Welcome, friends. This is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com,
reporting today via GlobalResearch.ca on the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalize War.
For those who have not seen my recent report on this subject,
I would suggest that you check it out.
It is called War is a Crime, and it presents the proceedings of a conference
that took place in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia just a few weeks ago.
And I was in attendance at that conference. It was a 20th anniversary commemoration
of the signing of the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalize War.
And all of the background and meaning and explanation of that initiative is
provided in that aforementioned report. So I will put that in the show notes
so that you can go and check it out if you have not yet done so.
Along with my interview with former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr.
Mahathir Mohamad, the person who spearheaded, launched, and helped to sign that initial declaration.
Long story short, that declaration was a bold and obviously aspirational,
but very important and very simple idea.
Simply the idea that aggressive war is a crime in and of itself and deserves
to be prosecuted as such.
Now, again, that's an interesting concept, and you can see my report on that
anniversary commemoration that I attended so that you can find out more about
that idea, where it came from, how it unfolded, and where it's going.
But as part of those proceedings, Professor Michel Chosodovsky,
who was one of the original signers of that original declaration back in 2005,
was, of course, invited to attend that event, but was unable to.
So I attended in his stead, but I was able to record a conversation with Professor
Chosodovsky, his reflections and ruminations on the meaning of that 20th anniversary
of that initiative today.
What is that initiative? Why is it important? What does it say that we have
made, if not little progress, perhaps even the antithesis of progress towards
that ideal of criminalizing war?
And Professor Chosodovsky has some very interesting things to say about that,
along the lines of, well, we have not made progress on criminalizing war,
but we have made progress on criminalizing politics, criminalizing justice,
criminalizing economics?
What does he mean by those statements?
I think it's a fascinating and interesting idea, so I trust that you will find
a lot of food for thought in this presentation.
So without further ado, I will present the presentation that Professor Chosodowski
recorded for that Kuala Lumpur commemoration, and I will leave it there for today.
This is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com reporting for GlobalResearch.ca.
Welcome, friends. This is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com,
reporting for Global Research TV at GlobalResearch.ca.
Today I'm talking to Michel Chosodovsky, obviously the editor of GlobalResearch.ca,
also the founder of the Center for Research on Globalization,
about his participation in the criminalization of war, specifically the Kuala
Lumpur Initiative on the criminalization of war that was first signed in 2005,
so 20 years ago. Michelle Chosodowski, thank you for your time today.
Delighted to be on the program. In many regards,
this is the message also to my colleagues and friends in Kuala Lumpur,
because on the 30th of this month, we are commemorating the 20th anniversary.
And it is also based on the fact that Tun Mahathir Mohamed,
who founded the Criminalization of War Initiative, will be honored at this meeting.
So that in many regards we are doing a certain retrospect of what has happened in the last 20 years,
which by many, in many regards,
is not very encouraging because we were focusing on the criminalization of war
in 2005 with a view to confronting major war initiatives.
And, of course, that was also the action against Israel on the one hand,
and then we had the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, and then we had also, of course,
action against the invasion of Iraq.
Tony Blair, and George W. Bush.
What I have been able to assess in the course of these 20 years is that visibly today,
although that was also true in 2005.
There has been what we might describe as the criminalization of justice.
Not the criminalization. International law is there, and it can't be changed
because it's based on concepts which were defined starting in 1948 with the Genocide Convention.
But the issue is that the judicial system today at the global level is criminalized.
And we've seen that with the International Criminal Court and the International
Court of Justice, the two main pillars of international law.
And then, of course, there are other entities which are created in relation
to a specific war like regarding, let's say, Rwanda or, you know.
And of course, Yugoslavia.
But the question there is that the criminalization of justice is linked up to
what I would describe as the criminalization of politics in the sense that,
well, in 2005, we still had honest government up to a point.
We still had the welfare state in Western countries. We had movements in the global south.
And what has now occurred is that if we look at the West, so-called,
in other words, the United States, Canada, and the European Union, or Western Europe,
there is a consensus that genocide is a legitimate undertaking.
And now...
When I say there's a criminalization of politics, it means that politicians
are endorsing genocide against the people of Palestine.
International law tells us exactly the opposite.
It says Article 3E of the Genocide Convention,
1948, that any complicity in
an act of genocide would be passable of punishment and a legal procedure.
And that we should understand that the political apparatus is criminalized.
And unfortunately, the peace movement is not confronting or is not in a position
to actually confront the politicians and say, well, you are a criminal.
Now, that applies. It applies in Palestine, but it applies in many other instances.
Genocide was also instrumented in the invasions of Afghanistan.
And Iraq. Now, the invasion of Afghanistan was based on the fact,
not on the fact, but on the illusion that Al-Qaeda had attacked America. Okay?
Now, I don't want to get into that, but it's...
Pretty well established that, first of all, al-Qaeda was created by U.S.
Intelligence, and al-Qaeda in Arabic means the base, the base on the computer system of U.S.
Intelligence, and consequently, it was the base of all those who had been recruited.
So this is the background. Now, there's a lot more about that,
and I think there's one element which has to be addressed, is the criminalization
of the financial apparatus.
I'm not saying the criminalization. I would make the distinction between the
criminalization of the financial apparatus,
the large banking institutions, and so on, on the one hand, and then you have,
of course, the global economy.
I'm talking about the real economy.
And the real economy is not a homogeneous. It's still a capitalist system.
But you have industry, you have agriculture, you have the airlines.
Now, it's not to say that the real economy is criminalized,
but the financial apparatus has a holding on real economic activity precisely
because it controls the debt.
And it can impose devastating impacts on the nation-state so that literally
what we have also is that the welfare state is more or less on the way out.
They're remnants of the welfare state in some of the Western countries.
And if we're looking at a broader context, and this was brought to my attention
in regards to the occupation of Syria.
Well, first of all, what the Western military alliance, NATO and the United
States have installed there is a head of state which is affiliated to al-Qaeda.
And in other words, Al-Qaeda becomes the,
becomes legit in regards to a nation state, which is Syria.
But then there's another element that war on Syria,
and more generally on the Levant, the whole area of the eastern Mediterranean,
is a crime against civilization.
And the crime against civilization is indicated by the fact that.
Damascus is a city which has existed for several thousand years.
And Aleppo has even a longer history. In other words, the Levant is being destroyed.
Civilization is being destroyed.
History is being destroyed. And people's minds are being destroyed because they
don't understand what humanity involves.
And I think the big message by Tun Mahathir is that this is a war against humanity.
It's a much more extensive war than what we had contemplated 20 years ago now the other element,
and this should be understood and it's part of a hegemonic project I wouldn't
necessarily call this US imperialism because US imperialism the United States is in crisis as well.
But if you look at the history of empires, you can't really build an empire with a republic.
I think Julius Caesar invoked that concept many years ago.
But the thing is that the whole process of warfare now, from an economic standpoint,
is to acquire control largely over strategic resources and energy,
and specifically oil and gas.
And recent events in Venezuela demonstrate that, in that Venezuela today is
the largest oil producer,
it's the largest in terms of reserves of oil and natural gas. It's number one.
And consequently now, the...
The Trump administration has created what is tantamount to a terrorism entity within Latin America.
Of course, they can't use the same concepts of Islamism and recruitment of jihadists and so on.
But there it is associated with organized crime. But the organized crime has
never been controlled by Venezuela.
And I know I worked in Venezuela at one time.
I was there at the time when they actually were.
And that was back in the 1970s when they nationalized petroleum.
It was negotiated with big oil.
Obviously, that was a semi-colony of the United States.
But nonetheless, the legal process was completed.
But what I'm saying here is that every single country on the planet is,
if they don't conform, they will be,
the intervention will be through
a regime change or a color revolution or whatever you want to describe it.
But in fact, it's how the intelligence apparatus of the West manages to create conditions,
whether it's in regards to elections or whether it's in regards to a particular
head of state or head of government that they want to get rid of,
that has become the norm.
We've lived that virtually through the whole post-colonial period in different countries,
but it would appear now that this is a generalized agenda,
in other words, regime change, incited by foreign interference and so on.
Now, all of this would never have occurred had they not also,
right from the beginning, but that was true also in 2005,
the criminalization of the media.
Involving censorship, but also where, I mean, when I made the reference to genocide in Palestine.
We are dealing with also another element with regard to the war in Ukraine,
is that, and it's recognized and it's documented,
that the government in Ukraine is Nazi or neo-Nazi.
And consequently, the same laws which pertain to genocide, take Germany.
Germany has very strict laws on cooperation with entities which are Nazi.
Or neo-Nazi. Now, it just so happens that the German government is channeling
weapons and money to a government which is overtly Nazi.
Now, the media will give you another perspective.
They might say the extreme right political parties, but they will not acknowledge
the fact that these aren't Nazis,
and they are also, it's exactly the same group of Nazis which were collaborating with the Third Reich,
specifically in western Ukraine.
And they are there running the government.
And our laws would say you're not allowed to,
Our laws in Western countries would come to the conclusion that this is something
which is also object of trial and punishment and prison.
Now, so that we have the criminalization of politics, we have the criminalization
of the judicial system, both internationally and nationally.
We have prime ministers like Starmer in the United Kingdom who is supportive
of genocide, in other words, killing children.
So that, in effect, we are on the border of what we might describe as World
War III, but we're probably already involved in a third world war.
Now, to conclude my discussion of these issues, I should mention nuclear war.
Now, the history of nuclear war is misunderstood.
It is characterized by the so-called Manhattan Project, which was led by Oppenheimer.
There's a lot of propaganda around that. But one thing which nobody knows,
even though it is, well, people do know it because the declassified documents
are there is that the United States of America on the 15th of September 1945,
just about a month a
bit more than a month after Hiroshima and Nagasaki released
it was the War Department now they call it the Pentagon the War Department issued
a plan to bomb the Soviet Union 66 cities with 200 atomic bombs.
And that has always been,
It has never been mentioned. The documents are there. The media does not cover it.
And in a sense, what was initiated with the Manhattan Project is the development
of a weapon which ultimately can destroy humanity in its entirety.
And that is what we have to address. and we have to demilitarize.
But I should mention that Obama, when he started his presidency,
but it was his second mandate, he put together.
And this is the biggest lie in American history,
he initiated a
campaign he said we must ensure that
the terrorists namely al-Qaeda should not get hold of nuclear weapons because
that would threaten our security and he had a big campaign internationally on
the fact that the real threat came from al-Qaeda the base,
the people that we recruited And if they have possession of nuclear weapons,
they're going to destroy us.
Now, there's a whole element of ridicule on that because nuclear weapons,
you need a delivery system, you need scientists and so on.
And obviously, Osama bin Laden didn't have those facilities,
but what he did justify was a budget of $1 trillion for ISIS.
Assigned specifically to nuclear weapons, $1 trillion.
And he got the Nobel Prize. He got the Nobel Prize for doing that.
$1 trillion. Now, you can imagine how many schools and hospitals you can build with $1 trillion.
But that $1 trillion now goes up to $2 trillion in 2030. It is currently at
1.3, and it is not regulated by the federal government's audits and expenditures.
In other words, it's not really part of the budget which is subjected to review
by the Senate and the House of Representatives and so on.
So bear in mind, they have increased the budget on nuclear weapons technology
from $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
And at the same time, they claim that this will enable peacemaking bombs.
They actually say that the use of nuclear weapons is preemptive.
It's there to protect yourself.
Now, all of this is rubbish from the scientific point of view,
from the strategic point of view.
But it is exceedingly dangerous when you have politicians like Donald Trump,
who has the foggiest idea of the impacts of nuclear war.
And he said, well, if it's safe for civilians because the explosion is underground
and we're using certain types of bombs, then let's go ahead and use them.
And actually, many of these smaller tactical nuclear weapons have been declassified
and are now within the conventional war theater so that a three-star general,
legally a three-star general, can go ahead and use it.
Now, all of this is documented, and I think what we have to do,
we have to continue with the initiative which was brought.
Which was launched by Tun Mahathir Mohamed in 2005.
And it's very important
that this initiative also extends and leads to dialogue within the peace movements
and we have to apply international law against those who violate,
The judicial system is criminalized. We have to decriminalize the judicial system.
In other words, if our leaders are in favor of genocide, they go to prison.
That is what a real legal system involves.
But we notice that exactly the opposite is occurring, because they've turned
it upside down, And they say killing the Palestinians is a mean to achieve peace in the Middle East.
And I... You have covered a lot of ground there. Yes. Thank you very much for that.
In wrapping up, do you have any message for Dr. Tun Mahathir Mohamed or the
other attendees here at the conference in Kuala Lumpur?
Well, I have a message of solidarity.
And I recall very precisely how this dialogue emerged and how Tun Mahathir chaired our sessions.
And I understand his tremendous political insight that every single person in
that meeting said something,
and then at the end Mahathir actually then integrated this into a series of
concepts that we ultimately,
which ultimately led to the formulation and then it led to the tribunal and
so on but there were I don't want to go through there were several hiccups But in substance,
I think we achieved something which was unique, which went against the stream.
And I think it is absolutely essential that we continue,
despite the impediments against this initiative,
this very powerful initiative of Tun Mahathir Mohamed,
who has recently celebrated his 100th year, anniversary.
I think we have to emphasize that we are committed to humanity,
and we are committed to life,
and we're committed to civilization, and we must recognize that humanity is a tremendous,
Well, it has civilizations, and all those civilizations have something in common,
and that is the value of humanity itself.
So that would be my concluding notes. And I,
again, unfortunately, I've not been able to travel to Kuala Lumpur to be with
my friends and colleagues at this important commemoration.
Some very profound and sober words for reflection. Thank you very much for sharing
them with us. Professor Chosodowski, thank you for your time.