Tag: War Films

The American Occupation of Iran 1941 – 1978: Iran as a pawn of British and US self-interests

Carlton Meyer, “The American Occupation of Iran 1941 – 1978” (Tales of the American Empire, 13 March 2020)

So much history is covered in this short 8-minute documentary that it bears watching at least a couple of times – though a few questions might be raised at the end of the video. In 1941, broke and needing oil badly for its armed forces, Britain decided to invade Iran to seize the country’s oil rather than pay royalties to the Iranians on oil production. Claiming to be neutral, the US actually provided military aid to allow both Britain and the Soviet Union to invade the country and then partition it and seize Iranian assets. Although Iran put up a fight, its armed forces were overwhelmed. The ruling Shah (Reza Shah Pahlavi) at the time was deposed and his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi agreed to replace him as a puppet ruler of a virtual American colony.

Under the 1941 Lend Lease Act, the US government provided military assistance to the British and the Soviets while at the same time the US public had to accept rationing of food and fuel, wage freezes and increased income taxation. Housing construction was halted and automobile factories had to switch over to producing war materiel. 30,000 US troops were sent to occupy Iran and Iran’s government had to accept Americans in major positions. Even after World War II ended, when most US troops returned home, the Iranian government under Mohammed Reza Pahlavi still relied on US advisors. Most of the country’s oil profits went to British and US oil companies, and the Shah frittered much of whatever oil profits came to Iran on buying US weapons and equipment (and setting up a nascent nuclear manufacturing program) and on enriching himself and members of his family. The US helped Mohammed Reza Pahlavi establish SAVAK, a combined secret police / domestic security / intelligence agency, which later gained notoriety among the Iranian public for torturing and executing people who opposed the Pahlavi government.

There are a few errors in Meyer’s presentation: he refers to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company as the Anglo-American Oil Company (they were actually two different companies, the former being the forerunner of BP and the latter the forerunner of Esso) and appears to insinuate that Germany invaded Poland in 1939 after the Soviets had done so (in fact Germany invaded Poland first, then the Soviets did so). Mention of Iran nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets in the early 1950s under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh might have a few viewers scratching their heads as to what Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his US advisors were doing that Mossadegh would dare to nationalise a British company, as it was after this nationalisation that the British and the Americans would work together to depose Mossadegh and install a new government that would not upset London and which would allow the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to continue keeping much of Iran’s oil wealth in its own coffers.

On the other hand, I do not have an issue with Meyer calling Iran’s current government a democracy as Iran does hold regular Presidential and parliamentary elections, however imperfect and corrupted the country’s government and political institutions may be. Indeed, Iran’s politics seems to be no more and no less “democratic” than those of Western nations where leaders are more likely to be hand-picked by their parties or other interested organisations, be they local or foreign, and presented to voters as the only choices rather than the voting electorate itself being allowed to put forward credible candidates for leadership positions.

In the last few minutes of the video, Meyer quickly updates viewers on the events that led to the downfall of the Shah in 1979. Meyer probably could have made much more of US arrogance and failure to read the mood of the Iranian general public and the widespread dissatisfaction at all levels of society with the Pahlavi royal family’s corruption and the increasing violence of SAVAK. Viewers will note the parallel between the US ignorance of the changing reality on the ground in Iran, as people joined protests and mass demonstrations against the Shah’s rule, and the current US bewilderment and panic at events in many parts of the world – in China (Hong Kong and Xinjiang), Russia, Syria and Venezuela among others – where US-supported grifters like Alexei Navalny (Russia) and Juan Guaido (Venezuela) have failed to rally public support behind them to lead a coup against governments the US desires to replace with puppet regimes. This parallel and similar parallels between the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – both coups involved violent mobs paid by US agencies to support overthrowing those leaders – surely make 20th-century Iranian history worth studying. A third parallel may be observed between the impoverishment of the US general public during World War II and the current impoverishment of Americans, the degradation of US national infrastructures and the evisceration of US culture, education, healthcare and other social services to feed an insatiable psychopathic appetite among US elites that celebrates violence, brutality and destruction in the service of empire.

The images used in the video are old and unfortunately the later part of the video uses photographic portraits of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi while Meyer does a general survey of that Shah’s rule – surely some old film footage of the Shah’s excesses might have been available. These are perhaps minor points in what is a general historical sketch of the vicious nature of both the US and British empires and their elites in a nation that has too much of a resource that both empires still need.

Entotsuya Peroo: a little man’s adventures exposing the devastation and brutality of war

Yoshitsugu Tanaka, “Entotsuya Peroo” (1930)

Known also as “Chimney Sweep Peroo”, this unusual animated film made in 1930 relies on silhouette or shadow animation to tell its tale of Peroo, a city chimney sweep who one day saves a pigeon from being eaten and is rewarded with a magic egg. After that incident, Peroo finds himself in one situation after another: after causing the death of a prince in a train accident, he is arrested and sentenced to be hanged but gets a last-minute reprieve; reunited with his magic egg, he returns to his tower residence but is caught up in a war that devastates his country. At first eagerly participating in it by stealing a cannon and using it to blow up soldiers from his own and the enemy’s sides, he is caught up in a bomb explosion himself. Managing to survive and with his egg intact, he is later taken on a trip through the destroyed countryside. The film concludes with Peroo having settled on a farm with a wife, Peroo himself tilling the soil.

Without the benefit of English-language subtitles, I was only able to follow the general outline of the plot which is vaguely similar in its structure to Jaroslav Hasek’s novel “The Good Soldier Svejk” in which a similar “little man” is caught up in the events of World War I and through possibly feigned insolence and stupidity exposes the futility of war and the incompetence and corrupt bureaucracy of his superiors in a long series of comic episodes. The chief attraction of “Entotsuya Peroo” is its use of shadow cut-out characters to tell the story against similarly cut-out shadow buildings, railway lines, trees and other background objects. Some of the animation is well done, especially in scenes where some perspective (distance perspective and atmospheric perspective) may be called for in what would otherwise be a completely two-dimensional black-and-white world but it does look quite crude. The film appears to be the work of university students enrolled in film and animation studies so the limitations of the use of shadow play animation and the vagueness of the plot in parts may be due to the film having had a small budget and the film-makers learning their craft by trial and error, among other things.

One thing for sure about this film is that it is definitely not for very young children to see: the scenes of war are not only very repetitive but they are horrific and the section of the film where Peroo travels by train through the countryside and sees utterly destroyed cities and ravaged farmland and forest is long and depressing to watch. By the end of the film Peroo is working on his farm so presumably he has learned something from his past actions. Perhaps at a later time when English-language subtitling or an English-language voice-over narration for the film becomes available, I may watch this film again to find out more about what the student film-makers had intended to say through Peroo’s adventures.

Conquering the Middle East: overview of the US plan to destabilise seven nations in five years

Carlton Meyer, “Conquering the Middle East” (Tales of the American Empire, 2 April 2021)

This episode in Carlton Meyer’s long-running “Tales of the American Empire” series revolves around a long-term military policy that the US had developed some time in the 1990s to invade seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa in the space of five years, overthrow their governments and install new puppet governments friendly to the US and Israel. This policy was communicated to retired 4-star US general Wesley Clark in the weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 by a colleague, also a 4-star general, who later showed Clark a classified memo from the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listing the seven countries targeted for invasion: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Clark later spoke to Democracy Now! about the memo and the plan in 2007. By then, Iraq had been invaded and its government replaced by one amenable to the Americans (with President Saddam Hussein having been executed on 30 December 2006), Lebanon had been invaded by Israel and Somalia by Ethiopia, and Sudan was starting to break up after civil war ended in January 2005 and the southern part of the country that would later become independent South Sudan in 2011 had its autonomy restored. Syria would soon be hit by a devastating and prolonged drought that, together with the burden of coping with refugees from Iraq and Palestine, would strain the country’s economy and political stability.

Meyer’s short film connects the US policy with Israel’s notorious Yinon Plan, formed in 1982, to expand Israeli territory as far east as Baghdad and as far west to the Nile River. According to the film the strategy was supported by the US oil industry to grab new oil-fields and by the US military-industrial complex which makes huge profits from prolonged warfare with no end. The film does not say who else would have benefited from this policy though it does mention that in the case of destabilising Syria from 2011 onwards with a de facto army made up of ISIS and other jihadi mercenaries, the US struck a deal with Turkey: Turkey would receive Syrian territory along its border with Syria if it would supply arms and military and transport equipment.

The film follows the fate of each of the seven countries on the list in the order they were to be invaded and destabilised, and their governments ousted and replaced. The summaries are short but succinct: the actions of the US and the West in undermining the countries on the list are shocking, with the use of jihadi mercenaries (many recruited through social media) as a de facto army in Syria; infiltration of political, economic and cultural institutions in several of these countries; US sanctions targeting Syria and Hezbollah causing a liquidity crisis in Lebanon’s banks in 2019; the NATO invasion of Libya in 2011 resulting in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi and chaos in that country that continues to the present; US encouragement and support for Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2006, leading to war for several years; and the splitting of Sudan into two nations and the replacement of former President Omar al Bashir through a coup with a president acceptable to the West. Of the seven target countries, Syria and Iran have proven more resilient than the others, with Syrian President Bashar al Assad still in power in Syria due to his leadership and strong public and military support for him along with help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in pushing back and defeating ISIS-allied jihadi forces; and Iran overcoming Color Revolution attempts that took place over 2017-2018 and 2019-2020. The policy of destabilising these nations still remains in place.

With the accession of Joe Biden to the US Presidency in January 2021 and the installation of Anthony Blinken as US Secretary of State, the policy has roared back into action as a virtual centrepiece of the Biden Administration’s Middle Eastern / North African foreign policy with US forces carrying out a bombing raid on Syrian territory along the Iraqi border one month into Biden’s presidency.

The film serves as a good introduction to current US foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa, and to the recent histories of some of the countries on the US kill list that have been invaded and wrecked. Viewers need to do their own research to get a better understanding of the enormity of the destruction and suffering the US and the West have caused to these nations though as the film by necessity has to cover several countries quickly and the coverage is either too broad or so selective as to be almost cherry-picking. The events described in the film need to be seen in a larger context: after mention of the Yinon Plan, Israel drops out of the film’s target sights, even its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 is glossed over. Viewers will get no sense of the Biden Administration as being beholden to the US military-industrial complex, Wall Street, the media corporations, the intelligence community, foreign governments and their Capitol Hill lobbyists, and other Deep State players with their own self-serving agendas. The eager participation of Britain, France, other states in the European Union, and other Western nations in infiltrating and weakening nations like Lebanon, Libya, Syria and others – in Britain’s case, by running huge propaganda and disinformation campaigns and creating organisations (actually fronts for British companies founded by ex-intel agents) that embed themselves in target nations’ security and justice institutions – go unmentioned.

It becomes clear that the West no longer has the moral authority, if it ever did, to insist that other nations must abide by its interpretation of the international rules-based order when Western nations clearly act like vultures in picking on nations much weaker than themselves.

All flash and style but little substance in “Occupation: Rainfall”

Luke Sparke, “Occupation: Rainfall” (2020)

Here’s a brisk and flashy science fiction action film done on a small budget with plenty of Australian bravado and no little ambition to prove that the Australian film industry can compete with the big guns in Hollywood. The film is the sequel to the even lower-budgeted “Occupation” in which Kali aliens first landed in Australia and humans began forming resistance cells to fight them off. The action in “… Rainfall” takes place a number of years later after intense war between the Kali and the humans has left Sydney a smouldering wreck, the aliens having done their best to obliterate decades of bad urban planning and the humans living in the sewers like rats. Refugees, human and Kali alike (some Kali having decided to become allies of the humans), have come into the sewers but the extent to which they can live in peace varies, with some humans being more accommodating than others. The Australian military command discover from some aliens that the Kali enemy in the skies is planning a final offensive and is also seeking a mystery object hidden somewhere near the former US military base known as Pine Gap, in central Australia. The humans decide to evacuate everyone out to refuge in the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney and to send a team out to Pine Gap to find the object before the Kali enemy does.

The film then splits into two parallel plots, one in which the Sydneysiders just manage to reach their Blue Mountains haven, having narrowly escaped being blown up along with what remains of Sydney … amazing that the substandard buildings in Sydney managed to resist years of bombardment by aliens wielding far superior technology and firepower than what can be mustered by humans … and the other being a good cop / bad cop plot in which human Matt Simmons (Dan Ewing) and the Kali alien nicknamed “Gary” (Lawrence Makoare) must put aside their mutual suspicions and prejudices in order to work together and succeed in their mission to reach Pine Gap and discover what it is that the enemy wants. With stowaway Marcus (Trystan Go) in tow, Matt and Gary fight the Kali in an improbable aerial battle and take on a huge alien spider before finding refuge with a group of humans living in a country settlement. They meet the Bartletts (Temuera Morrison and Izzy Stevens) who decide to accompany the trio on their mission to Pine Gap.

In the meantime the Sydney refugees must contend with their own internal quarrels between Wing Commander Hayes (Daniel Gillies), who rules the Blue Mountains haven like a fascist leader and who has sent all the aliens into underground cells where they are starved, tortured and experimented on by people loyal to Hayes, and the more compassionate humans led by Amelia (Jet Tranter), the older sister of Marcus, and Abraham (David Roberts).

The plots run at a brisk pace and are very straightforward in execution with no twists, save for one where Matt, Gary and their followers reach Pine Gap and discover two loopy American misfits (Ken Jeong and Jason Isaacs) running the place. There are continuity issues – how are Matt, Gary and their team able to reach Pine Gap in a matter of two or three days through rugged countryside even with the help of Kali alien horse substitutes? – and both plots are heavy on delivering moral messages about tolerance, how adversaries become brothers in arms through mutual suffering, being humane to all and layering on the identity politics but light on character development and battle strategy. The misfits provide comic relief to the intensity of the film’s actions and main characters although the jive stuff sometimes holds up the action. Fighting sequences have all the reality of video-game battles and Hollywood fights in which the good guys are always vastly outnumbered 10 to 1 by the bad guys yet when the dust settles the good guys are the one standing tall among a heap of fallen baddies. At least the actors put in solid and straight-faced performances with little histrionics in roles that are little more than stereotypes.

While visually impressive, and at times breath-taking in the scale of its sets and the use of Australian landscapes to give the film a distinct style, “… Rainfall” turns out to be an ordinary flick in its story-telling with an ensemble cast not given very much to do. At least the film has plenty of breezy energy and gusto, and barely bogs down for very long.

The Colonization of Haiti in 1915: Haiti as prototype for US occupation and treatment of other nations in the post-9/11 period

Carlton Meyer, “The Colonization of Haiti in 1915” (Tales of the American Empire, 11 December 2020)

In this short video, running just under 12 minutes, TotAE narrator / director Carlton Meyer excels in giving yet another history lesson of the violence and chaos the US has been leaving around the world over the past 150 or so years in its pursuit of material profit, power and influence. In this episode Meyer outlines the history of US invasion, occupation and devastation of Haiti, beginning with US naval harassment of the small, impoverished nation in 1857 which escalated to US Marines arriving in Port-au-Prince in 1914 and taking US$500,000 worth of gold from the country’s sole commercial bank the Banque Nationale d’Haiti and transferring it to the National City Bank of New York’s vaults – in effect, assuming control of the country’s finances. The following year, US President Woodrow Wilson sent 330 Marines to occupy Port-au-Prince, ostensibly to protect American and foreign business interests. (The reality was that the US saw the German business community in Haiti as a threat to American business interests: the Germans had intermarried with the Haitian elites and as a result were entitled to own land in Haiti which other foreigners could not do.) The US promptly began controlling Haiti’s administrative and financial institutions, took over the country’s customs houses, installed a new Haitian President and compelled him to accept and impose a new Haitian constitution that allowed foreigners to own land in the country. Haitian citizens were conscripted into virtual slave labour forces to work on public projects such as building roads and other infrastructure for the benefit of American businesses.

For a good part of the video Meyer focuses on Haitian Cacos (rebel) resistance to US rule and the US Marines’ slaughter of rebels armed with knives, machetes and not many rifles, and the severe punishment and killing the Marines inflicted on villages where rebellions broke out. One major Cacos leader, Charlemagne Péralte, was assassinated in 1919 by US Sergeant Herman Hanneken and his corporal after both had secretly been led to Péralte’s camp. Péralte’s body was taken by the Americans, tied to a door and the corpse was photographed; the photograph was later publicised throughout Haiti to discourage rebellion (in fact, it had the opposite effect and galvanised even more opposition). For his action against Péralte and other exploits in Haiti, Hanneken was decorated and promoted to Second Lieutenant.

After Péralte’s death and Hanneken’s promotion, the video glosses over much of the rest of Haiti’s occupation by US forces and how Haitians resisted the US presence in other ways. Meyer is not so good at detailing the non-military avenues by which Haitians fought back against the American occupation, including reaching out to people in the US, and black American people in particular, for help and support. As time passed and Woodrow Wilson was replaced by subsequent Presidents, the US government attitude towards its occupation of Haiti changed to the extent that eventually the Americans left the country in 1934 – though not before changing Haiti’s education system drastically to emphasise vocational training (in effect, treating Haitians as nothing more than robots or a pool of slave labour) and breaking the economic and political power of the German-Haitian community. The Americans continued to control Haiti’s finances however and this control surely was significant in prolonging Haiti’s poverty and suppressing its development economically and politically.

The video works best as an introduction to Haiti’s history from 1900 on, and as an example of the way in which the US invades and occupies other nations whose resources are much coveted by American corporations and elites, and the brutal American treatment of those nations’ peoples who resist occupation. Had the video drilled down even deeper into how the occupying Marines behaved in Haiti while serving there, it would have shown very clearly parallels between their unbecoming behaviour and the behaviour of US soldiers in other parts of the world (in Japan, South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan for example) where they have been stationed. Viewers come away with the depressing realisation that the US never learns anything from previous experiences of occupying nations, bringing destruction, violence and chaos, treating the people as racial inferiors born to serve others, and leaving a mess in the form of environmental destruction and institutions such as Americanised school systems that ignore the people’s real needs but prepare them only for manual slave labour. In the case of Haiti, viewers will wonder whether the country serves as a dumping ground for American desires to reinstate the culture and economy of Confederate America, and also as a target to thump to show black Americans and other minority groups in the US that they should know their place in society … as an inferior servant class.

The Covert War on Syria: how the West cynically wages war indirectly against nations targeted for regime change

Carlton Meyer, “The Covert War on Syria” (Tales of the American Empire, 27 November 2020)

Sequel to an earlier installment “The Plot to Destroy Syria” on Carlton Meyer’s Tales of the American Empire Youtube channel, this episode may not be an exhaustive account of the seven-year war that the US and its allies waged indirectly against Syria but it is a good introduction into the type of secret war of regime change that the West currently conducts against nations it disapproves of and the role that Western news media propaganda play to capture and maintain the support of the Western general public behind such wars.

After the successful overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddhafi’s government in Libya in 2011 (actually, even while NATO was attacking Libya, the US government was already moving terrorists and weapons from Benghazi in eastern Libya to Syria), the US turned its attention to Syria to incite violence in parts of Syria that could be escalated into all-out war. Getting public support for an invasion of Syria however was going to be difficult; Western publics were shocked at NATO’s use of a no-fly zone over Libya to start bombing the country and the Russians and Chinese on the UN Security Council were not to be fooled twice into supporting a no-fly zone over Syria. Under the then Obama administration, the US began encouraging foreigners through social media platforms and propaganda demonising the Syrian government as a repressive dictatorship to travel to Syria and support various disaffected groups (unemployed farmers made so by privatisation of land and utilities, Iraqi war refugees) in fighting Damascus. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Middle Eastern nations in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood began arming and funding such mercenaries, and introduced them to extremist Wahhabi and Salafi ideologies, with the result that groups preaching extreme forms of Islam and glorying in the executions of even other Muslims in addition to non-Muslims grew up in the region.

The episode is rather selective in what it emphasises during the West’s cynical conduct of the war from 2011 to 2018. Very little is said about Israel’s involvement in the war, in providing medical aid and patching up wounded terrorists in hospital, even though that country had an interest in retaining and annexing the Golan Heights. On the other hand, Meyer draws a fairly detailed link from Turkey’s support for oil tankers illegally taking Syrian oil and transporting it to Turkey to the shoot-down of a Russian jet fighter by jihadists in late 2015 (not long after Russia began assisting the Syrian Arab Army at Damascus’ request), the subsequent Russian wreckage of the Turkish economy, Turkey’s refusal to accept any more refugees fleeing the conflict and the aborted July 2016 coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The episode takes a detour to explain the rise of the White Helmets as a fake humanitarian aid organisation and supports its explanation with an excerpt of a Q&A session in which Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett sets a questioner right by detailing Western news media’s failure to adequately cover the Middle East by putting correspondents on the ground to get first-hand evidence.

Maps, photographs and excerpts of interviews are used to illustrate Meyer’s narration and the result is a detailed work that should be viewed as both an introduction into the current way Western nations try to overthrow governments of sovereign nations, preferring stealth and the cynical use of these nations’ citizens and foreign mercenaries to do the fighting; and the role propaganda has to play in convincing even educated people capable of knowing better to believe in false narratives about Syrian President Bashar al Assad being a dictator and about the Syrian public wanting to get rid of him. At the end of the episode, using economist / academic / analyst Jeffrey Sachs as a sort of mouthpiece (though what Sachs says is very much his own opinion), Meyer makes a case for the US to get all its troops out of Syria, give up trying to overthrow Assad and leave Syria and Syrians alone to deal with their problems and start reconstructing the country.

Viewers need to do their own research if they want to learn more. A 14-minute film, good and detailed as it is, can only be the start of the journey into understanding Syria and recent Syrian history.

China Will Not Invade Taiwan: why does the West insist otherwise?

Carlton Meyer, “China Will Not Invade Taiwan” (Tales of the American Empire, 18 September 2020)

In this video essay, narrator / director Carlton Meyer examines how a supposed Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not benefit China at all and would ruin that nation, by comparing the logistics that would be involved in such an invasion with the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, in 1944. Meyer quotes some impressive statistics in those landings and adds that Taiwan itself is impressively armed and able to defend itself. He looks at current Chinese naval and other military capabilities and finds, among other things, that China would need at least 6 million fighting personnel to mount a successful invasion of Taiwan, with 2 million fighters in the latter’s armed forces. On the historical military front, Meyer waxes in great detail – he is clearly at home as a military historian as he pulls in facts and figures from battles fought during World War II and afterwards to demonstrate how difficult a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be for both nations.

In fact as Meyer observes, China depends on Taiwan to supply semiconductors and other raw materials for its own high-tech industries, and tourists and business people from both countries visit one another’s territories. Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait want peace and have no desire for conflict. While Beijing regards Taiwan as part of China, it seems happy to allow Taiwan to run its political, business and social affairs, and not to intervene in Taiwanese affairs.

The real issue, which Meyer deals with rather quickly and not in much depth, is why the US and the West continue to insist through MSM propaganda that China is keen on invading Taiwan and that Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by Chinese military build-up, despite the fact that for over 70 years at least Beijing has never lifted a finger to send fighter jets or warships to its small island neighbour. Given that the US surrounds China with military bases in countries as far-flung as Japan and South Korea on one side, and Afghanistan and some parts of Central Asia on the other, talking up the possibility of conflict in East Asia justifies continued US military presence in its client states – and continued US military presence in client states enables US intel agencies stationed in those bases to spy on China and Taiwan, and embed paid agents in organisations in those countries to act as regime-change agents (as has been done in Hong Kong over the past several years) to try to get rid of politicians and governments perceived to be hostile to US attempts to throw its weight around and treat them as its inferiors.

Meyer concludes that if on the other hand China and the US ended up fighting each other, the Taiwanese most likely would back China to defeat the US. On that note, the film ends as viewers face the uncomfortable truth that it is the US that wants war with China – and cynically might try to use Taiwan and its clients Japan and South Korea as the battleground.

The Strange Tale of the SS Mayaguez: an example of US military arrogance and bungling resulting in needless tragedy

Carlton Meyer, “The Strange Tale of the SS Mayaguez” (Tales of the American Empire, 4 September 2020)

As an example of US military arrogance and incompetence resulting in unnecessary tragedy that could have had more serious long-term consequences for the world, the May 1975 SS Mayaguez incident would have been hard to beat in the pre-9/11 world. Since the World Trade Center attacks in September 2001, this incident is increasingly becoming a minor footnote in the long and continuing history of US military, political, economic and social decline and decay.

In May 1975, the US cargo ship SS Mayaguez, travelling from Hong Kong to Thailand and having picked up classified US materials from Saigon on the way – the US having just recently evacuated all its diplomatic staff from that city in early 1975 after the Communists claimed victory in the Vietnam War – passed very close to Poulo Wai island in Cambodian territorial waters and was captured by Khmer Rouge forces. The then US President Gerald Ford was notified of the ship’s capture and the US National Security Council met to discuss the incident. The US government determined to free the SS Mayaguez by force and sent an aircraft carrier and two destroyers to Koh Tang Island where the SS Mayaguez crew were supposedly being held hostage. So began a series of actions in which US Marines invaded Koh Tang Island only to be met by tremendous Khmer Rouge gunfire. In the ensuing battle, many Americans were killed, three were captured and over 100 Cambodians were killed. The three US Marines who were captured were later executed by the Khmer Rouge.

As Carlton Meyer’s matter-of-fact voice-over narration informs viewers, the SS Mayaguez crew were actually being held away from Koh Tang Island and were released unharmed by the Khmer Rouge to one of the US destroyers sent to Cambodia. The release of the SS Mayaguez crew and the recovery of the ship were hailed by the Ford administration as a successful rescue in spite of the actual bungled rescue attempt, the senseless killing and the fact that the Khmer Rouge had been planning all along to release the crew back to the Americans after checking the cargo on the SS Mayaguez.

The mini-documentary is very detailed in its retelling of the incident though it barely has much time investigating why the US government decided to invade Koh Tang Island and blast its way through to the captured ship and crew rather than use diplomacy to negotiate the release of the SS Mayaguez. The film points to the general political and military context of the time: the US had just suffered a major military defeat and humiliation by a minnow nation, and Gerald Ford had been in power as US President for a few months and needed a victory that would enhance his reputation and tenure. The film also asks what might have been in the cargo that had been picked up in Saigon: did the cargo include sensitive military recordings indicating US surveillance of Khmer Rouge and other Cambodian communications? Another issue is why the SS Mayaguez sailed so close to Poulo Wai and why it was not flying the US flag at the time. Was the captain merely incompetent or was he under orders at the time?

I’d have liked to know whether the brilliant minds who thought up the reckless rescue plan and decided to send the Marines to Koh Tang Island were reprimanded in any way and promoted horizontally rather than vertically upwards but the film does not say. The long-term impacts and consequences of the SS Mayaguez incident are not covered in the film either. One significant result was that the US was later forced by Thailand to remove all its combat troops from Thai soil in 1976 after the Thai government learned that in spite of its refusal to allow US forces to use a military base in Thailand to launch the invasion of Koh Tang Island, the US went ahead and started the invasion from the base anyway. Relations between Cambodia and the US soured to the extent that any Westerners found in Cambodia were presumed to be US spies and ended up being tortured, forced to make false confessions and then executed.

The film provides a good general survey of the Mayaguez incident. Viewers wanting a more specific understanding are directed to the Wikipedia article about the incident.

The 2014 American Coup in Ukraine: textbook example of how the US invades and makes over other nations

Carlton Meyer, “The 2014 American Coup in Ukraine” (Tales of the American Empire, 21 August 2020)

A very timely release in Carlton Meyer’s Tales of the American Empire series of short videos on US imperialism around the globe, this film reminds viewers of the history of Ukraine in the 20th century and how after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 Ukraine became a new battleground between the West and Russia in a new Cold War as the US and NATO sought to absorb Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics into their spheres of neoliberal political and economic influence, and extend their military power right up to (and beyond) Russian borders. A very brief account of how Ukraine acquired its territory and borders in the 20th century, with Crimea being added in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, supposedly to demonstrate Soviet solidarity, and a short ethno-demographic survey of Ukraine are given to set the historical context. In the 1990s, the US established various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Eastern European nations and Ukraine, many of them funded by US billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation or by the National Endowment for Democracy among other donors. In Ukraine, these NGOs became instrumental during the Maidan Revolution that took place in late 2013 / early 2014, culminating in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

A US government official, Victoria Nuland, the Under-Secretary of State for Europe under Secretary of State John Kerry, is singled out in the video for her role in fomenting unrest, rebellion and even the violence of the Maidan Revolution. The core of the video is given over to a speech she gave at a press conference in Washington DC in December 2013 in which she happily admits that US$5 billion was spent backing the Maidan Revolution. A phone call she made to US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in which she expresses her preference for Arseny Yatsenyuk to be Prime Minister in a post-Yanukovych government (“Yatso is our guy”) and pours scorn on the European Union (“Fuck the EU”) later became public.

The February 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych’s government led to political and economic difficulties for Ukraine. Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk fought for the right to use the Russian language in public forums, leading to the Ukrainian government invading their regions and starting a civil war that resulted in Kiev’s military humiliation some months later (and the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014). Crimea voted to become independent of Ukraine and to apply to rejoin Russia. Narrator Meyer mentions that the 23,000 Russian troops present in Crimea at the time of its referendum were there as part of a treaty signed by Russia and Ukraine in 1997 allowing up to 25,000 Russian troops to be stationed in Sevastopol and other parts of Crimea as the Crimean Parliament saw fit. Since civil war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia has steadily decreased the amount of natural gas transiting Ukraine to Western Europe and built alternate pipeline networks elsewhere (such as Nordstream I and II in the Baltic Sea) to supply gas to Germany; at the same time, Ukraine is being forced to pay market prices for natural gas from Russia, prices the country can ill afford to pay. Meyer could have said that under President Petro Poroshenko (2014 – 2019), political and economic corruption has increased in Ukraine at the same time that living standards have fallen to the extent that Ukraine has now become the second poorest nation in Europe.

The general information given is accurate and blame can be laid fairly and squarely on Victoria Nuland, John Kerry and others within the US government under President Barack Obama (2008 – 2016) for the instability and continuing crisis and plundering of Ukraine’s wealth by US and Ukrainian elites alike. Special mention is made of former US Senator John McCain and his role in talking up war against Russia. (Fortunate it is indeed that brain cancer finished off McCain in August 2018 before he could live to see his dream come true, even though he escaped justice for all the harm he has done to the world.)

As an introduction to the troubled history of post-1991 Ukraine, this video is good though already it is turning out quite dated: it makes no mention of Poroshenko’s presidency or of his replacement by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor and comedian. Curiously nothing is said about US Senator and 2020 Presidential candidate Joe Biden and his ties to Ukraine through his son Hunter who used to be a Board Director of Burisma Holdings, an energy company with a licence to drill for oil and natural gas in parts of eastern Ukraine. That perhaps is a story to be told another time. What is clear though is that, not for the first time or the last, the US has intervened in another country’s affairs to the extent of throwing out a legitimately elected (if incompetent) government and replacing it with one of its own choosing opposed by the victim country’s citizens, with the result of political instability and chaos, and economic ruin.

The Incident at Benghazi: a good summary of an ambitious diplomat’s career bites off more than it can chew

Carlton Meyer, “The Incident at Benghazi” (31 July 2020)

As short reports go, this one on the lynching death of US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens by terrorists in Benghazi, eastern Libya, in September 2012 is a real eye-opener which all but leaves viewers hanging off a cliff (figuratively of course but it sure feels real) as it concludes with Hillary Clinton as US State Secretary before a Congressional hearing in 2015 denying her involvement in the trafficking of weapons and jihadists to Libya from the Middle East (and beyond) to overthrow the Gadhafi government in late 2011 and then from Libya to Syria once Colonel Gadhafi was dead and gone. From the get-go, this film gets stuck into business: Chris Stevens is revealed as having volunteered to participate in overthrowing the Libyan government in 2011; he travels to Libya secretly on a Greek cargo ship with CIA help and starts directing operations in Benghazi to bring illegal supplies of weapons into Libya and to coordinate jihadist attacks on the Libyan army. After the Libyan government’s downfall, Stevens becomes US ambassador to Libya and moves to Tripoli to oversee the shipment of weapons to Syria to bring down that nation’s legitimate government. In September 2012, Stevens goes to the Benghazi consulate – revealed as not an actual consulate but more like two sets of buildings put together into one compound – where he and other Americans are surprised by terrorists who bomb the compound, capture Stevens and take him away. He is later found in a dreadful state by local Libyan people who take him to a hospital where he dies.

Contrary to the MSM view of Stevens as a hero, Stevens is revealed to be as much a criminal as others including Hillary Clinton in organising the overthrow of the Libyan government and then targeting the Syrian government for overthrow. When details of this elaborate plan, known as Operation Timber Sycamore and operated under CIA auspices, become known, arms contractor Marc Turi who had been selling arms to Qatar (which then supplied these arms to jihadis in Libya) is blamed and charged with illegally supplying weapons to Libya. The charges against him are later dropped in the dying days of US President Barack Obama’s second administration in 2016 when the case against points towards Hillary Clinton’s involvement and her use of an unsecured mail server to conduct government business.

The video does a good job of covering Chris Stevens’ criminal participation in the US government and CIA plot to overthrow Colonel Gadhafi and bring down Africa’s most prosperous country. Where it goes awry in trying to bite off more than it can chew in just under 11 minutes is when it gets bogged down in Clinton’s Congressional hearing where she is questioned by US Senator Rand Paul. After this little episode the video ends very abruptly leaving viewers wondering what actually came out of these hearings, other than that Clinton somehow escaped jail-time and was able to start campaigning for the US Presidency in 2016.

A much longer documentary is needed to cover Chris Stevens’ career as “US ambassador to Libya”, in particular how he used his post as a diplomat as a cover for helping to destroy Libya and then Syria, and how ultimately the US government in its own way abandoned him and others at the Benghazi compound by not properly securing it and thus enabling a terrorist attack to take place there. For the time being, this installment in Carlton Meyer’s Tales of the American Empire series will have to do, informative though it is as an introduction to the subject of US-coordinated regime change in Libya. If there is a moral to the story of Chris Stevens and his death, the moral is that people who agree to work for the US government and the CIA in dangerous work for money and career advancement, as Stevens did, are walking into a Faustian trap from which they will be lucky to escape with their lives. Stevens was not one of the lucky ones.