Foreign Correspondent: Turmoil In Belarus-- Citizens Take To The Streets To Protest What They See As A Stolen Election.

 

-by Reese Erlich

In a surprise ceremony on Wednesday, embattled President Alyaksandr Lukashenko was reportedly sworn in for a sixth term after Belarus’s contested elections in August. Opposition leaders are calling the unannounced ceremony a “thieves’ meeting” and a “farce” and are urging condemnation of the action.

Victoria Martinchik, a twenty-one-year-old attorney in Belarus, is fed up with years of authoritarian rule under Lukashenko. So she and family members have joined tens of thousands of their fellow Belarusians to protest what they consider to be a blatantly rigged August 9 presidential election.

“We are tired of enduring this injustice,” she says in a phone interview from Minsk, Belarus’s capital city. For three days, “riot police threw grenades at us during the protests, beat people, and simply killed us.”

For years, Lukashenko angered Belarusians by mismanaging the economy and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Conn Hallinan, an old friend of mine who works as a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“The demonstrations in the streets are genuine, not foreign-inspired, as claimed by Lukashenko,” says Hallinan in a phone interview. “But Western leaders certainly want to take advantage of the situation to expand their interests.”

Only a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, President Bill Clinton promised Europe “prosperity and security” through the expansion of NATO. In reality, Eastern European countries and former Soviet republics got impoverishment, kleptocratic ruling elites, and in some cases, neo-fascist governments.

The United States and other foreign powers engineered “color revolutions” in these countries, including an “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. These were seen as steps toward breaking alliances with Russia and expanding Western economic, political, and military dominance.

Lukashenko was an outlier in that he sought to maintain friendly ties with Russia, even signing a pact aimed at eventually reunifying the two countries. State-owned industries still dominate the Belarusian economy. And while these industries provided much needed blue-collar jobs, profits often trickled up to Lukashenko and his capitalist cronies.

Belarus developed a thriving computer-game and software industry that provided jobs for middle income professionals. The government made a tacit agreement with this sector: if they stayed out of politics, they could enjoy relative economic prosperity.

But, for most Belarusians, the new state-capitalist system has meant a drop in their standard of living, particularly since the pandemic. Unemployment continues to climb, and the country’s GDP is expected to shrink by 3.4 percent this year.

The final straw came when Lukashenko joined other authoritarian leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic. Lukashenko even suggested that the virus could be eliminated with saunas and vodka.

“Go to the sauna,” he advised his compatriots. “When you come out of the sauna, not only wash your hands, but also inside [with] 100 grams [of vodka].”

During the election in August, Lukashenko claimed to receive more than 80 percent of the vote, a figure most Belarusians are skeptical of. Rival presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who received 10 percent of the official vote, claims she won a majority.

Tikhanovskaya, who ran as an independent, and other opposition leaders in several parties receive support from Western countries and media as heroic “defenders of democracy.” But their shared political platform, known as the “Reanimation Reform Package for Belarus” is so conservative it could have been written by the International Monetary Fund, or the World Bank.

“The labour market is over-regulated,” states the joint reform package, referring to laws that protect workers’ rights. “The difficulties of hiring and firing workers, the presence of a large number of administrative restrictions, block the modernization of the labor market.”

The party calls for creating a favorable business climate to encourage multinational corporate investment. That includes fully or partially privatizing state-owned enterprises and vastly reducing economic ties with Russia.

Belarusians, most of whom speak Russian, don’t harbor the anti-Russian nationalism of other former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine.

But if the opposition parties were to seize power in Belarus, European countries such as Poland and Lithuania would exert tremendous pressure on Belarus to break with Russia and join NATO.

So far, the Trump Administration has shown little interest in the Belarus crisis, allowing European Union countries to make the usual denunciations of Lukashenko.

It’s not entirely clear whether Trump is making a conscious decision or is just ignorant. “I don’t think Trump knows where Belarus is,” says analyst Hallinan.

As the crisis continues, Lukashenko has sought support from Moscow, which officially is calling for a dialogue between the government and opposition. So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin is backing Lukashenko as the leader who will keep Belarus out of the Western camp and maintain friendly ties with Russia.

If the opposition ousts Lukashenko, there is, I think, a real possibility of some sort of Russian intervention.

Leftist parties in Belarus and internationally have taken sharply different positions on the crisis. The Communist Party of Belarus (CPB), an orthodox Marxist-Leninist group with ideological origins in the USSR, sees the demonstrations as yet another color revolution.

The CPB points to the neo-liberal policies advocated by the major opposition parties and argues that, under Lukashenko, “the state has maintained a system of strong social guarantees for children, young families, the disabled, veterans, and people with low incomes.”

A Just World Party, which split from the CPB in 1996, opposes both Lukashenko and the pro-Western opposition. The Russian Socialist Movement, affiliated with the Trotskyist Fourth International, supports the Belarus demonstrations and denounces any Russian intervention.

Belarusian political activists face a difficult situation, caught between a ruthless dictator and a potential Western takeover of their country. Some ally with Lukashenko as a lesser evil. Others side with the demonstrators, arguing that breaking Lukashenko’s grip on power is necessary before progressive change can take place.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Belarusians continue to peacefully demonstrate every Sunday. The government continues to arrest dozens of activists in an effort to stop the protests. And though blue-collar strikes at factories-- an early sign of popular support for the opposition, have stopped-- Lukashenko continues, at least for now, to have support among workers in state-owned enterprises, and among the police, the military, and intelligence agencies.

Activists like Martinchik, despite the confusion and turmoil, remain hopeful.

“I fall asleep with tears and wake up with tears,” she says. “Yesterday, against all this background, it seemed that we were losing. But after all darkness comes light.”

Chris Christie Owes His Victory To . . . The Dulles Brothers' Secret Policy Of Flooding New Jersey With Eastern European Nazi War Criminals!

On Christmas Eve I was living in a riad in Marrakech's ancient medina, reading a new book by former U.S. government prosecutor and Army intelligence officer John Loftus, America's Nazi Secret. The book, which systematically reveals-- in great detail-- a conspiracy to import Nazi war criminals (and not atomic scientists, just murderous thugs) into the United States, is shocking. Because of the current repression crisis in Belarus, the country that is a focus of Loftus' book, it seemed like a good topic to write about, and when I got home I called Loftus to follow up on a few topics he had raised but hadn't gone into in depth.

Before I get into my conversation with Loftus, let me quote from the epilogue of America's Nazi Secret. Keep in mind that he's referring to New Jersey here, not some faraway, quaint banana republic in Eastern Europe.

March 25 is the traditional National Day of the Byelorussians of South River.

On the Sunday closest to that date-- which marks the anniversary of the proclamation of the Byelorussian National Republic in 1918-- they gather at the Byelorussian-America Club on Whitehead Avenue to celebrate. Some of the girls and women wear brightly colored national costumes, and there is dancing, drinking and feasting.

On most days the club is almost empty except for a few old men drinking in the bar, but there are some interesting customers. One of them had thrown small children into a well and dropped hand grenades on them. A frequent visitor to the club has been an executioner at the death camp at Koldichevo. Another club patron teased a visitor known to be squeamish about the Holocaust by picking up a cleaver and hacking at some lunch meats. "I wish these were Jews," he declared.

The old men of South River have achieved a certain respectability. In 1978, the New Jersey American Revolution Bicentennial Celebration Commission published an Ethnic Directory of New Jersey. Heading the five pages of Byelorussian organizations were the American Friends of Byelorussia Central Council. It's president was listed as Emanuel Jasiuk [a notorious Nazi war criminal].

Radoslaw Ostrowsky [an even more notorious Nazi war criminal] had finally emigrated to America too. There is no controversy concerning his entry, but his file shows that at the time he applied for citizenship in 1972, the INS was notified of Ostrowsky's complete Nazi background. After considerable consultation among the various intelligence services, the INS noted in his file that he "appears to have been involved in some sort of espionage activity." A reporter for a New Jersey newspaper who learned that Ostrowsky was living in the United States asked the Immigration Service if the rumors were true. The INS noted on the letter that it had no record of any such individual, but filed it in Ostrowsky's folder. When the reporter came back in 1975 with several variants of the spelling of Ostrowsky's name [like Radaslau Astrouski, though none of which were Mendoza, Gomez, Valdez, Perez, Garcia, Martinez, Hernandez, Ruiz, Lopez, Ramirez, Espinoza, or Gonzalez] the INS put that in the folder too, along with the note that the reporter had been advised by telephone that the INS had concluded a full investigation which cleared Ostrowsky completely. And so one of the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to enter this country lived on undisturbed until his death in 1979.

The old men of South River might have been more circumspect if they had realized that despite the clean bill of health reluctantly given them by the General Accounting Office, another investigation was closing in on them.

Or might they not have been? After all, the Whitehead Avenue hall that the CIA [OPC] built for the Byelorussian Nazi war criminals now also serves as a Republican Party headquarters and when the Nazis and their spawn helped propel ideological brother Chris Christie into the governor's office-- along with a GOP takeover of the local government-- the Byelorussian-America Club on Whitehead Avenue is where Republicans and Nazis gathered to celebrate last year.

Loftus' entire book is fascinating, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. There are a few parts, though, that are particularly relevant for the DWT community.



The Dulles Brothers, at the nexus of Wall Street, the intelligence community, the Republican Party and dangerously inept Cold War jingoism, overrode President Truman's and Congress' ban on allowing Nazi war criminals into the country, let alone employing them-- purging their records and getting them U.S. citizenship. John Foster Dulles, who now shamefully has an airport named after him near our nation's capital, was complicit steeped in Wall Street backing for prewar Hitler and was at all times looking out for the interests of the wealthy Republican investors who invested in him, particularly the Rockefellers and the Bushes. They had decided to bring their Nazi cronies to the U.S. once Truman was defeated by Dewey.

When Truman didn't play his assigned role, they did it anyway, and then when the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was elected, the floodgates opened, and New Jersey, among a few other states, became a sanctuary for Nazi collaborators and war criminals from Eastern Europe. Nixon saw them as a counterbalance to the hated Jews, who always voted for the Democrats, and Eisenhower gave him supervisory powers over the operations to bring them to America. Ironically, many of them had been infiltrated by the Russian Communists and the entire program was an absolute disaster, bringing the U.S. no Cold War benefits whatsoever and costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars, but, eventually, helping elect Republican rightists from Nixon to Christie. These are the topics I talked with Loftus a few days ago.

For one thing, I wanted to know how much of the motivation for flooding New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, etc. with anti-Semitic Nazi war criminals, many of whom had personally taken part in the Holocaust, from Byelorussia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, etc. had to do with Wall Street greed and how much had to do with the ideological kinship between Germany's and America's right-wing parties, the Nazis and the Republicans. Loftus told me:

My guess is it was 90 percent greed, as they funded the infant Bolshevik and Nazi parties simultaneously. In fact, Hitler knew the robber barons preferred the conservative and Catholic parties over the Nazis, so that is why he banned foreign ownership of German companies, which forced the robber barons to enact the Swiss Bank Secrecy Act of 1933. In the upcoming film American Secrets we document how the Auschwitz industrial park was originally a Russian-German partnership funded by the robber barons of Wall Street.

But what about Nixon?

Nixon always blamed the Jews for his narrow loss to JFK, and tasked George H.W. Bush as co-director of the RNC to recruit the Eastern European groups... [T]he GOP still uses the old Arab Nazi network, the Muslim Brotherhood. That is why we are the only Western nation not to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. The second-generation Muslim Brotherhood members [Al Arian, Alamoudi, etc.] delivered Florida for Bush II against Gore. Nixon's Nazi dream come true.

Especially interesting coming from the past president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. But it's funny how when things like these are covered up and we "move on," they just repeat themselves over and over.

UPDATE: Times Didn't Quite Get The Story Right

In mid-December the NY Times ran a piece by Sam Roberts, Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis. It was a baby step in the right direction, but it didn't go all the way to exposing the conspiracy or the on-going coverup.

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.

...The report, “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War,” grew out of an interagency group created by Congress to identify, declassify and release federal records on Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to hold war criminals accountable. It is drawn from a sampling of 1,100 C.I.A files and 1.2 million Army counterintelligence files that were not declassified until after the group issued its final report in 2007.

“Hitler’s Shadow” adds a further dimension to a separate Justice Department history of American Nazi-hunting operations, which the government has refused to release since 2006 and which concluded that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for certain other former Nazis.

Like earlier reports generated by the group, this one paints a grim portrait of bureaucracy, turf wars and communication gaps among intelligence agencies. It also details blatantly cynical self-interested tactical decisions by Allied governments and a general predisposition that some war crimes by former Nazis and their collaborators should be overlooked because the suspects could be transformed into valuable assets in the more urgent undercover campaigns against Soviet aggression.

The American intelligence effort to infiltrate the East German Communist Party was dubbed “Project Happiness.”

“Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army’s priorities in late 1946,” the report says. Instead, it concludes that the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps spied on suspect groups ranging from German Communists to politically active Jewish refugees in camps for displaced people and also “went to some lengths to protect certain persons from justice.”

DWT has obtained a copy of a letter Loftus wrote to the Times after publication of the misleading, half-baked Justice Department report and just before the Times published it's own latest, uncritical coverage.

I am a former Justice Department Attorney with code word Top Secret clearances. The recent Nazi report which you published was written by DOJ to discredit my 1985 congressional testimony (see chapter 5) accusing the Justice Department itself of sponsoring the immigration of Nazi war criminals. I was threatened with imprisonment by Mark Richards and others if I ever revealed the names of living Nazis like Mykola Lebed. Lebed has since died and the CIA had declassified his files. I am ready to talk.

Lebed was the head of the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo, the Sluzhpa Beshpa or SB, wich recruited Nazi collabroators for the OUN/Bandera movement and the SS. He was arguably the highest ranking Nazi war criminal ever to enter the United States. His troops murdered Simon Wiesenthal's mother.

Lebed was personaly sponsored for immigration under an intelligence stautute by the Attorney General of the United States, without President Truman's knowledge.

His SB members were also allowed into the country by Justice on the grounds they were running an asssinaton program inside the Soviet Union that had killed 35,000 communists.

In 1985, the Justice Department falsely told the CIA, GAO, and Congress that Lebed was a leader of the Anti-Nazi resistance. Mark Richards knew that eventually I would write a book exposing him as a fraud, and that is why he prepared the report whch you published recently. Coincidentally, my new book, America's Nazi Secret, was just published on Veterans Day, just as the Justice Department released a copy of their report. This is the first time in thirty years I have been able to tell the whole story without government censorship. I would like to speak with you. State and Justice have committed a major fraud on the public.

Streams Of Consciousness, Christmas Eve Edition: Korea, Belarus, Jim Messina, et al.

Despite a disastrous meeting between White House political hack Jim Messina-- a kind of dense and clueless Rahm Emanuel sleazebag-- and the Democracy Alliance, a group of top progressive heavy donors (many vowing to never give another dime after hearing the White House's tone-deaf look forward, which apparently didn't include anything about job creation and didn't even mention the word "jobs"), the White House did lay out what many will consider a Christmas present for the nation yesterday, even before a major staff reshuffle. Not as likely to generate headlines as the success they had in repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, getting a reasonable healthcare package passed for the 9-11 first responders, and getting the START Treaty ratified-- none of which impinged on the core demands of government by the Conservative Consensus ruling elite-- the White House reversed Bush's anti-environmental wilderness policy, restoring federal land managers' powers to curb development on vast tracts of America's back country, undoing what conservation groups called a "no more wilderness" policy put in place under Bush.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will again have the authority to set aside large areas of federally owned territory in the West that it deems as deserving of wilderness protection.

It would still be up to Congress to decide whether to grant those areas formal wilderness status, thus putting them off-limits to energy development and other commercial uses on a permanent basis.

An official wilderness designation by law prohibits the building of roads or other structures, or any human activities that would alter the natural landscape, such as farming, logging, mining, or oil and gas drilling.

Hard to imagine either house of Congress getting behind this, though, financially controlled as each is by the extraction and development industries. It'll give us something to write about going forward, though. Already one of the worst special-interest whores in this area, Utah Republican crook-Senator Orrin Hatch denounced the policy shift as a "brazen" attempt by the Obama to usurp congressionalcontrol of wilderness designations. Hard to imagine Salazar fighting hard enough for the change to see it through to the end.

Bye-bye, Lynn Woolsey?

Lynn Woolsey has done more to retard the effective development of the Congressional Progressive Caucus than anyone else in Congress. As the caucus's co-chair, she sowed the kind of dissension and discord that have marked her entire political career. Long before she made herself famous by undermining the efforts of Raúl Grijalva to forge the CPC into an effective fighting force and long before she backed backed Blue Dog and warmonger Jane Harman against progressive acivist Marcy Winograd-- and long before becoming addled by her addiction to painkillers-- Woolsey had become such a divisive figure in Sonoma County politics that the Petaluma City Council did everything it could to "kick her upstairs" into an open congressional seat and get her out of their hair. It looks like she may actually retire now and get out of the way of real progressive change at a time it is most needed. It won't happen fast enough! (Imagine Norman Solomon replacing her!)

Plenty of Crime On Wall Street... And Punishment?

You're more likely to find a reasonable look at that by reading Rolling Stone than the Wall Street Journal, and Matt Taibbi reports on some real movement in bringing the evildoers to justice.

It took more than two years, but there might finally be some capital sentences handed out for crimes committed during the financial crisis. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course. Like the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, whose head was sacrificed during the Enron debacle, the once-proud financial auditing firm Ernst and Young now looks poised to take a spin down the toilet of history thanks to its role in the Lehman Brothers debacle.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is about to file civil fraud charges against E&Y for the work it did helping Lehman cook its books during 2007 and 2008.

Taibbi speculates that this suit is curtains for Ernst and Young and "may be the beginning of a series of investigations that ultimately take down the auditors and ratings agencies that made the financial crisis possible. Without accountants and raters signing off on all the bogus derivative math and bad bookkeeping, a lot of this mess would never have happened."

Belarus, A Nazi Hellhole That Never Dealt With Its Dark Past, In The News Again

I'm guessing most Americans couldn't tell you what or where Belarus is if their lives depended on it. The Republicans made the same bet right after World War II when they sponsored the illegal immigration of hundreds of Belarus Nazis to America, most of whom had been involved in extermination of that country's entire Jewish population. They moved to South River, New Jersey, and, contrary to federal law barring Nazis from immigrating, became citizens and staunch Republicans. Their resettlement was a pilot project for the GOP takeover of Florida with fascist Cuban refugees.

Former U.S. government prosecutor and Army intelligence officer John Loftus has a new book exposing the entire project, America's Nazi Secret. Right-wing elements in the State Department, led by the Dulles brothers, with powerful financial and ideological ties to the Nazis were able to subvert President Truman's policies and, once Eisenhower became president, move into high gear in bringing thousands of genocidal war criminals and Nazis from Belarus and Ukraine to America.

Today, never having dealt effectively with its past, Belarus is one of the world's worst authoritarian hellholes, and today the U.S. human rights organization Freedom House called on the European Union and our own country to renew full sanctions against Belarus.

More than 600 people were detained [including five presidential candidates] in the Belarusian capital [Minsk] during a police crackdown on demonstrators after the presidential vote that the opposition said had been rigged.

"The current situation is much worse than that in 2006, when the EU and U.S. together imposed sanctions against the regime," [Freedom House director David] Kramer added.

Western nations, including the United States, called the 2006 presidential elections in Belarus fraudulent and introduced sanctions against the country and travel bans on some Belarusian officials.

[Alexander] Lukashenko, 56, who has ruled Belarus with an iron rod since 1994 and has been dubbed by the United States "Europe's last dictator" for a clampdown on opposition and dissent, won 79.67% of the vote on Sunday. International monitors said the election was "flawed."

The United States and the European Union have called on Belarusian authorities to immediately release opposition activists who were arrested during the protests.

Wiping North Korea Off The Map Would Probably Guarantee Obama A Second Term-- A Popular Idea In Certain Circles

The U.S. won't be distracted by Belarus's fascism when it's busy provoking North Korea into a suicidal attack on South Korea so it can end the Communist regime there once and for all. Watch the video below explaining what's really happening in Korea and then read the U.S. propaganda version in the Washington Post, which is pushing a right-wing American line that South Korea's puppet-president, Lee Myung-bak, "looks weak" by not acting after all his bellicose statements attacking the North and his election promises to reunite the two countries.