Synthesis: Volume 5

By Shahbaz Fazal

VOLUME 5

Volume five ranges from 2015-17 and looks at the consequences of US-NATO regime change and war on terror policies, the European refugee crisis, Russian intervention in Syria, ISIS’ November 2015 Paris atrocities and President François Hollande’s responses to it. And the utterly dire situation of 26 million Yemeni people – right now. 

Synthesis ends with a summary of the big picture story; the 40-year neoliberal project in the interests of the world’s top 1%. Just before Theresa May calls a snap election for June 2017, that not only denied her the predicted landslide victory, but events led people to make connections between UK’s foreign policies and terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. 

Synthesis is an epic-sized book (202k + 67k in Refs), which is set out in Five Volumes. 

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SYNTHESIS

Synthesis is the story of five escapees from US Guantanamo in Oct. 2004 that unravels through to June, 2017. Over half of the book is the escapees’ unfolding adventure story under Cuban jurisdiction and the various international repercussions that follow. The second half exposes the connections between the war on terror, the 2008 banking crash, the military-industrial complex, and US-NATO regime change policies. All driven by a 40-year neoliberal agenda transferring wealth and power from ordinary people to the top 1%, and corporations. This is an epic-sized book (202k + 67k in Refs), which is set out in Five Volumes. 

Synthesis is bold and provocative. It will inform and enlighten the reader to question everything they’re told, and encourage them to think for themselves. The book mostly uses plain language (some very strong language), and there are two different endings to the five escapees’ story, as well as a third overall ending to the entire big picture story. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shahbaz Fazal
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386212577

Book preview

Re Copyright:

Synthesis is not a copyright book. You are welcome to copy it, print it off, and/or to send it to friends, organisations etc. But please be good enough to acknowledge me as the author. Thank you, for respecting my many years of hard work.

Dedications:

In writing Synthesis, I’ve been informed and inspired by (amongst others): John Pilger, Clive Stafford-Smith, Noam Chomsky, Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Michael Crichton, as well as George Orwell and Robert Tressell. I want to thank George Groom-White, for proof reading and guidance and Caroline Petherick for editing and enhancing the text. Though since then, I’ve added and altered many parts and take full responsibility for my errors.

About the Author:

I’m no spring chicken. Left school at fifteen and worked some 17 years before returning to education, as a mature student. Acquired a sociology degree, followed by social work and teaching qualifications. Worked as a social worker for eight years, before starting to write Synthesis on and off from 2004 – some 13 nears ago. Since then, I’ve worked variously as a builder, community worker, social worker and taxi-driver.

By the same author: [Shahbaz Fazal synthesisbook.com]

Israel-Palestine: who’s the victim?

This is a very brief, fact-based fictional book in six parts. It shows the essential issues at the heart of the Palestine–Israel conflict since 1948. The first two parts are an account of the 2008/09 Israeli Operation Cast Lead. Part Three looks at why the Palestinian people overwhelmingly voted for Hamas in January 2006.

Sections four and five provide updates and an assessment of the 2013, US-sponsored Israel-Palestine peace talks. The last part covers the 2014 Operation Protective Edge – Israel’s latest attempt to kill the Palestinian people’s irrepressible spirit.

This book exposes the big lie – the elephant hanging off a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy; of the claim, Israel, the victim. It is intended to put the other, seldom-heard point of view across to the reader – with a good dose of artistic licence.

Good News – this book can be read under 3 hours!

Synthesis Contents

Volume Five

Chapter 56  The Big Picture

Chapter 57  Regime Change Refugees

Chapter 58  The Three Ts

Chapter 59  Nabucco pipeline – versus Syrian people

Chapter 60  Russian Intervention

Chapter 61  The Gift that Keeps Giving

Chapter 62  Not a War on Terror but Civil Liberties

Chapter 63  Neoliberalism

Chapter 64  End Game – Part One

Chapter 65  End Game – Part Two

Chapter 66  Snap Election

Volume Five

Please ignore the introduction to this Volume,

if you wish to maintain the integrity of the unfolding story.

Volume Five – Chapters 56 to 64: Failure of war on terror to End Game.

Volume five covers the 2015-17 period. The consequences of US-NATO regime change and war on terror policies, the European refugee crisis, the Three Big Ts (trade treaties), Russian intervention in Syria, ISIS’ November 2015 Paris atrocities, and President François Hollande’s responses to it. Last, but not least – the utterly dire situation of 26 million Yemeni people – right now.

It shows how UK premier David Cameron seized the Paris atrocities to ram through a snoopers’ charter, huge increases in military and security spending, and the nuclear-armed Trident system.

Essentially, the war on terror and the banking crash has enabled Western governments to use the politics of fear, to drive their neoliberal agenda.

They’ve been able to blame all the problems caused by austerity and the war on terror on to foreign enemies from Saddam Hussain, Mummar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad to Vladimir Putin, as well as to internal scapegoats from immigrants and refugees to work-shy benefit cheats etc.

The last two chapters are a summary of the entire Synthesis big picture story and specifically, the culmination of a 40-year neoliberal project to dictate the future of humanity, in the interests of the world’s top 1%. If allowed to continue, this will most certainly lead to the end of democracy.

The war on terror, the hysterical Russo-phobia, ever-more pervasive attacks on civil liberties, while the super-rich grow richer – are systematic frontal assaults on dissent and democracy.

Western leaders have learned from China – they don’t need democracy, only a one-party state. This explains why all the mainstream political parties have turned neoliberal today.

As Noam Chomsky has said, ‘the question in essence is: whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved, or threats to be avoided?’ Theresa May unwittingly gave the British people the chance to answer this crucial question, in the June 2017 general election.

Chapter 56: The Big Picture

To round-off the big picture story – my friends, we’re going to be examining some different but connected issues reaching their pinnacle at the end of 2015. A neoliberal project that was started by Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher in the early 1980s; further entrenched by George W Bush and Tony Blair throughout the ‘90s and past the millennium; now being brought to its point of no-return by Barak Obama, David Cameron and Angela Merkel.

Neoliberalism, let me remind you, is an economic theory that says almost anything people need or want is best supplied by the market. That governments shouldn’t be involved in any businesses but remove unnecessary regulations; and because all government spending is a drain on the economy, it must be drastically reduced or privatised. In other words, the market rules.

They define free markets as being free of environmental, health and safety regulations, universal public services, employment protections, and also enable special tax privileges for corporations and investors. Which just happens to serve the best interests of the top 1%.

Neoliberal governments and economists don’t identify themselves as such and the mainstream media avoids using the word. They never describe IMF, World Bank, or right-wing government austerity policies as neoliberal – though it would be very accurate to do so.

Returning to the main issues, let’s start with the 2015 European refugee crisis. That followed Western NATO’s Middle East war on terror and regime change policies – which created ISIS.

That Russia was forced to confront after a year of US and its allies’ air-strikes – more interested in destroying Syria and President Al Assad than ISIS, which grew stronger.

A policy that even the US Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) was highly critical of. General Michael Flynn (former head of DIA) warned in the summer of 2012: ‘The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,’ and that they’re being supported by ‘the West, Gulf Countries and Turkey.’1

(Salafists are Sunni-Muslim, fundamentalists committed to holy war and vehemently opposed to Shia Islam, as well as other religions, atheists etc – anyone that isn’t one of them).2

Flynn’s report forecast ‘dire consequences’ of Al-Qaeda’s growing strength in Iraq and warned of the emergence of ‘an Islamic state, through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria,’ led by Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra Front. But these warnings were ignored.

He told al Jazeera TV in August 2015, it’s wrong to believe the US administration ‘turned a blind eye’ to DIA’s analysis. ‘I think it was a decision. I think it was a wilful decision,’ to allow the Islamic state to be established, and to use the jihadists to ‘isolate the Syrian regime.’3

This also confirms Nafeez Ahmed’s assessment which we learned earlier, that the US (with Saudi support) deliberately created Islamic extremism in order to proclaim a war on terror.

Ahmed argues, Flynn’s comments ‘contradict the official line’ of Western policies on Syria, and expose their ‘secret support for violent extremists abroad,’ while using ‘the threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.’4

Similarly, Charles Shoebridge (former British army and Metropolitan Police counter terrorism expert) points out, the US and UK governments and mainstream media have ‘promoted Syria’s rebels as being moderate, secular and democratic’ – so ‘deserving of the West’s support.’

The DIA report flatly contradicts this and its ‘immense significance,’ has been ‘almost totally ignored’ by the Western media. Which he suggests is due to their own complicity in misleading the public into believing Syria’s rebellion was largely ‘moderate.’5

Shoebridge adds, US and UK in particular, ‘through covert MI6 and CIA work,’ have played a pivotal role in facilitating the ‘vast flow of funds and arms’ to jihadist fighters in Syria.

Regardless of the fact that the ‘Free Syrian Army’ was actually ‘allied with ISIS, until it attacked them at the end of 2013.’ While today, the so called ‘moderate’ rebels supported by the US and UK are ’allied with Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate al Nusra’ and other jihadist groups.6

Simultaneously, my Western friends, you’ve largely been fed a very one-sided narrative – from some highly dubious sources.

The mainstream media (and the UN) have been using sources like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, though it was exposed as long ago as December 2011, as ‘an absurd propaganda front’ operated mainly by Rami Abdul Rahman, from a bedroom in Coventry.

Even the New York Times revealed in April 2013, Rahman receives funding from the EU and another European Country ‘that he declines to identify’ – but almost certainly the UK. As he has had direct access to the Foreign Secretary and meetings at the London Foreign Office.7

So it’s perfectly clear that US-NATO and their Saudi-led allies have supported Islamic terrorists from Afghanistan in 1978 to Chechnya and Georgia through the 1990s (and beyond),8 Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and relentlessly against the Syrian people and government since 2011.

Given this double-dealing and the one-sided truths of their mainstream media, most people are somewhat confused as to what its all about. Especially when Obama and Cameron tell them:

We support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIS. We don’t like ISIS, but its been supported by Saudi Arabia, which is now supporting us in bombing ISIS. We don’t like President Assad. We support the fight against him, but not ISIS, which is also fighting against him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against ISIS.

And all this was started by us invading Iraq to drive out the terrorists who weren’t there until we went to drive them out.9

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We’ll also be looking at US trade deals – the Three Big Ts, that will effect some 1.6 billion people in 52 countries and encompass two-thirds of global GDP. These are currently being negotiated in secret from the general public and their elected representatives.

If successful, they will come to enshrine economic laws and political doctrines of an irreversible neoliberal agenda that will increasingly consign democracy to the dustbin of history.

Juxtaposed against Jeremy Corbyn – representing the silenced voices that have always rejected this neoliberal agenda, and imperialist NATO policies. Who’s alternative ideas are finding favour with ordinary people – sick to death of austerity policies, while the super-rich grow richer.

To help you understand the big picture here, my terrestrial friends, I’m going to be using the UK example to illustrate the diametrically opposed ideas in play.

The March 2003 Iraq invasion is now almost universally agreed to have been disastrous, though it’s UK cheerleaders continue to profit. Every current cabinet minister and editor of a national newspaper (excluding Piers Morgan of Daily Mirror), heads of TV channels, academia and professions supported this illegal war; as did the big chiefs of FTSE 100 companies.10

To say nothing of the grinning Cheshire-cat – now sitting on a nest-egg of over £50 million in US-dollars, Euros, Israeli shekels and pounds sterling, for services to neoliberalism.

There are strong correlations between the advocates of the Iraq war, American exceptionalism, the neocons, support for Israeli-Zionism and the pro-corporations neoliberal agenda that serves the best interests of the top 1%.

The top 1%, is actually 0.0001% – or around 300 people worldwide, mostly white, Western men, born into wealth and power. The point at issue is the immorality of this tiny number of people dictating their agenda – to the detriment of 99.9999% of humanity. 11

These people are also firmly wedded to the nature side of the nature/nurture debate. That people are born good guys or bad guys – it’s Us and Them. Nothing to do with cause and effect; people’s socio-political circumstances; and there’s absolutely no other way of looking at it.

Jeremy Corbyn understands and rejects this entire neoliberal agenda in favour of a more equal and fairer, multi-polar world – where the accident of birth or privilege are not the determining factor – but all humanity sharing mother earth and its precious resources with equal dignity.

Over the following