I logged in this morning and noticed that CatchFire has closed the Webster Tarpley thread, under the ignorant pretext that discussing western involvement in the "Arab spring" is necessarily pro-imperialist, I copy and paste his diatribe:
This thread violates babble's anti-imperialist policy, so I'm closing it. Any future threads which entertain the conspiracy theory that the Arab nations were not responsible for their own insurrections and popular uprisings will be closed as well.
Discussion of CIA intelligence activities is now banned on babble.
Have any of you found new information on the CIA's role in the overthrow of Salvadore Allende? That's banned under babble rules.
Have any of you found new information on the CIA's role in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh? That's banned under babble rules.
Have any of you found new information on how the USA invests in Israel to better control the Arab world? That's now banned on babble. It's the brave Israelis and the brave Irgun who built everything there from scratch.
I'm sure he and his clique will tell you that the installation of Pinochet in 1973 was "organic", a "popular uprising". They'll say the same for all the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 1990s.
Now I'm going to explain why this fetishization of these golden youth is necessary misguided. First of all, we now with absolute certainty that western intelligence agencies have been engaged in these kinds of activities for a very long time. We have precedents in Iran, Chile, Ukraine, et cetera. We know that currently the London-Washington foreign policy establishment would want nothing more than to have color revolutions in Beijing and Moscow -- though that's difficult to pull off. All of this history is trivial of course, and it is tragic that it needs to be explained. Those of us who have a desire to understand history have an obligation to question what we're told by the media, and if these revolutions really are revolutions. Because so many of these 20th century revolutions have been scams, there's a strong prior that any revolution is a scam as well, and no conclusion should be established before the diligent examination of data. The fact that diligent analysis of information is rejected by the moderators on babble means that this site is no longer what it once was.
Let's take a look at Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The west has made hundreds of billions of dollars of profit by expropriating the assets of their former dictators. In Egypt, there is no revolution per se. The pro-US military is still in charge, same ruling class == no revolution. We just have a few revolving chairs as to who will be the local ringleader of neoliberalism.
It's also noteworthy that these revolutions are primarily targeting anti-US regimes. We had a failed color revolution in Iran two years ago. Now we had an attack on Mubarak, which was moving closer to Iran. Syria, the second most anti-US regime in the region. Libya, which was resisting the French empire in Africa. There are no color revolutions in Morocco, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia.
Why do you think the western media loves the Libyan rebels? Because Fox News and CNN love democracy and freedom?
The bottom line is that there are billions of starving people in the world with tanks pointed at them, with guns pointed at them, with nuclear weapons pointed at them. It's fetishization of the other to assume they can liberate themselves with ease. When you have a dominant power relation, it continues until the dominant power is either removed by its own will or a greater power emerges.
I for one have not concluded that all of these uprisings are color revolutions. I am unsure. However, I think there is evidence on both sides, and as my priority is to understand history rather than regurgitate what the MSM tells me, I have no choice but to go elsewhere.
BTW Catchfire I'm in Chile right now. If you like I can hook you up with some of them via skype, and you can lecture them on your theory that the installation of Pinochet in 1973 had no western involvement.