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Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem, and the Pursuit of Profit

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I have never read a book that educated me in such a plain and detailed way about the means and methods of Western imperialism. Mr. Elich, the author cuts right through all the theoretical discourse one could have on such subjects and gets straight to the concrete information a person needs in order to know how hegemonic power works in the current world order. Also, the fact that this book touches on a diverse array of examples/places within major areas of the world is also fantastic. Elich does so with meticulous research and intriguing literary style. This book is a demonstration of major insight by Mr. Elich to focus on some of the most misunderstood places in the world, on exactly those things that are most misunderstood about them, and how the powers that be systematically generate these misunderstandings. The title is completely fitting. Now Iam always recommending it anytime and anywthere i get the chance, Strange Liberators; Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit!

American foreign policy, especially during the Bush Administration, has been characterized as "incompetent" or "misguided," along with other such words. On the contrary, American foreign policy is actually very competent and works quite well, when its real purpose is to make the world safe for wealthy Western investors. Any country, no matter its size, that refuses to go along with America's demands is to be strangled into submission, by any means available.

Americans remember the Korean War as a limited "police action." North Koreans remember it as a time of total annihilation, when everything and anything was bombed. The seemingly irrational North Korean fear of an American invasion becomes much more rational considering that, in 1994, the Clinton Administration was very close to declaring war on North Korea, because of its nuclear program. The use of nuclear weapons to destroy North Korea's nuclear facilities would have spread radioactivity over most of the Korean peninsula, and killed hundreds of thousands of people, a fact which really didn't bother the Clinton Administration.

North Korea, in the midst of a huge energy crisis, has been willing to scrap its uranium reprocessing capabilities, in exchange for a couple of light water reactors (which are not good for reprocessing), and shipments of heavy oil until the reactors are finished. America and North Korea signed an agreement in 1994, which America promptly ignored. The American bargaining postition, from then until now, is full of bullying, and threats, and demanding that North Korea totally scrap its nuclear program, before America will agree to any kind of talks (with no guarantee that America will agree to do anything for North Korea).

The justification for the bombing and invasion of Yugoslavia was that hundreds of thousands of Albanians were being thrown out of Yugoslavia. The problem is that there was no evidence of thousands of people in mass graves, and the exodus of refugees started after the bombing. The 77 days of NATO bombing was supposed to target military facilities; nearly anything was considered a military target. Industrial plants were targeted, to cause maximum economic hardship, and all sorts of toxic materials were released into the atmosphere. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe's "crime" was to put the interests of his people ahead of those of Western investors.

I thought that I knew my way around present-day international relations, but this book was a huge eye-opener. Using local media sources (Korean, Yugoslav and Zimbabwean), Elich has written an amazing book. See for yourself what "democracy" from America means to the rest of the world.

Good source book for finding out what our corporate media doesn't tell us. The focus is on three pariah states-- North Korea, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. If you take usual reportage at face value, you probably think these countries amount to charnel houses run by madmen and populated by fanatics. I may exaggerate, but not much.

What the book tells is the other side of the story, the one we never get to hear. Thus, Elich presents an in-depth profile of North Korea's stance on nuclear power,. Corporate media usually portrays their negotiations as irrational, at best, or bomb-happy, at worst. Actually, once the picture is filled in, Pyongyang's contributions to the seemingly endless rounds of multilateral talks become quite reasonable and rational. That alone is worth the purchase price, exposing, as it does, Washington's duplicitous game that none in our media dares report.

Similarly, we get a fuller picture of the events leading up to NATO's criminal invasion of Yugoslavia. The air bombardment proceeded, of course, under the guise of protecting Albanians from Serbian genocide. The KLA's provocative role is either ignored or minimized. Frankly, this story has been told better in other sources-- Parenti, for one. However, we do get considerable anecdotal accounts of Serbian suffering at the hands of the KLA, a key aspect minimized in Western reporting. Nonetheless, this section is the book's weakest.

Zimbabwe's inclusion is timely. Britain and the US are again turning up the heat in an effort to topple the stubbornly independent Mugabe regime. The book details the brutal economic warfare that has been waged against this former British colony over the last several decades. It also debunks and/or explains the many myths surrounding the controversial project of land reform, the cornerstone of Zimbabwe's economic democratization. It's important that the country's story gets out since southeastern Africa is a neglected region, particularly vulnerable to Western subversion.

Of course, what these countries all have in common is a state-run economy resistant to unchecked foreign investment. That alone is enough to get them on Washington's hit list as corporate America reaches for unchallenged global supremacy. The objective is clear-- all holdouts, big or little, must be stamped out in the name of "democracy" and "free markets". What's more, It's not difficult to invent cosmetic reasons when you've got a compliant communications industry to back you up (think Iraq). That's why a work like this is so important. Sure, it's got flaws-- a sometimes repetitive text, for one. But it does detail an important and largely untold story. The overriding point here and elsewhere is that Americans can still approximate the truth as long as the margins continue to be tolerated.

I was particularly impressed by Mr. Elich's exploration of Western perfidy in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia and its campaign to bring non-aligned Zimbabwe to its knees. His defense of the struggle to preserve socialist Yugoslavia and of Zimbabwe's program of equitable land distribution are powerfully documented and keenly argued. Mr. Elich is clearly a man of the left, and his book challenges misperceptions of important issues where the fate of entire peoples are in the balance.

Martin Luther King noted in 1967 that the Vietnamese people `must see Americans as strange liberators'. In this brilliant and deeply-researched book, investigative journalist Gregory Elich shows how the US state has not changed its spots. He proves this by analysing its actions against Iraq, North Korea, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe.

The US state promotes the `free market' across the world. Elich shows how Honduras, Bangladesh and China, among all too many others, compete in a race to the bottom, each forcing workers to work 14-hour days, 7 days a week.

The US state has committed many war crimes in Iraq, including the organised looting of Iraq's cultural heritage, sponsored by the `American Council for Cultural Policy', a group of dealers and collectors which opposes `retentionist' laws on the export of antiquities.

In 1993 the US state declared that it was retargeting many of its nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union to the DPRK. William Perry, Clinton's Defense Secretary, admitted that he "spent much of the first half of 1994 preparing for war on the Korean peninsula."

After the 1994 Agreement between the USA and the DPRK, the US state broke every single one of its pledges - to provide a light water reactor by 2003, to abandon its aggressive nuclear posture, to recognise the DPRK, to end its embargo of the DPRK's trade, investment and credit, and to provide substitute energy. The European Parliament as usual backed the US state by voting to cancel its contribution to the energy project.

NATO forcibly devolved the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia, carving it up into small, easily-controlled mono-ethnic puppet states, while claiming to defend multi-ethnicity against the Serbs! The US state backed the secessionists. It supported the KLA terrorists. In the first eight months of the NATO occupation, the KLA expelled 350,000 people from Kosovo. NATO created a Kosovo Police Force, composed almost entirely of ex-KLA soldiers, and a Kosovo Protection Corps, which, the UN pointed out, pursued "criminal activities - killings, ill-treatment/torture, illegal policing, abuse of authority, intimidation, breaches of political neutrality and hate-speech."

The US state also supported Croatia's 1991 secessionist war, when its forces expelled Serb civilians and, unreported in the West's media, tortured and killed their prisoners, for example at Camp Lora in Split.

In Zimbabwe in 2002, just 4,500 white farmers still owned 70% of the land. So the government stepped up land reform and ended the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program. In response, Bush, Blair, the IMF, NATO, the EU, and `Non-Governmental Organisations' funded by NATO and EU governments, organised a campaign of sanctions, covert operations, political interference and propaganda lies against Zimbabwe's government.

Yet this government proved popular with the people of Zimbabwe: in 2002 Robert Mugabe won the Presidential elections yet again, by 400,000 votes, in an election the South African Observer Team called legitimate. Then his party ZANU-PF won 2005's parliamentary and Senate elections, elections also deemed fair by independent observers. Mugabe drily noted, "There was no democracy here, no human rights at all until the people of Zimbabwe decided to fight."

This comment is to clarify something R. A. Barricklow wrote in his very nice comment on the book. In his comment, Barricklow mentions "9/11, which was perpretrated by an inside cabal of government puppet masters". As a point of clarification, Barricklow is here expressing his own view. There is nothing in 'Strange Liberators' to suggest that. 'Strange Liberators' is a serious study.

We are living in one of the geatest propaganda eras of all time. There is the pivotal event, 9/11, which was perpretrated by an inside cabal of government puppet masters; indeed the same suit that flushed John & Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and others like them out of the poltical deck. The current deck has been and is stacked against the peoples of the world by a tiny few who now hold the keys to POWER. A corrupt power that Gregory Elich reports to factually, sharply, and succinctly both in method and purpose. He shows a U.S. foreign policy that is completley rational, consistant, and sickenly effective. A policy that supports despicable leaders who lay open their virgin lands, natural resources, honest labor, and small markets to rapaciously corrupted transnational corporations and oligopolist/monopolistic investors. These countries become sycophants of the global free-market(oxymoron) fixed system and are welcomed as pro-West and friendly. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, those countries that truly aspire to be free of corporate personhood and intellectuallly-patented-handcuffs are demonized as anti-american, anti-west. This is because they dare to be an egalitarian society. Ironically, these are the people, like you & me, who want to forge a way out of the corporate suicide noose that those transnational elite power-hungry-addicts have slipped around our living planet. As the author makes clear, the overriding goal of U.S. policy is to make the world ever safer and more profitable for international finance and multinationa/ttransnational corporations. He says that it is nothing short of criminal what awaits the planet & future generations, solely because political leaders prefer to give precedence to maximization of corporate profits. That this purest view would sacrifice the lives of others and the very planet itself simmply because it threatens the right of the wealthy to reap yet more ungodly riches, is beyond comprehension to human beings with heart.
A system that depends on military and economic might to maintain the privelges of the few while sowing death, starvation, poverty, exploitation and ruin for the many/has no right to call itself efficient or even a system that works. Not when, as the author says, those who benefit already pocess more than they will ever need, while crushing the aspirations of billions of people throughout the world, not when corporate greed and corruption threaten our living planet.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!

P.S. "Have you ever considered that we may be on the wrong side?... What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exits? And the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?
- Padme, from Star Wars, Episode 111: Revenge of the Sith