The ‘Great Dane’ Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of the pocket Scandinavian state, has called upon the Turkish authorities to sheath the sword in their reactions to ‘peaceful’ demonstrations, which he declares are elemental to rights and freedoms in any democratic society.
Hoorah to he who helps us sleep by night, huddled safe from harm under our duvets, till dawn breaks and brings another horrible terrorist drama.
This is a subject on which the Great Dane has, shall we say, form. While yet prime minister he allowed a Kurdish propaganda channel to beam reports from Danish soil aimed at rousing Europe to support the anti-Turkish PKK Kurdish Liberation Front in its struggle for autonomy from Turkish oppression.
Like Queen Victoria, the Turks were not especially amused.
The PKK is branded by the US as a terrorist organization. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, furiously accused the Danes of broadcasting terrorist hate mail.
But bless his Danish bacon breakfast and nightly supper of salt cod, the Great Dane would not relent. Now I say nothing as to the rightness or justice of the PKK cause. What I do say is that Rasmussen acted with the deliberate intention to bait the Turks.
I wonder how he smudged that little interlude on his job application for NATO, given Turkey is the 2nd largest contributor to the Alliance.
Now here he is lecturing the Turks again: membership of NATO is compatible with free speech, and free speech is one of the entrenched privileges of belonging to NATO. I am sure that all the protestors who are presently being harried and attacked by tear gas and water cannons in many a public square all over Turkey will be relieved to hear that. They will call Hosanna’s on his name. Perhaps.
After all, NATO has a very long history of interfering in the democratic rights and freedoms of Turkish citizens, for at least the past fifty years. The Alliance had a hand in four coups against elected Turkish governments, the bloodiest of which was undoubtedly the seizure of power by General Evren in 1980, which led to thousands being arrested, tortured and murdered.
In May last year Progressive Press of California published my book on NATO’s Secret Armies (see below) – generically known as Gladio – whose conduct in the infamous ‘years of lead’ which wracked Europe in the 1970’s and 80’s, is the subject of numerous independent assessments quite aside from my own. A good number are written in Turkish. That is because Gladio (locally code named Counter-Guerrilla) was so active there.
General Evren, who despite his great age is now on trial for crimes against humanity, was a great NATO pet and the commander-in-chief of Counter-Guerrilla.
The Swiss academic Daniele Ganser’s work entitled NATO’s Secret Armies is an outstanding example of the exhumation of Gladio which began to reach a widening audience some twenty years ago. There are many more penetrative works in French, German, Italian, Swedish and new studies regularly appear (one in Germany and two in Italy alone this year). Gladio is now a star performer on YouTube.
NATO’s first line of defense is always to deny the secret armies existed. True, one was grudgingly confessed and that was the outfit in Italy (thus ‘Gladio’) where the local unit, heavily impregnated by local serpentine politics, ‘went rogue’: so by implication, if the basket contained one poisoned apple, then by logical deduction the same basket contained other potentially harmful fruit. Even Snow White would have grasped that without too much prompting.
My publisher naturally sought the usual arrangements of placing the book where it would most likely arouse interest, which makes Brussels, headquarters and capital of NATO, a natural choice. The major bookseller in the city agreed with some rapture to list such an interesting title. That was until the owners of the store clammed up and refused to answer any queries from myself, the publisher, or anyone else. Someone got to them, of course.
The book was instantly delisted from the ‘available’ scroll (together, interestingly, with Dr. Ganser’s effort, which had previously appeared there). Visitors who inquired on the spot were informed there was no record of the book’s existence (nonsense, since the ISBN code provides an instant tracking mechanism). In straightforward Orwellian terms, it has been ‘unthought.’
The tale was repeated in other major European cities: Rome, Berlin, Milan, and Amsterdam among them. Yet Brussels, with its hordes of NATO-crats and other likely readers in the sprawling EU institutions, was obviously singled out for particular attention. Clearly, the implication is that someone or some institution has been wire-tapping the trail of correspondence with those places. It is pointless to assume otherwise.
Now is that ‘democratic’ and in accord with NATO’s vaunted ‘freedom of expression’ which is now being wished on the Turks?
With that cue, back to Turkey and the Department of Forked Tongues:
‘I urge all parties – official authorities as well as protesters – to ensure that manifestations of political views can take place in a peaceful manner. Obviously, it’s part of the democratic values on which the NATO alliance is based that people have the possibility to express their views freely and in a peaceful manner.’
Well, as an author I certainly fall under the heading of a peaceful protestor. I put the words on paper and readers make what they will of them. This is the story of human development, at heart our renaissance, down the ages. Or is NATO deciding what people should read, if it happens not to accord with organization’s world view of itself?
The problem is that here we have a large military federation accustomed only to unceasing veneration, having ‘won’ the Cold War, now bound on a self-appointed humanitarian crusade around the planet, acting as wholly impervious to any form of criticism. Even when a writer such as me is not wholly opposed to prudent systems of collective defense, I’d rather take the line of Machiavelli on that front.
Be sure, when large and powerful organizations which are not subject to civilian supervision start to metaphorically burn books (and snoop on e-mails) then we are immediately in the territory of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell’s 1984.
NATO has ignored all Freedom of Information requests. I gather that Dr. Ganser had similar experience. Gladio is not to be discussed, even when the amount of evidence reaching the public stage strongly supplies the indications of Gladio B Redux active in many spheres. That, I think, is the prevailing concern in the European Pentagon.
Mr. Rasmussen, I now claim those rights that you offer, ‘to ensure that manifestations of political views’ are freely dispensed no matter how uncomfortable they may be to entrenched vested interests. When Gladio is freely available to all callers in the bookshops of the NATO capital, then I’ll believe that you mean business.
Signed,
Richard Cottrell
(RSVP, given that you already have my e-mail address)
Edited by Madison Ruppert
Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative).
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