raised $3m from investors. “Ford Foundation, which has given Purpose’s non-profit arm a grant, reckons it is shaping up to be “one of the blue-chip social organisations of the future.” ^[Source] Purpose, like many other foundations, such as Rockefeller (who initially incubated 1Sky which merged with 350.org in 2011), also serves as an “incubator of social movements.” ^{[Further reading on Purpose]}”

 

…Purpose’s March campaign #withSyria website (which doubles as a hash tag for Twitter) partners include: Open Society Foundation (George Soros), Amnesty International, Christian Aid, Care, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and many more of the largest “humanitarian” NGOs within the non-profit industrial complex which makes up a billion dollar industry. [Full list of partners: http://marchcampaign.withsyria.com/partners0].”

In her report, she notes other players created by these same propagandists, including “The Syria Campaign” (created by Purpose, launched March 7, 2014), which indeed is active on social media in promoting the war agenda by sharing staged propaganda photos.

As she noted, the real purpose of Purpose Inc (and co) is not humanitarian.

“The lapdog media have not turned away, but much of the public has. It’s the job of Purpose to employ netwar methods (“a form of low intensity conflict, crime, and activism waged by actors using social networking services” according to Wikipedia) on the public (targeting Euro-Americans) that will instill hatred toward the democratically elected Bashar al-Assad.”

Read the entire article, a detailed account of the various “Human Rights” front groups (see a list here)

In his April 2015 investigation, “Chemical Fabrications: East Ghouta and Syria’s Missing Children, Professor Tim Anderson noted how the WH and allied campaigns were cheerleading for a No Fly Zone on Syria:

“Anti-Syrian ‘activists’, plus US-based NGOs such as Avaaz, the Syria Campaign and The White Helmets, also repeated and extended their accusations, while urging a Libyan styled ‘no fly zone’ (NFZ Syria 2015; White Helmets 2015), clearly intended to topple the Government in Damascus.”

In April 2015, Rick Sterling followed the “flow of misinformation”… including Purpose Inc, The Syria Campaign, White Helmets, Avaaz.

“The Syria Campaign began in spring 2014. One of their first efforts was to work to prevent publicity and information about the Syrian Presidential Election of June 2014. Accordingly, “The Syria Campaign” pressured Facebook to remove advertisements or publicity about the Syrian election. Since then Syria Campaign has engineered huge media exposure and mythology about their baby, the “White Helmets” using all sorts of social and traditional media. The campaigns are largely fact free.

 

The Syria Campaign is managed by Anna Nolan, who grew up in northern Ireland and has very likely never been to Syria. In addition to promoting the White Helmets, Syria Campaign promotes a new social media campaign called “Planet Syria”. It features emotional pleas for the world to take notice of Syria in another thinly veiled effort pushing for foreign intervention and war.

 

According to their website, The Syria Campaign received start-up funding from the foundation of Ayman Asfari, a billionaire who made his money in the oil and gas services industry.”

In his section addressing the White Helmets, he noted:

“Civilians from rebel controlled territory were paid to go to Turkey to receive some training in rescue operations. The program was managed by James Le Mesurier, a former British soldier and private contractor whose company is based in Dubai.

 

The trainees are said to be ‘nonpartisan’ but only work in rebel-controlled areas of Idlib (now controlled by Nusra/Al Queda) and Aleppo.”

In her September 2015 blog post, Vanessa Beeley began what would be a series of posts on the WH and their accomplices.

“Even when a report is written about an ISIS atrocity, we often will see Khaled Khatib’s photograph accompanying that report. I will give you an example. In March 2014, the Daily Star [Lebanon] reported on horrific mass executions carried out by ISIS throughout Syria, including Aleppo. ISIL jihadists conduct ‘mass executions’ in Syria: UN probe. Despite this article describing the hideous killings and torture of civilians by ISIS, the caption on the accompanying photo by KK reads ” The bodies of two children lie in the rubble of a residential building targeted by [yes you guessed it] barrel bombs launched by “regime” forces.

 

My marketing background alerts me to this insidious form of subliminal “advertising” that will ensure that the public psyche absorbs the message of “regime” atrocities in preference to the information regarding ISIS depravity. A brief check on other mainstream media reports demonstrates that this is not an isolated case….”

The propaganda war against Syria is replete with Imperialist front groups. However, their allegations and falsifications are becoming more transparent with every new lie and staged photograph.

[Eva Bartlett is a Canadian freelance journalist and activist who has lived in and written from the Gaza Strip, Syria, and Lebanon. Follow her work on her blog ingaza.wordpress.com.]

Breaking Free

A New Age Ghost Dance

Salish Sea Maritime

May 15th, 2016

By Jay Taber

Clean Energy

As I noted in the introduction to Hijacking the Environmental Movement: Just Say No to 350, in 2011, when the oil industry tycoon Warren Buffett poured $26 million into TIDES foundation—funder of 350–he was making a strategic long-term investment in public relations (PR), while simultaneously scheming to cash in on the gullibility of young, impressionable activists.

Most recently, 350 has come out with new propaganda to mislead climate activists. As they did with the KXL charade and the fossil fuel divestment hoax, 350 is promoting ineffective disobedience as a means of diverting activist energy from reality-based social change that might actually threaten the 350 funders’ fossil fuel investments.

As a fossil fuel industry-financed organization, 350 is the most insidious Wall Street Trojan Horse since Avaaz and Purpose. The 350 followers, like most activists, are utterly clueless.

The 350 break free moral theatrics, as a follow-up to the college campus fossil fuel divestment fraud, is not going to shut down Pacific Northwest oil refineries any more than divestment was going to shut down the oil industry. Divestment made the oil industry more powerful, and the break free scheme is part of Wall Street’s clean energy scam to build nuclear power plants.

New Economy

The ‘New Economy’ unveiled by the global financial elite at COP21 has two main components: 1. ‘clean energy’, and 2. ‘sustainable capitalism’. These, in turn, comprise two of the elements of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the 21st Century–a partnership project between Wall Street, the UN and international NGOs, i.e. Avaaz, Ceres, Purpose and 350.

The primary promoters of the ‘New Economy’, ‘clean energy’ and ‘sustainable capitalism’–that form the core of the UN SDGs–are Bill Gates, Jeremy Heimans (Avaaz & Purpose) and Bill McKibben (350). Economic development under the SDGs relies on financial investment from the World Bank, and compliance enforcement from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)–in partnership with Wall Street and regional investment banks.

The results of this ‘sustainable capitalism’ can already be seen in the form of mega-dams, mega-plantations, and mega-mining projects in South America, Africa and Asia. This industrial development–while profitable to the investors–has unfortunately resulted in major deforestation, toxic pollution of fresh water, and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples who formerly called these territories home.

Adjacent to the mega-dams, mega-plantations, and mega-mines of the ‘New Economy’ are makeshift camps for the industrial laborers, as well as rural shanty towns for displaced farmers and fishermen. The Indigenous peoples–those that aren’t murdered by corporate security personnel working in tandem with the police and military–are frequently relocated to urban slums far away, where many die a slow death of poverty and substance abuse.

The mega-dams provide electricity for industry, including the processing of minerals from the mega-mines, as well as the GMO soy and palm oil produced on the mega-plantations. The ‘clean energy’ minerals include gold, copper, and lithium, which are used in consumer electronics, solar panels, wind mills, and batteries for electric vehicles. They also include coal, oil, and uranium that is used to fuel the electrical grids in countries such as France, Japan and the UK.

The ‘clean energy’ plan of the UN, Wall Street and NGOs–that championed the financial elite at COP21–relies on two primary projects: 1. a global nuclear power renaissance, and 2. privatization of Indigenous and public resources worldwide.

Enchanting as the chimera of clean energy might be, it doesn’t scale to meet energy demand, and its use by marketing agencies like Avaaz, Purpose and 350 is to perpetuate the misbelief that Wall Street — which caused all our social and environmental problems — is our only hope for salvation. Sort of a New Age Ghost Dance.

Bomb Trains

The reason for the glut of Bakken crude now rolling into the March Point and Cherry Point refineries in Washington State goes back to 2012, when Obama opened up millions of acres for gas and oil in 23 states, ushering in the fracking boom that brought us the ‘bomb trains’ owned by Obama’s friend Warren Buffett since 2009, when he purchased Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (BNSF) for $34 billion–the same year TIDES Foundation funded 350.

In 2010, 350 launched the campaign to reject KXL; by 2014, crude-via-rail in the US soared to 500 thousand car loads per year, up from 5 thousand in 2008, with trains exploding across Canada and the US.

To refresh readers’ memories, the KXL ‘grassroots’ hoax was funded in large part by TIDES (flush with Buffett money) with 350 at the helm. Funds laundered through Buffett’s foundation NOVO and the TIDES Foundation — a money laundry used by Tar Sands investors and other elites to control NGOs — helped finance the KXL NGO charade, thus eclipsing any discussion about shutting down the Tar Sands, and making possible the explosive growth of bomb trains and other pipelines.

Divestment

When Klein and McKibben herded thousands of college students across America to fight climate change by forcing their schools to divest in fossil fuels, no one stopped to ask if that would make any difference. Using the emotive force of the idea of divestment as people power — based on an intentional association with its use in South Africa and Palestine — 350 inducted hypnotic behavior that omitted any critical judgment.

The fact that apartheid was opposed by a combination of boycott, divestment and sanction by national and international institutions in support of armed insurrection was lost on the climateers. Instead, they were hypnotized into believing that colleges selling back fossil fuel shares to Wall Street (where unscrupulous investors could then make a killing) was part of a magical social revolution. The same could apply to the nonsensical demand to end fossil fuels.

As a Wall Street shell game, the global fossil fuel divestment campaign — exposed by Cory Morningstar in Divestment as the Vehicle to Interlocking Globalized Capital — is a PR masterpiece.

As noted in the November 4, 2014 Harvard Business Review,

Were divestment ever to succeed in lowering the valuations of fossil fuel companies, an unintended consequence could be a shift from public markets to private markets… Such a shift could hurt transparency; companies that go private have minimal reporting obligations and they typically become very opaque. This could limit everyone’s ability to engage the management of these companies in a discussion around climate change.

As an indicator of the scale of fraud perpetrated by the divestment campaign led by 350, Exxon in 2014 spent $13.2 billion buying up its own stock. As I noted previously,

Discursive monoculture is the result of investment in private equity media, university endowments, and NGOs. The energy industry understands production and consumption cycles, and makes just as much on low prices as high. When the glut from fracking is burned up by frolicking consumers, they’ll double the price again, and make a killing on the divested shares.

Using hedge funds and other non-transparent private equity trading firms, the aristocracy – that is heavily invested in fossil fuels – is betting on increasing oil and gas consumption, long into the future. Corporate media rarely discusses the American aristocracy and how their agenda affects society. Consumers blame banks, but they have no idea how financial institutions are used by private equity traders to constantly replenish aristocratic wealth at our expense.

Private equity funds are not openly traded in any public stock exchange system, and therefore face considerably less regulatory oversight from institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission than their publicly traded counterparts.

Buying energy assets on the cheap as a result of fossil fuel divestment by universities and pension funds, investors such as Goldman Sachs Capital Partners “wield an immense amount of political influence” that divestment on college campuses helps to increase. While students celebrated divestment at their schools, private equity in 2015 raised $34 billion for oil and gas funds—a 94% rise from 2012.

Meanwhile, 350 promotes its ongoing Wall Street-funded revolution. As someone wise once said, “A half-truth is a whole lie.”

Tilting at Windmills

The kids mobilized by 350 don’t understand how they are being manipulated, but that’s the reality of the power elite behind the 350 hoaxes. They might get some token windmills and solar panels–which require fossil fuels to make, maintain, and replace–but those won’t come anywhere near to meeting the electrical demand now met by burning fossil fuels.

The funders of 350 know all this, which is why they finance 350 campaigns that don’t address the consumerism or militarism that drive fossil fuel demand. Instead, they promote the idea that Americans can continue consuming vast quantities of minerals for electricity and electronics, car and jet travel at the expense of the rest of the world. If the kids think Americans are going to tolerate them shutting down refineries, they are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

The oil trains are a problem that can be addressed as a public safety issue, but the refineries will still receive oil by ships and pipelines. Our society would collapse without it. Imagine no fossil-fueled shipping by air, land or sea of food, medicine, clothing or building materials. Where do they think their coffee, kayaks, bicycles, polar wear and yoga mats come from?

France went for fossil-free electricity, and they have nuclear power plants and radioactive waste instead. They have to invade African countries to get uranium, and now they have nuclear contamination to deal with. That’s the reality of breaking free.

Recommended viewing

Green Illusions

Recommended reading

A Culture of Imbeciles

Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests

The Society of the Spectacle

[Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted Indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations.]